Yesterday, Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) announced the development of an interesting device called “gCubik+i”.

 gCubik+i is a ten-centimeter cube that can show three-dimensional images. The prototype design does not require special glasses to view the image. gCubik+i is composed by 6 interactive 3D LCD touch screens that fits in the palm of your hand. A wireless version is in the works as well.

Unlike conventional 3D displays, which are viewed only from the front, the gCubik+i can be seen from 6 sides, giving different images from various angles. For example, student can use illustrated reference book and “gCubik+i” to observe the movement of fish from different sides.

Source: http://www2.nict.go.jp/pub/whatsnew/press/h21/090730/090730.html#zu01

There is a general consensus that Internet will evolve to become the backbone for communications and services. Basically everything will be connected to the Internet: people, communities, machines, objects, information, services and processes.

Growth of storage capacity coupled with enhanced processing capabilities and always-on connectivity will make terminals gain a dominant role in communications. This evolution will deeply impact network architectures. Indeed one of the main challenges will be understanding the ways future Internet actors (in the sense of Social Network Analysis) will communicate and interact, and how these will impact network evolution.

Studies and simulations on Small-World (SW) networks represent an interesting attempt to model the dynamical behavior of social, economic and physical networks. For example, in literature there are several studies to understand the effect of SW networks on classical systems, such as using the Ising model. I’ve always been fascinated by the simple beauty of the Ising model, one of the pillars of Statistical Physics: it is the most famous spin system model to study phase transitions. It was introduced in 1925 by Ernst Ising in his Ph.D. thesis.

Ising model has been used to simulate systems behaviors in which individual elements (called magnetic spins) can modify their behavior so as to adapt to the behavior of other individuals in their vicinity and to an external field (for details please see the following link). Elements might be real spins, molecules in a gas, atoms in a magnet, polymers or even a node of a SW network.

Please see more details here:

http://www.math.toronto.edu/~gabor/classwork/ising.pdf

However, they say that human social networks are more likely open systems, and as such, subject to nonequilibrium-like transitions; moreover many social and biz relations are asymmetric and it is not just the number of connections a person has that should be considered but also the frequency and duration of contact for those links. We need to study some evolutions of this kind of models.

Please see some results in this direction in this paper:

http://www.citebase.org/fulltext?format=application/pdf&identifier=oai:arXiv.org:cond-mat/0110500

As a matter of fact, these aspects may play an important and unforeseen role on the behavior of social models evolving on SW networks: it might turn out the emergence of unexpected relationships and not trivial phase diagrams.

By the way, concerning unexpected relations between scientific domains and emerging relationships, I would suggest taking a look at the world’s first Map of Science:

http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/nb.story/story_id/15965/nb_date/2009-03-11

>> Micro Four Third Camera

Olympus Pen E-P1 is a hybrid camera designed to combine advantages of both compact cameras and DSLR. As we all know, SLR cameras are bigger than compact one because of designing mirror box, penta prism, viewfinder etc. Those ‘Reflex Camera’ components are vanished in E-P1. So it’s minimized as high-end camera size, but lens shiftable.

- Olympus Pen E-P1-

Casual photographers prefer mini-sized and high qualify camera, unfortunately it is trade-off. (The Bigger camera, the better pictures you get) Olympus Pen E-P1 try to get both by chosing Micro four third system.

>> Full touch screen digital camera

This fuji’s new model is different from the other touch screen cameras. It has full touch screen, and get focus on the point where you touch. It is worth to notice because of its interative UI.

- Fuji Finepix Z300 -

>> Real 3d Camera

Now it is 3d camera, fuji’s another big challenge. It captures 3d image by using two lenses and two image sensors.

- Real3D, Fuji FInepix-

I’m not sure if we’d prefer 3d digital pictures or not, but finally we’d be able to capture our vision with 3d technology. It seems like digital imaging trends are moving toward to Not only the quality of pictures, but also mobility, interactivity and 3d.

It is now a well established scientific opinion (to become a fact it will take some more time) that once a set of interacting entities reaches certain thresholds that set starts to show an intelligent behavior.

