U of Oviedo Queue Mgmt. Project

11:39 pm | Computer Programming, Universidad de Oviedo | No comment

You are in a hurry to get home when you suddenly remember that you have to buy your groceries at the supermarket. You first went to the meat section to get a ticket to get you in line while you get the other stuff you need at the other sections.

Getting a ticket does not give you the assurance that you won’t miss your turn. Sometimes your mind wanders off with the other things that you need and forget that you are in a queue.

Queue management is a problem typically faced at grocery stores, such as with respect to fulfillment of deli orders. It requires the customer to remain close to the deli counter in order to bow when the order is ready. The customer often has little understanding as to how long it will take for his/her ticket number to be called forward or how long will take the service person to fulfill his/her order thus annoying the customer who may have other shopping to do at the store.

Thanks to the computer engineering students at the Universidad de Oviedo who worked on an exciting project about a system for service queue management that will solve queuing inside a supermarket; the wireless automatic queue ticket dispenser based on mobile devices. It also provides support for people with visual or auditory disabilities.

Futuristic Car Design by Munich Student

1:15 am | Automobile, Munich University | No comment

A student from Munich University in the department of science, Slavche Tanevsky,  is presently creating an ultramodern idea of a car model Lamborghini called Madura, got its name from the name of an island in Indonesia with a well-liked practice of karapan sapi. It is a resemblance to that of the Lamborghini Bull icon. Maintaining a slim, sleek, deeply concentrated design, Lamborghini Madura is even more dynamic and compelling. It is also eco-friendly. The idea was created – in cooperation with Lamborghini and Audi designers – for Lamborghini”s Raw Materials Project.

The front position of the Lamborghini Madura features thin headlights for highlighting the car’s width. It has huge air intakes and a rounded hood that makes an eye-catching design. At the rear end, the front-mounted hybrid powertrain lets Tanevsky to create a web of intricate lines, which helps the car to have an exceptional appearance.

NYU Social Venture Winners

9:47 pm | NYU, Sustainability | No comment

Water Canary, a venture that was set up by a team of NYU business students and scientists that have developed a low cost water testing device for use in disaster relief received the prize money of $25,000 for the social venture competition.

America Smiles on the other hand, is a venture too that was set up by a team from the NYU College of Dentistry that aims to bring oral health care to millions of Americans who do not have adequate access to dental care received the price money of $75,000 from the same competition.  

Based on the strengths of this year’s finalists, the judges had a great difficulty in choosing just one winner so they decided to choose two winners instead of one.

Young Epidemiology Scholars Announce Honors

9:40 pm | Biology | No comment

In the prestigious Young Epidemiology Scholars (YES) Competition, the nation’s leading public health research competition for high school students, two high school girls from Pennsylvania, reaped the top honors.

Shoshanna Goldin, a 17-year-old student at Moravian Academy in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, won for her research project entitled, “Energy Epidemic: Teen Perception and Consumption of Energy Drinks” and Gazelle Zerafati, a 16-year-old student at Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, won for her project entitled, “Epidemiology of Migraine in Teenage Girls, A Student Population Based Study.”
Their research about the growing consumption of energy drinks among adolescents and under diagnosed migraines in teenage girls draw attention on little recognized health threats to today’s teen population. Shoshanna became suspicious of the dangers of possible health risks of the amount of stimulants found in energy drinks and Gazelle looked at a health condition that most teenage girls are not aware of but is very common yet poorly recognized and undertreated.

Shoshanna Goldin of Allentown and Gazelle Zerafati of Villanova, each received a $50,000 college scholarship, the top award in the YES Competition.

UofBristol Student made parallel program easy

9:34 pm | Software, University of Bristol | No comment

James Hanlon, a PhD student undertaking a research project at the Department of Computer Science at University of Bristol, has invented programs that would help him write test software to explore chip to chip communication. Some major points covered include chip latency, barrier synchronizations, and an example program to show how easy it is to program in a parallel nature utilizing as many processors/cores as you need using XMOS and the XC programming language.

The XMP-64 is made up of 16 quad core G-series XMOS chips (64 processors in total) arranged in a hypercube allowing for very fast communication of data between processors (1.6 billion bits per second can flow between hypercube edges). The XMP-64 can therefore execute 25 billion instructions per second. Some applications a device such as the XMP-64 could be used in include: Image processing, Audio processing, Synthesizing, Communications, Packet inspection etc.

Youngest Student to Win the Biotalent Contest

9:31 pm | Biology, Engineering | No comment

Rui Song, 14, a 9th grader Saskatoon student who won the $5,000 1st prize in The Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge, loves studying pathogens that led her to decipher a method of finding, whether a dangerous fungus that destroys the Lentil crop is present in the crop or not.

