It has been believed for the last 50 years that our “human” brain can be so smart because it has over 85 billion neurons intricately connected. It is this extremely complex web that gives rise to intelligence and consciousness.

Newer studies carried out by researchers at the Queen Mary University in London are now pointing out that tiny brains, such as the ones of insects may be as smart as much bigger brains.

Testing the IQ of a Honeybee

Queen Mary’s researchers have shown that honeybees can count, categorize similar objects like dogs or human faces, understand the concept of “same” and “different” and perceive what is symmetric and what is asymmetrical. Now that is not like reading Goethe but it is a level of smartness that was not believed possible in such small brains. A honeybee brain weighs only 1 milligram (compare it with our 1.3-1.4 kg or a whale, 9 kg) and has less than a million neurons.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091117124009.htm

Researchers have found that the size increase of a brain let it work with more precision, higher sensitivity and so on. Clearly it helps in being smarter. However, bigger brains are also bigger because they need to operate bigger bodies, they have more circuits but they are repeating one another. They can control more pieces but not necessarily they do that in a smarter way. According to researchers a bigger brain compares to a bigger hard drive but does not necessarily stands for a better processor.

The new results seem to indicate that counting may be achieved with about a hundred neurons, advanced thinking can be done with a greater but still limited number of neurons and even consciousness can be generated with small neural circuits (as little as a few thousands according to their research): are honeybee conscious? We do not know, yet. But this is quite a change from the assured NO we used to respond to that question.

The results from this study, if confirmed, is important because we almost have the technology to create, in silicon, a honeybee sized brain. The target is to reach that kind of complexity by 2011.

If the hardware is sufficient, than the question is about the software to exploit it. If we find out the way honeybees can distinguish faces and categorize objects in the environment we could replicate that to distinguish images much better than today. iPhoto 9 is attempting (and basically failing) to do smart face recognition. May be iPhoto 10, embedding a bit of honeybee savvy may succeed.

At the European Parliament there is a group of key politicians who served in various capacity at the local Governments throughout Europe. Their job is to leverage on their experience to propose actions for the European Parliament. It is called Reflection Group, http://www.reflectiongroup.eu/ .

I have been asked to speak at one of their meeting in Brussel on Thursday, November 19^th. The theme was Information and Communications technology implication in the 2020-2030 timeframe. I was there as a futurologist (that’s their definition of what I am doing), and in good company. With me were the Director of Google Europe and the Director of Research and Development of Telefonica Spain.

Presentations were quite in synch, although the three speakers was meeting there for the first time (I understand that was intended, with the goal of getting different perspectives). These the main “visions”:

a) basically unlimited bandwidth both fix and mobile, provided at a flat rate;

b) data available for free by a variety of sources. Information embedded in services and interactions (augmented reality is the normal way of presenting information);

c) privacy is a personal decision and follows from the complete control over data directly and indirectly created.

d) any physical object in part of the web, connected to the Internet in various way.

e) most innovation is created by small enterprises and individuals, all over the world. It is made viable to the market by few big overreaching organisations; infrastructures at Country level are crucial to make innovation reality in that Country.

Interesting the discussion. Among the things that I felt notable

-       the understanding of the lock in created by an emphases (strict regulation) on privacy and the agreement that Europe should change the approach by ensuring control, rather than blocking access to private information, but the political difficulty in changing direction and lowering, at least at perception level on the public audience, the attention on privacy;

-       the importance of education and specifically in the areas of creating an innovation attitude (and a conducing environment)and in entrepreneurship. It is clear that most educated people in the long term (20 years from now) will be in Asia and Latin America. Those, therefore, are the geographical areas that are likely to have the most innovative resources, but the challenge for Europe lies more in leveraging on these resources than in improving education locally (although this remains a fundamental issue).

-       Infrastructures are crucial, they will be pervasive and will provide capacity exceeding demands, but who is going to build them? What should be the role of the regulation in fostering the development of these infrastructures, should they be a private or joint public and private endeavour?

If you are a fan of Karaoke you’ll love to know that Virgilio has openend up a (free) service to fuel your passion. http://singring.virgilio.it/karaoke.html

SingRing, by Virgilio

There are million of karaoke fans in Italy and this is surely going to please them. You select a title, you see the lirics words and you hear the song sung by the artist plus the accompanying music. Using two slide controls you can dim the voice of the artist or the music soundtrack to compelte silent and add your voice or your music. I like this latter part. I personally would love to accompanying Madonna with my piano…

Now, the question is: this nice and free service (revenues are created by pasting ads on the page) could benefit from its opening into an ecosystem?

