Physics & Chemistry
In creating an entirely new way to compress data, a team of researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has drawn inspiration from physics and the arts. The result is a new data compression method that outperforms existing techniques, such as JPEG for images, and that could eventually be adopted for medical, scientific and video streaming applications. In data communication, scientific research and medicine, an increasing number of today's applications require the capture and analysis of massive amounts of data in real time.
But "big data," as it's known, can present big problems, particularly in specialized fields in which the events being studied occur at rates that are too fast to be sampled and converted into digital data in real time. For example, in order to detect rare cancer cells in blood, researchers must screen millions of cells in a high-speed flow stream.
To help improve the process, the UCLA group, led by Bahram Jalali, holder of the Northrop Grumman Opto-Electronic Chair in Electrical Engineering, and including postdoctoral researcher Mohammad Asghari, created an entirely new method of data compression. The technique reshapes the signal carrying the data in a fashion that resembles the graphic art technique known as anamorphism, which has been used since the 1500s to create optical illusions in art and, later, film.
|