Just yesterday I posted the news of a fabric screen that can be deformed by your hands and fingers resulting in increased interactions with images. Today goes along the same lines with a device created by Anatomage letting medical students to practice anatomy on what looks like a surgery table with all the bell and whistles of augmented reality and digital images.

real life size human body can be seen through

The table has the same size of a surgery table and the screen can reproduce a patient body. With the assistance of a computer the students can interact with the image and move inside the body in the same way the would do using scalpel and retractors.

You can watch the video made by BBC.

The image can be part of a data base so that students can see many cases, or it can be generated from exams taken on a patient. In this case it becomes useful for a surgeon in looking inside the patient and studying the approach to the surgery. You can explore (if you are not faint of heart!) the various applications and images that can be visualized.

This kind of interface, here applied to medicine and it makes sense given the current high cost of the system, will slowly become more and more applicable to a variety of application fields, as its cost will go down. My expectation is that by the end of this decade we will start to see desk top screens in offices and in some school. By the end of the next decade most surfaces will double up as screen.

What I think is really interesting is that through these interfaces we move complexity from atoms to bits and we can perform all sort of manipulations at the bit level, thus dramatically reducing the cost and expanding the possibilities.

We are getting used to touch screens. Various types of technology, overlaid or embedded in the screen, let a computer perceive the points where your fingers are touching the screen surface and respond accordingly.

Researchers are looking at new ways to make hands interaction more seamless and powerful. I just run into one where researchers are exploiting the progress in gesture recognition through a Kinect device observing the changes in a surface made of fabric as the hands and fingers move on it.

Take a look at the clip:

[vimeo 42846180]

The screen is made by fabric (silk) and can be deformed by your hands. As it is shown in the video this makes for quite interesting, and intuitive interactions. A projectors displays images and the computer changes them based on the pressure and movements of the hands and fingers. You see picture and by pressing on a spot you get the image of what is below that surface, be it under the skin of a human body or the underground pipes and plumbing in a city.

As technology progresses expect better and simpler interfaces to become available and along with them expect to slowly change your way to interact with objects and the environment.

Telecommunications has become so important in the last century that many Countries have established the principle of it being a basic right to citizen and asking Telecom Operators to provide basic connectivity service under the banner of “Universal Service”. This is reflected in several regulations the incumbent Operators have to comply with.

In this new century wireless communications has taken (is taking) the upper hand over fixed line access and Internet has become a crucial information infrastructure. There are already several voices demanding the extension of the “Universal Service” principle to mobile Internet, particularly in developing Countries where the wireless connectivity is the only one available.

It is right in this line of thoughts that the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a project, Wikipedia Zero, to provide free internet access to Wikipedia in emerging Countries.

On April 4th services has started in Uganda, on April 24th in Tunisia and on May 21st in Malaysia.

The access is provided free of charge through agreement with mobile Operators in the Country and let people access the mobile version of Wikipedia in a variety of languages. More Countries are already in the roadmap for this year: Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Serbia, Montenegro and India.

The access to information has the potential of changing the way people live in these Countries bringing them in the Information Societies. Wireless communications has brought people together as never before, in the last century television has made the world aware of its variety and has fostered cultural evolution. Internet and easy access to information, so far hampered by economic affordability is the next step for enabling a better future to billions of people.

We see this happening through many signs, from the free availability of top notch education material on line, produced by the best world universities, to the embedding of free access to Wikipedia in Kindle.

“Networks are everywhere”. Network can be seen also from different perspective than bunches of nodes and links: simply imagine a network as an emergent property of an ecosystem of communication entities exchanging data. Actually, we see networks emerging through the electrochemical exchanges in ensembles of neurons, in living cells interactions, in the communications supporting self-organization of an ants’ nest, in the information exchanges in social networks…like Facebook.

Imagine ensembles of simple entities (e.g. Consumers’ electronic devices, sensors, actuators, smart things, etc.) embedding communication capabilities (e.g. radio/wireless connectivity); these entities have a simple logic coded through autonomic rules, making them capable of self-configuration and self-adaptation to dynamic changing conditions (e.g. like a Mac in your home). Now imagine multiple dynamic interactions between these simple entities letting network of networks emerging, morphing and disappearing, at the edge (of today’s infrastructures). Data and information will be virally propagated. As Roberto mentioned, the concept of traditional network infrastructure will fade away, substituted by the concept of communication fabric (with different space-time scales).

