We are generating so much information every day that we don’t even know what it is being recorded about us. I just checked on Google for my name and found 184,000 pointers. Clearly they will be many that are not about me (I just made random sampling up to the 100th page and with just few exceptions they were about me).

What struck me as funny (or is it not funny) is that a good percentage of these pointers were about something I did that I have now forgotten. Thinking about it and following the link I had to admit that, yes, I did it!

A smiling ghost making your content disappear after a little while!

I also thought that I do not know what 99% of the information linked by those pointers are actually saying….

Yes, I have the feeling that I have lost control about myself in the digital space.

Another thing that came to my mind is that the web has change the way we communicate in the sense that nothing fades away (although it gets buried in those 184,000 links…). And this thought was prompted by an article I read.

Indeed, the article points out that even for the information I generate of my own will I cannot control it once I circulate it on the web. Place a photo on Facebook, send a tweet…. it is there forever! Even those places that let you delete the information may be captured by crawlers (like the ones sent out by the WaybackMachine) and reappear in other places. I still remember British Telecom publishing a wrong information on new tariff and removing it after just few minutes. It was too late. That info had already been captured by crawlers and people could still access to it and blame BT for a breach of promise!

A new company, Snapchat, is providing you the tools to attach a time of survival for an information you place on the web and takes care of erasing it once the time goes by. There are now 100 million photos and text messages that destroy themselves, courtesy of Snapchat, every day! They are ghosts that appear for some fleeting moments (e.g. 10 seconds) and then they are gone forever.

The system is not foolproof. A person looking at your photo can make a screen capture and you no longer have control on it. Although Snapchat will let you know that the photo has been copied by xyz there is little you can do about it.

DuckDuckGo

And, of course, if instead of making a screen capture that bad guy takes a photo of your photo….well, you won’t even know he did it!

So the problem is far from being solved but I found 100 million information going through Snapchat as a clear indication that people feel the need to be somehow in control and to be able to NOT record something they do!

Similarly, the success of the DuckDuckGo search engine that makes the promise not to record what you have been looking for is another indication that people wish, from time to time, to preserve their privacy.

DuckDuckGo has already served over 400 million search requests, an average of over 1.5 million a day. Of course nothing compared to the over 3 billions search each day by Google…, but still a lot of people do not know, yet, about DuckDuckGo, and many have said by clicking on it that they do care about privacy!

Too bad that no foolproof solution is in sight!

The miniaturisation of digital cameras (now they can fit a 4mm cube) and the decrease in power consumption along with huge storage capabilities are transforming the world. The transformation is taking place under our eyes but it is so subtle that we probably don’t realise what is happening.

Glasses embedding a digital camera by PivotHead

Digital cameras are ending up in glasses frame, in cars bumper, in bicycles and so on. One of these camera can film for seven days on a single charge compressing the video to fit the storage. When required, or on an autonomous decision, it can move into HD filming. Some of them need to be connected to download the clips and images, other can connect in real time via BlueTooth.

So far they have been adopted by people doing sports, wishing to record the activities, by professionals for their job. As an example policemen in Austin, Texas, are now using glasses with an embedded camera to record their daily work. Realtors are using these glasses as they observe a real estate. Those clips will be used by a program to create a 360° view of the estate for showing it to prospective clients.

Researchers at the MIT Media Lab are working on the exploitation of this life feeds to create an augmented memory prosthetics that can help people remember.

Now, just take a step forward and imagine a world where these cameras can be connected in real time to the web. Imagine thousands of people moving around with these cameras picking up the daily life of a community, of a city…

Clearly, one might immediately think of the Big Brother, of being constantly monitored. But one can also think of the opportunity in service creation. Think about the huge amount of data becoming available to the single person and to the community.

Today when you walk around there are thousands of people “seeing” you, and of course we take this for granted, actually we do not even notice that. Obviously it is quite a different thing to be “recorded” and potentially been seen by people that were not at the same place you were. We clearly need some new framework. However, already today this is happening. You are picked up by hundreds of security cameras every single day, and probably you are on thousands of photos taken by someone just as you were wandering around. Now applications can go on Flickr, FB and other places amassing billions of pictures and find you!

It is just going to get worse, in a way. But it is also going to get better, since the awareness of what is going on will be more widespread, and services will become available to leverage those … Big Data. Among those services we might probably want to have one that would preserve our privacy, a sort of invisibility cloak. Problem is .. no-one today has an idea how to ensure such invisibility…

Vacation time, time to read and explore beyond the usual. And this is what I found when trying to update myself on connectomics, a science that is just beginning and that I mentioned a couple of times in previous post. If you need to start from the basics you may want to read Sebastian Seung book: Connectome.

