Twelve novel ready-for-market technologies, which will improve the quality of life for users in industry verticals such as lifestyle, security, communications and healthcare, have been developed by A*STAR’s (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R). They will be showcased at the upcoming CommunicAsia 2009, from 16 to 19 June 2009 at Singapore Expo Hall 3, Booth 3E2-01.

More notable among the group of I²R technologies are KnowleSuite, Snap2Tell / Snap2Play and SUSie (Share & UnShare, it’s easy). These technologies seek to alleviate some of the pressing IT issues today that are faced by millions around like world, including professionals, avid social media fans and even tourists.

 

KnowleSuite is a toolbox consisting of applications for automated knowledge search, capture and aggregation. Targeted at knowledge-intensive workers, the suite automates the process of knowledge acquisition and allows users to spend more time in value-adding analysis of the information than its acquisition.

 

Snap2Tell technology is an Image Recognition Engine that recognises images of scenes / objects without the need of labelling or putting barcode on the Point of Interest (POI); and associates it with relevant information. Its small code footprint enables this technology to be implemented into mobile devices, from ultra-mobile computers (UMPC) to regular mobile phones with camera. Snap2Play is an interactive mixed-reality mobile application. It employs Snap2Tell’s Image Recognition Engine as well as multi-input modalities (i.e. GPS and accelerometer sensors) to enhance the immersive mobile application. This technology will be well placed to serve the tourism industry, where tourists can simply “snap” pictures with their camera phone and get information on various places of interest.

 

SUSie (Share & UnShare, it’s easy) is an efficient de-centralised security key infrastructure technology that is specifically designed to enable users to share and unshare media content (e.g. pictures, video & audio) over social media sites. Sharing refers to enabling content recipients to read and store (encrypted) the media files; while unsharing refers to a complete revocation of media content – even if the recipients have downloaded a copy on their local drives.

 

The other ready-for-market technologies by I²R, including Brain-Computer Interface, Gender Recognition System, iTwin, MobiCare, MPEG-4 SLS, Niometrics, A*STAR Scalable Multimedia Platform, TV White Space sensor and Ultra-Wide Band, will be exhibited at the show. Commercialisation officers from Exploit Technologies will be on hand to discuss licensing and co-development opportunities of the technologies.

 

Additionally, four companies, which are either spin-offs from A*STAR or licensees of A*STAR technologies, will be showcasing their products and services at the A*STAR booth.

 

As part this year’s outreach efforts, a CommunicAsia blog has been set up to share with readers about A*STAR technologies and daily exciting developments at the booth.

 

Said Mr Lim Chuan Poh, Chairman of A*STAR: “CommunicAsia 2009 showcases many innovative products that continue to improve our quality of life and productivity. These innovations are only possible with world class scientific and engineering talent doing cutting edge research and design development working in close collaboration with domain experts to solve real problems. At the Fusionopolis, Biopolis and beyond, A*STAR has over 2000 scientists who work with both the public sector agencies and nearly 300 companies from the private sector to bring about impactful innovations. Some of these can be seen in this exhibition in the lifestyle, security, communications and healthcare sectors.”

 

On I²R's presence in CommunicAsia 2009, Prof Lye Kin Mun, Deputy Executive Director (Research) added, “The practical solutions from our R&D efforts that will be showcased here could enhance the way we live in the future.  In addition, the myriad of our new Infocomm and media technologies at the exhibition seeks to improve the quality of lifestyles through better healthcare, improved connectivity and information security for the infocomm world.”

 

Mr Boon Swan Foo, Executive Chairman of Exploit Technologies said, “Visitors to our CommunicAsia booth can expect to see a robust pool of A*STAR’s ready-for-market infocomm technologies, in the areas of lifestyle, security and communications and healthcare, which companies from multiple industry verticals can tap on to in turn create innovative products and services.