The thresholds is difficult to pin down to a single number, it is better represented by a tuple comprising the number of entities in the set, the variety of interactions and their frequencies, the degree of change introduced by each or cluster of interaction in the behavior of the entities, the availability and consumption of energy. It is probably even more difficult to explicitly state what intelligence is. However, for the sake of this discussion let’s content ourselves with an understanding of intelligence as being able of “smart” behavior.

This preface is to say that so far the assumption was that only complex organisms can display a sophisticated behavior, a cat has to be smarter than a spider. The “brainier” the “better”. Indeed we have seen smart behavior shown by aggregation of tiny components, like an ant colony. Here again we can see the general assumption at work. A single ant may not be that smart but an ant colony is able to react effectively to changing environment.

The consequence of this association of complexity to smartness is that unicellular being should be the foolest of them all. Apparently, this is not the case.

A recently published book, nice reading!, authored by Dennis Bray from the University of Cambridge, UK, Wetware: a computer in every living cells, points out with many astonishing examples how bacteria and microbes in general are no fool at all. Actually in many cases it looks like they are smart, intelligent beings.

I would suggest to pick up the book and take a look here and there.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227141.600-review-wetware-by-dennis-bray.html

In a way this book is bringing further material to consolidate the case of complexity vs intelligence. Dennis notes how a single cell is made up by billion of interacting molecules and out of this interaction springs out a complex, and smart, behavior.

What was of interest to me was to reflect on the fact that indeed complexity begets intelligence, independently of the fact that the entities involved are living beings or (as it is the case of a cell) not living entities (molecules). This means that communications in the next decade will provide interaction capabilities to billions of objects, each one embedding a computer, sometimes some sensors and some smart materials. Out of this connectivity we are going to see emerging “smart” behavior of ambient. Our living room can start to show some intelligence, once all the various pieces are connected one another (but they are far too few to reach a sufficient complexity level) and also connected to millions of other entities in the neigh borough, to the billions in the township and so on. The Internet of things will display smart behavior.

Bio-Ecosystems are smart, and the new ecosystems that will be emerging in the next decade will be smart too. It’s a new world coming up, better be prepared to live with it.

We have posted last week the news on the application for the iPhone released by Barnes & Noble to provide addiitonal information on Books and DVDs. Now, take a look at the following video.

Both Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble applications perform a digital image recognition of a tipically two dimensional object: the cover of a book or DVD.
The apps have been tested at Future Centre with very good results: both of them can easily recognize a cover and get the associated information; additionally, they enable users to buy the products or just to add them to a wishlist or remind list.
The next will be an upgrade from 2D object (like a CD cover) to some 3D objects.

The idea that an object can have a mirroring reality in the web is what has first started our work in the Project Atoms and Bits.

We are now seeing a number of clues that this hypotheses is not just correct but it is becoming a driver for the industry. Technology for making it possible to connect an object to its mirroring image (through tags, image recognition, communications with the object itself) is progressing rapidly.

Intel has just demoed in its  seventh annual Research@Intel event  held in Mountain View, California, how your smart phone can use a computer cloud to run applications that would require too much processing power to be run on the device itself. The idea is that your cell phone will exist in its physical way in your hand and also in a virtal way in the network. Whatever is going on in the physical instantiation goes on in its virtual one as well and here moe can happen by leveraging on the processing power made available in the cloud. Result of this processing will then appear on your physical cell phone.

This evolution is very interesting not just because it enables new, sophisticated applications (like image recognition, rendering, real time advertisement processing) but because it decouples the physical characteristics of that specific phone, enabling a host of third parties to provide services to a much bigger market place, that is now independent of the device specific characteristics.

By doing that it also opens up the service marketplace to many players, no more walled garden!

Take a look at the full paper on the cloud proposed by Intel…

http://berkeley.intel-research.net/bgchun/clonecloud-hotos09.pdf

Few days ago, I run onto an interesting interview to Lee Dryburg, the founder of the Emerging Communications Conference, published on the Skype Journal:

http://skypejournal.com/2009/06/dryburgh-what-after-skype-intent.html

Even though one has to take into account that the “pro Skype” statements may result from the context where the interview took place, there remains several interesting points being made that, I am afraid, I resonate with.

