Smart Economy

Synaptic transistor learns while it computes- transistor that mimics the behavior of a synapse

 

First of its kind, brain-inspired device looks toward highly efficient and fast parallel computing

 

Cambridge, Mass. – November 1, 2013 – It doesn't take a Watson to realize that even the world's best supercomputers are staggeringly inefficient and energy-intensive machines.

Our brains have upwards of 86 billion neurons, connected by synapses that not only complete myriad logic circuits; they continuously adapt to stimuli, strengthening some connections while weakening others. We call that process learning, and it enables the kind of rapid, highly efficient computational processes that put Siri and Blue Gene to shame.

Materials scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have now created a new type of transistor that mimics the behavior of a synapse. The novel device simultaneously modulates the flow of information in a circuit and physically adapts to changing signals.

Exploiting unusual properties in modern materials, the synaptic transistor could mark the
beginning of a new kind of artificial intelligence: one embedded not in smart algorithms but in the very architecture of a computer. The findings appear in Nature Communications.

“There’s extraordinary interest in building energy-efficient electronics these days,” says principal investigator Shriram Ramanathan, associate professor of materials science at Harvard SEAS. “Historically, people have been focused on speed, but with speed comes the penalty of power dissipation. With electronics becoming more and more powerful and ubiquitous, you could have a
huge impact by cutting down the amount of energy they consume.”

The human mind, for all its phenomenal computing power, runs on roughly 20 Watts of energy (less
than a household light bulb), so it offers a natural model for engineers.

“The transistor we’ve demonstrated is really an analog to the synapse in our brains,” says co-lead
author Jian Shi, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS. “Each time a neuron initiates an action and another neuron reacts, the synapse between them increases the strength of its connection. And the faster the neurons spike each time, the stronger the synaptic connection. Essentially, it memorizes the action between the neurons.”

In principle, a system integrating millions of tiny synaptic transistors and neuron terminals could take parallel computing into a new era of ultra-efficient high performance.

Several prototypes of the synaptic transistor are visible on this silicon chip. (Photo by Eliza Grinnell, SEAS Communications.)

While calcium ions and receptors effect a change in a biological synapse, the artificial version
achieves the same plasticity with oxygen ions. When a voltage is applied, these ions slip in and out of the crystal lattice of a very thin (80-nanometer) film of samarium nickelate, which acts as the synapse channel between two platinum "axon" and "dendrite" terminals. The varying concentration
of ions in the nickelate raises or lowers its conductance—that is, its ability to carry information on an electrical current—and, just as in a natural synapse, the strength of the connection depends on the time delay in the electrical signal.

Structurally, the device consists of the nickelate semiconductor sandwiched between two platinum
electrodes and adjacent to a small pocket of ionic liquid. An external circuit multiplexer converts the time delay into a magnitude of voltage which it applies to the ionic liquid, creating an electric field that either drives ions into the nickelate or removes them. The entire device, just a few hundred
microns long, is embedded in a silicon chip.

The synaptic transistor offers several immediate advantages over traditional silicon transistors.
For a start, it is not restricted to the binary system of ones and zeros.

“This system changes its conductance in an analog way, continuously, as the composition of the
material changes,” explains Shi. “It would be rather challenging to use CMOS, the traditional circuit technology, to imitate a synapse, because real biological synapses have a practically unlimited number of possible states—not just ‘on’ or ‘off.’”

The synaptic transistor offers another advantage: non-volatile memory, which means even when
power is interrupted, the device remembers its state.

Additionally, the new transistor is inherently energy efficient. The nickelate belongs to an unusual
class of materials, called correlated electron systems, that can undergo an insulator-metal transition. At a certain temperature—or, in this case, when exposed to an external field—the conductance of the material suddenly changes.

“We exploit the extreme sensitivity of this material,” says Ramanathan. “A very small excitation allows you to get a large signal, so the input energy required to drive this switching is potentially very small. That could translate into a large boost for energy efficiency.”

The nickelate system is also well positioned for seamless integration into existing silicon-based systems.

“In this paper, we demonstrate high-temperature operation, but the beauty of this type of a device
is that the 'learning' behavior is more or less temperature insensitive, and that’s a big advantage,” says Ramanathan. “We can operate this anywhere from about room temperature up to at least 160 degrees Celsius.”

For now, the limitations relate to the challenges of synthesizing a relatively unexplored material system, and to the size of the device, which affects its speed.

“In our proof-of-concept device, the time constant is really set by our experimental geometry,” says Ramanathan. “In other words, to really make a super-fas device, all you’d have to do is confine the liquid and position the gate electrode closer to it.”

In fact, Ramanathan and his research team are already planning, with microfluidics experts at SEAS,
to investigate the possibilities and limits for this “ultimate fluidic transistor.”

He also has a seed grant from the National Academy of Sciences to explore the integration of
synaptic transistors into bioinspired circuits, with L. Mahadevan, Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, and professor of physics.

