From millions of interconnected online genealogy profiles, researchers have amassed the largest, scientifically-vetted family tree to date, which at 13 million people, is slightly bigger than a nation the size of Cuba or Belgium.
With crowdsourced genealogy, “we have the ability to connect a much more vast network of individuals and locations around the world, in a faster, cheaper way,” said Yaniv Erlich, who led the study and is a computer science professor at Columbia University.
Columbia engineers are the first to miniaturize dual-frequency combs by putting two frequency comb generators on a single millimeter-sized silicon-based chip — work that could lead to low-cost, real-time portable sensing and spectroscopy in the field.
A new project led by Richard Plunz and his colleagues at the Earth Institute’s Urban Design Lab combines mapping techniques with Twitter-usage data to gain a real-time understanding of how people occupy public space.