Paper Computers

Researchers at ASU, including Win Burleson and Byron Lahey, have developed a revolutionary new flexible paper computer.  The paper computer uses a flexible E Ink display and the prototype they made is of a smart phone.  The flexible display allows for many gestures that aren't possible on a rigid device.  For example, the corners can be bent to flip a page or the entire screen can be bent in or out to zoom a page.

If the technology is refined a little more, it could be truly revolutionary.  Flexible screens can be put in clothes, appliances, phones, and just about anywhere else.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110504111147.htm

Near Perfect Visual Search Discovered ... Millions of Years Ago

It turns out our brains perform a near optimal visual search.  Given the available information in a scene, human brains can pick out objects surrounded by distractions in the best possible way.  It's believed that this initially evolved so mammals could see predators in shadows and in camouflage.  The same skill is also being used by TSA agents when they scan the X-Ray machine for outlawed objects.

If we can duplicate the visual search algorithm used by mammals in a computer, it could mean huge advances in human computer interaction.  Self driving cars could see as much detail as human drivers.  Robot interaction with humans could also be greatly improved.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110508134929.htm

Finding Out How We Learn

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara developed a predictive model that determines how much a person is able to learn.  They found that this capacity is independent of how much a person already knows.  The brain is made up of many different "modules" that all interconnect and talk to each other.  These connections change over time and the researchers found that the flexibility of these connections and the capacity for them to change is the biggest determinant of how much a person is able to learn.

Using this knowledge, people might be able to know when studying or physical therapy is going to be effective.  This could help people better schedule their day and increase the efficiency of these processes.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110419091157.htm

Thinking With Your Hands

This article can be filed into the "people aren't as rational as we thought" folder.  I found out that it has been known for a while that right-handers associate "good" with the right half of their vision and "bad" with the left half and left-handers have the opposite association.  When shown two options side by side, right-handers will more often choose the one on the right.  The crazy part is that people will make up reasons why the one on the right is better to justify their decision.  When the images are switched without the participant knowing, they will justify why the one now on the right is better.

The new research out of University of Pennsylvania contradicts the common belief that this favoring of the right side was hard-wired in the brain since birth.  They showed that when the right hand of a right-handed person was temporarily handicapped with burdensome ski mittens, the participants fairly quickly developed a left-side bias.  This shows that the brain is much more elastic than we thought.  It also raises the question "if what was once thought to be a deep held belief can be reversed in a matter of minutes with a simple glove, what does that say about the rest of our supposedly deep held beliefs?"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110310131006.htm

Copy-Cat Online Training Helpers

Researchers at North Carolina State University did a study and found that virtual avatars are most useful when they physically resemble the person using them. They did the test with an online educational training system.  Participants performed much better when the virtual helper shared the same communication style and had similar physical characteristics.

This confirms the belief that while opposites may attract, they rarely stay together.  Relationships are built upon commonalities and shared beliefs.  This information could be used to create better training systems but could also be expanded to create more emotionally engaging advertisements and video games.  You can add this to an ever growing list of "bran hacks" that marketers can use to manipulate people.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110302101658.htm

Driving With Your Mind

I read a cool article about Berlin researchers developed a car you can drive with your mind.  They used new and improved EEG brain wave sensors and training software to distinguish between brainwaves for "accelerate", "brake", "turn left", and "turn right".  They hooked the device directly to the car control system and the test subject was successfully able to navigate a course using thought alone.

They also did a second experiment which I think is even cooler.  They used a hybrid autonomous/mind-control vehicle that drove most of the way on its own and only used mind-inputs to determine which way to turn at an intersection.  This is like having your own chauffeur drive you around where ever you want to go.  You just occasionally give instructions and he handles all the details of the actual driving.  I could see this as a viable stepping stone between human-controlled vehicles and completely autonomous vehicles, assuming of course that we don't need to wear ugly helmets to properly read brain signals.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110218083711.htm

Brain Mouse

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are performing experiments with brain-computer interfaces.  There have already been multiple studies of monkeys controlling a robotic arm by thought and some experiments on human epilepsy patients who already had the motor areas of the brain exposed, thus allowing the temporary implantation of a brain-computer interface that let the patients move a mouse cursor and play games by thought alone.

The exciting part of the current research is that the scientists are ready to start testing brain-computer interfaces on people who actually need them.  They will soon begin testing the devices in conjunction with robotic prosthetic limbs on paralyzed patients.

