The first printed aircraft ever...

Well, that would be something, wouldn’t it?

We are not there yet, but it is still nice to see the progress being made in printing complex objects, like a (model) flying airplane.

Engineers at the University of Southampton have designed, printed and flow a model aircraft king from screen to flight without any intervention.

It is not the first post on this subject, go back and search for 3D printing and you can see the others.

What you’ll notice is that there is a great progress in terms of complexity increase and in terms of industrialized process.

In this case, the aircraft was printed though a laser printer able to manage both metals and plastic. The printing took 48 hours, layer by layer. There are no fastener and it took just 30 second to snap the pieces into place.

At the same time the design involved a total of 8 persons’ week.

The finished aircraft has a wing span of 2 meters, it is electrically powered and can reach 100mph speed. It has passed all maneuverability tests with flying colors…

We are really entering a new era in production!

Researchers at Intel are working to connect the car electronics to apps that can communicate with a cell phone. The idea is to leverage on functionalities of the car, like accelerometers and video camera to let third parties create applications for monitoring the car whilst you are away and letting you know if something unusual happens.

Hooking the car to your cell phone

The system is based on an Atom mobile processor that interfaces with the car electronics.

Suppose your car is bumped whilst parked by the sidewalk. The car will alert you with a phone call and you can see what the situation is through video feeds provided by the car video cameras. Same goes if the car starts to move and you are not there! What you are going to do once you are alerted remain to be seen.

With some cars you might probably send a command to the engine to stop and at the same time you can alert the police. Other cars might allow you to reposition the video camera to take a look at what is causing the problem (take a picture of the bumping car plate?).

The system goes beyond, potentially, communicating with you, the owner. It might also communicate your driving habits to your insurance company with some positive, and negative implications. If you are a careful driver and you managed to negotiate a lower premium as your carefulness is confirmed that is good. On the other hand, if you are more on the recklessness side your insurance company will likely increase the premium. Also, the system may talk with police officers…

Some information can be very useful to the driving community, however issues of privacy come to the fore.

Intel is not the first to work in this area. Indeed several car manufacturers are offering adds on to let the car communicate with Internet and also companies like TEMA Mobility offer adds on to connect your car to the world.

In this decade I can imagine that connectivity among cars and between a car and the Internet will become standard and will provide yet more customers to Telecom Companies. At the same time, in the longer term, these same cars may create alternative communications infrastructures that will compete with Telecom Operators…

You have surely seen the cool displays imagined by Corning in their clip “A day made of glass“. Some of these screens are completely transparent, like this cool cell phone in a frame taken from that clip:

Frame from "A day made of Glass" by Corning

The problem is that all components have to be transparent to create a transparent cell phone. So far technology can create transparent transistors and transparent pixels but the battery remains…black.

Transparent Battery - the "white" rectangle in the middle

Now researches at Stanford have managed to create a transparent battery. The problem is that electrodes are not transparent but they managed to sidestep this issue by having electrodes so thin that our eyes cannot see them. They have created a fabric of electrodes, each one 100 nanometers thick. All together they provide enough surface to provide the capacity required.

In the photo on the left an image of the battery. The transparent part is the one in the middle and that is the one that would be included in a cell phone. The bands on the sides are just for support.

The researchers have also invented  cost effective way to produce them, quite a feat for a structure based on such thin wiring.

It seem like now all the required components for a real cool cell phones are available, we just need to wait a bit more (3 years?) to see them coming together into our hand.

Following up on Antonio’s recent post, I recently read a book on complex dynamics, looking for some ideas on what might happen once we will have thousands of objects in a limited space each one generating a communication space that overlaps with some others generated by nearby objects.

The assumption is credible, since there will be more and more objects embedding communications capabilities and acting as sources of communications airwaves. Since they will emit radio waves at very low power they will not require to use regulated frequencies and there is a tremendous range for establishing a communications fabric.

Will future communications network look like a Mandelbrot set?

Clearly, each of this communications area will need to interact with the ones it overlaps and there need to be some sort of handshaking to negotiate the exchange of information. This will change constantly since there will be a continuous change in interacting players.

The book, Chaos: Making a new Science, by James Gleick, does not deal with telecommunications networks but makes many references to various types of networks and note how the complexity they manifest reveals a certain order, as it is the case with the Mandelbrot set, like the one shown on the side.

In this set the overall shape can be seen over and over as you zoom in and reveal more details. What you will see is not an exact replica but close enough to give you the impression of seeing the same form over and over.

This is also what I feel will happen once we move from the centralized network of today, connecting billions of points to billions of points generating local interconnection that by hops will provide larger and larger coverage. The local communications structure will be replicated in larger and larger scale.

Clearly, the situation is different from the Mandelbrot set. Rather than starting from the big picture and revealing its (infinitely) detailed structure we are starting from a dense but finite local structure and abstract to larger structures.

