Open Data Logo

I focused my previous posts on data about individuals and their activities, the so-called “personal data”. In this post, instead, I would start considering another source of data, the public administrations. Governmental agencies are considered to be the most significant data owners and providers in modern societies: their ”Public Data” can be defined as “the objective, factual, non-personal data on which public services run and are assessed, and on which policy decisions are based, or which is collected or generated in the course of public service delivery.” The disclosure of such data from one side would guarantee greater levels of transparency in the public administrations and could also enable new modes of democratic engagement.

An international “Open Government Data” movement started promoting openness for public sector information. The results of such an initiative are becoming visible in various countries: through governmental portals public agencies are starting making their datasets available to the general public. There are two main prerequisites for committing to the Open Data approach: a) high availability of the data, preferably in formats that are both human and machine friendly and b) possibility to reuse the data for all (legal) purposes and with no restrictions by citizens, enterprises, and other public  agencies.

UK is one of the countries which is more active in the endorsement of the open data movement principles. The portal “Opening Up Government” (released as “beta version”, in line with Web2.0 approach) makes available more than 7,800 datasets, through several access modes (downloading, browsing, searching through SPARQL, RESTful APIs, etc.). Moreover, the portal provides Apps (for different types of smartphones) exploiting the disclosed data. An example of the disclosed data is represented by COINS, a database storing the UK Government expenditure provided by government departments.

This commitment on opening public data was recently confirmed and strengthened by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, as part of the Government’s Autumn Statement.The Chancellor affirmed that opening up the public data not only will improve several sectors, such as travels and healthcare, but also will  create significant growth for industry and jobs in the UK, specifically in medical research and in digital technology.  The hope is that the shared data will enable building products, services, apps that can feed back into the economy and promote growth.

The action plan is focusing on the disclosure of data on critical sectors, such as medical knowledge and practice (e.g., by means of better links between data sets for individual patients),  business logistics and commuting (e.g., through new real-time information on the running of trains and buses, data on highways and local roads, such as congestions, works, etc.), weather and weather forecasting, housing market (e.g., track of sales and land ownership, data on residential home sales, including prices at address level). The detailed list of actions can be found here.

This action plan on open data is complemented by the creation of the “Open Data Institute”, a new organization directed by leading open data academics Professor Nigel Shadbolt and web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee: “… The ODI will be about ensuring a flourishing environment of open data entrepreneurs. In some cases we will have to secure the research to provide the tools, skills and methods to support the creation of new value using open government data… In other situations it will be about supporting new and innovative companies that are seeking to exploit open data… There is a substantial training program to provide a cohort of individuals with open data skills.”

If you have any doubts on the applications that can be developed by enabled by opening data owned by public administrations, maybe you can change your opinion by visiting the showcase of the applications developed by exploiting the open data related to San Francisco area.

So light, it does not crush a dandelion fluff!

The magic of nanotechnology has managed to create a material that is 100 times lighter than styrofoam. Just look at the photo on the left: A piece of this material is resting comfortably on top of a dandelion fluff without crushing it!

The feat was achieved by a group of researchers at he HRL Labs and at the California Institute of Technology.

The new material is a web of nano wires, a micro lattice that consist for 99.99% of air! That’s why it is so light. The infrastructure is made of nickel phosphorous. Although most of it is “air” the material presents some interesting properties, like being able to absorb amazing amount of compression energy and then bouncing back at the original shape. This is thanks to the nanowire, each one 1,000 times thinner than a human hair, that create a 3dimensional web as shown in the picture below:

The scheme of the ultra light material

Augmented reality, AR,  is the way we will see the world in the future. But we have already had glimpses of it with applications like Layar. And AR is already being used in many field.

Finding veins has got easier...

So, no surprise to see that at TEDMED, the conference on technology advances in medicine, there were a number of techs exploiting AR. The simplest one, and still very effective, has been shown by Accuvein,

It is a device tat projects an infrared beam on a part of the body. The beam is reflected by heat and a computer processes the signal and creates a map of the vein system. A projector, embedding in the device illuminates the part but not the veins that become visible and ready for the needle. No more false pics!

The devices is extremely simple to use, just one button to press and in a blink of an eye you get the veins map illuminated.

It is now a few year since AR has started to be used in surgery, particularly for brain surgery to tell the surgeon exactly were the problem is so that she can aim her scalpel. But these are very complex systems costing millions of dollars (they are usually integrated in robotic assisted surgery). What is amazing is seeing that low cost AR based devices are now becoming available.

NanoTech, interpreted by an artist, will create microchips at the blood cell size

That’s the forecast of Mike Muller, the CTO of ARM about cell phones: by 2020 expect your cell phone to contain 32 times as much storage capacity (that is assuming your smart phone today has 32 GB by 2020 it will exceed 1 TB), to be 20 times faster in terms of communication speed and its microprocessor to be … as big as a red blood cell!

