New Technologies

[winston]

Programmers Win DARPA Prize for Reconstructing Shredded Documents

To most people, 10,000 slivers of shredded paper are as good as trash. To three coders in San Francisco, they’re a challenge—especially when the jumbled mass of paper once made up five classified government documents.

The trio were not hackers trying to steal state secrets, but participants in a contest run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the government group that funds high-tech military research.

In October, Darpa offered $50,000 to the first group to piece together the shredded documents or the one that made the most progress by Dec. 4.

In previous Darpa tournaments, participants have been asked to build robotic cars or use the Internet to find balloons scattered across the country. The goal of the paper shredder puzzle was to unearth technologies that could be used for national security.

“I figured I know enough really damn good programmers that I could get a few people together and we might be able to win it,” says Otávio Good, the entrepreneur behind the iPhone app Word Lens, which translates foreign-language text as it’s viewed through the phone’s camera.

Good and his partners, a software engineer working at Lockheed Martin (LMT) and a mobile app maker, spent 600 hours combined piecing together the five shredded pages.

Out of nearly 9,000 teams, theirs—which they called “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.”—was the only one to complete all five puzzles, which they did with two days to spare.

Two weeks in, Good’s team was stumped by the fourth sheet of paper, which was more of a challenge because the words were irregularly spaced and written on unlined paper.

“I think everybody hit a wall on puzzle four and didn’t know what to do,” Good says. Then he happened on an article about a little-known government project: The U.S. Secret Service has been working with manufacturers of color laser printers to place tiny, imperceptible yellow dots on printed pages so that the government can track the machine that produced them.

Good put the puzzle under a blue-light filter and saw the dots. “It was a breakthrough moment,” he says. “The pattern of dots is practically a map for how everything comes together.”

Source: Bloomberg

[winston]

The Future Starts in 2020
By Thomas Lin and Jonathan Huang / Source: NY Times


A timeline of the most popular predictions: 2012 - 2259


2012: COMPUTER ON A CHIP "The high-end microprocessor of 2020 will be an entire computer on a single chip: processor and main memory versus the many processor chips and DRAM chips of today."


2013: ELECTRONIC INK "Electronic ink becomes as flexible and thin as paper. A new print revolution starts."


2019: ONLINE SCIENCE "Scientific publishing will move away from the current journal-and-conference model to a model that takes better advantage of online tools."


2019: UNIVERSAL MEDICAL DATABASE "Your entire medical history from birth till death will be collectively combined in one universal system and available to all your different doctors."


2022: HALO OF DATA "Personalized descriptions of what and who is around you will be available at the push of a button on your smartphone, and also by default. A 'halo of data' will constantly accompany you. This represents the next step beyond augmented reality."


2023: CURING CANCER "By 2020, the most common forms of cancer will be treated with a personalized therapy based on genetic sequencing. A patient's therapy will be retargeted every six months as a result of resequencing the cancer to track its inevitable evolution."


2024: PRACTICAL ROBOT CARS "By 2018, freeway car pool lanes will be opened to robot-driven cars."


2026: PROGRAMMABLE ORGANISMS "By 2030, reprogrammable tissue and organismal development will arrive. Scientists will design a life on a computer and print it out in a laboratory."


2031: FULL LIFE RECORDING "Most people will own and use a Personal Life Recorder which will store full video and audio of their daily lives. This will be a fully searchable archive that will radically augment a person's effective memory."


2039: DIGITAL 'LIFE' AND EVOLUTION "Systems grow so complex that new computer viruses spontaneously evolve from stray bits of code and transcription errors."


2056: CASH IS OUTLAWED "Cash will become illegal, replaced with electric currency."


2058: CYBERNETIC INTELLIGENCE "Enhanced intelligence will be available to most people through a combination of nanotechnology and embedded processors."


2060: FLYING CARS "By 2040, more people will use personal air vehicles for their daily commute than cars."


2063: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE "A computer program is created that has all the features of human intelligence, including emotion, creativity, the ability to learn and self-awareness."


2114: MEMORY BACKUP "Human memory backup system: the whole brain can be synced to the cloud. Humans can restore and backup their memories to the system. The system can even restore memories into a new body after end of the original owner's life."


2259: COLLECTIVE LEARNING "Old knowledge will not have to be learned; only new knowledge will need to be created. Learning will become obsolete. All known knowledge will be contained on a supercomputer. Individuals can download all known knowledge pertaining to any subject directly to the brain."

http://www.mindpowernews.com/FutureStarts2020.htm

[winston]

Surveillance System Can Recognize a Face From 36 Million Others in One Second

Face-recognition technology is rapidly evolving as evidenced by this new surveillance camera system. It can not only recognize specific faces, but is able to compare a single face to 36 million others in just one second.

