My oh my: Pillcam, with this kind of stuff I really feel like living in 2005, do some people think about deviant usage of this?!

The PillCam™ ESO video capsule is specifically designed to view the inner lining of the Esophagus. The capsule is equipped with miniature cameras on both ends and is about the size of a multi-vitamin, which can be swallowed easily. The patient swallows the capsule lying down, and is then raised in a series of inclinations over a total of 5 minutes. The PillCam™ ESO travels through the esophagus by normal peristaltic waves, flashing 14 times per second, each time capturing images of the inner lining of the esophagus.

During this five-minute procedure, the PillCam™ ESO captures images, which are transmitted to the sensor arrays. These images then travel from the sensors, along the wires to the DataRecorder™. (…) Once all equipment is removed from the patient, the portable DataRecorder™ downloads the video images to a designated workstation, from which the physician views and assesses the results in order to recommend next steps in the patient’s treatment.

Technorati Tags: pillcam

Funny way to control your car: Mazda’s new concept hatchback, Sassou, ditches the traditional cylinder lock key system in favor of USB flash drives as explained here:

On the inside is a high-tech, interactive interior concept reflecting the lifestyle of young people. It uses a USB stick as a key and an interface port for programming the hard disc drive conceived for the concept.

Why do I blog this? it’s an intriguing new way of ‘authenticating’ and controlling a car. The key is a way to memorize parameters/preferences of the vehicles.

The last issue of Communications of the ACM is a special issue about RFID tags. Here is a summar by editor Gaetano Borriello about the contribution:

Joshua R. Smith et al. describe an approach to integrating basic movement-sensing with tags and how they might be used to infer human activity, specifically, which objects people manipulate.

Ramesh Raskar et al. take this concept further by integrating light sensors into tags to add location- and geometric-reasoning to RFID tag/reader combinations. Applications range from identifying warehouse contents, to shelving books in libraries, to assisting robotic assembly procedures, to detecting obstructions on remote railroad tracks
Sherry Hsi and Holly Fait focus on a particularly interesting application involving the Exploratorium in San Francisco, a science museum using RFID tags to help visitors interact with exhibits within the museum, allowing them to register and document their interests, then extend the visit after they’ve gone home. However, as appealing as such extended scientific discovery may be to most of us, many museum visitors, in fact, forgo this potentially rewarding experience, fearing it could open them up to violations of personal privacy.

Miyako Ohkubo et al. address the problem of lost personal privacy head on, providing a way to continuously scramble a tag’s ID after every read so that only the tag’s authorized users are able to keep track of their scrambled IDs.

Oliver Günther and Sarah Spiekermann take on the consumer’s view of the inherent risks to their personal data privacy in RFID-based applications and why solutions (such as scrambled IDs) are only the first of a series of measures to ensure consumer participation in RFID-based retail deployments. The goal is to win consumer trust by giving them some amount of control—possibly legally mandated—over the RFID infrastructure and its uses. Otherwise, RFID vendors and RFID-enabled retailers risk losing them as customers.

And, finally, Bruce Eckfeldt cautions RFID-enabled retailers everywhere that they risk the same fate if they fail to consider—in advance—how the consumer might directly benefit or lose from their technology investment..

Why do I blog this? RFID is a more and more important technology but privacy issues are REALLY not that simple. I skimmed through the pages quickly but it seems to give a good overview of the field, judging from other studies I read in the past 2 years. I think the editor’s conclusion is quite standard in nowadays’ feeling about RFID:

This sampling of RFID technologies and their applications will help show what is possible and what is promised in consumer uses of passive RFID tags. Moreover, as tags get cheaper, smaller, and more capable, we can expect many as-yet unimagined beneficial yet potentially invasive uses in areas as diverse as health care and entertainment. As RFID technologists, application developers, and consumers, we must all be vigilant as to how these systems are designed not only for the sake of efficiency and cost but also to safeguard consumers’ privacy and instill their trust in the technology

“The network is the church” is the motto of the Next Scribe, an organization in New Mexico that conducts the research and development to assess and develop the long term potential of ubiquitous personal digital networks to enrich human relationships and spiritual community. The aim is to develop the spiritual potential of social digital networks. From what I could gather, they advocate for making digital media the instrument of spirituality (as explained by Genevieve Bell from intel in a report for the IFTF).

