To make their mark on the sport of surfing, two surfers took to the lab.

Dror Kodman and Brian Sweeney, graduate students at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., are seeking to use fluid flow analysis to match surfer and surf conditions to optimal board design.

Today, surfers who want a custom-built board have pretty much one option: Visit a shaper who crafts a board according to local surfing conditions and to the customer's weight and skill level. The process is one of trial and error, Sweeney said.

Two Stevens Tech graduate students hope to customize surfboard to surfer with the help of CFD software, which is used to analyze each proposed surfboard's shape and the forces acting upon it.

He and Kodman seek to bring hard science to the art of shaping through computational fluid dynamics analysis, which they're using to study forces, including the effect of wave conditions, on board design.

Because there's little research on surfboard design, the pair turned to boat hull design and analysis, and related it to surfboards.

There are two main types of boats: displacement and planing. The surfboard is essentially a planing vessel. It lifts and skims the surface of the water as it moves. It relies only minimally on buoyancy—just enough to float when at rest.

By looking at surfboards as planing craft, the two students could focus on the effects of lift and drag in the same way planing-hull designers do.

The pair built a database of CAD geometries that could be mixed and matched to best effect. For CAD, they used software from SolidWorks of Concord, Mass.

"The database is basically our design space," Kodman said. "We're comparing different combinations to determine which perform best."

They feed their models into the mesh-generation software Harpoon from CEI of Apex, N.C. After mesh generation, the team used the CFD program CFX from Ansys of Southpoint, Pa., to analyze the effects of various forces and moments acting on each proposed board design. The process is ongoing.

When asked when the project, with its seemingly infinite number of design combinations, would reach completion, Kodman and Sweeney quipped, "At graduation."

To get a frozen treat, you first need the machinery that makes it.

HC Duke & Son Inc. manufactures ice cream-making machinery. The company stays busy as the major equipment supplier to Dairy Queen and also supplies the Sonic chain with the means of making its shakes and slushes. To keep up with demand, executives at HC Duke in East Moline, Ill., recently installed product lifecycle management software to track the
design process closely.

With the system, engineers also have an easier way to work with the design team at HC Duke's sister company, Carpigiani, in Italy, on new product development.

The company uses CoCreate software from the company of the same name in Fort Collins, Colo.

Computer scientists from Bath, England, and Boston are unveiling electronic artwork that changes to match the mood of the person who looks at it.

"The program analyzes the viewer for eight facial expressions, such as the position and shape of the mouth, the openness of the eyes, and the angle of the brows, to work out the emotional state of the viewer," said John Collomosse of the department of computer science at the University of Bath. "It does all of this in real time, meaning that as the viewer's emotions change, the artwork responds accordingly."

Collomosse's team worked on the empathic painting project with Maria Shugrina and Margrit Betke, professors in the computer science department at Boston University.

Images collected through a Web cam recognize the eight facial features. Software then adapts the colors and brush strokes of the digital artwork to suit the changing mood of the viewer.

The researchers created the digital images with advanced artistic rendering techniques, which give the computer-generated artwork the appearance of having been painted onto canvas.

When the viewer is angry, the colors are dark and appear to have been applied to the canvas with more violent brush strokes. If the expression changes to happy, the artwork adapts so that the colors are vibrant and applied more subtly.

The project forms part of the ongoing research to develop artwork tools for the computer graphics industry. This has already resulted in software that allows designers to create animations directly from digital footage, Collomosse said.

A dancer in front of a screen in Maryland dances to music beamed (in a manner of speaking) from a performer in Alaska. Meanwhile, an actor performs in front of a camera in Utah. Her costumes are generated on a computer in Los Angeles and follow her around the screen, changing as the scene changes.

Audiences at locations around the world tune in to see these performances mixed and broadcast live via a high-speed network connection. This is Art on the Grid.

The project is actually an offshoot of a larger networking project called the Access Grid. Grid computing joins the resources of many networked computers to work on a single problem. Usually, it's a scientific or engineering computation, but in this case, it's art, said Scott Deal, an associate music professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

Deal and Miho Aoki, an assistant art professor at the university, have been collaborating more than four years on an interactive art and music show that's part of Art on the Grid. They joined forces with computer specialists at their university's Arctic Region Supercomputing Center to push the boundaries of their art and music via the grid, they said.

The linked technologies include multimedia large-format displays and presentation and interactive software joined via a network of computers and supercomputers, according to Deal.

"Instead of a physical location, there is a Web address," Deal said. "Anyone can venture there through their computer, and when they do, the minds and senses of real people, in real time, are there also."

Don't dump that old computer out on the curb. You could be opening the door to data theft. (Plus, it's probably not yet recyclable in your community.)

The proper disposal of surplus computer hardware is often a forgotten component in data security programs, according to Scott Conti, assistant director for network operations at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Reformatting a hard drive will not actually remove the data and that old data can be recovered with very little effort, Conti said.

He recommends three utilities that can be downloaded and written to a compact disk, which you can then use to boot the computer and wipe the hard drive. Darik's Boot and Nuke is available at dban.sourceforge.net; Active@Kill Disk Hard Drive Eraser is at www.killdisk.com, and the third utility, Eraser, is at www.heidi.ie/eraser/download.php.

To the average college student, art and engineering are exact opposite fields of study. But an engineering professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, who usually teaches classes on differential equations and electromagnetism, has created a popular course that merges his research with the world of fine arts.

