Researchers at the Urbana Illinois University have developed a cradle and an app for the iPhone transforming it into a Bio Lab.

The iPhone becomes a bio sensor. Photo by
Brian T. Cunningham

The cradle and app are using the iPhone camera and processing capability transforming it into a biosensor to detect toxins, proteins, bacteria, viruses and other molecules.

The bio sensing is made possible by a photonic crystal. This crystal lets pass just on wavelength  so that when anything biological attaches to the photonic crystal the reflected wavelength will be an indication of the bio substance that has attached to the crystal. This bio substance can be a protein, a cell, a bacteria, a virus.

The bio sensor cannot detect “any” bio molecule, it has to be primed to react to a specific target. For that a normal microscope slide is coated with photonic material that can “detect” the desired molecule.

This photonic crystal slide is inserted in the cradle and the iPhone camera (the app using the camera) measures the spectrum. The reflected wavelength shows up as a black gap in the spectrum. Then the measure is repeated without the microscope slide inserted and the degree of shift in the reflected wavelength indicates the amount of target molecule in the sample.
The resulting bio-sensing device is not as precise as a lab measurement but it can provide information that is not available in the lab: one can measure in real time and in several places the presence of a molecule, a toxin, using the iPhone GPS to localise the sample and this can give a good indication of the spreading, as well as the origin of a given bio molecule.

Clearly this is not for the every day user. It is a tool for bio specialists. But over time I can see that more and more sensors will become available for smart phones making detection of certain substances an everyday experience for everyone of us. We would actually refer to our phone, and be warned by it, for detecting allergenic substances or specific bacteria that may be dangerous given a specific health care problem we can suffer from.

Bio-engineering keeps progressing at a fast pace. What used to be science fiction just in the last century (that’s less than 15 years ago!) is now a roadmap that has already delivered some results.

It all starts from the need to repair some damages or overcome some disabilities, like a prosthetic leg to make up for a lost limb or an implant for an artificial eye. These prosthetics embed electronics and once you have a chip you can start adding up functionalities “almost for free”….

3D printed ear embeds electronics for super human hearing

Consider this news on a 3D-printed bionic ear created by researchers at Princeton university. It melds electronics and bionics.

The electronic part is able to detect radio frequencies that a normal ear would not be able to “hear”, converting them into sounds. It is like having an ear that doubles up as a radio!

You may want to read the full report by clicking on the link. It really shows how the synergies among various technologies is delivering much more than expected.

What interested me, and the reason for the post, however, is not the pure technological aspect but some reflections we can make on what could be the implication of this human augmentation. It is a theme that I have already touched in some other posts. It is a challenge because it brings us into unchartered territory.

Suppose just for a moment that we can have a chip implanted on our cortex to augment our capability to learn: rather than having to repeat 100 times a poem you just read it once, the chip stores it and then during idle periods of your brain it keeps sending the poem to the areas were words are recognised and meaning detected (researchers have discovered where these are…) so that as a matter of fact your brain is reading the poem a hundred time and hence it learns it. Notice that this example is (almost) within present possibilities, since it leverages on brain capabilities and our understanding of how long term memories are formed (still incomplete).

There are already a few prototypes to convert images into sounds so that people that have lost vision can receive aural information. In the project mentioned in this post we see a further step, providing augmented sensory capabilities by converting radio waves outside of the human sensory detection capacity into stimuli that can be detected and processed.

Evolution will progress at small steps, here restoring some lost capability, there augmenting some capability. Actually this is what has taken place since the XVI century with the invention of the microscope and of the telescope: augmenting human capacity to see the small and the weak (light signals from far away stars). More recently scientists have developed tools to see what cannot be seen with human eyes, the radio frequencies emitted by stars, thus effectively augmenting our senses.

Augmentation is taking place every day when we take an antibiotic to augment our body defences against bacteria, augmentation of our strength is made possible by machines… and we can say that new education tools augment our capacity to learn…

So it is not a strange thing to say that we are on a path of augmenting humans…

However, when it comes to brain implant to augment our brain capabilities it feels weird…

We will have to face these challenges that open up new issues and are likely to create an even bigger “digital divide”!

I had a talk with a journalist some days ago on the Internet of Things and then she followed up with a list of questions I just replied to few minutes ago. I’d like to share them with you and see if you would beg differently.

The BMW keys and cars communicate one another

The IoT is already here, just look at Cosm (https://cosm.com), or think about the car keys talking to the car systems (BMW cars use the car keys to store info on the car systems for maintenance purposes…). There are hundreds of other examples…

I have always been amazed by insects, by the way such tiny “things” seems to be able to live in a complex world and take smart decisions. And once I look at gregarious insects, such as ants and bees, the amazement grows.