“In the SEAS setting it’s very exciting; we’re able to collaborate easily with people from very
diverse interests,” Ramanathan says.

For the materials scientist, as much curiosity derives from exploring the capabilities of correlated oxides (like the nickelate used in this study) as from the possible applications.

“You have to build new instrumentation to be able to synthesize these new materials, but once
you’re able to do that, you really have a completely new material system whose properties are virtually unexplored,” Ramanathan says. “It’s very exciting to have such materials to work with, where very little is known about them and you have an opportunity to build knowledge from scratch.”

“This kind of proof-of-concept demonstration carries that work into the ‘applied’ world,” he
adds, “where you can really translate these exotic electronic properties into compelling, state-of-the-art devices.”

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Army Research Office’s
Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The team also benefited from the facilities at the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems, a member
of the NSF-supported National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network. Sieu D. Ha, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS, was the co-lead author; additional coauthors included graduate student You Zhou and Frank Schoofs, a former postdoctoral fellow.

 

 

 

Preventing 'Cyber Pearl Harbor'

Improving cyber attack detection through computer modeling

Cyber attacks that have long caused major work disruption and theft of private information are becoming more sophisticated with prolonged attacks perpetrated by organized groups. In September 2012, Bank of America, Citibank, the New York Stock Exchange, and other financial institutions were targets of attacks for more than five weeks. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned that the United States was facing the possibility of a "cyber-Pearl Harbor" and was increasingly vulnerable to foreign computer hackers who could disrupt the government, utility, transportation, and financial networks.

Key to protecting online operations is a high degree of "cyber security awareness," according to human factors/ergonomics researchers Varun Dutt, Young-Suk Ahn, and Cleotilde Gonzalez. In their Human Factors article, "Cyber Situation Awareness: Modeling Detection of Cyber Attacks With Instance-Based Learning Theory (http://bit.ly/VjVs7M)," they developed a computer model that presented 500 simulated cyber attack scenarios to gauge simulated network security analysts' ability to detect attacks characterized as either "impatient" (the threat occurs early in the attack) or "patient" (the threat comes later in the attack and is not detected promptly). Their model was able to predict the detection rates of security analysts by varying the analysts' degree of experience and risk tolerance as well as an attacker's strategy (impatient or patient attack).

The authors found that experienced, risk-averse analysts were less accurate at detecting threats in patient than in impatient attacks. "In a patient attack, when the attacker waits until the end to generate threats, the experiences in the analyst's memory that indicate an attack" are not as readily retrieved, says Dutt, which "makes it difficult to correctly detect patient attacks."

"Application of our results include the design of training tools that increase competency and the development of decision-support tools that improve defenders' on-the-job performance in detecting cyber attacks." The authors suggest that employers evaluate an analysts' risk tolerance before employment and/or manipulate tolerance levels during training to better identify threats.

As cyber warfare strategies and tactics evolve, the authors plan to further investigate the trend of drawn-out attacks and new intrusion detection software.

###

For more information on this article or to obtain a copy for reporting purposes, contact HFES Communications Director Lois Smith ([email protected]; 310/394-1811).

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society is the world's largest nonprofit individual-member, multidisciplinary scientific association for human factors/ergonomics professionals, with more than 4,500 members globally. HFES members include psychologists and other scientists, designers, and engineers, all of whom have a common interest in designing systems and equipment to be safe and effective for the people who operate and maintain them. "Human Factors and Ergonomics: People-Friendly Design Through Science and Engineering"

Plan to attend the HFES 2013 International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care: Advancing the Cause, to be held March 11-13, 2013 at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel, http://bit.ly/TBn4AF.

Important step in the next generation of computing-spintronics

Research reveals vital insight into spintronics

Scientists have taken one step closer to the next generation of computers. Research from the Cavendish Laboratory, the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics, provides new insight into spintronics, which has been hailed as the successor to the transistor.

Spintronics, which exploits the electron's tiny magnetic moment, or 'spin', could radically change computing due to its potential of high-speed, high-density and low-power consumption. The new research sheds light on how to make 'spin' more efficient.

For the past fifty years, progress in electronics has relied heavily on the downsizing of the transistor through the semiconductor industry in order to provide the technology for the small, powerful computers that are the basis of our modern information society. In a 1965 paper, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore described how the number of transistors that could be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit had doubled every year between 1958 and 1965, predicting that the trend would continue for at least ten more years.

That prediction, now known as Moore's Law, effectively described a trend that has continued ever since, but the end of that trend—the moment when transistors are as small as atoms, and cannot be shrunk any further—is expected as early as 2015. At the moment, researchers are seeking new concepts of electronics that sustain the growth of computing power.

Spintronics research attempts to develop a spin-based electronic technology that will replace the charge-based technology of semiconductors. Scientists have already begun to develop new spin-based electronics, beginning with the discovery in 1988 of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect. The discovery of GMR effect brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disk drives and was also key in the development of portable electronic devices such as the iPod.