NextScribe’s mission to develop the Network Centric Church began in 1994. NextScribe brings to this task a multidisciplinary expertise that is unique in the world:

• Spiritual Experience: A mission born in the purely contemplative monastic experience of the desert — informed by a 1,500 year tradition of community and spiritual life — that has been further extended by work with international, multi-denominational expressions of spiritual life and community;
• Technological Expertise: Long term, ongoing development of the multiple components of the Network Centric Church, including:
  • systems research and architecture
  • web and database design and programming
  • internet-based collaborative systems
  • IM system design and programming
  • wireless device integration
  • digital privacy and security
  • human/computer interaction research and design;
• Focus: a singular, long-term focus on developing technology to serve the spiritual life and community.

Why do I blog this? first because connection between technology and religion is kind of odd (especially for westerners where the catholic religion is quite conservative, especially with means of communication means that already fostered some problems for them, think about gutenberg and the reform). Second because I find this curious, especially when it’s about AI and religion!

Technorati Tags: puppy, religion

• Firefly: with just 5 keys:
  
• Tictalk (by Leapfrog and Enfora): parents can control Parents control the phone numbers online at mytictalk.com:
  
• MyScene Mobile phone (Mattel):
  
• ChatNow: The ChatNow two-way radio communicator is the new personal communicator that allow kids to ‘call’ or ‘text’ their friends. With the digital camera kids can take and store up to 30 images that can be viewed on the unit’s black-and-white screen.
  

Why do I blog this? I am looking at interface for kids (because of various projects for video game companies that target kids users). What I like in those phones is that they are not fully featured handsets (for instance calls can be limited to a set of numbers provided by the parent or some other features are missing). Either there are some interesting add-ons like the possiblity for children to make their own ringtones with the Leapfrog phone as well as the existence of five games on the phone, teaching math, spelling and social-science skills. Parents can also reward children with phone minutes for reaching certain levels in the games and they can set “quiet” times for the phone, for instance during school hours (as mentioned in this article in the WSJ).

The last issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing journal is specially dedicated to the use of pervasive computing in sports, which is a highly relevant topic (giving the mobility and multi-players potentialities/settings).

Sensors and other ubiquitous computing technologies have slowly penetrated the arena of sports. This special issue gives some excellent examples of pervasive technology in sports and points to future directions.

Why do I blog this? the article about real time analysis of football might sound good: Computerized Real-Time Analysis of Football Games by Michael Beetz, Bernhard Kirchlechner and Martin Lames.

Real-time game analysis systems must be able to automatically recognize intentional activities in a multiagent system with continually acting agents. To meet these demands, the authors developed the Football Interaction and Process Model and a software system that can acquire, interpret, and analyze this model. The system can acquire models of player skills, infer action-selection criteria, and determine player and team strengths and weaknesses. They tested it on the RoboCup simulation league and received promising results.

Technorati Tags: hci, interface, location-based games, pervasive, pervasive gaming, tangible interaction

Superstars of the Mobile Internet: Top 10 Mobile Multimedia Nations identifies the leading nations in terms of mobile multimedia usage. The report illustrates the types of indicators used to measure mobile multimedia penetration and identifies the 10 leading mobile multimedia nations in the world.

In a new report, Telecommunications Management Group, Inc. (TMG) identifies the leading nations in mobile multimedia. Entitled “Superstars of the Mobile Internet,” the publication provides the statistical basis to show which countries lead in using mobile handsets to download entertainment, exchange picture messages and access the Internet. The report compares often conflicting, exaggerated or vaguely defined mobile operator statistics with government surveys on mobile Internet use to arrive at its conclusions.

Japan and South Korea are neck and neck, leading the world in mobile multimedia use. The only other nation with double-digit penetration is France, part of a quartet of large European countries in the top ten (along with Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom). The tech-savvy Nordic nations are also present in the list, represented by Finland, Norway and Sweden. The only other Asian country in the top ten is Singapore, ranked number four.

Why do I blog this? I am not a great fan of market penetration studies/figures because I am dubious of the method used to gather such cues. Anyway, sometimes, it might be interesting to have a glance. I was a bit surprised that US are missing from this list. The datasheet gives an overview of the phenomenon. France 3rd position is also interesting as well as promising in terms of potential market to investigate users’ behavior towards these services.

This morning I was in a masters thesis jury at the University of Geneva. The presenter, Melie Genet showed her work, which consists in three tools allowing to discover communities of interest and to find help in a collaborative learning context. The most relevant part of the work is certainly the automatic extraction of personal information (identity, interests) and known relationships. These information are then turned into a FOAF file. Then you can query those foaf, investigating who knows whom, who’s known by whom and which person share the same interests with you.
The tools can be found here as well as the masters thesis which is only available in french.