Locust, grasshoppers, are somewhere in between loners and gregarious. As long as there are a few of them they behave like loners but once their density reaches a thresholds (it can vary from species to species, usually the thresholds is around 100 – 200 per square meter) they start becoming gregarious and their density rapidly increases (to reach thousands per square meters). At that point their behaviour changes and a group “soul” emerges.

Scientists have studied the various aspects of this transition and of the rules that take over once the transition occur leading to the emergence of the “group’s soul”. A good book I read recently is “Insect Outbreaks Revisited”.

A group of researchers at the University of Lincoln have studied the way locusts can manage to move into tightly packed swarms (both on the ground where as soon as the thresholds is reached they stop their random walking and start to march in columns and in flight) without bumping into each others.

The set of rules they apply are straightforward:

1. move in the same direction as your neighbour

2. stay as close as possible to the neighbour you follow

3. don’t bump into it

but what interested the researchers was how the locust could apply those rules -coded in their neural system-, based on the visual stimuli they get.

These insects have a very simplified neural system (at least if we compare it with the one of mammalian) and yet they are very effective in navigation and avoidance. Exactly what we would like to have in a swarm of … cars!

The researchers have been able to replicate the neural machinery the locust uses when moving in a swarm in a robot and voila!, the robots, shown in the photo, has acquired the capability to move in a complex environment avoiding moving obstacles. In a way it has become able to predict where other moving objects are heading and to avoid their path.

The next step is to see how this kind of behaviour can be applied to cars to make them aware and responsive to their environment. Although cars in a urban environment may look as extremely packed they are much less so than locust in a swarm and if they can only get as smart as a locust is, well we could be safer in our every day commute!

I love this technology evolution learning from Nature, and I do expect to see much more of this during this and next decade!

The evolution of networks resources will be linear: more fibers, particularly in metropolitan and distribution networks, deployed according to economic parameters, hence sensitive to regulatory framework evolution; more wireless bandwidth provided by more spectrum availability, better utilization (both of these factors are real but not revolutionary, given the intrinsic limitation of the available spectrum and of the high efficiency already reached in spectrum optimization), and more importantly by the use of unregulated spectrum, low power impulse radio communications, cognitive radio, device based cells dynamically meshed.

Autonomic Systems taking the upper hand

The tremendous increase in smart devices will expand the number of autonomous networks at the edges and these networks will have globally more processing power, more data storage capacity and more communications bandwidth than todays Operators owned networks.

As already pointed out by Antonio in some of these posts, the Cloud is moving from big data centers to myriads of devices transforming itself into a “fog”.
This fog is going to be an integral part of the communications fabric, acting a a bit like the serotonin and dopamine in the brain, as already pointed out in the previous post.

Any new product produced n the fourth decade of this century, as well as any new born human being, will become an integral part of the communications fabric extending it so that we won’t have a communications shortage due to new users. Every user is at the same time also a network provider.

Like in nature’s ecosystem communications become an emerging property of the ecosystem itself. In the savanna there are no trails as long as there are only few animals. But as the number of animals grow, some cluster into herds and communications trails start to emerge and these change the ecosystem communications infrastructure attracting other kind of animals and changing the vegetation. It just takes volumes and then it all falls into place.

I see a similar evolution in the telecommunications fabric.

DNA is the well known macro-molecule with a double helix, encoding all genetic information in a language with 64 three-letter words built from an alphabet with a set of four different letters. The used symbols are A, C, G, T and mean adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (thymine T is replaced by uracil U in RNA). Since the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953, by Watson and Crick, a lot of progresses have been made in studying the ensembles of molecular structures of the genetic code.

Scientists are investigating why this special language has been chosen by Nature.

As we have read in the last post there are effort for mimicking this language in informatics:    an avenue towards DNA-based computing and bioinformatics. On this matter, let me go back again to symmetry.

DNA has two helices, which run anti-parallel to each other: this is an inherent symmetry, which is highly important in the replication process of DNA. Furthermore, they say that the genetic code has an exact A-G permutation symmetry and an almost exact T-C permutation symmetry with respect to the third nucleotide. Given the enormous importance of spontaneous symmetry breaking in several physical phenomena, these symmetries in the genetic code are even more amazing!

In 1993 this paper proposed explaining the degeneracy of the genetic code as the result of a symmetry breaking process. This can be can be compared with explaining of the positioning of the chemical elements in the periodic table as a consequence of an underlying dynamical symmetry (which, in turn, are reflected in the electronic shell structure of atoms). Have a look at this recent paper to read more details about this fascinating perspective. Universal characteristics of symmetry breaking are even here, in the language of Nature.