While conventional technology relies on harnessing the charge of electrons, the field of spintronics depends instead on the manipulation of electrons' spin. One of the unique properties in spintronics is that spins can be transferred without the flow of electric charge currents. This is called "spin current" and unlike other concepts of harnessing electrons, the spin current can transfer information without generating heat in electric devices. The major remaining obstacle to a viable spin current technology is the difficulty of creating a volume of spin current large enough to support current and future electronic devices.

However, the new Cambridge researchers in close collaboration with Professor Sergej Demokritov group at the University of Muenster, Germany, have, in part, addressed this issue. In order to create enhanced spin currents, the researchers used the collective motion of spins called spin waves (the wave property of spins). By bringing spin waves into interaction, they have demonstrated a new, more efficient way of generating spin current.

Dr Hidekazu Kurebayashi, from the Microelectronics Group at the Cavendish Laboratory, said: "You can find lots of different waves in nature, and one of the fascinating things is that waves often interact with each other. Likewise, there are a number of different interactions in spin waves. Our idea was to use such spin wave interactions for generating efficient spin currents."

According to their findings, one of the spin wave interactions (called three-magnon splitting) generates spin current ten times more efficiently than using pre-interacting spin-waves. Additionally, the findings link the two major research fields in spintronics, namely the spin current and the spin wave interaction.

Did dreams of computer utopia cause economic collapse?

Silicon Valley in the 1990s. Excitement filled the air. Hopeful entrepreneurs drove fast cars to their shiny workplaces, where they discussed the boundless possibilities arising from the technological explosion unfolding before their eyes. They progressed in leaps and bounds towards their utopia: a self-stabilising network of human beings who could be free of state control and country borders.

Whence came that dream? And whither did it lead? In his new series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, British documentarian Adam Curtis, famed for his incisive and sometimes controversial socio-political works, marries his indisputable knowledge of economic and political history with insights into the way that computers have shaped not only our world, but our world view.

 

 full story here

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/05/how-computers-shaped-our-world.html

Is Toyota a victim of complexity?

IPCC and Toyota seem to be the two hard luck cases in 2010 so far. Everyone knows that IPCC fudged, "hid" and modified climate data.

Not only has Toyota "hid" data from consumers too but Toyota's case may be far more complex-literally.  With over 8 million autos recalled worldwide so far, they still don't know the exact cause(s) of all the recall problems. Cases of "phantom acceleration" are still being reported.

Modern day cars are no longer just vehicles, but an integrated package of hundreds of sensors and computers on wheels. All these systems need to work seemlessly and in synch. It's ironic because Toyota uses a TRIZ -like process to address technology paradoxes and contradictions (see "Extreme Toyota-radical contradictions that drive success at the world's best manufacturer." by J. Wiley and Sons)/ If your home computer occasionally freezes, then why not the car computer. Frankly, I'm surprised that there are so few cases.

I suspect that eventually the auto industry and government will admit that natural or man-made electromagnetic interference (EMI) is the underlying reason for random acceleration and not accelerator pedal designs or floor mats.

A University of Washington press release called "Conquering the chaos in modern, multiprocessor computers."might shed some light on the mystery.

"Computers should not play dice.  That, to paraphrase Einstein, is the feeling of a University of Washington computer scientist with a simple manifesto: If you enter the same computer command, you should get back the same result.  Unfortunately, that is far from the case with many of today's machines.  Beneath their smooth exteriors, modern computers behave in wildly unpredictable ways, said Luis Ceze, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering.

"With older, single-processor systems, computers behave exactly the same way as long as you give the same commands.  Today's computers are non-deterministic.  Even if you give the same set of commands, you might get a different result," Ceze said.

He and UW associate professors of computer science and engineering Mark Oskin and Dan Grossman and UW graduate students Owen Anderson, Tom Bergan, Joseph Devietti, Brandon Lucia and Nick Hunt have developed a way to get modern, multiple-processor computers to behave in predictable ways, by automatically parceling sets of commands and assigning them to specific places.  Sets of commands get calculated simultaneously, so the well-behaved program still runs faster than it would on a single processor. Next week at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems ( http://www.ece.cmu.edu/CALCM/asplos10/doku.php ) in Pittsburgh, Bergan will present a software-based version of this system that could be used on existing machines.  It builds on a more general approach the group published last year, which was recently chosen as a top paper for 2009 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' journal Micro.

In the old days one computer had one processor.  But today's consumer standard is dual-core processors, and even quad-core machines are appearing on store shelves.  Supercomputers and servers can house hundreds, even thousands, of processing units.

On the plus side, this design creates computers that run faster, cost less and use less power for the same performance delivered on a single processor.  On the other hand, multiple processors are responsible for elusive errors that freeze Web browsers and crash programs. 

