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Profile: Kenny Greenberg

Daniel P. Dern — Fri, 24 May 2013 20:30:00 GMT

Photo: Kenny Greenberg

Working in his New York City studio, Kenny Greenberg designs neon lighting for commercial, performance, and artistic spaces.

Photo: Kenny Greenberg

Each of the 2.7 meter-wide spheres contains 175 neon tubes. The spheres were created for a performance piece by Terence Koh at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 2007. An embedded control system allowed individual control of each tube.

Photo: Kenny Greenberg

Titled Ouija Light, with this 2002 neon sculpture viewers could manipulate a separate Ouija board. These manipulations were communicated to the sculpture, which responded with different colors and patterns of light.

Photo: Kenny Greenberg

A 2012 reconstruction for the Gagosian Gallery in New York City of the 1951 sculpture Luce Spaziale, originally created by the influential artist Lucio Fontana.

Photo: Kenny Greenberg

Neon lighting created for the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square, New York City.

Photo: Kenny Greenberg

A 1.8 meter-high diamond created for Doug Aitken’s work Sleepwalkers. As the diamond worked through a complicated illumination sequence, a woman was filmed figure skating around it. The result was then projected at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 2007.

Photo: Kenny Greenberg

This dragon, one of two, was created as a piece of scenery for the 2002 Broadway production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song.

Photo: Kenny Greenberg

This sign for Sardi’s was one of many replicas of well-known signs in the New York City theatre district created for sets featured in the 2005 Mel Brooks film, The Producers.

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What do the NASDAQ stock exchange, the movie Men in Black, TV’s “The Cosby Show,” and luxury retailer Bergdorf Goodman all have in common? Neon lighting designs created by Kenny Greenberg.

While LED-based signage and displays have risen to prominence in recent years (see “Fritz Morgan: LEDs Into Gold,” February 2005, IEEE Spectrum), they can’t duplicate neon’s iconic look. So Greenberg, owner of Krypton Neon in New York City, still finds great demand for his neon lighting displays and their associated power, control, and monitoring hardware and software.

Greenberg, who grew up in New York City and New Jersey, began to mix engineering and art early. He recalls building “a small interactive fun house in a neighbor’s garage” as a child. In high school (where—full disclosure—he and I were friends), an attempt with another friend to re-create Stanley Miller’s experiment in creating primordial amino acids from scratch led to his first experience in glass blowing. This came to a halt when “one of the chemistry teachers caught us, snatched all the expensive glass apparatus out of our hands, and lectured us on each one’s cost,” Greenberg says.

After getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Columbia University in perceptual psychology and education and spending five years developing and administering therapeutic creative arts programs for the Jewish Child Care Association of New York, Greenberg switched gears in 1980.

“I wanted to go back into the arts, specifically the emerging world of art as science and science as art,” says Greenberg. “Like anyone who lived in New York City, I had seen plenty of neon signs, but it had never occurred to me that somebody had to make them. When I learned of places offering courses in making neon, you could say that a lightbulb went on over my head.”

After his coursework was completed, “one of my teachers found me my first paying neon project, and soon friends were finding more, like doing signs for local restaurants,” he says. “This led over time to neon sets and pieces for Broadway shows, movies, TV shows, and larger commercial installations and projects for art museums and other public places.”

For Greenberg, the business has involved more than simply bending glass tubes, filling them with gas, and attaching power supplies. It’s also led him to design control circuitry and write software.

“When I started working with neon, the controls for the animated signs used mechanical flashers and rotating cams,” he says. “That led to my designing a solid-state transformer and working with circuitry to create my own flashing and sequencing systems that were more reliable. Eventually, the rest of the industry did this too.”

Today, Greenberg uses desktop and notebook computers to remotely monitor and control many of his installations, and he has been exploring mobile devices and apps. “I do a lot with the direct interface between PC and DMX512,” he says. (DMX512 is a standard that's popular for controlling stage lights and other effects.) He has also created downloadable software for neon creators, such as a neon load calculator and color chart.

For anyone interested in working with neon, Greenberg suggests taking a class. (He himself occasionally offers one- and two-day workshops.) “I recommend you get a copy of the book Neon Techniques by Samuel Miller and Wayne Strattman,” he adds. Currently, there are no specific neon-industry certifications, Greenberg points out, so he recommends joining the neon-l mailing list to keep up with what employers are looking for.

What’s next for Greenberg? More theater shows, working with international artists—and work for the upcoming movie The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

About the Author

Daniel P. Dern is an independent technology writer whose last article for IEEE Spectrum was about the rise of electronic comic books. He can be reached at dern@pair.com. His website is http://www.dern.com, and his technology blog is Trying Technology.

Navigating Las Vegas

Tekla Perry — Fri, 24 May 2013 17:34:00 GMT

How many of you have been to Las Vegas? Were I ask this question in a reader-filled room, I’d bet a majority would raise your hands, thanks to all the trade-show action there. How many of you have taken the monorail to the MGM Grand? I’m guessing I’d see quite a few hands still raised. Now, how many of you have gotten off the monorail at the MGM Grand, walked through the hotel, and made it to the front door without spending at least 15 minutes horribly lost? Maybe I’d have one person still nodding yes, but he was probably just lucky.

Getting around inside the MGM—or any large hotel—can be a nightmare; so many seem to be designed like the inn described in the song “Hotel California”: You can check in any time you want, but you can never leave. And, to date, the navigation software on mobile devices hasn’t been able to help lost travelers find their way inside such GPS-signal-blocking giant buildings.

In the past year or so, a number of companies have put a lot of effort into developing technologies to fix the indoor navigation problem. Solutions take on multiple forms, including simple maps, dead reckoning software that gathers data from sensors already built into smart phones, systems that calculate location using signals from cell phone towers, planted locator beams, and preexisting WiFi hotspots.

As t turns out it’s this last approach that will likely get you out of the MGM—without retracing your steps several times—the next time you’re in Las Vegas. Because today, Lighthouse Signal Systems announced that it has mapped the WiFi signals covering the nearly 2 million square meters of casino and hotel space in the gambling mecca. The result is WiFi fingerprints that enable a mobile device to determine its location to within 5 to 7 meters. Lighthouse is making the signal map and its indoor navigation software available to Android developers for free; it expects to profit from taking a small share of location-targeted ad revenue as that market develops. And, though Lighthouse doesn’t claim to be particularly good at app development, it does have a free Android app, Lighthouse Locate, that allows consumers to beta test its system. (Lighthouse Locate is available on Google Play.)

One small step for indoor navigation, one giant leap towards ensuring that even if you happen to get lost in Vegas you won't stay lost in Vegas.

Photo: Lighthouse Signal Systems

Updated 5/24/2013

Video Friday: AR Drone Stunt, Real Transformer, and Futurama Justice

Evan Ackerman — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:55:00 GMT

This week's Video Friday is kicking off with a long list of things not to do with an AR Drone unless you have the budget of a successful French wireless device manufacturer named after a bird.

