The size of the bar is proportional to the processing capacity (Credit: http://www.thegenesisblock.com)

It used to be easy to compare processing capacity some 20 years ago. You took a chip and you looked at the clock. The fastest it was the more crunching capacity available. Then it came new flavour of chips, those processing at 16, 64 bits and of course even if the clock speed was the same a 16 bit would perform twice as much as an 8 bit but just one fourth of a 64 bit with an equivalent clock speed.

Then we had to consider the multi-core architecture. Microchips started to have several cores, and again two chips running at the same clock speed would have their processing capacity depending on the number of cores.
Chips got specialised too: RISC and ASIC could perform much better than normal chip, running a t the same clock speed, because they where using a special or reduced instruction set.

Parallelism percolated not just in the chip (multicore) but also in supercomputer leading to massive parallel architectures so that you needed to take into account the speed of the single chip (core) the number of chips and also the speed of the interconnecting matrix.

More specialised chips came to the fore, like the GPU, Graphic Processing Units, that were even faster, ant then bitcoin networks specialised in mining operation (not ore but data…).

Got the picture? No?  Well I am not surprised. It is complex and when you see comparison of processing performance today you are likely to see comparison of apples and oranges.

In the graphic on the left you see a comparison of different kinds of apples: the evolution of processing taking as a gauging stick the fastest supercomputer according to the Top 500 ranking, and you can notice a sort of Moore’s law at work there, since each faster computer performed at twice the speed of the previous one, if they were separated by 18 months time.

The Genesis Block now reports that the latest bitcoin network has achieved a speed of 1 EFLOPS, that is a speed that is 20 times faster than the combined speed of the Top 500 computers all together (the fastest one today, Titan, has a speed of 17.59 PFLOPS, over fifty times “slower” than the bicoin network). Be careful: we are comparing apples with oranges but nevertheless this points out that there can be “apples” and then there can be “oranges”, that is different ways of approaching processing leading to amazing speed.

Today a top of the line smart phone can do as much as 200 MFLOPS, that is 50 million times less than the fastest supercomputer (Titan). On the other hand, there are 5 billions cell phones and all together they have a bigger processing capacity than that supercomputer. Were they all smart phones they would also exceed the bitcoin capacity.

Clearly the 5 billion cell phones are spread everywhere but if you are considering the hundreds of thousands within a city boundary you can appreciate the kind of processing power potentially available. Notice that of these hundreds of thousands probably over 90% are sitting idle, hence they have a processing power just waiting to be harvested!

In the future, this is my bet, they will create a processing fabric that will be used by a variety of applications. Actually they will be much more! They will have a tremendous amount of storage capacity, PB of redundant data and, most important, they will create an amazing sensors network able to harvest a variety of ambient data with many more inferred from them. As a matter of fact they will become an aware fog whose “state” will change as result of a multitude of stimuli.

And, of course, cell phones in ten years time will be just a fraction of the overall processing power, since the IoT will outnumber them at least 100 to 1.

What Google Car sees…

The car is equipped with a number of cameras that feed the on board computer. Is that a ball rolling out between those two parked cars? Watch out! There might be a kid running after the ball…

In the picture above (credit: Google) there is a spatial representation of the model developed by the on board computers as the car is making a left turn. All pictures are composed into a 3D model containing the size and potential behaviour of any object. A tree occupies a given space but it stays where it is, whilst a truck can move and occupy a different space and it is better that such a space does not overlap with the one that will be occupied by the car!
So, it is not enough to see, the car has to understand and speculate…

And doing this requires an amazing amount of data and of data crunching. Just think about hundreds of cars munching data and exchanging them (one car cannot see behind a corner, or a bend, but can radio its 3D understanding of the surrounding space to any other car in the vicinity). That is real broadband!

For most people these tools that are the springboard for science and technology evolution remain hidden, since most of us is just seeing what is being produced and not how it is produced. However discovery and production tools are more important in the evolution path than the products themselves…

Basic configuration of NV-NMR detection, showing sample geometry along the diamond axis with NV spin embedded 20-nm deep within 12C diamond layer. The NV center detects NMR of protons in the PMMA polymer layer. (Credit: H.J. Mamin et al./Science)

This is why I was so interested in reading this news on a new tools that is becoming available, thanks to a DARPA funded project: Quantum-Assisted Sensing and Readout (QuASAR).

