February 23, 2011

Training Machines to Recognize People

We've established that a computer can beat the best humans at Jeopardy.  But can it tell Alex Trebek from Chuck Woolery?

On Feb. 21, Deva Ramanan, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UC Irvine, was at Duke talking about his work on enhancing computer vision to the point where machines might be able to recognize individual people.

February 14, 2011

Statistical Research on Health Care in Kenya

“Malaria counts for 40 percent of the hospital visits in most areas of Kenya,” Duke Global Health Institute  researcher Nathan Smith said during a Friday, Feb. 11 talk.

December 10, 2010

Gesture-Based Interfaces: My Research

Blogger Vansh Muttreja (Class of  2012 B.S.E. Electrical and Computer Engineering and B.S. Economics) updates us on his research:

Over the past three months I have been working on some very interesting projects as part of Duke SyNRG (Systems Networking Research Group) which is led by Dr. Romit Roy Choudhury, Nortel Networks assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.

November 12, 2010

The Alarming Extinction of Species

“When we think of extinction,  we refer to dinosaurs and dodos. We don’t digest the concept of extinction in present day," said television host and conservationist Jeff Corwin, during a talk at Duke on Thursday.

He was here to talk about the state of conservation of natural resources in the 21st century.

October 29, 2010

Getting Shorter and Fatter

“Height trends reveal hidden aspects of economic and social growth,” said Professor John Komlos, chair of the Institute of Economic History at the University of Munich, during his talk here on Thursday entitled “Economics and Human Biology: Why are Americans shorter and fatter?"  

September 9, 2010

Nanoscale is More Than Meets the Eye

Post by student-blogger Vansh Muttreja:

Although there are vast numbers of nanoparticles around us, it has taken a long time for the ‘nano’ revolution to come to light, Virginia Tech geoscientist Michael F.Hochella Jr., said in a Sept. 9 lecture sponsored by the Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT)