Virtuality and digital technologies have added innumerable nuances to the nature of our identity. European researchers are working hard to keep pace with the new identity paradigm.

What is identity? In the digital age, this has become one of the big questions. The multiplication of online personas, the numerous and increasing contexts where identity plays a role, and the perennial problem of establishing reliable, secure identity in cyberspace make this one of the bigger challenges that the information society faces.

FIDIS, or the Future of Identity in the Information Society, is a network of excellence (NoE) set up to prepare Europe for the many emerging identity issues.

“As usual with research, particularly in a multidisciplinary project like FIDIS, we started out by defining our terms and looking at the nature of identity,” explains André Deuker of the Goethe University Frankfurt and a researcher at the FIDIS project. “What is the identity of identity?”

“We concluded that it is not one, single concept, but rather it is a host of pieces of information about an individual. So we came up with the concept of partial identities, where you might exchange your credit card information, for example, but wouldn’t reveal your eye colour, or social security number.”

So in the FIDIS network of excellence, identity are all those pieces of information that define a particular individual, from their DNA to how they like to take their coffee. Depending on the context, people will decide to reveal some information, but not all.

Such general statements provide the essential framework to approach a sprawling issue like identity, and are particularly useful for networks like FIDIS.

NoEs exist to create world-class expertise in a given scientific field by linking all the industry and academic players that contribute to a particular domain. Scientists, engineers, theoreticians, psychologists, legal experts and other social sciences can meet and get to know one another around a series of important problems in a particular field.

In this way, researchers in different areas, but working on the same problem, can learn about issues facing other disciplines. They make contacts and can help each other. The upshot is a much stronger research resource for Europe, and much greater standing across the world.

The future of identity in the information society is one of those big problems that can benefit enormously from this type of concerted effort. It is a complex and diverse problem, touching every area of life. It requires cooperation between many scientific, social and economic fields.

Deep in the bowels of Stanford University in California, a monster is being brought to life, not – for once – by a mad scientist playing God, but by a computer scientist, Professor Marc Levoy, and his team. Made from the spare parts of the photographic industry bolted on to a powerful computer, the Frankencamera may be incredibly ugly, but it will be the world's first open-source camera.

By giving researchers, programmers and the curious who buy the almost-£600 Frankencamera control for the first time over all the functions of a camera, Professor Levoy hopes those users will develop, as with the iPhone, the innovative ideas and applications necessary for the next revolution in photography: computational photography. That is the coming revolution that few people have heard of.

"Computational photography will change how we do photography," says the Professor of Computer Science. "It should allow you to fix things that you can't currently – whether by combining pictures in a different way, or by fiddling with optics so that more is recorded than on a normal camera; basically to do what photoshop can do, but the moment you take the photograph."

And so the only angry mob the Frankencamera will meet will be the photo fans desperate to get their hands on it.

Harnessing brain signals to control keyboards, robots or prosthetic devices is an active area of medical research. Now a rare peek at a human brain hooked up to a computer shows that the two can adapt to each other quickly, and possibly to the brain's benefit.

Researchers at the University of Washington looked at signals on the brain's surface while using imagined movements to control a cursor. The results, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that watching a cursor respond to one's thoughts prompts brain signals to become stronger than those generated in day-to-day life.

"Bodybuilders get muscles that are larger than normal by lifting weights," said lead author Kai Miller, a UW doctoral student in physics, neuroscience and medicine. "We get brain activity that's larger than normal by interacting with brain-computer interfaces. By using these interfaces, patients create super-active populations of brain cells."

The finding holds promise for rehabilitating patients after stroke or other neurological damage. It also suggests that a human brain could quickly become adept at manipulating an external device such as a computer interface or a prosthetic limb.

The team of computer scientists, physicists, physiologists and neurosurgeons studied eight patients awaiting epilepsy surgery at two Seattle hospitals. Patients had electrodes attached to the surface of their brains during the week leading up to the surgery and agreed to participate in research that would look at connecting brains to a computer.

The Mercedes-Benz F800 Style concept car that'll debut at the Geneva Motor Show next month is highly-touted by Mercedes-benz's press release scribes for its green-car tech, but what's probably of greater interest to most of you is its styling, which is everyone's first peek at what the next-generation CLS-Class sedan is going to look like. To that end, get ready for a nose section whose grille apes that of the SLS AMG, plus enough flame-surfaced bodywork to make one envision Chris Bangle, sporting a set of Groucho glasses to mask his true identity, clandestinely moonlighting at Benz. The rear doors are sliders, because it's a concept, and you need to give the people a clear view into the swoopy, sci-fi passenger cabin. Props to Mercedes PR for gamely making it sound as if there's an actual practical application for those doors, though.

An artificial foot that recycles energy otherwise wasted in between steps could make it easier for amputees to walk, its developers say.

Compared with conventional prosthetic feet, the new prototype device significantly cuts the energy spent per step.

