UniversidadCarlosIiiDeMadrid
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New in-car GPS tech uses motion sensors for accurate, autonomous city driving
In-car GPS developers have long had to wrestle with the urban canyon effect that blocks or bounces signals downtown: they often have to make best guesses for accuracy when they can't count on cellular or WiFi triangulation to pick up the slack, like a smartphone would. The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid has nonetheless found a way to borrow a page from mobile devices to get that accuracy back. By supplementing the GPS data with accelerometers and gyroscopes, researchers can use direction changes and speed to fill in the blanks, improving accuracy from a crude-at-best 49 feet to between 3 and 7 feet. The University's creation doesn't just minimize the chance of a wrong turn; it could be key to intelligent or driverless cars that have to perform sudden maneuvers all on their own. While the enhanced system is just a prototype without a commercialization schedule, it already slots into just about any car, including the University's own intelligent car prototype (not pictured here). We may no longer have to lump car GPS units into the same "close is good enough" category as horseshoes and hand grenades. [Image credit: Steve Jurvetson, Flickr]
Spanish researchers to train FIFA referees on calling plays with stereoscopic 3D, won't help catch dives
Spain might be on Cloud Nine after clinching victory in UEFA's Euro 2012, but a team at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid isn't resting easy. To help referees know when they should blow the whistle, researchers have recorded 500 simulated offside soccer (yes, football) plays in stereoscopic 3D to give refs a more immersive sense of what it's like to make the call on the pitch. The hope is to have FIFA more quickly and accurately stopping play without having to spend too much actual time on the grass. We don't yet know how many referees if any will be trained on the system by the 2014 World Cup, or if it will spread to other leagues -- what we do know is that no amount of extra immersion is needed to catch a theatrically fake injury.
New computer system can read your emotions, will probably be annoying about it (video)
It's bad enough listening to your therapist drone on about the hatred you harbor toward your father. Pretty soon, you may have to put up with a hyper-insightful computer, as well. That's what researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid have begun developing, with a new system capable of reading human emotions. As explained in their study, published in the Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, the computer has been designed to intelligently engage with people, and to adjust its dialogue according to a user's emotional state. To gauge this, researchers looked at a total of 60 acoustic parameters, including the tenor of a user's voice, the speed at which one speaks, and the length of any pauses. They also implemented controls to account for any endogenous reactions (e.g., if a user gets frustrated with the computer's speech), and enabled the adaptable device to modify its speech accordingly, based on predictions of where the conversation may lead. In the end, they found that users responded more positively whenever the computer spoke in "objective terms" (i.e., with more succinct dialogue). The same could probably be said for most bloggers, as well. Teleport past the break for the full PR, along with a demo video (in Spanish).
eT-shirt from España looks after your heart, minds its bedside manners (video)
Spain -- the land of pasión, jamón ibérico and flamenco is throwing a stylish solución towards the medical community's way. Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid have created an intelligent eT-shirt (looks more like a tank top to us) for biomonitoring of hospital patients. The wearable, washable chaleco is embedded with electrodes that monitor its wearer's vitals, and a removable thermometer and accelerometer for the collection of temperature and positioning data. A separate in-pocket GPS dongle is also used to locate individuals "within a two-meter margin of error," but the team plans to incorporate this localizer directly into the shirt in future iterations. Tested at the Cardiology unit of Madrid's Hospital Universitario La Paz, the collaborative LOBIN (Locating & Biomonitoring by means of Wireless Networks in Hospitals) project prototype could help reduce in-patient stays, delivering SMS alerts to off-site, connected medical staffs. No word on whether this'll be offered in S, M, L or XL, but hey, at least that black is slimming. ¿Hablas español? Pues, skip past the break for a video tour of the form-fitting device.