What is interesting, however, is that the way to manage information transfer across the overall fabric could be seen as a set of links connecting first a major structure then going down to a smaller one and so on but repeating basically the same algorithm. This will be required since the edges will be in a continuous turmoil and our current mechanism for coupling addressing and routing will need to be revised.

One interesting point in the book is the observation that communications in our body is to a certain extent mirroring complex networks with fuzzy defined edges where chaotic dynamics exist and where order emerges. It makes me think that the more we progress in technology the closer we get to Nature’s way.

It is widely shared vision that in about five-ten years networks will become like complex adaptive system of systems interconnecting an incredible number of heterogeneous nodes, devices, machines, smart things and objects. Even today we are witnessing the progressive migration of “intelligence” towards the edges of the network, where actually Users’ devices are becoming more and more powerful, literally similar to network nodes. Technologies advances in virtualization are already allowing multiple virtual networks to run simultaneously over a same physical infrastructure, decoupling network functionalities from the physical fabric.

Then, as like large scale complex adaptive system of systems, future networks might eventually exhibit behaviour at “edge of chaos”. This term was made popular by Stuart Kauffman and refers to the idea that many complex adaptive systems (including brain) seem to naturally evolve towards a regime that is delicately poised between order and chaos.

Example of chaotic behavior

Basically it means that pervasive future networks will be naturally robust and resilient against attacks, but on the other hand, their dynamics might be influenced by phase transitions (i.e. an abrupt change in some operating characteristics may take place with a relatively small variation of certain parameters). For example, this phenomenon would mean a dependence of the network’s global characteristics (e.g., connectivity and average delay rate) on some local parameters (e.g., communication path and transmission probability). This might bring to instabilities, but at the same time chaotic behaviour can be used to exploit several opportunities (I’ll drop a next post on this).

My take is that at this level of complexity management of future edge networks will becom highly challenging (not feasible with the traditional approaches, even if these (maybe) will be still applicable at the core). Should an Operator wish to play a “game” in this arena, it should start thinking about “edge network self-management”, a domain of investigations which is at the intersection between automatic control theory and non-linear dynamics, the ideal place for exploiting the enormous potential of the Chaos Theory.

MIcroarray Chip

The advance of electronics is delivering a wealth of data about …us. Using gene microarrays, small chip to analyze the genome, it is possible to efficiently (quick and cheap) create a digital copy of the genome and then discover what are the characteristics of that individual and the likelihood to get a certain disease. It is even possible to forecast the length of life and the aging (by looking at telomeres).

Although we have no decoded the genome we are still in the fog in understanding most of it and its relation to many ailments. This is why initiatives like the one of Kaiser Permanente, a no profit organization for health care in the USA, are so important. They have created a digital copy of 100,000 genome of their clients and are now matching them with the kind of ailments they suffered to identify correlations. This will enable predictions on other’s genome and therefore the monitoring and proactive procedures.

Imagine when, possibly at the end of this decade, every person will have his/her genome copied in digital form on a health care file. As soon as one is born, and likely even before (if amniocenteses is performed), apps can look at the potential for any ailment during the lifetime and create a roadmap for actions to prevent them.

Not all diseases have genetic roots but most are at least related to genes and the effectiveness of many drugs depend on the genome. Hence, also for diseases that are not genome based the understanding of the genome will prove invaluable for prescribing the cure. And it goes even further. Because of our specificity there are some environmental conditions that can affect one more severely than another. By having the genome in digital form it becomes possible to raise red flags as environment condition approach critical levels for that specific person.

In my mind, it is quite clear that our cell phone (of some sort…) is the ideal bridge between my environment and my genome, enabling supervision apps to steer me clear of danger.

Welcome to the future of health care.

The “fibre rush” around  the end of last century has created an abundance of optical fibre that today are laying in the ground with no one using them. The evolution of technology, making it possible to multiply fibre capacity by using more wavelengths, seemed to have condemned these dark fibers (dark because not illuminated, not used) to remain inactive for very long time.

But now Internet 2 (a USA consortium) and the Energy Science Foundation are starting to use these fibers for experimenting what a network sustaining 100+Gbps traffic can do for research.

The new Network based on unused dark fibers

The network connects many US research Centers and the goal is to have researchers working on new ideas, including new protocols, that may provide the future backbone for the Internet beyond 2020.

In Europe we are also looking through several projects, mostly funded by the European Union, to the same timeframe and the proposal for GEANT that is now being finalized to be presented this fall is part of this view.

It is not just a matter of experimenting with higher network capacity or thinking about what services, not possible today, can be enabled. It is also a matter of understanding that the more capacity is available the higher chances, and possibility, for hampering the network and whatever is connected by it.

Possibly, security is the one area that has been looked less in the early days of Internet and the problems are now well clear. Not the solutions though. So it is just appropriate to have issues like security being considered at the very beginning of a new Internet cycle.