Since the discovery of DNA huge progresses have been made in unveiling the genetic code, and the rate of discoveries in this field is accelerating day by day thanks also to the growing amounts of processed genetic data: a multi-disciplinary approach capable of integrating Mathematics, Physics, Biology, Informatics and Engineering could bring to a breakthrough, changing profoundly ICT horizons.

We have managed to run this blog for the last three years without missing a single day and then we got stuck for almost 3 weeks!

If you tried to connect to the blog since January 20th this is what you have got:

The fact is that we have been subject to an hacking attack (a successful one….) that forced the system administrator to close down the blog, to investigated where the attack originated (apparently from some Russian IP address) and what the consequences have been (many links to news were changed to fake site for phishing…).

According to Treat Post there have been an average of 33,000 phishing attacks per month in 2012 (growing 19% over 2011) causing damage in the first 7 month of 2012 estimated in over 650M$.

In our case the attack resulted in the closing down of the web site, some work to track and take countermeasure but no direct financial losses.

I guess this is the downside of living in a connected world.

Well, anyhow, we are now back to business and a new blog will be posted tomorrow ….

Headphones components produced through 3D printing. Image form Teague Labs

The number of news on the advances in 3D printing keeps growing, some related to better (and cheaper) 3D printers, others to growing fields of application.

On the left an image of headphones components produced using 3D printing. They are ready to be assembled and this can be done at home… Still it just represents another possible application and does not seem to be a game changer, and the same can be said for the many other applications that we have seen so far and for those you can see here, by 3D systems (look at the nice guitar that has been printed using their 3D printers!)

However, and this is what the science of connectivity in large sets is telling us, you may reach a point when all of a sudden particles that were independent one another and just connected to a few other become completely connected and change the overall structure (as it happens in areas like whipping up the eggs to make the mayonnaise….). It is what physicists call a phase transition.

It happens also in economic systems and in this case it changes the value chains that have been in place for decades and even centuries.

Well, someone has started to foresee this change as result of the growing application of 3D printing.

Acoustic guitar printed by 3DSystems

An interesting paper, that you can download here, deals with “the implication of 3D printing for the global logitic industry”.

According to the paper:

 ‘3D Printing’, or ‘additive manufacturing’ as it is also known, has the potential to become the biggest single disruptive phenomenon to impact global industry since assembly lines were introduced in early twentieth century America.

This is no small claim! As a matter of fact, think of the implications: what is now decentralised production (in China and the Far East) may be completely reversed by the possibility of producing products near the sales point (or even at home).

More than that. Whereas in mass production all product instances are the same, with a 3D printing potentially each product can be customised, thus transforming a product into a service at the production level. Additionally, customisation can be further enhanced by embedded chips (and software) and communications plugging in that product on the Internet.

I suggest to read the paper. It may be addressing a distant future but technology evolution is not just shrinking distance and cost, it is also shrinking time….

And if you still think it is just about a distant future, then read the announcement of the opening of the first 3D printing factory in NYC planning custom printing 5 million objects in 2013….

I spoke today at a panel on “Communicating the Future” organised by the ITU.

Along with me there were key people from Intel, Saudi Arabia Telecom, Novartis, Tencent, and Geddes consulting. What struck me was the consensus from the other panelists that we are moving towards an economy of free in telecommunications. According to Zheren Ma, Head of Strategy of a big ISP in China, this is already happening, voice and text are getting more and more “free”, no longer one pays for services but for access, and then it is basically an “all you can eat”. Within 5 years, he said, the game will be over for those Telecoms which won’t be able to move up from wires to data.

Mr. Khaled al Ghoneim, CEO of STC, grudgingly acknowledged this scenario. Personally, I am a bit more cautious, although I see the trends towards the “access fee and that’s it”.

I pointed out that the problem is: the price of bits has gone down to almost zero (and this has created an audience for those who take connectivity for granted and offer services at low cost over a world wide market) but at the same time the price/cost of infrastructures to deliver those bits has not gone to zero, on the contrary, it may cost even more today than it used to cost in the past, given the raising cost of civil engineering work required to deploy a new infrastructure.

I pointed out that there is no free lunch so the “economy of free” is actually an economy hiding where the cost are being paid.

The availability of a fibre infrastructure with wireless drops would clearly create significant benefit to the competitiveness of a Country and contribute to the GDP increase. The problem, though, is that such a wealth creation not necessarily goes into the pockets of the Operators funding the new infrastructure, and there are strong doubts that their increased revenues still may be well below an acceptable remuneration of the investment.

Are we going to stay with the present copper infrastructure forever? Clearly that is not the case. By 2030 it is most likely that all today’s copper will be gone, replaced by fibre and radio, because after a certain number of years (let’s say 15) the copper has to be replaced and it surely makes more sense to replace it with fibre and radio.

