Posts Tagged ‘NCSU’
Wednesday, April 20th, 2011
 PINEHURST, NC – Biofuel companies are hot this year. We’ve reported investments in biofuels companies from Maryland to Georgia since January. Red Wolf Refining Corp., which holds rights to biofuels research at NC State University, wants to get in on the action and has raised $475,850 toward a $3 million equity offering, according to a regulatory filing.
Red Wolf’s technology is a thermal-chemical catalytic process that makes fuel from crops such as jatropha, camelina, soy, canola, palm, yellow grease (chicken fat), and hog fat. It coverts fatty oils into diesel, jet and gasoline fuel.
The company disclosed the offering in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Tags: biofuels, equity offering, NC, NCSU, Pinehurst, Raleigh, Red Wolf Refining Corp., SEC
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011
 RALEIGH, NC – Companies spend millions to develop their brand’s personality, in hopes that it can help sell products. But they’ve had no way of measuring whether that personality actually appeals to consumers. Now, research from North Carolina State University lays out a system for measuring the appeal of a brand’s personality.
“We developed this means of measuring brand personality appeal (BPA) so companies can figure out how favorably their brand personality is viewed by consumers – and what they can do to enhance that personality’s appeal to their market,” says Dr. David Henard, an associate professor of business management at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the study.
I’m a Mac
The concept of brand personality helps consumers form attachments to specific brands. For example, Apple has its “I’m a Mac…And I’m a PC” campaign, which brands its products as young and hip. But does that brand personality actually get people to buy anything?
“Until now, researchers have only been able to determine whether a company has a brand personality,” Henard says. “The only existing scale was Aaker’s Brand Personality Scale, which could determine whether a brand personality is rugged, sophisticated, competent, exciting or sincere.
Deeper into concrete outcomes
“What we’ve done here is develop a system that digs deeper to help companies link brand personality to concrete outcomes. For example, does the brand personality actually make people want to buy their product?”
The researchers first broke BPA down into three components: favorability, originality and clarity. Favorability is how positively a brand personality is viewed by consumers.
Originality is how distinct the brand personality is from other brands. Clarity is how clearly the brand personality is perceived by consumers.
For example, Ford trucks are clearly recognized as having a “rugged” brand personality. A brand personality’s appeal is determined according to the interaction of these three variables.
The researchers then used these three variables to establish a measurement system for BPA. The system consists of 16 questions that provide information on each of the three BPA variables. The questions can be applied to any brand personality, from Mercedes Benz to Mary Kay. By assessing consumer responses to these 16 questions, a brand personality is graded on its overall favorability, originality and clarity.
Better understanding of how brands work
For example, a company may find that its brand personality has a moderate rating on favorability, but is viewed as highly original and clearly defined.
High marks for originality and clarity make the brand personality more appealing than the moderate favorability rating might indicate. It also tells a company that it needs to focus its efforts on improving its favorability rating, rather than distinguishing itself from competitors, in order to boost the brand personality’s overall appeal.
“This work gives us a much more thorough understanding of how the mechanics of brand personality work on consumers,” Henard says.
The paper, “Brand personality appeal: conceptualization and empirical validation,” was co-authored by Henard; Dr. Traci Freling, of the University of Texas-Arlington; and Dr. Jody Crosno, of West Virginia University. The paper is forthcoming from the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
Tags: Apple-Mac, brand personality, brand study, NCSU, University research
Posted in Marketing, Studies, surveys, reports, University Tech | Comments Off
Monday, April 18th, 2011
 RALEIGH, NC – Did you know that pencil lead may just end up changing the world? Graphene is the material from which graphite, the core of your No. 2 pencil, is made. It is also the latest “wonder material,” and may be the electronics industry’s next great hope for the creation of extremely fast electronic devices.
Researchers at North Carolina State University have found one of the first roadblocks to utilizing graphene by proving that its conductivity decreases significantly when more than one layer is present.
Graphene’s structure is what makes it promising for electronics. Because of the way its carbon atoms are arranged, its electrons are very mobile. Mobile electrons mean that a material should have high conductivity.
But NC State physicist Dr. Marco Buongiorno-Nardelli and NC State electrical and computer engineer Dr. Ki Wook Kim wanted to find a way to study the behavior of “real” graphene and see if this was actually the case.
“You cannot make a semiconductor with just one graphite layer,”Buongiorno-Nardelli explains. “To make a device, the conductive material must have a means by which it can be turned off and on. And bilayer provides such ability.”
They discovered both good and bad news.
