Data Mapping

Pollsters, public health officials, and marketing executives are among the many who use cartograms, special maps that provide a visual sense of geographic information by distorting it in proportion to a key variable. Researchers at AT&T labs in Florham Park, NJ, have created software that takes just minutes to calculate the distortion for thousands of regions (say, for all 3,066 U.S. counties), while old methods could take hours and could handle only tens of regions at a time. The AT&T technology reduces the computational job by imposing lines of various lengths and orientations across the map and performing size adjustments to the space on either side of each line. The process reconfigures geographic regions into recognizable but meaningfully transformed shapes without having to recalculate the whole map. Earlier cartogram programs used different approaches: Some treated the regions like balloons that inflated or deflated in a process that worked quickly but didn't preserve recognizable shapes. Other software that treated the data as a series of mathematical equations produced more familiar and accurate shapes, but consumed hours of processing time. Daniel Keim, the new software's lead developer, says AT&T began using it this year and researchers are refining it while the firm pursues licensing agreements.

Name That Tune

Forget the name of a song you heard on the radio this morning? Soon, thanks to an audio search engine developed by researchers at Philips Electronics in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, you will be able to search a database and find the song simply by humming its melody. A specialized device embedded in either a desktop computer or a compact disc player will capture your voice, and algorithms will identify the duration and pitch of each note in the song's melody, creating an audio fingerprint. The fingerprint will then be fed into a search engine that uses pattern recognition software to find a matching song stored on a compact disc, computer hard drive, or even the Internet.

Other audio-search engines in development might not work well for people who are even slightly tone deaf, but Philips's technology works for people with musical training and "people who can't sing, like myself," says Boris de Ruyter, a senior scientist at Philips. The company hopes to market the technology in consumer products within two years.

Feel-Good Drug Making

A system that lets researchers touch, feel, and prod 3-D molecular images could improve scientists' sense of how molecules interact, aiding the development of new drugs. Texas A&M University biochemist Edgar Meyer and his colleagues Stan Swanson and Jennifer Novak are developing simulation software that will make just such a system possible. Their software calculates millisecond-by-millisecond changes in the behavior of the interacting molecules; a commercially available joystick-like interface translates that 3-D information into a tactile sense of pushing, pulling, or resistance. Because many therapeutic agents work by binding tightly with disease-causing molecules, the software could be a critical tool that allows researchers to virtually check-and modify-the fit between molecules. Meyer plans to partner with one or more pharmaceutical companies within the year.