Sencepta Futura

"What’s the difference between Ubiquitous Computing (“ubicomp”) and Augmented Reality (“AR”)? I hear..."

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:02:12 -0800

“What’s the difference between Ubiquitous Computing (“ubicomp”) and Augmented Reality (“AR”)? I hear this question often, and you could replace “augmented reality” in that question with any of the following buzzy paradigms for people-interacting-with-computers: Virtual Reality, Pervasive Computing, Mobile Computing, Wearable Computing, Multi-Device Interaction, Cloud Computing, Intelligent Systems, Ambient Intelligence, Context-Aware Computing, Adaptive Systems, Machine Perception, Social Computing, Smart Environments, Everyware, and so on.”

- Defining ubiquitous computing vs. augmented reality - PARC blog

"CSIRO researchers have developed miniature sensors that track lab equipment, coffee mugs and..."

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 10:22:15 -0800

“

CSIRO researchers have developed miniature sensors that track lab equipment, coffee mugs and staplers in the office.

Called Fleck Nano, the sensors build on CSIRO’s existing Fleck technology that is being commercially produced for monitoring cows on farms.

Fleck sensors collect data like location and temperature. They form an ad-hoc mesh network, and communicate with static nodes and each other via radio waves.

Since the a battery attachment would significantly affect the size of the device, the researchers are currently looking into reducing the Fleck Nano’s energy demands and ways to harvest energy from the environment. The prototype cost $50 to manufacture. Valencia said a mass-produced device is likely to cost “orders of magnitude” less.

In future, Valencia said the technology could be integrated with machine learning algorithms that will allow for applications like kettles that automatically boil water as a coffee mug is carried to the kitchen.

“I think the future will be filled with that kind of stuff; we’re just working towards getting there,” he told iTnews.

”

- Scientists build sensor networks for your missing pens - Networking - Technology - News - iTnews.com.au

"Robots may be taking your place on the factory floor, but they’re also aiming for higher goals:..."

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 10:12:00 -0800

“Robots may be taking your place on the factory floor, but they’re also aiming for higher goals: replacing fireworks and conquering the sky. MIT’s Flyfire project uses a swarm of miniature helicopters with embedded LED lights to act as ’smart pixels’ as they fly through the air. Acting in concert they will be able to form complex three dimensional shapes – digital displays that will awe you more than exploding chemicals ever could. Not only will the pixels change color, the 3D dynamic movement will create an immersive experience that you can view from any angle. According to a recent press release, MIT only has a few of these micro-copters up and flying at the moment, but they want to scale up the project to large numbers quickly. They’ve produced an awesome demonstration video with a few shots of the copters and a lot of simulated footage. ”

- MIT’s Flyfire – Miniature Helicopters Turn Sky into Digital Screen

"The L.H.C., which operates under the auspices of the European Organization for Nuclear Research,..."

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 11:22:52 -0800

“The L.H.C., which operates under the auspices of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, cern, is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in 1994, and has been under construction for the last 13 years, the product of tens of millions of man-hours. It’s also gargantuan: a circular tunnel 17 miles around, punctuated by shopping-mall-size subterranean caverns and fitted out with more than $9 billion worth of steel and pipe and cable more reminiscent of Jules Verne than Steve Jobs. The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.”

- Kurt Andersen on the Large Hadron Collider - VANITYFAIR.com

At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:03:20 -0800

At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper “laptop.” In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he’ll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.

Pretty neat demos.

"MIT Technology Review reports researchers from several universties have demonstrated arrays of..."

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:08:30 -0800

“MIT Technology Review reports researchers from several universties have demonstrated arrays of transistors made on thin films of silk. While electronics must usually be encased to protect them from the body, these electronics don’t need protection, and the silk means the electronics conform to biological tissue. The silk melts away over time and the thin silicon circuits left behind don’t cause irritation because they are just nanometers thick.”

- Biodegradable circuits could enable better neural interfaces and LED tattoos

Life Logging

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:17:32 -0700

Mike Treder at IEET writes a little about a new device from a UK company that is essentially a camera worn around the neck, photographing every significant moment of our lives.