However, 18 years are a long time and those Countries that will speed up the renovation of their infrastructures will be more competitive than the others. Hence the pressure to find a solution to a lack of economic sustainability for Telecom Operators and the need for better infrastructure at Country level.

In Europe we have started to see a growing interest in Private Public Partnership as a way to address this issue.

Leadership is strongly needed to make this happen. As benefits deriving from more advanced infrastructures can be expected in most productivity and delivery areas there is a need for a Telecom Operator to cooperate in research with those areas, a direction that Telecom Italia has taken with the initiative to delocalise part of its research teams on University campuses. Similarly there is a need for Operators to involve Institutions and the Territory to make the infrastructure evolution a joint project.

Data was mentioned as a new gold mine (although I have some reservation that such a gold mine can produce as much wealth into an Operator coffer as that now provided by Telecom Services) and according to the ISP representative many people are willing to give up their privacy rights to get services for free and better services (more tailored to their needs). Services are becoming embedded in objects and in experiences, it is getting more and more difficult to charge for them (save for a small part of the market that is willing to pay for “better quality”). Having said that, there may be a general underestimation of the dangers deriving from a loss of privacy and actions should be taken to inform people of what is happening and what the consequences might be.

An additional point addressed by the panel was the need for a change in education. It was noted that  technology evolution is destroying present jobs and therefore the need for being qualified for those jobs (a theme also addressed at the STS Forum last week). Hence the education should not prepare students to meet today’s job requirements, nor it can prepare them for jobs that do not exist today. Rather education should aim at teaching students to create their own job, to become entrepreneurs.

Current “ossification” of IP (over optical transport) networks is creating limitations for Operators in the development and deployment of new network functionality, services, protocols, security designs, management policies and approaches…and other element that are essential to cope with the increasingly complexity of future networks.

Today to launch a new network services is becoming complex and expensive, often inhibiting the rapid roll out of new revenue earning. Looking at the future, this is an important bottleneck to be overcome. A part this, future networks should also be able to reduce operational and capital expenditures (OPEX and CAPEX): OPEX reduction can be achieved by easing human operators (and reducing human mistakes) in managing and configuring automatically equipment and network functionality; CAPEX reduction can be achieved by postponing network resources investments (e.g. optimized use of available resources), for example by exploiting multiple “constrained optimizations“ (i.e. practically this can be achieved by deploying into the network equipment – and/or in the management control systems – several “control loops”) capable of load balancing, traffic engineering, optimized allocations, resources negotiations, etc.)… This means a lot of software, as I’ve pointed out in former post.

Well, in a few words, future networks (which are including Users’ devices and “Things”) will look like ecosystems of pieces of software interacting with each other, and – just like in any ecosystem – self-organization will be the result of sets of “constrained optimizations“ and dynamic games.

One may ask if the emerging Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm can be seen as a step in this direction. Yes, it is likely to be, even if – in my opinion – the major disruptiveness of SDN will be played at the (and beyond) the edge. This is where autonomics and self-organization have to play a major role: in fact traditional management is failing due to pervasivity and complexity.

Concerning management, have a look at this recent post (from a well-known Expert in network management, who I know personally) addressing how current SDN proposals are not (fully) taking account of the network management functions, specifically the relationships between the logically centralized control plane and the management plane. Interestingly the Author argues that the control plane (even if very advanced) can not replace the management plane. What I like here is the problem formulation: what we’ll have to face in future software network will be the orchestration of multiple controllers! Future networks will have multiple control loops that must be situated in order to accommodate multiple data formats in multiple languages at multiple levels of abstraction.

Imagine the edge: a sheer number of nodes, devices, “things” will interact each other competing, cooperating and negotiating resources. 

Sailing towards “blue oceans” ?

 I believe that, in contrast to today where competition exists only at the application level, future network at the edge will open new business’ dimensions (blue ocean): negotiations, incentives, cooperation and competition will boost the long-term value of the network architectures — like in ecosystems, where evolution select the winning species, winning services will succeed, grow, and promote further investments, while losing ideas will fade away.

On the other hand introducing sets of control loops into (both in fixed and mobile, think about SON) might potentially bring to inconsistencies and non linearities in the network behavior (e.g. due unwanted couplings or interactions, or missing coordination) thus creating instabilities and abrupt phase transitions, which can rapidly propagate.

This is a risk which each ecosystem is running: singles species may have feedback mechanisms that would ensure the population’s stability were them alone, but when together global state transitions to instability regions may occur as the number and strength of interactions among species increase.

The real challenge I see is designing nodes and devices local rules and control/management planes (i.e. creating an ocean of control loops beyond the edge) in a way to enable thriving and stable ecosystems.