Google maps are great and they change the way we see information. They are more and more “localized”. Looking for a hotel and seeing a map along with it is just normal. Taking a photo and inserting it in an album to see it becoming part of a map is also a usual experience for people with a Mac and iPhoto.

Now, thanks to Livemapp, you can expect  to change your perception of the “map” once more.

The idea is simple, the result is catchy!

Everybody nowadays has a phone with a camera and more and more have an embedded GPS. That is the case of the people wandering around with the iPhone latest models.  The Livemapp app, so far only available on iPhones but soon to be on the Androids flocks as well, let you take a phone and post it on the web. It ends up on a map so that people looking at the map through Livemapp will see it.

It is a way to add on the map the sights (and I am pretty sure the sounds as well in a short while). You may take a look at the place you are in, or the ones your friends are at the moment, and see what’s up. You can also go back in time to see what was it some times ago. And you can elect to visualize only the most recent photos in those places where lot of people are shooting and posting.

The apps can be enriched with new functions, I suppose. Why not see only the photos posted by your friends, so that you can follow their wanderings. And similarly post your photos for the eyes of your friends only.

And what about a etcher going on vacation in Greece: she might take pictures of places she will be talking about in the new semester and add comments to them. Once back in the classroom she can enable her maps to her students to see and commit upon….

The real kick is the possibility of creating your interpretation of a space and share it with others. The future, I am convinced, will be more and more like this, each one of us an actor and a spectator, in some cases living the act as it unfolds.

Most of the world we perceive generates far many more signals than the ones we really captures. Hence, if new sensors can intercept that information unseen to us we can get a better view, and understanding of the world.

This is what MIT researchers have made by extracting information from normal video capture using a process called Eulerian Video Magnification.

In simple terms a computer analyses tiny nuances in each frame identifying changes over different frames, changes that are so subtle they are not perceived by our eyes.

As an example, our heart beats once a second and as it beats the blood pumped in the arteries creates tiny ripples on our skin and minute changes in redness of the skin, too weak to be seen by us but sufficient to be detected by the computer applying the Eulerian Video Magnification. See an example in the figure where the redness of the skin is amplified to become visible.

The shape of the ripples can tell a lot about how the heart is beating, what is the blood pressure and the health of the arteries and veins. I t can also pinpoint some pathologies, particularly if it is possible to compare historical data.

It doesn’t take a particular camera to pick up the frames, any normal mass market camera will work. The trick is in the software that is able to amplify tiny differences and therefore enable other software to do the analyses.

In the future we might expect to see a growing number of data analyses based on this technology and a doctor will really be able “to see” our heart beating, just looking, through the application on his desk at its rendering derived by the images of our face or arms his webcam is taking right then.

Also, imagine what a saving in cost this implies. No more queues at the lab for exams, it is all done on spot, in the doctors studio. And, moving down the lane of time, why not imagine one of the (several) webcams in our home pick up tell tale signs of problem and raising a red flag to our doctor who will get in touch with us is something might get wrong, and well before it does!

Well of course, I am not entitled to judge future habits but still looking at  Lovotics last product … well it feels creepy to me!

Kissing via Internet … as real as it gets

It is a robot, dressed up in various shape to your liking, with a pair of lips that you can kiss. Why would you want to kiss those lips? Well they are connected to sensors able to feel the pressure of your lips. A computer transforms those pressures into messages that are relayed to the other robot connected to yours via Internet. Actuators will reproduce your kiss on those lips so if your partner has her lips on the robot lips it can feel your kiss, or so it is claimed.

Not sure if it is going to be “the thing” for the 2013 S. Valentine day… We’ll see.

What is good to see, is the progress being made in the interface domain, with sensors able to pick up subtle nuances and actuators replicating them.

If you are curious to see Kissenger at work take a look!

The development of ver very cheap electronics, made possible through a printing technology, is about to change bar codes into electronic tags. This is what Thinfilm has agreed to do signing a contract with Bemis to create intelligent packaging and the related platform. They expect to bring this technology to supermarkets and stores by 2014.