The good news: With a single layer of graphene, the mobility – and therefore conductivity – shown by the researchers’ simulations turned out to be much higher than they had originally thought.
The bad news: bilayer graphene was an order of magnitude lower in the mobility of its electrons. “The reduction is substantial, but even this reduced number is higher than in many conventional semiconductors,” Borysenko said.
Buongiorno-Nardelli says that the NC State researchers are turning their attention to remedying this problem.
“If we put the graphene on a substrate that can ‘siphon off’ some of the heat generated by the electric current, the crystal vibrations will decrease and the mobility will increase. Those are our next steps – running the simulations with graphene and substrates that have this property.”
Tags: graphene, NCSU, pencils, University research, wonder material for electronics
Posted in Carolinas, Hardware, North Carolina, University Tech | Comments Off
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
 RALEIGH, NC – Computer programs are incorporating more and more safety features to protect users, but those features can also slow the programs down by 1,000 percent or more. Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a software tool that helps these programs run much more efficiently without sacrificing their safety features.
“These safety features – or meta-functions – can slow a program down so much that software developers will often leave them out entirely,” says Dr. James Tuck, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and leader of the research team that designed the new tool. “Leaving out those features can mean that you don’t identify a problem as soon as you could or should, which can be important – particularly if it’s a problem that puts your system at risk from attack.”
Historically, these safety features have been incorporated directly into a software program’s code, and are run through the same core – the central processing unit that serves as the brain of a computer chip – that the program itself uses. That is what slows the program down.
Researchers at NC State have developed a tool that takes advantage of multi-core computer chips by running the safety features on a separate core in the same chip – most chips currently contain between four and eight cores – allowing the main program to run at close-to-normal operating speed.
“To give you some idea of the problem, we saw the application we were testing being slowed down by approximately 580 percent,” Tuck says.
“Utilizing our software tool, we were able to incorporate safety metafunctions, while only slowing the program down by approximately 25 percent. That’s a huge difference.”
This multi-core approach has been tried before, but previous efforts were unwieldy and involved replicating huge chunks of code – a process that was time-consuming and used a great deal of power. The new tool, Tuck says, “significantly streamlines the safety feature work being done by other cores.”
Tuck stresses that the tool functions automatically, and does not involve manual reprogramming. In fact, Tuck’s team found that the tool is more effective than manual reprogramming for at least some applications, and is far less labor intensive.
The software tool is implemented as a plug-in for the Gnu Compiler Collection of software tools, and Tuck’s team is working to fine-tune and extend the tool to support a wider range of applications and meta-functions. “We plan to release the first version of this tool as open-source software later this spring,” Tuck says.
Tags: Dr. James Tuck, meta-functions, multi-core computer chips, NCSU, software tool boosts efficiency, University Tech
Posted in Carolinas, Internet/New Media, IT, North Carolina, University Tech | Comments Off
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
RALEIGH NC – Opposites don’t always attract. A study from North Carolina State University shows that participants are happier – and perform better – when the electronic helpers used in online training programs resemble the participants themselves.
“It is important that the people who design online training programs understand that one size does not fit all,” says Dr. Lori Foster Thompson, an associate professor of psychology at NC State and co-author of the study. “Efforts to program helper agents that may be tailored to individuals can yield very positive results for the people taking the training.”
Online training programs are becoming increasingly common, and are used for everything from developing work skills in employees to teaching children basic math skills. Many of these programs utilize electronic training agents, or “helpers,” to give feedback to users and help them through the coursework. But the usefulness of these helpers can vary, or even be annoying. Remember Clippy, the animated paper clip, from Microsoft?
In the Southeast, we have seen a fair number of online training and Internet education-related companies nabbing financing in recent months. Like many things in the digital world, the increasing number of mobile devices that access the Internet and the wider availability of broadband connections are factors.
Which characteristics make online training helpers more effective?
NC State researchers set out to determine what characteristics make a training helper more effective. “We know from existing research on human interaction that we like people who are like us,” Foster Thompson says. “We wanted to see whether that held true for these training agents.”
The researchers evaluated the superficial similarities between 257 study participants and helper agents in an online training course, and assessed each participant’s communication style and their similarity to the helper’s communication style. Superficial similarities included the gender and race of the participant.
Assessment of each participant’s communication style was determined by asking participants how they would give feedback to others in various situations – such as helping someone with classwork. Researchers also asked participants how similar they felt the helper’s communication style was to their own style.
