Solexant, a company based in San Jose www.solexant.com , California, has announced the availability of a new technology to produce solar cells, having the same efficiency of current state of the art solar cell but much cheaper. They expect to sell these cells at about 1$ a W, 3000 $ to light a home in Italy.

The technology is based on cheap nanocrystal used to make an ink that is printed on the substrata. The printing process is much cheaper than the etching process used in standard cells and the efficiency in solar energy conversion is about 10% (not significantly different from standard cells).

On the left the nanorods, on the right the printed cell

The nanocrystal used are rods having a diameter of 4 nanometers (about 40 atoms) and a length of about 20-30 nm. As they get printed they are also heated transforming the individual nanocrystal into a continuum sheet. The substrata is a metal foil and the crucial thing is the deposition process of the ink. This has to ensure a good conductivity of the electrons being displaced by the energy coming from the solar light.

Once the deposition is finished a glass pane is overlaid. The overall cost is about 50c of a dollar per W (this is what makes possible to sell it at 1$ per W).

The first product will be on the market next year and the company is seeking funds to increase its production plant from the present 2MW to 100MW a year.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23980/

According to Intel by 2020 people will be able to save the money and space taken by a keyboard simply by embedding a chip directly in their skull. I can’t say I am looking forward to that.

They are envisaging a sensing technology that for the faint of heart can be embedded into a headset. The research is jointly carried out with the Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh.

The goal is to sense and understand brain waves and convert them into radio wave signals that can be used to command computers, television sets and cell phones (actually these are also computers…).

According to the researchers many people will gladly accept a chip implant for the convenience it can offer. According to Andrew Chien, VP of research and director of future technologies research lab at Intel,

“ ….human beings are remarkable adaptive. If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time, they would have said, ‘I don’t want that. I don’t need that.’ Now you can’t get them to stop [carrying devices]. There are a lot of things that have to be done first but I think [implanting chips into human brains] is well within the scope of possibility.”

Let me beg to differ….

Dean Poerleau, an Intel research scientist, resonate:

“ …users will soon tire of depending on a computer interface, and having to fish a device out of their pocket or bag to access it. Users will tire of having to manipulate an interface with their fingers. Instead, they’ll simply manipulate their various devices with their brains. Eventually people may be willing to be more committed … to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts.”

The recognition of brain waves is getting nearer thanks to the advances in FMRI, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and the analyses being made on its outcome.

Will we really go this far, and I am not talking from the technology side but from the consumer side? My bet is no, but again, I am getting (seriously) old and I am starting to use the sentences I remember my grandfather used.

Anyhow, I think it is worth to take a look at the full article, and the Intel researchers forecast on what to expect in the next 40 years.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141180/Intel_Chips_in_brains_will_control_computers_by_2020

In these last decades telecommunications has become the most widespread infrastructure in the world, linking over 4 billion phones and it is well on the way to reach the one man – one phone target by the next decade. What else could we imagine?

Sensors on a Bridge using CeNSE

Well, HP has just announced the project CeNSE, a Central Nervous System for the Earth. www.hpl.hp.com/research/quantum_systems.html

It is an R&D program to build a planet wide sensing network using billion and billion of tiny sensors, including accelerator (to detect motion and vibrations), barometric pressure, light, temperature, pesticide and whatever. All of them should be linked to a over-reaching infrastructure, the one for the Internet of Things. Obviously, each sensor have to be extremely cheap, robust and self standing. The technology used is stemming from the work of HP labs on Nanotechnologies. Sensors are similar to RFID chips although the first batch has been designed to measure acceleration. These sensors are amazingly sensitive, over 1000 fold more accurate than the accelerometers used in devices like the iPhone and Wii.
According to HP these sensors could be used on any building, including bridges, to detect structural strains, they may be used to finely measure weather conditions, monitor traffic. How many sensors would you need to measure possible strain in a structure like the Golden Gate bridge? According to HP some 10,000 sensors would do! And if the figure looks impressive you will be staggered by the forecast of HP Lab: by the end of the next decade the world will be covered by a trillion! Of sensors (that is one thousand billion). Curiously, this is exactly the same figure estimated at the end of the 90ies by DoCoMo.

In the words of HP Lab they will cost next to nothing and they will measure everything.