Parrot's AR Drone is, as far as robots go, nearly indestructible. To highlight this fact, Parrot spent more than four months preparing and filming a super slow-mo video of a drone flying through fire, water, and dust. It's epic, in the way that only things with a big budget can be epic:

Some things to note about this video: there's no CGI, it's all real drones flying through real fire and other real stuff that robots generally don't get along with. That's a real crash into a brick wall at the end. And remarkably, none of the 25 drones used during the filming suffered any major injuries. Trust me, I've been playing with one of these things for a little while now, and they can take a beating. You can see more in this behind-the-scenes video:

For just $300, this is an incredible robot. And especially now that you can control it with ROS, it's worth a serious look.

[ AR Drone ]

Teams of robots that work underground could learn a thing or two from ants. Insects are experts at working cooperatively in small, dark spaces, and Georgia Tech researchers are trying to figure how they move around:

[ Georgia Tech ]

This ad for the Chevy Volt came out a couple months ago, but I missed it. Probably because it's an ad. And I don't watch ads. But this ad features a cute robotic dog, and I'm also a big fan of the Volt, so it's worth a look:

You know, every time I see CGI footage of robots like this, I can't help but think something along the lines of, "holy moley that robot is going to be utterly impossible for a very, very long time." Sigh.

Via [ AdWeek ]

We met UC Berkeley's STAR "sprawl-tuned" robot back in February, but here's an updated video showing what the little bot was primarily intended to be used for: playing pool.

[ Biomimetic Millisystems Lab ]

Hey look, it's a little robot car. But just wait until 40 seconds in:

WHOA. I had to watch that first transforming move like eight times in a row to convince myself that it wasn't a.) fake or b.) sped up, but I think it might be legit. This is a custom transformer robot by Kenji Ishida, who wants to have one of these THAT YOU CAN RIDE IN by 2030.

[ Brave Robotics ]

Humans are awful at languages. We've got thousands of them (close to 7000, in fact), and even if you speak the same language as someone else, regional accents and dialects may make them virtually incomprehensible. This (among other reasons) is why speech recognition is so difficult for robots, and the ROILA project is solving this problem by inventing a brand new language exclusively for humans interacting with robots and software—a kind of Esperanto for human-machine communication:

There's about 800 words in total, each one constructed by a genetic algorithm to be as different from the others as possible so that robots can understand them without any trouble. Check out the language guide here.

[ ROILA ]

Well, this is seriously awesome: turns out you can hacksaw a Sphero in half and give it some eyeballs:

Probably not the best thing to try unless you know exactly what you're doing, though.

[ RoseRolls ]

Curiosity has been busy on Mars. How busy? This busy:

[ MSL ]

This video of a group of dancing NAOs from Aldebaran and MIT is unique because it's demonstrating a robust synchronization program that allows individual robots to drop out and join back in without missing a beat:

Read the paper here.

Remember the Costa Concordia ? Team BlackSheep takes us on a quadrotor tour of the still partially sunken cruise liner:

[ Team BlackSheep ]

Last month, Futurama co-producer Patric Verrone gave an absolutely fantastic talk at the We Robot conference at Stanford. A video of the talk is now online, and that's the good news. The bad news is that none of the clips of Futurama itself made it into the YouTube video (for reasons you can probably imagine). However, hardcore Futurama fans should be able to picture all of the scenes that Patric talks about, and even if you're not as familiar with the show as you should be, it's still an awesome talk about the ethics of robots and justice in a cartoon future a thousand years from now.

Via [ RoboHub ]

Will Face Recognition Ever Capture Criminals?

Steven Cherry — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:30:00 GMT

Steven Cherry: Hi, this is Steven Cherry for IEEE Spectrum’s “Techwise Conversations.”

The technologies of face recognition have come a long way, but they were no help in finding the Boston Marathon bombers. In fact, by various accounts, the authorities didn’t even try, even though there were millions of images captured in Boston that day by closed-circuit TV systems at stores, banks, street intersections, and by spectators’ smartphones, cameras, and video cams.

What’s wrong with face recognition, and when will it finally help us identify and apprehend criminal suspects? On the other hand, when it gets that good, will it turn on its masters and be used to diminish the privacy and security of lawful citizens?

My guest today is James Wayman. He’s the former director of the National Biometric Test Center at San Jose State University and is now an administrator in its Office of Graduate Studies and Research. He holds four patents in speech processing and has helped develop national and international standards in biometrics. He joins us by phone.

Jim, welcome to the podcast.

James Wayman: Well, thank you very much. I appreciate being here.

Steven Cherry: News outlets reported that the images captured in Boston were of too poor a quality to be compared to a photo database. But as I understand it, that didn’t even matter. The FBI isn’t even set up to match individual photos against a database against them. Why is that?

James Wayman: Well, so, you’re exactly right. Why do images need to be high quality? Well, the state of the art, where we are in biometric facial-recognition matching, is that we do a very good job if we have full frontal facial images that are evenly lit, with a high amount of resolution, meaning a whole lot of pixels—hopefully at least 90 pixels between the eyes—and we have a completely uncluttered background. In fact, the standard refers to an 18 percent grayscale nonreflective background. So that’s the technology we’re fundamentally dealing with.

Secondly, as you point out, the FBI’s not even set up now to try to compare faces with that level of quality and resolution. Now, the FBI has announced that starting next year, they’re going to have a pilot project that will allow them to compare mug shots. Mug shots aren’t quite to the resolution level that I just mentioned. In other words, if you look at a mug shot coming out of a police department, it will not have an 18 percent nonreflective grayscale background. You’ll see all kinds of stuff in the background.

So the FBI’s saying, well, maybe starting next year we can have a pilot project that will allow us to compare mug shots, even though the quality of most mug shots is not real good.

Steven Cherry: Just this business of image quality, I guess that’s what prevented comparing the suspects’ photographs to, say, the Massachusetts driver’s license database, where I guess they both had driver’s licenses.

So let’s talk about how this works. There are a lot of strategies for comparing two facial images. The National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] has held some competitions and has a grand challenge for facial recognition. What seems to be working the best right now?

James Wayman: Yeah, I don’t want people to think somehow we’re finding the distance between the nose and the eyes and the nose and the mouth, because we can’t even find the mouth. There’s something down there. But we can find the eyes. The eyes, we got really lucky. God gave us eyes that have a dark-colored pupil against a white-colored sclera, and those are pretty distinctive. If your eyes are open, we can find those, and we can find the eye centers pretty well. But noses, not so much, and mouths certainly not. Mouths move too much, or mine does. And your chin kind of seems to fade into your neck. Remember, these images are all black and white.

