»software«

John Markoff reports in the NY Times (25.2.2006) how U.S. intelligence agencies use modern technology to scan telephone records or other data sources to track suspicious actions. The field of data mining enables law enforcement authorities to correlate very different data records like telephone calls and financial transactions, sometimes to the detriment of privacy issues.

Sabine Böhne writes in Spiegel online (25.2.2006) about crime mapping, a computer-based tool to combine data of a criminal case with geographical information.

Looks like a prototype model for James Bond: the glasses with a small display added show the translated speech of a person talking to you in a foreign language. It goes as follows: the speech is recorded by a microphone [1], transferred into text [2], translated [3] and given as subtitles on the display [4]. The key component of course is the software that performs the speech-to-speech translation [step 3] as speech recognition and output (or synthesis for an ear plug) already work reasonable good. The prototype is developed at U of Karlsruhe, Germany, in the group of Alex Waibel. He told me recently that the performance in the language pair english/spanish is already fine, for instance, to follow a lecture. The pair english/german is moderate just to grasp an idea on what the speaker is saying.

Interesting is the software's approach to 'learn' a foreign language: just assume that any sentence or phrase is already translated somewhere on the Internet. Now, let the search engines collect the paired phrases and do some intelligent data interpretation. If it works for one language pair, it will do it for any other pair with only slight modifications of the software, hopes Waibel. image (c) University of Karlsruhe

SETI@home, the popular screen saver that uses your computer's idle time for searching aliens, revitalizes its mission: It switches off for a short break to join forces with other distributed computer projects. At present, computer users could donate their unused computer time only to one project, for instance, SETI, disease research or climate simulation. The new approach puts all these project on one single platform, reports Declan Butler in Nature online (15.12.2005). On top of this new software platform, called BOINC, you may support several projects at once and donate, for instance, 70% to drug research, 20% to check the skies for aliens, and 10% for saving world's climate. More than 300,000 people around the world are already running the BOINC software.
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/051212-10.html

The website ScienceDaily.com (11.3.2006) brings an overview on recently launched car safety projects by the European Commission. Central are the i2010 Intelligent Car Initiative and the PReVENT integrated project. Main target of the EU is to halve the death toll from road accidents to less than annually 25,000 by the year 2010 in Europe. All is about new sensors and intelligent data acquisition to decrease distraction of the driver, focus his attention and protect passengers inside the cars and pedestrians. Actually, the limiting factors is always the human being behind the steering wheel. Hopefully, he or she can cope with the many new safety features which are waiting being introduced into the market, like assistance for turning left, cross intersections, watch the blind spot, mitigate collisions, and more to come.