In perspective these sensors may be embedded in any objects and may be used to recognize any objects, people included.

All these sensors will provide a huge amount of data to supplement the already growing information base that everyday is becoming available. It is difficult to predict what new services and what new business will become possible, but I am sure we are in for some unexpected twist.

Get more information on what HP Labs are doing at the nanoscale:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2009/oct-dec/cense.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

Nuclear reactors are not something you fancy carrying around in your pocket. So it may sound strange reading that an American company, Widtronix www.widetronix.com/index.php , is offering you just that. The reactor is a small scale one indeed: the battery harvest electricity using a betavoltaics effect and can produce a very tiny current for as long as 25 years. Its applications are both in the military and in the medical sector.

Nuclear battery based on (safe) tritium isotope

The energy comes from the decay of tritium isotopes that creates high energy electrons. A thin layer of tritium (a hydrogen isotope) is sandwiched in silicon carbide layers. The technology is not new, actually it is 50 years old but it faded away because of the development of cheaper lithium ion batteries. However, the progress in semiconductor is now revamping the betavoltaics technology for its very long lasting characteristics couple with a high robustness, making it ideal for military and medical applications. Contructors may also be interested to power sensors embedded in roads and bridges.For these applications a different isotope would be better, like nickel (isotope 63): this will stretch the life of the battery to a 100 years.
A package as small as a 1 square centimetre and 2 millimetres thick provide about 25 nW of power. Very little, but enough to power a sensor.
A battery of this type does not come cheap: about 500$, that’s 20$ a year.

In the future we are going to see many many sensors and batteries are going to play a crucial role in their dissemination. Additionally we will be seeing a whole new branch of medicine involving embedded sensors and dispensers. These batteries may be one of the possible solutions (tritium beta radiation is safe). We will be seeing a big shift from drugs being a product to drugs becoming a service with continuous monitoring associated.

The increasing popularity of Augmented Reality apps for smart phone (which means, iPhone and Android: apps for Windows Mobile are still to come) is under the radar of our blog since a (quite) long time and, indeed, we have found that most of the apps available for download are focused on a small number of application fields.

According to a classification developed by Gary Hayes, augmented reality applications can be catalogued in 16 different business (we’d rather write service) models. The chart below is useful to understand which apps are more popular and profitable (or, whith a higher commercial value).

We believe that our of these 16 service models, we can pick up four or five main models which could be applied or involved in an AR service concept which a strong relationship with telecommunication and social network capabilities:

• Location layer
• Enhanced classified
• Personalized shopping  
• Recognition and Targeting
• Blended Brand

These models carry important features which can help us designing or conceiving an augmented reality driven application or a service which can involve different players in the ecosystems, with particular reference to small and medium enterprises, business, stores, accomodation and, generally, all the advertisers who would like to reach a wider and more personalized target.

An effective, personalized advertising content relies on the analysis and knowledge of the customers it wants to address. That means that enterprises should acquire relevant information about their potential customers’ profile in order to design and customize their messages and their offer.

An augmented reality application, which offers the ability to collect information of a specific context, can be the right place where users (consumers) meet enterprises and their products/services. But before doing that, enterprises should e helped to understand what actually a context is: because not only  it refers to a place with geographical coordinates; a context is also a representation of users’ digital life.

The opinions expressed by users in their social profiles, their like/dislike preferences, the community they subscribe, the stores they’re customers of… all these elements could be effectively analyzed and the results could be collected and aggregated in an AR app in order to provide a specific user with the information, the content and the advertising he actually needs and appreciate. Because these recommendations and suggestion may turn to decisions and, as a consequence, into purchases or subscriptions.

Digital Graffiti is a technique which allows to associate information virtually to any position and to visualize information location. It runs on a mobile device such as a PDA, mobile phone, smartphone, notebook or similar.

Compared with real graffiti on walls, digital graffiti exist only virtually. A digital graffito is associated to a geographical location.

A Digital Graffiti system consists of :

· the Digital Graffiti client application,

· a technique to determine the user’s current position

· the Digital Graffiti server and

· a technique for the wireless data transmission

The Digital Graffiti client application runs on a mobile device. The client application shows all digital graffiti which are visible for the user at his current position and match with his specified interests. A graffito is only visible if the user is within the graffito’s visibility area specified by its originator. The user can switch between a 2D map and a list representation. The map displays the visible digital graffiti at their virtual location. In both representations the user can select a graffito and, by a keystroke, load the associated content from the server. The content will be displayed. The client application also allows the user to create digital graffiti. He can make them visible for other users; he can edit or even delete them.

