The brain may be a human organ, but it's also a complex system. Taking a systems engineering approach to understanding the brain could help the scientists who study its workings.

That's the approach of Victor Eliashberg, a systems engineer who teaches Mathematics of the Brain, a course launched this year at Stanford University in California. The course aims to address systems integration as a part of modeling the brain.

The brain may be a human organ, but it's also a complex system that could benefit from being studied from a systems engineering perspective, said a Stanford mathematician.

Neuroscience and technology have developed to the point that researchers can now attempt to reverse-engineer and simulate the work of the human brain as an integrated system, Eliashberg said.

"Understanding the brain as a system requires systems engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, neurobiology, psychology, and, most importantly, a broad mathematical background," Eliashberg said. He's a consulting professor in Stanford's electrical engineering department. "Mathematics is the common point on which to converge the discipline."

Researchers are conducting interesting brain-related studies at Stanford and other academic institutions, said Yasha Eliashberg. He's chair of the Stanford math department and Victor Eliashberg's brother.

What's missing amid all that research is a mathematical way to represent and integrate the multidisciplinary research. The new course could lead to a program that addresses the brain as an integrated computing system, Yasha Eliasberg said.

One day, cell phones might be able to share information with nearby phones or mobile devices. That shared data could allow you to avoid traffic jams on your way to work—
or find the best way out of a burning building.

Middleware being developed at IBM would allow mobile devices to pass pertinent information back and forth regardless of operating system, hardware, or communication modes.

The ad hoc network, called Infinity, that middleware creates could be used to monitor traffic or respond to natural disasters, said Stefan Schoenauer, lead IBM researcher on the Infinity team.

"The idea for Infinity started with realizing we have a whole lot of mobile devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and even USB memory sticks, which all store a lot of information," Schoenauer said. "So we wondered: What if we could tap into all those devices and make all that information accessible?"

Because all those devices essentially speak many languages—thanks to their various operating systems, and hardware and software features—they're hard to connect.

"So we've built a piece of software that runs atop all these mobile devices and makes them speak a common language, makes the exchange of information easier, and takes security and privacy into account so that you're only sharing information with whom you want," Schoenauer said.

Once Infinity gets up and running, a beleaguered driver commuting to work could use his cell phone to get data directly from mobile devices from other people stuck in traffic. That data could be shared atop Infinity via Bluetooth wireless or General Packet Radio Service, a popular cellular service.

In another example, Schoenauer described a disaster scenario where damaged cell phone towers would knock out cellular service. Using Bluetooth atop Infinity, rescue workers could more easily track the locations of co-workers or victims.

"I can see Infinity as a product that will take the Internet beyond its current state from what is now a network of stand-alone devices to devices that are connected," Schoenauer said. "From a data standpoint, it would open the floodgates."

To boost performance of full-vehicle heavy truck analyses and reduce analysis time, the International Truck Development Technology Center recently installed a computer cluster.

The center, in Fort Wayne, Ind., installed the SGI Altix XE cluster—powered by Intel Xeon processors—in October 2006 to run its finite element analysis, computer-aided engineering, and computational fluid dynamics analyses of its trucks, which include everything from a curbside delivery truck to an 18-wheeler, according to Craig Harmeyer, senior IT specialist at
the center.

The International Truck Development Technology Center recently boosted its computing power by installing a cluster from SGI. The cluster has sped analysis and reduced visualization time.

"We needed to be more efficient as far as computer power, system reliability, and storage capability," Harmeyer said. "We were running into performance issues, where we required better performance than what we were getting from the cluster we had."

The hardware helps engineers analyze design to find the right steel reinforcement for each truck, Harmeyer said. Designers don't want to use too much steel, which could add unnecessary weight and cost, or too little, which would take away from a truck's safety, Harmeyer said.

Now playing at the Future of Flight Aviation Center: a 3-D visual holographic video that, in four minutes, depicts the assembly of a Boeing 787.

David Shaw, who has worked at Boeing and is now a senior CAD designer at Freightliner in Portland, Ore., helped put together the display for the center in Everett, Wash., as part of his master's degree project at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

"It normally takes about three weeks to assemble a plane of this magnitude," Shaw said. "Our goal was to give a layperson not necessarily skilled in aircraft construction a glimpse of how a massive airplane is put together. We purposefully used easy concepts that even a five-year-old can understand."

In the animation, viewers see the three main parts of the plane—the nose, fuselage, and tail—come together. Each section is mobile and joins without the help of any people on the ground. Robotic arms place the tailfin and the wings on the plane and then add the engines. Next, the supporting rollers glide away and the plane is then lowered to the ground, where it taxis out of the assembly line.

The Boeing 787, also known as the Dreamliner, is assembled much like other Boeing passenger jumbo jets, except that the 787 features a one-piece fuselage section. That eliminates 1,500 aluminum sheets and more than 40,000 fasteners, Shaw said.

"It's not an exact or, by any means, a complete look at the assembly, but it is a good representation," Shaw said.

Shaw used facilities at Purdue's Envision Center for Data Perceptualization to test and display the animation. An Atlanta-based company, 3DH, did additional animation and final composition.

If you can't buy it, build it. That's the theory behind a recent robot initiative.

Because they couldn't find exactly the right robot for their research, scientists at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering in Hanover, N.H., are now at work on their own mobile, low-cost robots that they'll use for a study of cooperative control.

Unable to locate commercially available robots for use in the study, the researchers opted to develop their own.

Cooperative control allows many high-speed, all-terrain robots to be controlled by one person in one location, which does away with the one soldier per robot ratio now needed for highly specialized military robots. A one-controller, many-robots approach can obviously reduce cost for ventures like robots sent out to map terrain, said Laura Ray, an associate professor of engineering at Dartmouth.

