Researchers of the University of Toronto have found a way to detect the distance of single elements in an image taken by a camera and using software with an appropriate hardware can create images where all components are in-focus.

On the left the photo with all details in focus, on the right the same photo taken with a normal camera

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/uot-ov050410.php

According to prof. Keigo Iizuka,

“the intensity of a point source decays with the inverse square of the distance of propagation. This variation with distance has proven to be large enough to provide depth mapping with high resolution. What’s more, by using two point sources at different locations, the distance of the object can be determined without the influence of its surface texture.”

The camera, still in a prototype stage, can find application in several areas like medicine when a surgical operation using laparoscopie is performed. Today the surgeon has to continually adjust the focus to see the various parts in the operating field, using a camera with this technology the surgeon could see every details at the same time. Another application may be a television shooting where you want to have both the singer and the orchestra playing in the back in focus.

Get more examples of pictures that become possible with this technology at:

http://www.engineering.utoronto.ca/Assets/AppSci+Digital+Assets/press_releases/Press_Release_Omni_Focus.zip

Notice however that in general photography you do NOT want to have everything in focus. Actually several photographers love high aperture lenses just to put out of focus certain parts of the picture as a way to isolate those parts that really have to draw attention.

It is interesting, anyhow, to see how software and hardware are progressively meerged to provide solutions that are impossible in a single technology domain.

I also see connectivity as the next frontier in digital photography where the integration of hardware, software and connectivity will enhance functionalities and change the way we look at photography. In my mind, the picture of the future will be but a link to an Internet space where that photo will come to life.

Think back 10 years ago: we did not have multi touch screens (nor single touch screen in consumer market), screens were mostly based on CRT and were bulky, voice and gesture recognition were for demos in labs.

What will be interfaces ten years from now? Take a look at:

http://blog.radioactiveyak.com/2010/08/future-of-mobile-invisible-connected.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheRadioactiveYak+(The+Radioactive+Yak)

The future of Glasses? Embedding a telecamera!

where Reto Meier, an Android developer for Google, take his shot to the future of interfaces. According ot Meier in 5 years time picoprojector will be as ubiquitous as cameras are today in cell phones, and this should not come as a surprise since there are already a few models having an embedded projector. Additionally he expects to see flexible displays in the consumer market. I am in synch with this as well and I feel these area will be driven first by eBook readers and then, more substantially but in the last part of this decade, by the replacement of labels on packages by screens to change the look and feel of products.

In ten years time Reto foresees transparent LCD patches that can be applied to glasses bringing augmented reality to everyday life. No more need for bulky glasses embedding a screen and a camera, just a transparent layer on normal lenses. That will be good for those of us wearing glasses but what about those who are fortunate enough not to need glasses (and there will be even more since laser surgery will probably displace the use of glasses in most situations…)?

Well for them there is a need to wait for ten more years. In twenty years time, according to Reto, contact lenses doubling up as screens will be available.  I wonder, however, what will be the acceptance of these lenses in the mass market. There are also technical issues (and biotechnical ones) like the powering of those lenses and the dissipation of heat.

Interactions will be served by much better gesture and voice recognition but Reto foresees in the next decade the coming of brain controlled interface. Here the issue is if some means will be found to intercept brain electrical activity without the use of cumbersome apparatus and without having to go under surgery to place electrode in the brain, somthing, I bet, very few people would look forward to.

Personally I do not see this prediction turning into reality, at least in the mass market. I can imagine a few sectors (like people with disabilities) interested in this kind of interface but these are niches and not mainstream.

It is however true that what used to be a niche in the past has become mass market. Still…I am not buying into it.

Try drawing with your finger a circle in the air, just in front of your eyes. Probably will not be that of Giotto, but that’s okay too. Then, in the ideal upper semicircle, draw two dots. Immediately below, mark a small vertical line and below a small moon with the concavity upwards. Ok, you’ve just drawn a smiling face! No, it’s not a joke. I just wanted to invite you in observing how it’s possible, and quite easy, to paint on air using imagination, even if that sketch will remain etched over the imaginary 2D space created by your mind only for a few seconds. That’s the basic concept behind Imaginary Interfaces, a research project developed at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, that investigates the question: “To what extent can users interact spatially with a user interface that exists only in their imagination?”.

In short, the idea is to bring spatial interaction to screen-less devices and let users to create and manipulate objects in an invisible bi-dimensional plan that takes place in their imagination. Unlike for example the Sixth Sense projection-based solution, here there is no a physical interaction plane. Users start invoking a shared white-board app by forming an ‘L’ with their index finger and thumb. By leveraging visual short-term memory, they can in this way draw with the other hand in the resulting space. How many times did you give street directions to a friend via cell phone? Imagine if you could be able to clarify spatial information during a conversation through a little sketch and give to your friend a hand-made map to be edited on his phone. Useful, don’t you think? This is just an example, but I believe such a technology can have interesting use cases.