It is not so different from the classic chaos problem in which a butterfly flaps its wings in one place and can cause a hurricane across the globe.  Modern shared-memory computers have to shuffle tasks from one place to another.  The speed at which the information travels can be affected by tiny changes, such as the distance between parts in the computer or even the temperature of the wires.  Information can thus arrive in a different order and lead to unexpected errors, even for tasks that ran smoothly hundreds of times before.

"With multi-core systems the trend is to have more bugs because it's harder to write code for them," Ceze said.  "And these concurrency bugs are much harder to get a handle on."

One application of the UW system is to make errors reproducible, so that programs can be properly tested.

"We've developed a basic technique that could be used in a range of systems, from cell phones to data centers," Ceze said.  "Ultimately, I want to make it really easy for people to design high-performing, low-energy and secure systems."

Last year Ceze, Oskin, and Peter Godman, a former director at Isilon Systems, founded a company to commercialize their technology.  PetraVM (http://petravm.com/) is initially named after the Greek word for rock because it hopes to develop "rock-solid systems," Ceze said.  The Seattle-based startup will soon release its first product, Jinx, which makes any errors that are going to crop up in a program happen quickly.

"We can compress the effect of thousands of people using a program into a few minutes during the software's development," Ceze said.  "We want to allow people to write code for multi-core systems without going insane."

The company already has some big-name clients trying its product, Ceze said, though it is not yet disclosing their identities.

"If this erratic behavior irritates us, as software users, imagine how it is for banks or other mission-critical applications."

N.B. Part of this research was funded by the National Science Foundation and a Microsoft Research fellowship.

Walter Derzko

Technology, Control, Happiness and Depression: Is technology controlling you and your life or vise a versa?

(Graphic from New Scientist)  Just sit back and think for a moment: how long has it been since you read your last email? Scanned your last last Twitter?  Dispatched you previous text message? Updated Facebook or Linked In?

With the annual homage to the  Mecca of consumer materialism -the consumer electronics show  (CES) in  Vegas this month ,it may be appropriate to ask the bigger social question

Is technology controlling you and your life or vise a versa?  

Yair Amichai-Hamburger offers  a provocative opinion piece on this month’s issue of New Scientist (Dec 27, 2009 volume 2739) titled “Shiny unhappy People” in the print version or “Free yourself from oppression by technology.” In  the online version

From his Tetrad model, Marshall McLuhan reminds us that technology has four simultaneous impacts on society...and in this case, here's my take on the social impacts and secondary consequences of communication technologies

 

1)Something gets enhanced?  (materialism, consumption, depression, a stecato culture of information, continuous interruption, a middle class that's under the influence of mass cultural and perpetual distraction, fragmentation of reactive efforts, sense of being overwhelmed and not knowing were to turn, public passivity, digital version of divide to conquer etc )

2) something gets obsolesced or lost?  (social relationships, happiness, tenacity & longevity of thought, thoroughness,  propensity for societal action, coordinated social response)

3) something gets brought back or retrieved? (digital-slavery, time enslavement ) and

4) something gets flipped or reversed?  (from ease of communication to communication stress &Info overload or what I call pauperization of communication & information, debasted or watered-down wisdom)

 

Amichai-Hamburger touches on  all 4 of these social impacts- enhancement, retrieval, obsolescence, and reversal.

 

Here’s a recap and summary of his key points

• "Are we being served by these technological wonders or have we become enslaved by them?"
• We living in an"age of melancholy" coined by psychologist Daniel Goleman to describe our era. "People today experience more depression than previous generations, despite the technological wonders that help us every day. It might be because of them."
• "Our lifestyles are increasingly driven by technology. Phones, computers and the internet pervade our days. There is a constant, nagging need to check for texts and email, to update Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn profiles, to acquire the latest notebook or 3G cellphone. "
• "For many of us it is becoming increasingly difficult to control the impulse to check our inbox yet again or see whether the headlines have changed since we last looked. [...] In many homes, the computer has become the centre of attention; it is the medium through which we work and play."
• "How did this arise, and what is it doing to us? In this era of mass consumption, we are surrounded by advertising that urges us to find fulfillment through the acquisition of material goods. As a result, adults and children increasingly believe that in order to belong and feel good about themselves, they must own the latest model or gadget."
• "Yet research has shown that people who place a high value on material goals are unhappier than those who are less materialistic. Materialism is also associated with lower self-esteem, greater narcissism, greater tendency to compare oneself unfavorably with other people, less empathy and more conflict in relationships."
• "People who place a high value on material goals are unhappier than those who are less materialistic "--N.B. this is supported by other studies that show consumers value "experiential events" over "material goods"--Walter Derzko
• "Our culture also constantly reminds us that time is money. This implies a need for total efficiency, which is why we are allowing laptop computers and mobile phones to blur the separation between work and home. As one unhappy human-resource manager in a high-tech company put it: "They gave me a mobile phone so they can own me 24 hours a day, and a portable computer, so my office is now with me all the time - I cannot break out of this pressure." Sound familiar?"
• "Psychologists generally believe that the lack of a clear separation between work and home significantly damages our relationships with loved ones. It also predisposes us to focus on the here and now at the expense of long-term goals."
• "By imposing these twin pressures, modern society is in danger of swapping standard of living for quality of life. We need ways to help recover those increasingly large parts of our lives that we have ceded to technology, to regain mastery over technology and learn to use it in a healthy and positive way."
• Amichai-Hamburger offers a 4 point  prescription to reagin self-control based on  self-determination theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester in New York state. It identifies three vital elements of healthy personal development and functioning that  can be used to recalibrate our relationship with technology. Amichai-Hamburger  thenadds a 4th point below.