This technology, if it gets off the ground, can make so many Hollywood movies come to life.  We could have Avatars or Surrogates that we control from a distance.  We could have robotic hands like Anakin Skywalker or Will Smith in I, Robot.  We could have fully roboticized exoskeletons like Iron Man.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll live to see any of these actually happen and I think I have a pretty good chance.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110217124913.htm

Robot Phones

Cynthia Breazeal gave a good TED talk on the rise of personal robots.  She and her team at the MIT Media Lab are devising new ways that robots can interact with people in everyday tasks.  One of the more interesting experiments involves attaching a smart phone to a small desk-top robot.  The content and emotions of a call are reflected by the robot's body language.  They found that people thought the conversations were more real when the robot's body language was changing as opposed to a simple video chat.  This could have big impacts on all kinds of long term relationships and conversations, ranging from a grandmother wanting to see her grandkids in another state to a phone interview for a new job.

http://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_breazeal_the_rise_of_personal_robots.html

Virtual Secret Service

The department of defense has used a teaching method called Tiny Town to train Secret Service officers for over 40 years.  This consists of miniature models of various buildings (sports stadium, hotel, airport, etc.) that students try and devise a security plan to allow for the visit of a dignitary.  The model helps them visualize possible lines of attack and think of ways to prevent them.

The department recently developed a virtual version of Tiny Town that runs of touchscreen kiosks.  This brings the Secret Service into the 21st century and allows to do things they never could before, like perform a virtual first-person walk-through of an area or simulate the spread of poisonous gasses in a chemical attack.  I don't know if the Secret Service plans to release the technology, but this could be really useful for private security firms as well.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110215102844.htm

Mobile 3D

Researchers in Germany created a new video codec that can compress high definition 3D video down to sizes that could be streamed over a wireless network, allowing cell phones to view full 3D video.  As far as I know, they are leaving the actual displaying of the video up to the cell phone and only working on the compression and streaming aspect.  I don't think 3D glasses would go over well for a cell phone, so Nintendo 3DS-like screens that don't need glasses will probably be involved.  The other big hurdle they have to overcome is limited processing power on mobile devices.  Many new smart phones have 1GHz processors, but this probably isn't enough to decode this highly compressed video and display it at fast enough frame rates.  Once phones are closer to 2 or 3 GHz or contain dedicated graphics chips, they should be able to handle it.  Hopefully Android incorporates this codec at some point so I can watch 3D video on my 2013 5G phone.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110211074747.htm

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

Two companies based out of Germany and Austria have combined forces to create a wireless touch-screen health monitoring device called myVitali for the elderly.  Current systems like Life Alert use analog phone lines to send emergency signals, but there is a limit to the functionality you can provide this way.   The myVitali device uses the internet instead, which allows for much more functionality but posed some problems as well. 

First of all, the service must be available 100% of the time so users can always get help in an emergency.  To overcome this, the companies set up cloud servers in 5 countries across the globe to provide fall-back protection in case of outages.  In addition to this, the device checks its connection to the server every 30 seconds and alerts the user if a connection could not be made. 

Secondly, the device had to be extremely simple to use.  Most of the customers would have little or no computer experience and would have to interact with wireless networks, tablets, touch-screens, and internet.  Many of the customers also suffered hearing or sight loss.  A combination of these things meant that the device had to be extremely accessible and have all the back-end technology abstracted away to a simple user interface. 

They currently have 1200 user accounts and counting in Europe.  It would be interesting to see how this would do in the US.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110203081443.htm

Stand Up Robots

I watched a TED talk with Heather Knight, a roboticist who is interested in the intersection between  robots and entertainment.  She runs Marilyn Monrobot, a company which aims to create "socially intelligent robot performances."  Heather showcased her robot Data, an amateur stand-up comedian.  The audience members in the front row were given red and green cards they could hold up to show whether or not they liked the jokes being told.  Data was built with visual sensors to detect the cards and a microphone to pick up applause and laughter.  Supposedly, he would choose his jokes based on the audience reactions. 

For the talk, he stood up on his own, told 3 or 4 jokes (mostly funny) and sat back down.  The actual demonstration wasn't that impressive to me.  It seemed like Data was just using text-to-speech to read jokes from a database and do pre-programmed hand movements.  There wasn't any comic timing or real expression coming through.  It would be interesting to see him doing a longer (15 minutes or so) show and see how he would react to the audience.  As Data stands right now, he is certainly not the worst stand up comedian out there, but he's got a ways to go until he can compete with the big guys.