Friend-Of-A-Friend (FOAF) est un langage dérivé du XML qui permet de décrire les personnes et leurs liens, et de manipuler ces données avec une grande facilité. Il s’impose donc comme une référence pour l’étude des réseaux sociaux. Cependant, la plupart des gens négligent de créer des métadonnées les concernant et préfèrent publier des informations non structurées sur leurs pages personnelles. Nous faisons la proposition d’un système de génération automatique de profils FOAF à partir des données des pages personnelles, qui va produire une banque de données interrogeable sous forme visuelle et textuelle. Le programme utilise par ailleurs une technique statistique pour détecter des termes sémantiquement proches et déceler des communautés d’intérêts au sein des membres du TECFA (Technologie de Formation et d’Apprentissage, unité de la FPSE, Université de Genève) : l’analyse de sémantique latente. Les prototypes fournis, quoi que nécessitant des développements ultérieurs importants, présentent de nombreux aspects novateurs et pourraient être utilisés afin de promouvoir la perception de communautés de pratiques, de supporter la localisation d’experts et de soutenir le travail collaboratif.

Why do I blog this? I found the project relevant and brought me back one year ago when roberto and I were thinking about all this FOAF buzz! Foaf seems to be a bit downhill lately
Any people interested can write to her (email is genet1 (at) etu dot unige dot ch), she’s fluent in english.

I really like Hydra’s tagline: “Living” Building Blocks for Self-designing Artefacts“

The HYDRA project works towards the design of building blocks for self-reconfigurable artefacts. The building blocks shall allow robust and efficient morphological development of artefacts. In order to allow end-users of our approach to design new artefacts in an easy manner, we will provide an architecture (the HYDRA architecture) made up of simple building blocks, simple connections, and simple interactions. Inspired by biological principles, the HYDRA project realises engineering structures with the properties of differentiation and self-reconfiguration.

Also there are plenty of interesting related projects here.

(via), an impressive artificial arm. What is very impressive is that the arms are attached to the guy’s muscles. Therefore, he could commande them.

Researchers have developed artificial arms that can be moved as it if they were real limbs, simply by thinking about making them move,. The world’s first bionic man, Jesse Sullivan, 54, accidentally touched live wires while working as a utility lineman in Tennessee. He suffered severe burns, causing him to lose his arms.

I don’t know why it reminded the time when Slayer’s guitarist had his huge prothesis.

Viewpoint: Instant messaging and the future of language by Naomi Baron, Communications of the ACM, Volume 48 , Issue 7 (July 2005).

In this paper, the author claims that the writing style commonly used in IMing, texting, and other forms of computer-mediated communication need not spell the end of normative language.

Are email, instant messaging (IM), and text messaging on cell phones degrading the language? This question surfaces in debates among language professionals and, perhaps more important, among parents and their teenage offspring. (…) The most important effect of IM on language turns out to be not stylized vocabulary or grammar but the control seasoned users feel they have over their communication networks. (…) Adolescents have long been a source of linguistic and behavioral novelty. Teens often use spoken language to express small-group identity. It is hardly surprising to find many of them experimenting with a new linguistic medium (such as IM) to complement the identity construction they achieve through speech, clothing, or hair style. (…) Our research suggests that IM conversations serve largely pragmatic information-sharing and social-communication functions rather than providing contexts for establishing or maintaining group identity. Moreover, college students often eschew brevity. Our data contains few abbreviations or acronyms (…) IM conversations are not always instant. (…) The most important effect of IM on language turns out to be not stylized vocabulary or grammar but the control seasoned users feel they have over their communication networks. (…) Our data suggests that when teenagers transition to college, they naturally shed some of their adolescent linguistic ways in favor of more formal writing conventions

Why do I blog this? analysis of IM, focused on whatever domain (forms, content, social networks…) is amazingly intriguing!

Getting a leg up, thanks to robotic limbs By Michel Marriott The New York Times. An interesting piece about a new trend: incorporating new technologies into the body. It’s about Cameron Clapp new robotic legs.

