Research from a multi-university partnership is testing the live broadcast of surgeries from one facility to multiple others. This is not just as a teaching tool. This will allow the surgeon in your hometown to collaborate on a surgery without having to actually be in the operating room and allow doctors in remote locations could receive immediate expert support from top specialists in hospitals around the world.

Rochester Institute of Technology is collaborating with a team led by the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine that recently tested technology, which allows for the transmission of high quality, real time video to multiple locations. Using a secure, high-speed network, an endoscopic surgery at the University of Puerto Rico was broadcast to multiple locations in the United States. The experiment also included a multipoint videoconference that was connected to the video stream, allowing for live interaction between participants.

Of course, this is just a new application of an older technology used to broadcast surgeries in a more limited capacity.

“The University of Puerto Rico has been performing this type of transmission between two sites for more than a year, but we are now able to utilize a combination of technologies that allows us to transmit to multiple sites simultaneously,” notes José Conde, director of the Center for Information Architecture in Research at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus.

“Being isolated geographically from major research centers, we need to use information technology to foster research collaborations with scientists around the world,” Conde adds.

“Previous efforts in telemedicine have been hampered by the quality of the video stream produced and the potential for network interruptions,” says Gurcharan Khanna, director of research computing at RIT and a member of the research team. “This test demonstrates that by using the speed and advanced protocols support provided by the Internet2 network, we have the potential to develop real-time, remote consultation and diagnosis during surgery, taking telemedicine to the next level.”

The system uses a 30-megabit-per-second broadcast quality video stream, and configured it to be transmitted via multicast using Microsoft Research’s ConferenceXP system. This system allows for extremely high resolution images.

In the future there are other, non-surgial applications avaliable for the system.

“Today, physicians often need to travel to both examine patients and conduct consultations,” says Khanna. “Given the growing capacity of Internet technologies, the development of live remote consultation with high quality video could revolutionize medicine and greatly enhance the care patients can receive while reducing overall costs to the health care system.”

Have you ever wondered what you would look like if you could be as beautiful as a super model? It is only human nature, at least for those of use who were born without the perfect genetics, to try and figure it out.

Well researchers at the Tel Aviv University may just give you the chance to find out, without the amazingly high bills and associated risks of getting plastic surgery. They have built a computer designed to enhance the human face, a kind of instant beautifier for your photos.  How does it do this, why with that most sexy of fields, math.

Beauty, contrary to what most people think, is not simply in the eye of the beholder,” says lead researcher Prof. Daniel Cohen-Or of the Blavatnik School of Computer Sciences at Tel Aviv University. With the aid of computers, attractiveness can be objectified and boiled down to a function of mathematical distances or ratios, he says. This function is the basis for his beauty machine.

Of course, these type of things always come with a debate.

Beauty is, after all, a quality that has captivated artists since time immemorial, and its definition has eluded even the world’s greatest philosophers. Prof. Cohen-Or sees things more scientifically.

“Beauty can be quantified by mathematical measurements and ratios. It can be defined as average distances between features, which a majority of people agree are the most beautiful,” says Prof. Cohen-Or. “I don’t claim to know much about beauty. For us, every picture in this research project is just a collection of numbers.”

I bet that you are wondering how they made up that algorythm after all turning personal preference into hard data is no easy task. Well, I will tell you how it was done:

In a study, recently published in the journal Siggraph, for  computer graphics, Prof. Cohen-Or and his graduate student Tommer Leyvand  together with two colleagues  surveyed 68 Israeli and German men and women, aged 25 to 40, asking them to rank the beauty of 93 different men’s and women’s faces on a scale of 1 to 7. These scores were then entered into a database and correlated to 250 different measurements and facial features, such as ratios of the nose, chin and distance from ears to eyes.  From this, the scientists created an algorithm that applies desirable elements of attractiveness to a fresh image.

While this technology is not on the market yet you could end up seeing it in a lot of different places like:

- The offices of plastic suregons who want to develop more natural guides for working on their patients.

- In the offices of magazines, where cover models are often used.

- In your next digital camera. Imagine looking like a model in all of your family photos.

I know what you are thinking, “Is this really a breakthrough? I bet I could do the same thing at home with photoshop.”

While you can enhance your images with photoshop there is a difference between the two methods. Unlike heavily processed Photoshop images that can make magazine cover models and celebrities unrecognizable, Tel Aviv University’s “beautification engine” is much more subtle. Observers say that the final image it produces retains an unmistakable similarity to the original picture, unless, as it turns out, you happen to be a celebrity.

“We’ve run the faces of people like Brigitte Bardot and Woody Allen through the machine and most people are very unhappy with the results,” Prof. Cohen-Or admits. “But in unfamiliar faces, most would agree the output is better.” Of course, if you are a celebrity, you could just pay for a team of professionals to air brush you, then you won’t need the software.

So do you want to:

- Find out how if your girlfriend really will flirt with your best friend when you back is turned?

- Outwit your enemies as they plot against you in the dead of the night?

- Find out just what will happen to your boss if you were to lock him in his office at 5pm with a wedge under the door?

- Just find out how many people it really does take to make your nervous co-worker feel claustrophobic.

Well, you can’t do those things right now but you might also be able to do that in the future thanks to new and improved computer behavior modeling techniques.

Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology department has created a computer model that can predict how people will complete a controlled task and how the knowledge needed to complete that task develops over time.