Okay, so, let’s start historically with the technology. It was developed in the early 1960s by a fellow named Woodrow W. Bledsoe, who I believe was an IEEE member. He later retired at the University of Texas at Austin. And what he was doing was marking facial images by hand—the centers of the eyes, the corners of the eyes, the corners of the lips, and the like. And then he projected these marks onto a sphere and he rotated the sphere, trying to get marks from two different images to line up, at which point he could say, aha, these are from the same person.

Well, all of this hand marking didn’t work so well, and in the late 1980s, Sirovich and Kirby came out with this very simplistic idea that is so simple it sounds like it’ll never possibly work, but it did. And that is, we’re going to project the entire face image onto a series of filters. The filters themselves will be derived from a PCA [principal component analysis] to composition of a set of vectors created by another group of facial images.

Well, that approach didn’t work all that great. And one of the reasons is these filters are global filters, meaning all over each one of these basis functions, you have nonzero values. What that means is if someone changes their mouth, for instance, it impacts every single one of the projection coefficients—every one of them. Oh, that’s terrible.

So in, I think, about 1996, you had a Rockefeller University professor, says we’re going to fix that. And what we’re going to use for our basis vectors onto which we project these faces, we’re going to use what we call “local basis vectors,” meaning most of the basis vector is zero. So if you smile between the two pictures, one picture’s smiling and one picture’s not smiling, maybe only one or two of the coefficients in the representation is going to change. He called this “local feature analysis” because each one of these basis vectors only had a localized nonzero region. And that worked really, really well. And, in fact, that took us into the 2000s.

And then in 2000, under funding from the Office of Naval Research, a whole new approach was developed. And that was, what we’re going to do, is we’re going to take simply very, very small filters, technically speaking, Gabor filters, and we’re going to draw a grid on the face, and every place where the grid, this checkerboard, crosses in the face, we’re going to put down a series of Gabor filters, small Gabor filters on that area of the face, and we’re going to find out what coefficients we get out.

Then the next advance, that came maybe just five or six years ago, was to try to tie the grid to actual landmarks on the face. Now, we can’t find the nose exactly and the mouth exactly, but we’ve done a very, very good job in the last 10 years of finding eye centers pretty exactly. And for most people, the nose is midway between the two eye centers and down. I say for most people, because there are people that eye centers are not horizontally aligned, so that’s one failure mode. But for most people, we can guess where the nose might be, and we might look for changes in the black-white pattern between the eyes and down that would indicate, yeah, that’s sort of a nose, and if we go below that, we should get the mouth.

And then what you can do is, because facial expression changes, the illumination of the face changes, the pose angle of the face changes, you can warp these grids around a little bit to try to get the Gabor filter coefficients of two facial images to match up. And if you can get the coefficients to match up, you say, “Aha, this may be the same face.” If, despite your attempts at warping, you can’t get the facial image coefficients to match, you say, “Well, it’s probably not the same guy.”

So one more approach we need to talk about, and that’s the one that you might have thought of originally, and that is the local correlation. Maybe we can just take small face patches of one face and place it over another face and see if they kind of correlate and match up.

Now, all these methods are available, and I understand now from the facial-recognition companies that, depending on the resolution of the image available, they can actually apply all four methods simultaneously to determine the degree of correspondence, the degree of similarity between two facial images.

Steven Cherry: Good. So, I guess another problem holding back face recognition in law-enforcement situations is on the database side, right? The quality of those images. And then there’s yet another problem, also on the database side. It’s the too-much-of-a-good-thing problem, right? It’s impractical to compare an image against, say, every photo in Facebook, even though the images there are mostly pretty good images.

James Wayman: And you’re leaving out a third impediment, and that is legislative. For instance, I don’t know what authority the FBI would even have to access the driver’s license images from the State of California. I guarantee that they do not have authority to access the facial images stored in our social service welfare database.

Steven Cherry: Well, let’s suppose that weren’t an impediment, and I believe that it is an impediment now, and that there are efforts to remove that impediment. So let’s just talk about the practical matter of comparing a single image against a database of millions of photographs, say.

James Wayman: Okay. Well, I mean, it’s the obvious probabilistic problem, and that is, even minuscule false positive rates result in a few false positives over a very large database, right? So now, suppose the person you’re looking for actually is in the database. You get back that person’s face mixed with all the false positives. Suppose that person you’re looking for is not in the facial database. You still get about the same number of false positives. So, you spend most of your time looking at the false positives.

Steven Cherry: Right, which is something that sometimes happens for the FBI, right? They have to track down a thousand leads and one of them proves to be correct.

James Wayman: I suppose, but that’s not how the FBI does it. I mean, that’s really an impractical way to approach things. There’s a saying in this community that “one word is worth a thousand pictures.” You don’t have to look through a thousand pictures; that’s ridiculous. You want to just find the word. The word maybe is the guy’s driver’s license number or the guy’s address or the guy’s passport number or maybe even his name or something like that. And then get that, find that first. That may be a whole lot easier. And that way you don’t have to cull through all those pictures.

Steven Cherry: Now, what about the computational problem? How much time does it take to compare two photographs?

James Wayman: There’s an easy answer to that, and I’m sure it’s in the NIST test reports. I just don’t remember it. I mean, these numbers are commonly published, and they just go in one eye and out the other in me. I just can’t tell you. You know, it’s on the order of milliseconds, I’m sure. And, you know, you can parallelize that, right? And so you can have multiple computers. That’s not the issue. The issue is not the computational time. That can be handled through parallel computing.

Steven Cherry: We’ve seen a lot of areas where technology seems to be making very little progress for years, and then suddenly it takes off, right? Self-driving cars went—you should pardon the pun—from 0 to 60 in just the last few years, language translation, voice recognition. Do you think that’s likely to happen with face recognition?

James Wayman: Well, I don’t know that I accept the fundamental premise. Voice-recognition work, this is the work I was doing in the ’80s, both speech- and speaker-recognition work has progressed pretty uniformly for the 30 years I’ve been involved, meaning that it did get to a level where people could actually start using it, maybe a couple of years ago when Apple came out with Siri. It may just rise to the level where people can start using it. That doesn’t mean that the progress has in any way been uneven.

Now, I would say with regard to facial-recognition technology, the government dumped a ton of money into this technology after 9/11. And I worked for the government, helping them spend some of that money. I didn’t receive the money myself; I helped them allocate money to universities to do the research. And so when the money went into the technology, the technology improved greatly.

Right now, of course, we’ve cut back on our R&D money. The technology will not be improving as rapidly in the coming years, but it takes a while. There’s a phase lag there. It’ll take a while for us to figure that out, that the technology improved very, very rapidly in the 2000s and did not improve as rapidly in our decade because the amount of money being spent was minuscule compared to the previous decade.

Steven Cherry: Eventually, at some point, maybe a few years and maybe longer, but at some point this stuff is going to be really fantastic. And at that point, are we going to start to worry about incursions of our privacy, being too readily identified, and are we going to start regretting all those millions of photos we’ve put on Facebook, for example?