The research can help in preventing damage to the Lentil crop (which is a major agricultural export item) by early detection of fungus in the crops. Rui Song explains that the fungus that is causing the infection can decrease the yield of the Lentil crop by half and also reduce the seed quality by 10%. She has verified 50 out of the 2000 potential genetic markers in the field and has therefore given a breakthrough start for more thorough research by agriculture specialists. If the milder fungus was early detected by the farmers as the one who attacks their crops, it would save them time, money and effort as they could do without spraying a fungicide, said one of the judges.

UM Low-cost Wheelchairs Headed to Africa

9:18 pm | Engineering, Health, University of Maine | No comment

Five students of Mechanical Engineering Technology in the University of Maine together with their senior-year projects with the supervision of professor Herb Crosby presented Wednesday morning their design for the Landmine Victim Mobility Vehicle Project.

The winning team which is composed of seniors Jacob Cookson, Levi Guimond, Jesse Miller, Matthew Mingo and Sean Theriault, created a prototype for a hand-powered tricycle wheelchair meant for adults who have been the victims of land mines in Mozambique. They developed a push-pull system of powering its tricycle. Their design was based on an Irish Mail (Cart) that uses a push-pull lever to drive a main gear, which then drives the axle and propels the gear forward. They also had one of the least expensive prototypes. The majority of the teams went over the suggested cost of $200 in wholesale materials, and the winning team’s design costs $349.96 and was the only one that came in closer to $200. It was also one of the lighter prototypes, coming in at 72 pounds.

Utah student turns crops into biodiesel

9:13 pm | Biology, Chemistry, Utah State University | No comment

Dallas Hanks, 47, of Salt Lake City and a doctoral student of Utah State University created a program from his idea which is called FreeWays to Fuel. A 20-acre crop of safflower plants that grows on an unused municipal land will be collected and the oil from the plants will be processed into biodiesel fuel to operate Salt Lake County vehicles. Having a small scientific research company, Hanks had projected that there are as many as 10 million acres of highway rights of way throughout the nation that could be used the same way. The idea was first suggested to a receptive Utah Department of Transportation a few years ago, then contacted Ralph Whitesides of Utah State’s Department of Plants, Soils & Climate. The program created its first inexpensively effective harvest in 2009 after experimentations harvests in 2007 and 2008. This is an advantage for the farmers since they can easily make their own fuel.

UW Students Discover Home Interfaces

10:31 am | Design, University of Washington | No comment

At the University of Washington, five student projects explored the projection of interfaces on any surface suitable for display and interaction in the home of the future. The design team that consisted of students from the Division of Design’s Interaction Design program and the HCI concentration in Human Centered Design and Engineering, the iSchool, Computer Science and Engineering, and students from other UW HCI-oriented majors presented design techniques ranging from contextual inquiry, ideation, and storyboarding, to concept visualizations and video protypes. The succeeding five projects envision the embedding of community networks into the home, a search, interaction across walls, lifestyle coaching, and interactive cooking.

Real Ideal is a life consultant that makes use of wall and floor space in the house to display ambient cues relating to a person’s current duty or goal.

Mprint is based around the idea of an objects physical history. It employs histories by visualizing a solution to a very common problem of losing things!

Spaces envisions entire walls as displays that provide relations with images, stories, and assist communications by combining spaces that are otherwise separated by walls.

Wall[ace] is a social networking interface that represents friends and community as avatars that live as projections on the walls of the home environment that can be controlled by natural language and gesture recognition from any point in your home.

Foodie is pictured as an interactive coach that makes cooking easier instead of using a laptop for cooking in the kitchen that has some terminology that is confusing for beginners.

WPI students showcase Moonracker 2.0 Robot

10:36 am | Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute | No comment

The Boston Block Party at the Museum of Science was a successful event in celebration of the National Robotics Week.

The prize winning Moonraker 2.0 robot of the students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) gave a remarkable impression that will interest anyone who sees it. Moonraker 2.0 which won the $500,000 NASA Regolith Challenge in October 2009 was created by Paul’s Robotics, which was led by robotics engineering major Paul Ventimiglia. NASA needed robots to excavate at least 150 kilograms of simulated lunar soil within a 30-minute period, demonstrating a task that will be important for future lunar construction and processing projects.

An eye-catching robotic bug from the Harvard Microrobotics Lab. These tiny robots and spying devices are part of the craze nowadays. Engineers from Harvard have created these fly-size gizmos that indicate a generation of miniscule machines. Their movement was modeled from a real fly and weighs only 60 milligrams with a wingspan of three centimeters that one of these days can be used as spies, or for detecting harmful chemicals.