Information technology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Information technology (IT) is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications.[1] The term in its modern sense first appeared in a 1958 article published in the Harvard Business Review, in which authors Leavitt and Whisler commented that "the new technology does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology (IT).".[2] Some of the modern and emerging fields of Information technology are next generation web technologies, bioinformatics, cloud computing, global information systems, large scale knowledgebases, etc.
Contents
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1 General information 2 Technological capacity and growth 3 See also 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

General information

Information and communication technology spending in 2005

IT is the area of managing technology and spans wide variety of areas that include but are not limited to things such as processes,computer software, information systems, computer hardware,programming languages, and

data constructs. In short, anything that renders data, information or perceived knowledge in any visual format whatsoever, via any multimedia distribution mechanism, is considered part of the IT domain. IT provides businesses with four sets of core services to help execute the business strategy: business process automation, providing information, connecting with customers, and productivity tools. IT professionals perform a variety of functions (IT Disciplines/Competencies) that ranges from installing applicationsto designing complex computer networks and information databases. A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management, networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well as management and administration of entire systems. Information technology is starting to spread further than the conventional personal computer and network technologies, and more into integrations of other technologies such as the use of cell phones, televisions, automobiles, and more, which is increasing the demand for such jobs. In the recent past, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology and the Association for Computing Machinery have collaborated to form accreditation and curriculum standards[3] for degrees in Information Technology as a distinct field of study as compared[4] toComputer Science and Information Systems today. SIGITE (Special Interest Group for IT Education)[5] is the ACM working group for defining these standards. The Worldwide IT services revenue totaled $763 billion in 2009.[6]

Technological capacity and growth

Based on a global inventory of the world's IT capacity, Hilbert and Lopez[7] identify the exponential pace of technological change (a kind ofMoore's law): machines application-specific capacity to compute information per capita has roughly doubled every 14 months between 1986-2007; the per capita capacity of the worlds general-purpose computers has doubled every 18 months during the same two decades; the global telecommunication capacity per capita doubled every 34 months; the worlds storage capacity per capita required roughly 40 months to double (every 3 years); and per capita broadcast information has doubled roughly every 12.3 years.[7]

See also

Information and communications technology (ICT) Computer science

References
1. ^ Longley, Dennis; Shain, Michael (1985), Dictionary of Information
Technology (2 ed.), Macmillan Press, p. 164, ISBN 0-333-37260-3

2. ^ "information technology (subscription required)", Oxford English Dictionary

(2 ed.), Oxford University Press, 1989, retrieved 20 November 2010

3. ^ ABET 4. ^ Isbell, Charles; Impagliazzo, John; Stein, Lynn; Proulx, Viera; Russ, Steve;
Forbes, Jeffrey; Thomas, Richard; Fraser, Linda et al. (December 2009), (Re)Defining Computing Curricula by (Re)Defining Computing, Association for Computing Machinery, ACM, ISBN 978-1-60558-886-5

5. ^ ACM-SIGITE 6. ^ "Gartner Says Worldwide IT Services Revenue Declined 5.3 Percent in

2009", Gartner, retrieved 20 November 2010

7. ^ a b "The Worlds Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and

Compute Information", Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lpez (2011), Science (journal), 332(6025), 60-65; free access to the article through here: martinhilbert.net/WorldInfoCapacity.html

Further reading

Adelman, C. (2000). A Parallel Post-secondary Universe: The Certification System in Information Technology. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education.

Allen, T., and M.S. Morton, eds. 1994. Information Technology and the Corporation of the 1990s. New York: Oxford University Press.

Shelly, Gary, Cashman, Thomas, Vermaat, Misty, and Walker, Tim. (1999). Discovering Computers 2000: Concepts for a Connected World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Course Technology.

Webster, Frank, and Robins, Kevin. (1986). Information TechnologyA Luddite Analysis. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

The Global Information Technology Report 20082009, World Economic Forum and INSEAD, 2009, ISBN 978-92-95044-19-7

Blais, Steven (December 2011). Business Analysis: Best Practices for Success. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 1118076001.

External links
Wikiversity has learning materials about Information technology

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

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American Institute of Physics

Technology
Recent advances in computer vision
by Massimo Picardi and Tony Jan

PDF version of this article

A special offer for readers of TIP fromPhysics Today...

