QA&TEST Blog

Author: Zeev Smilansky – Emza Visual Sense, Israel.

Security is a growing concern around the world. There are no quick and easy solutions. One concept that is becoming accepted around the world is that of surveillance cameras. In many places, people have become accustomed to the concept that a surveillance camera is a solution for reducing crime and alerting for dangerous situations. Around the world, cities are installing surveillance cameras to improve safety and security (200,000 in Moscow, millions in London, 100,000,000 sold annually) around the world. However, almost always, these cameras are – as their name implies – recording devices and the video they captured is stored and almost never looked at.

SQS is participating in a project that proposes a new approach, instead of sending and storing raw video, the system will generate real-time alerts in order to prevent dangerous and criminal events; will require low infrastructure in terms of power supply, communication bandwidth and storage; be simple to install and operate; and help city officials improve the safety and security of their city.

To develop the system, we needed benchmark movies. Two approaches were considered. The first approach is recording real urban scenes. This can be very difficult and time consuming if you count on finding “natural” events, or expensive and complicated if you plan to “direct” events with actors and attendants. The second approach is creating animated movies. For simple cases, this is certainly possible. For more complicated scenes, the effort required can quickly become prohibitive. In the end, we started with simple animations (created by us (SQS)) and move gradually to real-life captured movies. A frame from one of these simulated movies is shown on the left.

The project is now at the middle of its duration. Next year we will see if the performance matches the expectations.

Link to HUSIMS project: http://projects.celtic-initiative.org/husims/index.html

Automotive engineering transfers its improvements in health industry to create custom orthopedic implants and components that reduce the margin of error in surgery and could reduce costs.

Read the full article here.

Can a large organization adopt agile approaches to software development when the organization holds the notion that not all projects should be agile? In other words, can there be a mix of waterfall-type projects and agile projects in the same organization? The short answer is yes, however there is a cost that must be paid for this coexistence.

In transitioning to agile, most companies gradually transition a few teams at a time, learning from their successes and mistakes and applying the new knowledge to the rollout of new agile teams. This process can take months or years, depending on the size of the organization and the stability of management and agile champions.

Click here to continue reading this article at Sticky Minds.

Virtualization is a long established technology in the server world. It has been used for decades as an enabler for platform consolidation. In the recent years, the technology has also gained new public interest due to its availability for Desktop PC platforms. The fact that it can provide strong isolation between applications and that this level of isolation can be achieved with only a very small layer of trusted code has also raised interest from the security related field of applications.

The possibility to integrate multiple independent subsystems in a single physical machine could also prove beneficial for many safety-critical applications.However, in addition to the spatial isolation that virtualization readily provides, most of these applications also require some level of temporal determinism: Each subsystem typically interacts with a technical component and, consequently, it has to keep up with that component’s timing properties.

Click here to continue reading this article at Embedded Control Europe.

The European Union has decided to designate this year 2009 as the year “of the creativity and the innovation” and for this reason, throughout year 2009, we will have the occasion to participate in conferences, events and another type of directed initiatives, all of them organized to emphasize the importance of innovating to evolve.

In addition to this, the European Union will harness measures, at European, national, regional and local level, with the aim of promoting the creativity as an innovation factor.

Visit the official Web of the European year of the innovation and the creativity