Click - 31/01/2012

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Attendees from last week's Kabul Innovation Lab tell us how it went; Angela Saini looks at digital street design for wheelchair users; The new maths for ten times the file compression.

Last week's Kabul Innovation Lab brought together ICT experts and entrepreneurs from across Afghanistan to try to develop solutions to address social problems and develop technological solutions. ICT consultant and co-ordinator Javed Hamdard, and Roya Mahboob, head of the company Afghan Citadel Software, talk to Gareth about the sorts of things they looked at, and the successes and challenges facing the ICT sector in Afghanistan.

In London, Angela Saini visits researchers using digital measuring devices to try to improve street design for wheelchair users. Professor Nick Tyler at University College London measures the stresses and efforts involved in navigating a wheelchair around an arduous mock-up street in his laboratory.

A mathematical technique known as a "Fast Fourier Transform", has since the 1960s belied most file compression and signal processing in digital devices. A team at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have presented a new algorithm - they call it the "sparse" Fast Fourier Transform - which could increase compression and efficiency by as much as 10-fold, potentially very good news for streaming video or audio where bandwidth is scarce.