James Wayman: I think it’s interesting you should bring that question up in the context of biometrics. I mean, don’t we already have that problem? People carry around these personal transmitter devices called cellphones, right? And those numbers are pretty identifying. Nobody but me carries my cellphone, and the cellphone transmits, however many seconds, its phone number to whatever tower is hanging around. And the potential for invading my privacy is much, much stronger with things like my cellphone or my Facebook account or my e-mail account than it is for using facial-recognition and surveillance applications. For me, that’s a nonstarter with regard to privacy. That’s not the issue; the issue is things like cellphones.

Steven Cherry: Fair enough. Well, Jim, it’s a potentially fabulously useful technology, and I guess maybe that is fearfully so, as I might have thought, given what you have to say about cellphones. So, thanks for joining us today and telling us about it.

James Wayman: Well, thank you very much. I enjoyed talking to you.

Steven Cherry: We’ve been speaking with biometric researcher Jim Wayman about the current limitations—and future prospects—of face recognition.

For IEEE Spectrum’s “Techwise Conversations,” I’m Steven Cherry.

This interview was recorded Thursday, 16 May 2013.

Segment producer: Barbara Finkelstein; audio engineer: Francesco Ferorelli

Read more “ Techwise Conversations ,” find us in iTunes , or follow us on Twitter.

Image: Julien Tromeur/iStockphoto

NOTE: Transcripts are created for the convenience of our readers and listeners and may not perfectly match their associated interviews and narratives. The authoritative record of IEEE Spectrum’s audio programming is the audio version.

To Probe Further

Face Recognition Failed to Find Boston Bombers Meanwhile, the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System uses cameras in a more promising way

The Future of Riots Video surveillance of London’s rioters points to future of facial recognition

Technology Is Still Easily Foiled by Cosmetic Surgery In the first test of face-recognition technology versus cosmetic surgery, face recognition loses

Here's Looking at You, and You, and You... A Massachusetts man is falsely singled out by an automated antiterrorism facial-recognition system

Download an mp3 of this podcast

Swiss Warehouse Helps Buffer the Grid

Jean Kumagai — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Photo: SSI-Schaefer

Cold Case: A freezer warehouse operated by retailer Migros is helping to balance Switzerland’s electricity supply.

Supplying electricity used to be so simple: some big coal plants, a few gigawatts of nuclear, maybe a hydroelectric dam for good measure—all of them capable of churning out a steady supply of watts. These days, more solar and wind energy means the electricity supply is often unpredictable and the power grid far more challenging to operate. A new project at a refrigerated warehouse in Switzerland could help meet that challenge.

The warehouse is operated by Migros, Switzerland’s largest supermarket chain. Located in Neuendorf, 60 kilometers west of Zurich, it’s a vast facility that stores goods heading for the company’s 630 stores. It’s also cold, with an average temperature of –28 °C maintained throughout the 200 000-square-meter space.

Beyond just keeping frozen pizza from spoiling, all that cold can be harnessed as a buffer for the grid. “In a sense, our deep-freeze warehouse stores energy in the form of coldness,” says Migros’s Roland Stadler. “With smart controls, we should be able to dynamically adapt the power consumption, to consume electricity when there’s enough power in the grid and not to consume when power is scarce.” The company is now doing just that through a partnership with IBM; BKW, the electricity utility for the Swiss canton of Bern; and Swissgrid, the national grid operator.

Here’s how it works: The first step is to forecast the warehouse’s electricity needs for the coming week based on the weather—freezers will obviously consume more watts on a humid August day than on a cold night in February—and on logistics like the amount and types of goods coming in by truck and train. MeteoSwiss, the national weather service, supplies weather data, as does a small weather station on site. IBM researchers also created a model of the warehouse’s typical electricity usage.

“Based on all those key factors, our system makes a forecast of the minimum energy consumption and the maximum consumption,” explains Doug Dykeman, a computer scientist at IBM Research–Zurich who is leading the project. The difference between the minimum and maximum is the warehouse’s “flexibility”—the amount of electricity that the company is willing to not consume should the need arise.

For the grid operator, the warehouse acts like a virtual battery, capable of delivering an amount of power equal to the flexibility. The energy forecast is broadcast to BKW and Swissgrid, says Dykeman. “They can then issue a command to Migros that basically says, ‘Okay, I need 10 percent or 100 percent of what you advertised.’ ” The entire system is automated; when the warehouse control systems receive a signal from BKW, they can respond by adjusting the compressors’ power consumption. BKW will cancel the signal when it no longer needs the electricity or when it detects the freezer temperature exceeding a certain level.

On average, the Neuendorf freezers consume about 500 000 kilowatt-hours per month. In initial tests in April, peak energy consumption was around 1000 kWh, and up to 900 kWh were available to balance the grid for limited periods—typically an hour.

The Migros warehouse isn’t the first to be used in this fashion. In 2008, for example, Amy’s Kitchen, an organic frozen food producer in Petaluma, Calif., retrofitted its freezers with a somewhat cruder system that could automatically reduce consumption during peak times. Sasank Goli, a program manager at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), in California, has studied the technology, known generally as automated demand response. His group found that with the tariff reductions from the utility, the food maker’s investment paid off within a year. [PDF] “And the utility benefits because they don’t need to build more capacity,” he says.

Right now, Goli says, few companies are using the technology. “There’s always some reticence to adopt what is perceived to be somebody else controlling your facility,” he says. But if every industrial freezer in California were to implement the technology, up to one-fourth of the freezers’ total load of 360 megawatts could be available for demand response [PDF], according to a study that Goli’s group did in 2011. To further that vision, LBNL helped develop an open-source communications standard called OpenADR, to facilitate automated demand response.

The main difference between the Swiss installation and others is that the former is “smarter”: It predicts how much load the facility can comfortably shed and monitors the site’s response in real time. IBM hopes that the pilot project, which runs through the end of this year, will convince other industrial users that the technology is feasible and won’t impede operations or the bottom line.

For Migros, cost savings are only part of the motivation, says Stadler. The larger goal is to support Europe’s energiewende , a German phrase meaning “energy turnaround” that has come to signify the move away from nuclear power and toward renewables. The Neuendorf plant recently installed Switzerland’s largest array of rooftop photovoltaics, for example.

“It’s a motivation to take on our responsibility to society,” Stadler says.

Graphene-based Ink Promises Future Flexible Electronics

Dexter Johnson — Fri, 24 May 2013 04:40:00 GMT

Researchers at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering have developed a graphene-based ink that could be sprayed onto substrates to make flexible electronics.

While the research thus far has only extended to spraying 14-nanometer-thick layers to create precise patterns, the researchers believe that method they developed for creating the graphene-based ink could lead to flexible electronic devices in the future.