Google in July 2009 announced the idea to build a browser-based operating system, called Chrome OS.

Google Chrome OS (Operating System) is an open-source project to engage with partners, the open source community and developers, as with the Google Chrome browser: this means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions.

Chrome OS  is all about the web: the entire experience takes place within the browser, all applications are web applications and they live within the browser (this is good for security). Users do not have to install, manage and update programs.

Google Chrome OS will be ready for consumers in December next year.

“Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management said in his presentation, we’re reaching a perfect storm of converging trends where computers are behaving more like mobile devices, and phones are behaving more like small computers,” Google said in a statement in response to questions about how and when the two projects would merge. “Having two open source operating systems from Google provides both users and device manufacturers with more choice and helps contribute a wealth of new code to the open source community.”

Google wants to manage in his cloud all the data of his costumers… a new way to gather the digital life?

December will see the appearance of Avatar in theatres, a movie of James Cameron. However toys by Mattel representing the movie characters are already available in USA stores.

iTags packaging for the James Cameron Avatar characters

The toy may cost something like 11$ and it comes on a small tray. Pick up the tray and wave it in front of your PC webcam after having connected to the website provided with the toy,  www.avataritag.com.

What you will see on your computer screen is not yourself waving the tray but yourself waving a complicated control center that you can start to use. What you get depends on the toy you got but it is something that will engage you in a greater level of play.

Read the press release explaining the iTag:

  http://www.thefwoosh.com/2009/10/mattels-avatar-with-i-tag-technology

The technology being used comes from Total Immersion, www.t-immersion.com/, and is available since the year 2000. The webcam reads the information (represented by the tray) and converts it into images that are layered on the real world image recorded by the webcam.

It is just another application of augmented reality, a real hit (at least in headlines) in 2009. We have seen applications from Yelp, www.yelp.com  , that provide information on restaurants you are looking at through your smart phone. We have also seen a growing interest from advertisers and companies like Nike, McDonalds, Procter and Gamble, Burger King are trying out some sort of augmented reality for their offerings.
According to Davis, the director of Total Immersion, the augmented reality applied to the Avatar characters is a “digital accessory” and he bets we are going to see plenty of these next year. The cell phone promises to be the ideal gateway to access augmented reality.

It remains to be seen, of course, if this is just a fad or the start of a real business. My bet is on the latter. Moreover I think that this technology is the ideal one to foster the creation of ecosystems on products and objects in general. It is a concrete application of the Mash ups paradigm.

HP Labs has announced (New York Times Nov. 18, 2009) a project called “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (CeNSE): it is a R&D program to build a planet-wide sensing network, using millions and millions of tiny, cheap and sensitive detectors (e.g. accelerometers that detect motion and vibrations, ones for light, temperature, barometric pressure, airflow and humidity) [1]. CeNSE is another effort in building a pervasive infrastructure gathering and processing huge amounts of data.

We see a general consensus that data around the world will continue growing and everything will become more instrumented and interconnected (Internet of Things). Most probably, this trend will bring also the need of innovative computational and networking paradigms – i.e. enhanced with cognitive capabilities capable of spotting patterns in huge amount of data, to analyze, route and integrate information real-time and to deal with stochastic behaviors typical of complex, real environments. A question arises: are current computing paradigms ready to face these challenges?

In the direction of inventing brain-inspired computational paradigms (facing challenges of a pervasive Internet of Things), a recent press released [2] announced that scientists, at IBM Research, in collaboration with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have performed for the first time a near real-time cortical simulation of the brain (with a scale of 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses).  Specifically, in collaboration with Stanford University, IBM has developed an algorithm (Blue Matter) [3] exploiting the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture in order to map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain. Final goal is building brain-like computing systems based on a compact, low-power chip using nanotechnology and advances in phase change memory and magnetic tunnel junctions.