Matching race and gender increases focus
The researchers found that people reported being more engaged and focused on their training when the helper was portrayed by an image that matched both their race and gender. Furthermore, the researchers found that participants liked the helper more – and learned more from the program – when the helper’s communication style matched their own in regard to a very specific aspect of giving feedback.
Essentially, when giving feedback, some people give individual performance evaluations by comparing the individual to the group (e.g., you are in the top 10 percent), while others compare an individual’s performance only against that individual’s previous record (e.g., you did much better this time). Study participants performed much betterwhen the helper’s feedback style matched their own in this regard.
The study also showed that perception could be more important than reality in participant performance. “We found that people liked the helper more, were more engaged and viewed the program more favorably when they perceived the helper agent as having a feedback style similar to their own – regardless of whether that was actually true,” Foster Thompson says.
The paper isforthcoming from the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
Tags: helper agents, NCSU, online training, University research
Posted in Carolinas, Education, Internet/New Media, IT, North Carolina, University Tech | Comments Off
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011
 Dual core computer chip RALEIGH, NC – Computer engineers at North Carolina State University have developed hardware that allows programs to operate more efficiently by significantly boosting the speed at which the “cores” on a computer chip communicate with each other.
The core, or central processing unit, is the brain of a computer chip; most chips currently contain between four and eight cores. In order to perform a task more quickly using multiple cores on a single chip, those cores need to communicate with each other.
But there are no direct ways for cores to communicate. Instead, one core sends data to memory and another core retrieves it using software algorithms.
“Our technology is more efficient because it provides a single instruction to send data to another core, which is six times faster than the best state-of-the-art software we could find,” says Dr. James Tuck, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. Tuck explains that the technology, called HAQu, is “not hardware designed to communicate data on its own, but is hardware that expedites data-sharing using existing data paths on a computer chip.”
Because HAQu uses these existing data paths, the research team compared it to software communication tools – even though it is a piece of hardware.
HAQu is also more energy efficient. “It actually consumes more power when operating but, because it runs so much more quickly, the overall energy consumption of the chip actually decreases,” Tuck says.
The next step for the research team is to incorporate the hardware into a prototype system to demonstrate its utility in a complex software environment.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.
Tags: increasing speed of dual core computer chips, NCSU
Posted in Carolinas, Hardware, IT, North Carolina, University Tech | Comments Off
Friday, January 28th, 2011
 Samsung Adroid Phone 2.3 RALEIGH, NC – A computer security researcher at NC State University, Xuxian Jiang, has identified a security vulnerability in the latest version of Google Android, version 2.3, also known as Gingerbread. The vulnerability gives attackers access to user data – similar to a vulnerability identified in previous iterations of Android, which Google thought it had fixed with the latest version.
Basically, simply by clicking on a link, Android users may give attackers access to personal information. If exploited, the vulnerability would allow a malicious Web site to read and upload the contents of any file stored on the phone’s microSD (memory) card. Information on the SD card could include saved voicemails, photos or online banking data.
The vulnerability would also allow attackers to find out all of the applications installed on a phone, and upload many of the applications onto a remote server – including all built-in applications.
Jiang, who discovered the vulnerability when working on an Android-related research project, has confirmed the vulnerability using Gingerbread being run on a Nexus S phone.
A similar vulnerability was reported on earlier versions of Android phones, leading Google to make changes in Gingerbread designed to address the flaw. However, Jiang has found that the Gingerbread fix can be bypassed.
So, what can be done to mitigate the vulnerability? The simplest way to protect your information is to remove or disable the SD card in your phone. However, that will leave you unable to save voice mail or photos. You could also disable the JavaScript function in your browser. But that would affect your ability to access online content. Another option is to switch to a third-party browser, such as Firefox.
Now that this information is out there, programmers can begin to develop means of addressing the vulnerability.
Tags: Gingerbread, Google Android version 2.3, NC, NCSU, Raleigh, security vulnerbility, Xuxian Jiang
Posted in Carolinas, Internet/New Media, IT, North Carolina, Security, Telecommunications, University Tech | Comments Off
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
RALEIGH, NC – NC State University researchers will receive $750,000 of a $5.15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).
The grant, most of which goes to Cree, which is leading the project, will support North Carolina State University efforts to develop new technologies essential to the development of a “smart grid” that can easily store and distribute energy from renewable sources, such as solar and wind.
NC State’s role is to develop a transformerless intelligent power substation.
Dr. Subhashish Bhattacharya, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and primary investigator for the university on the grant project. “TIPS will enable the vision of the smart grid,” Bhattacharya says. “It will be a more cost-effective and efficient means of connecting renewable energy resources to the existing power infrastructure.”
