RAKESH

Note:
SETs A to D: Marquee players based on their skills, recent performance and availability
SET E: Wicketkeepers
SET F: All-rounder
SET G: Batsmen
SET H: Bowlers

  Honda Motor and the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) have jointly developed new technology that enables a robot to mimic the movements of a person by reading the patterns of activity in the person’s brain. Clench your fist, and the robot does the same; hold two fingers up, and the robot does likewise. Researchers in the West have already developed technology in which devices can be operated by implanting electrodes in the brain or controlling blood flow through special exercises, but this is the first system in the world to achieve robotic movement using changes in the natural blood flow caused by brain activity.

Potential for Use in Electric Wheelchairs
Aiming to develop a robot whose movements are entirely controlled by human thought, Honda plans to apply this latest innovation to its bipedal robot ASIMO. The company hopes to produce a robot that helps people in their daily lives within five to ten years.

The ability to control a machine simply through the power of thought could have positive implications for severely disabled or elderly people. Such technology would enable the development of electric wheelchairs and other assistive devices that could be controlled through signals from the brain, circumventing the need for manual controls.

   Makers of HDD/DVD recorders and PCs continue to compete over how many hours of recorded video can be stored on their products. But while these devices may be able to store hundreds of hours of TV programs and movies, it can sometimes be hard for viewers to find what they want to watch. In response to feedback from users, NEC has developed what it claims is an unprecedented system that makes searching for specific content much easier and faster.Searching from a Vast Library
NEC calls this breakthrough “topic division technology.” Voice patterns from the audiovisual data of a program are analyzed, and all of the data related to a specific search term can be called up regardless of whether the data in question is related to politics, entertainment, or sports.

For example, when searching for Major League Baseball player Suzuki Ichiro, the technology uses keywords like “baseball,” “United States,” and “outfielder” to locate and play video footage of Ichiro. It can also pull up a specific story from a news broadcast for the viewer.

Overcoming Difficulties
Present technology for searching audiovisual content relies on keywords that can be found in the electronic programming guide or in the content itself in the form of subtitles. But in addition to the expense of generating this data, the search itself is simplistic, making it hard to access content in a disaggregated way.

According to NEC, these problems have been overcome with the development of topic division technology. Now that the massive amounts of audiovisual content coming over digital broadcast networks and the Internet can be searched, accessed, and viewed according to subject matter, both suppliers and consumers of content will be able to access and interact with it more efficiently. The company is looking to commercialize this technology in 2008 and also wants to use it in home computers in the future.

SURFING IN THE RAIN:

Gray, rainy days may be about to get more colorful thanks to a new umbrella invented by Japanese researchers. The Internet Umbrella, conceived by a team at Keio University, acts as a photo browser by displaying images from the Internet as the user walks along. The handle of the umbrella contains a projector that displays images on the underside of the umbrella.

Student Inventors
The Internet umbrella, named Pileus (meaning the head of a mushroom) was created by two young graduate students. Second-year doctoral student Matsumoto Takashi, 27, and first-year master’s student Hashimoto Sho, 22, of Keio University’s Graduate School of Media and Governance were motivated by a desire to make walking on rainy days more enjoyable. Both belong to a research lab led by Professor Okude Naohito that is renowned for its interaction design research based on the concept of ubiquitous computing.

Prompted to start this project by the everyday act of using an umbrella, Matsumoto and Hashimoto combined numerous technologies to make the Internet umbrella a reality. The handle of their creation contains a camera, a motion sensor, GPS, and a digital compass. The device is controlled by rotating the grip.

WORLD’S SMALLEST HUMANOID ROBOT::::::::::::

A new humanoid robot, certified as the world’s smallest, will be released this autumn by Japanese toy manufacturer Tomy Company. On October 25, 2007, the Omnibot 17µ i-SOBOT is scheduled to hit the market—as well as the 2008 edition of Guinness World Records, which will list the product as “the smallest humanoid robot in production.” Robotics fans look forward to i-SOBOT as a fun toy to add to their collections, but also as a leap forward in miniaturization of the advanced parts that go into these high-tech tools.

Social networking online is grabbing all of the headlines. But huge numbers of people have been using cellphones to socialise electronically for much longer. Surely the mobile platform is a better one for social networking.

Computer scientist Vassilis Kostakos certainly thinks so. He recently told me about some FaceBook plugins he is developing that can connect people you meet in real life with their online profiles. It uses software installed on your phone to look for nearby devices using Bluetooth.

One of his plugins, called CityWare, was launched last summer. If you get close enough to another person who is also running the plugin on their phone, you are provided with a link to their profile the next time you login to Facebook. It was developed as part of a research project also called CityWare, partly funded by HP, Nokia and Vodafone.

Kostakos is working on more plugins, one of which really brings social networking and phones together.

Called Little Bird, it gets your phone to update you with information from your friends’ profiles whenever you meet them. “When you walk into a room, a message on your phone tells you what events your friends in the room are attending in the near future,” explains Kostakos.

I think we’ll be seeing more applications like this. It makes sense to help people get at this information on their phones; for example, telling you when contacts stored on your phone come online.

Kostakos says that since gaining publicity last year for his first Facebook application, he has spoken with several large European mobile operators interested in bringing social networking and phones together.

I imagine the handset makers will also be interested. I wonder how long it’ll be before the first ‘Facebook phone’ appears. Perhaps the first wave of devices based on Google’s ‘open’ Android platform will see that happen.