Understanding the implications of this network evolution is rather challenging. Traditional information theory based on Claude Shannon’s seminal work (1948) will not be applicable anymore: for example new definitions of information embodied in space structures (e.g. a 3D ensemble of neurons) and new metrics will probably be necessary to understand its creation, exchange (e.g. transmission) and evolution (e.g. processing, de-re generation).

Analysis of these challenges will (probably) situate best at the intersection between non-linear dynamics and statistical thermodynamics, an ideal place where hopefully multi-disciplinary (e.g. biology, physics, mathematics, neuro-science) approaches will converge in the future. We should be there as well.

What is sure is that this network transformation will impact profoundly our lives: it will change perceptions and interactions with the environment, paving the way to new socio-economic models and business. Not only: a better understanding of these ultra-dense networks, we’ll allow revolutionizing genomics, proteomics and medicine.

We have been used for over a century to connect to THE network infrastructure to communicate. The advent of wireless communications  (cell phones) has shifted the idea of connectivity from the infrastructure to a choice of infrastructures. Then the advent of WiFi networks has evolved the concept further  to a communication access area.

More recently we have seen tethering, a communication access area created by a device (like a Mac or iPhone) that in turns connect to the big internet via a classic telecommunications access.

Devices create local networks among them and will be orchestrate access to available network infrastructures

The next, revolutionary, step I feel will be in the transformation of all we have today into an Network Fabric.

Imagine having in the environment you are in many data bases (there are indeed, just think about the data contained in cell phones, in media centers…), many potential access gateways (again, you can have a number of WiFi networks, some generated by some devices, each cell phone is a gateway to an access network…).

Whilst there is, generally speaking, no problem in sharing a public WiFi access network, clearly there are issues (cost and who pays) if one is pooling cell phones access.

However, already today there are unlimited access plans for cell phones, there are “capped” access plans that may have good traffic availability on the last day of the billing period that is likely to go wasted… In the future one can be that we will see more flat or semi flat access plans and statistical pooling of these access plan can actually increase the access potential to all those participating in the pool.

Software can be the lever to crack current schemes and open the door to other paradigms, more based on a generalized ambient access. Personally, I feel this is going to happen, before the end of this decade. I understand Operators may not like it, and will try to delay this scenario. But eventually, I see a shift in business model that will take communications capacity for granted and focus on revenues generated “because” there is such an abundant capacity. At that point the sharing of access gateways will be natural and in the interest of Operators.

It will not happen all of a sudden, but one little step after another. And some of these first steps are already been taken by companies like Open Garden.

This company is currently providing software to let you share internet connection among your devices but clearly the next step is the possibility of sharing/pooling internet access among devices owned by different users.
This will lead to a new form of perception: we will be living in environments that double up as communications fabric, rather than environment that provide a connection to a network infrastructure. As I mention at the very beginning of this post this is more than “wires”. It is actually about data, so massive distributed data bases will play a major role.

Bioengineering and genomics are making big progresses but most of them are hidden from our perception. We had placed great expectations on the sequencing of the genome 10+ years ago but very little happened.  However, in the back stage researchers have managed to perfect their tools and create new ones. It is thanks to this progress that the cost of sequencing a genome and the time it takes has fell by several orders of magnitude.

Part of the evolution is taken place through discovery of better ways to manipulate DNA strings, usually through enzymes and microbes. As a side effect, researchers are learning to use these manipulated DNA strings and microbes for engineering new behavior (like bacteria feeding on oil to clean up a contaminated sea).

Red and blue fluorescence denotes 0 and 1 information stored in microbes

This capability to change at will DNA strings has been exploited by researchers at Stanford to use microbe to store one bit of information (0 or 1), as if it were a magnetic memory.

The researchers have used two proteins, integrase and excisionase, that can flip a certain part of the DNA of the microbe resulting in a fluorescence in red or in blue. By activating one protein or the other it is therefore possible to associate to each microbe a value, one bit. As an example 0 for red and 1 for blue. By applying the opposing protein one can flip the DNA (and therefore the bit). This transform the microbe into a cell for storing one bit of information. Clearly we are ages away from even dreaming about using microbes for storing our movies (a pity since there are gazillions of microbes all around -and within- us) not to mention the complexity to control the flip and the time it takes. Still this result goes further than mere curiosity.