It is more than forecast. ARM has announced the development of a microprocessor that can be implanted in the eye of patients suffering from glaucoma to continuously measure intra-eye pressure. The device is a 1 cubic millimeter in size, and it contains the sensor, the microprocessor and the battery. The consumption for a sensor can be as low as 1 nW and the battery can last several years.

The foreseen advances in wireless bandwidth capacity are the result of new network topology (many more antennas) rather than more efficient spectrum use (it is already pretty good today).

This is likely to happen in urban areas where there is an economic interest in increasing the bandwidth and the overall wireless capacity whilst is it going to lag behind in rural areas.

What fascinates me most is the smaller: if it gets smaller it can fit everywhere and that will change the way objects behave and the way we perceive them.

ATT has set up an Emerging Devices Division and has started to propose a variety of objects embedding sensors, actuators, communication gateways…

Health tracking wearable device by ATT

Recently they have started to offer boxes (for placing pills, as an example) that can signal when they are opened, dog collars with GPS receivers and cell phones to let you know about your dog’s wandering and so on.

Now they are offering wearable systems to monitor health parameters. According to Glenn Lurie, President of the Emerging Devices division,

“People want this kind of feedback about their health. Automatically pushing information to a vertically integrated site makes things easier.”

What was of interest to me is that in the article (by the way take a look at the photos of cool connected watches and smart fitness gadgets on sale) is that ATT already today has some 14 million devices connected to its wireless network that are NOT cell phones. This is an interesting market considering that the number of cell phones pro capita cannot increase much more in countries like Italy and the USA so we need to look at something else to connect.

Basic technologies to support flexible displays have been around for a few years now. But, so far, they have been prototype with no market roadmap defined.

The flex cell phone shown by Samsung...2012 ready?

Now Samsung in its last meeting with investors has shown a flexible screen AND has told about its plans to have it embedded in its products in 2012.

Apparently, also Apple is at work on flexible screens, if we can tell from the patents they have submitted, but as secret as usual, there have been no indication on when a flexible screen can turn up into a product.

Besides, Samsung is competing with Apple but at the same time is one of its big suppliers so it might even be that a Samsung technology for flex screens may end up in an Apple product.

I am quite curious to see what can be done with a flex screen. Problem is, I am so used to have hard screens that I have problem in understanding where I would want to have one. I can see the need for bendable screens, so that I can transform a curved surface in a screen (and that will challenge the processing power of the computer rendering the image) but I am at loss thinking about a flex screen. True, I saw some prototypes of rollable screens that you can extract from your cell phone to get a bigger viewing area but they all looked to me more like gadgets than a real thing. I assume that by the time you would have such a screen you are likely to have alternative ways of displaying and viewing things on the many surfaces around you…let’s see.

My previous posts mainly focused on solutions for allowing individuals to enforce control on data about them, the so called “personal data”. Different initiatives are investigating the advantages for creating a user-centric personal data ecosystem enabled by provisioning to individuals Services for storing and managing their Personal Data.

The collection of personal data and the control of their sharing with third parties is just one side of the problem. Another issue concerns the reduction of the personal information which are gathered by service providers when users access their on-line services. Several types of mechanisms, such as cookies, web-bugs, flash cookie, etc., are put in place for collecting and inferencing information on users’ behavior, preferences, etc.

Recently, a great interest emerged around an “browser-based” mechanism named “Do Not Track”, proposed by Stanford: it aims at introducing a mechanism for enabling end-users to control the tracking of their online activities. Roughly, it consists in adding an http header to declare that the user does not want to the tracked. Users can control the activation/deactivation of this “Do Not Track” option: almost all browsers already implement, are planning to include it in their new releases, this feature. In this way “users could opt out from all online tracking with one click”. Once a user has declared as unwilling to be tracked, it is up to individual web sites to “honor” her/his request.

US Federal Trade Commission is evaluating if it has to oblige all web sites to honor the “Do Not Track” declarations. Also the European Commission considering whether to include the mechanism in the new version of the ePrivacy Directive: a user which activates the “Do Not Track” option is similar to a user which does not release the authorization to the treatment of her/his data. Recently Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda Online privacy, declared that a standard for unifying the interpretation and the enforcement of the “Do Not Track” declarations should be defined by June 2012.