As an example, I can imagine that other companies may be willing to piggy back on this service to provide additional features, such as showing the sheet music, providing different soudtracks and arrangements, linking some parts of the lirics to multimedia content. There are probably many more that I cannot foresee but you may probably help me out.

What would you as a company do to exploit the interesting market being created by this service, if only Virgilio would open up the access to your “ingenious” service? And, what would you, as a user, like to see to improve this service?

Wing mirrors have improved (slightly) in the last fifteen years by embedding a motor letting the driver to position them to fit his view. Some top of the line cars offer a screen to replace the mirror where the image is not reflected but captured by a camera.

Now a British company, Light Blue Optics , has developed a tiny holographic projector that can be embedded in the wing mirror to overlay information on the reflected image. Notice that this holographic projector is not producing a hologram but uses constructive and destructive interference of light to create the overlaid image. The technology allows the creation of a smaller unit to project the image, to give a comparison the unit is 10 times smaller than the one used today by BMW series 5 to provide Head Up Display (HUD) projection on the windshield.

Wing Mirror with Augmented reality

For more info take a look at:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=11268&m=430

HUD and now this Holographic projector are basically mash ups of information. So far there is no talking on opening up this mash ups as it happens for Google maps but I do wonder what the future has in store. Clearly in the car there is the problem of avoiding to overwhelm the driver with information and most important avoiding distracting her. However, I can imagine some ingenious service provider to come up with pertinent information to actually help the driver based on her habits, resulting in increasing safety. Of course, as it is the case today with on car television we can imagine that once the car is still the driver can use this overlaid information to get more value from the surrounding environment.

What I see in the future is a multiplication of screens, in various formats and shapes, that will be used as flexible windows for augmenting the reality around us.

Actually, you may want to take a look at

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/layar_tells_cnn_augmented_reality_will_be_second_o.php

where Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald the cofounder of Layar, is forecasting that augmented reality will be the second most popular consumer service just after voice for cell phones in the coming years. Some people don’t buy into that, saying that many augmented reality applications today don’t work well at all.

In my humble opinion I would tend to support this vision. I can see mashing up of ads in a smart and non intrusive way as something acceptable to users and I can see a variety of services of interest to the “mass market of one”, meaning information targeted to that specific person. If technology exists to enable a demand and the demand is actually there I am sure that technology will get better and better.

Indeed Nature is full of patterns: imagine the colorful patterns found on tropical fish or the beautifully complex patterns on seashells. Patterns of the same type may look alike, but they never are exactly the same and noise is the reason.

Alan Turing proposed (in 1952) the reaction-diffusion principle [1] to model biological pattern formation, and morphogenesis (cellular differentiation in early biological development). Diffusion is the relatively slow process employed by nature to equalize concentrations, for example chemicals components; reaction is a faster inhibitory local effect between two components. The overall system is constantly in search of a stable (activator – inhibitor) equilibrium: if the system is unable to find such equilibrium, it will be fully dynamic (e.g. chaos and constant transitions); if the system is able to find a stable state, it can create a certain pattern. What is amazing is that Turing’s model is capable of describing many natural patterns.

Reaction-diffusion systems have some very interesting properties for possible application in future networks engineering, pervasive computing and artificial intelligence. Imagine, for example, a network of nodes each of which performing some type of computation (reaction) and being linked to other nodes by some communications protocol (diffusion). They create a kind of ecosystem whose emerging intelligence may be symbolic and/or structural. As another example, reaction-diffusion could be used to enable highly complex ecosystems of ‘minimally cognitive’ objects [2]: actually, in neuroscience, they consider plausible that reaction-diffusion processes can mimic the formation of synaptic contacts between neurons and computational meshes [3], [4].

Simulations of this reaction-diffusion phenomenon are very fascinating. I’d like offering a short movie showing a simulation that I’ve made this morning using the Breve environment.

[local /files/2009/11/rd-simulation.wmv RD simulation]

Imagine it as a cube of nano/micro-devices/nodes interacting with each other through reaction-diffusion and creating dynamic computational meshes or synaptic patterns. 

