A high capacity video surveillance may not be of much use if not accompanied by the necessary work of image analysis. Without this work, one should run with the risk that suspicious acts are overlooked, or they may raise false alarms.

The cost of knowing what is happening is very high. “The problem now is that we can not put more cameras, the problem is to observe what they show is very expensive and error prone,” said Paul Cohen, head of the department of computer science at the University of Arizona.

To help mitigate some of these limitations, Cohen and his collaborators are working to build an intuitive, not only to capture video, but also to detect suspicious human behaviors. (more…)

A group of researchers from the automotive industry and the U.S. Argonne National Laboratory has shown that in a race car, a fuel injection engine fueled with E-85, an ethanol-based fuel, than the same engine equipped with a carburetor and fuel fed by a lead, racecar specific.

The group, dubbed “Project Green”, the tests showed an improvement of 7 percent in the torque and speed of a jet engine model from General Motors LS3 CT525, with a catalytic converter added to the exhaust gas and fed with the E-85 renewable fuel. The General Motors engine is very popular among race car drivers in unamended. (more…)

A new type of heat pump is being developed at Purdue University that could benefit residents in areas with cold weather, reducing by half the money they spend on heating. Conventional heat pumps provide heating in winter and cool air in summer, but they are very efficient in very cold climates.

The new heat pump can maintain a high degree of efficiency even when the temperature outside the building is very low. (more…)

A team of experts from the Faculty of Engineering at Monash University, Australia, has developed a simple analysis to determine instantly the blood group of a person at a cost of only a few cents.

The analysis requires placing a drop of blood on a specially treated paper strip. (more…)

A stormy day makes the poles with traffic signals to shake and the leaves of the tree shook noisily. These are the vibrations that a research group at Cornell University is using and transforming it into electricity through a new energy storage system.

This group, led by Frank Moon, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and whose members include Rona Banai, Kevin Pelletier and Jamie Pratt, are working in an efficient and cost to convert the vibrations induced by wind into electricity. Just as the solar panels on many roofs look now, the researchers predict a possible future in which buildings are common vibration equipped with panels that could store the energy transmitted by even the slightest of breezes. (more…)

If at work usually attend frequent meetings in which big quantities of paper and need the support of visual materials will be used to carry memory stick. However, in case you have a top heavy workload, even going to have different reports for each meeting or each customer. (more…)

The traditional video surveillance cameras can be of great assistance to security forces in a wide variety of situations, such as scan the crowd looking for criminal activity, find out who left a bag under a bench in a park, or treat locating a suspect who has fled the scene of a crime and is mixed with the crowd on the subway.

But the conventional video cameras have limitations. Zoom in on a specific point of interest is often associated with loss of visual contact with the rest of the scene. (more…)

An experimental aircraft powered by solar energy on Thursday met the historical mark of 24 hours in flight, said the Swiss group that built the device. (more…)

From the science fiction movie “Minority Report” (2002) by Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise in which a transparent screen appears in front of lots of images by manipulating only the movement of their hands in the air, the idea of computer interfaces based on gestures has captured the imagination of technophiles. (more…)

To make electric cars part of everyday life it is needed a new vehicle design and components.

Take for example the engine that drives only one wheel, and connected directly to it. One of the advantages of these motors is that manufacturers can use for other things the space occupied by the conventional engine as these engines are coupled directly to the wheels of the vehicle. This opens a wealth of opportunities for automotive designers face when designing a new vehicle. (more…)