1) "The first is autonomy - the feeling that our activities are self-chosen and self-endorsed. When we feel in control, we are able to organize our priorities and place effective boundaries around them. But when we feel we have insufficient control, it leaves us vulnerable to our impulses and causes us to abdicate decisions to other people. It is easy to see how technology undermines autonomy, but also how to regain it. This may be as simple as switching off mobile phones during meals and family time, setting aside specific times to answer emails, and being available only when we choose to be."

2) "We also need a sense of competence, a belief that our actions are effective. In this respect our relationship with technology is complex, because many of us feel competent when we deal with an email, when we have the newest BlackBerry, or because 50 people enjoyed the holiday snaps we posted on Facebook. "

3) "Relatedness:our need to feel close to other people. Technology is a threat to this. Devices like the iPod can be used to create a bubble that disconnects us from normal human interactions, and while some virtual relationships may be truly meaningful, in many cases they come at the expense of real-world connections. Psychologists have found that the pivotal difference between happy and unhappy people is the presence or absence of rich and satisfying social relationships. Spending meaningful time with friends, family and partners is necessary for happiness."

Many North American's have lost this, which is why seemingly poorer nations tend to be happier --Walter Derzko.

4) "Critical thinking. In today's world, where we are potentially available 24/7 to absorb messages from well-honed advertisements, it is vital that we know how to analyze and evaluate their validity - and to neutralize them where necessary."

Autonomy, competence, relatedness and critical thinking are the best ways to establish a balanced approach to technology, and so enhance our well-being.

Intersting question to ponder...will Eastern & Asian cultures (India, China etc) turn to North American ideals of materialism & consumption to find fullfillment in life as they develop economically or to something else?--Walter Derzko

N.B Yair Amichai-Hamburger is director of the Research Center for Internet Psychology at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications, the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel.

Full story here

Walter Derzko, Smart Economy, Toronto

 

Author of the soon-to-be published book- Opportunity 45 Scenarios to Drive Your Business in Challenging Times, published by J. Wiley and Sons

ISBN13: 978-0-470-73761-3

ISBN10: 0-470-73761-1

Intel's view of smart technologies in the next Smart Economy: energy harvesting

A number of companies are working away at developing smart technologies, but releasing few details to the public.

So I was delighted to see several press releases and comments by Intel CTO Justin Ratner, who  gave us a glimpse of that Intel is developing in its back room labs.

When I do emerging technology briefings for clients, one of my predictions is that energy harvesting (used  in self-powered intelligent objects) would be a key new-to-the-world capability of smart enabling technologies and in intelligent objects, systems and environments. In fact,  it's  my trend #4 on my list of 15 new trends that show what the potential impacts of smart technologies might be. Working in that direction Intel reported on Friday that:

"...[...]... it is researching technology to harvest free energy from the environment, which could lead to devices such as mobile phones running for indefinite periods without recharging.

The company is working on tiny sensors that can capture energy from sources such as sunlight and body heat. In the future, such energy could be used to power personal electronic devices such as cell phones."

There are already watches available that are powered by body heat, as well as prototype smartphones with display screens that double as solar cells, said Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel, during a press event. Intel is also looking at powering a mobile phone by harvesting the energy the user generates by moving the phone's trackball. The radiation of cell phone or TV signals might also be used to power devices.

"Wouldn't it be nice if, in fact, you were able to go almost indefinitely without charging the battery, if you were able to scavenge enough free energy from the environment?" Rattner said.

Intel's initial efforts revolve around the sensors, which could power themselves using free energy. Recharging themselves by scavenging free energy allows the sensors to continuously record and transmit readings over wireless networks, without any human involvement. "

...[...]....

Intel has also designed a self-charging neural implant that can monitor bodily functions and transmit its readings wirelessly, Rattner said. .."I never have to ... come along with some sort of external fixture and have to recharge this. These become ... install-and-forget systems, because they can scavenge energy from the environment and power themselves up," Rattner said.

Intel has not marketed such a sensor yet, as its research is still ongoing, Rattner said. Sensors use just a fraction of the power demanded by typical mobile devices, and it may take a while before the energy-harvesting technology can power larger items.