Researchers say that with this capability to mark a microbe (that is a cell) one can imagine within this decade to crete living markers in the body, and use them to count the number of times a cell is replicating and possibly how close a cell might be to degenerate into a cancer cell.

As with many “unusual” discovery and invention we need to let the future tells us what is the interesting application (if any). What can be said, and that’s the reason for posting it, is that our capability to control nature at its tiniest level keeps improving.

Physicists, involved in Quantum Networks developments, are looking for ways to transfer quantum information between matter and light using entanglement, a property in which the state of one particle depends on the state of a second ones.

At the University of Innsbruck they have developed and tested a prototype of interface between light and matter for future quantum processing and networking.

The experimental device traps a single calcium ion in a Paul trap and places it between two highly mirrors. The ion is excited with a laser, thus generating a photon entangled with the ion and reflected back and forth by the mirrors. Interestingly, the frequency and amplitude of the laser can be tuned so that the target collective state of the ion and photon is reached.

Experimental apparatus

“Whenever we have to transfer quantum information from processing sites to communication channels, and vice versa, we’re going to need an interface between light and matter” explains the Physicists.

The experiment is impressive as it offers important practical insights into the interaction of light and matter: another step towards quantum computers or future quantum networks.

Ref.: A. Stute, B. Casabone, P. Schindler, T. Monz, P. O. Schmidt, B. Brandstätter, T. E. Northup, R. Blatt, Tunable Ion-Photon Entanglement in an Optical Cavity, Nature, 2012, DOI: 10.1038/nature11120

I am here today at the TTM, the Technology Time Machine, organized by the IEEE where I have been chairing a panel on the Future of Service.

We have seen quite a change in telecommunications services in the last 10 years. In the last century (but that is just 12 years ago!) telecommunications services were strongly coupled with the infrastructure. Then the shift of intelligence to the edges (smarter terminals) and the transparency of the infrastructure led to a decoupling of services from the network. All of a sudden services were no longer confined by the network reach but have become global. The decreasing cost of sending bits have made the origination point irrelevant. From Kolkata you can provide a service to Cape Town. The world shrunk and the service providers multiplied to reach hundreds of thousands. The explosion of Apps are an evidence of this, as the services provided by Indian companies like Reliance to manage a network in the US from Mumbai.

There is here a weak win-win situation: Operators have seen an explosion of traffic driven by the increased number of services and service providers have seen an increased demand for services. It is a weak win however. Operators have lost their monopoly on services, actually they lost the service offering; the service providers are so many that only a few make significant money, most of them are barely cutting even and many are offering services without expecting revenues, further depressing the overall market.

The customer is a winner: there are so many cheap/free services to choose from. The reality is that of the 200 apps that might the present on a cell phone just a very few are actually used.

There is also a lose-lose situation: Operators have seen their cost for network upgrading increasing with uncertain revenues and service providers have a hard time to develop a money making service proposition, given the jungle and abundance of services.

Customers, as well, may be losing some of the quality they were used to. On the average, today’s customers have lowered their Quality Expectation and this makes, once again, a difficult selling proposition pricing for quality. Clearly some customers are willing to pay for guaranteed quality but they are just a minority. Besides, such a guarantee is getting more and more difficult to provide, given the spanning of a services over many networks a single Operator cannot control and involving resources that are not part, nor controlled by the network.

What can we expect in this decade and beyond? A crank back is unlikely. We are going to have even more networks in the future, each one controlled by a different party and actually so many of them, and sometimes so fleeting, that the establishment of old time inter-Operator agreements is not an option. We are going to see networks created by terminals, mesh networks, sensors networks, software defined networks, viral networks, bio-networks. You embed a chip, or even program a bacteria (we are in 2050) and you establish a communications through nearby bodies.

