Blogs / Discoblog

The computer maestros tinkering with Yahoo’s code at their all-night hackathon weren’t the only hackers that have been busy lately.

Late last week, a group hacked into one of the Large Hadron Collider’s main computer systems. Calling themselves part of the “Greek Security Team,” the hackers said they wanted to expose the weaknesses in the particle smasher’s computer systems. The attack against the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, one of the LHC’s four main experiments, did little direct harm, save some embarrassment for the LHC scientists, but they did bring down the CERN Web site.

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Well, here’s one way to reinvent your company: Pull a college-style all-nighter.

Yahoo threw open its doors this weekend and sponsored a “hackathon,” their first since 2006. Three hundred computer whizzes, fueled by pizza, kegs of beer, and Red Bull, used a night of unprecedented access at Yahoo’s California campus to see what they could do with the company’s code.

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As the paparazzi wait for celebrities to walk by with perfect hair, researchers have found a way to create perfect hair graphically. Scientists at the University of California at San Diego used cameras and light sources in a new way to create ultra-realistic hair on animated figures.

The researchers took 2,500 images with 16 cameras, used 150 light sources, and set up three projectors to determine the exact position of each strand of hair and imputed the data into a complex model. Most animated films shown in theaters today typically only show characters with treatment done to the top layer of their hair. The secret to this new model is that it looks at hairstyles from all angles to focus in on individual stands and reproduce the strands from the scalp.

The model shows how light reflects off of 100,000 hair strands —an important feature, especially when animators need their characters to look normal when the wind blows and when the sun shines. “We want to give movie and video game makers the tools necessary to animate actors and have their hair look and behave as it would in the real world,” says U.C. San Diego computer scientist Matthias Zwicker.

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Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, it’s off to do science we go.

In the early 1990s, Disney brought modern computer graphics to its films by signing a deal with Pixar, which led to movies like Toy Stoy, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E. Now, Disney is starting its own scientific enterprise: The entertainment giant says is will create two brand new research centers, one at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the other at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

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Don’t look now, but apparently the revolution has begun.

John Rogers from the University of Illinois and Max Lagally from the University of Wisconsin announced this week that they created a way for cameras to capture images on a curved surface, rather than the flat surface used by regular film and digital cameras. It’s a design based on the mammalian eye, and it’s made possible by stretchable electronics made from silicon, which allow cameras to capture wide-angle images without the pictures being distorted.

Rogers says his finding, especially the idea of putting circuits on elastic surfaces, could someday lead to electronics that can integrate with the human body. But the British Newspaper The Telegraph isn’t willing to wait, publishing the story with the headline, “Bionic Eye Heralds Cyborg Revolution.”

It’s an exciting finding, but sadly, many years of research, development, and testing stand between us and creating The Terminator. So if you poke your eye out tomorrow, don’t expect an electronic replacement to be ready.

Image: iStockphoto

·The original Google, encased in Legos, gets a home at the Stanford University Museum.

·Whiskey goes green: Maker’s Mark uses its leftover water, grain, and yeast for energy.

·Scrabulous, everyone’s favorite Facebook time waster, folds under pressure from Scrabble makers Hasbro, but then reappears in a new form as “Wordscraper.”

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Since its launch last year, Google Street View has raised privacy concerns and ruffled feathers (or fur, in the case of a BoingBoing.net reader whose cat was captured on camera.) Because of complaints, Google has begun to blur the faces of people who were captured by the all-seeing eye of Google Street View and broadcast to the world.

But blurred faces are just aesthetically displeasing—not to mention that they throw off the idea of reality, since most of us go around without our mugs being artificially obscured. So Columbia University researchers came up with a solution: hybrid faces.

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·Science bloggers are amused, ambivalent, and unimpressed in their reactions to Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy.

·MIT catalogs all the videos removed from YouTube for copyright complaints, calling the project “YouTomb.”

·McCain may be lousy with technology, but his staff uses clever Internet chicanery against Obama.

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The machines have schooled us once again.

Last week we wrote that Polaris, the poker-playing computer designed by University of Alberta researchers, was headed down to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker. After a narrow loss against two human poker pros in 2007, the design team tweaked their program and came back for another shot.

This time, Polaris prevailed. The contest came down to the wire, and the computer trailed with only two matches to go. However, Polaris staged a comeback and came out on top.

Wait till next year, humanity.

Image: flickr/Jam Adams

It’s the middle of a high-stakes poker game. You steal a glance at your opponent—do they have a tell, or some physical tick that might inform you whether they’re bluffing or they actually have great cards? But all you see is a glowing laptop monitor, no help at all.

Phil Laak and Ali Eslami confronted this difficulty last summer, when they went to battle against Polaris, a poker-playing computer programmed by scientists at the University of Alberta. In a match-up called “The First Man-Machine Poker Championship,” man triumphed, but barely. Now an improved Polaris has returned for a rematch, and as the poker world gathers in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker later this week, other human players will try to defend humanity’s honor.

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