Just published, a devilishly clever algorithm from MIT for detecting the location of an individual using WiFi to within a few centimetres.
This has been a bit of a holy grail in computer science for years and the best solutions still require multiple WiFi nodes effectively comparing notes.
The details are complex, but basically the new approach involves frequency hopping the WiFi signal to obtain multiple measurements of the time a signal takes to travel to another node. These measurements are then combined and multiplied by the speed of light to get a highly accurate result.
Tech Lunch 
Barry Cooper and Turing
December 18, 2015I was saddened to hear of the death of Barry Cooper, a Leeds University mathematician, who specialised in computability, the fiendish maths of proving whether something is calculable. As the Guardian obit makes clear he arguably did more than anyone else to make Alan Turing and his work known to the wider public, and was instrumental in organizing the great computer scientist’s centenary year in 2012. It seems doubtful that Turing would have won a pardon or that films would have been made about his time at Bletchley without Cooper’s initial efforts. He taught at Leeds whilst I was an undergraduate, although I don’t recall attending one of his lectures. You can read more about Cooper’s ideas, research and his championing of Turing at his webpage.
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