 

“We have been actively engaging the industry to leverage A*STAR technologies to provide a competitive edge to their products and services. The use of social media applications like a blog and mobile phone applications this year demonstrates our commitment to reach out to more potential partners through various avenues. To date, we have granted close to 300 licences for our technologies; with more than 70% of our licences going to local SMEs. I am happy that some of these SMEs, like Aksaas, CommonTown, FeRmi and Compex, will be exhibiting at our booth this year. We urge more industry players to partner us to jointly develop A*STAR technologies for use in their businesses. The current economic downturn has in fact provided a good window of opportunity for companies to invest in their IT capabilities, so as to ride the upward economic swing when it happens over the next two years.”

 

The pool of ready-for-market technologies can be categorised into four main areas, namely:

 

 

All media representatives and your photographer/film crews are cordially invited to visit A*STAR’s booth at CommunicAsia 2009, from 16 to 19 June 2009at Singapore Expo Hall 3, Booth 3E-01.

 

Do also visit the CommunicAsia blog at exploit-tech.webs.com for the latest updates on A*STAR’s participation in CommunicAsia 2009.

 

Annex A:          Short notes to editors on the technologies to be showcased

Annex B:          Catalogue of technologies available for licensing

 

For media enquiries, please contact:

 

Seeto Wei Peng

Exploit Technologies Pte Ltd (A member of A*STAR)

Vice President, Corporate Marketing and Communications

DID: (65) 6478 8443  

Mobile: (65) 8375 9474

Email: weipeng@exploit-tech.com

 

Andrew Yap

Acting Manager, Corporate Communications

DID: (65) 6874 8003   

Fax: (65) 6775 9923

Email: yapjt@scei.a-star.edu.sg  

 

Exploit Technologies is the strategic marketing and commercialisation arm of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). Its mission is to support A*STAR in transforming the economy through commercialising R&D. Exploit Technologies enhances the research output of A*STAR scientists by translating their inventions into marketable products or processes. Through licensing deals and spin-offs with industry partners, Exploit Technologies is a key driver of technology transfer in Singapore. It actively engages industry leaders and players to commercialise A*STAR's technologies and capabilities, bridging the gap from Mind to Market. Exploit Technologies’ charter is to identify, protect and exploit promising intellectual property (IP) created by A*STAR’s research institutes.

 

For more information, please visit http://www.exploit-tech.com   

The Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R pronounced as i-squared-r) is a member of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) family. Established in 2002, our mission is to be the globally preferred source of innovations in `Interactive Secured Information, Content and Services Anytime Anywhere’ through research by passionate people dedicated to Singapore’s economic success. I²R performs R&D in information, communications and media (ICM) technologies to develop holistic solutions across the ICM value chain. Website: www.i2r.a-star.edu.sg

 

 

 

A provider of e-learning, mobile applications and portal development services that is developing new products in language e-learning with speech processing technologies from A*STAR. 

Aksaas is provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) with leading-edge office automation, knowledge management and document security applications developed with A*STAR's text analytics and information security technologies.

 

A fabless semiconductor company that provides integrated RF reader ICs and reference solutions for low cost mobile RFID systems. FeRmi adds value to its partners in the RF reader hardware market segment and enables leading edge solutions to customers for portable applications in various industry segments such as healthcare, pharmaceuticals, logistics, security and other market segments that it serves.

Compex specializes in designing on wireless radio, embedded board, antenna and enclosed for OEM/ODM customers. Compex is primarily focusing in OEM/ODM supply of network communication systems and broadband wireless systems (including but not limited to hotspot/hotzone access management systems, outdoor systems for wireless infrastructures, subscriber units and indoor mesh systems) via board-level supplies and complete product builds.

 

 

 

Brain-computer interface (BCI) provides a direct communication and interaction channel between the human brain and the computer. I2R focuses on research and development of non-invasive BCI systems using brain signals from the scalp or electroencephalography (EEG), to create novel medical solutions in assistive devices for the physical disabled, neuro-rehabilitation for stroke patients, and attention training for people diagnosed with neurophysiologic disorders.

 

This system has the ability to detect frontal human faces on digital video stream quickly and reliably. Based on the extracted face images, the engine is able to simultaneously detects the genders of multiple persons. In addition to that, it can return the statistic of the viewers such as the number of person looking at the screen. In summary, this technology provides the means to measure audience demographics which could be helpful for the advertising industry.

