The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : Talking Heads Will Let Us ‘See’ Speech Up Close
If an elderly friend tells you she hears the TV better with her glasses on, don’t laugh. Visual clues are crucial to our ability to understand speech. That’s why a team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz has created a computerized “talking head.” They hope that studying facial animation--visible speech--will aid research in areas as diverse as the learning of second languages, speech therapy for brain-injury patients and the development of a next generation of computer communications as a “face-to-face” form of electronic mail. The three-dimensional computerized image, created by psychology professor Dominic Massaro and research associate Michael Cohen, resembles a mannequin with moving eyes, brows and mouth. The features move in real time--an underlying grid allows researchers to control about 60 separate parameters to animate the face and create the movements of speech. Using a text-to-speech system developed by Massaro, researchers can type in English, which the computer then produces as spoken language, complete with corresponding facial movements.
The work has been supported in part by the National Institute of Deafness and Communicative Disorders with the idea that someday printed books could be translated into visual speech for the hearing-impaired. While the visually impaired listen to audio books, the hearing-impaired could watch talking heads.
Glass in the Rough: With production of non-hazardous solid wastes currently exceeding 11 billion tons a year and landfill costs rising, all sorts of techniques are emerging to turn trash into treasure. An increasingly popular choice is vitrification--the transformation of garbage into glass.
When solid wastes are melted in a special furnace, the end product has a composition very similar to that of natural basalt glasses such as obsidian. These glasses can be formed into products ranging from sidewalks or patio stones to premium railroad ties.
But the systems are expensive--from $3 million to $4 million for a melter capable of handling 50 tons a day. Now Pacific Northwest Laboratory, operated by Battelle Memorial Institute, has developed a new melter technology called Terra-Vit that is supposed to make the cost of vitrified wastes competitive with that of landfills.
Traditional vitrification is expensive because it requires the chamber where melting takes place to be lined with special oxides of alumina, zirconia or silica to handle the high temperatures and the corrosive effect of molten glass. But Terra-Vit features an oversize design with very thick walls that can be made from low-cost materials such as slag from steel mills.
Engineering a Better Ashtray: With secondhand smoke becoming a major concern, smokeless ashtrays would seem to be a good idea in places such as bars, restaurants and offices where smoking is still legal. But tests conducted at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory show that the most commonly available models don’t work. It seems they merely disperse the smoke rather than remove it.
The problem lies in the filters, which are not suitable for removing the small particles that compose cigarette smoke. Now William Nazaroff, an associate professor of civil engineering at UC Berkeley and a scientist and engineer at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, has developed a new smokeless ashtray that uses the same glass filters used by workers dealing with asbestos or radioactive compounds.
He believes an ashtray could be made to retail for about $40.
Stack ‘Em High: Computer chip designers are engaged in an endless challenge to squeeze more circuits into less space--mainly using improved production technologies to make individual “features” smaller. But while no one is sure when it will happen, the time is approaching when the laws of physics will limit how many more transistors can be crammed into this two-dimensional space. So designers are now thinking in 3-D, essentially stacking chips on top of one another.
At Irvine Sensors Corp. in Costa Mesa, engineers remove the wire leads from standard memory chips, shave them down to a fraction of a millimeter and bond them together into a pancake-like stack, with the individual chips interconnected along the edges of the stack. Originally developed for the military, the technology makes it possible to stack up to 10 memory chips within the height and “footprint” of a single packaged chip. IBM Corp. has agreed to help Irvine Sensors commercialize its Short Stacks. Cubic Memory, a start-up in Scotts Valley, Calif., is also exploiting the third dimension, though its interconnection approach differs from that of Irvine Sensors and it is looking at different markets--portable computers, notebooks, workstations and servers. But both companies face the same problem: how to bring the price of the products low enough to compete in cutthroat commodity chip markets.
