Google explores “computer vision”

Humans may excel at pattern recognition, but computers aren't very smart at identifying images, writes PC World. Our brains can immediately identify photos of famous landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty or Great Wall of China, but computers are typically clueless without text tags as a cheat sheet.

This may be change, however, if a Google research project in "computer vision" pans out. The search giant presented a paper on landmark recognition at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Miami this week.

The new technology allows computers to quickly ID images of more than 50 000 world landmarks with 80% accuracy, Google says.

IBM has unveiled a first-of-its-kind high-performance computer (HPC) that will use water for cooling, as a way of cutting energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from data centres, says GreenerComputing.

The new machine, which has been developed with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), is called Aquasar, and the two organisations say it can decrease the carbon footprint of the system by up to 85% and save up to 30 tonnes of CO2 per year, compared to similar existing systems.

Aquasar will begin operations at ETH Zurich in 2010, cutting energy consumption by 40% and harnessing the waste heat to warm university buildings.

Printed electronics is the broad term for a relatively new technology that defines the printing of electronics on common substrates such as paper, plastic, and textile using standard printing processes, according to Engineer Live.

The technology, according to Rahn and Energy Curing, is believed to be one of the fastest growing in the world with an estimated $300 billion market potential.

Common press equipment used in the graphics arts industry, such as screen printing, flexography, gravure, ink-jet and offset lithography are employed. Instead of printing graphic arts inks, families of electrically functional electronic inks are used to print devices, such as thin film transistors.