Thinfilm technology creates an electronic circuit, like the one used for RFID tags (Radio Frequency Identification), simply printing it on a flexible material that can be sticked on any package, thus replacing a bar code.

The RFID tag can be read at a distance, since it communicate via radio. A cell phone can do that. The data contained in the tag can be as little as a simple code (a url) allowing an application to get more information about that product, or it can be a set of data (a few kBs). What is also interesting is that Thinfilm can produce a tag that has a much more complex circuit than the one used in an RFID tag. As an example it can contain sensor capability, to measure the temperature that package has been exposed to, and can store this information for subsequent control. It can also contain an active radio communications to send an alarm if the temperature approaches a critical level.

The shelves can provide the power support by generating an electromagnetic field that can be used to power the circuit and keep a small battery charged.

According to their press release:

“Intelligent packaging is an emerging technology with many potential intersections with Bemis’ flexible packaging and pressure sensitive materials business segments,” said Henry Theisen, Bemis Company President and Chief Executive Officer. “Our agreement with Thinfilm represents an investment in a technology that could eventually make printed electronics a component of every package we manufacture.”

Once you have this electronic circuits associated to each package in a supermarket you really start to have a huge amount of common “things” that can connect to the Internet. The strawberry package can embed a sensor to detect the excessive ripening and send an alarm to make sure that the package is moved to the front of the shelf (or thrown away if it is getting rot) and there you have the IoT, Internet of Things.

But that same package, connected to the web via the platform, can be used to deliver services, like recipes or information that can be cross checked with a particular customer to see whether those strawberry can create allergy problems. Welcome to the Internet with Things, IwT.

In the first case the relation is between the package and a system, a thing to thing communications, in the latter we have that the “thing”, the package, has become one of the element of the web and can be searched, polled, mashed up, associated to services to serve a person.

Moving towards crowd-movies…

A new app is ready for you on the Apple Store. It is Vyclone, an app that takes advantage of the location and time information  attached to shootings you take with your iPhone.

Suppose you are watching a sport game and shooting. As you, there may b tens, hundreds of other spectators shooting the same event, although each one from a different position. Here comes Vyclone.

You can ask Vyclone to mash ups, in a completely automated way, your shooting with those of three other people that were filming at your same time. It can be done instantly, provided you and the others have an Internet connection, like a WiFi, and are on Vyclone as well, or it can be done the next day or the next year. Vyclone checks the location and time stamp on your video and looks for identical data in other video.

Then it mashes up the clips together providing a movies resulting from a multi camera shoot. It keeps one of the sound tracks so that you don’t get a confusing audio.

The effect is really nice, as you can see in the video below. Of course, once created, you can post the video to your social network, YouTube and the likes.

The present limitation of mashing up a maximum of four movies is going to be relaxed in the future, according to Joe Summer, one of the founder of Vyclone, who is also the Chief Creative Officer (CCO, I like the new acronym), and the system can scale up to accommodate several more cameras.

What I like is this idea of social shooting and the possibility to create something through crowd sourcing. It makes the world so much more connected and let eat of us see it with some others’ eyes. Also, I can imagine in the future that the mash ups will actually be producing as many layers as there are movies so that when you watch it you can decide to take the images from a different camera. Of course that would make the resulting film much bigger in terms of Bytes (but who cares tray about a file size?) and also much more demanding in terms of bandwidth if you are planning to stream it (but who’s gonna care about bandwidth in a few years time?).

A chip with photosensors, microprocessors and electrodes is placed in the eye

At the beginning of this century, that is 12 years ago , scientists promised that by 2010 we would have the possibility to restore vision to people who lost it because of retinal degeneration. In the last decade several steps in the right direction were made and some demonstrations proved that indeed sight can be restored.

However by the end of the last decade scientists have proved the concept but a real mass market ready to use “prosthetics” was nowhere to be seen (sorry for the unintended pun). So researchers started to say that we should be able to meet the target by the end of this decade. What is really needed, and promised, is a seamless integration of a prosthetic into the eye, with no bulky apparatus to run it.