Kenneth Hayworth goes a step further of Sebastian speculation that “we are are neuronal connections” to declare that by the end of this century it will be possible to replicate in a computer all neurones and their connection so that such a replica will be “us”. Insert the computer in a robot and “voilà”, you have achieved immortality.

He goes even further to depict the exact procedure for achieving such replica:  first you die (not before throwing a party with all your friends) and at the hospital they replace your intracellular fluid with resins. Then your brain is sliced in micro-slices and each one is read by a computer, through a scanner, to identify each neurone and each connection. This is what is done already today to study portion of brain tissue. Then all the information is transferred to the robot computer that from then on will be you.

Let me say that I find this approach too simplistic (I should also say that I don’t like it in a more general sense, but this is not the point). It is not that I believe there is something more than the mechanic brain (like the soul) but I think there is more in a brain that just its connections (and neurones). What about the way that specific neurone is going to reach to a signal brought by the afferent dendrites? What about the molecules that float in the intracellular brain fluid (like serotonin) that are actually influencing the response to electrical signals?

I am not alone in having strong doubts, there are many “non believers” in this approach as you can see from the linked article.

Still, I found it an interesting view….

For immortality, or just a longer (and healthier) life, I put my bets on bio-engineering: it looks like patching the telomeres, avoiding their chopping as we grow older, can do the trick. At least for mice it works!

Three weeks ago I posted some reflection on distant future considering the possibility to transfer our human experience to a computer where it can be re-lived and re-enhacted. Sort of creating during our life a digital shadow that in specific circumstances or at a specific time can take over behaving like the person that it is shadowing.

Well, I just run onto a blog of the Huffington Post that pointed to the Terasem’s LifeNaut project and I started to wonder whether I was mistaken by setting the date at 2050. It looks like it can really happen much sooner!

You should really take a look at the clip here to get a feeling of what I mean:

[vimeo 21399280]

I am quite at loss in understanding what the implications might be. In the clip you see just part of the person and clearly you cannot be fooled, but what if you are having a conversation via … Skype, or whatever? I t would seem natural to see just the upper part of “me” on your screen and how can you tell it is not me if that image is going to tell you about that time we spent together five years ago… and the emotions we shared?

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!

I spent the morning in an event closing the 100 years since the birth of Mc Luhan (he was born on July 21st, 1911) and I presented some thoughts on the impact of technology in our life. I wish to share them on this blog as well.

Technology has become a sort of metronome pacing the rhythm of our life and shaping our habits. In a way it has always been the case but in these last hundred years its continuous and quick evolution has influenced even more social changes and emphasized even more the gap among generations.

It has been estimated that the amount of information produced by human kind since Homo Habilis over a million hers ago and 2003 could be stored in 5EB, 5 billion billion bytes. Well, in 2010, we have produced 5EB every 2 days and the forecast is that next year, in 2013, we will be producing 5EB every 10 minutes.

This is made possible by technology but it really happens because each of us has internalized technology that now has become a sort of prosthetics for our communication capabilities. These EB are by far the result of the production and communications of each one of us, taken all together. The magic of Internet is the capability to transform that individual local communications into a global communications.

All of this happens in background. As a matter of fact each of us think to  perceive technology but we perceive technology evolution, sometimes with awe sometimes with concern. Most of the time we use technology without perceiving it. And this is the technology that really impacts our Society and our life because it has become entrenched in our way of living, is an integral part of our context.

That is why technologies like the conversion of the voice in electrical signals, the telephone, that at their birth were strangers to us became over time part of our world, and we absorb them completely as the way of life. Hence, when in the 70ies a new technology allowed video communication through the phone people did not like it at all. Communications was something that go through the handset, not through a video. This latter felt weird! And this in spite of the fact that our animal communications is visual as well as based on voice, inflections, tone, volume.

For the youngster, that were born with multimedia communications this latter  is to be the “natural” one.

What does technology offer? It offers the possibility to create a correspondence between the physical world mad of atoms with the virtual world made of bits. This correspondence is achieved through sensors, like videocamera, accelerometers, microphone,…All of them can capture our communications, our wandering on the web, images of ourselves and our social networks, our experiences and our emotions. And our cell phone is probably one of the most important tool for creating this correspondence.