In the age of ultrafast broadband networks we are still using FedEx to send big volumes of data from one place to another. If you have 70 TB of data to send from Milan to New York you can use a good optical fibre and in about 10 days you have it at destination (that is the time it takes to “mail” 70 TB using a 1 Gbps connection). Or, you can load the data on a tape cartridge and mail it via FedEx to have it at destination in 24 hours….

You should not think that the situation is significantly different when bits have to be transported from a massive storage repository to a supercomputer processing units. Rather than using a “bus” to send bits electronically we use robotized storage magazines like the one shown in the video clip.

Mag tapes are the oldest digital media in use today and their demise is not (yet) on sight.

For more insight, take a look at a blog on Technology Review…

In this decade, and in the ones to follow, as far as we can tell, we are going to see big storage repositories, probably not many more than the ones we have today, using this kind of technology, but we are going to have many more date stored in devices, buildings, in everyday objects. That will make up a tremendous storage that will exceed by a factor of millions the biggest storage repository. We already have this kind of massive distributed storage (in Italy alone we can estimate something like 10+EB of storage collectively available in the homes) but this storage (most of it) is not on line. In this decade we will bring most of it on line and that will completely change our view of the network and its architecture since it will morph, gradually but inevitably, into a data centric network,

As more and more implants become available the problem of powering them gets bigger. We have had pacemakers for many years now, there are prosthetic limbs, artificial hearts… They are great but they all require energy supply and in some cases the one provided by battery is not enough so you need a cord to plug the implant (and you) in the mains.

In many labs, including Telecom Italia Research Lab, researchers have come up with ways to harvest radio energy to power sensors. This is feasible as long as the energy required is in the area of mW. The more energy you need the more complex (and cumbersome) it gets.

Now researchers at the University of Washington in the Sensors Departments have demonstrated, as you can see in the video, a set of coils that can be used to transfer a larger amount of energy, sufficient to power an artificial heart.

A whole ambient providing radio energy may relieve the need for a cord

As you can see in the clip, the coils are pretty large and they are pretty close one another so their use for powering an artificial heart would require the patient to stay within centimeters of the coil. Not so much different than a tether!

However, and this is the proposal of the researchers team, if you place a number of coils in various places in an ambient, like in the bed mattress, in couches, in walls, and a receiving coil in the T-shirt of the patient you can have sufficient energy to drive the artificial heart.

Of course you will need to have the patient wearing accumulator so that you always have local power to drive the artificial heart available. The radio transmitted energy recharges the accumulator whenever you are close enough to a transmitter.

By placing more transmitter in the ambient you can be sure that as the patient moves around the energy received is sufficient to keep the accumulator charged.

Clearly it is still a long way from achieving a complete freedom but it is a very good step forward for patients that today need to be tethered to a power supply.

In the future I can imagine that as we will have more and more objects recharged by induction (like electric cars) we can have open spaces supporting recharge also for implants thus providing even more freedom of movement to people. And I am sure that a cell phone based navigator, coupled with the sensors in the accumulator will guide the person with the implant through the best path from A to B that would ensure the accumulator will be recharged on the way…

Personally I never thought I would have a tattoo. I may like to see them on somebody else but I decided long time ago they were not for me.

Tattoo detecting blood sodium level being read by an iPhone app

But now I just discovered that tattoos can have quite unexpected application by teaming up with my iPhone.

Researchers at the Northeastern university in the Department of Pharmaceutical Science have developed nanoparticles that fluoresce when in contact with certain substances and the degree of fluorescence is proportional to the amount of substance. Specifically, they have developed nanoparticles that fluoresce when in contact with sodium. The nanoparticles are injected like a tattoo under the skin. Unlike a normal tattoo they are invisible and fluorescence is activated once light is shine over the skin AND there is sodium bound to the nanoparticles.

An iPhone equipped with a cover containing a battery and a set of LEDs to shine light at the right frequency can be used to check the fluorescence and a special app read the level through the iPhone camera. Different nanoparticles can be manufactured to bind with different substances, like glucose or a substance provided by a medication. In this way it becomes possible to measure the quantity of substance that is actually reaching a target area.

The applications are many and they open up a much easier way to monitor our physical parameters. Today people suffering for diabetes have to prick their finger several times a day to measure the glucose level. With this app all they need to do is to place their phone on the skin and click on the app.

And, of course, this approach brings telecommunications at the core of health care, since all date can be accrued by the cell phone and transmitted to a control center. I can even see a time when we will be injected with nanoparticles during the vaccination (one single shot for rubella, measles, … and nanoparticles) and we will become sensors that can provide ambient data on noxious substances that are actually absorbed by our bodies! This information will become part of a smart city and of a smart environment.

Science fiction? Well it was science fiction being able to communicate worldwide with a personal communicator just 50 years ago, or having all the library of the Congress on our desk just 30 years ago, getting television images through a flat screen less than an inch thick just 20 years ago …