[...] "We haven't been driving it as an Intel product; it's not on anyone's road map at this point. It's part of our broader effort in both sensors and energy harvesting," Rattner said.

In an earlier summer time announcement Intel divulged:

"In the next 40 years, Intel is planning to develop a range of new technology that will allow chips to communicate through pulses of light and allow users to wirelessly project the Internet onto large screens from tiny mobile devices."

The benefits of these types of processors are chips that use less energy and give off less heat, while increasing the bandwidth and the speed at which data travels from one point to another. IBM is also working on similar technology.

Looking at novel embedded capabilities, Intel also announced a photonics breakthrough that will allow us to  transmit data using light faster, shifting our manufacturing paradigm from  electrons and copper to light and fiber optics. The research paper, which is being published in the Dec. 7 edition of the scientific journal Nature Photonics, describes efforts by Intel engineers to build a silicon-based APD (avalanche photodetector) at a lower cost and that gives better overall performance than conventional photodetectors made of different materials.

IBM endorses smart technology and a smarter planet

A while back when I was at the Idea Lab at the Design Exchange, I remember sitting over a coffee and exploring a thought exercise with some clients.

The question under debate was: What are  the generic elements or activities that would accelerate any new technology platform, (such as smart technologies) and overcome the initial market interia. Simply put, Is there a generic technology evolution matrix?

We came up with over 25 items. (see related Post-Do you know how to spot opportunities?)

One was having cartoonists make fun of your technology ( No, smart technologies aren't on Dilbert's radar screen yet, but any day now I hope)  Another key event would be to have some influential CEO highlight the benefits of your technology in a milestone keynote speech (act as a complimentor-in business strategy terms. )

Well for smart technologies, that breakthrough event may have happened this month on November 6^th, when IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, outlined a new agenda for building a smarter planet - during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relation. (hat tip to Adam Christensen at IBM HQ)

 

 

From IBM's blog:

"In the speech, he outlines a number of the challenges faced today by people, governments, businesses and organizations. A lack of clean water for a fifth of the world’s population. Energy systems that waste more energy than they produce. Traffic in our cities that clogs roads and chokes economic growth. 

Clearly there are no simple solutions for these problems.

Technology can play a big role in helping find answers to these problems. While the Internet currently connects more than a billion people, in just a few years, it will connect more than a trillion objects. Everything from cell phones, cars, roads, buildings, and even objects in nature itself, will have embedded technology and be connected to one another, enabling tremendous advances in how we understand how the world works and make smarter decisions to make it work better. 

But technology is just part of the solution. Without the people, policies and culture to inspire and execute the change, nothing ultimately gets done."

From Sam’s speech:

[...]   These collective realizations have reminded us that we are all now connected—economically, technically and socially. But we're also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get "flatter." And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected. But something is happening that holds even greater potential. In a word, our planet is becoming smarter.

This isn't just a metaphor.I mean infusing intelligence into the way the world literally works—the systems and processes that enable physical goods to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold… services to be delivered… everything from people and money to oil, water and electrons to move… and billions of people to work and live.

 What's making this possible?

• First, our world is becoming instrumented: The transistor, invented 60 years ago, is the basic building block of the digital age. Now, consider a world in which there are a billion transistors per human, each one costing one ten-millionth of a cent. We'll have that by 2010. There will likely be 4 billion mobile phone subscribers by the end of this year… and 30 billion Radio Frequency Identification tags produced globally within two years. Sensors are being embedded across entire ecosystems—supply-chains, healthcare networks, cities… even natural systems like rivers.
• Second, our world is becoming interconnected: Very soon there will be 2 billion people on the Internet. But in an instrumented world, systems and objects can now "speak" to one another, too. Think about the prospect of a trillion connected and intelligent things—cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines… even pharmaceuticals and livestock. The amount of information produced by the interaction of all those things will be unprecedented.
• Third, all things are becoming intelligent: New computing models can handle the proliferation of end-user devices, sensors and actuators and connect them with back-end systems. Combined with advanced analytics, those supercomputers can turn mountains of data into intelligence that can be translated into action, making our systems, processes and infrastructures more efficient, more productive and responsive—in a word, smarter.

What this means is that the digital and physical infrastructures of the world are converging. Computational power is being put into things we wouldn't recognize as computers. Indeed, almost anything—any person, any object, any process or any service, for any organization, large or small—can become digitally aware and networked.

With so much technology and networking abundantly available at such low cost, what wouldn't you enhance? What service wouldn't you provide a customer, citizen, student or patient? What wouldn't you connect? What information wouldn't you mine for insight?

The answer is, you or your competitor—another company, or another city or nation—will do all of that. You will do it because you can—the technology is available and affordable.

But there is another reason we will make our companies, institutions and industries smarter. Because we must. Not just at moments of widespread shock, but integrated into our day-to-day operations. These mundane processes of business, government and life—which are ultimately the source of those "surprising" crises—are not smart enough to be sustainable.

