The Feeling of Color: A Haptic Feedback Device for the Visually Disabled

Tapson J, Gurari N, Diaz J, et al. The Feeling of Color: A Haptic Feedback Device for the Visually Disabled. Presented at the Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference (BIOCAS), Baltimore, MD.We describe a sensory augmentation system designed to provide the visually disabled with a sense of color. Our system consists of a glove with short-range optical color sensors mounted on its fingertips, and a torso-worn belt on which tactors (haptic feedback actuators) are mounted. Each fingertip sensor detects the observed objectpsilas color. This information is encoded to the tactor through vibrations in respective locations and varying modulations. Early results suggest that detection of primary colors is possible with near 100% accuracy and moderate latency, with a minimum amount of training

AER Auditory Filtering and CPG for Robot Control

Address-Event-Representation (AER) is a communication protocol for transferring asynchronous events between VLSI chips, originally developed for bio-inspired processing systems (for example, image processing). The event information in an AER system is transferred using a highspeed digital parallel bus. This paper presents an experiment using AER for sensing, processing and finally actuating a Robot. The AER output of a silicon cochlea is processed by an AER filter implemented on a FPGA to produce rhythmic walking in a humanoid robot (Redbot). We have implemented both the AER rhythm detector and the Central Pattern Generator (CPG) on a Spartan II FPGA which is part of a USB-AER platform developed by some of the authors.Commission of the European Communities IST-2001-34124 (CAVIAR)Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC-2003-08164-C03-0

Confession Session: Learning from Others Mistakes

Accepted versio

Focal-Plane Change Triggered Video Compression for Low-Power Vision Sensor Systems

Video sensors with embedded compression offer significant energy savings in transmission but incur energy losses in the complexity of the encoder. Energy efficient video compression architectures for CMOS image sensors with focal-plane change detection are presented and analyzed. The compression architectures use pixel-level computational circuits to minimize energy usage by selectively processing only pixels which generate significant temporal intensity changes. Using the temporal intensity change detection to gate the operation of a differential DCT based encoder achieves nearly identical image quality to traditional systems (4dB decrease in PSNR) while reducing the amount of data that is processed by 67% and reducing overall power consumption reduction of 51%. These typical energy savings, resulting from the sparsity of motion activity in the visual scene, demonstrate the utility of focal-plane change triggered compression to surveillance vision systems

Measurement of χ c1 and χ c2 production with s√ = 7 TeV pp collisions at ATLAS

The prompt and non-prompt production cross-sections for the χ c1 and χ c2 charmonium states are measured in pp collisions at s√ = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC using 4.5 fb−1 of integrated luminosity. The χ c states are reconstructed through the radiative decay χ c → J/ψγ (with J/ψ → μ + μ −) where photons are reconstructed from γ → e + e − conversions. The production rate of the χ c2 state relative to the χ c1 state is measured for prompt and non-prompt χ c as a function of J/ψ transverse momentum. The prompt χ c cross-sections are combined with existing measurements of prompt J/ψ production to derive the fraction of prompt J/ψ produced in feed-down from χ c decays. The fractions of χ c1 and χ c2 produced in b-hadron decays are also measured

Search for high-mass resonances decaying to dilepton final states in pp collisions at s√=7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

The ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider is used to search for high-mass resonances decaying to an electron-positron pair or a muon-antimuon pair. The search is sensitive to heavy neutral Z′ gauge bosons, Randall-Sundrum gravitons, Z * bosons, techni-mesons, Kaluza-Klein Z/γ bosons, and bosons predicted by Torsion models. Results are presented based on an analysis of pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.9 fb−1 in the e + e − channel and 5.0 fb−1 in the μ + μ −channel. A Z ′ boson with Standard Model-like couplings is excluded at 95 % confidence level for masses below 2.22 TeV. A Randall-Sundrum graviton with coupling k/MPl=0.1 is excluded at 95 % confidence level for masses below 2.16 TeV. Limits on the other models are also presented, including Technicolor and Minimal Z′ Models