Graphene’s s one atom thick, two-dimensional characteristics have been tantalizing to those interested in flexible electronics. Just last year, researchers at Cornell University performed work with graphene that suggested that circuits could be made so thin that they would be both flexible and transparent.

The Cornell researchers' approach used traditional chip manufacturing processes like lithography, whereas the Northwestern team has developed a graphene-based ink that could be used for ink-jet printing of electronic circuits.

This use of ink-jet printing means that the Northwestern team had to focus much of its work on finding ways of creating an ink-powder form of graphene without losing any of its attractive electrical characteristics, such as high conductivity.

The research, which was initially published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (“Inkjet Printing of High Conductivity, Flexible Graphene Patterns”), yielded a method for exfoliating graphite so that it produces small bits of graphene whose electrical conductivity has not been compromised. The method can be done at room temperature using a combination of ethanol and ethyl cellulose to exfoliate the graphite. This technique, say the researchers, reduces residues and leaves a high concentration of graphene flakes that are subsequently put into a solvent, creating the ink.

While the graphene-based ink leads to patterns that are 250 times as conductive as previous attempts to print graphene-based electronic patterns, the paper doesn't discuss whether the material can be engineered to act as a semiconductor. Engineering a band gap into graphene remains a critical prerequisite for applying the material in electronics, and was a preoccupation for the Cornell team in its attempts to use graphene in flexible electronics.

Of course, the focus of the Northwestern team was just to find a way to extract a large amount of graphene during an exfoliation process on graphite and have the resulting material remain highly conductive. But if a method is developed that allows for the doping of the graphene ink so it can be a semiconductor as well as a conductor, we may indeed be moving towards flexible electronics made from graphene.

Image: PARC

Heinrich Rohrer: The Modest Pioneer of Nanotechnology

Dexter Johnson — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:01:00 GMT

By now, just about everyone with an interest in the field of nanotechnology has heard that Heinrich Rohrer, who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), passed away this week at the age of 79 from natural causes.

It would be hard to overstate the impact that Rohrer and his colleague at IBM Zurich, Gerd Binnig, have had on the field of nanotechnology. The STM has become a cornerstone tool for characterizing and manipulating the world on the nanoscale. Through ever more refined iterations of the device, we are peering into the atomic scale with greater and greater clarity. Even the lay-est of laypersons can appreciate the STM’s feats of prowess when they're put on display in videos in which atoms are made to perform stunts as if they're children in a home movie.

For a description of how the STM came to be and how it works, IBM Zurich’s reporting on Rohrer’s life is both thorough and poignant and I recommend you take a look at it.

All I would add are my own personal recollections of Rohrer from a one-on-one interview I had with him and from joint interviews I and other journalists had with him and Binnig back in 2011 while attending the grand opening of IBM Zurich’s new nanotechnology research facility, which IBM aptly named the “Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center.“

In these interviews, I was struck by three things.

First, Rohrer’s absolute humility in his role in the development of the STM. He characterized himself as simply wanting to see if it would be possible to eliminate approximations of inhomogenities on surfaces and measure them precisely. Beyond his genius of simply asking the right question, he also had the good sense to hire a brilliant young scientist—Binnig—who could help him in his quest.

Second, Rohrer was funny. Nearly everything he said during our brief time together had a wry twist of humor to it. It seemed to be humor borne of humility (not taking himself too seriously), pragmatism, and his sense that his role as a leader in a technology revolution was so unexpected that he just had to laugh at it.

Finally, I was struck by the chemistry between the two men. They expressed unflagging admiration for one another, despite being in some ways polar opposites. Rohrer was the pragmatist, while Binnig seems to have the touch of the poet. Interestingly, though, in the development of the STM those roles were reversed in that Rohrer was the idea guy and Binnig was the engineer who got the device built.

In any event, their contrasting personalities, humor, and chemistry were on clear display the day of the opening of the lab named after them.

After Binnig had carefully answered a question about their co-discovery of the STM, Rohrer quipped, "If you didn't quite understand what Gerd just told you, you are not alone."

The audience laughed with relief that it was okay that they didn’t understand the carefully thought out explanation—I among them. But the truth was that Rohrer understood Binnig’s explanation perfectly and said that to put the audience at ease. Rohrer was both a great scientist and a true gentleman.

Image: IBM

Intel Takes Aim at "Cool Technology"

Rachel Courtland — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:13:00 GMT

When I last wrote about Intel, exactly 30 days ago, the company had yet to announce a replacement for outgoing CEO Paul Otellini, and there a was a lot of speculation about the company's direction.

A lot can change in a month. On 2 May, Intel announced the promotion of 30-year Intel veteran Brian Krzanich to the chief executive role. And earlier this week, Reuters broke the news of a "sweeping" reorganization. Krzanich himself will now directly oversee most of the main product groups, including the company's PC and mobile units. He has also formed a "new devices" group. Mobile chip guru and Palm and Apple veteran Mike Bell has reportedly been tapped to head it up.

What will this "new devices" unit do exactly? AllThingsD says it will focus at least in part on "ultra-mobile products" and quotes a statement from the company that "the group will be tasked with turning cool technology and business model innovations into products that shape and lead markets". PCWorld speculates the new group will focus less on playing catch-up in the smartphone and tablet markets (which are still dominated by ARM-aligned companies) than on jazzier new products, such as Google Glass.

But Intel has invested a lot in its pursuit of the mobile market. Earlier this month—what a busy month!—the company unveiled Silvermont, a chip architecture that is optimized for power consumption. We'll likely have to wait until at least the end of the year, when the first chips in the Silvermont family ship, to see whether all that hard work has paid off.

(Photo: Robert Galbraith/Reuters)

Wireless Technique Gives Quick, Cheap Read on Brain Injuries

Prachi Patel — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:25:00 GMT

Photo: Cesar A. Gonzalez

Brain Scanner: A device can quickly spot a brain injury by measuring the organ's impedance using RF energy.

Researchers have developed an inexpensive helmetlike device that scans the brain with radio-frequency signals to immediately reveal signs of brain damage. They claim that using this tool could be a quick, cheap way to tell whether a person has a potentially life-threatening brain injury that would require a hospital visit for detailed medical imaging. This would be especially useful in rural settings, where the nearest big hospital is often many kilometers away.

The technology is simple to use and could cost as little as a blood-pressure measurement device, says Boris Rubinsky, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been developing the technique for various applications over the past six years.

The invention is based on the idea that healthy and abnormal brain tissue conduct alternating current differently. In tests on humans, reported in the 14 May issue of PLoS ONE , Rubinsky and his colleagues could differentiate between healthy and injured brains by measuring this difference. Among the damaged brains, they could distinguish whether there was tissue swelling or internal bleeding.

