Videos R Us

We could tell you about our latest news, but it might be easier for you to watch it. YouTube has posted nominees for its second annual YouTube Awards and two Carnegie Mellon videos are in the running.

Computer Science Prof. Randy Pausch's "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," is one of six videos nominated for Most Inspirational, while Johnny Chung Lee, a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and his "Head Tracking for Desktop VR" are nominated for Best Instructional video. Overlooked: Lee's Wii remote merits a Best Supporting Gizmo award, but unfortunately that category doesn't yet exist.

You can vote once a day for your favorite in each of 12 categories and you have until March 19. You know what you need to do. Both of these nominated videos, BTW, are available on Carnegie Mellon's YouTube channel.

Byron Spice

Pausch Testifies on the HIll

Randy Pausch has become famous for his "last lecture," his Sept. 18 talk in which the computer scientist discussed how he had achieved his childhood dreams and shared his wisdom on how to live a good life. The speech was made especially powerful by an inescapable fact: his pancreatic cancer had recurred and all but certainly had reduced his remaining lifespan to a matter of months.

Pausch maintains that all pancreatic cancer patients need not share his fate; at least not if the federal government would increase research funding for the deadly disease. On Capitol Hill today, he is scheduled to testify before the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies. He plans on reminding Congress that the National Cancer Institute spends less than 2 percent of its research budget on pancreatic cancer even though pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths.

"Ironically, the National Cancer Institute developed a pancreatic cancer research plan back in 2001," he said in his prepared remarks. "The problem is it was never fully implemented. In fact, only five of the plan's 39 recommendations were acted upon."

Pausch has joined with the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network to support an updated version of the plan and to seek $170 million in federal funds to implement it over the next five years.

"My mother always liked to refer to me as her son, the doctor, but not the type of doctor who helps people," he said. "I hope that by being here today, I will help people by shining a spotlight on this disease and urging you to provide necessary research funding for this disease."

Byron Spice

Driving While Listening

Dialing, texting and otherwise juggling a cell phone is obviously a distraction for a driver and is causing many legislatures to consider new laws restricting cell phone use in cars. New Jersey, for instance, just became the first state to make text messaging while driving a primary offense, which means police officers don't need another reason to pull a driver over. Simply seeing a driver texting is enough to stop and cite a driver.

The Pennsylvania General Assembly is considering a number of bills regarding driving safety, including the banning of hand-held phones while driving. But as Carnegie Mellon neuroscientist Marcel Just will testify today at a hearing of the House Transportation Committee here in Pittsburgh, drivers need not dial, hold or even talk into a cell phone to be distracted. Simply listening intently is enough to impair driving.

Just and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study volunteers using a driver simulator. When they concentrated on a sentence they heard, they were more likely to weave in their lane than when they were driving undisturbed. Moreover, the fMRI scans showed that listening reduced by 37 percent the activity in the area of the brain associated with driving.

Byron Spice

Virtually touching

What would happen if your computer mouse pushed back? What would it be like to click on an image of a ceramic bunny on your computer screen and not only see it, but feel its shape and texture through your mouse? Visitors to Ralph Hollis’s lab today are getting a feel for this type of touch-based, or haptic, interface.

A team led by Hollis, a research professor in the Robotics Institute, developed a haptic interface based on magnetic levitation, which enables computer users to feel virtual objects. Most other haptic interfaces use motors and mechanical linkages to make it seem as if you feel an object, or experience some force feedback. Even some video game control pads can vibrate to give players some tactile feedback. But Hollis built a device with a single moving part that floats on magnetic fields and the result, he says, is perhaps the most realistic sense of touch provided by any such device in the world.

A group of local journalists got their hands on the devices this morning and the larger campus and technical community are likewise giving the interfaces a test drive this afternoon at a lab open house. They can draw a virtual stylus across different surfaces, feeling the varying textures, or they can push a box around inside a larger box on a computer screen, not only watching it bounce off the inner walls of the larger box, but feeling the rebound in their hands. In another demo, involving one haptic interface for each hand, they can lift and throw boxes or balance balls, feeling the heft of each.

This isn’t a technology that most people will have in their homes any time soon. In fact, only now, thanks to some funding from the National Science Foundation, has Hollis made enough of these devices to share them with other haptic interface researchers in the U.S. and Canada. But Hollis believes they could be used eventually to teleoperate robots, train surgeons and dentists and check the fit of parts designed on computers before they are ever built, among other uses. No one yet knows what all of the possibilities might be.

Byron Spice