 

Using iTwin is like using a physical cable: Plug one Twin into first PC and the other Twin into the second PC and you are ready to go. Thus, it is like the 2 ends of a cable without the cable – an infinitely long cable. iTwin requires no downloading, installation or configuration of software. The Twin auto-loads the required software and self-configures itself, making file access extremely simple.

 

KnowleSuite is a toolbox consisting of applications for automated knowledge search, capture and aggregation. Targeted at knowledge-intensive workers, the suite automates the process of knowledge acquisition and allows users to spend more time in value-adding analysis of the information than its acquisition.

 

MobiCare is a wireless sensor used to capture ECG and activity signals. Handheld devices such as PDA or cell phone are used to process the capture ECG and activity data. High accuracy and reliable feature extraction and classification methods as well as optimized algorithm are developed and embedded into the mobile devices to automatically process the data. It transmits critical data to hospital when it detects cardiac abnormality. In hospitals, physicians will verify and diagnose if the patient is at high or low risk by examining the received data. Based on their diagnosis, an ambulance can be dispatched to bring in the patients at high risk; an message can be dispatched informing the patients at low risk to come in for a thorough screening.

 

As a lossless audio coding technology, MPEG-4 SLS provides state-of-the-art lossless compression performance for audio signals with sampling rate up to 192 kHz and amplitude resolution up to 24 bits/sample. MPEG-4 SLS also provides backward compatibility by embedding a MPEG Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) bitstream, a widely adopted lossy audio coder, and Fine Granular Scalability (FGS) from its AAC core data rate all the way to lossless for applications with various Quality of Service (QoS) requirements or varying network conditions. With FGS, “additional compression” is obtained by simply truncating the bit-stream or compressed file without additional encoding or transcoding.

 

The Network Application Fingerprinting technology enables the detection and fingerprinting of network applications including encrypted BitTorrent, Skype and eMule. It can be used to provide Service Providers with visibility of subscriber and application usage patterns as well as malicious traffic on the net.

 

The A*STAR’s Scalable Multimedia Platform (A*SMP) is poised to be among the world’s first scalable multimedia platforms that exploits that latest ISO/IEC multimedia codecs / networking and W3C web standards. It revolutionises the way multimedia content is encoded, stored, managed and delivered by content owners and service providers. It also offers a whole new seamlessly connected multimedia experience to consumers, anytime, anywhere and across any device.   A*SMP natively supports state-of-the-art ISO/IEC multimedia codec standards including H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, H.264/SVC, MPEG-4 SLS and AAC. With a single scalable compressed multimedia file on the server, the platform can now simultaneously serve heterogeneous users across HDTV, PC, mobile phone, and over broadband, wireless and 3G networks.

 

Snap2Tell technology is an Image Recognition Engine developed at I2R. Having this capability, we can recognize images of scenes / objects without the need of labeling or putting barcode on the Point of Interest (POI), and then associate it with relevant information. Its small code footprint enables this technology to be implemented into mobile devices, from ultra-mobile computers (UMPC) to regular mobile phones with camera.

 

Snap2Play is an interactive mixed-reality mobile application. It employs Snap2Tell’s Image Recognition Engine as well as multi-input modalities (i.e. GPS and accelerometer sensors) to enhance the immersive mobile application.

 

 

 

SUSie (Share & UnShare, it’s easy) is an efficient de-centralized security key infrastructure technology specifically designed to enable software applications that require sharing and unsharing of media content (e.g. pictures, video & audo). Sharing refers to enabling content recipients to read and storage (encrypted) while unsharing refers to complete revocation of media content inadvertently read or exposed to the recipients.

 

TV White Space refers to frequencies allocated to a broadcasting service but not utilised in the local spatial context. It has been touted as an untapped resource that has the potential to unleashing a myriad of applications and services, given its attractive propagation characteristics and relatively large frequency blocks.

 

The Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) Localisation system can be used to track the position of a moving object with centimeter level accuracy in an indoor environment. It makes use of pulse-based UWB technology. Each tracked item carries a UWB tag. The position of the Tag is monitored by stationary reference. Readers distributed around the tracked zone. By using both Range and Angle-of-Arrival (AOA) information, the position of a Tag can be located using just a single reference Reader.