Group2_OLDBRIDGE:NEXI – Robot

The Nexi Robot

The Nexi Robot (Great Idea) by Toney Allman will fascinate you from beginning to end. It relates the quest of MIT robotics professor Cynthia Breazeal to build a social robot, one that learns like a person does and that interacts with people in a social way. Much different than tool and task oriented robots that dominate the robotics field, social robots are designed to learn from people and interact with people, understanding and showing emotions.

Author Toney Allman does a great job of making these complicated ideas understandable and stimulating. Sometimes the author struggles to keep the writing simple all the way through. At times the level is appropriate for a skilled 2nd grade reader, but overall we’re looking at a book aimed at 3rd and 4th graders and up. The format follows a younger reader level, but don’t let kids be put off. They’ll be rewarded with an excellent story about scientific inquiry that is sure to spur their imaginations and help shape their career and educational choices. I recommend this book for any school or public library or for a kid interested in robotics or engineering.

Here is a “Robots to the Rescue”, a short video kids might enjoy staring Nexi and another flying robot. At the end, you’ll see that Nexi looks like it could use a good dose of Visine as it blinks away the smokey sting from its eyes.

NEXI – Robot with facial expressions

A latest invention by MIT Media Lab is a new robot that is able to show various facial expressions such as ‘slanting its eyebrows in anger’, or ‘raise them in surprise’, and show a wide assortment of facial expressions while communicating with people.

This latest achievement in the field of Robotics is named NEXI as it is framed as the next generation robots which is aimed for a range of applications for personal robots and human-robot teamwork.

DESIGNING

The head and face of NEXI were designed by Xitome Design which is a innovative designing and development company that specializes in robotic design and development. The expressive robotics started with a neck mechanism sporting 4 degrees of freedom (DoF) at the base, plus pan-tilt-yaw of the head itself. The mechanism has been constructed to time the movements so they mimic human speed. The face of NEXI has been specially designed to use gaze, eyebrows, eyelids and an articulate mandible which helps in expressing a wide range of different emotions.

The chassis of NEXI is also advanced. It has been developed by the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics UMASS (University of Massachusetts), Amherst. This chassis is based on the uBot5 mobile manipulator. The mobile base can balance dynamically on two wheels. The arms of NEXI can pick up a weight of up to 10 pounds and the plastic covering of the chassis can detect any kind of human touch.

CYNTHIA BREAZEAL: HEAD OF THE PROJECT

This project was headed by Media Lab’s Cynthia Breazeal, a well known robotics expert famous for earlier expressive robots such as Kismet. She is an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT. She named her new product as an MDS (mobile, dextrous, social) robot.

FEATURES OF NEXI

Except a wide range of facial expressions, Nexi has many other features. It has self-balancing wheels like the Segway transporter, to ultimately ride on. Currently it uses an additional set of supportive wheels to operate as a statically stable platform in its early stage of development. It has hands which can be used to manipulate objects, eyes (video cameras), ears (an array of microphones), and a 3-D infrared camera and laser rangefinder which support real-time tracking of objects, people and voices as well as indoor navigation.

Group2_OLDBRIDGE:Forget Windows: Midori is coming

Is Midori Really the Next Windows?

The Windows 7 craze is barely over, and yet the internet is already buzzing with the next big thing from Microsoft: a project called Midori. The SD Times claims to have seen internal Microsoft documents detailing what Midori actually is, and they say it’s the clean-break from Windows many of us have been waiting for. The SD Times article is heavy on the details, and quite technical, but luckily Ars Technica provides a more accessible summary of what Microsoft has in store for Midori.

Microsoft promised an operating system written in managed code a long time ago, but instead we got Vista – the managed code came with too many compatibility problems. Midori, being based on Singularity, is written entirely in managed code. In addition, it is built for a ‘cloud computing’ world.

According to Ars’ Peter Bright, Microsoft is facing two major problems in its future operating systems strategy. We are all very familiar with the first problem: compatibility. The soft and hardware world is ever changing and evolving, and Microsoft’s commitment to providing as much backwards compatibility as possible is holding the development of its flagship product back. Many have advocated using a virtual machine for backwards compatibility, much like Apple did with Mac OS 9 in Mac OS X, or os/2 with DOS and Windows 3.x. This would allow Microsoft to make a clean API break, without wrecking backwards compatibility.

