13. Real bandwidth management
University of California at San Diego computer scientists say they have developed a TCP-based bandwidth management system that works across global networks.
The "flow proportional share" algorithm created by Barath Raghavan and his teammates is designed to enable a group of rate limiters to work together, providing better availability of network applications, including Web sites.
"With our system, an organization with mirrored Web sites or other services across the globe could dynamically shift its bandwidth allocations between sites based on demand. You can't do that now, and this lack of control is a significant drawback to today's cloud-based computing approaches," said Raghavan, a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering.
The work is described in a paper called "Cloud Control with Distributed Rate Limiting".
14. Doing away with digital clutter
MIT researchers have come up with a way to measure visual clutter, a breakthrough that could help everyone from fighter pilots to Web site designers.
The scientists published a paper in the Journal of Vision that explains their work. The impetus for the work was that "we lack a clear understanding of what clutter is, what features, attributes and factors are relevant, why it presents a problem and how to identify it," says Ruth Rosenholtz, principal research scientist at MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Another issue is that clutter is perceived differently by different people, so coming up with a universal measure of what's hard or easy to pick out in a display is challenging. The model devised takes into account such factors as color, data and contrast.
The researchers tested their model on people looking at a map, trying to find an arrow saying "You are here," for example.
Rosenholtz plans to offer the MIT team's visual clutter tool to designers as part of a continuing study. You can test out the level of clutter in a display yourself by going here.
15. Finding pictures of needles in haystacks
Penn State researchers have developed software they say tags images upon uploading to Yahoo's Flickr or other photo systems but also automatically updates those tags based on how people interact with the photos.
This could greatly improve searching for images, the researchers say.
"Tagging itself is challenging as it involves converting an image's pixels to descriptive words," said James Wang, lead researcher and associate professor of information sciences and technology, in a statement. "But what is novel with the 'Tagging over Time' or T/T technology is that the system adapts as people's preferences for images and words change."
In recent tests the system was shown to correctly annotate four of every 10 images. It still needs work, but is an improvement over an earlier Penn State-developed system dubbed Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures-Real Time that analyzed pixel content to suggest tags. The new software, which relies on machine-learning, is described in more detail in a paper called "Tagging Over Time: Real-world Image Annotation by Lightweight Meta-learning." The researchers say accuracy of the new system can grow from 40 per cent to 60 per cent as it learns from user behavior.