“First you’ve got the telephony application itself. Because of the exceptional widespread deployment of the telephone, it’s century long cultural embedment, extreme ease of use and very low barriers to usage, it’s not going away in a big way, at any time least soon. It’s far too big and you’ve got far too much inertia in and around it. However because it’s substantial list of deficiencies grows, what we are seeing emerging and what will gain ever further traction is software based voice-enabled, communication technologies. Interestingly voice may not be the “substrate” of these clients, “relationships” will be, both between people and things.”

Software is going to be the basic infrastructure enabling communications. Clearly, physical transportation of bits is required but all processing is no longer part of the “wiring infrastructure”, it lays at the edges, in terminal and in data centres. Furthermore communications is not focussing on people only but on any combination of people and things.”

“Six years ago, the Skype software client was released. It was the harbinger of change to come. It called into question the need for very expensive dedicated underlying transport networks by pushing edge intelligence into the Codec layer to deal with less than ideal networks. It called into question the need for dedicated telecom hardware in the core network, by using the edge-clients to perform the work in a decentralised fashion. It called into question the inherent limited geographical structuring of telecom operators themselves; software does not face such physical and regulatory boundaries; distribution is relatively zero-cost; and worse still for the operator model, by it’s global footprint, it achieves unprecedented scale.”

I found this statement interesting because it moves the focus from “cheap communications” enabled by Skype to the issue of what is needed to enable communciations, sealing the fate of the switching and control points that have played a central role in telecommunication evolution. Skype, according to Lee, represents just the first tiny step. What’s next is more related to user behaviour and economic models than to technology. Again, there is no downplaying  the importance of technology, its continuous evolution is making the shift possible.  The point is that the importance moves from technology to its impact.

“Phase two is built around an economic model that puts human time and attention at a premium as opposed to dedicated circuits, specialist hardware and personnel. It’s the opposite of what we experience today with telephony, where human time and attention is wasted; ringing, call queues, voice mail boxes, IVR trees, repetitious verbal transfer of static information such as credit card numbers, call transfers and such like. And that’s just a quick C2B example. C2C has similar lunacy, for example needing to place a telephone call to request a single piece of discrete information or the other person’s location. The economic crisis experienced worldwide is likely to highlight such sources of great inefficiency. Here is another angle to get you thinking, more and more calls originate from a number noted on a Website and yet when the call is placed, no information is passed with the call about what the context of the call. It’s lost, so each end has to orally work more at the beginning that would otherwise be necessary. Billions of minutes are needlessly wasted on a every day globally.”

“Phase two is about intention-based economics. It’s focused on fulfilling intentions and desires. Another way of putting it is we no longer need to care about network availability (i.e. “dial tone”), and reaching an endpoint (i.e. A telephone). Network availability and endpoint reachability is assumed. What we care about with intention based economics is human psychology and behavour, both individual and in aggregate. I’m not saying we need to become psychologists and anthropologists. But what we need to build for is access to ever more personal information, i.e. about the human behind the endpoint. Privacy does not exist looking long-term. Ever more personal information is the new currency, which underlies intention-based economics, and people will increasingly trade it for free access to services.”

These concepts of personalization and use of our own information, with a sort of trading between privacy and convenience/service are interesting. They are our motivation at the Future Centre to study issues created by our Digital Life. Let me close this blog by inviting you to read the full interview and come up with your comments. I wish to close with the last statement Lee made in his interview:

“You’re probably wondering what phase two looks like from the point of view of applications? This is where things get very abstract and potentially the prose could get long-winded. But this is not to be unexpected since the foundation is in the abstract with the word “intention.” To try and get a flavour of the phase two application direction, imagine for a start that the demarcation lines between content, information access, entertainment, ecommerce unravel ever further and the result is intrinsically tied to an ever smarter fusion of increasing communication modalities. Now underpin that attention and intention based economics. Now dream a little”.

For instance, Amazon has recently released an application for iPhone to find information (and more) about  books, DVDs and audio CDs. Users can take a picture of the cover of a book or DVD; the application compresses the picture, sends it to Amazon, performs a search in their databases and retrieves relevant information. Please watch the following video which shows how Amazon.com app works. 

I have always been fascinated by theoretical physics. What surprises me is the underlying mathematics that seems to permeate physics. Physicist find an equation to explain a certain physical phenomena and then by working on the solution to that equation they come to the conclusion that there must be something more to it: the equation is no longer explaining reality (the experiment) it seems to force reality to behave according to the equation. We have seen a number of examples, from the general theory of relativity implying existence of black holes to the Dirac equation implying the existence of the neutrino and of the anti-electron (the positron). 