Symptoms of swelling or bleeding in the brain are not immediately obvious. The sure way to know is with magnetic resonance imaging or computed tomography (CT) scans. But the detailed images generated from those techniques might not be necessary in many situations. And in rural areas or in economically disadvantaged parts of the world, such as Mexico and India, those imaging technologies are expensive and not readily available, Rubinsky says.

“Say a child falls down in an accident,” he says. With no outward signs of brain trauma, “if the parents are poor and far from a local hospital, they may not take the child to the hospital. But if there was a very inexpensive device locally in the village to determine that there is an injury, they’d take the child.”

The helmetlike device has two coils that are placed on either side of the head. One coil emits radio-frequency signals at 1 to 200 megahertz. These signals travel through the brain to reach the receiving coil. The impedance of different tissue changes noticeably over a specific narrow frequency range, Rubinsky explains. In a normal brain, this change shows up over a certain set of frequencies, while in tissue infused with saline or blood it occurs over other frequency ranges. A computer algorithm analyzes the signals from the receiver coil to spot this shift, thereby determining if the brain tissue is normal or if it contains excess blood from internal bleeding or excess fluid indicative of swelling.

Rubinsky’s colleague César A. González, a professor at the National Polytechnic Institute’s Superior School of Medicine, in Mexico, tested the device on 46 healthy volunteers and 8 patients with brain damage at a military hospital in Mexico. He confirmed the results with CT scans.

Rubinsky says that data from the device could be sent via cellphone to a central hospital processing facility to avoid the need for a computer at local rural sites. The technology could be adapted to measure brain health and could also be used for detecting tumors and infections, he adds.

The new technology could be more cost-effective than other similar techniques, such as electrical impedance tomography, which makes it suitable for developing countries, says Te Tang, a biomedical engineering professor at Florida State University. Tang adds that the pilot study is encouraging.

However, says Kenneth Foster, professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, “to succeed, the method would have to be reliable and also suitable for use by relatively unsophisticated operators.” Proving its reliability will require more-extensive, better-designed studies.

About the Author

Prachi Patel is a contributing editor to IEEE Spectrum. In April 2013, she reported on an improvement to optogenetics, the use of light-controlled genetics to manipulate brain circuits.

TurtleBot 2 Tutorial: Installing ROS

Evan Ackerman — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:42:00 GMT

Due to ICRA (among other robot-y things), we had to take a bit of a break from our TurtleBot tutorials, but we're back this week to help get you going with Linux and ROS. The good news is, if you managed to survive the Ubuntu install, getting ROS installed is a cinch. The latest ROS version is called Groovy Galapagos (hence the hippie tortoise above). We'll help you through it, and provide some tips on using Linux, in the next installment of our tutorial. Groovy!

So, Linux. In a lot of ways, Ubuntu is a lot like Windows, and in a lot of other ways, Ubuntu is nothing like Windows at all. Ubuntu has a graphical interface that you can use for some things, but for most of the robot stuff, we'll be dealing with an all-text display mode and a command line. It's a bit of mental shift, and it takes some getting used to, but remembering the basic commands that you need isn't that hard.

If you haven't yet, the first thing you'll probably want to do in Ubuntu (after installing GRUB from our previous tutorial) is find yourself a web browser. Why? Well, any future problems you have can probably be solved with a Google search, and if they can't, there are other web-based ways to get help. More on that later, but let's get Google Chrome up and running so that (among other things) you can keep on reading this tutorial while you install ROS.

As with anything else on Linux, you can install programs via a command line, or you can do it more like you're used to in Windows, by downloading an install file from a website and then running it. We're going to use the latter option; ROS doesn't work that way, but Chrome does, and it's fast and easy. Ubuntu comes with Mozilla Firefox installed, and you're of course free to keep on using that, but we're going to pretend that we only like Chrome just to explore one of the two primary software install options that you'll need to know while using Ubuntu.

Start off in Firefox (you can find it by clicking on the "Dash Home" icon in the upper left of the Ubuntu sidebar), and head on over to www.google.com/chrome/. The website should recognize that you're on Linux and offer you some download options. Choose the one for Debian/Ubuntu, pick the right architecture (32 bit or 64 bit), and download the install file. Once it's finished, you can double click it to run it just like in Windows, and Chrome should install itself. Many applications work in this window-ish way, and even though most of the robot stuff is terminal-based, being able to install things with just a few clicks can help make your overall Linux experience a heck of a lot friendlier.

Once you've got Chrome running, you'll see that a Chrome icon pops up in the Ubuntu sidebar. If you right click that icon, you can make it stick around, like a shortcut. You can also do this with other programs: I have Chrome and a terminal window stickied like that, because they're the two things that I end up using most often.

Okay, so now that we have teh Intarwebs available for help, we can go ahead and install ROS. Like I said up top, it's a cinch, because there's a fantastic step-by-step guide available on the ROS.org Wiki, right here. You really do just have to follow the steps, and there's very little that's complicated. At this point, I'm not exactly understanding most of the commands I'm entering, but what matters is that they seem to work. Make sure and install the full desktop version, and just go on down the guide until you hit the end.

The next step, according to the ROS Wiki, is to run some of the ROS tutorials, but we're not going to go that route. Instead, we're going to swing back around to our TurtleBot, and tackle ROS from there.

One final tip for today: we'll be dealing with the command line interface (the terminal) a lot more later on, but here's a link to a nice big cheat sheet for terminal commands. Personally, I've started a little Google Doc for myself with a bunch of stuff on it to help me remember things that I end up using often. Sooner or later, we'll all turn into Linux gurus, but until then, it helps to have a quick reference guide to glance at every once in a while.

With a working robot and ROS on our desktop, the next step is to get them to properly talk to each other, which (in my experience so far) is one of the trickiest parts of ROS. Our next tutorial will probably be on basic TurtleBot networking, including how to set your TurtleBot up on your home wireless network and get it to talk to your desktop, along with how to alter your TurtleBot's settings so that it can work away from your home network, which is trickier than it sounds.

Google Acquires Airborne Wind Power Company Makani

Dave Levitan — Thu, 23 May 2013 04:49:00 GMT

Makani Power, long one of the leaders in the growing field of airborne wind energy, now has a very large and rich parent. A statement on the company's website announced yesterday that Google would acquire Makani for an undisclosed amount; Google—or more specifically, Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm—had previously backed Makani to the tune of US $15 million.

Makani makes a kite-like wind energy device, essentially a fixed wing with small turbines on board. The wing is tethered to the ground and flies in vertical circles to generate power, which is sent back down the tether to the ground, where it could be sent on to the grid. In its statement, Makani wrote that "the timing couldn't be better, as we completed the first ever autonomous all-modes flight with our Wing 7 prototype last week." The video below shows that full test sped up five times.

