April 2018

If John von Neumann were designing a computer today, there’s no way he would build a thick wall between processing and memory. At least, that’s what computer engineer Naresh Shanbhag of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign believes. 

For centuries, humans have been exploring the subsurface structure of planet Earth. Several Earth geophysical applications, such as mining, earthquake studies, and oil and gas exploration, have driven research that produced, over the years, ground-breaking theories and innovative technologies that image Earth’s subsurface. 

In the coming years, cities are expected to deal with an increasing number and type of services for their citizens, all having to do with overarching goals such as sustainability, environment, quality of life, energy saving, just to name a few. As the population living in urban areas is expected to double by 2050, there is a general consensus that any new process will require more than just an incremental upgrading of the cities’ organization, infrastructure, and services provided to its citizens.

Speaker age and gender classification is one of the most challenging problems in speech processing. Recently with developing technologies, identifying a speaker age and gender has become a necessity for speaker verification and identification systems such as identifying suspects in criminal cases, improving human-machine interaction, and adapting music for awaiting people queue.

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI) has been proven to be a valuable source of diagnostic information concerning heart health. One application, myocardial blood flow (MBF) quantification using first-pass contrast-enhanced myocardial perfusion, has aided the detection of coronary artery disease and provides an accurate evaluation of myocardial ischemia, an identifier of coronary artery stenosis.