2011 news highlights - Computer and communications sciences
© 2011 EPFL
Augmented reality, 3 D pictures, reduction of data centers energy consumption, are some of the domains explored by IC School scientists. Here is a selection of this year’s headlines.
APRIL- EPFL Spinoff Turns Thousands of 2D Photos into 3D Images
Researchers in EPFL’s Computer Vision Laboratory thought a computer program that generates a 3D image from up to thousands of 2D shots. Since April, the EPFL start-up Pix4D has been offering the modeling service with an intriguing plus: a fourth dimension—time.
MAY- New start-up leverages Scala – a product of EPFL
Thanks to the raising of three million dollars, Martin Odersky, professor at Programming Methods Laboratory, has just created the company Typesafe. This investment will enable the Scala programming language – a promising alternative to Java – to increase its use on the Internet. Many big companies active on the Web like Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn and the internet site of the British newspaper The Guardian (guardian.co.uk) have adopted it.
MAY- An effort to curb the IT industry's energy appetite
The ecocloud consortium brings several EPFL laboratories together to tackle the skyrocketing electricity demands of Internet data processing centers.The center’s ambition can be illustrated on a graph: the increase in data centers’ electricity consumption should not rise exponentially, but linearly. If it doesn’t, the viability of the IT sector will be in jeopardy.
JUNE- Augmented reality in an iPhone app
Imagine you’re in a museum, and you can point your iPhone camera to a painting or an object in an exhibit and instantly get additional information about what you’re looking at. This is what PixLive, an iPhone app developed by the start-up company Vidinoti, lets you do – enrich an image with text, video, and other multimedia content.
NOVEMBER- New technology tracks multiple athletes at once
International sports federations would like to be able to follow the movements of individual athletes more easily during televised matches, even when they’re hidden from view. Today, EPFL’s Computer Vision Laboratory announces an innovative system that accomplishes this task—and the implications go far beyond sports.