When participating in a video call or conference, it is often hard to maintain direct eye contact with other participants, as this requires looking into the camera rather than at the screen. Although most people use video calling services on a regular basis, so far,...
TECHXPLORE
Kaolin: The first comprehensive library for 3-D deep learning research
As most real-world environments are three-dimensional, deep learning models designed to analyze videos or complete tasks in real-world environments should ideally be trained on 3-D data. Technological tools such as robots, self-driving vehicles, smartphones, and other...
Exploring open-ended evolution in web services
Just like living ecosystems, web services form a complex artificial system consisting of tags and the user-generated media associated with them, such as photographs, movies and web pages. When drawing an analogy between biological and artificial ecosystems, tags could...
Flexible organic electrodes built using water-processed silver nanowires
Organic electronic devices, which are made of small molecules or polymers (i.e., substances composed primarily or completely of similar units bound together) are known to have several advantageous properties. In fact, organic electronics have relatively low production...
Flexoskeleton printing: Fabricating flexible exoskeletons for insect-inspired robots
Insects typically have a variety of complex exoskeleton structures, which support them in their movements and everyday activities. Fabricating artificial exoskeletons for insect-inspired robots that match the complexity of these naturally-occurring structures is a key...
FoodTracker: An AI-powered food detection mobile application
A research team at McGill University in Canada has developed a mobile application that can recognize food items inside an overall meal in real-time, providing useful nutrition-related information. The team outlined the new mobile application, called FoodTracker, in a...
From motion to emotion: The potential of robot swarms in artistic performances
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have recently carried out an interesting study exploring how motion and shape descriptors that are associated with particular emotions can be incorporated into swarm behaviors to create evocative artistic expositions....
Generating cross-modal sensory data for robotic visual-tactile perception
Perceiving an object only visually (e.g. on a screen) or only by touching it, can sometimes limit what we are able to infer about it. Human beings, however, have the innate ability to integrate visual and tactile stimuli, leveraging whatever sensory data is available...
Highly performing and wafer-scalable aligned carbon nanotube transistors
As we enter the wireless world of 5G, communications in the millimeter-wave band (i.e., from 30 to 300 GHz) will become increasingly important, particularly for high-speed wireless data-transfer applications. The trouble is that at these small wavelengths, the...
Hourglass-shaped silicon photodiodes with an enhanced near-infrared photoresponse
Silicon photodiodes are semiconductor devices commonly used to detect visible light and measure its intensity, color and position. The fact that these devices are made of silicon has both advantages and disadvantages.