COOLEST INVENTIONS IN ELECTRONICS

Great news to all the Harry Potter and Twilight fans! In the years to come we can truly feel the magic of the invisibility cloak and the Marauder’s map and also evoke the “Edwards” in us by reading others mind! Wondering how? Read through!

The Invisibility Cloak

Most would have had longed to have the invisibility cloak that harry possessed. Now Harry’s invisibility cloak would be yours too. Thanks to the new inventions in technology .Invisibility cloaking is already a reality, but don’t expect it works just like in Harry Potter.

For the past decade or so, extremely promising advances have been reported. Using either metamaterials – artificial materials with properties typically not found in nature –or natural materials, scientists have devised all sorts of invisibility cloaks. All of these work, yet all of them are flawed in one way or the other.

They render an object invisible only from one angle or only for a particular set of frequencies like microwaves and so on. In order to make a perfect invisibility cloak, one needs extremely advanced manufacturing methods

Scientists at University of Cambridge have devised a breakthrough technique that will allow us to build materials previously unavailable, including those that could be used to build invisibility cloaks – the genuine kind.Totally invisible not exactly, so how does this work?, what do you see? You don’t see objects, trees or the sky, but the light that becomes reflected off each atom or molecules. Some frequencies are absorbed, while others are reflected eventually bouncing into our retinas, before eventually the brain taps in and decodes this information in manner we all recognize as sight. It’s not absurd to claim everything we see isn’t real, but a projection.

An invisibility cloak, in theory, has a surface geometry that refracts light in complex patterns and unusual directions. There are certain nano particles that can be used to refract light in this manner, but assembling them in the right pattern has proven so far impossible.

The research by the team at University of Cambridge offers a viable solution for building this sort of meta materials. They designed and built an unfocused laser that scatters light in millions of tiny needles.

The laser is fired upon gold nano particles that line up in a string, then more strings are stacked on top so eventually you wind up with a macroscopic piece of the meta material you can then use to fit a purpose. This process is called laser stitching. The gold particles were electrically connected to form a strand, while spacer molecules called cucurbiturils (CBs) were used to form a scaffold that keeps the particles just the right distance apart so that ripples of electrons can flow along the surface of the chain. So next time want to escape out from the world, remember to take the cloak along with you.

MARAUDERS MAP

The fun harry had in knowing the where others where can be experienced by you too, the Marauder’s map. Carnegie Mellon researchers Alexander Hauptmann, Shoou-I Yu and Yi Yang announced last week that they have created a “method for tracking the locations of multiple individuals in complex, indoor settings using a network of video cameras.”

The algorithm they created allows people to be tracked from one camera to the next, and can estimate people’s positions when they’re in the camera network’s blind spots, a task previously impossible for computerized systems. Such complex tracking and analysis is still typically done manually, the researchers say.

According to the scientists’ research paper, the project is very similar to The Marauder’s Map, a map in the Harry Potter book series that tracks every student and teacher in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

But not everyone’s pleased that The Marauder’s Map has come to life. The full research paper also reveals that Hauptmann, Yu and Yang are already aware how the system could be used in more advanced security situations. Their introduction says as much: “The Marauder’s Map, which locates and tracks friends and enemies of Harry Potter in the magical world, is also invaluable in real world surveillance scenarios.”

.According to the team, they hope that the technology will lead to the development of a method for speech communication for patients who cannot verbally communicate, whether due to paralysis or any other disability. In designing the map, Shoou-I Yu, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, who has been working on multi-object tracking in multi-camera environments for surveillance scenarios, sought to take on the challenge of finding and following individuals in complex indoor environments where walls and furniture may obstruct views. He and his team found a solution by combining several tracking techniques. In one of the settings tested, a nursing home, 13 people were tracked as they moved through the building. The result was that their algorithms were far more accurate than other software systems tested, they said. The researchers will present a paper on the work at the IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Portland, Oregon in June. This is considered a top-level conference in computer vision. Don’t forget to say “mischief managed” before you close the map

MIND READING, NOW NO MORE FICTION!

Guys! Be ready to become the Edward of your lives, don’t worry, you need not turn yourself into a vampire, simply thank the technology! Reading minds has long been a staple of science fiction abilities. Like many superpowers, we’re working towards gaining them via the magic of science. And researchers just took a big step towards realizing it in a system called Brain-to-Text.

Developed by a team from the Cognitive Systems Lab at KIT and the Wadsworth Centre in New York, the system basically reconstructs speech by reading a person’s brainwaves. They weren’t just able to identify words, but complete sentences in continuous speech, effectively inventing a system that works like an artificial intelligence telepath of sorts.

In Brain-to-Text, seven volunteer epileptic patients were hooked up to electrodes to monitor speech-related brainwaves while reading aloud sample texts. Recordings from these sessions were combined with the interdisciplinary team’s knowledge in machine learning and linguistic processing, enabling the development of a novel method for taking the brainwaves and converting them into its text equivalent. Being able to read the minds of a small sample of seven people, of course, is far from a legit superpower, aside from the fact that it’s restricted to decoding brainwaves from audibly spoken language rather than actual thoughts. It is, however, a significant step in our quest to develop some of that Professor X swag and gives us hope for a real science fiction future.

Thus the evolution in technology is taking place at faster rate that world will seem more magical!, all those equipment considered only fictional and in films are now turning into reality. So lets us be the Harry potter and Hermoine in our lives rather than Voldemort and use them effectively in winning against the evil –Forever!

Contributed by, Malavika (ECE-2/4)

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