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NYU Tech Lab May Be Able To Help With
Homeland Security
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JUNE 17TH, 2002
Every
year, a handful of new technologies are created and developed
out of a little facility at NYU called the Center for Advanced
Technology, or CAT Lab. This year's crop includes a few that
could help with the new focus on homeland security.
NY1 Tech Beat Reporter Adam Balkin has more in the
following story.
Software that finds terrorists,
trains doctors and teaches disabled children are just some of
the projects NYU's Center for Advanced Technology, the CAT
Lab, is working on
In these times, the Tensor Faces
software to find terrorists is drawing lots of attention. It
allows cameras to identify faces in a crowd, even if they're
shadowed or disguised.
“There are various factors that
give rise to that image,” says Demetri Terzopoulos of NYU’s
CAT Lab. “There's the viewpoint, the lighting conditions, and
the expression of the person’s face, so what Tensor Faces does
is takes apart these factors and represents them separately.
This system has proven to be much more robust than the systems
currently out there.”
In the event of a crisis, this
software allows authorities to quickly scan and zoom in on an
aerial map.
“You're also looking at the ability for
firemen or law enforcement officials to take around a portable
display that is connected to the Internet and say, ‘Tell me
what I need to know about this place,’ or, if you discover
something, be able to annotate it right then and there and
upload it to a universal database,” says Ken Perlin, the
Director of NYU’s CAT Lab.
This whole presentation is
also interesting because it shows you how ideas can change
focus very quickly and sometimes in bizarre ways. For example,
what started out as one professor's quest to simply catalogue
his girlfriend's - now his ex-girlfriend’s - facial
expressions is now helping kids with autism.
“One of
the problems that children with autism have is they don't
automatically recognize facial expressions,” says Perlin.
“Working with real faces is much too frightening for them, so
having a controlled situation on the web where they can play
with an artificial face that will respond emotionally turns
out to be very useful.”
A new method of entering data
into a PDA or cell phone, without lifting a stylus, is also
being used in an unexpected way.
“Children who are
physically impaired can’t physically click and lift and move a
mouse,” says Perlin. “Using just a finger nudging a track
ball, children as young as 3-years-old who before didn't have
any access to computers because of physical disabilities can
now talk to each other.”
Finally, the Surgery
Interactive Multimedia Model is an interactive tool to
supplement medical school textbooks and help teachers test
students.
According to the lab’s Martin Nachbar, “By
working though this and using the assessment piece, the
attendant or faculty member really has knowledge of the group
- how well they understood this material - and so the contact
time, we think, is much better spent.”
To check out or
use some of these products, visit cat.nyu.edu.
- Adam
Balkin
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 Adam Balkin
Adam
Balkin covers the technology beat for NY1 News. He is the
champion of NY1's "Hat Trick" hockey video arcade
game. |
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