Justin Rattner, Intel chief technology officer and vice president of Intel Labs hosts the 9th annual Research@Intel Day and announces Intel’s latest Intel Science Technology Center focused on secure computing and discusses Intel Lab’s research in cloud computing, visual computing. |
Intel
Labs opened its doors to the media, academia, partners and customers
this week at the 9th annual Research at Intel event, where Justin
Rattner, Intel Corporation chief technology officer, unveiled more than
35 innovative research projects underway that will help transform the
future of technology.
Many
of these projects are the result of joint research among different
divisions of Intel and its academic and industry partners. Additionally,
Rattner announced the latest Intel Science Technology Center (ISTC), a
new collaborative framework for security research between Intel and
several leading universities.
Focused
on secure computing, Intel’s latest ISTC is hosted at the University of
California, Berkeley, and also includes partnerships with Carnegie
Mellon, Drexel, Duke and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
This center represents the next $15 million installment of Intel’s
recently announced 5-year, $100 million ISTC program to increase
university research and accelerate innovation. As with the first ISTC
for Visual Computing, the new Secure Computing center will encourage
tighter collaboration between university thought leaders and Intel.
“The
co-principal investigators from Intel and UC Berkeley will lead a
talented team of researchers from across the country to address today’s
most challenging problems in computer security,” said Rattner. “Forming a
multidisciplinary community of Intel, faculty and graduate student
researchers will lead to fundamental breakthroughs in one of the most
difficult and vexing areas of computing technology.”
The
ISTC for secure computing will focus its research on a variety of areas
over the next 5 years, including making personal computers safer from
malware, securing mobile devices, both in terms of data protection for
the individual, as well as making it safer to download data to devices,
and use of third party applications. Another key area researchers will
address is how to protect personal data once it is scattered throughout
the Web. Today people share their personal data all over the Internet
when signing up for a variety of services. Users exert little to no
control over their personal data once they’ve granted access to it, and
as such, the new ISTC will look into ways to give people more control
and make their data more secure.
A glimpse into the future of technology
Demonstrations
at the Research at Intel event spanned such areas as visual computing,
security and authentication to user experience and cloud computing,
among others, and are the result of ongoing, collaborative efforts
between Intel and its industry and academic partners. For example:
Intel Labs’ reseach demo, Magic Mirror, aims to transform the shopping experience using a realistic avatar of the consumer dressed in the latest fashions showing Intel’s research in body tracking and our parametric human body model. This demo uses a 3D avatar that tracks your movements in real time. You will be able change the dimensions of the body with a gestural interface. |
- “Unleashing
the Potential of Intel Processor Graphics” for cryptography operations
demonstrates how faster and more efficiently security measures can be
achieved using the 2nd Generation Intel Core processor-based platforms. - “Authentication
of the Future” shows how identify theft can be avoided when using a
trusted client with advanced authentication and user presence techniques
by locally establishing your identity and confirming it with Web-based
services, improving both the security and user experience. - “Magic
Mirror” provides a look at a virtual shopping experience with a
realistic avatar of the shopper dressed in the latest fashions. This
demo shows a 3-D avatar that tracked movements in real-time and changed
body dimensions using gesture. - “Steerable
Sound” shows spherical loudspeakers that not only give best-in-class
sound reproduction, but also dynamic, steerable sound analogous to
traditional acoustic musical instruments. - “Automatic
Classroom Collaboration” shows how students can form collaborative
groups automatically using Intel-based classmate PCs. Proximity
detection technology finds classmate PCs near a student and helps to
form a group automatically with students who are in the vicinity. With a
click of a button students can form groups, start collaborating on a
project, take a quiz together or compete with each other. - “Wireless
Energy Sensing Technology” (WEST) is an easy-to-use plug-in device that
uses pattern recognition to determine when different electrical loads
turn on and off in the home. Using a simple application, homeowners can
examine a variety of energy reports to help them better manage their
energy consumption. - The
“Many-Core Applications Research” community shows how more than 80
worldwide institutions are researching future software using Intel Lab’s
48-core single-chip Cloud Computer concept chip.
Intel software code releases
Intel’s Cloud-based Ray Tracing on Handheld Devices demonstrates the capability to bring more realistic visuals to portable devices beyond what is possible today. A cloud using Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) processors renders complex effects using ray tracing, which can then be streamed to a variety of clients, including small handheld devices. |
As
part of its strategy to increase collaboration across the industry and
academic sectors, Intel Labs announced it will release source code for
its Distributed Scene Graph 3-D Internet technology. This code is part
of an ongoing effort to augment the OpenSim open-source virtual world
simulator and will enable developers to build virtual regions where
people can work or play online with a cast of thousands, instead of
being limited to less than a hundred today – a more than 20 times
improvement. Virtual environments have applications from entertainment
and education to social networking. Intel showed an example of how the
technology could enable a massive multi-player “game” to train first
responders for different disaster scenarios.
Also
this month, Intel Labs will release as open source its state-of-the-art
offline ray tracing code to researchers and developers. Ray tracing is a
computer graphics technique that produces photo-realistic images by
tracing imaginary light rays to determine where and how every part of an
object should be illuminated. Intel showed how this code will improve
the speed by up to 100 percent on Intel-based systems. This advanced ray
tracing code targets professional applications and is a separate effort
from the company’s game-focused, real-time ray tracing project shown
previously. The code is expected to find use in commercial applications
such as designing cars, making movies and visualizing new architectural
designs.