The system, made by Hitachi Kokusai Electric and reported by DigInfo TV, was shown at a security trade show recently. It’s able to achieve its blazing speed by not wasting time on image processing — it takes visual data directly from the camera to compare the face in real time. The software also groups faces with similar features, so it’s able to narrow down the field very quickly.

When the system finds candidates that could be a match to the person being scanned, it immediately displays their thumbnails. The user can then review the archived footage and see if the person is, say, a repeat customer if it’s being used in a business. And the usefulness to law enforcement is pretty obvious.

As with any technology, there are limits. The software assumes people are looking right into the camera or facing no more than 30 degrees off center. And they’d better be close, too — if the face takes up anything smaller than a 40 x 40-pixel square, there’s just not enough face there to go on.

It’s impressive nonetheless, but it’s also a bit chilling to think that as soon as you look at a camera, whoever’s watching probably knows exactly who you are.

https://mashable.com/2012/03/23/hitachi ... cognition/

[winston]

Enlightened Transhumanists or Techno-Occult Mad Scientists?

http://www.mindbendingvideos.com/enligh ... cientists/

[winston]

Google Shows Off Glasses of the Future

If the guy in this video doesn't fall into a manhole, no one will.

Google this morning uploaded a YouTube video showing off its planned "reality" eyeglasses, the glasses interacts with what you're seeing and act as a smartphone, day planner, turn-by-turn navigation system, camera and more.

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/20 ... uture.html?

[winston]

Liquid Metal Battery: TED Talk Offers the Missing Energy Link by Nancy DuVergne Smith

MIT Professor Don Sadoway, an expert in materials chemistry, brought his astonishing battery idea to the recent talks at TED 2012: Full Spectrum.

While most new battery inventions target spaces inside smartphones or electric cars, Sadoway’s idea is big. Gigantic, in fact.

He and his team have invented a Liquid Metal Battery that could be a warehouse-size repository of energy generated by renewable and other power resources. Watch his TED talk for an accessible explanation of the battery and its potential uses.

Here are some ideas from his talk:

Professor Sadoway's battery could spur the use of renewable energy sources on conventional energy grids.

“With a giant battery, we could address the problem of intermittency that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal and gas and nuclear do today. The battery is the key enabling device.

With it, we could draw electricity from the sun, even when the sun does not shine, and that could change everything because the renewables such as wind and solar could come out from the wings and here to center stage. ”

The Liquid Metal Battery, a new form of energy storage invented by Sadoway and his lab, could solve that problem, he says.

http://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/20 ... l-battery/

[winston]

Smart Floors

Forget smart phones. Do you have one of those new smart floors?

That's a question friends might be asking one another years from now.

Last month, the U.S. Patent Office issued a new patent to IBM. The title: "Securing premises using surfaced-based computing technology."

That's an unglamorous way to describe a floor with a computerized surface. When you walk across this smart floor, numerous sensors record every step.

Drop your keys. Roll a ball. The floor knows.

Nobody at IBM has explained how they'll utilize this technology. Home and workplace security is one obvious use.

Health is another. A smart floor will sense irregularities, such as a person lying on the floor. In the event of a stroke, heart attack, or a fall, your floor will alert emergency services.

And just imagine if IBM brings Apple into the development of the smart floor. The sky's the limit!

In the future, "I've fallen and I can't get up," might go more like this: "Siri, I've fallen. Send help. And play ‘Purple Rain' while we're waiting."


Source: HSI

[winston]

The Future Is Better Than You Think

In the new book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, space entrepreneur turned innovation pioneer, Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler, document how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, infinite computing, ubiquitous broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and many other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous two hundred years.

http://www.mindbendingvideos.com/the-fu ... you-think/

[winston]

Scientists develop spray-on battery By Chris Wickham

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists in the United States have developed a paint that can store and deliver electrical power just like a battery.


http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/ ... nologyNews

[winston]

A New Era of Transformational Technology Is Here

We are poised to enter a new era that will come from the convergence of three technological transformations that have already happened: Big Data, the Wireless Wired World, and Computational Manufacturing (3D printing).

The emerging grand transformations—Big Data, Wireless Broadband, Computational Manufacturing—are all an integrated part of the next great cycle of the information economy.

Returning to Drucker, the evidence that this transformation has already happened is visible in Census data. The share of our economy devoted to moving bits—ideas and information—is already much bigger than the share associated with moving people and stuff.

Not only does the United States have the world’s most sophisticated and reliable (and low-cost) electric grid that is a vital infrastructure to fuel the information industries, but the United States also leads in the development of each of the core technological transformations. All things considered, there is every reason to be optimistic about our future.

You can’t predict what company will be the next Apple—though investors try. But you can predict there will be another Apple-like company. And there will emerge an entirely new family of companies—and jobs, and growth—arising from the transformational technology changes already happening.

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-n ... gical.html