Writing with Crowds

Researchers in CMU's HCI Institute found that multiple people working independently could produce informational articles of higher quality than individuals.  For the experiment, they built a platform called CrowdForge on top of the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform.  CrowdForge splits complex tasks, like writing an article, into smaller tasks that can be done simultaneously by many people.  For example, some people were given the task of creating an outline while others voted on the best ones and still others turned these outlines into prose small sections at a time.  They compared this with articles written by individuals and Wikipedia articles and found that people rated the crowd sourced articles as higher quality and with less variation in quality.  If the CrowdForge system can prove viable for other types of complex problems, it could really change the way businesses operate.  Imagine being able to crowd source your tax forms or documentation?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110202152056.htm

Baby Robots

There was a cool story about a roboticist at University of Vermont that used genetic algorithms to teach robots how to walk.  Robots were created in a sophisticated computer simulation and were given a task of walking toward a light without falling over.  Some of the robots started like tadpoles, some like snakes with legs, some like lizards, and some like mammals with legs directly beneath their body.  The genetic algorithm allowed the designs to evolve and let natural selection take its course.  The interesting finding was that the robots that started out with a more primitive form and evolved to the mammalian form performed better than the robots that started in the mammalian form.  These robots were mimicking how humans learn to walk.  They first learn forward movement and don't worry about balance since it is harder to fall over with a reptile-like frame.  Once they master forward movement, they can learn balance and improve their speed and gait.  I think this may be a promising technology for future robots.  Instead of trying to "play god" and program extremely complicated maneuvers manually, they can build the framework and leverage the power of evolution to come up with solutions itself.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110120131542.htm

Robotic Fish

There was an article recently in Science Daily (my favorite news website) about a team at Northwestern University that studied the Ghost Knifefish, an unusual fish that can move in any direction - horizontal or vertical - almost instantaneously and built a robotic version.  Humans are great at building fast machines with poor maneuverability, like airplanes and cars, but have a hard time building slower machines with high maneuverability.  Nature on the other hand is excellent at producing highly maneuverable "machines" and we could learn a lot by studying the processes it uses.  The Knifefish has one ribbon-like fin on the bottom of its body and depending on the type of wave it creates on the fin, it can move in any direction.  To move forward or backwards, it sends a single wave either from front-to-back or back-to-front.  To move vertically, it sends two waves from opposite ends that meet in the center.  The two waves cancel out horizontal movement and all of the energy goes down and propels the animal upwards.  The scientists were able to reproduce this behavior with a highly sophisticated robot using 32 motors to control the individual parts of the fin.  Possible applications might include an underwater robot that can perform delicate operations like fixing oil pipes or exploring small areas.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110119095045.htm

We Are All Cyborgs

I watched a TED talk by Amber Case where she claims that we are all becoming cyborgs.  She defines a cyborg as an organism with added technology that helps it adapt to its surroundings.  She cites people using cell phones and computers as examples of modern day cyborgs.  Up until recently, all human technology has dealt primarily with advancing our physical properties, such as allowing us to fight at a distance or chop down wood or open nuts and seeds faster.  Today, our tools are now extending our mental properties, making it easier for us to remember, communicate, and learn.  A consequence of this that she mentions is that adolescents now have to go through two awkward phases, the normal biological phase and an even more awkward technological adolescence that keeps a record of everything they have done. 

I thought the talk was really interesting and well done.  To think, I've been a cyborg this whole time and didn't even know it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/amber_case_we_are_all_cyborgs_now.html

Video Games With Living Cells

I remember reading an article recently where a Stanford physicist and his team created a series of video games that used actual living cells.  According to the article, they "developed the first video games in which a player's actions influence the behavior of living microorganisms in real time -- while the game is being played."  The team created 3 video games: PAC-mecium,  a Pacman clone where a paramecium is controlled with a mild electric field; PolymerRace, where users bet on which PCR reaction will finish first; and a game where users have to identify the type of yeast in a colony based on the smell.  The idea of the project was to get kids interested in biology, but I think just about anyone would find these games fun and engaging.  How cool would it be to see real-time video of a paramecium moving and know that you're the one controlling it with a joystick.  Although probably not practical on a large scale, I could definitely see exhibits like this popping up in science centers and museums.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110114100955.htm

Sharing Medical Data Between Doctors

There was an interesting article on Science Daily a few weeks ago about how doctors store and share patient data, such as MRI images and CT scans.  Apparently, there is a standard called Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) that outlines how files should be stored and transferred.  The problem is that many doctors don't follow this standard, which causes delays that could potentially be detrimental to patients.  Most medical data today is transferred on CDs and DVDs.  I think a simple open source application that takes a range of medical files of different types and compiles them according to the DICOM standard could really help doctors get the information they need quickly and efficiently.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110104064028.htm