Future Lab Radio

Brain trauma affects more than 2 million people in the U.S. each year because of accidents and participation in sports. But little is understood about the connections within the brain that can be broken but not detected. Using MRI scans, computer scientists are helping brain researchers to map the network of tracks–containing hundreds of thousands […]

Open Cirrus, a test bed for cloud computing (spearheaded by the companies HP, Intel and Yahoo, and including research partners such as Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois) recently announced its expansion. An Internet service such as Facebook is one example of cloud computing which presents certain data management challenges. Large sets of […]

A coming major advance in computer technology is a form of context awareness known as Socially Enabled Services or SENS, which refers to mobile devices that can anticipate user needs, such as advising the best routes to take on the road or providing information to other people about the user’s availability. SENS technology is possible […]

We have Isaac Asimov to thank for thinking about robots as a science when he coined the term “robotics” in the 1940s. Originally, the term came from the word “robota” from Czech (possessing a similar meaning in other Slavic tongues) referring to hard labor. In an interesting twist, robots portrayed in movies are often nearly […]

When Intel Labs established its Interactions and Experience Research Lab, known as IXR, this past summer, it was a sign that the making of technology has profoundly changed. It is one thing to invent a machine or a process, it is another to make one that people want to use. And to do that, one […]

In ancient Greece, potters would never have believed the vases they created – donning a vast array of inscriptions about daily life – would fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. They also would have not guessed how much precious information about their (and our) civilization would be gleaned from this pottery. Today, millions […]

In 2009 the Irish rock band U2 experienced the realities of space communication when they connected in a live 2-way video conference between Bono on the concert stage in front of stadium audiences and astronauts in the International Space Station. There’s only about a half second delay from the surface of our planet to the […]

In this week’s show we explore computer vision and perception, and the research involved in advancing a computer’s ability to understand the real world. We talk with Intel senior researchers Rahul Sakthankar and Lily Mummert from the Intel research lab in Pittsburgh about practical applications like tracking honeybees in a hive, watching for signs of […]

The concept of “stemness” refers to the capacity within a stem cell to create different kinds of cells. It promises to revolutionize medicine. Isolated in the petri dish, stem cells exhibit interesting behaviors that scientists are just beginning to understand. With thousands of cells to monitor, computer vision technology is helping researchers analyze great numbers […]

Zero energy buildings, known as ZEB and also known as zero net energy buildings, promise to have a huge impact on energy consumption globally, especially since office and commercial buildings use nearly 40% of fossil based energy in the U.S. and Europe. Milan Milenkovic, who heads up the zero net energy project for Intel Labs, […]

What is possible if we could greatly reduce the bottlenecks in the transfer of data? Electrons and copper wire have taken us far, but only so far. What lies beyond is light speed. Silicon photonics is the transmission of data using light, which can go much faster and farther. It unleashes many new possibilities inside […]