References

[1] A.M. Turing, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., B237, 37-72 (1952).

[2] http://alifexi.alife.org/papers/ALIFExi_pp142-149.pdf

[3] http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2202-9-S1-P85.pdf

[4] http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0211283v2

Technology is ripe to deliver augmented reality to the mass market. We have posted a number of news in this blog and we will keep monitoring the evolution since it is one of the most promising area where Telecommunications Operators can provide an ecosystem fabric to grow the offer and meet, create demand.

This week ISMAR09, the International Symposium on Mixed and augmented reality taking place in Orlando, is showcasing some new advances in this area.

I briefly report on a few of them but you should take a look at the videoclips available at

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24253/?a=f to get a real feeling of them.

A key “underlying” aspect of Augmented Reality is the possibility to track reality and the interaction with it. It is obviously impossible to add information to something if a) you do not know what that “something” is and b) you do not know when and what the potential user wants.

Today GPS is the key technology to identify the user position although for many applications this is not sufficient. Most of augmented reality in the future will involve a direct manipulation of the object by the user. In this area HIT Lab is presenting a way to manipulate 3D objects. See the clip. In another research project, carried out at the Oxford University a software has been developed to support through computer vision multiple objects recognition.

Another issue of augmented reality is that the ideal would be to have the creation of a real life reality but what you have with augmented reality is a mixture of real physical environment with an overlaid virtual one. The problem is that the characteristic of the real one are completely different from the virtual one (e.g. you cannot walk through a car but you can see your hand going through the virtual driver graciously created through augmented reality).

A research carried out at the Columbia university aims at creating a more real augmented reality, a space where virtual overlaid is having similar characteristics to the real one. This has some nice applications in video games but it will have applications in many other areas as well.

Take a look at the video clip.

The complexities of rendering a virtual space onto a real one are such that in most cases the overlapping is based on a pre-formatted set of information. A research presented by the Georgia Institute of Technology Computational Perception Laboratory shows how to use real time information in the overlaid space. The example provided consists of adding dynamic, real-time information, such as traffic or weather, to aerial Earth from Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earths, turning these mapping applications into an impressive augmented environment.

We have posted some time ago the news on a research of a Washington University team aiming at creating a contact lens to provide augmented reality, http://www.blog.telecomfuturecentre.it/2009/09/11/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens/

Now, that same team has a working prototype that is being experimented on a rabbit.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18146-contact-lenses-to-get-builtin-virtual-graphics.html

It will be presented at Biocas 2009, Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference that will take place in Beijing at the end of this month.

Lens doubling up as LCD screen, experimented on rabbits

The lens embeds the LCD screen, the processing uniti and the radio receiver. All components are so tiny that they are not obscuring sight. The effect on the viewer would be an image that is floating in front of him at a distance that can be regulated between 50 and 100 centimetres, ideal for providing information overlaied on the backdrop image.

Powering the lens remains a crucial issue. Today the lens is being powered by an antenna connected to it but the team of researchers is aiming at using the energy of the signal being sent to power the lens. The goal is to have the lens connecting wirelessly with a cell phone receiving both signals and energy from it.

The commercial availability for humans is still a few years away but years go by very fast, so it is about time to queue up.

YouTube is receiving every minute 20 hours worth of video. Facebook receives 1.6 million videoclips a month and 1 billion photos. That’s a lot, by any standard.

Imagine the amount of bandwidth that is being used, taking into account that for any upload you may consider at least 10 viewers accessing that content.

This increase in bandwidth usage is an everyday experience of Network Operators that need to invest money to keep their network viable, although there is no corresponding increase in revenues. It is one of the paradoxes pointed out in the nice series published on this blog by Roberto Minerva. If you misses that, check it out.

Now YouTube is getting ready to host and disseminated HD video.  http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10396826-2.html

The number of HD cameras in consumer market has grown significantly, and we moght expect that in the next decade we would only be able to buy HD videocameras. At the same time bandwidth availability is increasing and all Operators will soon find themselves struggling to provide higher bandwidth to their clients. In South Korea the government is looking at 1 Gbps by 2012 as in Europe we are discussing on when and if to provide 50 Mbps.

Television screens will be HD only in the next decade (the ones you buy, for a total replacement we can estimate 2015 as a reasonable date) and as television embed computer and internet connection YouTube is getting ready to be a big player.

