The article, "The Many Uses of Big Data," discusses the overwhelming volume of data that is being created, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, and how that data is being used in healthcare, policing and multiplayer online games. Read the full article on the Twin Cities Business Journal website.

The work of associate professor Volkan Isler was featured on the KSTP news broadcast Thursday, September 6. Isler and his research group use a network of robotic devices to locate and track radio-tagged carp,  an invasive species of fish. The common carp poses a significant threat across the Midwest by polluting lakes by uprooting plants and releasing large quantities of harmful nutrients while bottom-feeding. Watch the robotic boats work in the news segment via the KSTP news website. 

The group uses cameras set up in a nursery to monitor 3 and 5 year-olds as they play tracking each child based on their clothing. The footage is loaded to a computer where software then examines each child's movement based on the average amount of movement in the room, and then flagging children who move more or less than the average.

Computer science researchers Denis Foo Kune, associate professors Nick Hopper and Yongdae Kim, and undergraduate student John Koelndorfer have discovered that cell phone hackers can track your physical location without your knowledge. Using a cheap phone, readily available equipment, and no direct help from a service provider, hackers can listen to unencrypted broadcast messages from cell phone towers.

The group described their work in a recently released paper “Location Leaks on the GSM Air Interface” which was presented at the 19th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego, California. The research has received extensive media coverage both locally in the StarTribune, on MPR, KMSP, Fox9 and others as well as global coverage on various tech news websites. You can read their full paper; Location Leaks on the GSM Air Interface (pdf).

Professor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos is featured in a new story in the Pioneer Press and on twincities.com. The article discusses the burgeoning robotics industry in the Twin Cities area and Robotics Alley, the first regional conference on robots hosted by Edina-based ReconRobotics and the Minnesota High Tech Association happening Thursday, November 17th at the Carlson School of Management.

Papanikolopoulos discusses the Scout, the robot created at the University of Minnestoa in 2006. "It's just a camera on wheels," Papanikolopoulos said. "Why is it so popular? Because it does a very dangerous job and it saves lives." Read the full story and see a video of the scout in action at twincities.com.

Papanikolopoulos's group includes researchres in the Institute of Child Development, the University of Minnesota Medical School and the College of Science and Engineering. The researchers are exploring the use of technology to diagnose children of mental disorders via a video monitoring system comprised of several Xbox Kinect cameras stationed around a room to record footage of a child playing with toys.

You can read the full article, "Researchers ‘Kinect’ data to make faster diagnoses."

Shekhar and Oliver's work was also featured on GIS and Science, a premier Geographic Information Science blog.  Shekhar and Oliver's paper was first presented in the December 2010 NSF/ARO Spatio-Temporal Constraints on Social Networks Workshop, organized by Michael Goodchild, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and Kathleen M. Carley, a pioneer in social network analysis. The workshop was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.

The research of Department Head Vipin Kumar was featured December 18, 2010 issue of The Economist. The article specifically highlights the University of Minnesota's data mining work as a key enabler for low-cost monitoring of global forest cover.

This article discusses the launch of the first prototype of the forest skin that was developed jointly between the University of Minnesota, Planetary Skin Institute and NASA.

The Planetary Skin Institute and its partners unveiled the beta version of its Tropical Forest ALERTS 1.0 platform for monitoring global land change at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This is Planetary Skin Institute's first of a series of global public good platforms planned.

Read the full article titled "Seeing the world for the trees" on The Economist website.

CSE Ph.D. student Benjamin VanderSluis, post-doctoral scientist Jeremy Bellay and their advisor Chad Myers recently had their work published in the Molecular Systems Biology journal. Their paper, “Genetic interactions reveal the evolutionary trajectories of duplicate genes,” presents new insights about how genes evolve based on network analysis of genetic interactions in yeast. The ancestor of modern day yeast underwent a whole-genome duplication event approximately 120 million years ago, from which ~10% of the genes have been retained in duplicate with very similar sequences.  Since gene duplication is one of the major drivers of genome evolution, understanding how these duplicate sequences have evolved since then is a major focus of the yeast and evolution community. VanderSluis, Bellay, and Myers with collaborators at the University of Toronto, showed that the differences in genetic interactions between two duplicate genes can be used to infer how their functions have diverged, and found new evidence for a model that suggests that genes evolve highly asymmetrically after a duplication event.