A smart phone senses audio, imagery, and/or other stimulus from a user's environment, and acts autonomously to fulfill inferred or anticipated user desires. In one aspect, the detailed technology concerns phone-based cognition of a scene viewed by the phone's camera. The image processing tasks applied to the scene can be selected from among various alternatives by reference to resource costs, resource constraints, other stimulus information (e.g., audio), task substitutability, etc. The phone can apply more or less resources to an image processing task depending on how successfully the task is proceeding, or based on the user's apparent interest in the task. In some arrangements, data may be referred to the cloud for analysis, or for gleaning. Cognition, and identification of appropriate device response(s), can be aided by collateral information, such as context. A great number of other features and arrangements are also detailed.

Intuitive computing methods and systems

Arrangements involving portable devices (e.g., smartphones and tablet computers) are disclosed. One arrangement enables a content creator to select software with which that creator's content should be rendered—assuring continuity between artistic intention and delivery. Another utilizes a device camera to identify nearby subjects, and take actions based thereon. Others rely on near field chip (RFID) identification of objects, or on identification of audio streams (e.g., music, voice). Some technologies concern improvements to the user interfaces associated with such devices. Others involve use of these devices in connection with shopping, text entry, sign language interpretation, and vision-based discovery. Still other improvements are architectural in nature, e.g., relating to evidence-based state machines, and blackboard systems. Yet other technologies concern use of linked data in portable devices—some of which exploit GPU capabilities. Still other technologies concern computational photography. A great variety of other features and arrangements are also detailed.

Smartphone-based methods and systems

The increasing cost of energy and finite oil and gas reserves has created a need to develop alternative fuels from renewable sources Currently, the development of a renewable transportation fuel is ethanol based Ethanol production is now sugar/starch based, but use of these carbohydrates is limited; they are also required as a food and feed source The need to generate a large and sustainable supply of biomass to make biofuels generation from lignocellulose profitable will require the development of crops grown specifically for bioenergy production There will be several different species used as dedicated bioenergy crops, and for several reasons; it is expected that sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L Moench) will be one of these species Sorghum is a highly productive, drought-tolerant species with a history of improvement and production of lignocellulose, sugar and starch Given this history and the existing genetic improvement infrastructure available for the species, it is logical to expect that sorghum hybrids for dedicated bioenergy production can be developed in the near-term future and will be grown and used for bioenergy production © 2007 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Designing sorghum as a dedicated bioenergy feedstock

A mobile terminal including a terminal body; a wireless communication unit configured to provide wireless communication; a display unit, and a controller configured to deactivate the display unit, and receive a plurality of taps applied to the deactivated display unit, and display information of a preset function on the display unit based on a tapped pattern formed with the plurality of taps matching a preset pattern and a current state of the terminal.

Mobile terminal and control method for the mobile terminal

(2007). The Ripple Effect: Biofuels, Food Security, and the Environment. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development: Vol. 49, No. 9, pp. 30-43.

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The ripple effect biofuels, food security, and the environment.

Sweet sorghum Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench is a special purpose sorghum with a sugar-rich stalk, almost like sugarcane. Besides having rapid growth, high sugar accumulation, and biomass production potential, sweet sorghum has wider adaptability (Reddy and Sanjana 2003). Given that water availability is poised to become a major constraint to agricultural production in coming years (Ryan and Spencer 2001), cultivation of sugarcane becomes difficult. Sweet sorghum would be a logical crop option in lieu of sugarcane in such situations. Sweet sorghum can be grown with less irrigation and rainfall and purchased inputs compared to sugarcane. The sugar content in the juice extracted from sweet sorghum varies from 1623% Brix. It has a great potential for jaggery, syrup and most importantly fuel alcohol production (Ratnavathi et al. 2004a). The stillage after extraction of juice from sweet sorghum can be used for co-generation of power.

Sweet sorghum-a potential alternative raw material for bioethanol and bio-energy

Shape-based search of a collection of content associated with one or more images of inventory items (“inventory images”) is enabled at least in part by associating the collection of content and/or its associated inventory images with representative refinement shapes. Inventory items may be grouped into categories and at least one refinement shape may be created for each of the categories. A refinement-shape hierarchy may be created by arranging the refinement shapes into parent and child refinement shapes. Inventory images may be associated to at least one of the refinement shapes of the refinement-shape hierarchy based at least in part on similarities between the refinement shapes and shapes of the inventory items reflected in the inventory images.

Shape-based search of a collection of content

Approaches are described for rendering augmented reality overlays on an interface displaying the active field of view of a camera. The interface can display to a user an image or video, for example, and the overlay can be rendered over, near, or otherwise positioned with respect to any text or other such elements represented in the image. The overlay can have associated therewith at least one function or information, and when an input associated with the overlay is selected, the function can be performed (or caused to be performed) by the portable computing device.

Providing overlays based on text in a live camera view

Visual incongruity in search result sets may be reduced at least in part by searching an optimized visually significant subset of a category tree that categorizes a collection of content. The category tree may be optimized at build time at least in part by pruning with respect to visual coherence and by the size of the content collection subset referenced by particular categories. Content collection subset sizes both too large and too small can detract from the visual significance of a particular category. The visually significant subset of the category tree may be further optimized at query time by intersecting the visually significant subset with the query-associated sub-tree(s) and further pruning categories in the visually significant subset that have child categories in the visually significant subset. Searching with respect to the optimized visually significant subset can also improve search efficiency.

Content search with category-aware visual similarity

Differential configuration update commands can be communicated and applied quickly and efficiently to active zone sets and zone set libraries, without requiring propagation of entire zone sets through a fabric of a SAN Furthermore, the commands can be applied quickly to support dynamic configuration updates Ordered differential configuration update commands can be applied to ordered zone set data structures to minimize update instruction communication requirements and optimize configuration update operations In addition, differential configuration update commands can be applied to active zone set data structures (eg, in an active zone set or a zone set library) to optimize configuration update operations

Sunil Ramesh

Papers

Sweet sorghum-a potential alternative raw material for bioethanol and bio-energy

Shape-based search of a collection of content

Providing overlays based on text in a live camera view

Content search with category-aware visual similarity

Dynamic configuration updating in a storage area network