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A variety of audio compression technologies are being used today, each having a distinct advantage over the other in terms of compression ratio, coding delay, coding complexity or legacy system compatibility. This makes subset of audio codecs suited for particular systems and makes working with multiple audio compression technologies indispensable. In designing time-critical systems like conferencing, broadcast transcoding systems or be it in designing any audio and video play-out system, the knowledge of the delay encountered while audio encoding or decoding becomes critical.

The Balancing Cube is a robotic sculpture that can stand on any of its corners. Pendulum-like modules, located on the inner faces of the cube, constantly adjust their positions to shift the structure's center of gravity and keep it balanced. The cube remains stable even if you poke it. But not too hard! Created by Raffaello D'Andrea, Sebastian Trimpe, and Matt Donovan at ETH Zurich, the contraption is half art and half technology. They got their inspiration from a Cirque du Soleil performance in which acrobats use their bodies to support each other and balance together in seemingly impossible positions.

Remember Hitachi’s little helper robot, EMIEW 2 (Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Work-mate)?  It’s been a couple of years since we heard anything regarding the project and we feared the worst.  Hitachi has put those fears to rest by holding a news conference to show off its new enhanced voice recognition and driving performance! Known primarily for its unique legs which have wheels for feet, EMIEW 2 can drive at up to 6km/h to keep pace with people.  If it needs to carry something it can kneel down (for added stability) and scoot around, and thanks to its bipedal legs it can step over obstacles that are too high to drive over.  Now it has been given adaptive suspension control technology which increases its stability when driving over bumpy terrain such as elevator doors.  During the press demonstration, EMIEW 2′s springy legs bobbed independently as it drove over cables and uneven flooring.

You might think that some devices in the modern age have reached their maximum development level, such as the common desk-lamp, but you would be wrong. Natan Linder, a student from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created a robotic version that can not only light your room, but project internet pages on your desk as well. It is an upgrade on the AUR lamp from 2007, which tracks movements around a desk or table and can alter the color, focus, and strength of its light to suit the user’s needs. The LuminAR comes with those abilities, and much more. The robotic arm can move about on its own, and combines a vision system with a pico projector, wireless computer and camera. When turned on, the projector will look for a flat space around your room on which to display images. Since it can project more than one internet window, you can check your email and browse another website at the same time.

A test circuit built with nanowires of silicon could point the way to much smaller transistors, say the IBM researchers who created it. Researchers from IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center announced today at the annual Symposium on VLSI Technology, in Honolulu, that they have built a ring oscillator out of field-effect transistors (FETs) based on nanowires with diameters as small as 3 nanometers. The oscillator—is composed of 25 inverters using negative- and positive-channel FETs. The device, which demonstrated a delay of just 10 picoseconds per stage, shows that engineers can build a working circuit from transistors with much shorter channel lengths than today’s devices. Current flows through an FET’s channel under the control of the device’s gate. Scaling down the channel length will be critical if the dimensions of circuits on silicon chips are to continue to shrink, says Jeffrey Sleight, a senior technical staff member at IBM.

It is no secret that field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are getting bigger and more complex all the time. The fabrication process creates smaller transistors and makes more dense chips packing more digital processing per nanometer. Engineers love to see advancement because it means they can do more with modern silicon, and many times NI LabVIEW FPGA Module technology helps by abstracting the complexity to a higher level so that engineers can more smoothly take advantage of these improvements.  Unfortunately, there is one issue with FPGAs that continues to be a time sink and only gets worse with denser FPGAs: compilation time.

bowl and pairing off to come up with a way to create and commercialise sensors and switches that generate their own power. The idea is that the parts will make external power sources redundant - because they can convert energy from body heat, light and vibrations straight into electricity. Self powered electronics have already sporadically been used in technology like wall-mount remote control units for air conditioners, says Nikkei, but existing parts are bulky and cost a couple thousand yen a piece. 3,000 yen is about $35 - which means they're not the best bet, financially, yet.

Single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT)-based thin film transistors (TFTs) could be at the core of next-generation flexible electronics – displays, electronic circuits, sensors, memory chips, and other applications that are transitioning from rigid substrates, such as silicon and glass, to flexible substrates. What's holding back commercial applications is that industrial-type manufacturing of large scale SWCNT-based nanoelectronic devices isn't practical yet because controlling the morphology of single-walled carbon nanotubes is still causing headaches for materials engineers.

What made me fall of my chair is the methodology/architecture part of this statement. It’s hard enough (but doable) to use RDF to map philosophically similar APIs. It’s a non-starter to use it to bridge architectural and methodological differences. I have spent a fair amount of time looking at Semantic Web technologies in the context of modeling IT systems (see the “semantic tech” category of this blog). While I think they would be a great foundation I don’t see them ever coming anywhere near what Reuven describes.

