Self-levitating displays allow physical interactions with mid-air virtual objects

An interactive swarm of flying 3D pixels (voxels) developed at Queen’s Univ.’s Human Media Lab is set to revolutionize the way people interact with virtual reality. The system, called BitDrones, allows users to explore virtual 3D information by interacting with physical self-levitating building blocks.

Queen’s professor Roel Vertegaal and his students are unveiling the BitDrones system on Monday, Nov. 9 at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Charlotte, North Carolina. BitDrones is the first step towards creating interactive self-levitating programmable matter – materials capable of changing their 3D shape in a programmable fashion – using swarms of nano quadcopters. The work highlights many possible applications for the new technology, including real-reality 3D modeling, gaming, molecular modeling, medical imaging, robotics and online information visualization.

“BitDrones brings flying programmable matter, such as featured in the futuristic Disney movie Big Hero 6, closer to reality,” says Dr. Vertegaal. “It is a first step towards allowing people to interact with virtual 3D objects as real physical objects.”

Computational strategy finds brain tumor-shrinking molecules

Patients with glioblastoma, a type of malignant brain tumor, usually survive fewer than 15 months following diagnosis. Since there are no effective treatments for the deadly disease, Univ. of California, San Diego researchers developed a new computational strategy to search for molecules that could be developed into glioblastoma drugs. In mouse models of human glioblastoma, one molecule they found shrank the average tumor size by half. The study is published by Oncotarget.

The newly discovered molecule works against glioblastoma by wedging itself in the temporary interface between two proteins whose binding is essential for the tumor’s survival and growth. This study is the first to demonstrate successful inhibition of this type of protein, known as a transcription factor.

“Most drugs target stable pockets within proteins, so when we started out, people thought it would be impossible to inhibit the transient interface between two transcription factors,” said first author Igor Tsigelny, PhD, research scientist at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, as well as the San Diego Supercomputer Center and Department of Neurosciences at UC San Diego. “But we addressed this challenge and created a new strategy for drug design—one that we expect many other researchers will immediately begin implementing in the development of drugs that target similar proteins, for the treatment of a variety of diseases.”

Researchers fur-bricate hair with inexpensive 3-D printer

3-D printers typically produce hard plastic objects, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon Univ. have found a way to produce hair-like strands, fibers and bristles using a common, low-cost printer.

The technique for producing 3-D-printed hair is similar to - and inspired by - the way that gossamer plastic strands are extruded when a person uses a hot glue gun.

"You just squirt a little bit of material and pull away," said Gierad Laput, a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). "It's a very simple idea, really."

The plastic hair is produced strand by strand, so the process isn't fast - it takes about 20-25 minutes to generate hair on 10 square millimeters. But it requires no special hardware, just a set of parameters that can be added to a 3-D print job. The resulting hair can be cut, curled with hot air, or braided. Dense, close-cropped strands can form a brush.

A new way of computing

Researchers from the Univ. of South Florida College of Engineering have proposed a new form of computing that uses circular nanomagnets to solve quadratic optimization problems orders of magnitude faster than that of a conventional computer.

A wide range of application domains can be potentially accelerated through this research such as finding patterns in social media, error-correcting codes to big data and biosciences.

In an article published in Nature Nanotechnology, authors Sanjukta Bhanja, D.K. Karunaratne, Ravi Panchumarthy, Srinath Rajaram and Sudeep Sarkar discuss how their work harnessed the energy-minimization nature of nanomagnetic systems to solve the quadratic optimization problems that arise in computer vision applications, which are computationally expensive.

How wireless “X-ray vision” could power virtual reality, smart homes, and Hollywood

A team of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has long believed that wireless signals like WiFi can be used to see things that are invisible to the naked eye.

Since 2013, CSAIL researchers have been developing technologies that use wireless signals to track human motion. The team has shown that it can detect gestures and body movements as subtle as the rise and fall of a person’s chest from the other side of a house, allowing a mother to monitor a baby’s breathing or a firefighter to determine if there are survivors inside a burning building.

Next up? Seeing a person’s silhouette and even distinguishing between individuals.

In a paper accepted to the SIGGRAPH Asia conference taking place next month, the team presents a new technology called RF Capture that picks up wireless reflections off the human body to see the silhouette of a human standing behind a wall.

How sensorimotor intelligence may develop

It is fascinating to observe a robot exploring its physical possibilities and surroundings, and subsequently developing different self-taught behaviors without any instructions. In their paper published on October, 26, 2015 in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), Professor Ralf Der from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, und Georg Martius, Postdoc and Fellow at the Institute for Science and Technology (IST Austria), demonstrate the emergence of sensorimotor intelligence in robots based on their proposed learning rule.

How brains or artificial neural networks develop autonomous, self-directed behavior is a fundamental challenge for both neuroscience and robotics. Traditionally, the self-organized development of behavior is explained by using concepts such as intrinsic motivation or curiosity. In their paper, Der and Martius argue however that the emergence of such behavior can be grounded directly in the synaptic plasticity of the nervous system.

The world's fastest nanoscale photonics switch

International team of researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State Univ. and the Australian National Univ. in Canberra created an ultrafast all-optical switch on silicon nanostructures. This device may become a platform for future computers and permit to transfer data at an ultrahigh speed. The article with the description of the device was published in Nano Letters journal and highlighted in Nature Materials.

This work belongs to the field of photonics - an optics discipline which appeared in the 1960-s, simultaneously with the invention of lasers. Photonics has the same goals as electronics does, but uses photons--the quanta of light--instead of electrons. The biggest advantage of using photons is the absence of interactions between them. As a consequence, photons address the data transmission problem better than electrons. This property can primarily be used for in computing where IPS (instructions per second) is the main attribute to be maximized. The typical scale of eletronic transistors--the basis of contemporary electronic devices--is less than 100 nanometers, wheres the typical scale of photonic transistors stays on the scale of several micrometers. Nanostructures that are able to compete with the electronic structures--for example, plasmonic nanoparticles--are characterized by low efficiency and significant losses. Therefore, coming up with a compact photonic switch was a very challenging task.

A basis for all cryptography

“Indistinguishability obfuscation” is a powerful concept that would yield provably secure versions of every cryptographic system we’ve ever developed and all those we’ve been unable to develop. But nobody knows how to put it into practice.

At the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers showed that the problem of indistinguishability obfuscation is, in fact, a variation on a different cryptographic problem, called efficient functional encryption. And while computer scientists don’t know how to do efficient functional encryption, either, they believe that they’re close—much closer than they thought they were to indistinguishability obfuscation.

“This thing has really been studied for a longer time than obfuscation, and we’ve had a very nice progression of results achieving better and better functional-encryption schemes,” says Nir Bitansky, a postdoc in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who wrote the conference paper together with Vinod Vaikuntanathan, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “People thought this is a small gap. Obfuscation—that’s another dimension. It’s much more powerful. There’s a huge gap there. What we did was really narrow this gap. Now if you want to do obfuscation and get all of crypto, everything that you can imagine, from standard assumptions, all that you have to do is solve this very specific problem, making functional encryption just a little bit more efficient.”