IFTF's Future Now

UAV navigation

The UC Berkeley Lab Notes has an article on a project to give UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) the capability to perform automated tasks for civilian use. UAVs have been used by the U.S. military-- they played a prominent role in the Afghanistan campaign, and when equipped with air-to-ground missiles are able to attack ground targets-- and their potential for civilian applications is obvious. They're relatively small, cheap (about $20k will buy you a good one), and can navigate using GPS. They also are pretty flexible systems, in that you can hack one together using off-the-shelf technology: the Predator, for example, is powered by a four-cylinder snowmobile engine.

The problem is that they haven't been very good at doing some simple things, like following roads. Military UAVs have pilots, for obvious reasons: you need someone to make the decision to fire on a target, or to take evasive action against enemy fire. In fact-- if memory serves-- the military has had to make sure that time logged "flying" UAV missions would be counted towards promotion, just like flying in a real plane.

But in the civilian world, there are lots of cases where you'd want the UAV to basically work like a flying surveillance camera: to take a route and look for anything out of the ordinary. As Berkeley professor Raja Sengupta realized,

"I realized that it's very difficult for a UAV to follow a road. GPS errors can cause a UAV to veer off its path quite easily."

The Berkeley team's approach is to augment GPS with machine vision software and a $120 off-the-shelf video camera. The challenge, Sengupta explains, is for the computer to discern the road from the rest of the terrain from altitudes up to several hundred feet.

The solution is a two-step process devised by Zu Kim, a researcher with the UC Berkeley-based PATH (Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways) program. First, the software distinguishes the road from the surrounding area based on differences in contrast. In the desert, for instance, the asphalt is much darker than the sand. Next, the lane boundaries are identified based on the lightness of lane markings as compared to the asphalt. Once the boundaries are located, the plane follows the lane from above.

"GPS will get the plane in the vicinity and once our system locks onto the road, the plane can adjust itself regardless of what the GPS says," Sengupta explains.

There's also a biomimicry component to the story.

The final prong in the Berkeley UAV research is focused on what Sengupta calls the "canyon problem." While monitoring traffic in an urban setting, a UAV may be forced to fly between buildings lining the road it's tracking. One intriguing solution was inspired by the navigation of bees. The insects are able to fly down a corridor without bouncing between the walls by determining if they seem to be moving past both walls at the same rate. If there's a discrepancy between walls, the bee adjusts its trajectory. Sengupta hopes that borrowing this biological principle behind bee flight will lead to a computationally quick way to deal with "urban canyons."

It'll be interesting to see if there develop applications in which you'd want UAVs to fly in flocks.

Berkeley nanomotor

BBC News reports that

Researchers at Berkeley at the University of California created the world's smallest electrical device earlier this year - one hundred million of which could fit on the end of a pin....

The motors - the work of Berkeley researchers Alex Zettl and Adam Fennimore - were built using a atom-fine point of a nano-probe, inserting the circuits into place on a silicon chip.

The motor sits in the middle of a silicon chip four millimetres square. The motor itself is much, much smaller - the shaft is a half a tenth of a thousandth of a millimetre thick.

One thing that's striking about this-- and this one of those oddities that tells you something about the character of nanotechnology, and the challenges researchers face when working at this level-- is that

the motor is so small that the researchers do not yet know exactly how it behaves.

"It's hard to image whether it's flipping or spinning, and we're still working on trying to resolve that," he said.

"We know that it flips back and forth faster than 33 milliseconds because that's the frame rate that we're able to grab them at.

"But we still haven't conclusively shown what's going on at the nanoscale."

Personal server gets closer

New Scientist reports that

A full-featured PC that is small enough to slip into a shirt pocket is being hailed by its makers as the world's first modular computer. The machine can perform as both a PC and a handheld computer, but it remains to be seen if consumers are willing to pay for such a hybrid device.