A paper about the device is published in the Feb. 17 edition of in the journal PLoS ONE. The foot was created by Kuo and Steve Collins, who was then a U-M graduate student. Now Collins is an associate research fellow at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

The human walking gait naturally wastes energy as each foot collides with the ground in between steps.

A typical prosthesis doesn't reproduce the force a living ankle exerts to push off of the ground. As a result, test subjects spent 23 percent more energy walking with a conventional prosthetic foot, compared with walking naturally. To test how stepping with their device compared with normal walking, the engineers conducted their experiments with non-amputees wearing a rigid boot and prosthetic simulator.

In research that gives literal meaning to the term "power suit," University of California, Berkeley, engineers have created energy-scavenging nanofibers that could one day be woven into clothing and textiles.

These nano-sized generators have "piezoelectric" properties that allow them to convert into electricity the energy created through mechanical stress, stretches and twists.

"This technology could eventually lead to wearable 'smart clothes' that can power hand-held electronics through ordinary body movements," said Liwei Lin, UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering and head of the international research team that developed the fiber nanogenerators.

Because the nanofibers are made from organic polyvinylidene fluoride, or PVDF, they are flexible and relatively easy and cheap to manufacture.

A pan-European team of robotics researchers began a project this year that could see humanoid bots interact with groups of people in a realistic, anthropomorphic way, for the first time.

The "Humanoids with auditory and visual abilities in populated spaces" (HUMAVIPS) project has the ambitious goal of making humanoid bots just that bit more human by building algorithms that will enable bots to mimic what psychologists call the "cocktail party effect" -– the human ability to focus attention on just one person in the midst of other people, voices and background noise.

If successful, HUMAVIPS will give future humanoid bots something that existing bots don't possess -– the simple social skills necessary to deal with small groups of people, including the basic intelligence to pick out a group of humans and determine which ones want to interact with it. It could also endow bots with the ability to infer meaning from incoming sense data, which would be a rudimentary step towards truly anthropomorphic robot intelligence.

For people who despair that there is too much information online, Chris Manning has a response: Technology is not the problem. In fact, technology may understand what you're trying to say.

At the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, the Stanford associate professor of computer science and linguistics talked about enabling computers to process human language well enough to use the information it conveys.

"The problem of the age is information overload," said Manning, who delivered his presentation on Feb. 19. "The fundamental challenge I'm going to talk about is how we can get computers to actually understand at least a reasonable amount of what they read."

As computers make more sense of what's online, they will deliver more relevant search results and will help summarize, structure and act on information that individuals care about, much like a personal assistant.

A smartphone email program that understands the difference between "We need the Q4 figures" and "We found the Q4 figures" could prove invaluable to a busy executive.

Computers also could help researchers extract key facts from a sea of articles to create and update databases. In fact, Manning already has developed software that mines biology research papers for basic data.

Silicon is the most prevalent material in electronics, no matter whether for mobile phones, solar cells or computers. Nanometer-sized wires made of silicon have a large potential for a completely new chip architecture. But this requires a detailed investigation and understanding of their electronic properties which is technologically challenging due to the ultra-small size of the nanowires. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics and the Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (FZD) were able to describe the electrical resistance and current flow inside individual silicon nanowires. The results were published in the journal NANO LETTERS.
Pressemitteilung vom 18.01.2010: Hoch statt flach: Nanodrähte für eine neue Chip-Architektur, FZD und Max-Planck-Institut für Mikrostrukturphysik, Publikation in Nano Letters

3D scheme of a usual transistor (left) and of a novel vertical transistor made out of silicon. The arrows symbolize the current flow.

All pictures: Sander Münster, Dresden.

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Nowadays, a myriad of silicon transistors are responsible to pass on the information on a microchip. The transistors are arranged in a planar array, i.e. lying flat next to each other, and have shrunk down already to a size of only about 50 nanometers (1 nanometer = 1 millionth part of 1 millimeter). Further miniaturization of transistors with a planar structure will soon come to an end due to fundamental physical limits. Still, even smaller transistors are desirable in order to continuously improve their functions while reducing the cost of the electronics.

Currently, researchers are working hard to find new approaches to overcome the physical limits on downscaling and integration of microchips. One such concept is to fabricate a completely new transistor architecture in three-dimensions. In this concept, instead of arranging them flat on the substrate the silicon transistors are turned by 90 degrees so that they stick out of the chip substrate like tiny columns. In this way, numerous vertical transistors could be built on the area normally occupied by only one planar transistor.

A physicist has demonstrated that teleportation of energy is possible, a discovery that has profound implications for the study of physics.

Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University in Japan showed that teleportation of energy is possible by using the quantum principles to transport information.

Relying on the quantum phenomenon called “entanglement” — in which two particles share the same existence, meaning that a measurement on one particle immediately influences the other despite being light-years apart — Hotta’s idea involves making a measurement on each one an entangled pair of particles.