Worn on a cord around the neck, the camera takes pictures automatically as often as once every 30 seconds. It also uses an accelerometer and light sensors to snap an image when a person enters a new environment, and an infrared sensor to take one when it detects the body heat of a person in front of the wearer. It can fit 30,000 images onto its 1-gigabyte memory.
The ViconRevue was originally developed as the SenseCam by Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, for researchers studying Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Studies showed that reviewing the events of the day using SenseCam photos could help some people improve long-term recall.

Mike predicts that we might have devices like this that take video as well, and not on light- or location-triggers, but all the time. This would be useful, he says, for re-living past experiences (and for “gathering data to be used in re-creating a personality embedded in silicon”, whatever that means).

In a similar vein, Wired has a review of the Fitbit Fitness and Sleep Tracker, a beefed-up pedometer with a triaxial accelerometer and a computer docking station. The Fitbit clips to your clothes and tracks how far and how fast you move, how you sleep, and the accompanying web interface lets you input calories consumed to complement calories expended. Interestingly, the Fitbit has a focus on data, metrics and trends for everything it tracks.

This is an interesting trend that I think will become more and more prevalent. Combine these devices, or allow them to gather data in a standardized way, and you can get a pretty accurate picture of of someone’s doings. Combine with a GPS receiver, a heartrate monitor, perhaps a light-level sensor, etc and that’s a whole lot of data that could be mined for interesting patterns.

"Recent developments in neuroimaging have created concerns about the ethics of..."

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:58:00 -0700

“Recent developments in neuroimaging have created concerns about the ethics of ‘mind-reading’. A technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has led to significant advances in the ability to determine what someone is thinking by monitoring their brain activity. Early research focused on determining very simple features of a person’s mental state, such as whether or not they were currently looking at a picture of a face. However, new research by John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute has gone beyond this, allowing scientists to determine which action the subjects in their trial were intending to perform before they performed it (see a summary, or the paper itself). The task in question was to decide whether to add or subtract the two numbers which would later be shown. After being trained on a number of examples, the system could predict which of the two operations the subject would later perform. Furthermore, a study at Carnegie Mellon University showed that it was possible to determine which word from a given list a subject was thinking of, even if it had not scanned that person’s brain before.”

- Practical Ethics: The ethics of mind-reading

Implications of increased lifespans

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:29:00 -0700

[Miami Herald: Oh baby, it’s a long life]:
Today’s babies will be tomorrow’s centenarians. A new report says that reaching the age of 100 may become ordinary for most American babies born since 2000. How will living for a century affect our kids? And what quality of life awaits those who live this long?

An interesting article with some facts about the growing number of centenarians in Japan, the US, and other first-world countries.

Japan’s quickly-growing older population has already begun changing the how it’s society views them. There are an increasing number lifestyle products to make the lives of the extremely elderly easier.

But, what will happen when old people are more healthy, still self-sufficient, presumably still employed, and otherwise active? Will their longer experience and accumulated wealth become an insurmountable obstacle for newer generations?

Fashions in ideologies also tend to shift when the older generations die - will our politics become stagnant with the over-repeated ideas of the older giants who refuse to die or retire? Will the younger voice be drowned out and ignored?

"I realized from watching this wonderful summary that space stations will be like cities: ever..."

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:53:38 -0700

“I realized from watching this wonderful summary that space stations will be like cities: ever changing, ever accumulating, ever growing. Some may grow to be a century old, full of new layers but and contain ancient parts they cannot shed.”

- The Technium: Evolution of the Space Station

CCNx: Content Centric Networking

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 15:22:46 -0700

CCNx (code) is a next-generation content-centric “networking” protocol born from the CCN research group at PARC. Instead of connecting hosts like traditional protocols, CCNx creates a P2P model where clients address data instead of other clients (protocol overview).

I, for one, don’t want to ask the lights of my home-of-the-future to dim by way of an IPv6 address, and I don’t think we’ll be running DNS servers for our homes either - naming every appliance and application would be a chore. I hope to explore the implications of “everyware”, as Adam Greenfield calls it, on future networking in later posts.

