• A Camera Is My CopilotIt will scrutinize your face more intently than a new love, but it will also scold you as sharply as Mom would if you're not paying attention. FaceLAB, unveiled in March by Seeing Machines, is a smart video-monitoring system that can sense if a driver is distracted or drifting off to sleep—situations that researchers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration say may account for half of all motor vehicle accidents. Unlike previous incarnations of eye-tracking technology, FaceLAB requires neither bulky headgear nor infrared illumination of the subject's cornea, so it can follow eye movements right through eyeglass lenses and is almost impervious to fluctuating light conditions. Alex Zelinsky, Australia National University professor of robotics and CEO of Seeing Machines, says his lab began developing the system in order to build a robot that can fetch objects chosen by a disabled user; the robot proceeds by monitoring his or her gaze.
FaceLAB now exists only as a prototype. A version for cars and trucks is likely to consist of two lipstick-sized video cameras mounted on the dashboard that continuously monitor the driver's entire head, transmitting the image to a computer with software that can track up to 18 points on the face. — Christine Soares
• A Vote For SimplicityTwo weeks after the presidential election, while debates still raged about dimpled chads, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology launched the Voting Technology Project to figure out how to prevent a repeat of the Florida debacle. "It is remarkable that we in America put up with a system where as many as six out of every hundred voters are unable to get their vote counted," said Caltech president David Baltimore. "Twenty-first-century technology should be able to do much better than this."