Now NanoRetina has announced the availability for testing of a compact systems that fulfill the goal, and the intention to make it available on the market, at a 60,000 dollar price tag, starting 2013.

As you can see in the attached video, NanoRetina has produced a tiny chip consisting on one side of 576 photoreceptors that provide signals to a microcomputer. In turns, the microcomputer modulates the stimulation on the optical nerve, in such a way to provide information also on the intensity of the light, something that the brain perceives as hues of grey.

The chip can be placed on the retina with a simple surgery, about 30 minutes from beginning to end, through a small incision in the eye. The chip is powered by a laser beam generated by a special pair of glasses.

A 576 dot matrix is sufficient to provide an intelligible representation of the world. They actually claim that a person with that chip implanted would be able to watch a movie.

We are moving towards an highly connected age, based on the complex interplay between social and ICT networks. Network Science will have a role in contributing to the challenge of rewriting economic equations of Internet. Actually, considering technology acceleration, it’s easy to imagine future telecommunication infrastructures be based on cloud ecosystems of virtual resources, with diversified s/w features and characteristics, capable of meeting dynamically requirements of next generation services. I think that borders between networks and data centers will blur progressively, or better a high capacity and “elastic” (i.e. self-reconfigurable) networks will be able to interconnect and serve ensembles of hybrid Virtual Data Centers.

The question is what are the key milestones to turn this vision into reality ? There are several technology trajectories under the spot. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is one of them, proposing the decoupling between s/w control plane (e.g. in charge of routing, traffic engineering, mobility) and data plane (e.g. in charge of forwarding the data packets) of future network nodes (e.g. based on general purpose hardware). SDN is not OpenFlow (which is today a protocol acting on decoupled forwarding tables) but it is often considered its future evolution. SDN should not be confused with Network Virtualization (which is bringing into network nodes the virtualization features normally adopted for IT resources), even if the two trajectories could intersect with interesting perspectives. Moreover it should be also noted that SDN s/w control is expected to be (at least today) logically centralized. Then we have autonomic, cognitive networking, etc … which are, to make it simple (filtering the hype), introducing algorithms, methods, rules, automatic control loops, and other Industrial Mathematics tools, into networks to make them capable of self-adaptation and self-management. From this short analysis, it appears that the common denominator is: decoupling software, more tools from Industrial Mathematics (to master complexity) and clouds of low-costs open nodes (by the way, this is reducing Opex costs, think about Google Data Centers). Are we ready for this change of mind ?

Clearly, this will create a ripple in the current markets, as it would mean, in principle, commoditizing (or at least opening) Vendors’ network nodes, and reducing dramatically network costs (both Opex and Capex); on the other hand this move would create the conditions for new ecosystems (with economy of scale) where Operators can gain ground in the QoS domain (i.e. programmability of services), even up to the edges, reinventing their biz in the Internet of Services.

In line with this reasoning, I’ve been captured by this piece of news, today. Technology-economics interactions are bidirectional: economic forces shape the evolution of technology, while disruptive technologies can rewrite economic equations.

The ever growing digitalization of health care, the monitoring of in and out patients through sensors, epidemic data and the mass sequencing of genome is generating a deluge of data that now are in the process of being used.

Using big data to improve pediatric cancer diagnoses and treatment

A paper published by Cloud Computing News provides an overview of todays pilot use of big data in various aspects of the Health Care world. It makes for an interesting reading.

1. The approach to genome understanding and identification of genome based causes for a disease are rapidly moving to the big data approach. As more and more genomes are available a statistic analyses of the differences is more effective than a study to understand the meaning (impact) of specific variations.

2. Terabytes of data are more likely to hide information than to make it visible, unless those terabytes are converted into graphic images that can convey meaning at first glance. This is what is being done at the Seattle’s Children Hospital and the improved understanding has resulted in better health care and lower cost, estimated in 3 million $ savings per year.

3. Semantic analyses of patients records allow doctors to consider thousand of records to improve their diagnoses, something that would be impossible if the doctor has to read the records one by one.

4. Analyses of adverse effects created by the use of different drugs becomes possible looking at millions of patients records: fast cheap and effective.