(via Trivium)

"In recent years, quantum computers have lost some of their luster. In the 1990s, it seemed that they..."

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:11:47 -0700

“In recent years, quantum computers have lost some of their luster. In the 1990s, it seemed that they might be able to solve a class of difficult but common problems — the so-called NP-complete problems — exponentially faster than classical computers. Now, it seems that they probably can’t. In fact, until this week, the only common calculation where quantum computation promised exponential gains was the factoring of large numbers, which isn’t that useful outside cryptography. In a paper appearing today in Physical Review Letters, however, MIT researchers present a new algorithm that could bring the same type of efficiency to systems of linear equations — whose solution is crucial to image processing, video processing, signal processing, robot control, weather modeling, genetic analysis and population analysis, to name just a few applications.”

- Quantum computing may actually be useful, after all

Some Core Principles

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:02:37 -0700

We ought to set down some core principles to refer to when discussing the future.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Predictions aren’t very useful without hard evidence to back them up, and the best sort of evidence is reality. All short-term predictions, if they are viable, ought to have a clear next step to bringing about their existence. The most reliable and trust-worthy predictor will have already taken this step.

With that said, the next best way to make a prediction is to examine the past. In general, history is an excellent resource to inform us about how we act, perceive, and record. For example, I have trouble believing we will ever have personal jetpacks - the history of air travel is predisposed against it (not to mention physical impracticalities, fuel costs, inconvenience, and general sentiment for public transport). A good prediction will examine historical precedent.

Beware Science Fiction.

Science Fiction is fiction first, science second. Sci-Fi has some neat ideas, but they ought to be examined carefully. Many times, Sci-Fi will introduce seemingly near-practical inventions while failing to take into account their full implications. Predicted inventions should not be considered out-of-context.

The future will be messy and human.

There will be no clean lines and gleaming surfaces, there will be no single human government, and there will be no universal hive mind. The future will be distinctly human, because it will have been built by humans. No purely technical change will unify humanity, solve it’s deficiencies, or end all suffering.

The future may not be good.

Humanity, indeed, all life, is a happy accident, and we are still in a very fragile position that is not getting any better. There is no reason humanity has to survive. We have only one habitable planet, no easy way of reaching others, no inexpensive way of Terra-forming others, and an steadily-increasing population.

There are no aliens.

At least, we won’t ever run into them. The universe is very very large, life is very very fragile, and if we encountered any extraterrestrial life, we probably wouldn’t be able to recognize it as such or communicate with it. Drake’s Equation examines many factors necessary for meeting intelligent life, and the end result gives us almost no chance at all.

Standing on shoulders

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:20:00 -0700

Your editor’s views did not spring fully-formed like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, although he sometimes likes to think so. No, instead he has done lots of reading of smart folks’ writings, and you should too. Here are a couple of websites, authors, and resources to explore.

Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, who also writes at Speedbird about futuristic urbanism, interface design, and design and architecture.
Raymond Kurzweil is an inventor (the scanner, OCR, TTS, speech recognition, and the synthesizer) and transhumanist. He predicted the future by inventing it, and continues to do so.
Marvin Minsky and Eleizer Yudkowsky have done some thinking about AI.
The Long Now Foundation “was established in 01996 to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.”

Note: I’ll keep updating this page, so check back.

Welcome

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:49:00 -0700

Welcome to Sencepta Futura.

“The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” Sci-Fi author William Gibson recognized that the future we dream of is not that distant, and in many cases, has already arrived. Sencepta Futura aims to highlight these arrivals and document their integration into our conscious lives.

Furthermore, as Computer Scientist Alan Kay explained, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” However, it is important that we invent the correct future, and so Sencepta Futura also aims to educate you, dear reader, which futures are meaningless fantasies, and which we actually have a chance of building and those that have a chance of enriching our lives.

If you come across something you think merits a mention, please send it to me via DISQUS, Twitter, Tumblr, or some other method.