PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

From handwritten CAPTCHAs to 'smart rooms,' tech solutions start with pattern recognition

2010-10-15
(Press-News.org) BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Buy something online, enter your credit card number and mailing address. Simple. Then you come to the box with the CAPTCHA, the Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Here, the website attempts to confirm that you're a human, not some robot about to commit a cybercrime. You dutifully copy down the warped, watery-looking letters. Incorrect. Another captcha appears. You try again. Also incorrect. A third captcha appears. You start rethinking your purchase. University at Buffalo computer scientist Venu Govindaraju, who pioneered machine recognition of human handwriting, believes that this annoying 21st-century problem has a decidedly old-fashioned solution: handwriting. "Here at UB's Center for Unified Biometrics, we're the only ones who have proposed and thoroughly studied handwritten captchas," says Govindaraju. "Our perspective is that humans are good at reading handwriting, machines are not. It comes naturally to humans. But computer scientists typically consider handwriting a hopeless case, until someone comes along and shows them that it isn't." Govindaraju should know. Research he and his UB colleagues conducted in the 1990s helped the U.S. Postal Service establish the first machines that could read handwritten addresses, a feat that many at the time -- especially in industry -- said simply could not be done. In 1996, after years of research, the UB research enabled the USPS to be able to start machine-reading of handwritten addresses, boosting efficiency and saving the agency millions of dollars each year. Govindaraju believes a similar success can occur with captchas. One of his doctoral students at UB has graduated and was hired by Yahoo! on the basis of his work developing "simulated" handwritten captchas. "We developed an archive that can automatically generate as many different styles of handwriting as we want," says Govindaraju. The research is based on pattern recognition, a subfield of machine learning in computer science that is concerned with developing systems based on detecting patterns in data. Similar issues are being studied by Govindaraju and his UB colleagues in order to develop "smart room" technologies, supported by an HP Labs Innovation Research award. "Smart rooms" are indoor environments equipped with sensitive, but unobtrusive devices, such as cameras and microphones that can identify and track the movements and gestures of inhabitants for a broad range of applications, from providing supplemental supervision in assisted living facilities for the elderly or disabled, to monitoring office workplaces and retail establishments for security. Eventually, the goal is to extend "smart room" features to larger arenas, such as shopping centers, airports and other transportation centers. Biometrics that CUBS researchers are studying for "smart room" applications include hand gestures as well as the more common biometrics of facial, voice and gait recognition. "This, too, is all pattern recognition," Govindaraju says, "but instead of letters, here, we're trying to standardize gestures. "It's like developing an alphabet of gestures so machines can be programmed to do gesture recognition. The idea is to control objects on a monitor without technology," he says. INFORMATION:

Since its founding in 2003, CUBS has attracted approximately $10 million in federal and industry funding and has produced 17 doctoral-level graduates. The center advances machine learning and pattern recognition technologies to build engineered systems for both civilian and homeland security applications. It develops new methods for customizing devices that use data from physical biometrics, such as fingerprints, hand geometry and iris scans; behavioral biometrics, such as signature, voiceprint and gait; and chemical biometrics, such as DNA and body odor.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, a flagship institution in the State University of New York system and its largest and most comprehensive campus. UB's more than 28,000 students pursue their academic interests through more than 300 undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities.



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Astronomer leverages supercomputers to study black holes, galaxies

Astronomer leverages supercomputers to study black holes, galaxies
2010-10-15
Columbus, Ohio (Oct. 14, 2010) – An Ohio State University astronomer is working to unlock some of the mysteries surrounding the formation of vast galaxies and the evolution of massive black holes with his own large constellation of silicon wafers. Over the last year, two research teams led by Stelios Kazantzidis, a Long-Term Fellow at the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics (CCAPP) at The Ohio State University, have used what would average out to nearly 1,000 computing hours each day on the parallel high performance computing systems of the Ohio Supercomputer ...

UCSB physicists detect and control quantum states in diamond with light

2010-10-15
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have succeeded in combining laser light with trapped electrons to detect and control the electrons' fragile quantum state without erasing it. This is an important step toward using quantum physics to expand computing power and to communicate over long distances without the possibility of eavesdropping. The work appears online today at Science Express. The research, led by David Awschalom, professor of physics, electrical and computer engineering, and director of UCSB's Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation, ...

Young children are especially trusting of things they're told

2010-10-15
Little kids believe the darnedest things. For example, that a fat man in a red suit flies through the air on a sleigh pulled by reindeer. A new study on three-year-olds, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that they aren't just generally trusting. They're particularly trusting of things people say to them. Previous research has found that three-year-olds are a credulous bunch; they believe most things they're told, and skepticism doesn't kick in until later. Vikram K. Jaswal, of the University of Virginia, ...

Gene identified that prevents stem cells from turning cancerous

2010-10-15
Stem cells, the prodigious precursors of all the tissues in our body, can make almost anything, given the right circumstances. Including, unfortunately, cancer. Now research from Rockefeller University shows that having too many stem cells, or stem cells that live for too long, can increase the odds of developing cancer. By identifying a mechanism that regulates programmed cell death in precursor cells for blood, or hematopoietic stem cells, the work is the first to connect the death of such cells to a later susceptibility to tumors in mice. It also provides evidence of ...

