Recently in Innovations Category

I was responsible for the following sections/sub-sections:

• Socio-Technical Analysis
• Professional Support of Thesis: Dr. Massimiliano Vasile
• Professional Support of Thesis: Dr. Gary An
• Future Technologies and Applications of Thesis

Below is an iPaper document containing my contributions. If you would like a good old-fashioned PDF, you can grab it from here.


Note: There will probably be a few minor changes made to my parts at some point tomorrow, but I would guess that this is 99.43% representative of what’s actually submitted.

[As mentioned in some of my previous blog posts, my group's final presentation will be focused on science fiction and its ability to predict future technologies. My specific part of the presentation will focus on more recent predictions of technologies that are expected within the next century.]

Assuming that science fiction is, in fact, an accurate indicator of future technology (which we believe to be true, as supported by my group members, Chris and Rolland), what fun innovations should we expect to be seeing within the duration of our lifetimes? Here are a few examples of predictions, mostly taken from Trivia-Library, made by the likes of Brian Aldiss, James Blish, D.G. Compton, Hugo Gernsback, Joe Haldeman, Robert A. Heinlein, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells:

• Automatic clothes-making machines, which obtain the user's measurements and produce on the spot
• Gene therapy as preventive medicine
• Weather Control
• Temperature-controlled couches
• Moving conveyor roadways
  
• DNA repair/replacement
• Sound bombs
• Electromagnetic tube elevators, no cables
  
• Computers that translate 10 languages simultaneously
• Computers hook directly into students' minds for accelerated learning
• Suspended animation for extended spaceflight
  
• Human life-span predicting machine
• The cosmiflyer, a 6-in. cosmic power generator strapped to one's back, is used for short-distance aerial transit
• Sound waves employed to expand vegetable cells (and man's food supply) a thousand times over
• Thought recorders
• Nuclear satellite bombs
• Iridium wire spirals at street corners, change night into day
• Ultrahigh-frequency electronic baths to remove dirt and other foreign particles from the human body
• Underwater air guns using glass electric shells that shock their prey
• The "stasis field," a special kind of force field, renders all radiation, electricity, light, and magnetism inert (including the atom bomb) and makes conventional weapons obsolete
• Manipulation of matter at the atomic scale, combining elements to build custom molecules and providing the world with new materials and medicines
• Electronic glass pane air-conditioning units
• Wireless and synthesized 3D viewers, allowing individuals to interact and conduct business with people not really there (but seem to be)
• Anticrime devices, which render felons rigid and helpless for 15 minutes
• Amplifiers that will pick up sounds in a house 20 mi. away
• Individual force fields enable the adventurous to sleep nude in snowstorms
• Faster-than-light spaceships
• Laser weapons
• 3D tape recorders
  
• Total absorption of radar waves, a radar cloaking device
  
• Amputated limbs and damaged organs can be regrown from their stumps
• Transatlantic rocket flights and commercial rocket travel
• Permanent settlements on the moon
  

Exciting, is it not? While I expect that some of these concepts will take decades to become reality (weather control, commercial rocket travel, iridium wire spirals that turn night into day), several hardly seem unrealistic (automatic clothes-making machines, gene therapy, sound bombs, human life-span predicting machines). As suggested by the article "Where Has All the Sci-Fi Gone?", it's becoming more and more difficult for writers to make incredibly futuristic claims. Because information technology grows at an exponential rate (see video below - it's long, but informative), the more we advance, the harder it becomes for writers/futurists to keep pace. To add insult to their injury, we (the audience) have become accustomed to this accelerated rate of development, so the bar for shocking/impressing us has also risen. Despite these disadvantages, though, we still feel that science fiction is a legitimate tool for predicting future technologies for some time.


While there are certainly no shortage of predictions to explore, I find the most interesting area of future technology to be that of singularity...