These technologies are on the way towards disappearance from our perception and hence they start to affect our way of perceiving reality and the way we interact with it.

There are new technologies appearing but they too will follow the path towards disappearance: augmented reality, tactile interaction both physical and virtual (this latter refers to the possibility of mimicking texture on a vibrating screen), the aggregation of social networks on a point in space, on an object or on a point in time…

They are still in research labs but within a few years they will get out to become curiosity and gadgets  and later on part of them will become part of reality.

Technology, however, really changes the world because it decreases cost and free our time.

Buying a banana today means paying 20-50c, in spite of the fact that such banana in our hand is the result of a value chain started by a farmer who tilled the tree, harvest the banana and loaded it on a truck. The truck took it to a ship that traveled thousands of miles to deliver it to another truck for delivering it to a grocery store where somebody placed it on  a shelf for us to pick it up. And all of that is part of the 20-50c price! This magic happens because of the huge amount of technology, including information and communications technologies.

Technologies frees our time from chores. Lighting a room for one hour in Babilonia required sesame oil in a lamp and that implied over 50 hours of work. Lighting a room for a hour in the seventeen century with a tallow candle required 6 hours of work but lighting a room with a kerosene lamp in the XIX century required only 15 minutes of work. And today? Lighting a room or a hour with a light bulb requires about 0,5 seconds of work.

It is clear that the availability of a huge set of affordable goods and the availability of more time to dedicate to other activities expand our possibility to live in a digital world. And this is a virtuous circle. As more people connects to the digital world, the more market for that digital world will expand its capabilities and decrease it cost making it affordable to more and more people.

The digitalization of the “person” falls into this framework and today we have already moved beyond the imagination of McLuhan futures. We already have services that create a partial clone of a person in the digital world (if you think about it the gramophone was in a way a first example of extending the life of a singer by recording his voice and playing it beyond his physical life). Artificial intelligence is now brushing close to the Turing challenge and it is bound to beat it soon, thus resulting in a digital person that can live its own life departing from the one that mirrored at the time it was created. Read the book “Mind’s I” to see what I mean.

Do we want these evolutions? Surely NO. We live, culturally, in the past. However, the new generation, the young people 10 years old, are living in what, for us, is the future but for them it is the present, it is every day life.

Sure, they will get older and will look with some concern at the future, but for them too there will be a new generation more than willing to live such a future.

I am involved in a group of futurist set up by the European Commission and I will post here, as well as on their web site, some future looking scenarios… Enjoy and comment!

Ouch! Just broke my leg skying. And yet I know I should not complain too much. Help was there in very few minutes, I was taken to a emergency help just few hundreds yards away where an engineer with medical training engaged a robot to take care of me. This is no surprise, it started in the 30ies and became common in the 40ies. What surprised me is that the robot had my latest data on my legs, joints and muscles, some of it only 3hours old. Apparently, as the doctor-engineer pointed out, sensors in my home, on my bicycle and most important those on/in my body kept a digital copy of myself in the cyberspace.

Now this is coming handy, not just for fixing me up but also to help in re-education of the leg movement. You are no longer exercising based on a generic model of limbs movement, rather you receive personalized direction based on the analyses of your most recent digital persona.

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In 2050, sensors of many types will be creating and updating a digital image of ourselves, our body, as well as our experience, our emotions, our skills, both physical and mental skills. Storing all these data is not an issue. You may easily carry with you, in you, PB of information. Communications of these data to the cyberspace is not an issue as well. THe communications is no longer based on “pipes”, rather it is based on a fabric composedly the ambient itself, since any object (most of them anyhow) create a communication space that overlaps with other objects comm space to create the communications fabric. The objects have embedded processing, as much as needed to resolve the message from the noise, (circumventing the Shannon limit) and thus the wireless bandwidth is unlimited. Energy issues in communications have been managed (not solved) by decreasing the demand from electronics (now  based on carbon and crystalline substrate) and increasing the number of nodes, thus shortening the distance between them.

This presence of a digital copy of myself has created a whole set of new issues. TO what extent is my digital copy a faithful one? Unless somebody has tampered with it, but my provider swears it will never happen…again -;) of course it is an exact replica.

