November 19th, 2009

7 things you should know about Body Area Networks (BANs)

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 12:08 am

Categories: Computers & Internet, Defense & Security, Health & Medicine, Wireless & Telecom

Tags: Communication, Sensor, IEEE, Wireless, Body Area Networks Technology, Wi-Fi, Wireless And Mobility, Chris Jablonski

The budding field of Body Area Networks gives new meaning to the term “personal” in PCs. In a nutshell, the technology leverages wireless communications protocols that allow for low-powered sensors to communicate with one another and transmit data to a local base station and to remote places like hospitals.

For instance, small flat sensors placed on the skin, or even under it, could be used to create a “medical” body area network that provides doctors with real-time data about their patients’ bio-signs. Another key application is short-range person-to-person communications that could help protect front line soldiers in combat.

BAN technology is still in its infancy and mainstream adoption is still over the horizon as engineers and researchers work to overcome challenges involving interoperability, sensor design constraints (i.e. power and complexity), privacy, and security to name a few. Once these issues are overcome, expect BANs to first revolutionize healthcare allowing for concepts like telemedicine and mHealth to become real, and potentially allow for groundbreaking uses in communications, security, and sports.

Below, in no particular order, is a list of facts, news, and generally good things to know about BANs: Read the rest of this entry »

November 12th, 2009

Top three Star Trek-style holodeck experiences

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 12:24 am

Categories: Computers & Internet, Energy & Environment, Engineering & Innovation, Health & Medicine, Nanotechnology, Science & Nature, Space & Aerospace

Tags: User Interaction, 3D, Pixel, StarCAVE, Audio System, Tech Spec, Projectors, Virtual Reality, Hardware, Components

Surround 3D TV is making its way to your living room. To get a sense of what it may look and sound like, look no further than the cutting edge of virtual reality taking shape at academic research centers outfitted with world class data visualization facilities. In this post, we’ll take a look at three (ok, four) of the most remarkable scientific visualization technologies.

Allosphere: University of California, Santa Barbara

The AlloSphere is a spherical space in which immersive, virtual environments allow researchers to convert large data sets into experiences of sight and sound. For example, it allows researchers to “fly” through a hydrogen atom while hearing sonified features of the wavefunction of its single electron to help describe invisible processes of nature.

The facility consists of a 30-foot diameter sphere built inside a 3-story cube that’s nearly echo-free. Inside the chamber are two spherical hemispheres that are constructed of perforated aluminum designed to be optically opaque and acoustically transparent. A 7-foot-wide bridge runs across the center, supporting the users. High-resolution video projectors can project images across the entire inner surface enabling seamless stereo-optic 3D projection.

The Allosphere has more than 500 audio components that hang suspended in rings just outside the aluminum shell and are connected to multiple Gigabit Ethernet LAN fibers that lead to a server farm consisting of seven Hewlett Packard 9400 workstations (as of April 2009).

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November 3rd, 2009

Biodegradable silk electronics to improve implants

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 7:27 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Engineering & Innovation, Science & Nature

Tags: Electrode, Silk, Electronics, Telecom & Utilities, Chris Jablonski

Building on advancements in foldable ultra-thin flexible circuits, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Tufts University have developed electronics that almost completely dissolve inside the body by incorporating silk.

Technology Review reports that the research group has demonstrated arrays of transistors made on thin films of silk.

(Credit: Rogers/Omenetto via Technology Review)

Typically, implanted electronics are encased to protect them from the body, but these new electronics don’t need such protection. The silk allows for the electronics to conform to biological tissue as it melts away over time.  And the thin silicon circuits left behind don’t cause irritation because they are just nanometers thick.

The image on the left depicts the implantable device. It consists of a clear silk film, about one centimeter squared, with six silicon transistors on its surface. The device can be implanted in mice like the one in this image and the silk degrades over time. It causes no harm to the animal. (The orange liquid on the hair is a disinfectant used during the surgery.)

Here is how the article describes how the devices are made:

To make the devices, silicon transistors about one millimeter long and 250 nanometers thick are collected on a stamp and then transferred to the surface of a thin film of silk. The silk holds each device in place, even after the array is implanted in an animal and wetted with saline, causing it to conform to the tissue surface.