So many more networks on the horizon. So many that some radical change in management and communication paradigm is needed. My opinion is that such a change will derive not from planning and deployment, rather it will happen as an emergent property of the whole. Autonomic systems will dominate the landscape. The very concept of network is going to fade away, substituted by the concept of communication fabric.
Services will keep increasing in number but given the hundreds thousands we already have, does any increase make a difference? Am I going to feel it? Unlikely. But if I, and you, are not going to feel it it is even more unlikely that we are going to pay for them.

And still, they will keep growing. Hence, new biz models, new sustainability ways have to be found. As communications, sustainability is likely to become embedded in objects and in environments.

The same, I bet, will happen to services. That is the only way for accessing them. You cannot access a service you don’t know is there and with millions of them you will be unaware of most. But you, and I, will keep accessing objects around us, will keep living in our environment and interact with it. This interaction, more and more, will be service mediated. This is what the Internet of Things and WITH Things are all about. And this, to me, is the future.

If you are like me, and all the rest of us, you don’t like to have a needle pricking you, even if it is for your good sake, like blood testing. That’s why I bet you’ll be pleased to know that researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology, Technion, have demonstrated a device that can use a beam of light to look inside your blood vessels and determine the RBC, WBC and all other nice acronyms you find on the paper reporting the blood exam result.

Computer rendering of the observation of a capillary through light penetrating the skin

In the image above you see what a computer can create as an image from the data detected by the reflection of a sam of light through the skin. It is much more than a rendering. What you see it is a capillary and the raisin like blobs are red blood cells (RBC, if you like acronyms). The computer can measure the density of RBC, and look at their shape to detect possible diseases. It can count withe blood cells (WBC) and the various types thus providing all the information you normally get through a pricking needle. and it can do that almost instantaneously.

Schematics of the blood analyses system

The system includes a probe and a detector that beam and receives the reflected light through a set of lenses in a stick that is placed over the skin. A PC receives all the data and process them creating the report (the graphic rendering is normally not done, although the shape of RBC is sometime of interest, like in case of possible sickle cell anemia.

You can place the stick over many parts of the body, in the demonstration the researcher used the lips. The probe emits a multi-wavelenght light and the reflection splits the wavelength providing the raw data that are fed into the computer for analyses. The technique is based on spectral encoded confocal microscopy (SECM). The light beam is scattered when it hits a blood cell and carries a spacial information that is used to single out red from white cells.

The analyses is pretty complex since one has to take into consideration the motion of the cells and compensate for that.

The device is portable, making it particularly useful for use in areas where the normal paraphernalia of medical testing equipment is not available.

In the future, it shouldn’t be difficult to imagine our cell phone performing this kind of analyses. True, it would require an increase in performance and decrease in price of (may be, out of the hat) 1,000 fold, but that is what happens in 8-10 years. We are already carrying in our hand the supercomputer capacity of the 80ies, at an infinitesimal fraction of the price they had.

Not talking about your little kid (kids whimper but they don’t yelp, do they?) but about your dog. Well now Fujitsu is coming to your help.

They have just announced the development of a device that can be attached to the dog’s collar to monitor several parameters to measure their level of activity and possibly some signs of sickness.

In the announcement they say the device will be made available in the second half of 2012 and will provide connectivity to a cloud. People (not the dog, indirect biz model!) will subscribe to a service and I can easily imagine that one may subscribe to different levels of services, depending on what kind of data analyses you want.

The service has been demonstrated at the Fujitsu Forum on May 17 and 18 in Tokyo. The device embeds a number of sensors and accumulates data. Using your cell phone (with FeliCa feature, widely available in Japanese cell phones, since it is used for mobile payment) you get the data from the collar and they are automatically transferred to the cloud.

Through a dedicated web page you can look at data as they are interpreted by a number of applications, in part coming with the service but, I guess, in part acquired by you through third party offering. It is an example of open data and leveraging them.

What I find interesting is the fact that this may create a very interesting test bed for trying health applications leveraging on data without all the hassle one has to face when dealing with human data. Clearly the dog is not as sensitive as we might be about revealing his whereabouts and physiological data.

The success in this “dog” market may stimulate applications focussing on human health. Don’t underestimate the potential for success. The Bowlingual system (a cell phone embedded in the dog’s collar that detects the dog’s mood and translate that into sentences -up to 200 different emotions) had a significant success in Japan!