But that is for the here and now. What happens as I, or someone else, starts to use the digital copy? It may be done to make me be at the same time in two places, miles away, it may be to use my skill in a certain area. Indeed it has become convenient to use my digital copy to go to work and make money as I stroll on a beach. Of course THAT digital copy from the veery moment it starts to work and make money for me is no longer my copy, but an instance of my copy that very rapidly diverge from me since it is subject to different sort of experiences and learn things that I cannot learn as I stroll the beach.

Sometimes it gets interesting to look at one of my instances (I have the ownership over all my instances…) and just how it evolved over time!

And, as I look at the 3D life size replica of myself doing somethingI never thought I could do I wonder if that instance will outlive myself, if my grandchildren will be confused to see several instances of their grandfather. I also start to wonder what it feels to be an instance of myself. I know I can read that instance emotions, but I am still not sure what a digital emotion means. And yet, some people have chosen to shut off their atom based body and keep existing in bits’ form….

By 2050 the Digital World will be as real and as important as the physical world.

Manufacturers will create for any of their product a mirror image of it that will be present in the digital space. This digital copy will be instantiated and associated to the actual buyer of the product (and to the user). This will create a market space for third parties to generate services and adds on to the product.

The digital instance will keep growing and transforming as time goes by, reflecting its use, its transformations and the interaction with the ambient. Along with that a web of relations is formed connecting whoever and what ever use or has exposure with the product.

In this digital space there will be basically no difference between objects, information, services and people. Each of this is a digital set that keeps transforming reflecting the transformation in the physical world. Each object (person, service, information…) will therefore have an associated digital shadow that in many cases can be used to “patch” the physical object.

Additionally, the digital existence can be mashed on the physical existence so that a physical object can be perceived as a single whole composed by its atoms and the overlaid bits. The key to the success is twofold:

- it should provide a seamless experience where actually bits and atoms are smoothly intertwined

- there is the possibility to select (again seamlessly) the amount of overlay (if any) desired.

Lifebrowser, creating a timeline of your life bits

Microsoft is working of Lifebrowser, an application that access all information on your computer and your connection to the web, analyzing photos, e-mails, search history and more to identify what can be landmark events. Basically, and this is what Eric Horvitz a distinguished scientist at Microsoft and creator of Lifebrouser say, the application is a personal data miner focussing on you and visualizing the timeline of your life, easing your navigation through your life content.

This is a step forward in the path of My-Life-Bits, the other MS project that set the foundation to store all of your life bits into a computer.

Facebook provides you with the possibility of creating a timeline, but the burden is onto you. With Lifebrowser this happens automatically, and it visualize only those events it feels really matters. This is done using some artificial intelligence but you can control the depth of relevance to make some events pass the thresholds of visibility.

Searching can identify events and cluster them around a landmark. Obviously you can manipulate the landmarks automatically generated by adding some new and deleting others but the application is pretty good in coming up with something reasonable.It is also pretty good in analyzing photos, detecting how many people are there, correlating faces from one photo to another and hence creating relationships. Photos with the associated EXIF (the information about the photo at the time it was taken provided by the camera) are rich information sources allowing to timeline our relationship with other people.

It all depends on the volume and range of data it can mine, of course. Up to few years ago we used to delete (or just lose) data but with storage getting cheaper and cheaper and an easy transfer of data from the old computer to the new one it is more likely that data will keep growing over time. In perspectives, we will be synchronizing data in the cloud and (as Google said several years ago) we will never need to delete data anymore. That will really create a digital shadow of our life and applications like Lifebrowser will come handy.  If you like to try one of these applications, try MUSE. It will look into your email and highlight the ups and down in your life, pop up some forgotten acquaintances, and identify patterns in your communications.

It is really amazing what can be done once you have a huge collection of data, and we have just begun.

The glove multiply your strength relieving from fatigue

Bio prosthetics have just taken a step forward with this pair of gloves (actually it is a single glove!) you can wear to relieve fatigue on your hand.

NASA and GM have been working together on the Human Grasp Assist device (also known as K-glove or Robo-glove) to decrease the amount of effort required in manipulation of objects, like the ones happening in assembling a car. the Robo-glove can decrease an effort of 15/20 pounds down to 5/10 pounds.

The glove contains sensors that feel the pressure on each finger as you move them to grab an object or twist an handle and signal your intention to a computer embedded in the glove (in the wrist part of it). The computer drives pneumatic pumps, like a hoe, to generate the extra effort required.

This work is in the line of augmenting human capabilities by integrating robots with the human body. It also has, as a side effect, that every action can be monitored and can contribute to enrich your digital life.