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Three Princeton ‘08 engineering graduates have been in residence for the past six weeks as part of a “young filmmakers” program in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Tomorrow they will show six short videos they have produced on different aspects of engineering - ranging from the re-construction of ancient Greek frescoes to a summer program for students doing lab research in synthetic biology. The screening starts at 3 p.m., Thursday, July 17, in Bowen Hall Auditorium. So if you happen to be on campus, please stop by. Free popcorn and atomic fireballs.

The three filmmakers — Zennen Clifton, Taofik Kolade and Michael E. Wood — will be on hand to talk about their projects.

Download an 11” by 17” copy of the poster here.

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NOVA recently broadcast an exciting episode on the mathematical/computer wizardry that researchers are developing to smoke out art forgeries.

Princeton wavelet pioneer Ingrid Daubechies is featured in the segment along with two electrical engineering students — Shannon Hughes and Eugene Brevdo.

NOVA challenged Daubechies’ team and two other teams (one based at Penn State and the other at Maastricht University) to train their algorithmic prowess on two seemingly identical paintings. One painting was a genuine Van Gogh and the other a highly skilled forgery. The teams were not told which was which. Each team used digital image analysis models they had developed to try to determine which was the fake. Then the teams gathered together and, while the cameras were rolling, each team announced which painting it had identified as the forgery. Did the Princeton team correctly identify the fake? You will have to watch the show to find out. J.F. Hannan interviewed the Princeton team for the Times of Trenton.

You can see some wavelet detective work in action in this visualization showing a rotating, three-dimensional arrangement of 73 paintings. The paintings are arranged according to “dissimilarity distances,” which distinguish paintings by Van Gogh from those by other painters. The red dots mark the paintings that are not by Van Gogh. Visit Daubechies’ website for more detailed information and to download the Proceedings of the May 2007 First International Workshop on Image Processing for Artist Identification.

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In the current issue of Washingtonian magazine, editor Garrett Graff speculates that, if elected, Barak Obama might appoint a Cabinet-level chief technology officer. Among those on Graff’s short list? Princeton’s own Ed Felten (testifying before Congress in the photo to the right).

Also on Graff’s tech czar short list is Amazon.com CEO and Princeton Engineering alumnus Jeff Bezos.

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The Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering team brought home some major awards from the 16th Annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition.

Princeton came in first in the design competition, was named “rookie of the year,” and placed third overall among 47 teams, who were tasked with creating a robot capable of negotiating obstacles and navigating with GPS all on its own.

Computer science professor Robert Schapire described Princeton’s team as “an extremely talented and motivated group of undergraduates.” “I am officially their advisor,” Schapire said, “but I can assure you that the project was entirely theirs from start to finish.”

You can check out some videos of Princeton’s award-winning robot at the PAVE website. The judges seem a bit surprised when they learn that one of the team members, Jonathan Mayer, is a Woodrow Wilson School (rather than engineering) major.

Photo by Frank Wojciechowski. Pictured above with their awards (left to right) are Gordon Franken, Derrick Yu, and Andrew Saxe.

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The Princeton Laptop Orchestra made its Carnegie Hall debut recently as part of Playing it UNsafe, “the nation’s first professional laboratory for the creation of cutting-edge new orchestral music.” Catherine Rampell blogged the event yesterday for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The New York Times described PLOrk’s contribution this way:

“In Dan Trueman’s appealing “Silicon/Carbon: An Anti-Concerto Grosso” members of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra used computers to manipulate sounds made by the acoustic ensemble while adding rhythmic patter and rubbed-goblet peals. The results sounded something like a shimmering moment from a John Adams orchestral score stretched out indefinitely.”

PLOrk, under the auspices of Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, recently got a $238,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of its Digital Media and Learning Competition. Seventeen winning projects — PLOrk among them — were selected from 1,010 applications.

Trueman and Cook will be using the grant to make the instruments played in PLOrk as portable as electric guitars.

“The MacArthur grant will allow us to completely reinvent the PLOrk technology,” Trueman explains. “The history of musical instruments shows us that the music we imagine is inextricably linked to the instruments we make it with. It is hard to overstate how important this redesign might be for us.”

PLOrk also recently played at the Sonic Divergence festival. Here is some nice coverage by the Daily Northwestern.

This video takes you backstage for a recent PLOrk rehearsal. For a completely different style of reporting, check out this past coverage from Fox News (Ge Wang, a Princeton computer science Ph.D. now at Stanford, conducts).

Photo courtesy Alice Truong, The Daily Northwestern

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Technology Review yesterday covered a new technique developed by Stephen Chou and Qiangfei Xia for improving microchip quality without increasing costs.

The idea, basically, is to liquefy microchip components and then let surface tension naturally “melt away” defects, producing in the end structures with precisely defined edges — important for chip performance.

“What is nice about the method is that it takes advantage of self-assembly,” George Whitesides, a professor of chemistry at Harvard University and a pioneer in nanofabrication, tells Stephen Ornes of Technology Review. “You start with a structure that isn’t the shape you want, and let it fold itself into the shape you want.”

The researchers report on their work in the May 4 online issue of Nature Nanotechnology. The work inspired quite a lot of conversation on slashdot and was covered by nanodot.

For a full description of the technology, see this piece by Chandra Shekhar.

By the way, Qiangfei Xia won third prize in Princeton’s most recent Art of Science competition, for the image above — which he has appropriately titled “Easter Bonnet.” This and other images from the Art of Science exhibit were recently featured by the Washington Post.

Qiangfei describes the image this way: “A laser pulse melted a tiny piece of metal on a silicon chip, resulting in an unexpected shape that looks like a very, very small Easter bonnet. An unintended dust particle serves as a decorative flower on its top. The size of the bonnet in this photo, measured from left to right, is about 45 micrometers, half the diameter of a human hair.”

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The Center for Information Technology Policy is hosting what promises to be a provocative conference May 14-15 on the Future of News.

The conference features a distinguished roster of panelists who will be discussing the sweeping technologically-driven transformation of the news business. Of special interest is a panel on the new journalistic frontiers of data mining, interactivity, and visualization.

Among the panelists: Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal; author Eric Alterman; Kevin Anderson of the Guardian; Matthew Hurst of Microsoft Live Labs; technology writer Dan Gillmor; machine learning expert (Princeton’s own) David Blei; Mark Davis of the San Diego Union-Tribune, and Reihan Salam of The Atlantic.

The conference is free for those who can make it to Princeton; for those who can’t, plan on attending the live broadcast.

The director of CITP is maverick computer scientist and freedom-to-tinker blogger Ed Felten, whom you may have seen recently on Rocketboom being interviewed by WhyTuesday’s Jacob Soboroff about electronic voting machines. Also check out reports by Wired, Techdirt, and the Huffington Post.

For an in-depth discussion from Felten on recent research by his group, read this interview from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School.

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