Here the paper presented at the 2010 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) and the related demo video:

http://www.seangustafson.com/static/papers/2010-UIST-Gustafson-ImaginaryInterfaces.pdf

Digital textbooks are a reality in terms of availability, at least in countries like the USA. CafeScribe is a point in case:

In CafeScribe there are over 10,000 text books available and more are added every day. SOme of them are for sale, other are available for free. Several schools in the USA have adopted digital textbooks but they ae far from being a substitution to paper textbook. According to some recent posts on digital textbooks,

tokao.com/2010/08/18/text-books-in-electronic-format-cafescribe/ ,

students prefer paper books (74% of them in the USA when given a choice go for paper). Teachers have indicated that digital books foster social learning better, they allow the sharing of notes (CafeScribe is an example), but the devices to read them are not yet perfect. eBook readers, like Kindle, do not support colour, iPad costs too much for the average student. So far most schools that have adopted eBooks (or are promting students to adopt them like the New York University that sends the link to the digital textbooks to be used in classes) are suggesting to read them on PC and laptops.

By 2014 the adoption rate in the USA should reach 20% (1 out of 5 textbooks will be bought and read in digital form).

My feeling is that we will see the usual curve of adoption, starting slowly and then taking over. By the end of this decade most textbooks, in many countries, Italy included, will be digital. That will mirror a different approach to teaching and will have significant implication on the way we learn through out our life. I see a tremendous opportunity for new companies to become lifetime tutor and a new business of knowledge management to develop.

In his book “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age”, C. Shirky argues that “the wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource, and lets us design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource”.

http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world.html

Indeed the diffusion of wireless communications and the ubiquitous availability of miniaturized devices (with growing processing and storage capabilities) is likely to change social paradigms through an highly connected world.  A limitless variety of (real/virtual) objects with embedded wireless communication capabilities will be able to receive, process and transmit information to and from other devices (of humans and machines) and (real/virtual) objects through omni-pervasive autonomic networks.

So in the future we’ll live in a highly interconnected environment which is between real and virtual worlds: our lives activities will be carried out by exploiting the potentiality of an omni-pervasive network interconnecting not only people, but also virtual objects (clones of your mobile phone or PC on the cloud, any pieces of s/w as a service, applications, etc.) and real objects real mobile phone or PC, any kind of electronics devices, sensor/actuator, any physical object, etc).

This evolution will also integrate Social Networks and Internet of Objects realms enabling the development of new ecosystems around real/virtual objects, maybe even moving towards decentralised micro-manufacturing models.

Suppose you invent a concept of a real object and you wish to build it: you start sketching it and then you can forward the preliminary electronic sketch to an expert designer (that you have discovered with your social network tools). He produces a detailed electronic design. Then you have discovered (still on the network) that a SME (or more than one, or some friend of yours) can build that object, so you forward them the detailed design for the manufacturing phase. At the end, the produced real object can be augmented with the information about its features and the development process (maybe creating also a virtual clone of it that can live and be updated on the Cloud), for example: the specifications, who had the concept idea, who produced the (detailed) designed, who produced and assembled it.  Then, you may wish to sell it over the cyber-market (the design or the real object or both): your social networking tool may help you also in doing that.

This paper provides further examples about combining Social Networks and the Internet of Things:

http://www.im.ethz.ch/publications/thingstwitter_ciot2010/

In general, I think that (to put forward this vision) one of the most promising area we need to investigate is how Social Networking tools can take advantage of key functionalities/services of underneath (autonomic) pervasive networks (and viceversa), for example certified discovery (of people and machine/objects) and message routing (virally, towards humans and machines/objects).

The end of the Moore’s La for storage is not in sight yet. Researchers at the Tohuku University in Japan have announced on Applied Physics Letters article (it may be requested by sending the request to: jbardi@aip.org ) the creation of a mechanism allowing the storage on ferromagnetic media (hard disk…) with a density of 4Tb per square inch, that is 8 times as much as the present highest storage density.

That means that you would be able to accomodate inside your cell phone 500 GB o of data.  But this is not the end: Seagate is working to achieve a density of 50 Tb per square inch, that would translate into 6,000 GB in your cell phone!

Are 6 TB too tiny? Don’t worry. Colossal Storage research initiative, http://colossalstorage.net/spintronics.htm , is there to help. They are targeting a 3.5 inch hard disk with a capacity of 1.2 PB, that is 1,200,000 GB, enough to store the genome of the population of Italy.

Spintronic technology for huge storage capacity

This technology is very interesting but it is unlikely, I believe, to displace the flash memory since this is less energy hungry and intrinsecally more robost, therefore better fitting usage in a mobile device.