An innovatice camera system could in future enhance security in public areas and buildings. Smart Eyes works just like the human eye. The system analyzes the recorded data in real time and then immediately flags up salient features and unusual scenes.  »Goal, goal, goal!« fans in the stadium are absolutely ecstatic, the uproar is enormous. So it‘s hardly surprising that the security personnel fail to spot a brawl going on between a few spectators. Separating jubilant fans from scuffling hooligans is virtually impossible in such a situation. Special surveillance cameras that immediately spot anything untoward and identify anything out of the ordinary could provide a solution. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT in Sankt Augustin have now developed such a device as part of the EU project »SEARISE – Smart Eyes: Attending and Recognizing Instances of Salient Events«. The automatic camera system is designed to replicate human-like capabilities in identifying and processing moving images.

Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has detailed the software used to make their robot dance (see some nice photos over at Pink Tentacle) in a recent press release.  The software, dubbed Choreonoid (Choreography and Humanoid), is similar to conventional computer animation software.  Users create key poses and the software automatically interpolates the motion between them.  What makes the software unique is that it also corrects the poses if they are mechanically unstable, such as modifying the position of the feet and waist, allowing anyone to create motions compatible with the ZMP balancing method.  This is especially important for robots like the HRP-4C, where complicated motions could easily cause it to fall over.

South Korean researchers have recently made a flexible nonvolatile memory based on memristors—fundamental electronic circuit elements discovered in 2008—using thin graphene oxide films. Memristors promise a new type of dense, cheap, and low-power memory and have typically been made using metal oxide thin films. The new graphene oxide devices should be cheaper and simpler to fabricate—they could be printed on rolls of plastic sheets and used in plastic RFID tags or in the wearable electronics of the future. "We think graphene oxide can be a good candidate for next-generation memory," says Sung-Yool Choi, who leads flexible devices research at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejeon, South Korea. Choi and his colleagues reported their device last week in Nano Letters.

Opus is Octasic's high-performing, ultra low-power, asynchronous DSP technology optimized for basestations, video processing and media gateway solutions. Asynchronous designs deliver similar computing performance to synchronous designs, but use less silicon and less power. No clock tree No state-elements Less sensitive to process and temperature variations

The goal of Long Term Evolution (LTE) is to achieve higher data rates through more efficient transmission, and thus improving the cellular phone user experience by enabling powerful new devices. The changes required in this technology present new challenges for base station vendors and their suppliers. Supporting 4G systems efficiently requires a number of innovations in DSP design; these innovations are moving the industry toward SoC architectures to support such systems. This paper will explore how TI's new architecture enables the key features in 4G systems.

RoweBots Research, Inc., a supplier of tiny embedded POSIX RTOS products, today announced the launch and release of UnisonTM Version 5 and the open-source version of Unison Version 4. These two ultra-tiny embedded-Linux and POSIX compatible RTOSs open Renesas Technology Corp.’s SH-2A Microcontroller (MCU) family to Linux and POSIX compatible development for the first time.

The ARM Cortex™-M4 processor is the latest embedded processor by ARM specifically developed to address digital signal control markets that demand an efficient, easy-to-use blend of control and signal processing capabilities. The combination of high-efficiency signal processing functionality with the low-power, low cost and ease-of-use benefits of the Cortex-M family of processors is designed to satisfy the emerging category of flexible solutions specifically targeting the motor control, automotive, power management, embedded audio and industrial automation markets. The Cortex-M4 processor features extended single-cycle multiply-accumulate (MAC) instructions, optimized SIMD arithmetic, saturating arithmetic instructions and an optional single precision Floating Point Unit (FPU). These features build upon the innovative technology that characterizes the ARM Cortex-M series processors…

Within the next three years, the U.S. military will test the feasibility of sending a quadruped robot out into the field as a trusty pack mule to carry supplies for its troops, wherever they go. If the testing goes well for Boston Dynamics's Legged Squad Support System (LS3), company founder Marc Raibert will have come a long way from the one-legged hopping robots he pioneered in the 1980s. Actually Raibert has already come a long way, to the point where the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Tactical Technology Office and the U.S. Marine Corps awarded his company a 30-month, $32-million contract last week to deliver a prototype LS3. This would be the first step in fulfilling the military's call for an autonomous, legged robot that can carry up to 181 kilograms of supplies for at least 32 kilometers without refueling.

The potential for the QTC material to transition from an insulator to a conductor (i.e. change its electrical property) is influenced by how much deformation the material is experiencing as a result of the applied mechanical pressure. QTC can be used to produce low profile, low cost, pressure activated switches or sensors that display variable resistance with applied force and return to a quiescent state when the force is removed. The difference between a QTC switch and a QTC sensor is arguably only the speed and amount of physical input required to achieve the required switching point or resistance range.

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“The ability to harness and control the power of bacterial motion is an important requirement for further development of hybrid biomechanical systems driven by microorganisms," said Argonne physicist and principal investigator Igor Aronson. “In this system, the gears are a million times more massive than the bacteria."