5. Medical consultancy can happen by giving a doctor the possibility to interrogate a giant data base, using natural language to initiate a massive search and analyses of medical records.

6. Early diagnoses become possible  by understanding subtle symptoms and that may require the correlation of huge amount of data.

7. The data may comprises information gee rated by people on  variety of forums, people reporting on the effectiveness of a cure, on side effects, on symptoms. Crowdsourcing is just started to be applied to health care and already seems very promising.

No wonder then that a new type of health care professional is emerging: the Data Scientist in Residence. That is exactly the position that Alliance Health Networks has added in May 2012 to its organization!

Flexible screens are already available, although to see them you need to go to a research lab. There are a few small flexible screens on the market but they are usually black and white and you won’t associate them to a television screen.

A Samsung prototype based on AMOLED technology

Samsung has been on of the pioneer (see one of their prototype in the picture on the left, along with Plastic Logic that was planning to use one of its flexible screens in a tablet but the project never came to the market.

Now the Korean Government has announced a funding for research to lead to mass market flexible 60″ display by 2017.

The Korean Government has chosen LG as the leading research lab to pursue this goal; for LG this is a significant victory over Samsung. The Government expects that the availability of such screens will transform many ambient, providing visual interaction everywhere.

This translate, in competitive terms, to a potential export valued at 56 billion $ and creating over 840,000 jobs in Korea. Given the track record I am betting they will succeed.

This reinforces my belief that by the end of this decade we will become accustomed to interactive walls, and soon after to screens substituting products labels. I can see myself walking down an isle in a department store and seeing the tomato cans labels transforming themselves into a giant screen attracting my attention….

3 LCD screens are overlaid, each presenting part of the image. The perceived effect is an image that changes as we change our point of sight

3D imaging today is quite different from our reality perception of the 3D world around us. Today’s screens can provide you (with or without special glasses) a sense of depth that gives you an illusion of viewing a 3D image. However, in the real world we get a 3D perception not just because we sense depth in an image but also because as we change perspective the image changes.

This is not the case in current 3D screens. Every single person watching a 3D movie at a theater will see exactly the same image, independently of where he is seated. That would not be the case in the real world!

To get a changing perspective you should use holographic technology but today, and for several years ahead, this technology is still very expensive and has so many shortcomings that cannot be used (it is almost impossible to provide good colors and moving image with present technology…).

Researchers at the Media Lab have developed a new technology that is able to deliver a closer to life 3D experience. They are using three LCD screens, a technology that is now widely available and reasonably cheap, to display an image that results from the composition of those displayed in the three screens, as shown in the figure on the left.

The system is amazingly complex, not in the hardware, although also the hardware is at the prototype stage since it custom built needing a refresh time of 360 frames per second on each LCD screen, where the most advanced screens you can get on the market today have a refresh rate of 240 frames per second and most to not exceed 120 frames per second, but in the software needed to create the right signal.

The image is continuously recalculated and the high refresh rate is used to send more “images” to each of the screens so that depending on the point of sight the viewer will see a different scene. So two person looking at the same screen will see the image from two different viewpoints.

Actually, a refresh rate of over 1,000 frames per second would be required to provide these different point of sight but on the average quite a bit of a scene does not change significantly (it is not perceived to change) as you change your point of sight. This is exploited through number crunching to reduce the required refresh rate to 360 frames per second.

How much bandwidth is required for this type of display? Difficult to say. It really depends on where the rendering is being done. With processing power still increasing at the Moore’s law pace, it can be expected that the rendering will take place in the television itself, thus limiting the increase of bandwidth to some 3/4 times what would be needed today (a 6 mbps for today HD TV would be pushed to a 20 Mbps for this kind of display, whilst the 25 Mbps needed to feed a 4k screen would be pushed up to 100 Mbps to feed this technology).

If you were to perform the rendering at a service point and then to drive the three LCDs at 360 frames per second, well , that would really put a strain on the transport infrastructure since we would be talking of a bandwidth in the range of 100 Mbps for a “normal” HD TV and over 500 Mbps for a 4k resolution!