Low beta blocker dose can put patients at risk for subsequent heart attacks

2010-10-15
CHICAGO –For nearly 40 years a class of drugs known as beta blockers have been proven to increase patients' survival prospects following a heart attack by decreasing the cardiac workload and oxygen demand on the heart. In a breakthrough study released in the American Heart Journal, Northwestern Medicine cardiologist Jeffrey J. Goldberger found the majority of patients are frequently not receiving a large enough dose of these drugs, which can put their recovery from heart attacks and overall health into peril. "Only 46% of patients studied were taking 50% or more of the ...

Carbon dioxide controls Earth's temperature

2010-10-15
NEW YORK -- Water vapor and clouds are the major contributors to Earth's greenhouse effect, but a new atmosphere-ocean climate modeling study shows that the planet's temperature ultimately depends on the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide. The study, conducted by Andrew Lacis and colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, examined the nature of Earth's greenhouse effect and clarified the role that greenhouse gases and clouds play in absorbing outgoing infrared radiation. Notably, the team identified non-condensing greenhouse gases -- ...

The risks and benefits of using poplars for biofuels

2010-10-15
A potential solution for global energy demands is the use of Poplar, a fast-growing tree with high yields, for biofuels. To get the most out of Poplar plantations, varieties that are the best fit for the conditions—ones with disease resistance or higher yields, for example—are desired. But do these plantations of new, non-native (exotic) species impact nearby native populations of Poplar? In particular, is the genetic makeup of the native populations being altered by interactions with the exotic species? In the October issue of the American Journal of Botany (http://www.amjbot.org/cgi/reprint/97/10/1688), ...

Humidity makes gecko feet stickier

2010-10-15
Human adhesives are famed for their fallibility. Gooey glues soon lose their grip, are easily contaminated and leave residues behind. But not gecko feet. Geckos can cling on repeatedly to the smoothest surfaces thanks to the self-cleaning microscopic spatula-shaped hairs (setae) that coat the soles of their feet. Back in 2002, Kellar Autumn found that these dry hairs are in such intimate contact with surfaces that the reptiles 'glue' themselves on by van der Waals forces with no need for fluid adhesives. More recent studies had suggested that geckos might benefit from additional ...

Study finds a high rate of restless legs syndrome in adults with fibromyalgia

2010-10-15
DARIEN, IL – A study in the Oct. 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that adults with fibromyalgia had a much higher prevalence and risk of restless legs syndrome than healthy controls. The study suggests that treating RLS may improve sleep and quality of life in people with fibromyalgia. Results show that the prevalence of restless legs syndrome was about 10 times higher in the fibromyalgia group (33 percent) than among controls (3.1 percent). After statistical adjustments for potential confounders such as age, gender and ethnicity, participants ...

BeMo - Project Intelligence Unlocks the Full Power of Microsoft Project Server 2010

2010-10-15
This week's PMI (Project Management Institute) Global Congress 2010 in Washington DC marked the official launch of BeMo - Project Intelligence, a specialized online marketplace for Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solutions and related services. BeMo founders Bruno Lecoq and Joel Lachance have created the business to help individuals or companies of any size, manage any and all of their projects online - quickly and easily. While a few key players like ProjectHosts, EPM Live are already in the burgeoning Microsoft Project Server 2010 hosting market, the BeMo - Project ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Cheap and environmentally friendly – the next generation LEDs may soon be here

Rare frog rediscovered after 130 years

Earth's 'dirty mirror' effect is accelerating climate change

Breakthrough in next-generation polio vaccines

A call for federally funded pediatric firearm injury prevention research

New research reveals how a 252 million year old climate crisis accompanied the ‘Great Dying’ mass extinction event, completely reorganizing the Earth’s ecosystems

Untangling quantum entanglement with new calculation formulas

Adults abused as children twice as likely to develop health and mental health conditions

A dive into erythritol slurry and its potential for waste heat recovery

No place like home—how proteins that plasma cells express at their origin affect migration

Socioeconomic factors fuel global inequalities in Alzheimer's disease burden, study finds

Foraging footballers suggest how we come together to act as one

SSA: Semantic Structure Aware Inference for Weakly Pixel-Wise Dense Predictions without Cost

New test helps doctors predict a dangerous side effect of cancer treatment

UC Study: Long sentences for juveniles make reentry into society more difficult

Death by feral cat: DNA shows cats to be culprits in killing of native animals

Plant Physiology is Searching for its Next Editor-in-Chief

Clothes dryers and the bottom line: Switching to air drying can save hundreds

New insights into tRNA-derived small RNAs offer hope for digestive tract disease diagnosis and treatment

Emotive marketing for sustainable consumption?

Prostate cancer is not a death knell, study shows

Unveiling the role of tumor-infiltrating immune cells in endometrial carcinoma

Traditional Chinese medicine unlocks new potential in treating diseases through ferroptosis regulation

MSU study pinpoints the impact of prenatal stress across 27 weeks of pregnancy

Biochemist’s impact on science and students honored

ELF4: A key transcription factor shaping immunity and cancer progression

Updated chronic kidney disease management guidelines recommend SGLT2 inhibitors regardless of diabetes or kidney disease type

New research explores how AI can build trust in knowledge work

Compound found in common herbs inspires potential anti-inflammatory drug for Alzheimer’s disease

Inhaled COVID vaccine begins recruitment for phase-2 human trials

[Press-News.org] From handwritten CAPTCHAs to 'smart rooms,' tech solutions start with pattern recognition