The Modular Computing Core is being launched on 7 November by Antelope Technologies, a Colorado-based start-up. The device is a single portable unit into which all the essential computing components are crammed. At 76 by 127 by 19 millimetres (5 x 3 x 3/4 inches), the MCC is not much bigger than a deck of cards.

This core unit can then either be slotted into a docking station to be used with a screen and keyboard as a desktop computer, or into small portable "shell" with a touch-sensitive screen, turning it into a handheld computer. "Modular computers will change the way people use their computer," claims Kenneth Geyer, president of Antelope Technologies.

Inside the MCC is a 1GHz microprocessor, 256 MB of RAM and a 10 or 15 GB hard drive. It will also run a full version of Microsoft's XP operating system, instead of the stripped-down operating systems used by handheld computers.

This is a small, albeit somewhat costly ($4000) step towards the "personal server" concept, discussed here earlier.

Street vending IT

BBC News reports on a student project to develop means for bringing Internet access to public areas.

"I looked at ways of having people at the centre of the infrastructure where digital services could be offered like fruit and veg."

She sees this as providing a much more personal and fluid service than static internet cafes or web points.

From this, Ms Tulusan developed the "webpacker".

The concept is very simple. Disguise a touch screen computer, attach it someone and have them walk around with it, linked to a wireless network.

"Anyone can just go there and ask for a bit of internet or can you give me some data," she explained.

The project, named wandervogel (German for "migrating bird"), looked at Internet kisosks and mobile phone services in South Asia and Latin America. The resulting prototype is part street vendor, part Blade Runner.

[via smart mobs]

Smart dust articles

Two noteworthy recent articles on smart dust and RFID:

• Get ready for the smart shopping basket, BBC News, with a focus on RFID and the smart shopping cart;
• Smart Dust Collecting in the Enterprise, on Siliconvalley.internet.com, on recent work on smart dust.

One interesting thing in both is a certain note of exasperation on the part of developers over privacy issues. Accenture's Glover Ferguson is quoted in the BBC piece as saying, "It is like nuclear energy, you can't uninvent it. We're going to have to learn to live with it. The genie is out of the bottle." Given the history of nuclear energy, this is not a comparison that would warm my heart, if I were an RFID manufacturer. And smart dust guru Kris Pister is described as "quick to dismiss" privacy issues. "Yes, personal privacy is getting harder and harder to come by. Every technology has a dark side-- deal with it." All in all, not the best day for RFID PR.

Design for Wellbeing

Last week I met Larry Leifer, founder of the Smart Products program at Stanford. As anyone who follows technology trends already knows, there's a lot of talk about "smart objects," "smartifacts" (a term that I'd just as soon we all forgot), and "smart environments," among other terms. It was sobering to realize that Leifer founded the Stanford program 25 years ago, and that attempts to invest objects with rudimentary decision-making, sensing, and actuating capacity are actually into their second generation.

Leifer is now working on a new multinational project on "Design for Wellbeing" with colleagues in Scandanavia and Japan. The project "redirects the focus of product development from technology-based development, via needs-based development, to participative product development." Its initially focused on assistive technologies, but there's a lot more to it than that.

Leifer will be a speaker at the Institute's Technology Horizons conference this Wednesday, which is shaping up to be very good couple days.

Are friends electric?*

(*With apologies to Gary Numan.)

NTT researchers recently presented their ElectAura-Net technology, which uses humans' natural electrical fields (those things that mystics and New Agers think of as auras) to move information. They explain how it works in a SIGGRAPH publication:

ElectAura-Net is a novel indoor broadband networking and positioning system. A wireless(-like) communication is enabled by electric-fields (electric aura) emanated from the human body and the floor. The result: the world's first broadband (10Mbps) intrabody communication. ElectAura-Net also provides indoor positioning, which is urgently needed for "ubiquitous" communication.