The NC State TIPS development project will be made possible by the work that Cree will be doing under the grant – developing a power semiconductor device based on silicon carbide.
NC State is recognized as a leader in developing smart grid technologies, and is home to the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center for Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management.
Tags: Cree, Dr. Subhashish Bhattacharya, NC, NCSU, Raleigh, smart grid tech
Posted in Carolinas, Energy, Hardware, IT, North Carolina, University Tech | Comments Off
Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
RALEIGH, NC -The operating system (OS) is the backbone of your computer. If the OS is compromised, attackers can take over your computer – or crash it. Now researchers at North Carolina State University have developed an efficient system that utilizes hardware and software to restore an OS if it is attacked.
At issue are security attacks in which an outside party successfully compromises one computer application (such as a Web browser) and then uses that application to gain access to the OS. For example, the compromised application could submit a “system call” to the OS, effectively asking the OS to perform a specific function.
However, instead of a routine function, the attacker would use the system call to attempt to gain control of the OS.
“Our goal is to give the OS the ability to survive such attacks,”
says Dr. Yan Solihin, an associate professor of electrical and computer
engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the new
system. “Our approach has three components: attack detection; security
fault isolation; and recovery.”
The concept is to take a snapshot of the OS at strategic points in time
(such as system calls or interrupts), when it is functioning normally
and then, if the OS is attacked, to erase everything that was done since
the last “good” snapshot was taken – effectively going back in time
to before the OS attack. The mechanism also allows the OS to identify
the source of the attack and isolate it, so that the OS will no longer
be vulnerable to attacks from that application.
The idea of detecting attacks and re-setting a system to a safe state
is a well-known technique for restoring a system’s normal functions
after a failure, but this is the first time researchers have developed a
system that also incorporates the security fault isolation component.
This critical component prevents the OS from succumbing to the same
attack repeatedly.
The concept of taking snapshots of the OS and using it to replace the
OS if it is compromised was previously viewed as impractical, since
taking these snapshots and running such a system significantly slowed
computer operating speeds. “But we’ve developed hardware support
that allows the OS to incorporate these survivability components more
efficiently, so that they take up less time and energy,” Solihin says.
The researchers say the survival system takes up less than 5 percent of
the OS’s operating overhead.
The paper, “Architectural Framework for Supporting Operating System
Survivability,” was co-authored by Solihin and former NC State Ph.D.
student Xiaowei Jiang. The paper will be presented Feb. 16 at the IEEE
International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture in San
Antonio, Texas. The research was supported, in part, by the National
Science Foundation.
Tags: NC, NCSU, operating system backup, Raleigh, Security, University research
Posted in Carolinas, Hardware, IT, North Carolina | Comments Off
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010
 DURHAM, NC – Rumors about the possibility of Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) moving its headquarters have persisted throughout 2010 and may be resolved next year, if talk on the street is correct.
Talk of moving the Linux software developer to the West Coast has been one rumor that former executives confirmed earlier this year never ceased to be discussed within the company.
Now, while the company has made no secret of needing larger digs than its current space at North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus in Raleigh, rumors suggest the company may be considering a move to Durham.
Much of the Research Triangle Park itself is in Durham, but a space there would be isolated from amenities just as the Centennial Campus is. Many RTP firms decry the lack of choice in restaurants or even a place to drop off dry cleaning and have for years. Still, the company could probably find the increased room it needs there and address remains prestigious.
Durham, on the other hand, has a flourishing tech community centered around the American Tobacco Campus that includes the recently opened American Underground, now home to CED and a number of start-ups, as well as some larger tech tenants.
Of course, Red Hat would want a much larger space – as much as 300,000 square feet, some say – but even being near the ATC would add to the collegial atmosphere of a more tightly knit tech community.
That seems to be the new paradigm for many technology centered parks these days, which are as likely to spring up in a downtown area of a city as in some dedicated industrial site.
The Piedmont Triad Research Park in Winston Salem, NC, and the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, NC, both life sciences oriented, were built on that new model of a community, not just an industrial park.
Rick Smith over at WRAL’s Local Tech Wire, has suggested the possibility of a Red Hat move to Durham. Capitol Broadcasting Co., owner of WRAL, is also an owner of The American Tobacco Campus.
Email TJS Editor Allan Maurer: Allan at TechJournalSouth dot com.
Tags: American Tobacco Campus, Centennial Campus, Durham, NCSU, Raleigh, Red Hat, rumor of Red Hat HQ move
Posted in Carolinas, IT, North Carolina, Tech Space | Comments Off
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