Midori seems to be doing just that, while allowing for a rather clever migration path. Midori will not only run as a stand-alone operating system, but also under the Hyper-V hypervisor, and even as a process under Windows. Bright explains that the migration path is a three-stage process:

Initially, then, Midori might work as just another Windows program used for cloud applications. As Midori applications become more abundant and can be used for more day-to-day computing tasks, it can run as a complete OS under Hyper-V, so the machine would be shared between a (legacy) Windows virtual machine and a (new and shiny) Midori VM. Further still into the future, as Windows applications become less and less necessary, Midori can be run as the sole OS on a machine, with the occasional Windows app relegated to a virtual machine.

The second problem arises from the cloud computing thing. Being geared for cloud computing means you need to have the ability to run on not 2 or 4 cores, but maybe hundreds, thousands of them. Developing for multiple processors or cores is already a major challenge for developers today dealing with a few cores, so you can imagine how complicated things get when we’re talking hundreds of cores. With Midori, Microsoft is aiming to make it significantly easier to do parallel programming, enabling programers to efficiently utilise the benefits of having a vast amount of cores available.

This is all still speculation at this point, as Microsoft’s official response when inquired about Midori is that it is an incubation project, and one of many, at that. It is far too early to claim that Midori is the next Windows, just as it was far too early to claim that Singularity was the next Windows. Microsoft Research is a big place with lots of interesting projects going on, and Midori seems to “just” be one of them, no more, no less.

I concur with what Peter Bright concludes: developing an operating system to supersede Windows that is “fundamentally designed for cloud computing” seems like a “risky gamble”. As Bright concludes:

Midori could be anything from a complete dead-end, to the OS 95 percent of the world will be running in five to ten years.I suspect that the truth will lie somewhere in between; a future Microsoft OS will use virtualization to provide backwards compatibility, and that future OS will use managed code. Finally, the asynchronous, networked, fault-tolerant parts will materialize within the next year as part of Microsoft’s cloud computing initiative – a software platform, libraries, and tools. Indeed, this cloud computing platform might be Midori.

WINDOWS is a name that has ruled the whole computer world since its first launch in November 1985. Since then it is like a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

With many advanced versions of Windows available today such as Windows XP, Windows Vista, it is the most used operating system in the world. In 2010, Microsoft is going to launch WINDOWS 2007, but now here is time to experience a yet another technology of operating systems.

Yes, MICROSOFT is working on a new generation of operating systems called Cloud-Based Operating System and rumors are there that MIDORI will be their first such operating system, which will replace Windows fully from computer map.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE

MIDORI is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system. In this the tools and libraries are completely managed code. MIDORI is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), will be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process.

MIDORI can be also seen as MICROSOFT’S answer those competitors who are applying “Virtualization” as a mean to solving issues within contemporary computing.

The main idea behind MIDORI is to develop a lightweight portable OS which can be mated easily to lots of various applications.

IMPORTANCE OF MIDORI

For knowing the importance of MIDORI you have to think about, how an operating system is loaded on a computer. Actually operating system is loaded onto a hard disk physically located on that machine. In this way, the operating system is tied very tightly to that hardware. As Windows is dependent on hardware, it might face opposition from contemporary ways of working because people are extremely mobile in using different devices in order get diverse information.

Due to this trend installing different applications on a single computer may led to different compatibility issues whenever the machine require updating. The new operating system will solve these problems by the concept of Virtualizing. This will solve problems such as widespread security vulnerabilities, unexpected interactions among different applications, failures caused by errant extensions, plug-ins, and drivers and many more.

ERIC RUDDER, Senior Vice President, Technical Strategy

The importance of this project for MICROSOFT can be understood by the fact that company choose Eric Rudder , former head of Microsoft’s server and tools business and a key member of Chairman Bill Gates’ faction of the company, to handle it.

WHEN WILL IT BE LAUNCHED

Just Wait and See. Microsoft has not declared any such date about launching of MIDORI, but there are rumors that this project is in incubation phase.

