IEEE

The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) has announced the completion of the IEEE 802.22 wireless network standard, which has been in the works since 2004. Utilizing unused white spaces between channels in the TV frequency spectrum, the 802.22 standard will serve Wireless Regional Area Networks (WRANs), which are meant to bring broadband access to sparsely populated rural areas, as well as to developing countries. Read More

We can’t say we weren’t warned. Last August, Japan’s Eager Co. Ltd. announced that it was planning to begin sales of the Telenoid R1 telepresence robot in October. The toddler-sized ghostly-looking robot is intended to be a physical stand-in for a remote user during internet communications, mirroring that person’s movements via real-time face tracking software on their computer – their voice also comes out of the device. Well, Telenoid now has a little sibling. The Elfoid P1, as it’s called, was unveiled at a press conference yesterday in Japan, and is intended to serve as a combination mobile phone and mini telepresence robot. Read More

We’ve seen it in numerous TV shows and movies – the witness to a crime looks through a book of mug shots, then works with a police sketch artist to come up with a likeness of the nasty person they saw. After looking through hundreds of mug shots, however, it’s possible that the tired-brained witness could look right at a photo of the guilty party and not recognize them. It’s also possible that there is a mug shot of the criminal on a database somewhere out there, but that this particular witness will never see it. A computer system being pioneered at Michigan State University, however, could be the solution to such problems – it automatically matches faces in police sketches to mug shots. Read More

A collaboration between Fujitsu and the University of Tokyo achieved a record 25Gbps data communication link using quantum dot laser, a low-cost technology that can reliably handle high-speed data transmissions while consuming minimal power. With good performance and wide margins for further improvement, this development paves the way to the next generation of high-speed Ethernet data communications, which will see a tenfold increase in transfer speed. Read More

Seven years after starting to talk about it, and six years after introducing the first draft, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) has finally ratified the 802.11n wireless local area network (WLAN) amendment to the base standard. This effectively means that the super-fast routers we've been using in our home networks and for internet access for the past couple of years are now amongst those officially recognized by the IEEE. Read More

Robots generally aren’t the most expressive of entities, but their faces are becoming increasingly realistic as the number of artificial muscles controlling them rises. Today, a highly trained person must manually set up these kinds of realistic robots so that the servos pull in the right combination to make specific facial expressions, but researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are looking to automate the process by giving robots the ability to learn realistic facial expressions. Read More

Juniper Networks has announced what it says is the industry's first 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE) router interface card, which will be offered as part of Juniper's T1600 core router. The 100 GbE card is designed to address what the company calls the “new generation of scale” coming to core networks. Telecommunications providers, cloud-infrastructure companies, and other organizations rolling out large-scale virtualization face ever increasing demands on their networks. The 100 GE interface will provide an order of magnitude increase over most current interfaces. Read More

August 1, 2008 Since its introduction in 1995, IEEE 1394 (better known as FireWire, Apple's name for the interface) has become the go-to interface for high-bandwidth applications like professional audio and video production. The IEEE has approved the IEEE 1394-2008 specification, adding support for bandwidth up to 3.2Gbps. Read More