ElectAura-Net provides both broadband wireless(-like) networks and a meter-accuracy positioning system for indoor use. It is a kind of "intrabody communication" system that uses electric fields as transmission media, and the human body and floor as an Ethernet cable. In this system, a "communication-cell" (carpet size) can be shrunk down to one meter or less, and simultaneous access by many users can be realized. Ordinary intrabody communication systems cannot achieve long-distance communication between components such as body-worn devices and the floor. ElectAura-Net provides extra-high-sensitivity and high-speed capability.

This is an extension of the Personal Area Network (PAN) research done at MIT in the 1990s by Tom Zimmerman (the subject of his 1995 MA thesis), and later picked up at IBM. That technology exploited the fact that the

natural salinity of the human body makes it an excellent conductor of electrical current. PAN technology takes advantage of this conductivity by creating an external electric field that passes an incredibly tiny current through the body, over which data is carried.

The current used is one-billionth of an amp (one nanoamp), which is lower than the natural currents already in the body. In fact, the electrical field created by running a comb through hair is more than 1,000 times greater than that being used by PAN technology.

The difference here is that this new technology isn't aimed at linking people together, but at connecting people (and all their devices) to a network, and using that same technology to sense people's locations.

The NTT technology sounds like it's a long way from hitting the streets, but the notion of using our bodies-- and touch-- as a way to share information is one that I find kind of breathtaking: wonderful in its simplicity, deep in its conceptual potential.

We already have a pretty good protocol for sharing information via PDAs: I can beam something to another person with a PDA, but they have to accept it before it gets stored on their device. Sharing a picture, or a message, or a piece of music with someone by holding their hand-- or touching their shoulder, or tapping them on the arm-- is at once both high-tech and intimate. If it adopted some features of the PDA method-- that a file has to be actively accepted by the recipient, or it's discarded-- this method would also provide a means of sharing information that was as transparent as handing someone a Polaroid or business card: you'd know who it was coming from, you'd have to choose to accept it, and the transaction would take place within the context of a social exchange.

Imagine, for example, that you're at a wedding. At the reception, you take a lot of pictures, as does everyone else. The bride and groom have a great time, the guests have a great time; and at the end of the evening, one of the things you do for the happy couple-- the course of shaking hands with him or hugging her-- is share those pictures with them. Or, you and your teenage friends are at an amusement park, and you have a passerby take a group picture with your camera. After getting the camera back, you'd cue up the picture, then hand a copy of the picture to each one of your friends. Information-sharing turns into a genuinely social activity. Pushing bits becomes an exercise in gift-giving. Data becomes a social artifact.

It would be the ultimate example of social navigation, of an information technology that drew upon existing methods and media for digital communication. This interpretation runs completely opposite to an IBM article from a few years ago that declared that described Zimmerman's work as showing "how a touch can also be used to communicate unemotional digital information." Today, what seems interesting is how the PAN could place the communication of digital information in an emotional and social context.

Finally, it would be an exemplar of a trend we're actively exploring at the Institute: how the growth of ubiquitous or pervasive technologies promises to remove computers and communications technologies as obstacles to social interaction.

Other sources:

• Eric Smalley, "Body network gains speed," Technology Research News (October 2003).
  
• "A Truly Organic Network," Wired News (December 15, 1997).
  
• "Personal Area Network enables intrabody communication," Design News (1998).
  
• Bruce Schechter, "The Body Electric," Think Research (1997).
  

[via Smart Mobs]

New research on IT and productivity

From The Economist (subscription required):

Computing the gains: The economic benefits of the IT revolution are now visible in Europe and Japan

AFTER years of debate about the virtues or vices of the so-called “new economy”, most economists now agree that America has, indeed, enjoyed stronger productivity growth since 1995, thanks largely to investment in information technology (IT). However, many also agree that Japan and Europe, for some reason, seem to have missed out on computer-driven productivity gains. The growth of labour productivity in Japan and most European countries has actually slowed since the mid-1990s. New research, however, suggests that the economic rewards from IT have spread outside America, but have not been measured correctly.