Leon Chua, an electronic engineer at Berkeley, reasoned in 1971 that according to the model of electromagnetisms there are four related characteristics: the electric charge, the change over time of the charge (a current), the magnetic flux (created by a current) and the variation of magnetic flux (the voltage). Point is that if you have four related characteristics there should be 6 ways of relating them (think of them as points and relations as the possible ways to connect the points: four points, six connecting lines). Now charge and current – change of magnetic flux and voltage are connected by virtue of their own definition. Then we have the concept of resistance (and resistor) that connects current and voltage, the one of capacitor connecting a voltage with a certain amount of charge and the one of inductor connecting current to magnetic flux. That makes 5. Where and what is the sixth one? Chua named it Memristor. Memristor should provide the connection between charge and magnetic flux. It should be a sort of resistor with the capability of remembering what charge passed before and change the flux based on that. Theoretically speaking it was perfect. The only problem was that no-one has ever seen a Memristor nor found a way to develop one.

Actually, it turns out that there are billions and billions on Memristor, and just in a single brain, mine as well as yours. Nature has found a way to create them long time ago and we can say thanks to that for it is at the core of our capacity to learn and react in different ways based on experience. Now researchers at the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California have managed to create Memristors using nanotechnology.

This consists of two layers made of titanium dioxide. In one layer it behaves like a semiconductor, in the other, that is produced by heating it some oxygen atoms are missing thus making it behave like a metal. Applying a voltage moves the electron bubbles present in the “metal” layer to the semiconductor making it a conductor; by applying the voltage in the other direction the electron bubbles  move back. Now come the interesting part: every time the voltage is switched off the bubbles freeze where they are, in other word the material remember what happened before. This effect was never seen before because it occurs only at atomic level and only using nanotechnology it becomes apparent.

Memristor seen with an electron microscope

With respect to conventional memories memristors use just few picojoule of energy and can store indefinitely the “memory”. A bit can be stored in much smaller space than in a conventional flash memory made of transistors so we can pack many more of them in a given space. Note that memristors do far, as flash memories, can only stand about 10,000 cycles so they cannot be used as computer memories. This may change in the future.

What is most interesting, however, it is not the more densely packaged storage nor the use of memristors as storage underpinning. To understand this we need to turn to how living beings manage interactions within themselves and with the environment (as well as giving rise to ecosystems behavior).

Computers have architectures that separate the place where information is stored from the one where it is processed and the one where it is communicated. Neurons do not work that way. At the same time they process, store and communicate and these functions cannot be separated from one another. What is being stored depend on communications among neurons and on what they process and the other way round in all possible combination. In computers you can change one function at a time (change a data in a memory cell or change the processing algorithm and even change what is communicated to whom), in living beings brains this is not possible since there is no distinction among these functions.

Memristors are the physical equivalent underpinning to this way of storing, processing and communicating. That is why they can be so interesting in the future. They may help developing intelligent engines, for the first time.

You can get more information and insight looking on the Web, a good place is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor for a technical discussion

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327151.600-memristor-minds-the-future-of-artificial-intelligence.html for insight on use of Memristors in Artificial Intelligence

The use of the personal information in the virtual world is a big issue that social network and any other virtual storage of personal information must be concerned about.

Facebook is facing some problems with Canadian privacy law. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada found that Facebook shares its users’ personal information with developers who create applications in a way that breaches Canadian privacy law. One of the big reason for this is that Facebook is not transparent. According to them “Facebook provides information about privacy issues that is often confusing or incomplete” .

According to PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) a Canadian law related to privacy:

• Personal information must be collected for a specific purpose and cannot be used for other purposes.
• The information cannot be collected unless the person that the information belongs to has been informed and has provided consent.
• The information can only be kept for a specified amount of time, and must be destroyed when it is no longer needed to fulfill its original purpose.

“Users should be able to opt out of actions that could lead them to lose control over their personal information”, Canadian assistant privacy commissioner said. In some cases, that information could then be used for marketing purposes or even identity theft.

According to the studies of LIFE AND LIVES project, every virtual information belongs to the user so the information is personal and the user must be able to choose what could be shared and used by the social network or any other website.