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It is often said that before air travel our skies were bluer yet how, in the 21st century, could we ever know what light and colors were like one hundred years ago? Recently, a group of researchers from EPFL s Audiovisual Communications Laboratory, in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC), had a unique opportunity to try to find out.
Normally hidden treasures locked away in the vaults of a handful of museums, the researchers were offered access to some of the original photographic plates and images of the scientist and inventor Gabriel Lippmann, who won the 1908 Nobel Prize in physics for his method of reproducing colors in photography.
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Telehealth has become a critical way for doctors to still provide health care while minimizing in-person contact during COVID-19. But with phone or Zoom appointments, it s harder for doctors to get important vital signs from a patient, such as their pulse or respiration rate, in real time.
A University of Washington-led team has developed a method that uses the camera on a person s smartphone or computer to take their pulse and respiration signal from a real-time video of their face. The researchers presented this state-of-the-art system in December at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference.
Now the team is proposing a better system to measure these physiological signals. This system is less likely to be tripped up by different cameras, lighting conditions or facial features, such as skin color. The researchers will present these findings April 8 at the ACM Conference on Health, Interference, and Learning.
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Despite pandemic-driven restrictions on movement, there were over 12,000 accidents in Madrid in 2020, leading to 31 fatalities. In Barcelona, there were more than 5,700 collisions, causing 14 deaths. Pedestrian and vehicle safety is a priority, which is why a research project at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) is harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to make decisions that will make cities safer. The researchers have looked into the correlation between the complexity of certain urban areas and the likelihood of an accident occurring there.
According to the researchers, the data they have gathered can be used to train neural networks to detect probable hazards in an area and work out patterns associated with this high risk potential. The researchers, headed by Cristina Bustos and Javier Borge, are working with algorithms that will aid traffic authorities in reducing the likelihood of accidents in urban environments.
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IMAGE: This figure shows the experimental demonstration of 2D and 3D holographic projection. The left photograph is focused on the mouse toy (in yellow box) closer to the camera, and the. view more
Credit: Courtesy of Liang Shi, Wojciech Matusik, et al
Despite years of hype, virtual reality headsets have yet to topple TV or computer screens as the go-to devices for video viewing. One reason: VR can make users feel sick. Nausea and eye strain can result because VR creates an illusion of 3D viewing although the user is in fact staring at a fixed-distance 2D display. The solution for better 3D visualization could lie in a 60-year-old technology remade for the digital world: holograms.