Airborne wind power takes advantage of the fact that wind speeds are higher and more consistent as one gains altitude. Makani's current design would fly at around 500 meters; going even higher could garner even more energy. The recently-tested prototype is rated at 30 kilowatts capacity, but the company is on record as wanting to build a 600-kw wing that would have a wingspan of 92 feet. Google's money could potentially move that goal closer, quicker.

The purchase also may allay concerns about the loss, last fall, of Makani's founder and primary engineering pioneer, Corwin Hardham. Hardham, only 38 at the time, passed away unexpectedly at his desk. When I met him only a month or so earlier, he excitedly told me about plans to use even the 92-foot, 600-kw turbine as a mere starting point on the way to 5 megawatts.

The fact that Google was the one to purchase the company isn't all that surprising, given their ongoing efforts with renewable energy. The company has so far invested more than $1 billion toward renewables, including backing BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar plant soon to open in the Mojave, the ambitious Atlantic Wind Connection transmission "backbone" project (see also here), and others. Though airborne wind ideas have an air (no pun intended) of the far-fetched about them, having Google at your back can make even the most quixotic (this time, pun intended) scheme seem practical.

Smartwatch Saves Battery Life with Two Processors

Jeremy Hsu — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:28:00 GMT

Smartphones have replaced wristwatches as timekeepers for many teenagers and tech-savvy adults. But a new smartwatch aims to win over customers with such features as an extremely low-power processor and the convenience of wireless charging.

Dreams of wearing a smartwatch as a handy computer on the wrist, also known as a watch-phone, have captured the public's imagination going back to the Dick Tracy newspaper comic strip. Such watches hold the promise of making smartphone features conveniently available on the wrist without having to pull mobile devices out of a pocket or bag.

The new "Agent" smartwatch has already raised more than US $300 000 on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter—easily surpassing its $100 000 goal since the project launched on 21 May. Despite its quick success, it by no means has the field to itself. It doesn't even have Kickstarter to itself—the popular Pebble watch raised $10 million there. Apple and Microsoft are both rumored to be jumping into the smartwatch market as well.

Two features help set Agent apart. First, there's its novel dual-processor design. The main processor is a new ARM Cortex-M4 that consumes just 33 microamperes (uA) in sleep mode compared to 300 uA for most of last year's processors. And it will get more sleep than most, because a smaller second processor handles background "housekeeping duties and events." The smaller processor itself has a sleep mode, which uses just 0.1 uA.

Second, Agent has built-in wireless charging capability based on the industry-standard Qi system. Wearers would simply have to place their watch on an included Qi charging pad—or any other Qi charging pad—to recharge the device.

Agent also has a Sharp Memory Display that combines the best of both LCD and E-paper technologies for fast animations and readability out of doors. It too will have an extremely low power consumption of about 20 uA. Techcrunch was duly impressed:

The Agent is a refreshing change from other Kickstarter smartwatches in that it actually offers something new in terms of technical aspirations. The watch should get up to 7 days of battery life with its smart functions activated, or up to 30 days of standby in ‘watchface-only” mode. Even if that misses the mark by a bit, it should still beat the stated and actual battery life of existing devices like the Pebble.

But getting the technology right is just the first step. In fact, smartwatch success has proven more of the exception rather than the rule. Past flops have included Microsoft's 2004 attempt to introduce the SPOT watch—an expensive failure of a device that didn't offer consumers any new information they couldn't already get for free on existing mobile devices (IEEE Spectrum wisely called it out as a tech "loser" early on).

To win a place in consumer hearts and on their wrists, smartwatches need to offer a compelling new argument to people already carrying phones and tablets. They also have to form a habit that most young people have never had—a 2008 survey by investment bank Piper Jaffray showed that almost two-thirds of teens never wear a watch. Others have abandoned ordinary watches in droves.

A strong sense of style will be essential for the growing number of people who see watches as fashion accessories or luxury items instead of necessary timekeepers. That means the technical prowess of Agent's engineering team at Secret Labs will have to be matched by the aesthetic design provided by House of Horology, a custom timepiece manufacturer that recently earned a "Best Men's Watches of 2013" accolade from New York Magazine.

Photo: Secret Labs | House of Horology

Phonon Lasers Make a More Practical Sound

John Boyd — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:35:00 GMT

Image: Dane Wirtzfeld/iStockphoto

Ever since the laser saw the light of day a half century ago, researchers have been playing with the idea that something similar could be created using sound rather than light. But the concept made little headway in the ensuing decades. In 2009, the situation changed abruptly, when scientists at Caltech and the University of Nottingham, in England, using tiny drums and stacked semiconductors, respectively, employed conventional lasers to stimulate or probe the emission of a stream of “phonons”—the quasiparticles of sound—proving that phonon lasers, or “sasers,” were indeed a sound idea.

Now researchers at NTT Basic Research Laboratories, in Japan, have taken a significant step forward by fabricating an entirely electromechanical resonator on a chip that also eliminates the need for the lasers that previous devices required. This advance makes integration with other devices easier, and applications like extremely high-resolution medical imaging and compact, low-power, high-frequency clock-pulse generators are now within reach, say its inventors.

The word laser is an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.” A laser works by exciting electrons around an atom to higher levels, which then shed the extra energy in the form of photons. This activity takes place in an optical resonator, which is essentially an enclosed chamber, typically with mirrors at either end. The trapped photons bounce back and forth, stimulating the emission of more photons of the same wavelength, some of which are allowed to escape in a controlled beam of laser light.

“In our approach to the saser, we replaced the optical resonator with a microelectromechanical resonator, or oscillator, that moves up and down and produces a spectrum of discrete sonic vibrations, or phonon modes,” says Imran Mahboob, a researcher at NTT. “Simply put, we’re creating an electromechanical atom that we then jiggle to produce the phonons.”

The resonator consists of a micrometer-scale gallium arsenide bar (250 x 85 x 1.4 micrometers) called a beam, which is suspended above a gap in a semiconductor chip and whose oscillations are controlled with piezoelectric transducers. An alternating voltage applied to the beam’s terminals induces alternating expansion and compression. In this scheme, the bar plays the part of an optical resonator, while three levels of oscillating tones or modes (high, middle, and low) mimic the changing of the electron energy levels of the atoms in a specific type of optical laser, generating phonons in the process. When the high state is excited, it generates phonon emissions in the middle and low states. With some fine-tuning of the system, so that the sum frequency of the middle and low states matches the high mode, emission in the low mode is resonantly enhanced, and a precise, highly stable phonon beam is produced, with fluctuations limited to one part in 2 million.

Because the mechanical oscillations are extremely tiny, existing at the subnanometer level, “we place everything into a cryogenic environment with a temperature of around 2 kelvin to make them easier to observe,” says Mahboob. “This also ensures that the different resonance modes are precise, because if [the device is] hot, their frequencies would broaden and overlap so that the sum frequency of the middle and low states wouldn’t always match the high state.”

Image: NTT

Well-Balanced Beam: A gallium arsenide resonator is the heart of NTT's phonon laser.