Wired on utility and privacy

Wired News reports from Ubicomp 2003 on the balance researchers in ubiquitous computing are trying to strike between the utility of having smart objects, and the privacy implications. It's less interesting as a summary of the conference, then as a data-point in the way we're talking about these issues: they're almost always cast in the language of trade-offs and balancing of rights vs. conveniences.

There's got to be a more sophisticated way to think about these things. I recently asked Andy Clark, author of Natural Born Cyborgs and a very deep thinker on issues of human-technology relationships, whether he thought there were more useful ways of thinking about the impact of information technologies on our minds and brains than to ask, "is it good or bad?" His reply is apposite here:

I think there are. Every technology, tool, and notation has it’s own pattern of pros and cons. Roman numerals actually (though many people are surprised by this) made certain calculations easier, though in general the Arabic system wins out. Rather than thinking in terms of black and white, good and bad, we should try to spot the strengths and weaknesses, and then attempt to balance them with other tools or actions. Making a point of browsing a physical bookshop now and then is, for example, a sensible way of counteracting the tendency of collaborative filtering systems to offer us more and more of what we already buy and like.

Balancing active exploration with reliance on semi-intelligent trail-sensing software is probably one of the most important new skills we will have to teach and learn.*

To build on this, I think it's not so useful to think of privacy in terms of a specific set of conditions, or a thing that's defined by the presence of absence of certain technologies; as I think most of us will realize, the boundaries of privacy are many and fluid. Our spouses or parents see parts of our lives that our children do not; our families get to know things that the government doesn't; we entrust certain kinds of information to doctors that we don't to marketers (or our families). As adults, we become pretty good at working out those boundaries, and setting rules for what gets shared with whom. (As Dahlia Lithwick points out, these boundaries are recognized by the law to determine that spouses act as surrogate decision-makers for one another: "the law assumes that your spouse knows you intimately and shares with you a sphere of legal privacy into which even your parents and siblings may not intrude.")

Personally, I think the concerns about technology-enabled loss of privacy aren't as big a deal as some make them out to be. For one thing, the kinds of information you can gather from devices will be so trivial as to be worthless: any agency that sets a broad filter will be overwhelmed with data. For another, many kinds of information are available through multiple channels. Reading the RFID tags in my Gap sweater, Levis jeans, and Nike shoes, you'll pretty much pick up the same information that you would if... you just looked at me. We broadcast information about our buying habits just by going outside. Finally, as I note elsewhere, it's already possible to create some pretty intrusive surveillance systems using the videocameras that increasingly are a standard part of public spaces.

The challenge in the future will not be to preserve privacy, but to negotiate it; to understand what technologies broadcast about us, what they allow us to broadcast, and how to use them in the multiple social contexts in which we operate every day.

[via Anne Galloway]

*This is, incidentally, part of a much larger interview that we'll be publishing in its entirety.

Stealth computers

The New York Times (registration requred) has a somewhat whimsical, but still illuminating, article on stealth somputers-- DIY machines built around the mini-ITX, a low-power, low-heat motherboard that allows hackers to build computers into all kinds of imaginative enclosures-- old toasters, vintage radios, Ikea breadboxes, even plush toys.

The tone of the piece is a little "aren't these geeks a nutty bunch," but there's a serious side to this phenomenon. It's a kind of bottom-up, soldered-together ubiquitous computing: many of these devices are designed to blend in with their environments, to look like anything but a computer. And the users are making it happen. As Richard Brown, marketing VP at Via (which makes the mini-ITX) puts it, "The hobbyists are actually the ones leading the way. They're very serious mechanical and technical projects."

If you want to see where technology is going, it's worth watching what skilled enthusiasts do. Had you attended meetings of Macintosh user groups in the mid-1980s, you would have seen demos of what would later become networking products and software packages; at a place like BMUG, people who would become technology journalists, Mac evangelists, and entrepreneurs; and a culture that assumed that it was possible to do some profoundly interesting things with the personal computer. The future of computing was visible at those meetings. A piece of it may be visible in mini-ITX machines.

[Update, 24 October 2003: Anne Galloway discusses the value of end-user configuration.]