On the other hand, as Roberto pointed out in November 21st post, new results seem indicating that some elementary brain-like functions, e.g. counting, may be achieved with only a hundred neurons, that advanced thinking can be done with a greater but still limited number of neurons and that even consciousness might be generated (in principle) with smaller neuronal networks than billions spiking neurons! Nature is amazing.

Reading that I am more and more convinced that a clear understanding of how the brain works requires considering higher level models than the ones at the neuronal level. This is what Nobel Prize Prof. Brian D. Josephson argues in [4]. It looks reasonable to think that subtleties of brain such as consciousness have as basis higher level forms of description than ones at the neuronal level, whose role might be limited to justifying the higher levels. For example, Prof. J. Cowan (University of Chicago) discovered that neural activity could be effectively described as an analog of a chemical reaction-diffusion process (see my last post), and that at rest, it is statistically similar to Brownian motion; such description ignore, in turn, first-principles derivation from very basic physical laws. Nature has jumped ahead of us: once we become aware of these generic biological models we can probably make use of them to progress our understanding of the brain.

This approach leaves main questions open: What are these generic models? How do hierarchies of models emerge (and concatenate) in the brain? How are higher level models justified by the neuronal level? And beyond that, at the very basic physical laws?

References

1. http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=11423&m=54146
2. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/28842.wss#release
3. http://www.modha.org/C2S2/2009/11182009/content/MICCAI_BlueMatter.pdf
4. http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/mm/articles/cognition.html

Quantum Computers have been a dream for a few physicists and mathematicians and an intriguing name for most of us.

The story in itself is not too difficult to understand, if we accept something that looks like the truth: in normal computers you are using elements that can be associated with two values, one and zero. If you want to perform logic operations you can manipulate these values to get a result. It turns out that you can also use logic operations to do arithmetics and many more things, like compressing a signal or describing an image.

If rather than using a circuit that can flip-flop between one and zero, depending on the input signal and the structure of the circuit, you happen to have an element that can assume an unlimited number of values it is obvious that you have got something much more powerful. Actually the situation is not as clean as it looks. In a computer element, the “bit” is either at the 0 or 1 value. In a quantum computer, so goes the theory, the “q-bit” is at the same time both at 0 and 1 value. It gets more complicated, sorry. In a normal computer when you have 3 bits you can use them to represent any 8 numbers (000 to 111). In a quantum computer the 3 q-bits are “entangled”, that is they constitute a single unity: anything happening at one q-bit instantaneously happens to the others. So if you have 3 q-bits there are 8 values that are concurrently present. By interacting with it (using a laser) you collapse the range of values to a specific one but, and here is the amazing thing, you are actually performing the operation on all the possible values, at the same time.

Whilst the theory is now well progressed and, in theory, we know how to manipulate q-bits, in practice we do not know how to do it and get a sensible result.

Theoreticians, however, have worked hard and have demonstrated several interesting theorems, like the one that with a quantum computer it would be possible to solve factorialization in a blink of an eye.

Factorialization (finding the factors of a number) is a very lenghty process with current computers and this is exploited in cryptography. The keys are made up of two very large prime numbers and the resulting number (the multiplication of the two primes) is used to encript the information. Unless you know the factors there is no way to decrypt the information and finding the factors would take a computer many many years.

If a quantum computer were available the factorialization will be easy and with that will go our cryptographic method.

So far scientists have been able to develop structures containing up to 28 q-bits and this is no small feat (7 q-bits would be enough to work on the factorialization problem). However, no one has been able to create a computer using the q-bit. No one till now.

Researchers at NIST, in Boulder Colorado, have published a paper , Nature Physics, DOI: 10.1038/nphys1453 , reporting their success in building a quantum computer based on 2 q-bits. However, the result obtained in performing 160 different programs on the q-bits has got just over 70% of accuracy. This is not sufficient since once you have to use several q-bits in a row (as you would for factorialising a number) the end result will be a complete nonsense.

Hence, the progress made has made possible to see the horizon (somthing that was not possible before) of the solution but we do not know how long it will take to get there. Someone is actually talking in terms of a rainbow, rather than an horizon: as you get closer it moves away from you. Bankers and military forces can still trust their encrypted data for a while.

If you want to get a bit more of information on this result but you do not feel like getting the full story on the (highly) technical paper take at look at:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18154-first-universal-programmable-quantum-computer-unveiled.html