Computer vision is the branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on providing computers with the functions typical of human vision. To date, computer vision has produced important applications in fields such as industrial automation, robotics, biomedicine, and satellite observation of Earth. In the field of industrial automation alone, its applications include guidance for robots to correctly pick up and place manufactured parts, nondestructive quality and integrity inspection, and on-line measurements. Until a few years ago, chronic problems affected computervision systems and prevented their widespread adoption. Since its start, computer vision has appeared as a computationally intensive and almost intractable field because its algorithms require a minimum of hundreds of MIPS (millions of instructions per second) to be executed in acceptable Figure 1. The Face Detection Project can automatically distinguish images containing real time. Even the input faces from other images and put a box around output of high-resolution each detected facefrontal, profile, or threeimages at video rate was quarter images. traditionally a bottleneck for (Henry Schneiderman and Takeo Kanade, common computing Carnegie Mellon University) platforms such as personal computers and workstations. To solve these problems, the research community has produced an impressive number of dedicated computer- vision systems. One such famous system was the Massively Parallel Processor (MPP), designed at the Goddard Space Flight Center in 1983 and operated there until 1991. The MPP used an array of 16,384

single-bit processors and was capable at peak performance of 250 million floating-point operations/san impressive feat at the time. Dedicated computers such as the MMP have always received a cold reception from industry because they were expensive, cumbersome, and difficult to program. In recent years, however, increased performance at the system levelfaster microprocessors, faster and larger memories, and faster and wider buseshas made computer vision affordable on a wide scale. Fast microprocessors and digitalsignal processors are now available as off-the-shelf solutions, and some of them can execute calculations at rates of thousands of MIPS. The Texas Instruments C6414 processor, for example, runs at 600 MHz and can achieve a peak performance of 4,800 MIPS. Highspeed serial buses such as the IEEE 1394 and USB 2.0 are capable of transferring hundreds of megabits per second, a rate that greatly exceeds the requirements of any common high-resolution video camera. These buses are already integrated into the most recent personal computer chipsets or are available as inexpensive daughterboards. Moreover, video cameras have gone almost completely to digital, and they come in several price ranges and types. Consumer camcorders are based on standards such as the Digital Video (DV), which provides videos with 720 480 pixels/frame at a rate of 30 frames/s. Even Webcams can now provide images of satisfactory quality at prices starting as low as $25. The availability of affordable hardware and software has opened the way for new, pervasive applications of computer vision. These applications have one factor in common. They tend to be humancentered; that is, either humans are the targets of the vision system or they wander about wearing small cameras, or sometimes both. Vision systems have become the central sensor in applications such as human-computer interfaces (HCIs), the links between computers and their users augmented perception, tools that increase normal perception capabilities of humans automatic media interpretation, which provides an understanding of the content of modern digital media, such as videos and movies, without the need for human intervention or annotation video surveillance and biometrics.

Human-computer interfaces The basic idea behind the use of computer vision in HCIs is that in several applications, computers can be instructed more naturally by human gestures than by the use of a keyboard or mouse. In one interesting application, computer scientist James L. Crowley of the National Polytechnical Institute of Grenoble in France and his colleagues used human eye movements to scroll a computer screen up and down. A camera located on top of the screen tracked the eye movements. The French researchers reported that a trained operator could complete a given task 32% faster by using his eyes

rather than a keyboard or mouse to direct screen scrolling. In general, using cameras to sense human gestures is much easier than making users wear cumbersome peripherals such as digital gloves. Another interesting example of an HCI application can be downloaded here for personal testing, provided a Webcam is plugged into your personal computer. This applicationcalled Nouse, for nose as a mousetracks the movements of your nose, and was developed by Figure 2. A camera tracks the point of each Dmitry Gorodnichy. You can players nose closest to the camera and links it play NosePong, a noseto the red bat at the top (or bottom) of the driven version of the Pong table to return the computer ball across the net. video game (Figure 2, left), (Institute for Information Technology National or test your ability to paint Research Council Canada; University of with your nose or to write Technology, Sydney, Australia) with your nose. Although this application is slanted toward fun, it is a convincing demonstration of the potential uses of cameras as natural interfaces. In industry, for example, an operator might quickly stop a conveyor belt with a specific gesture detected by a camera without needing to physically push a button, pull a lever, or carry a remote control. Cameras could also become powerful peripherals for the so-called intelligent home. A camera located in your living room would perform several tasks, starting with sensing a human presence and then turning the lights on and the heat up. Indeed, cameras could replace the many hard-to-find remote controls around todays homes, provide environmental surveillance, and turn the TV off when you fall asleep in your favourite armchair. The Voice Another application is The vOICe, developed at Philips Research Laboratories (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) by Peter B. L. Meijer and available online for testing. The vOICe provides a simple yet effective means of augmented perception for people with partially impaired vision. In the virtual demonstration, the camera accompanies you in your wanderings. The camera periodically scans the scene in front of you and turns images into sounds, using different pitches and lengths to encode objects position and size. Media interpretation The use of computer vision for automatic media interpretation assists users in searching for specific scenes and shots otherwise not annotated in the video-scene indexes. For example, images containing faces can be automatically distinguished from other

