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'We live life in the network. We check our e-mails regularly, make mobile phone calls from almost any location, swipe transit cards to use public transportation, and make purchases with credit cards. Our movements in public places may be captured by video cameras, and our medical records stored as digital files. We may post blog entries accessible to anyone, or maintain friendships through online social networks. Each of these transactions leaves digital traces that can be compiled into comprehensive pictures of both individual and group behavior, with the potential to transform our understanding of our lives, organizations, and societies.'
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'On June 23, IBM announced a multiyear effort to increase the performance of rechargeable batteries by a factor of 10. The aim is to design batteries that will make it possible for electric vehicles to travel 300 to 500 miles on a single charge, up from 50 to 100 miles currently. "We want to see if we can find a radically different battery technology," says Chandrasekhar "Spike" Narayan, who manages the Science & Technology Organization at IBM Research's Almaden lab in San Jose, Calif. '
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'Intimate procedures such as breast exams, while a routine and critical part of medical care, are notoriously tough to teach. Medical students practice on disembodied prosthetics but have limited opportunities to practice exams on real people — especially patients who have an abnormality. In a collaboration with the Augusta, Ga.-based Medical College of Georgia and three other universities, UF engineers have crafted a solution: a hybrid computer/mannequin that helps train students not only how to correctly perform a breast exam — but also how to talk to, and glean information from, the patient during the procedure.'
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'Do friends wear the same style of shoe or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, which is why they became friends in the first place? Or once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors? Social scientists don't know for sure. They're still trying to understand the role social influence plays in the spreading of trends because the real world doesn't keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences.'
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'A key feature of the system is that is made up of a large number of tiny imagers. These are small, simple cameras, each directed independently by a MEMS-controlled micro-mirror. Because there is no large lens, Pantoptes can be made flat, unlike other cameras. A central processor combines the images into a single picture, producing a higher resolution than the individual imagers. The intelligence is in the way that the system identifies areas of interest and concentrates the sub-imagers on the relevant part of the scene. Christensen gives the example of the Panoptes system looking at a building in a field.'
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I wonder if they will 'Open Source' this technology.
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W3C is stopping work on XHTML, focusing instead on HTML 5.
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'The EU-funded OpenInterface (OI) project took as its starting point the many interaction devices currently available – touch screens, motion sensors, speech recognisers and many others – and sought to create an open source development framework capable of quickly and simply supporting the design and development of new user interfaces by mixing and matching different types of input device and modality. “These devices and modalities have been around a long time, but whenever developers seek to employ them in new ways or simply in their applications, they have to reinvent the wheel,” notes Laurence Nigay, OpenInterface’s coordinator. “They need to characterise the device, develop ways to get it to work with technology and other interface systems. And then do a lot of testing to make sure it usefully improves how people interact with technology,” he says. '
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'It sounds like something from a science fiction movie: Sensors are surgically inserted in the brain to understand what you're thinking. Machines that can speak, move or process information — based on the fleeting thoughts in a person's imagination. But it's not completely fictional. The technology is out there. A researcher in Wisconsin recently announced the ability to "think" updates onto the Twitter website. Locally, researchers at Washington University have developed even deeper ways of tying humans and computers together.'
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'Secure Internet activity requires being able to prove who you are. Security experts agree that the traditional approach of passwords is not always effective. PKI and public key cryptography solve these problems, and Dartmouth researchers are leading the way in helping organizations deploy PKI. A new system developed at Dartmouth called PRQP, which stands for PKI Resource Query Protocol, is now in the pipeline with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to become the universal way to easily implement PKI-enhanced computing security.'
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..or maybe the question should be, will they love or hate *us*?
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'The project’s scientific coordinator Denis Caromel says: “We have been developing an open source suite of products to allow parallel, distributed, multi-core computing. What this means is that an application can be run on a series of machines, or a cluster of servers, or an enterprise grid comprising many machines and even all the way up to cloud computing, or any combination of these.”'
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This is the best single-page view of the history of computing technology I've ever seen.
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' “Cyber-physical systems are "smart" technologies that are beginning to transform our lives. Today's research will lead to tomorrow's autonomous, smart vehicles for safe transportation; homes filled with smart appliances; intelligent, earthquake resistant buildings and bridges; robots that assist us at home, at work, and at play; and unobtrusive assistive technology for healthier living... Cyber-physical systems technologies will affect sectors critical to our well-being, security and competitiveness, including aerospace, automotive, chemical production, civil infrastructure, energy, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, materials and transportation.”'
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'"The question is, can't we change the way in which people interact with machines such that they are much better to anticipate what you want to do and provide a richer form of interaction," Mundie said... He compares this shift to a historical one that Nathan Myhrvold, his former boss, once pointed out. Myhrvold noted that video cameras were first used to record plays. Not until a few years later did people realize that they could create something new and glue together pieces of film to make a movie. "That's kind of what we're going through with computing," Mundie said.'
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'Picture a wall that stares back at you. Or a uniform that shows a soldier a 360-degree view of the battlefield. Both scenarios are possible courtesy of a new generation of flexible, translucent fibers developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. These so-called multimaterial fibers can turn incoming light waves into images without the need for a camera lens. And unlike fiber optic cables, they can transmit images that have been captured across their entire length.'
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'there is more to the digital civilisation that we are now entering than the Internet alone. It also covers telecommunications (telephone, television), satellites and intelligent environments, for example. It is true, however, that the Internet of the future, with its blogs, emails, videos, messages, and mobile systems, will favour an even greater interaction between users. The Internet has developed like a Darwinian system, sprouting offshoots like the evolutionary tree of life.'
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'“Japan is years ahead in any innovation. But it hasn’t been able to get business out of it,” said Gerhard Fasol, president of the Tokyo-based IT consulting firm, Eurotechnology Japan... The Japanese have a name for their problem: Galápagos syndrome. '
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'Not everyone is impressed with the search giant's latest move, however. My colleague Randall Kennedy says Chrome OS has "an ice cube's chance in Hell" of competing successfully with Windows or Mac OS X, citing the overwhelming effort needed to duplicate the full range of device drivers and applications available on those platforms today. Randall just doesn't see that happening, and for that matter neither do I.'
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ACM TechNews: 'The key to the creation of more efficient software for mobile platforms and multicore chips could lie in artificial intelligence (AI), and the MilePost project seeks to make this vision a reality. The project has devised an experimental version of the GNU Compiler Collection that employs AI to enhance the quality of its own output so that compiler developers can spend less time modifying compilers for particular platforms by allowing the compilers to do that by themselves. '
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'A team of Yale University researchers has discovered a "repulsive" light force that can be used to manipulate components on silicon microchips, meaning future nanodevices could be controlled by light rather than electricity.'