According to Arthur C. Clarke, a famous science fiction author, inventor and futurist (whose works have foreshadowed technologies such as video phones, e-mail, space travel, laptops, and cloning), artificial intelligence will reach human levels by the year 2020, marking the existence of two intelligent species on earth - one biological, one non-biological. Another renowned inventor and futurist, Raymond Kurzweil, who has his own extensive list of predictions and was featured in the above video, estimates the following timeline (courtesy of Wikipedia):

• 2010 - Supercomputers will have the same power as human brains
• 2020 - Personal computers will have the same processing power as human brains
• 2030 - Mind uploading becomes possible - Nano-machines could be directly inserted into the brain and could interact with brain cells to totally control incoming and outgoing signals. As a result, truly full-immersion virtual reality could be generated without the need for any external equipment
• 2040 - Human body 3.0 comes into existence. It lacks a fixed, corporeal form and can alter its shape and external appearance at will via foglet-like nano-technology. Organs are also replaced by superior cybernetic implants.
• 2045 - The Singularity
• $1000 buys a computer a billion times more intelligent than every human combined. This means that average and even low-end computers are infinitely smarter than even highly intelligent, unenhanced humans.
• The Singularity occurs as artificial intelligences surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on. The machines enter into a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, with each new generation of A.I.s appearing faster and faster. From this point onwards, technological advancement is explosive, under the control of the machines, and thus cannot be accurately predicted.
• The Singularity is an extremely disruptive, world-altering event that forever changes the course of human history. The extermination of humanity by violent machines is unlikely (though not impossible) because sharp distinctions between man and machine will no longer exist thanks to the existence of cybernetically enhanced humans and uploaded humans.
• Post-2045 - "Waking Up" the Universe
• The physical bottom limit to how small computer transistors can be shrunk is reached. From this moment onwards, computers can only be made more powerful if they are made larger in size.
• Because of this, A.I.s convert more and more of the Earth's matter into engineered, computational substrate capable of supporting more A.I.s. until the whole Earth is one, gigantic computer.
• At this point, the only possible way to increase the intelligence of the machines any farther is to begin converting all of the matter in the universe into similar massive computers. A.I.s radiate out into space in all directions from the Earth, breaking down whole planets, moons and meteoroids and reassembling them into giant computers. This, in effect, "wakes up" the universe as all the inanimate "dumb" matter (rocks, dust, gases, etc.) is converted into structured matter capable of supporting life (albeit synthetic life).
• Kurzweil predicts that machines might have the ability to make planet-sized computers by 2099, which underscores how enormously technology will advance after the Singularity.
• The process of "waking up" the universe could be complete as early as 2199, or might take billions of years depending on whether or not machines could figure out a way to circumvent the speed of light for the purposes of space travel.
• With the entire universe made into a giant, highly efficient supercomputer, A.I./human hybrids (so integrated that, in truth it is a new category of "life") would have both supreme intelligence and physical control over the universe. Kurzweil suggests that this would open up all sorts of new possibilities, including abrogation of the laws of Physics, interdimensional travel, and a possible infinite extension of existence (true immortality).

Pretty heavy stuff, right? And the scary part is that these futurists have exceptional track records when it comes to predicting future technologies. Could singularity really be just around the corner? And is this how the events following will unfold? Is this what we want? Do we even have the ability to change the outcome? Is it a matter of technological determinism or social constructivism?

I don't have the answers to these questions, but I do believe that these predictions are momentous (and probable) enough that we should be taking them seriously. These are technologies that may very well be irreversible. Once we cross the line of singularity, there could be no turning back. And before we cross the Rubicon, we should be prepared to face the consequences, which we might already be aware of, or then again maybe not.

As discussed in one of my earlier blog posts, two months ago it was announced that Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Yahoo were on board with OpenID. If you're not familiar with the technology, here's a quick summary provided by the always helpful Wikipedia, followed by a video explanation presented by Dave:

OpenID is a shared identity service, which allows internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, eliminating the need for a different username and password for each site. It is a decentralized, free and open standard that lets users control the amount of personal information they provide.