images, as the results of the Face Detection Project led by Henry Schneiderman and Takeo Kanade at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) prove. The CMU face detector is considered the most accurate for frontal face detection and is also reliable for facial profiles and three-quarter images. Many examples are available here - one is shown in Figure 1, top andanyone can submit an image which will process the image overnight and depict all detected faces with a box around them. However, computer vision can do much more for multimedia. For example, it is an invaluable support to recent multimedia standards aimed at compressing digital videosreducing their size in bytes while still retaining acceptable visual quality. One such standard is MPEG-4 from the Moving Picture Expert Group, which allows the compression of different objects in a scene with specific compression levels in such a way as to adjust the trade-off between space reduction and visual quality on a per-object basis. The basic idea is that important objects such as actors should retain the highest visual quality, while objects in the background can be encoded with lower quality to save bytes. Nonetheless, MPEG-4 is silent on how to separate a video into the objects of which it is composed. Here again, computer vision can help with a variety of techniques that perform the task automatically. Video surveillance Perhaps the most developed modern application of computer vision is video surveillance. Long gone are the days when video surveillance meant low-resolution, black-and-white, analog closedcircuit television. Nowadays, computer vision enables the integration of views from many cameras into a single, consistent superimage. Such an image automatically detects scenes with people and/or vehicles or other targets of interest, classifies them in categories such as people, cars, bicycles, or buses, extracts their trajectories, recognizes limb and arm positions, and provides some form of behavior analysis. The analysis relies on a list of previously specified behaviors or on statistical observations such as frequent-versus-infrequent behaviors. The basic goal is not to completely replace security personnel but to assist them in supervising wider areas and focusing their attention on events of interest. Although the critical issue of privacy must be addressed before society widely adopts these video surveillance systems, the recent need for increased security has made them more likely to win general acceptance. In addition, several technical countermeasures can be taken to prevent privacy abuses, such as protecting access to video footage by way of passwords and encryption. At the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, we have developed and tested a system that can detect suspicious pedestrian behavior in parking lots. Our approach is based on the assumption that a suspicious behavior corresponds to an individuals erratic walking trajectory. The rationale behind this assumption is that a potential offender will wander about and stop between different cars to inspect their contents, whereas normal users will maintain a more direct path of travel.

Figure 3. This parking-lot surveillance system subtracts the static background image, distinguishes a person from moving vehicles, locates the head, and calculates the speed of the head in each frame.

The first step consists of detecting all the moving objects in the scene by subtracting an estimated background imageone that represents only the static objects in the scene from the current frame (Figures 3a and 3b, left). The next step is to distinguish people from moving vehicles on the basis of a form factor, such as the height:width ratio, and to locate their heads as the top region in their silhouette. In this way, the heads speed at each frame is automatically determined. Then, a series of speed samples are repeatedly measured for each person in the scene. Each series covers an interval of about 10 s, which is enough to detect

suspicious behavior patterns (Figure 4, below).

Figure 4. Examples of the speed of the head (in pixels per frame) of a person in the parking lot exhibiting normal behavior (a) and abnormal behavior (b). Such video surveillance might alert a security guard to a possible car thief.

Finally, a neural network classifier, trained to recognize the suspicious behaviors, provides the behavior classification. In the experiments we performed, the system achieved good accuracy, with a reasonably limited number of false dismissals and false alarms4% and 2%, respectively, among more than 100 test samples. Although manufacturers and operators of surveillance systems have often been reluctant to accept innovation, recent results from research laboratories of major companies prove that these systems are now reliable, economical, and ready for commercialization. One example is DETER from Honeywell Labs, a prototype urban-surveillance system. For those who want to build their own surveillance systems, an enormous amount of equipment is available. Web sites of manufacturers such as Sony, Axis, Pelco, and many others offer a wide range of cameras. You can find network cameras starting at less than $500 that can be simply plugged into any network, such as a TCP-IP, which can carry a full Web server and allow camera frames to be downloaded and processed. Adjustable pantiltzoom cameras can be used to point and focus on specific targets over wide survey areas. And if cabling poses a problem because of camera location, wireless versions are available off-the-shelf. Computer vision, already a useful aid in several industrial processes, will find increasing uses as companies develop new applications in areas such as HCI, augmented perception, and automatic media interpretation. Its potential to improve plant and public safety is

attracting increasing attention in todays security-conscious world. Further reading Crowley, J. L; Coutaz, J.; Brard, F. Perceptual user interfaces: things that see. Commun. ACM 2000, 43 (3), 5464. Jan, T.; Piccardi, M.; Hintz, T. Automated Human Behaviour Classification using Modified Probabilistic Neural Network. In Proc. Int. Conf. Computational Intelligence for Modelling, Control and Automation; CIMCA 2003, Vienna, Austria, Feb. 1214, 2003. National Instruments Corp. (Austin, TX), markets a range of computer-vision products. Its LabView-based Vision line focuses on industrial and scientific uses. Pavlidis, I.; Morellas, V.; Tsiamyrtzis, P.; Harp, S. Urban surveillance systems: from the laboratory to the commercial world. Proc. IEEE 2001, 89 (10), 14781496. Biography Massimo Piccardi is an associate professor of computer science and Tony Jan is a lecturer in the department of computer systems at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia.