Technology News

New Computational Model Can Predict Breast Cancer Survival
Thursday, April 18, 2013 - 09:14

Columbia Engineering researchers, led by Dimitris Anastassiou, Charles Batchelor Professor in Electrical Engineering and member of the Columbia Initiative in Systems Biology, have developed a new computational model that is highly predictive of breast cancer survival. The team, which won the Sage Bionetworks / DREAM Breast Cancer Prognosis Challenge for this work, published its results—"Development of a Prognostic Model for Breast Cancer Survival in an Open Challenge Environment"—in the April 17 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

 

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New keyboard for touchscreens
Wednesday, April 17, 2013 - 10:01

The research team of Antti Oulasvirta at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics has created a new keyboard called KALQ that enables faster thumb-typing on touchscreen devices. They used computational optimization techniques in conjunction with a model of thumb movement to search among millions of potential layouts before identifying one that yields superior performance. A user study confirmed that, after a short amount of practice, users could type 34% faster than they could with a QWERTY layout.

 

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Scientist's Discovery Could Lead to a Better Capacitor
Tuesday, April 16, 2013 - 12:26

A new process for growing forests of manganese dioxide nanorods may lead to the next generation of high-performance capacitors. As an energy-storage material for batteries and capacitors, manganese dioxide has a lot going for it: it’s cheap, environmentally friendly and abundant. However, chemical capacitors made with manganese dioxide have lacked the power of the typical carbon-based physical capacitor.

 

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Researchers evaluate Bose-Einstein condensates for communicating among quantum computers
Thursday, April 11, 2013 - 11:47

Quantum computers promise to perform certain types of operations much more quickly than conventional digital computers. But many challenges must be addressed before these ultra-fast machines become available, among them, the loss of order in the systems – a problem known as quantum decoherence – which worsens as the number of bits in a quantum computer increases.

 

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Diamond as a Building Material for Optical Circuits
Thursday, April 11, 2013 - 10:37

The application of light for information processing opens up a multitude of possibilities. However, to be able to adequately use photons in circuits and sensors, materials need to have particular optical and mechanical properties. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now for the first time used polycrystalline diamond to manufacture optical circuits and have published their results online in Nature Communications.

 

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Flexible electronics could transform the way we make and use electronic devices
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - 09:26

Nearly everyone knows what the inside of a computer or a mobile phone looks like: A stiff circuit board, usually green, crammed with chips, resistors, capacitors and sockets, interconnected by a suburban sprawl of printed wiring.

 

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