But the machines Dartmouth scientists are building have potential nonmilitary applications as well. For instance, they might assess potentially dangerous situations before first responders move in, she said.

To develop the robot, researchers are using the computer-aided design tool Pro/Engineer from PTC of Needham, Mass., for design. They also turn to Pro/Engineer Mechanica for structural analysis, to make sure the robots can move across various terrains, Ray said.

The move from designing parts for race cars to actual race car design can't be easy. But one company in The Netherlands said it's up to the task.

CEEMO Engineering of Maarssen makes airfoils, body panels, and air boxes for race cars. Not content to rest on their laurels, CEEMO engineers have moved on to design their first concept car, said Evan van Wolfswinkel, a company engineer.

Engineers at CEEMO Engineering have stepped up from designing race car parts and now are also at work on a concept car. They use fluid dynamics software to improve the car's aerodynamics.

To help them get started, engineers turned to the fluid dynamics software package EFD.Lab from Flomerics Ltd. of Marlborough, Mass. They use it to analyze and improve the aerodynamics of the car chassis.

The software helped van Wolfswinkel and his team determine just how to adjust the car's ground clearance for better aerodynamics. They also made the back of the car rounder to reduce drag.

The car is still about two years away from production. Meanwhile, van Wolfswinkel and his team have turned their attention to the car's suspension.

As any woodworker knows, you risk losing a finger if you're not paying attention.

Lifelong woodworker Steve Gass wants to end that danger. He applied his doctorate in physics to design a saw that runs with a small electrical current on the blade. When the blade touches a finger—or something else that conducts electrical current—the current drops and engages a brake.

As the blade's teeth sink into the brake, the momentum forces the blade to drop below the table, Gass said. The entire process takes only three milliseconds, a fraction of the blink of an eye. Gass founded SawStop LLC of Tualatin, Ore., after inventing the SawStop blade. The company develops improved safety technology for woodworking equipment.

But inventing the blade was easier than learning the first CAD software the company bought, said Dave Fulmer, SawStop's vice president of engineering.

"We're all inventors or engineers, but none of us really had any CAD experience," he said. They spent eight months learning the new software before realizing it wasn't for them and turning to another package.

They now use SolidWorks for CAD and CosmosXpress and CosmosWorks, also from SolidWorks of Concord, Mass., for analysis.

It may sound like a new slimming craze, but thin clients are, in fact, slimmed-down computers used to move data. No fancy number crunching or processing for these computers, which don't include hard drives. They send information to a server that stores the operating system.

Those in the information technology field have always recognized that a thin-client network needs very little maintenance. Update the central operating system and you've automatically updated all the thin-client computers.

Now a study from Fraunhofer Institute of Oberhausen, Germany, has quantified other benefits. Researchers found that thin clients use about half the electricity of regular personal computers. "In view of climate change and the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, this is an important factor," said Hartmut Pflaum, an institute researcher.

In an earlier study, the researchers examined the economics of the slim devices. The scientists based their research on a small to medium-size company with a staff of 150 to 300 people.

Companies that use thin-client networks can cut overall costs by 44 to 48 percent compared to the use of PCs with a software distribution system," said Christian Knermann, a Fraunhofer IT expert.

The Internet is marvel enough. And yet, it grew up in very willy-nilly fashion. The nagging question (at least in the minds of some computer scientists): Is this really how we would build it if we could design it all over again, knowing what we know today?

The answer to that question can give scientists something to think about as they consider the Internet's direction, according to a group of researchers at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. They're looking to the Internet's past to consider its future as part of a program they call Clean Slate Design for the Internet.

"How should the Internet look in 15 years?" asked Nick McKeown, a Stanford associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, who leads the Clean Slate effort. "We should be able to answer that question by saying we created exactly what we need, not just that we patched some more holes, made some new tweaks, or came up with some more workarounds."

McKeown and his Clean Slate colleagues are already at work on research that could have an impact on the Internet of the future.

Take Ethane, a 400-user wireless network. Today's corporate networks rely on awkward administrative tricks for security, McKeown said. But Ethane is a straightforward design for a secure corporate network. Whereas today's networks allow open communication by default, Ethane prohibits communications except when administrators open the network to appropriate parties. It makes the job of maintaining security much easier, McKeown said.

Another Clean Slate project aims to adjust the mismatched wireless network's limited capacity to the huge growth in the number of wireless devices. As part of that project, Andrea Goldsmith, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, has teamed with researchers to find a way to let wireless devices like phones and other handheld devices access pockets of unused wireless spectrum.

Noran Engineering Inc. of Westminster, Calif., which makes FEA software, is expanding its business relationship with UGS Corp. of Plano, Texas, from supplier to channel partner. Noran now markets, sells, distributes, supports, and services UGS's portfolio of engineering software.

Lattice Technology of San Francisco, a developer of 3-D publishing applications, has released Lattice3D Reporter, with which manufacturers can insert 3D XVL data easily on reports and documents.

Informative Graphics Corp. of Scottsdale, Ariz., has upgraded its Myriad 3-D and 2-D CAD viewer to version 8.

Dassault Systèmes of Paris has released Catia Automotive Extensions, Vehicle Architecture, or CAVA. It ensures legal conformity of the car architecture with national and international mandates during design.

Algor Inc. of Pittsburgh has upgraded its piping design and analysis software, PipePak, to version 10.

Haptic software and hardware maker SensAble Technologies Inc. of Woburn, Mass., has upgraded its FreeForm Modeling and Modeling Plus software to version 9.1.

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