Wireless Virtual Reality

There are many different new and amazing developments in modern technology happening everyday. One of them is virtual reality in which people can experience a false reality through the lens of VR goggles. If the development of virtual reality wasn't enough, researchers have developed wireless VR goggles which allows people to be mobile as they experience an alternate world. There was a development in the device because the HDMI chords attached to computers processing data lead to people tripping over chords while they walked around using the goggles.

One of the problems with making the device wireless was the fact that the device originally didn't support advance data processing even with wires and streaming the data without wires would be even harder to support. The researchers decided to try mmWaves which are high frequency waves that were thought to be able to help the device work wirelessly. One downside of these waves are that they do not work well with obstacles which a person is likely to encounter if they don't use the headset in a completely empty room. Researchers at MIT developed a mirror called MoVR that reflects waves at programmable angles instead of reflecting it at the same angle it comes in like it normally would. This allows the VR headset to be used with obstacles and to avoid losing signal. 

The researchers have been able to get the VR device to work but are looking to make the hardware more compact as it is much larger than a person would feel comfortable having on their face. They are also looking to make the waves compatible in order to have the ability to allow multiple devices in a room for multiplayer virtual worlds to exist wirelessly. 

References:

https://www.eecs.mit.edu/news-events/media/enabling-wireless-virtual-reality

http://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/wearables/review-samsungs-virtual-reality-glasses-gear-vr-are-really-here-but-are-they-really-worth-buying/news-story/8055338addf88802c5ba1b913242c42d

Stanford University Using Language Analysis for Crisis Hotlines

Many people around the world suffer from different mental health disorders. Among those disorders is depression and anxiety which are two diseases that can affect how a person functions on a day to day basis with relationships, academics, and work life. Crisis hotlines have been put in place to help people suffering with these mental health issues so that they can talk through any bad thoughts they may be having.
There has been a recent emergence in crisis hotlines that can be reached via text. Now instead of calling the hotline and talking to a stranger, people with mental health issues can text throughout the day about how they may be feeling. Graduate students at Stanford University have analyzed hundreds of thousands of texts from the thousands of text conversations between  people with mental health disorders and the counselors at the crisis hotline. They were looking to find a way to determine whether a textual conversation had been effective or not. The researchers looked at natural language analysis to determine whether a certain way of texting improved the way the person felt after the conversation.

The researchers found that the successful conversations all had five stages to them (Introduction, problem setting, problem exploration, problem solving, and wrap up of the conversation) that were all marked by key words. The researchers are hoping that by analyzing the language of the crisis counselors, they may be able to generate an automated counseling system to increase the amount of people that can be helped. They are also hoping to use artificial intelligence to make the automated counseling seem more human-like and approachable for a person who has a mental health disorder.

MIT Develops Autonomous Scooter

With self driving cars on the rise, it is quite easy to forget that there are other forms of transportation that can be used hands free. A new vehicle to join this group is autonomous scooters. Scooters used by the elderly and disabled have now been developed to be hands free for easier use by the rider. The software for the scooter was developed by MIT 's artificial intelligence and Computer Science Lab with help from the National University of Singapore and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. This is helpful technology because it allows people who are mobility impaired to have easier forms of transportation. The scooter can be used both indoors and outdoors but the researchers at the university are working on making the scooter maneuver around tight spaces.

The researchers has many layers of software. There is a low level control algorithm that allows the vehicle to respond immediately to changes in the surrounding environment. This includes avoiding objects and pedestrians in the path of the scooter. There is also a route planning algorithm that the vehicle uses to figure out where it is on a map. The control algorithm for the scooters is also used for golf carts and city cars which is beneficial because it allows for uniformity and easier understanding of the systems. In addition, this uniformity allows for information to be transferred easily across vehicles and reduces the complexity when developing the vehicles.

These autonomous scooters are a great development for our increasingly disabled-friendly world. Now not only will we have doors that open automatically for wheelchairs like most buildings have implemented, but we will now have transportation for people lack mobility so they too can also lead an autonomous lifestyle.

References:

https://www.eecs.mit.edu/news-events/media/driverless-vehicle-options-now-include-scooters

http://www.theonion.com/graphic/new-tandem-mobility-scooter-released-33043

Data Corruption

If you have read any of my previous blog posts, you may have seen that I have already discussed data analysis in depth. If you are unaware of data analysis or have forgotten what it is, it is simply the process of analyzing and modeling data to find out useful information and make conclusions about the data. At MIT, there are researchers in the Computer Science sector that have created a new set of algorithms that “can efficiently fit probability distributions to high- dimensional data” (MIT, 2016). This is helpful because many of the apps and websites we use everyday are high-dimensional data and knowing how to solve their corruption, if it happens to occur, is very beneficial to making our lives easier.

How data works is that if it contains corrupted lines, it could lead to the the standard data- fitting technique breaking down and causing the data to not function properly. Having data with many dimensions, with an immense amount of lines of code, makes having any form of a corruption much harder to detect and correct. The researchers at MIT found that using the median to find the mean of the data is less likely to yield corrupted data than an algorithm that uses the average. They took this into consideration when trying to form an algorithm. 

Commonly, Computer scientists often use 2-D cross sections of the graph of the data to test whether or not they look like “Gaussian distributions”. Gaussian distributions are continuous functions that estimate the exact binomial distribution of events. Data that does not look like Gaussian distributions likely has corruption within it. They used the concept of Gaussian and combined it with a common distribution called "product distribution" and used it to create an algorithm with efficiency and applicability to the real world as its central focus. 

References:

https://www.eecs.mit.edu/news-events/media/finding-patterns-corrupted-data

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_analysis