According to a report, Microsoft isn’t just looking at the next version of Windows (no, not Mojave) for future OS possibilities, but is looking beyond the Windows architecture altogether with a project known as Midori. The new OS is still in the “incubation” phase (which puts it slightly closer to market than R&D projects), but Microsoft has admitted to its existence, and the Software Daily Times says at least one team in Redmond is actively working on the new architecture.

The basis for the platform centers around research related to Microsoft’s Singularity project, and envisions a distributed environment where applications, documents, and connectivity are blurred in a cloud-computing phantasmagoria which can be run natively or hosted across multiple systems. The researchers are working to create a concurrent / parallel distribution of resources, as well as a method of handling applications across separate machines — religiously-dubbed the Asynchronous Promise Architecture — which will set the stage for a backwards-compatible operating system built from the ground up, with networks of varying size in mind. Says the SD Times, “The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.” Like it technical? Hit the read link for an in-depth look at the possible shape of Microsoft’s future.king to create a concurrent / parallel distribution of resources, as well as a method of handling applications across separate machines — religiously-dubbed the Asynchronous Promise Architecture — which will set the stage for a backwards-compatible operating system built from the ground up, with networks of varying size in mind. Says the SD Times, “The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.” Like it technical? Hit the read link for an in-depth look at the possible shape of Microsoft’s future.

Group2_OLDBRIDGE: 4G Technology

What is 4G Wireless Technology?

At present 2G Technology (GSM) is widely used worldwide. The problem with 2G technology is that the data rates are limited. This makes it ineffecient for Data Transfer applications like video conferencing, music or video downloads, etc. To increase the speed various new technologies have come into picture. The first is 2.5G (GPRS) technology that allows data transfer at a better rate than GSM and recently 3G (WCDMA/UMTS) technology has come into picture. The maximum theoretical data transfer with this 3G technology is 2Mbps (practically it could be a max of 384Kbps or even less). The 4G technology which is at its infancy is suppose to allow data transfer upto 100Mbps outdoor and 1Gbps indoor.

When is the 4G Technology going to be launched?

NTT Docomo is planning to launch 4G sevices in Japan around 2010-2015. Earlier it announced that it would be launching the service in 2006-2008. But at the same time it has said that the data transfer would be maximum of 20Mbps. Recently they have started calling this intermediate launch as ‘Super-3G’.

What would be the main features of 4G Technology?

The 4G technology will be able to support Interactive services like Video Conferencing (with more than 2 sites simultaneously), Wireless Internet,etc. The bandwidth would be much wider (100 MHz) and data would be transferred at much higher rates. The cost of the data transfer would be comparatively very less and global mobility would be possible. The networks will be all IP networks based on IPv6. The antennas will be much smarter and improved access technologies like OFDM and MC-CDMA (Multi Carrier CDMA) will be used. Also the security features will be much better.

What are the likely new features?

The entire network would be packet switched (IP based). All switches would be digital. Higher bandwidths would be available which would make cheap data transfer possible. The network security would be much tighter. Also QoS will imrpove. More effecient algorithms at the Physical layer will reduce the Inter-channel Interference and Co-channel Interference.



Evolution of Mobile Cellular Communication Systems

4G Mobile technology – The mobile race to innovate, includes the following innovations:

1. The mobile communications comprise two steps: access to the mobile network, and access to the mobile services. Traditionally, these two steps are all controlled by one operator in a closed and proprietary way. In the 4G mobile era, the access to the mobile services will be evolved to an open Mobile Cloud so that it is fully open to any developers and providers. In this way, any non-wireless industries, such as Google, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, GM, Bank of America can provide services for their mobile users. The access to the mobile network is still controlled by the traditional wireless operators such as AT&T, Verizon,  T-Mobile and China Mobile. Of course, the operators are very reluctant to go this trend, but for the mobile users and for the future global movement, it is just a matter of time to do it.
2. The mobile device system architecture will be open in order to converge multiple RTTs (radio transmission technologies) in one same device. Same as laptop computer, the future Smartphone will be based on open wireless architecture (OWA) technology which means, when you change the wireless standards, you do not need to change phone. It is totally different from current multi-standards phone which is in closed system architecture, and users can not remove the unused RTT modules and basically can not do anything on the mobile phone system. In the OWA system, you can just change RTT card in your Smartphone to switch your wireless standards, or you can integrate multiple wireless standards in one RTT SIM card. Based on this OWA platform, you can integrate home phone, office phone and mobile phone into one common Personal device – it is more beyond just a phone. In fact, this 4G mobile device is a system to bring the world to your hand, or we call it iHand – the World in Hand, which is more better than calling it an iPhone.
3. Any portable consumer electronics device can be a mobile phone by inserting the OWA-powered mobile RTT(s) card. This approach is truly converging the mobile wireless technology with the computer technology by providing the OWA virtualization layer between the high-layer computer-based OS (operating systems) & applications solutions and the underlying wireless transmission-based different mobile networks access means.
4. More breakthrough technologies are being developed for efficient utilization of wireless spectrum, and the dynamic and open spectrum management. Wireless is totally different from wired communications, and therefore the overall performance relies on both system performance and transmission performance where spectrum is one of the key issues.
5. Power efficiency is another critical issue for mobile device. The system architecture must be open to enable removable of unused modules, and the processing architecture must be optimized to the lowest possible in terms of the whole system performance. Meanwhile, the RF radio modules should be narrowed to the minimal meeting the basic requirements of necessary RTTs.

Group2_OLDBRIDGE:Lip Reading computers

Lip-reading computers for deaf people are a step closer with scientists successfully teaching computers to recognize different languages from the shapes and movements of people’s mouths.

Researchers at the School of Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia conducted statistical modeling of the lip motions of 23 bilingual and trilingual speakers. The languages tested included English, French, German, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, Polish and Russian, and the system was able to identify with very high degree of accuracy which language was spoken by an individual speaker.

“This is an exciting advance in automatic lip-reading technology and the first scientific confirmation of something we already intuitively suspected -­ that when people speak different languages, they use different mouth shapes in different sequences,” said Professor Cox who, along with PhD student Jake Newman, led the team.

“For example, we found frequent ‘lip-rounding’ among French speakers and more prominent tongue movements among Arabic speakers.”

Improving the system’s ability to identify individual characteristics and ways of speaking is the next step. The research is part of a wider UEA project on automatic lip-reading funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The current research builds on earlier work conducted by the University in conjunction with Surrey University. In 2008 it announced the development of a lip-reading system that converts videos of conversations into written transcripts. The researchers developed software to track face and lip movements and a database of expressions and lip movements corresponding to letter combinations.

Language recognition offers enormous potential to help deaf people and those who have difficulty hearing in noisy environments.

The technology could also be of value to law enforcement agencies in the fight against terrorism, crime and antisocial behavior. But while most of us have nothing to hide, it’s also likely to raise the usual questions and concerns about privacy and increasing levels of (often covert) surveillance and capture of data.

Subsystems of our lip-reader: Face-Tracker Lip-Finder: Neural Net architecture to find the corners of the lips visual TDNN: preprocessing: gray-level images, LDA, PCA, FFT, gray-value-modification acoustic TDNN: preprocessing: 16 Melscale Coefficient av combined MS-TDNN: the combination is done on the phonetic layer. System overview: This work is sponsored by the state of Baden-W�rtemberg Germany (Landesforschungsschwerpunkt Neuroinformatik). Partial support was also provided by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (US). One of the first member was Chris Bregler in 1992, he’s now with International Computer Science Institute in Berkley (have a look at his Lipreading page Visual Acoustic Speech Recognition (Computer Lipreading))

Group2_OLDBRIDGE:BLU_RAY technology

Blu-Ray is an optical storage format developed by Sony and Phillips. Blu-Ray was created to store large amounts of high definition video and sound. Blu-Ray gets its name from the type of laser it uses to read and write data from and to the disc, the color of the laser is a hue of blue-violet. Due to the extreme density of these optical discs the data needs to be smaller to fit onto the disc, a blue-violet laser has a shorter wavelength than the normal red lasers used today.