Read the rest of this entry »

October 28th, 2009

Software that automatically fixes itself, without shutting down

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 10:58 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Defense & Security

Tags: Software, Team, Patch Management, Attack, ClearView, Patches, Tools & Techniques, Security, Management, Chris Jablonski

Software vulnerabilities that take days or weeks to fix may one day be a thing of the past. A team of researchers have presented new software, called ClearView, that automatically patches errors in deployed software in a matter of minutes.

As Technology Review reports, ClearView works without assistance from humans and without access to a program’s underlying source code. Instead, it monitors the behavior of a binary: the form the program takes in order to execute instructions on a computer’s hardware.

A paper, Automatically Patching Errors in Deployed Software, published by the Association for Computing Machinery, explains how ClearView works as five sequential steps:

1. It observes normal executions to learn invariants that characterize the application’s normal behavior
2. Uses error detectors to distinguish normal executions from erroneous executions
3. Identifies violations of learned invariants that occur during erroneous executions
4. Generates candidate repair patches that enforce selected invariants by changing the state or flow of control to make the invariant true, and;
5. Observes the continued execution of patched applications to select the most successful patch

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October 15th, 2009

Computers have speed limit as unbreakable as speed of light, say physicists

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 11:31 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Engineering & Innovation

Tags: Physicist, Speed, Computer, Moore, Productivity, Chris Jablonski

A pair of physicists have shown that if processors continue to accelerate in accordance to Moore’s Law, we’ll hit the wall of faster processing in roughly 75 years.

The curtain will eventually come down for silicon in today’s manufacturing methods once engineers can no longer further shrink transistors and the copper wires that connect them. Processor fabrication using new technologies such as imprint lithography, graphene, and quantum computing will continue to yield faster and smaller chips. Nonetheless, those advanced techniques only stave off the absolute ceiling for speed, no matter how small the components get, according to professors Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.  As Inside Science reports, the two have slapped a speed limit on computing. Read the rest of this entry »

October 9th, 2009

Ubicomp 2009 and the fusion of our digital and physical worlds

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 12:00 am

Categories: Computers & Internet, Engineering & Innovation, Wireless & Telecom

Tags: Ubiquitous Computing, Cell Phone, Chris Jablonski

Recently, I used my newly downloaded Zipcar app on my iPhone to unlock and honk my booked vehicle from several yards away. It was more novel than useful, but a tall tale example of the countless invisible interactions we’re having with sensing, inferring, and data transferring machines every day. It’s also a good sign that ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) has arrived.

New to ubicomp? Here’s a quick refresher: The concept of ubiquitous computing (also called pervasive computing) centers on information processing bridging the gaps between the digital and physical worlds. It includes all intelligent device communications and connected services that utilize sensors and devices across wire-line and wireless networks. That includes, but is not limited to, Industrial Ethernet, cellular, satellite, wireless LAN, and Bluetooth.

A recent conference dedicated to ubiquitous computing is another example of the multidisciplinary field anchoring in as the center of our computing future.  Hundreds of researchers and students gathered at the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ‘09) at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando to present their ideas for the gadgets of tomorrow.

Here are a few of the notable examples that made it into the Miami Herald:

• The “Cheeron++” is a fluffy color-changing robot built by students in Japan that cheers after a day of exercise, and gets mad when you haven’t been active enough.
• Another student from Ochanomizu University in Japan put computer chips in clothes hangers that could help a computer keep track of your outfits and share it with a social network like Twitter to help you coordinate your wardrobe.
• Students from Tsinghua University in China used cellphone cameras and a projector to let passersby use a phone to brush the air and paint on the projected image.
• A group from Carnegie Mellon University proposed sensors in cellphones to test the air quality.

Eric Paulos, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon, told the Miami Herald; “We’re used to using our mobile phones as a communication tool, but it can also be a measurement instrument. We know what happened when people added a camera, we got citizen journalism. . . . What happens if you could measure things? You could talk about the air quality in your neighborhood.”

The combination of technologies that continually provide real time information at the point of task and distribute updates to where we are and what we are doing will change our behaviors and make ubiquitous computing indispensable.

