The Ultrasonic Gesture Recognizer: Natural gestures to interact with the electronic world
Optical 3D imagers for gesture recognition, such as Microsoft Kinect, suffer from large size and high power consumption. Their performance depends on ambient illumination and they generally cannot operate in sunlight. These factors have prevented widespread adoption of gesture interfaces in energy- and volume-limited environments such as tablets and smartphones. Gesture recognition using sound is an attractive candidate to overcome these difficulties because of the potential for chip-scale solution size, low power consumption, and ambient light insensitivity. Our research focuses on building an ultrasonic 3D range sensor system suitable for gesture recognition using batch-fabricated micromachined aluminum nitride (AlN) ultrasonic transducer arrays and custom CMOS electronics.
eCHEM 1A: Online General Chemistry
College of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley
http://chemistry.berkeley.edu/echem1a
Curriculum and ChemQuizzes developed by Dr. Mark Kubinec and Professor Alexander Pines
Chemical Demonstrations by Lonnie Martin
Video Production by Jon Schainker and Scott Vento
Developed with the support of The Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation
CONFERENCE ON AMBIGUITY, UNCERTAINTY, AND CLIMATE CHANGE
http://calclimate.wordpress.com
Session 8 - Directions for Climate Policy Decisions
Over the past decade, there has been considerable progress in the economic theory of ambiguity and ambiguity aversion, involving decisions where the decision maker does not know, or is uncertain about, the probabilities attached to various potential outcomes. This is an appropriate characterization of the current understanding of many facets of climate change science: the uncertainty is pervasive and profound, with many unknowns, and unknown unknowns, that cannot be characterized in terms of a conventional probability distribution. The conference explores the application of developments in the economic theory of ambiguity to climate change policy, including both mitigation policy (the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation policy (coping with the consequences of climate change). Some, but not all, of the fog of uncertainty will gradually dissipate over time, but meanwhile policy decisions have to be made now, whether for mitigation or adaptation. Climate change policy analysis needs to reflect not only the prevailing uncertainty and ambiguity, but also the anticipated future resolution of uncertainty and ambiguity. The challenge is to incorporate risk and risk aversion, ambiguity and ambiguity aversion, and learning, more adequately into the formulation of a framework for decision making on climate change policy. This is the central focus of the conference.
To explore this issue, the conference brings some leading researchers on the economic theory of uncertainty and ambiguity and the economics of climate change together with some leading climate scientists and modelers. Some of the invitees have been asked to make formal presentations or provide formal comments; others invitees are expected to contribute to the discussion from the floor.
A collection of video clips from events produced by UC Berkeley Educational Technology Services (ETS). For more information, see http://ets.berkeley.edu