Notably, an output signal is observed only when the input voltage exceeds a specific figure. This threshold voltage is a signature feature of optical lasers, as is a large improvement in the beam’s frequency precision when phonon lasing is triggered. “So we’re convinced we have phonon lasing,” says Mahboob.

As for how such a laser could be used, he says that the device’s compactness, low energy consumption, and the possibility of high frequency give it the potential to replace the relatively bulky quartz-crystal resonators used to provide stable frequencies for synchronized operations and precise timekeeping in computers and other electronic equipment. Superior medical ultrasound imaging is another possible application, and Mahboob speculates that one day the laser might be used as a medical treatment.

Hiroshi Yamaguchi, an NTT senior distinguished researcher, also points out that by increasing the frequency of the oscillating states, the resonator could potentially be manipulated to store a discrete number of phonons. “This could open up new avenues to explore quantum cryptography and quantum computing,” he says, “as well as having the potential of enabling us to study quantum effects at the macro level.”

But before such speculations can be seriously investigated, the researchers admit they must first overcome a major challenge. Whereas optical lasers can travel through a vacuum, a phonon beam requires a medium. In this research, the sound propagates through the semiconductor crystal, and the researchers are now working out how to handle this limitation.

“On the other hand, the technology does have the advantage [in] that it’s a compound semiconductor,” points out Yamaguchi. “So it could, for example, easily be integrated with an optical device and an electrical device all on the same chip and, of course, integrated with a variety of systems. We believe this is a major advantage of our device.”

Other phonon laser researchers have been improving their devices, too. Tony Kent, a professor of physics at the University of Nottingham who is working with semiconductor stack devices to realize sasers, has been working on using them for applications that need frequencies in the hundreds of gigahertz or even terahertz frequencies. “Our main focus is exploring applications for a terahertz saser as a stable, low-noise reference or local oscillator, for use in communications, medical imaging, and security screening, and as a source for acoustic sensors of nano-objects,” he says.

Kent says that while he expects the NTT research to have a major impact on the fundamental science of micromechanical systems, he questions the practicality of some of the applications that are being suggested.

Putting aside the problem of having to work with low temperatures, and the difficulty getting the sound out of the resonator and into the semiconductor crystal, the reported beam device works at a frequency of only around 1 megahertz,” says Kent. “Yet there are already technologies generating acoustic signals for ultrasound measurement available now with frequencies higher than 1 GHz.”

About the Author

John Boyd covers technology in Japan. In April 2013, he reported on the test of new silicon carbide power electronics in the Tokyo subway system.

Credit Union: Bitcoin's New Best Friends?

Morgen Peck — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:08:00 GMT

If the Bitcoin convention held this weekend in San Jose, CA proved one thing, it's that the community is surprisingly diverse. Putting aside the appalling gender gap, you simply had no idea who you would bump into. A fashion photographer from Milan. A curious kid from Edmonton, Canada. An Australian anarchist recently transplanted to New York City.

The one person that no one expected to see in all this flurry was the head of a bank or credit union, and you certainly didn't expect to find him trying to make friends. So all in all, Jordan Modell might have been the most peculiar of all the peculiar people I met at the conference. There was, it turns out, an explanation for his crypto-tech-friendly stance.

He had arrived together with Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, to find out whether there was anything they could do to support Bitcoin entrepreneurs during this rather crazy time.

In March, the market value of all bitcoins in circulation reached one billion dollars, attracting new investors, but also closer scrutiny from regulators. Last week, Dwolla shut down an account which funds MT Gox, the most popular online bitcoin exchange, after the Department of Homeland Security served the payment processor with a warrant. (It was hardly the first problem exchanges have seen. Back in 2011, PayPal didn't wait for the regulators to act when it proactively closed the account of Coinpal, an individual who used to accept PayPal for bitcoins. In the early days, this service was one of the best ways for people to get their hands on bitcoins.)

At the conference, Kahle explained that he was there to help. A few years ago, he had convinced his long time friend, Jordan Modell, to start a credit union with him. In 2012, the Internet Archive Federal Credit Union began serving low-income families in New Bruswick, N.J. In some ways, the move came out of left field, and it seems that even Kahle was unsure how this new endeavor would fit into his role as public steward of Internet.

During a presentation on Saturday Kahle said of his credit union, "I think we've now finally discovered why we need one."

As Modell, explained: "Most of the threat to the bitcoin world seems to come from regulators and banks. For lack of clear guidance, we do not know why banks are closing accounts. Banks may have decided that bitcoins for now are not worth the hassle of filings necessary or the associated taint," he says. "If there are no regulatory issues that prevent our doing work with bitcoin firms, then to us the bitcoin wolf looks like a playful puppy."

In the U.S., credit unions are required to verify the identity of the people they do business with (so-called "know-your-customer" laws), especially if they are acting as money service businesses. They're also required to file suspicious activity reports (SARs) to the government. But, Modell argues, this doesn't mean they can't lend a hand.

"We understand the need for SARs," Modell says. "And of course every activity over $10 000 is reported. But, subject to what regulators and council tells us, we do not think this added burden is enough to keep us from helping the bitcoin world."

After talking with people at the conference, Modell says he's identified some of the needs of the community. Assuming they get approval from their lawyers and regulators, Modell says the Internet Archive Federal Credit Union would like to help both the people who are setting up bitcoin exchanges and those who want to do business with them, navigating them through the regulatory landscape by setting up accounts that follow know-your-customer laws.

Modell would also like to work to set up low-cost, overnight transfers between bitcoin exchanges and the bank accounts of their customers. This would be a much cheaper alternative to wire transfers, which can cost more than forty dollars each.

Finally, Modell says the credit union may extend credit lines up to $5000 to individuals that are investing in bitcoin through these exchanges.

His hope is to help the bitcoin players who want to come into compliance do so at a low cost. "Honestly, I'm excited. And I think bitcoins can immediately co-exist now in a fiat-centric world," explained Modell in an email. "I just worry that those wishing to push boundaries too far and too fast might break the system by bringing on a backlash of regulation. Most regulators that I have met on my journey are real people with an understanding and care for the industry. But there is a saying: No regulator ever got called before Congress for saying no. I always want to work with, not try to bulldoze anyone on either side of the equation."

Photo Credit: George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Here's Microsoft's New Kinect Sensor

Evan Ackerman — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:42:00 GMT

Yesterday, Microsoft held an event to announce its brand new Kinect sensor, and... Uh... Something else that we can't remember offhand, so it must not be that important. If you've hung around here long enough, you've probably noticed that Kinect sensors are on all kinds of robots nowadays, because they're inexpensive and pretty darn awesome. Plus, since so many people have them, there's a huge community that encourages ease of use.

But Kinect is nearly three years old, which is basically prehistoric in technological terms. It's time for something new, and better, and here it is.