[...]

Leaders will need to hone their collaboration skills, because we will need leadership that pulls across systems. We will need to bring together stakeholders and experts from across business, government and academia, and all of them will need to move outside their traditional comfort zones.

I’m struck by the questions this raises. What investments need to be made by both public and private institutions? What policy issues need to be debated and resolved? What role can individual citizens and employees play in helping bring about meaningful change?

I’m also struck by the potential opportunities inherent in finding solutions to these problems. 

see full text of Sam Palmisano's speech

Walter Derzko

 

From IBM's blog:

"In the speech, he outlines a number of the challenges faced today by people, governments, businesses and organizations. A lack of clean water for a fifth of the world’s population. Energy systems that waste more energy than they produce. Traffic in our cities that clogs roads and chokes economic growth. 

Clearly there are no simple solutions for these problems.

Technology can play a big role in helping find answers to these problems. While the Internet currently connects more than a billion people, in just a few years, it will connect more than a trillion objects. Everything from cell phones, cars, roads, buildings, and even objects in nature itself, will have embedded technology and be connected to one another, enabling tremendous advances in how we understand how the world works and make smarter decisions to make it work better. 

But technology is just part of the solution. Without the people, policies and culture to inspire and execute the change, nothing ultimately gets done."

From Sam’s speech:

[...]   These collective realizations have reminded us that we are all now connected—economically, technically and socially. But we're also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get "flatter." And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected. But something is happening that holds even greater potential. In a word, our planet is becoming smarter.

This isn't just a metaphor.I mean infusing intelligence into the way the world literally works—the systems and processes that enable physical goods to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold… services to be delivered… everything from people and money to oil, water and electrons to move… and billions of people to work and live.

 What's making this possible?

• First, our world is becoming instrumented: The transistor, invented 60 years ago, is the basic building block of the digital age. Now, consider a world in which there are a billion transistors per human, each one costing one ten-millionth of a cent. We'll have that by 2010. There will likely be 4 billion mobile phone subscribers by the end of this year… and 30 billion Radio Frequency Identification tags produced globally within two years. Sensors are being embedded across entire ecosystems—supply-chains, healthcare networks, cities… even natural systems like rivers.
• Second, our world is becoming interconnected: Very soon there will be 2 billion people on the Internet. But in an instrumented world, systems and objects can now "speak" to one another, too. Think about the prospect of a trillion connected and intelligent things—cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines… even pharmaceuticals and livestock. The amount of information produced by the interaction of all those things will be unprecedented.
• Third, all things are becoming intelligent: New computing models can handle the proliferation of end-user devices, sensors and actuators and connect them with back-end systems. Combined with advanced analytics, those supercomputers can turn mountains of data into intelligence that can be translated into action, making our systems, processes and infrastructures more efficient, more productive and responsive—in a word, smarter.

What this means is that the digital and physical infrastructures of the world are converging. Computational power is being put into things we wouldn't recognize as computers. Indeed, almost anything—any person, any object, any process or any service, for any organization, large or small—can become digitally aware and networked.

With so much technology and networking abundantly available at such low cost, what wouldn't you enhance? What service wouldn't you provide a customer, citizen, student or patient? What wouldn't you connect? What information wouldn't you mine for insight?

The answer is, you or your competitor—another company, or another city or nation—will do all of that. You will do it because you can—the technology is available and affordable.

But there is another reason we will make our companies, institutions and industries smarter. Because we must. Not just at moments of widespread shock, but integrated into our day-to-day operations. These mundane processes of business, government and life—which are ultimately the source of those "surprising" crises—are not smart enough to be sustainable.

[...]

Leaders will need to hone their collaboration skills, because we will need leadership that pulls across systems. We will need to bring together stakeholders and experts from across business, government and academia, and all of them will need to move outside their traditional comfort zones.

I’m struck by the questions this raises. What investments need to be made by both public and private institutions? What policy issues need to be debated and resolved? What role can individual citizens and employees play in helping bring about meaningful change?

I’m also struck by the potential opportunities inherent in finding solutions to these problems. 

see full text of Sam Palmisano's speech

Walter Derzko

Smart Sustainability Showcase for Toronto and Canada

From: Walter Derzko

Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 12:19 AM

To: undisclosed list

Subject: re Smart Sustainability ShowCase for Toronto and Canada.

Importance: High

Dear Colleagues

I’d like to plant an idea with you – after speaking with a number of designers and vendors, I’m exploring the idea for a sustainability showcase that would feature theme based exhibits with smart technologies from Canadian and international sources-the best from Ontario, nationally and from around the world.

The launch would be 2010, The timing for this seems right.  The target audience would be Canadian business, consumers and school children

I’m writing a book on smart technologies and this would be a logical extension of the concept.