Blu-Ray technology is so-named because of its use of blue laser technology in storing and reading data. Being on the shorter wavelength end of the light spectrum than the red laser used for DVD and CD technologies (405 nanometer for Blu-Ray versus 650 nanometer and 780 nanometer for DVD and CD technology), blue laser is capable of storing a much larger amount of data using the same space because of a much smaller “spot size” requirement. Blu-Ray’s 405nm wavelength blue-violet laser uses an 0.85nm pickup aperture.

Single-layer Blu-Ray disks currently store 23.3GB of data, which dual-layer Blu-Ray disks are able to store 46.6GB of data.

There is currently a market war taking place against both HD DVD’s and Blu-Ray DVD’s. These two types of DVD’s are fighting to see who will be the new form of media for the years to come. As of yet, neither media type has made enough inroads to garner a champion.

Obviously the major benefit of Blu-Ray DVD’s is that it is able to hold more data on one disc, therefore allowing high definition audio and video. The more data you have, the more data can be read to give a clearer picture with more color and vividness.

One of the benefits of Blu-Ray technology is that because data is so close together, early types of Blu-Ray discs would be contaminated by slight scratches. However, a new coating has been developed that makes Blu-Ray discs extremely difficult to scratch.

Blu-Ray is looking to make inroads into the consumer electronics market with the Blu-Ray DVD player with its Sony PlayStation. The Sony PlayStation will include a basic Blu-Ray DVD player which might spur sales of media and make it the de facto standard.

The disadvantages to Blu-Ray discs are that they are quite expensive. For instance, players are selling at about the $1,000 mark and DVD discs will be more expensive than their standard DVD counterparts. Another disadvantage is that since there are two standards, both Blu-Ray and HD, most people are sitting on the sidelines to see who the winner is. Because Blu-Ray has been developed in part with Sony, Sony has included DRM or digital rights management that will make it more difficult for people to place shift and time shift their content.

Blu-Ray Technology

BD Formats

There are three formats being developed for Blu-Ray technology. The BD-ROM or Blu-Ray read-only disc format will be used to store movies, computer games and software. The Blu-Ray recordable or BD-R will provide users the opportunity to store larger amounts of data and HDTV recordings in one disc. The BD-RE or Blu-Ray rewritable disc format will provide users the ability to change the disc’s contents.

Disc Capacity

The main advantage of Blu-Ray technology is its capability of storing massive amounts of data in one disc. Blu-Ray technology will enable users to store an average of 25GB-27GB worth of data into just one layer. This is equivalent to 4 hours worth of HD video and audio. Moreover, Blu-Ray dual layer discs will have a storage capacity of up to 54GB. Research on Blu-Ray discs with up to four layers and with storage capacities of up to 200 GB is currently underway.

Supportable File Formats

Blu-Ray discs are capable of supporting different file formats such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4 High Profile AVC and VC-1 coder decoders which enables the discs to store up to four hours worth of HDTV audio-video per layer. It is also capable of supporting the different multi-channel audio file formats such as the different file formats of Dolby and DTS as well as PCM audio file formats. BD rewritable and recordable disc formats will also be backwards-compatible with older formats such as MPEG-2 while newer codecs will enable Blu-Ray technology to support new file formats in the future. The integration of Java cross platform will also enable the Blu-Ray disc to have interactive menus as well as the capability to add new content or updates such as new subtitles through the Internet.

Regional Codes and Security

For security, Blu-Ray supports mandatory HDCP encrypted output, ROM-Mark watermarking, BD+ dynamic cryptology, and the Advanced Access Content System (AACS).

Blu-Ray discs will have three regional codes: one for countries in the Amercian continent as well as countries in east Asia except China and Japan, another for countries in the European and African continents and another one for all the other countries in the Asian continent such as China, Russia, etc.

Blu-Ray Disc Association is the developer of Blu-Ray Discs.

Blu-Ray is the new technology of optical discs and offers us more capacity of storage than DVDs, but at the same time it offers higher quality at playing movies and music, especially on HD-Ready and Full HD generations of television.