Essentially, OpenID is a system that facilitates a single universal login and profile for each user. There's a great deal to be said about the technology's benefits to users:

• Only one set of credentials to be concerned with
  
• No more registering for every other site on the Internet
• Improved analytics, resulting in better recommendations, integration, and advertising
  

as well as some concerns over how our information is being tracked, exploited and sold to third parties.

Today, however, the topic of discussion is crime in technology. And the most prominent issue I'm foreseeing with the rise of OpenID is its vulnerability to identity theft, which is already a rising problem with current security practices.

According to IdentityTheftSecurity.com, there are four primary methods of "high-tech" identity theft:

• Hacking - stealing users' information from website networks and databases
  
• Phishing - imitating legitimate organizations and fooling users to send private information
  
• Trojans - computer program hidden in software applications that give hackers access to users' computers
• Spyware - inconspicuously logging users' internet activity and sending results to third parties
  (although I'm not sure I would classify spyware as identity theft)
  

There are plenty of well-known precautions to be taken in order to prevent identity theft, yet we frequently neglect them. And even if we do take the utmost care in following the safe-internet-use rules, there's still a very real chance that our identities can be stolen. This is true even for the computer savvy 18-25 demographic that most of us fall into. For past generations, who, as a whole, know alarmingly little about modern technology, the odds are much worse. The most desirable victims (the older folk, who actually have money in their bank accounts and higher limits on their credit cards) tend to be the easiest targets...ridiculously easy. Let's take a moment to demonstrate how one might go about stealing the identity. We'll discuss phishing, as it's probably the simplest approach.

To elaborate a little on the previous definition, I've borrowed from F-Secure.com:

Phishing is an impersonation of a corporation or other trusted institution. The goal of the impersonation is to extract passwords or other sensitive information from the victim. It is a form of criminal activity that utilizes social engineering techniques. Phishing is typically done using e-mail or an instant messaging program. The attempt of the message is to appear to be from an authentic source so that victim will either directly respond, or will open a URL link to a fake web site run by the criminals.

Here's what we'll need to do in preparation:

1. spend about $10/month on a domain (preferably one similar to the name of the institute we're trying to mimic - if we're going to be First National Bank, then we might try to get the domain 1stNational.org, which seems to be available),
2. pull down the HTML files and images from the actual site we're going to replicate (File -> Save Page As and make sure the type is set to "Webpage, complete"),
3. make a few minor tweaks (so any form information submitted will be stored in our database or sent to our e-mail),
4. then upload these slightly modified files to our new domain.

And now we're ready to go. Here's a little snippet of PHP that allows us to send mass e-mails, probably to a large list of recipients that we've purchased from some third party who gets their information from spyware:

<?php

function sendEmail($name, $email) {

$to = $name . " <" . $email . ">";
$subject = "Account Confirmation";
$message = "Body of e-mail goes here.";
$headers = "From: First National Bank Customer Service <CustomerService@1stNational.org>\r\n

Reply-To: First National Bank Customer Service <CustomerService@1stNational.org>";

$mail_sent = @mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
echo $mail_sent ? "Mail sent.<br />" : "Mail failed.<br />";

}

?>

Replace the subject variable with a formal-sounding message, explaining that there has been some suspicious use of the individual's account (logging in from distant locations, perhaps), and in order to prevent identity theft, it is recommended that the individual follow a provided link, log in using existing credentials, confirm his/her account number, then change the password. To make the whole scheme seamless, you might want to then have your website send a confirmation that the user's password has been changed, and then you could actually modify the user's password on the legitimate sight. And there you sit, with all the passwords and banking information of every individual that believed your e-mail was real.

I have never done, or even thought of doing, anything like this before. You shouldn't either - don't be an assbag. The reason I posted the process was because I was surprised/frightened by how simple the whole ordeal is. It's no rocket science, and anyone with a little bit of computer knowledge (who would actually be willing to do something like this) could easily put together a similar operation...and get away with it. The scary thing about OpenID is that they only need to get away with it once. One simple scam and they have the credentials to every site you visit on the internet and every piece of information you store in your profile. All the eggs will be in one basket, making for a very desirable target.