Two years ago I talked to Samantha Sannella and Poala Polletto at the Design Exchange (DX) in Toronto and with several people at the Ont Science Center.  Both groups expressed interest but said that we would need to find sponsors for the project

My business model for this would be three pronged -vendor based revenue, corporate based sponsor revenue and municipality based sponsorship ie city of Toronto or Mississauga and possibly the province of Ontario who may wish to promote sustainable manufacturing.

This concept would be a Canadian, in fact a North American first.

I have a list of 150 potential vendors, and designers from around the world who are working on smart technologies that we can start to approach.

The exhibits would be theme based, --the sustainable kitchen, the sustainable office, the sustainable retail shelf, the sustainable workspace, the sustainable community, the sustainable city etc and would be updated with new technologies every 3-5 years and have a 1-5 year forward focus. (what's commercially available now or in the very near future.

For other exhibits, there can be a regional or national focus ie smart sustainable technology from the UK, Finland, Germany (Fraunhofer Inst), China, Ukraine, Russia, or Singapore, Hong Kong etc

Corporate sponsors might include: Walmart, Rona, Home Deport, Canadian Tire, Loblaws, Sears, Imperial Oil, the banks (RBC, TD, RBC BMO) etc.

The Sustainability Showcase could be housed in a physical location, or it could tour from location to location around the city or province or be mobile ( on a bus the way the Japanese and Korean do- a display bus turned into a demo center that tours from school to school or to fairs and exhibitions.

OCAD students and staff and Beal senior fellows could play a hand in designing exhibit spaces and sourcing new vendors and sustainable technologies.

Several other revenue opportunities could spin off from this as well

Here’s just a few examples of what can be showcased

1) Environmentally sensible packaging such as Mercury-Absorbant NanoSponge packaging for broken compact fluorescent lamps (CFL's) http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2008/06/mercury-absorba.html

2) Concrete Wood (from the example I mentioned June 2 at OCAD, when Bob Logan was bemoaning the lack of durability of pressboard shelving from Ikea.  See Concrete Wood from lodgepole pine trees destroyed by pine beetles (kills two birds with one stone) http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2007/11/concrete-wood.html

3) End of Traditional Heating and Air conditioning Thin-film version of Active Building Envelope (ABE) systems could make conventional air conditioning and heating equipment obsolete http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2006/07/thinfilm_versio.html

4) OLEDs New High efficiency flat light source OLEDs > Almost any surface in a home, whether flat or curved, could become a light source: walls, curtains, ceilings, cabinets, shelves or tables.  Http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2006/04/new_high_effici.html

Lots more like these

For anyone who is interested in exploring the idea of a Smart Sustainability Showcase for Toronto, we are having a meeting on Tuesday July 22 at 11 am at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity, room 600, 6th floor , 100 McCaul St, Toronto just south of the Ont Art Gallery.

Please RSVP, so we know how many people are coming

I have had some positive feedback from several organizations, & I’d like to push the concept forward

I'm sending this nationally and internationally in  case you are aware of any designers, vendors, manufacturers or research centers who have interesting cutting edge smart sustainable technology to showcase.

Contact me by email

----Walter  Derzko; Senior Fellow Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity, OCAD 

© 2005-2008 Walter Derzko -"Changing the world, one idea at a time"©

Expert, Consultant, Keynote Speaker and Lecturer on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy

The Smart Technology Blog: The Smart Economy -- Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !!

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Smart Desktop -Software that organizes files intelligently

Erica Naone at MIT Technology Review profiles a new software that's out in beta to an small invited user group.

"Smart Desktop automatically groups documents and communications by project. "

The heaps of information piling up virtually on today's computers present a major organizational problem for many people.  A soon-to-be-released product called Smart Desktop, from a division of Seattle-based company Pi Corporation, aims to help people sort that information automatically and intelligently.

"People's lives are inherently complex, and so everyone, no matter what their job description, has to break their lives into a series of manageable chunks," says Jon Herlocker, vice president of engineering and CTO of Pi's Smart Desktop division.  "Those chunks become the context in which things get worked on."  Smart Desktop is designed, accordingly, to group information by project.  But the software does far more than put all your Word and Excel documents in one folder.  Normally, information is stored in separate applications: important URLs might be saved in Firefox's Web history, for example, while e-mails are stored in Outlook.  Smart Desktop unifies the information into a single view.  When the system understands that a user is working on a particular project, it will bring together related files and e-mails, and it will also bring related, newly arriving e-mails to the user's attention.

The system will make this information available to users in two ways, says John Forbes, president of Pi's Smart Desktop division.  All materials related to a project will be visible inside Smart Desktop's user interface.  The system will also tag the files so that the user can search for project tags created by Smart Desktop in Outlook, for example.  "One way to think about Smart Desktop technology is automatic tagging," says Forbes."

ETA: Smart Desktop is currently available in an invitation-only preview, but the company expects the full product to be released in late 2008

Full story here >> [...]