October 6th, 2009

A brain-computer interface that communicates thoughts between people

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 11:30 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Engineering & Innovation, Health & Medicine, Science & Nature

Tags: Light-emitting Diode, Person, Engineering, Internet, B2B, Telecom & Utilities, E-business/E-Commerce, Chris Jablonski

New research from the University of Southampton has demonstrated that it is possible for communication from person to person through the power of thought alone.

Looking to take brain-computer interfaces (BCI) to the next level, Dr. Christopher James from the University’s Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, set out to show that brain-to-brain (B2B) communication is possible. Utilizing electrodes, computers, and the internet, he claims that his experiment is a “proof of concept” that shows, for the first time, true brain to brain interfacing.

Dr James noted: “Whilst BCI is no longer a new thing and person to person communication via the nervous system was shown previously in work by Professor Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading, here we show, for the first time, true brain to brain interfacing. We have yet to grasp the full implications of this but there are various scenarios where B2B could be of benefit such as helping people with severe debilitating muscle wasting diseases, or with the so-called ‘locked-in’ syndrome, to communicate and it also has applications for gaming.”

Below is a three and a half-minute video detailing the BCI experiment:

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October 5th, 2009

SIM 2009 study: Boosting productivity and cutting costs top IT concerns

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 10:54 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet

Tags: SIM Card, Information Technology, Strategy, Management, Chris Jablonski

Initial results for the SIM 2009 IT Trends Survey reveal that business productivity and cost reduction are the top concerns for IT executives.

IT and business alignment, the number-one concern in 2008, fell to number-two on the survey, which is commissioned annually by the Society for Information Management and provides important benchmark data in areas including spending, salaries, job scope of IT professionals, and technical/business trends.

The results indicate that information technology executives are not slashing jobs as part of their cost-cutting efforts in the same way way as they did in previous economic downturns. In the current recession, they’re instead making the most of their budgets. Dr. Jerry Luftman, a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, said that the the downturn has caused a significant shift in priorities.

“While IT organizations have slashed spending on infrastructure, they don’t seem to be laying off IT people; the IT turnover rate is at 6.9 percent. In fact, the most successful IT organizations are not being asked to cut their own expenses, but to help the overall business reduce their costs.

“The bad news is that they’re not hiring like they have in recent years. Instead, they are filling gaps by outsourcing domestically because this is faster than going overseas, but that will change next years,” said Luftman.

Below is a list with the top 10 concerns in SIM’s annual survey together:

1. Business productivity and cost reduction
2. IT and business alignment
3. Business agility and speed to market
4. Business process re-engineering
5. IT cost reduction
6. IT reliability and efficiency
7. IT strategic planning
8. Revenue generating IT innovations
9. Security and privacy
10. CIO leadership role

Read the rest of this entry »

September 30th, 2009

Scientists replicate the physics of a stellar jet in laboratory

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 11:34 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Space & Aerospace

Tags: Jet, Magnetic Field, Team Management, Management, Chris Jablonski

Astronomers will tell you that among the most beautiful structures observed in the Universe are the intricate jets of matter speeding away from accreting stars, such as young proto-stars and stellar mass black holes. But they have a hard time explaining it. A pair of professors the University of Rochester is hoping to change that.

Twin Jet Nebula (Credit: NASA)

Earlier this year, Adam Frank, professor of physics and astronomy and his colleague, Eric Blackman, professor of physics and astronomy, were part of what he called “one of the greatest astrophysical experiments that’s ever been done.” In partnership with a team at Imperial College London led by Professor Sergey Lebedev, they replicated the physics of a stellar jet in a laboratory and matched the known physics of jets “amazingly well.” (See video here).

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September 27th, 2009

New type of 'excitonic' computer a step closer to commercial viability

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 9:01 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Nanotechnology, Science & Nature

Tags: Team, Integrated Circuit, Electron, Computing, Computer, Team Management, Semiconductors, Management, Hardware, Chris Jablonski

The physicists at UC San Diego that a year ago created the first integrated circuit using particles called excitons, now have discovered a technique that allows for operation at commercially cold temperatures.

This brings the possibility of a new type of extremely fast computer based on excitons closer to reality. When commercialized, the technology could speed computing and communications by better integrating electronic circuits and optical data communications.

Alex High and Aaron Hammack adjust the optics in their UCSD lab (Credit: UCSD)

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