Even if the “Do Not Track” mechanism captured the interest of these policy maker organizations, several experts are doubting on the effectiveness of such an approach. For instance, Jared Newman noted in his PCWorld blog “Do-Not-Track in Chrome and Firefox: Different Approaches, Same Fatal Flaw“  that the proposed mechanism is targeting the wrong people: “Do Not Track, even with legislation in place, affects only those sites that play by the rules. Users could end up punishing sites that traffic solely in comparatively harmless advertising, while giving free rein to sites that have fewer scruples about using your online information”.

This opinion is stressed by Robert McGarvey in “The Myth of Browser-Based ‘Do Not Track’“, where he also pointed out that it is necessary that the legislation provides a clear interpretation on the way the “Do Not Track” declarations must be honored by web sites. Is it sufficient to avoid sending personalized advertisements? Or is it required to refrain from collecting and processing any information gathered and inferred from the users’ requests?

These doubts on the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism suggest to investigate the adoption of alternative solutions. A possible approach to avoid that web sites collect and use information gathered from users’ interactions is to prevent that this information arrives to them. A solution, even if not at all aligned with the end-to-end approach of “pure” internet, is to introduce “intermediaries” which, for instance, provide proxy-like functions. These could either remove sensible information, implement anonimization features or provide other intermediation functions, such as those related to the integration with an Identity Management framework.

Network operators are used to provide intermediation functions. Moreover, they are considered by most of the users “trusted” parties, in particular, in the correct enforcement of privacy policies.  Can we imagine to enhance the services to access the internet with intermediary functions to implement effective “Do Not Track” mechanisms?  Which is your opinion?

Take a look at this:

I don’t know about you but it gives me the impression of playing with ghost.

It s a Holodesk, developed by Microsoft researchers, showing that it is now possible to create the visual perception of 3D objects and to interact with them. A camera picks up the position and movements of your hands and a computer transform the ghost like images as if you were actually interacting with them.

Notice that the impression is made stronger by the careful way the “player” interacts with the images. He is very careful not to squeeze his fingers (they would just go through the marbles and the other objects…).

This lack of tactual feedback, of course, may be a strong limiting factor in the make believe. Still, it is notable to see the amazing progresses that have been made in creating 3D illusion and in interpreting the movement of objects (like our hands).

The cell phone embedded in the prosthetic arm

Today in most places (developed countries but getting true also in many developing countries…) for every person you have a cell phone. For many of us it has become an essential extension of ourselves.

So, it is not too much surprising the news in The Telegraph reporting that a person who is missing a limb since his birth had found a way to accommodate his cell phone in his prosthetic limb, as shown in the photo.

He used to have problems in using the phone since he had to hold it with his prosthetic limb (not easy to do) while texting with the other hand.

Talking to the company that has been helping him with prostheses since he was 3 years old and with Nokia reps in UK he has been able to get a special prosthetic with a slot to plug in his phone.

On the one hand, this news emphasizes the importance of our cell phones, on the other it is a pointer to a not distant future when we will be embedding communications capabilities within our body.

The very basic technologies are around: scientists have found a way to use our skin to transmit electrical signals, a vibrating device to create a sound sensation can be implanted in a tooth, a mike can be embedded in our t-shirt as well as the electronics required for processing the signal and the antenna. Just wait a little while and you’ll become the cell phone!

I have been using Dropbox for a while and I noticed that many of my acquaintances are using it too. In some of the European working groups I am in it has become a standard way to store, share and exchange documents. It provides 2 GB for free and you can upgrade to a 50 GB or 100 GB capacity for a monthly fee (9.99 and 19.99 respectively).

They have managed to attract 45 million users and fell under the eye of Steve Jobs who proposed to buy the company but they refused (and now Apple has its own Cloud).

Now they are expanding their services to biz customers (they already have over a million of them, I consider myself more like a residential customer…).

For them they plan to offer 1 TB at a yearly fee of 795$ and additional licenses, each with an extra 200 GB of space, at 125$ a year.

Interestingly, they are targeting the cell phone users, by embedding their client in HTC phones starting 2012. In Japan they have a deal with SoftBank to embed their client in their Sharp cell phones. In Europe some of the Sony Ericsson Android phones have the client embedded.

Their strong point is the transparency to the terminal, and that is why I use them. You can share files from your Android phone and read them on your iPad without a glitch.

Simplicity is at the core of success and the seamless experience they provide explains why so many are using it. Whether they will be able to capture a serious biz customer base remains to be seen. Will business trust placing their data on the Cloud?

Clearly, the push being made by several Telecom Operators, if successful in creating trust will in the end favor players like Dropbox, unless the message got by potential customer is not “trust the cloud” but “trust the brand”.

This cloud evolution is going to be another challenge for Telecom Operators that may risk pouring money in creating infrastructures and trust and end up seeing other taking advantage of that. This is likely to be the outcome, unless the Operators’ Could proposition moves away from the pure storage at low cost…