APRIL 4 - Pittsburgh Pair Claims Privacy Invaded By Posting of Home Photo -- A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google for invasion of privacy, claiming that the web giant's popular "Street View" mapping feature has made a photo of their home available to online searchers. Aaron and Christine Boring accuse Google of an "intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion" of their seclusion and privacy since they live on a street that is "clearly marked with a 'Private Road' sign," according to a lawsuit the couple filed this week in Allegheny County's Court of Common Pleas.

If you've never used Google's Street View feature on Maps, you can watch the short introductory video below and then (just a little bit farther down) try the functionality out for yourself with the embedded Street View map of Anchorage, Alaska.

View Larger Map
I intentionally selected a not-so-heavily-trafficked residential area to demonstrate the more intrusive side of Google's Street View. As you can see, you have a front-row seat to just about any house in the neighborhood, and if you zoom in, you can walk right up the driveway and onto the porch of some of the homes. It's understandable that habitants dwelling in Street View-able areas might be concerned. Millions of strangers can freely roam the streets and inspect the layout and landscape of any house near a road. For those with children, this is even more alarming. What a convenient tool for potential predators and burglars! Even more worrying, perhaps, is knowing that this is just the beginning of our home privacy concerns. Take a minute to watch the PhotoSynth demonstration below.


While Google's Street View might be too close for comfort to some, the potential of PhotoSynth digs deeper, reaching degrees of privacy invasion that even the more carefree individuals might consider threatening. According to an article on ReadWriteWeb,

The Street View maps are developed in partnership with Immersive Media, which, according to the O'Reilly Radar blog, is "a company that has an eleven lens camera capable of taking full, high-res video while driving along city streets." What that means is that these Street View maps, because they are extracted from video shot while driving, are not just static images at random points around the city. They can be advanced fluidly down the street.

In order to create the Street View experience, Google had to send out vehicles equipped with these super cameras to roam the city streets. I don't think we need to worry about them getting too much closer, because I doubt the day will come when cameramen are knocking on our doors, asking to be let in our homes to film for Google Maps.

PhotoSynth, on the other hand, isn't limited to the resources of a single organization. Because the technology utilizes the metadata associated with each image, it doesn't matter where the media is coming from. If it's available on the internet and properly tagged, it can be used to construct a three-dimensional representation of the real world. Pictures taken at parties, holidays, or during rainy afternoons lounging around the house, whatever the occasion, are fair game if they're posted online. And because of the nature of our photo-sharing (Facebook, WebShots, Flickr, blogs, personal webpages, etc.), it wouldn't be hard for friends, family and peers to tag any information that might be left out. Before long, anyone could take a full tour of your home or business from the comfort of their computer chair. Even one album of photos might be enough to reconstruct the interior of a building.

The end result? If the proper precautions aren't made, then just about anybody might be able to take a virtual tour of the inside of your house. A cool technology in many respects, but with the benefits we'll need to take the privacy and security issues as well.

[The article can be found here, and the video here. I would have embedded it, but it looked rather ugly.]

For the past year or so, I've been wondering why Facebook hasn't incorporated instant messaging into its hugely popular social networking system. It seems like a logical progression to me, and I'm surprised it's taken this long. But then again, maybe the company was just waiting for the perfect time to strike.

At this point, I think it's become set in stone that Facebook is (or at least is going to be) victorious over the obviously inferior MySpace. It's assumed that practically every college student has an account (which is crucial for the success of any sort of IM system), and because college folk like us are typically the ones that nurture new  Internet technologies into maturity, Facebook has everything it needs.

I'm anticipating that, at first, many will experiment with Facebook's new instant messaging feature, but the majority will still rely primarily on AIM. While Facebook Chat (very similar to GoogleTalk) seems to be unobtrusive, lightweight and well-integrated, it still runs in a browser, thus requiring more effort to maintain and being limited in its capabilities (especially when compared to an application installed on the operating system, like AIM).