Frank Ritter, associate professor of IST and psychology, and his research associates, used the Soar programming language, which is designed to represent human knowledge, on a 20-trial circuit troubleshooting task most recently done by 10 students at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Each participant was to identify faults in a circuit system after memorizing the organization of its components and switches. This process was repeated 20 times for each person, with the series of tests chosen randomly each time. Their choices and reaction times were recorded and compared with the computer model’s results.

Much like the students, the computer model, called Diag, learned as it went through each test and developed the knowledge for completing the task quickly and efficiently.

“The model does not merely accurately predict problem-solving time for the human participants; it also replicates the strategy that human participants use, and it learns at the same rate at which the participants learn,” Ritter said.

In most cases, the model came within two to four seconds of predicting how long it would take each participant to solve the problem and it fit eight out of the 10 participants’ problem-solving times very well.

“The project shows we can predict human learning on a fine-grained level,” Ritter said. “Everyone thinks that’s possible, but here’s an actual model doing it. The model provides a detailed representation of how a transfer works, and that transfer process is really what education is about.”

So, you may have to get your potential victim to spend some time with the machine, but once that happens you can predict with comfort and ease.

Solar power could be the savior in our energy crisis. When you consider its many benefits:

1. It is completely clean power with no carbon production.

2. Unlike fossil fuels we will have a really hard time running out of it. If we ever do, I promise that you will have much bigger problems than why your car that won’t run.

3. It won’t give us radiation sickness.

Now that you know why the solar cells are a good idea here is the information about the new and more perfect solar cells.

Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered and demonstrated a new method for overcoming two major hurdles facing solar energy. They have developed a new antireflective coating that boosts the amount of sunlight captured by solar panels and allows those panels to absorb the entire solar spectrum from nearly any angle.

The untreated silicon solar cell which are currently on the market, only absorb on average about 67.4 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that nearly one-third of that sunlight is reflected away and thus unharvestable. From an economic and efficiency perspective this is just a waste of potential energy. In these new cells the coated materials were able to absorb 96.21 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that only 3.79 percent of the sunlight was reflected and unharvested. A significantly reduced waste.

Lin’s new coating also successfully tackles the tricky challenge of angles.

Most surfaces and coatings are designed to absorb light — i.e., be antireflective — and transmit light — i.e., allow the light to pass through it — from a specific range of angles. Eyeglass lenses, for example, will absorb and transmit quite a bit of light from a light source directly in front of them, but those same lenses would absorb and transmit considerably less light if the light source were off to the side or on the wearer’s periphery. This same is true of conventional solar panels, which is why some industrial solar arrays are mechanized to slowly move throughout the day so their panels are perfectly aligned with the sun’s position in the sky. This was a waste of power, but a needed one to keep things moving.

What do the researchers have to say about the new panel technology?

“To get maximum efficiency when converting solar power into electricity, you want a solar panel that can absorb nearly every single photon of light, regardless of the sun’s position in the sky,” said Shawn-Yu Lin, professor of physics at Rensselaer and a member of the university’s Future Chips Constellation, who led the research project.  “Our new antireflective coating makes this possible.”

If you want to know more about the project, the research behind it and some future applications you can check out the results of the year-long project  in the paper “Realization of a Near Perfect Antireflection Coating for Silicon Solar Energy,” published this week by the journal Optics Letters.

OK, I know on the site that we usually talk about the technology that will come into the far future, but today I want to talk about a piece of technology that will come into your life tomorrow, at least if you live in the USA, your voting machine.

As many of us, or at least those of us in swing states, have learned in previous elections that voting machines do not always do what you tell them to do. That is why today, I am posting a little bit on how to make sure that your vote is counted correctly*.

• Bring a marked-up sample ballot to the polling place. This will enable voters to quickly and accurately transfer the information from the sample ballot to the real thing, saving time and cutting down the likelihood of errors due to snap decisions.
• Voters using touch screen or other electronic voting systems should pay careful attention to the review screen. The screen will highlight any races or ballot questions where the voter has not made a selection or has marked the ballot incorrectly.
• Voters using paper ballot/optical scan systems will have to be more vigilant. These systems don’t have review pages that highlight skipped or missing votes. Some vote scanners do have a small screen that alerts voters who did not make a selection in a specific race or who made more selections than allowed in a given race. (It is impossible to make the latter “overvote” error on electronic systems.)
• Once voters realize they’ve forgotten to make a selection on a paper ballot, the remedy is simply to fill in the oval and make the choice. But, the remedy for a wrong selection is to start over with a new paper ballot and discard the old one. Voters who cross out one choice and fill in the oval for another are likely to have that vote nullified because the scanner will treat them as two votes in a single race, an overvote.
• If voting on paper and casting a write-in vote, be sure to fill in the oval, complete the arrow, or do whatever is required to alert the machine that a write-in selection has been made.

How common are voting booth problems? Well Paul S. Herrnson, a University of Maryland political scientist said, “In our experiments, even with the simplest ballot design and the most user-friendly machines, we found voters still cast their ballots for the wrong candidate about three percent of the time,” Herrnson adds. “Depending on which polls you believe, that’s enough of a margin to affect the outcome on Tuesday. Most often, when voters make a mistake, they not only fail to cast their ballot for the candidate they want, they end up voting for the opponent. So it’s a double whammy.”

* These tips come from “Voting Technology: The Not-so-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot”, a publication by Paul S. Herrnson is a University of Maryland political scientist who led a multi-year, multi-state study comparing voter use of electronic and paper/optical scan systems. That means you are getting expert advice here, and ot just my take on things.