Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, California, will donate $2.65m in equipment and funds over the next three years to support research projects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s famous Media Lab. The grant continues Hewlett’s tradition of over 20 years of supporting undergraduate and graduate education and research programs at the Institute. Hewlett-Packard provided the first workstation to the Institute’s Media Lab in 1985. Equipment donated this year includes 11 HP Apollo 9000 Series workstations, and laboratory testing and measurement instrumentation. The donation will be used as part of Hewlett’s External Research Program, a project that aims to improve the ways humans interact with computers by programming the machines to recognise more than just text and numbers. The Media Lab’s Physics & Media group, under the direction of professor Neil Gershenfeld, will use the donation to create the tools needed to improve human-machine interaction. Scientists from the Personal Systems Lab in Bristol here in the UK, will collaborate with the Institute to develop advanced interfaces for mobile computing and the next generation of personal information appliances, beyond the limitations of current keyboard-based systems. To accomplish this, a research team is seeking to explore the fundamental physics of the materials, sensors and algorithms that lie between information processing systems and their environment.
Tactile Feedback
Research will be used to guide the development of new devices. For example, the computers of the future may be able to provide tactile as well as auditory and visual feedback, and sense a user’s activity remotely. The Institute’s Texture- and Pattern-Modeling Project will pursue new ways of accessing information in multimedia databases. The results will be used in medical and engineering applications and should give professionals a more effective means of accessing information. Specifically, this project focuses on developing mathematical models to represent textures in an image, so computers eventually can recognise textures and patterns. The group is working to program the computers – Hewlett’s workstations equipped with specific hardware for texture mapping – to recognise these images for their overall properties. The goal is to enable the computer to retrieve images just as easily as today’s computers search for and retrieve phrases or words.
