E-Mail
A key portion of MIT s campus overlaps with Kendall Square, the bustling area in East Cambridge where students, residents, and tech employees scurry around in between classes, meetings, and meals. Where are they all going? Is there a way to make sense of this daily flurry of foot traffic?
In fact, there is: MIT Associate Professor Andres Sevtsuk has made Kendall Square the basis of a newly published model of pedestrian movement that could help planners and developers better grasp the flow of foot traffic in all cities.
Sevtsuk s work emphasizes the functionality of a neighborhood s elements, above and beyond its physical form, making the model one that could be used from Cambridge to Cape Town.
E-Mail
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.
E-Mail
IMAGE: Virginia Tech professor Chris Zobel is part of a multidisciplinary project on human-artificial intelligence teaming to identify disaster-related risks in social media posts to provide situational awareness for emergency management. view more
Credit: Virginia Tech
When a disaster strikes, social media can be helpful in alerting the public quickly. Social media posts can also offer useful information for emergency response and decision making.
Given the immense amount of data in social media posts, only some of which may be important to emergency managers, researchers are using artificial intelligence, or AI, to make the process more efficient. Such computer systems use a process called machine learning, in which the computers are trained by humans, who help identify the characteristics of relevant posts in different situations.
E-Mail
BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - Studies show wearing masks and social distancing can contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus, but their combined effectiveness was not precisely known.
Researchers at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering and Politecnico di Torino in Italy developed a network model to study the effects of these two measures on the spread of airborne diseases like COVID-19. The model shows viral outbreaks can be prevented if at least 60% of a population complies with both measures. Neither social distancing nor mask wearing alone are likely sufficient to halt the spread of COVID-19, unless almost the entire population adheres to the single measure, said Maurizio Porfiri, institute professor of mechanical and aerospace, biomedical, and civil and urban engineering at NYU Tandon. But if a significant fraction of the population adheres to both measures, viral spreading can be prevented without mass vaccination.
E-Mail
IMAGE: A research team led by Assistant Professor Tan Swee Ching (left) from the NUS Department of Materials Science and Engineering has created SmartFarm - a device that uses an advanced. view more
Credit: National University of Singapore
A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has recently developed a simple solution to address two of the world s biggest problems - water scarcity and food shortage. They created a solar-powered, fully automated device called SmartFarm that is equipped with a moisture-attracting material to absorb air moisture at night when the relative humidity is higher, and releases water when exposed to sunlight in the day for irrigation.