For people who see Cameron Clapp for the first time, he is an object of wonderment: a young man walking tall on shiny robotic legs. (…) Clapp lost both his legs above the knee and his right arm just short of his shoulder after falling onto train tracks almost five years ago near his home in Grover Beach, California.
After years of rehabilitation and trying a series of prosthetics, each more technologically sophisticated than the last, he finally found his legs. (…) In the last few years, technology has definitely been on his side, in the form of the C-Leg. Introduced by Otto Bock HealthCare, a German company that makes advanced prosthetics, the C-Leg combines computer technology with hydraulics. It literally does the walking for the walker.
Blazing advancements, including lightweight composite materials, keener sensors and tiny programmable microprocessors are restoring remarkable degrees of mobility to amputees. (…) “There is a kind of cyborg consciousness, a fluidity at the boundaries of what is flesh and what is machine, that has happened behind our backs,” said Sherry Turkle, director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is writing a book on robots and culture. “The notion that your leg is a machine part and it is exposed, that it is an enhancement, is becoming comfortable in the sense that it can be made a part of you.”

Why do I blog this? the article is worth reading, it summarizes the crux issues raised by this kind of technology and its impact. Besides, I am wondering when handicapped will do better performance in competition with such devices.
Update! regine just pointed me on this article about artificial legs, which is… intriguing: The ethics of amputation by choice “People should be able to have healthy limbs removed by choice, say two Australian philosophers who are exploring the phenomenon of “amputee wannabes”.“.

Wrning, Hardcore post here: I would not bet on it but there is now a connection between XML and neural network. For people not confortable with neural network, it’s an artificial intelligence technique that aim to simulate some properties of real neural networks in order to do cognitive modeling (which actually works pretty well for pattern recognition and classification tasks). XML is data formalism.

Now let’s turn to this: XML-BASED FORMAT FOR TRAINED NEURAL NETWORK DEFINITION by D.V. Rubtsov, S.V. Butakov.

In this work a format for neural network models description is introduced. Its main purpose is to provide a unified way for neural network model definition. Format allows interchanging neural models as well as documentation, store and manipulating them independently from the simulation system that produced it. We propose to use XML notation for full description of neural models, including data dictionary, properties of training sample, preprocessing methods, details of network structure and parameters, method for network output interpretation. The first version of DTD for neural model description language is developed. A model description structure, contents of main issues in XML document and example of software structure for handling files with neural model description are presented.

Roughly speaking, here is a concrete example (it might be not so concrete for those not aware with both concepts):

The scary image on the left is described by the XML format and turned into another scary image on the right.
Why do I blog this? because this providing a unified description of a neural network is a vers relevant idea. I am interested by this because I do think it’s relevant for cognitive science research. Besides, the use of the XML technology (a web tech!) is an intriguing by-product of this project: the underlying presence of the Internet/Web: it’s implicitly present in the project: the Internet takes a central part here (which is not obvious with regard to the neural network definition).

Selkirk: Jabberwocky Cartography of/as a Little Mind by Wilfried Hou Je Bek and Orkan Telhan:

…SELKIRK is a special purpose application of our ongoing fundamental research in the creation of little minds (grassroots artificial intelligence or rather telligence similar to the distinction between humour and black umour of Jacques Vaché, the Selkirk behind the Surrealist movement)… In SELKIRK the wiring of it’s little mind is the streetgram of Amsterdam. Severed from the city, stripped of its physical components, each neuron in the mind of SELKIRK is equivalent to a street, or a part of a street, in Amsterdam… like a face in a cloud: some see the head of a sheep, some the contours of a ghost while other the backside of a minotaur, all in the same cloud.

Interesting product by betomorrow: now you can use LiveFoot to get a real-ime coverage of a soccer game. LiveFoot is available on Wap, J2ME and Microsoft Smartphone formats:

According to the society:

LiveFoot is a complete soccer information service. It allows presentation at all times of information on games, teams, players and statistics. Thanks to a very innovating technology, LIVEFOOT allows to follow, in real time, the highlights of a football match over a mobile device. Along with the reconstruction of the actions, a spoken or written commentary is supplied by a journalist.

• The specific system developed by Symah Vision, Epsis LOCATOR, assesses in real time the position of the players as well as the ball. Moreover, it offers in-depth information such as the speed of the ball or the distance to the goal.
• BeTomorrow developed a cutting-edge process to integrate the data in a real time environment. Thanks to this solution using very little bandwidth, LIVEFOOT offers an operational alternative to video on mobile devices.

There is also LiveSailing dedicated to live reggattas broadcasting.
Why do I blog this? It do think it’s an innovative applications: now you can have a “real-time replay” of a soccer game on your cell phone, played with avatars. It’s dead crazy! Even though it’s not working for the whole game (just highlights), there is an tremendous paradigm shift here: real players will play and some users will watch avatars! The LiveFoot system seems a but outdated, don’t know if it was thrown to the market and I’m not sure whether it would work, it just sounds curious.