We are however ib sigh of a abundance of storage capacity that will steer interest towards new architectures where data are really in the devices and protocols will have to be created to exploit this edge based storage with limited involvement of the core network. Indeed the major hurdle towards a storage cloud at the edges is the energy consumption in the devices. As soon as this issue will be solved we will see the emergence of a completely different network paradigm where the convergence of autonomic systems, massive distributed data bases, distributed ownership control  will change the rules of the game.

Running a supermarket at the center of New York City is not an easy task. The high cost rent of NYC real estate properties and limited selections of products due to insufficient amount of spaces have plagued retailers frequently. FreshDirect, an online supermarket based in NYC, capitalizes on the wonder of technology and overcomes the difficulties of high rent and limited selections of products.

Firstly, the company focuses its business only in NYC and its neighboring areas. In order to lower the cost of rent, this online supermarket rents a huge warehouse with the size of five football fields in the industrial zone at Queens. This huge warehouse enables the company to offer a selection of products five times more in comparison with that of its main competitors at NYC. In addition, the location at lower rent industrial region helps the company to save considerably in terms of rent expenses.

Secondly, the company manages to maintain the freshness of its products. As for freshness, consider that while the average grocer may have seven to nine days of seafood inventory, FreshDirect’s seafood stock turns each day. Stock is typically purchased direct from the docks the morning of delivery in order to fulfill orders placed the prior night. The firm buys what it sells and shoplifting can’t happen through a website, so loss from waste and theft plummets.

Thirdly, the extra expenses of FreshDirect are low in comparison to traditional grcery shops. The company does not have to install the money and energy sucking open-air refrigerators since all customers purchase online. Moreover, shoplifting does not happen at FreshDirect because thieves cannot steal away products from an online storefront.

Nowadays, the service of Freshdirect is so popular that many apartments at NYC are redesigned with common refrigerators in order to receive delivery from FreshDirect when customers are not home. In the past five years, the number of grocery stores has decreased nearly 30% since the presence of Freshdirect.

Internet is likely to have a great impact on our future daily lives progressively becoming inherent part of strategic areas such as communications, electricity control, transportation, utilities and resources management, healthcare, manufacturing, commerce, etc. In the future, any smart object with embedded communication capabilities will be able to receive and transmit information to and from other devices (of humans and machines) and objects through omni-pervasive communication networks. And this, maybe, will enable what Clay Shirky calls (in his the new book) “Cognitive Surplus”. But, my question is will/could these networks have some cognitive features inherently hardwired?

The first definition of a cognitive network (rather than from the cognitive radio community) comes perhaps from D. Clark [1] “a network that can assemble itself given high level instructions, reassemble itself as requirements change, automatically discover when something goes wrong, and automatically fix a detected problem or explain why it cannot do so”.

In [2] a more recent definition is given: “a cognitive network is a network with a cognitive process that can perceive current network conditions, and then plan, decide and act on those conditions. The network can learn from these adaptations and use them to make future decisions, all while taking into account end-to-end goals.”

Looking at these definitions, one might expect that to make a network cognitive it is necessary to exploit a knowledge plane or some cognitive processes (for instance, based on reasoning, learning, etc). Well, a quite large international community is working by adopting this perspective. As usual, there are still the dilemma questions on costs/benefits: what is the “price of the feature”? What are the (capex, opex) savings?

I’m organizing a networking session at ICT2010 about this.

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/cf/ict2010/item-display.cfm?id=3025

I’ll tell you about the results.

On the other hand, it sounds also reasonable to observe that the increasing complexity of future networks (as a consequence of pervasive connectivity, diffusion of more and more powerful mobile devices, smart objects/things interconnections, etc) will results in a cognitive-like behaviour, almost spontaneously.

It’s rather easy to understand that the “networks within networks” in human brain are the results of a long evolution. It is also well known that adaptation is the heart of this evolution: a brain, coming from millions of years of evolution, is able to perform complex cognitive processes assuring human adaptability and survivability. Whatever will be the level of abstraction one may want to consider to model the brain (e.g., multi-level networks of molecules, organelle, neurons…), in any case, there are some basic hard-wired rules embedded into the interconnection capability of the said abstraction elements (at the different levels). This is observed also in most animals: they seem to have a set of rules that they follow under certain circumstances, sort of a hard-wired stimulus/response primitives. Then, as a result of interactions between group members, (for example ants) the community as a whole eventually will exhibit patterns called “emergent behaviours”. In [3] some examples of bio-inspired primitives are reported: integrity and variability, positive feedback, negative feedback, response thresholds, leadership, redundancy, synchronisation and selfishness. This is just an example. For humans, for example, this set of hard-wired behaviors is very small, and generally plays little role in day-to-day existence. But now we’re talking about network enabling human collective intelligence and new related ecosystems.