Two teams of researchers (University of Stuttgart and IBM Almaden Research Centre) have developed a nanoscale magnetometer that can resolve at a scale of 10,000 protons or 125 cubic nanometers, about the size of a protein molecule.

This is a significant improvement with respect to current MRI systems that have a resolution in the order of a few microns, that is 3 orders of magnitude bigger (if you look, as you should, at the cubic dimension).

It is like having a telescope that let you see at objects 1,000 km  away whilst the one you are currently use can let you see objects only as far as 1 km away. This new tool is opening up new horizons.

The progress is not just on resolution but also in cost since this nanoMRI, as they have decided to call this technology, can operate a room temperature with no need for a cooling system as present MRI does.

According to the researchers this technology has promises of application in medical field:

Support future drug development by facilitating increased understanding of the structure of proteins.

Enable detailed, three-dimensional mapping of biological molecules, with sufficient sensitivity to identify specific elements. This information could streamline assessment of inhibitor drugs against naturally occurring and bioengineered viruses.

Enable measurement of the magnetic field of firing neurons.

To me it can also represent a step in the direction os using quantum properties for storing and computation, something the researchers are not mentioning but that I feel can fall out from these results.

A wink is all it takes

One of this application, called “Winky” for the time being, wants to enable the life logging. Life logging is a way to record our life, every moment, in a digital form. Storage is no longer an issue since we can have TB of space for less than 100€, and getting cheaper as we speak. In the coming years storage may even become irrelevant as the network provides ubiquitous and unlimited capacity thus de-localizing the storage from the point of use of data.

It remains the problem of capturing the “snapshot” of our life that we want to record in a seamless way. There have been a number of proposals in this field, like the Memoto automatic lifelogging camera on sale for 279$ including any required Cloud Storage, but the problem is that these systems capture “too much”.

Of course you can lifelog by using your cell phone, and matter of fact many youngsters are doing just that by clicking and clicking and posting on twitter, Facebook and more. But it is not always convenient to pick up your phone, frame, click and post.

Here it is where Winky comes handy: provide a seamless way to capture moments of your life by … winking. It exploits the Google glass camera and its capability to recognise the eyelids movement. You wink, a photo is taken on what you are looking at.

As it gets easier to capture the world around us it gets weirder to live in such a world. We already have hundreds of security cameras taking note of what we do but at least these cameras are supposed to be regulated (not 100% true, since I doubt very much that private security cameras collected data comply to any regulation…).

In the near future we might have (we will have) thousands of cameras recording photos in which we will be part, although in most cases we will be completely unaware. Are these photos going to hunt us in the future by bringing us back to an awkward past?

A technology marvel brought some problems along with it… (Credits: www.cagle.com)

Indeed, it is easy to provide examples of new problems created by technology, by evolution,… by anything, religion included!
If you search on Google for the sentence “problems created by technology” you get 256 million pointers (I didn’t check them all…), a clear sign that it is a topic that has attracted attention (and now after this post there will be 256 million plus one).

However, this is not just an issue for modern technology and innovation, and this is why I liked so much the comment of Andrea. It is a general issue related to whatever is shifting the present environment (and mindset)  to a new one, possibly solving present problems but inevitably creating new ones.

Hence, it is naive to present technology, and solutions, as silver bullet solving once and for all any issue. You might solve present ones but because of that you open the door to new ones. The point, therefore, is not to fight resistance to evolution by declaring that whatever comes in is better but to be ready to face what the new will bring along. This kind of attitude rather than hampering innovation may actually ease its adoption by taking on board those that are pointing out its downsides.

Yet, although I concurred in what they said, something made me feel uneasy, there were bells ringing but they sounded fake.

And then it hit me. There is a cultural divide and an economic divide standing in the way as a giant, but invisible boulder, blocking the path so clearly depicted.

Just few days ago Internet went down (the access to Internet) in my home and my two kids still living at home got sad, angry and then “moved out” of the home looking for connectivity “for free”. For them Internet is an essential component of their life, something that cannot be separated from it. As in the cartoons here (credits: http://cramdodge.com/life-when-my-internet-doesnt-work/) there is little life left if Internet is not accessible.