DVDs are read by a red laser, while the Blu-Ray is read by blue laser. Blu-Ray Discs (BD) offer a capacity of between 25GB to a single layer and 50GB for those with dual layers.

Blu-Ray discs (BD) have a higher purchase price than DVDs and CDs because of the last generation which offers a more capacity of storage than at DVDs and CDs, but also a high-definition playing video and music, what I stated and above.

Also, Sony Entertainment have already introduced the Blu-Ray technology for the PlayStation 3 console which dominates the game console’s market.

Blu-Ray ROM offers up to 1920×1080 pixels resolution on high definition video and up to 60 frames per second.

This is the future technology that will dominate the market in a short time.

Group2_OldBridge:Network Protocol Analysis ppt

Group2_OldBridge:Selective repeat

Selective Repeat Error Recovery

Selective Repeat error recovery is a procedure which is implemented in some communications protocols to provide reliability. It is the most complex of a set of procedures which may provide error recovery, it is however the most efficient scheme. Selective repeat is employed by the TCP transport protocol.

Features required for Selective Repeat ARQ

• To support Go-Back-N ARQ, a protocol must number each PDU which is sent. (PDUs are normally numbered using modulo arithmetic, which allows the same number to be re-used after a suitably long period of time. The time period is selected to ensure the same PDU number is never used again for a different PDU, until the first PDU has “left the network” (e.g. it may have been acknowledged)).
• The local node must also keep a buffer of all PDUs which have been sent, but have not yet been acknowledged.
• The receiver at the remote node keeps a record of the highest numbered PDU which has been correctly received. This number corresponds to the last acknowledgement PDU which it may have sent.

The above features are also required for Go-Back-N, however for selective repeat, the receiver must also maintain a buffer of frames which have been received, but not acknowledged.

Recovery of lost PDUs using Selective Repeat ARQ

The recovery of a corrupted PDU proceeds in four stages:

• First, the corrupted PDU is discarded at the remote node’s receiver.
• Second, the remote node requests retransmission of the missing PDU using a control PDU (sometimes called a Selective Reject). The receiver then stores all out-of-sequence PDUs in the receive buffer until the requested PDU has been retransmitted.
• The sender receives the retransmission request and then transmits the lost PDU(s).
• The receiver forwards the retransmitted PDU, and all subsequent in-sequence PDUs which are held in the receive buffer.

Retransmission using Selective Repeat

A remote node may request retransmission of corrupted PDUs by initiating Selective Repeat error recovery by sending a control PDU indicating the missing PDU. This allows the remote node to instruct the sending node where to retransmit the PDU which has not been received. The remote stores any out-of-sequence PDUs (i.e. which do not have the expected sequence number) until the retransmission is complete.

Upon receipt of a Selective Repeat control PDU (by the local node), the transmitter sends a single PDU from its buffer of unacknowledged PDUs. The transmitter then continues normal transmission of new PDUs until the PDUs are acknowledged or another selective repeat request is received.

Operation of Selective Repeat. The sender transmits four PDUs (1-4). The first PDU (1) is corrupted and not received. The receiver detects this when it receives PDU(2), which it stores in the receive buffer and requests a selective repeat of PDU(1). The sender responds to the request by sending PDU(1), and then continues sending PDUs (5-7). The receiver stores all subsequent out-of-sequence PDUs (3-4), until it receives PDU(1) correctly. The received PDU (1) and all stored PDUs (2-4) are then forwarded, followed by (5-7) as each of these is received in turn.

If the retransmission is not successful, the protocol relies upon a protocol timer in the local node to detect that no acknowledgment was received. The lost PDUs may then be recovered by Polling.

Comparison of ARQ Methods

The table below provides a comparison of the various ARQ methods described. (W is the window size, or number of PDUs which may be in transit at any one time).

ARQ Method	Sender Buffer	Receiver Buffer	Control PDUs
Stop-and-Wait	1 PDU	1 PDU	ACK
Polling	W PDUs	1 PDU	ACK, Poll, Response
Go-Back-N	W PDUs	1 PDU	ACK, Go-Back-N
Selective Repeat	W PDUs	W PDUs	ACK, Selective Repeat