But in time, I expect to see a standalone version of Facebook. With the recent release of the delightful new AIR runtime environment, the technologies are now available to design an extremely powerful, local version of Facebook, with richly aesthetic and highly interactive interfaces. The Facebook application will be a sort of "Super AIM", providing all of the flexibilities of our current IM standards (system-level control, access to the file system, the ability to directly send images and files, audio/video chat, etc.), but additionally, it will have all the perks of Facebook - extensive user profiles, the ability to search for friends by a variety of fields, integrated and user-friendly multimedia players, extensive privacy controls, groups, events, applications, etc.

Once the Facebook standalone has been released, we won't have a need for any other instant messaging system (except for talking to that 5% of stragglers who haven't gotten with the program yet), and really, none of the existing clients will even be able to compete. How could they? Facebook's insuperable advantage over everyone (Google included) is that it knows all of us...very, very well. It can take social interaction to a level that current IM clients (that know little more about us than who's on our buddy lists and what songs are quoted in our away messages) can't even fathom. And with the added power of a standalone Facebook, the gap's only going to grow...

It will have access to resources like our iTunes libraries, most likely linking friends with similar musical tastes, allowing for group playlists and custom radio broadcasts, pulling music from the files on individuals' machines. We'll also have "movie sessions", so when someone purchases a new blockbuster from the iStore, all of his/her friends can join in and watch it together as it streams from the owner's computer. When Tuesday rolls around and a new album is released, listening parties, too, could be arranged in this manner. Members of the audience could enjoy their friend's most recent musical purchase, listening, commenting, discussing (in a chatroom type of environment) without needing to interrupt the songs to verbally communicate. All of the previously mentioned gatherings would be treated as events, either public or invite-only, that users can organize and attend.

Facebook may also try to outdo Google Docs, creating its own set of collaboration tools. Users who submit their school schedules could easily be placed into course groups. With some modifications to the standalone Facebook, students could share papers, presentations, even art, modifying the files simultaneously, and chatting with one another to communicate ideas in the process.

The possibilities are there, and I do hope that at least some of the features I've described become a reality. But, maybe the Facebook community will reject that new chat/IM system and my ideas will never see the light of day. Time will tell.

Some neuroscientists at Berkeley have recently made significant progress in decoding visual brainwaves. As stated in this article,

The scientists used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine -- a real-time brain scanner -- to record the mental activity of a person looking at thousands of random pictures: people, animals, landscapes, objects, the stuff of everyday visual life. With those recordings the researchers built a computational model for predicting the mental patterns elicited by looking at any other photograph. When tested with neurological readouts generated by a different set of pictures, the decoder passed with flying colors, identifying the images seen with unprecedented accuracy.

While most people are moving toward more technologically advanced security systems, at least one "Crazy Englishman" is reverting back to medieval approaches. As described in this interesting little article, the UK businessman pictured below has put together a 30-foot iron catapult for flinging chicken manure at potential thieves. The police don't approve, but he doesn't seem to care. He has signs up to warn any trespassers of the risk they run (apparently trespassing/thievery is a fairly big problem in the UK now), and it seems to be doing the job. I know I wouldn't want to chance the messy consequences.

Adobe has officially released the long-awaited AIR runtime environment. Being a frequent developer/user of Flash applications, this was pretty exciting news for me. I haven't had a chance to do much more than download the updates for CS3, but everything I've read/seen looks great. Most of the applications that I've tried so far have been fairly impressive, and even though none of them reach the full potential of AIR, they've suggested some interesting possibilities.

The platform offers the same ease of Flash when it comes to interface design and animation, but it takes the programming side up a notch, providing deeper functionalities previously reserved for more traditional and formal languages like C++ and Java. For one, AIR applications have the ability to read/write/modify on the local file system, which, as one application has already demonstrated, allows for interesting things like pulling information from the contents of your iTunes library. AIR applications can also create and manipulate native windows and menus, add items to the system tray and dock, build local MySQLite databases, make network connections, and communicate with other clients through network connections. These functionalities aren't anything new, of course, but this is the first time that they've been so simple to implement and allowed for such a powerful and easy-to-build front-end.