Notice also that for them “free Internet” is the same as “Internet”. They both have a smart phone providing access to Internet for free up to 1 GB (which means I pay for that) but living on Internet requires many more GBs. Hence, from their point of view no access to Internet means life stands still!

In trying to fix the problem I discovered that the issue was a flooded pipe causing a lower impedance in the twisted pair connecting all flats in my building. And I discovered I was the lucky one, since other flats started to experience problems a month ago (and still suffer from it). Well, I talk to the various dwellers and I clearly noticed a trend: the level of “anger” was inversely proportional to the age. In a flat there was a web company and they were really angry and told me they were suing the Provider, but they were copying with the failure using wireless access.

This is what I consider one of the real issues facing any Digital Agenda: a culture divide between those in charge of implementing the Digital Agenda that have lived without it and those that are already living in the digital world where the Digital Agenda has already been implemented. It is tough to build something that you are not really experiencing at a cultural level. You always have the escape hatch saying “well, that can wait, you don’t really need it, we can still do as we did,…”.

The second aspect that was often mentioned in the talks is the efficiency that a Digital Agenda will inject into the overall system with great benefits to all. Actually, this is not true!

Inefficiency is a VALUE! There are plenty of companies and individuals that are making money toady because the processes are inefficient. If you leverage what technology can offer to make processes more efficient you are cutting the grass under those companies and individuals feet. And you can bet they are against this. Having an eGovernment for sure decreases the cost of Government but this saving is due to the decrease of clerks! And you cannot enjoy efficiency if you are the one being downsized to create such efficiency.

Over time both these boulders will be removed. It is just a matter of time. We wouldn’t be able to live in a world as it was 200 years ago, and that world had a completely different set of cultures and efficiencies (and ways of thriving on inefficiencies).

The Digital Agenda is not about designing a new world, is about accelerating a transition towards something that already exist.

A paper thin sensor to check on your cardio-vascular system

It really looks like a plain bandage but if you detach it you’ll discover a patch, not bigger that a stamp that is able to sense variations of tension on your skin with a very high precision.

You can see it in the photo on the side (credit: L.A. Cicero/Stanford University): it has been designed to monitor not just your heart but also the cardio-vascular system as a whole.

When our heart beats it sends a pressure wave that is detected by the sensor under the bandage. Its strength and periodicity can provide important information on your heart workings. That first pressure wave is followed by a much tinier set of waves generated by the tissue response to the first wave (like a spring that is compressed by the first wave and then bounces back once the pressure wave is gone). These further waves can tell a lot about our vascular system: a sclerotic vein, or artery, generates a different response to the pressure wave than a normal vessel. By being able to capture and measure the tiny variations of these waves the sensor can provide most useful information on the status of our cardio vascular system. Obviously, the sensor is just picking up the variations of skin tension but these variations are transmitted to a computer, the one in your smart phone would be perfect, for analyses and comparison with previous sets of measurements so that even more meaning can be derived.

Notice that the cell phone might act as an integrator (this is my speculation, not presented by the researchers at Stanford), picking up information about your movement, as an example: if you are jogging (and this can be inferred by the cell phone accelerator, or if you are walking in a city rather than in a forest, by the seaside or on a mountain (and this is known through the positioning system in your cell phone) the data coming from the sensor lead to a different sort of information and all together, taken in different situations, can provide an amazingly accurate picture of the health of your cardio vascular system.

To create such a precise, flexible and unobtrusive sensor researchers at Stanford have overlaid on a thin rubber sheet two electrodes. The whole is thinner than a dollar bill. The rubber band is composed of tiny pyramids. Variation in the tension of the skin produces a variation in these pyramids, just a few microns each, and in turns changes the distance between the two electrodes leading to a variation in the electromagnetic field. Et voila! these is the data provided by the sensor to the computer for analyses.

The system is both sophisticated (a very precise distribution of the pyramids) and simple and so it is easy to manufacture at a very low cost. We can expect to find these kinds of monitoring devices on our body in the near future with our cell phone acting as the local interpreter of what is going on and as a relay point to more sophisticated analyses.

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”!

Systemic interdependencies of the socio-economic variables of the hyper-connected world we are living in (credit: World Economic Forum)

Have a look at this picture showing just a simple representation of part of the systemic interdependencies of the socio-economic variables of the world we are living in.