David Snider incorporates the works of the masters, the tools of artists, and the vision of engineers in his art class to broaden the perspective of his students and to open their eyes to a world they might otherwise pass by, he said. Fine arts students in the class get to see artworks from an engineering perspective.

Students in David Snider's fine arts and engineering class at the University of South Florida in Tampa look at art from an engineering perspective. This is the work of Ansel Adams, who photographed the American Southwest beginning in the 1920s.

"I decided to design an art introduction where the technology students are empowered, rather than handicapped," Snider said. "The fine arts students in the class are simultaneously amused and awed by the unexpected viewpoints expressed by the techies."

Snider covers topics from general interest—such as early theories of light and the structure of the eye—to more engineering-based topics, including a detailed look at the wave nature of light and the creation of cameras, from pinhole to digital.

The course, which presents nearly 100 artists ranging from photographer Ansel Adams to pop artist Andy Warhol, also covers software and hardware used to identify forgeries or to determine if a work was created by a famous artist or by an understudy.

Believe it or not, at one time all television shows were telecast in black and white. Then came color. High-definition images next promised to revolutionize the viewing experience, but so far, they haven't. What's next? Could images broadcast in three dimensions be on the horizon?

Yes, said Levent Onural of Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He's coordinating the research of about 200 people from 19 universities in seven countries as part of the 3DTV project.

The 3DTV project pools ongoing research in fields like computer graphics, signal processing, telecommunications, electronics, optics, and physics. The 3-D television sets would display holographic images—that is, images in three dimensions. Viewers wouldn't need to wear special glasses, Onural said.

Now, almost midway through its four-year duration, 3DTV has already made significant strides, he said.

"We have working prototypes of 3-D video-capture using multiple cameras," he said. "We can process and represent 3-D scenes from the captured multivideo sequences. We can stream stereo-video through the Internet, and we have various types of 3-D display device prototypes in place."

The imaging technology could have applications in many other fields, such as medicine, dentistry, air-traffic control, military, entertainment, or computer games, he added.

Still, there's some way to go before viewers will be able to see 3-D images in their living rooms, Onural said.

"Dynamic holographic displays for satisfactory holographic motion pictures are still far away," he said. "Another decade might be needed before they become a commercial reality. However, basic research to investigate these high-end 3-D displays is moving forward with considerable momentum."

Picture hopping into a small, golf cart-size car to get from your home to the nearest public transit stop. Might make you reconsider your car as commuter tool, right? Researchers at a new Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory are working to make the scenario happen.

The new MIT Design Laboratory—which opened in spring 2006—brings emerging technology to bear on problems of social, economic, and cultural importance, according to William Mitchell, who heads the lab.

The Design Lab is made up of research groups already working on projects that combine sustainability issues with new technology—like the City Car. Of course, those at work on the projects use a variety of design hardware and software, particularly the CAD programs used by both engineers and architects.

The City Car, a two-seat, stackable car, would be perfect for dense, urban areas. Instead of parking your car, you'd stack it at places like bus and subway stops where it would be electrically charged while you hop on the bus, Mitchell said. Upon return, you'd remove a fully charged vehicle from the front of the stack, just as you'd pick up a luggage cart at the airport. You wouldn't own the car. It would be more like renting it—you'd just grab one that happens to be at the front of the stack when you need it.

That project began as a challenge to redesign the automobile, but quickly led to the larger question of how to reinvent personal transportation for a sustainable city, Mitchell said.

Work at the Design Lab involves a combination of consortium-driven research and commissioned research projects with funding from government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, he added.

SmartCAM of Springfield, Ore., has released SmartCAM version 13.5, a computer-aided manufacturing software application for milling, turning, and fabrication. The upgrade gives users the capability to organize job and process data.

Geometric Software Solutions of Mumbai, India, released 3DSearchIT for SolidWorks, which lets SolidWorks users locate files based on shape criteria.

Cadig of Eden Prairie, Minn., has released AutoTable 3.5 beta for AutoCAD, with which Excel spreadsheets can be imported into AutoCAD and modified.

The Rapidly Operational Virtual Reality visualization system from Fakespace Systems Inc. of Marshalltown, Iowa, now includes Beacon stereoscopic projector technology.

CNC Software of Tolland, Conn., has released Mastercam X Art CAD and CAM software. The application is for artistic-relief design, and the upgrade includes new features like wrapping.

Analysis software maker Ansys Inc. of Southpoint, Pa., said the upcoming release of its multiphysics simulation software Ansys 11 and Fluent 6.3 will include support for Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, to enable high-performance computing on the Microsoft Windows platform.

Simmetrix Inc. of Clifton Park, N.Y., has released the simulation modeling application Simulation Modeling Suite 6.0.

The maker of product lifecycle management software, UGS Corp. of Plano, Texas, said its D-Cubed Collision Detection Manager software has been integrated into its NX computer-aided manufacturing application for gouge checking during tool path generation.

DARcorporation of Lawrence, Kan., announced an upgrade to its aircraft design software, Advanced Aircraft Analysis version 3.1.

Bluebeam Software of Pasadena, Calif., has released Bluebeam PDF review version 4.7. With it, users can create PDF files from CAD and Windows applications.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, N.Y., recently announced an in-kind contribution commercially valued at $514 million from the Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education, a joint philanthropic initiative of General Motors, EDS, Sun Microsystems, and UGS Corp. to support academic institutions with computer-based design tools.

Delcam of Birmingham, England, has released FeatureCAM 2007, the latest version of the company's feature-based machining software.

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