Below is a brief overview provided by Lee Brimelow, creator of gotoAndLearn.com. It outlines some of the new functionalities introduced by AIR and demonstrates how simple they are to utilize.

AIRConditioning

Having limited experience with the technology, I can't say for sure, but I expect AIR to become hugely popular in the near future. Highly aesthetic, fairly powerful applications will be much easier to produce than in the past. These programs will be light-weight, fast to install, and completely cross-platform. We'll still need the more traditional languages for more intense, highly computational games and applications, but for small to medium-sized needs, AIR may be the new standard.

Playstation 3


XBox 360


iPod


Helio Ocean


Overall, I think they're all well-made and pretty impressive pieces of advertising. A polymorphous swiss-army-octopus-speaker-city creature, an 80-foot tall ogre with a furry hoodie, Paul McCartney dancing through a tripped out, inverted vector-spawning city with his mandolin, and a collection of metallic, party-planning robots sending messages on their equally shiny, holograph-producing new phones. Definitely a ton of creativity and probably even more money going into these commercials.

But, while they do stand out among practically all of the competition, these advertisements are somewhat predictable. Each clip is representing some huge new technology in the marketplace, and it's not particularly surprising when they try to embody/exaggerate the cutting-edge appeal of their products. If you would have asked me a year ago how I thought Sony and Microsoft would go about advertising their new consoles, I probably wouldn't have been able to give you all the details, and I might have left out the part about an urban medieval war and waves of arrows sailing through the city sky. However, I could have told you that each of the multi-billion dollar companies would be dumping an absurd amount of resources into their marketing campaigns, probably utilizing the best multimedia software and developers that they could get their hands on.

Now, take a look at some of Apple's iPhone commercials below.







A little different of a vibe, right? Minimalist, chill (visually and aurally), and no cgi. Unlike the first set of ads, the iPhone commercials don't depict the product in any kind of unrealistic light or behaving in any extraordinary manner. There's narrative in the background describing a fairly plausible situation that potential iPhone owners might find themselves in. The hands then react accordingly to the scenario, demonstrating some of the more impressive (but, by no means, mind-blowing) functionalities of the product. It's completely straightforward - "This is the iPhone. This is what it can do." - and as far as technical production goes, it couldn't be much more simple. With a nice camera, a greenscreen, and an iPhone, it would be reasonable to assume that an undergraduate college student could have put the commercial together for some medium-sized course project in a couple of days. Yet it works so well, and in my opinion, it was a brilliant marketing move.

A huge part of Apple's fairly recent success can be attributed to the company's devotion to simplicity. Its products have comparatively few buttons, ports and plugs. They're clean, stylish and intuitive. Apple really fosters the notion that technology is for everyone, and products should be easy to use regardless of technical background. The iPhone is no exception. In fact, it's one of the shining examples of this theory.

The commercials do a lovely job of demonstrating the ease of using the iPhone. They show how quickly and effortlessly users can navigate through the system and accomplish whatever goals that might spontaneously arise (sharing photos with friends, getting directions to the nearest seafood restaurant, etc.). They're pushing the idea that in our busy and unpredictable lives, the iPhone can provide us with rhyme and reason. It gives us all the technologies we might need right at the tips of our fingers, so easily accessible that we'll never miss a beat. There's a lot going on in these ads, but everything feels calm, smooth and in control (largely due to the music, the hands' efficient use of the iPhone, and strategic cuts).

And who can take advantage of this hip new technology? Well, as alluded to before and as implied by the exclusion of any human beings (save a pair of hands) in the commercials, nobody's left out- the iPhone is for everyone. And this philosophy works nicely with the minimalistic style that Apple's so inclined to - no people or words (save the very end where the product name appears) interrupting the audiences attention - just the product, in plain site, available for everyone.