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Researchers at the NanoRobotics Laboratory of the École Polytechnique de Montréal, in Canada, are putting swarms of bacteria to work, using them to perform micro-manipulations and even propel microrobots. Led by Professor Sylvain Martel, the researchers want to use flagellated bacteria to carry drugs into tumors, act as sensing agents for detecting pathogens, and operate micro-factories that could perform pharmacological and genetic tests. They also want to use the bacteria as micro-workers for building things. Things like a tiny step pyramid. The video below shows some 5000 bacteria moving like a swarm of little fish, working together to transport tiny epoxy bricks and assemble a pyramidal structure -- all in 15 minutes. The video was presented at IROS last year, along with a wonderfully titled paper, "A Robotic Micro-Assembly Process Inspired By the Construction of the Ancient Pyramids and Relying on Several Thousands of Flagellated Bacteria Acting as Workers."

Today's FPGAs are doubling in capacity every 2 years and have already surpassed the 5 million equivalent ASIC gate mark. With designs of this magnitude, the need for fast flows has never been greater. At the same time, designers are seeking rapid feedback on their ASIC or FPGA designs by implementing quick prototypes or initial designs on FPGA-based boards. These prototypes or designs allow designers to start development, verification and debug of the design—in the context of system software and hardware—and also to fine tune algorithms in the design architecture. Quick and intuitive debug iterations to incorporate fixes are of great value. The ability to perform design updates that don't completely uproot all parts of the design that have already been verified is also a bonus! Whether the goal is aggressive performance or to get a working initial design or prototype on the board as quickly as possible, this paper provides information on traditional and new techniques that accelerate design and debug iterations.

Chemicals giant Merck KGaA (Darmstadt, Germany) and Plastic Logic GmbH (Dresden, Germany), the developer of the Que e-reader, have announced plans to develop, test and commercialize novel lisicon-type organic semiconductors from Merck in Plastic Logic's displays. The introduction and production of the materials is planned for 2011. Having shown the Que e-reader at the Consumer Electronics Show in January Plastic Logic was originally expected to ship the e-reader in April 2010 but that launch has now slipped to June, it is reported. Merck recently invested in the expansion of its Chilworth Technical Center chemicals research site in Southampton, England, by adding laboratories to intensify and accelerate display material developments based on plastic electronics.

Bruno Oliveira and I are working on a functional pearl called The Monad Zipper (*). You know how dealing with monad transformers can be quite awkward -- especially when developing highly modular programs where every component comes with its own effects?Well, we bring relief in this situation by applying Huet's zipper to a type-level data structure: the monad stack.We're submitting to ICFP on April 2, and would greatly appreciate your feedback on the current draft. Please let us know what you think of the presented approach, the clarity and style of writing, examples of situations where you could have used the monad zipper, ...(*) not to be confused with the zipper monad

This white paper looks at a number of key techniques to optimize the systems engineering process and ensure project success. It examines the business benefits the techniques can provide and looks at IBM Rational solutions that are available to support the techniques.

Model based Optical proximity correction is usually used to compensate for the pattern distortion during the microlithography process. Currently, almost all the lithography effects, such as the proximity effects from the limited NA, the 3D mask effects due to the shrinking critical dimension, the photo resist effects, and some other well known physical process, can all be well considered into modeling with the OPC algorithm. However, the micro-lithography is not the final step of the pattern transformation procedure from the mask to the wafer. The etch process is also a very important stage. It is well known that till now, the etch process still can't be well explained by physics theory. In this paper, we will demonstrate our study on the model based etch bias retarget for OPC.

If you're a long time reader, you may remember our mention in 2008 of Emanuel Diamant's provocatively titled paper "I'm sorry to say, but your understanding of image processing fundamentals is absolutely wrong" (PDF). Diamant is back with a presentation created for the 3rd Israeli Conference on Robotics, with the equally provocative title: "It's Cognitive Robotics, Stupid" (PDF). In it he laments the lack of agreed upon definitions for words like intelligence, knowledge, and information that are crucial to the development of robotics.