So, my point is: which is the way to look at those “rules” to be embedded into nodes, devices and objects of future networks (maybe at the different interacting levels) in order to allow a spontaneous emergence of (certain desired) cognitive-like behaviours?

By the way, this approach prefers considering cognition as a side-effect emergence in future networks, rather than adopting a traditional top-down formal design.

[1] D. D. Clark, C. Partridge, J. C. Ramming, and J. T. Wroclawski, “A knowledge plane for the Internet,” in Proc. of SIGCOMM ’03;

[2] R. W. Thomas, L. A. DaSilva, and A. B. Mackenzie, “Cognitive networks,” in Proc. of IEEE DySPAN 2005, pp. 352–360, Nov. 2005;

[3] D. J. T. Sumpter. The principles of collective animal behaviour. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London, 361:5–22, 2006.

Our brain is made up of approximately 100 billion neurons, nerve cells which can gather and transmit electrochemical signals over long distances, up to a few meters, passing messages one another. The use of electroencephalography, a measure of brain waves, dates back to 1848 with the first attempts to detect electrical signals in the nervous system. In the 1870s and 1880s Richard Canton started first experiments using the galvanometer for revealing the electrical activity in a monkey’s brain. It took nearly half a century to pass from animals to humans and in 1924 Hans Berger tested the use of the galvanometer for recording electrical activities in the human brain. But it’s only been within the last 40 years that non-invasive electroencephalography to read the neural activity has been used to explore brain computer interfaces.
In the video below, Tan Le, president of the US/Australian firm Emotiv Systems, shows the next generation of human-machine interface, a neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain, both conscious thoughts and non-conscious emotions, and recognizes expressions on the face from the electrical muscle impulses. Through this helmet it is possible to control four concurrent actions interacting with virtual objects and even physical electronics just with thoughts. And concentration, as you will see. Ok, there is nothing new in headsets which read neural activity. It was the early 2009 when Honda, ATR and Shimadzu jointly developed BMI technology enabling control of the robot ASIMO by human thoughts, using electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). And I remember an astonishing 2008 video where some guys were adapting an advanced biofeedback system for using mind control to drive a car. The real jump here, according to me, is the simplification of the helmet (small net of electrodes, easiness in calibrating and operating, no gel on the scalp) and that you can buy it at a very reasonable price. Moreover, and I think it’s the best part, they have realized an SDK to develop apps. So one for instance could build an application that tracks computer use collecting feedbacks which might help in improving concentration and giving suggestion to mitigate user’s levels of frustration, anxiety or depression, and so on. And this opens up new and unthinkable opportunities, and markets. Emotiv, in fact, has been collaborating with IBM for some time to develop the technology for uses in strategic markets and virtual worlds and I think they have well learned the Apple’s marketing lesson that has showed how an ecosystem is so much more powerful when created on services leveraging an innovation totally left to the imagination of the developer communities.

I think such a technology is absolutely a cornerstone of the future of virtual communication and 3D Internet, but I can imagine in a few decades brain-implantable neural interfaces that will allow us to mind-control all our digital devices naturally and intuitively. Perhaps twenty years ago it could sound like I had been reading too much Cyberpunk. Now it sounds so likely! And when that day comes, ready (or not?) to live like Jedi Knights (or Sith Lords, due to our own inclination), we won’t probably talk of “revolution”. But everything will depend on how we will be affected by that technology, because how the American writer Clay Shirky once said “a revolution doesn’t happen when the society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviors.”

I mentioned yesterday the Badoku app. letting you read the bar code of a product and get/provide information about it in a Social Network. Today I did some homework on the blogosphere and discovered several others that are really creating a “quilt” that is going to reshape the future of retail. As an example take a look at this article:

http://regator.com/p/244178336/barcode_hero_attacks_in-store_shopping_with_an_addictive/

In a previous post we have talked about FourSquare, a start up that has created a model for engaging people visiting places, including shops. The basic idea is that the more you become a “habitue” of a place the more you know about it and the more you can be considered as an expert. This idea is now being exploited in the shopping area by other companies like Kima Labs and their application Barcode Hero (not available so far in Europe, you need to have a registered account in the USA on the iTunes Store to download it).

Attaching your bits to objects....

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post it is getting easier and easier to decode a bar code using your cell phone and associate your own comments to them (as an example, take a look at StickyBits, http://stickybits.com , an apps that let you post your comments on a message board tagging them with the barcode identity).

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/08/stickybits-barcodes-message-boards/

I like the new twists made possible by using the cell phone in any day activities. With these sort of applications the ideas that we have been putting forward at the Future Centre on mashing up informaiton on objects and bridging atoms with bits are turning into reality and sooner than we expected, As this happens it changes the way we look at objects and new business opportunties opens up.