In this direction towards an hyper-connected world, thinking at the fast evolution of pervasive computing and networking “at the edge” (i.e., around the Users), there is a growing interest in finding ways for understanding better (steering, controlling) the dynamic emergence of connected groups of entities (e.g., nodes/devices, things, Users).

This is not only for the design of the self-control of dynamic networks hooking a sheer number of physical and virtual resources, but also for learning the highly interconnected Users’ experience behind services such as those provided by Google, Facebook or Twitter… (i.e., involving any sort of relationships among people and data through social networking tools). Two sides of the same coin. Still we find systemic interdependencies.

Modelling “emergence” (and taming “butterfly effects”) is a well-known problem, which has been already analysed in several other contexts of Network Science (e.g., in medicine, biology, neuroscience,  etc). Emergence can be seen as the aggregation of “mesoscopic structures” which are dynamically and spontaneously aggregating in highly connected (collaborative-competitive) environments.

Needless to say that a inner “mathematics of emergence” (if any) may have interesting business implications for any Telecom or ICT Player wishing to gain a winning role in future networks and services ecosystems.

Bose Einstein Condensation (Credits: mit.edu)

Interestingly, some studies from statistical physics, which are modelling each node (or device, or ensembles of data) in a network as an energy level and each virtual link as a particle, show a perfect analogy between the mathematics of a network and the mathematics of a Bose gas: just have a look at this paper.

It appears even possible to argue that “first-mover-advantage”, “fit-get-rich,” and “winner-takes-all” strategies observed in collaborative-competitive environments emerge from the underlying dynamic networks in which single nodes captures a macroscopic fraction of links. And the “temperature” (T) is the main controlling parameter.

It might be possible even applying the same model to the human minds, which are behind the nodes and are, in turn, influenced by their interactions. Each single thought can be seen as an energy level (e.g., even the psychologist R. Assagioli argued something like that!) and association of a couple of thoughts as a particle: well, this is just another level of abstraction, but the inner mathematics, might be indeed the same. This is the universality of Nature’s laws.

Then, at the end of the day, we are talking about nested multi-scale networks, creating collaborative-competitive environments probably based on an the same inner mathematics, e.g., the one governing the condensations of “giant waves” (or certain levels of coherency) at the right conditions (i.e., values of some controlling parameters).

Concluding, I’m not arguing that future Internet (or human mind) should be modelled like a realistic Bose gas (even if this idea is very fascinating), but this reasoning brings to my mind another lateral perspective: said systemic interdependencies of a highly connected world full of data may represent sometimes a risk; for example think about unwanted couplings or over-coupled relations… do we have the instruments to tame unwanted “condensations” ? Can we “shield” Users from too many connections and too many data ?

Although we are still “far” from industrial solutions, researchers are working on ways to exploit graphene and more and more often we see reports on some extraordinary achievement in terms of increased performance.

Illustration of tunneling transistor based on vertical graphene heterostructures. Tunneling current between two graphene layers can be controlled by gating. (Credit: Condensed Matter Physics Group/University of Manchester)

This is the case with the work carried out at the University of Manchester (where graphene was “invented”) that resulted in the development of a transistor made by two layers of graphene (each just one atom thick) with a juxtaposed layer of boron nitride (a few atoms thick).

This structure (it is the first time that a multilayer structure made by layers of different substances is create) shows amazing properties in terms of speed.

Due to the ultra thin separation layer of boron electrons can move from one graphene layer to the other through a phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling. This allows a quick movement of electrons in two voltage levels at such a speed that the switching of charges from one layer to the other is called “quantum seesaw”.

The frequency can reach the THz zone. Hence, we are over 20 times faster than what can be done with today’s transistors.

There are potentially many applications, including medical diagnoses and security scan and you can look at the announcement to see them.

One thing that was not mentioned in the paper, but that I would considered a possible application, is that today’s transistors performance place a limit on the data transmission speed on optical fibre, in the range of 40 Gbps. You can carry, and you do, much more by having many streams in parallel (DWDM: Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) but the single stream cannot go faster than 40 Gbps. With graphene transistors having a switching time over 20 times faster one could open up transmission in the Tbps range! And, of course, you could have many Tbps communications channels operating in parallel on a single fibre!