I expect a real revolution in terms of players AND habits in the area of television with the television set becoming the aggregator of a vast ecosystem spanning augmented reality, education, shopping, health care, social presence and, of course, entertainment.

I have run across some claims to set up rules in an ecosystem so that the players can preserve their advantage. It goes a little like this: I love to be part of the ecosystem but I want to preserve my strenght in the market, as an example I am not prepared to disclose my data because on those I build my competitive advantage.

This is understandable and it is just fair. But we need to reflect on this position in terms of being it in line with the ecosystem concept.

In an ecosystem a player does not own resources, it tries to control them outside of any contractual obligation. Take as an example the savanna ecosystem: a gazelle does not own the grass, rather its evolutionary story has equipped it with a digestive apparatus containing bacteria that can digest cellulose. Lions do not and hence cannot eat grass. This does not mean that gazzelles own the grass whilst lions do not. We might say that gazelle can benefit from grass.

At the same time, the fact that in the savanna ecosystem there are some players eating grass (and thus transforming energy contained in sugar into energy contained in proteins) makes it possible to other players to thrive (by eating the proteins graciusly provided by the grazers). A balance is achieved in the ecosystem through a mutual limitations of players, again not achieved through contracts but as a characteristics of that ecosystem.

The keypoint of ecosystem is that they create value throough the existence of the many players playing a loosely connected game. The “connected” part is the key. In natural ecosystem the connectivity is spatial, that is the presence of the players in the same space. The vicinity is what makes interaction possible.

In markets vicinity has always played a crucial point as well. The availability of more efficient distribution chains expanded the market space providing more reach to interactions. Communications is annihilating distances and as a matter of fact is creating global markets where interaction is no longer hampered by distance.

This fact has enabled the ecosytems in terms of interactions among players. The fact that the transaction cost (including the production, distribution, showcasing costs) has decreased drammatically created a much larger number of players and in turn this variety enriched the ecosystems.

Biz Ecosystems are therefore value creators but the exchange of value happens within value chains. Any enterprise belong to a value chain and is facing the challenge of deciding what to share freely in an ecosystem and what to keep under its ownership, knowing that by sharing it will increase the ecosystem value, but at the same time such a value will be out for grab by potentially any player in the ecosystem and by keeping under its ownership it guarantees a control on the marketplace.  

The challenge today is that ecosystems are born, as I said, out of lower transaction cost and annihilation of distance. Companies have very little saying in this. They may opt to be part of such ecosystems or stay out of them. But as market value increases in ecosystems they may find themselves to be cut out of the marketplace. On the contrary, they may stimulate the growth of ecosystems (and the related market value) by contributing “freely” to the ecosystem, e.g. sharing some of their previously owned data. The gamble is twofold: by increasing the value of the ecosystem they can hope to get a share of that value (through the value chain they are in) that is greater than the loss of value they sustain by releasing their previously owned data, and by participating in an ecosystem they can benefit from the shift of the marketplace previously attached to single value chain and now existing in between value chains.

 As electronics shrinks, the power applied to the various components decreases. This is good in terms of energy consumption but the signal gets so weak to be almost indistinguishable from the background noise. This is considered by some as the brick wall that will stop the Moore’s law.

It is therefore interesting to note that researchers at the ”Instituto Tecnologico” of Buenos Aires, Argentina, have looked at how Nature copes with noise in signal transmission in living beings to solve the problem.

Apparently, noise can be used to reinforce the signal, rather than swamping it. A phenomenon known as stochastic resonance by physicists is being used by neurons to do just that.

Stochastic resonance to reinforce signal leveraging on noise

The Buenos Aires researchers are proposing to use this technique to improve storage. They demonstrated the concept using two resonators and showing that in effect the signal is reinforced by the ambient noise. Now the problem is to have these resonators working at the nanoscale of the storage cells components.

For more details take a look at:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24366/?a=f

What interested me is the fact that again and again as we are confronted with a barrier that is impossible to overcome…some researchers find a way around it. I am pretty confident that we will see the continuous evolution predicted by Moore to hold for the next decade (up to 2015/2016 scientists have the solutions required).

What is interesting, of course, is that already today we are seeing that the increased performances have brought us beyond some thresholds where biz rules change and as the increase in performance (and the related decrease in cost) continues in the next decade we will see many more thresholds being overcome and more and more changes in the rule of the game.