Machine Intelligence

Today's NYTimes article on program's designed to thwart machine's and software's ability to "pretend" to be a human reminded me of the entire A.I. field of study from college and years ago when we were trying to sell companies and the government on commercial AI applications.

The article itself is about CAPTCHA and re-Captcha as well as image recognition and how these systems are used by Yahoo, Google and others to keep the "bad guys" from signing up for bogus email accounts and whatever and then spamming us to death. An admirable goal. Even the system's themselves are going good, for example re-CAPTCHA where images that cannot be scanned and OCR'd properly are being "read" by the human populace one or two words at a time as they sign-on or sign-up and the words (actually multiple iterations of the same word from different people in order to ensure fewer errors creep in) are then substituted in the scanned books of libraries and other material and thus improving our ability to read books "at a distance" where maybe only a copy or two exists.

The point of all of these tests is to determine if it's a human behind the "keyboard" rather than a machine cranking out sign-up requests by the thousand's. I have heard that the spammer's themselves were using similar human powered examination of the images to thwart these attempts, in that they rewarded viewers at their porn sites to simply solve the same problem by revealing more and more of a naked lady as the letters of the problem were typed in.

Beyond this is all of the work that has led up to this point... The CAPTCHA acronym itself stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart” and is a direct reference to the British mathematician, Alan Turing. (for a fictional counterpoint to all of this, read an excellent novel by Neal Stephenson Crypotnomicon - a 1999 novel which had a side plot about the the Bletchley Park mathematicians in their attempts to crack Axis codes during WW-II.) who has contributed much to be beginning of this field.

The Hollywood machine, with another Terminator movie out, would lead us to believe that much of this is ready, available, and here already. Let's send Jay Leno out to do another "man on the street" interview to see what Americans really know. What he would find would be humorous, because this work is all hard. Even 10 years ago with the beginning of commercialization of this kind AI technology, it's still really hard with only now some specialized things coming out of MIT and other schools/research groups to support some very specific kinds of applications, like an autopilot for a truck or a robot "pack mule". The most recent, big deal AI app I'm aware of was for plane refueling during Desert Storm, where AI's constructed AI's to schedule the mid-air tanker's for all of those fighter jets. None were lost, and at the scale of the operation I'm told we would have been limited or had some flame-outs if the human schedules had continued.

Still, eventually this will all really be commonplace, and probably without the Terminator.

Politics and Technology

Sorry for not posting for so long, I am totally consumed with a project at work. This week, I'm taking some vacation and I promised myself I would post.

Today I just wanted to note, at the eve of the "mother of all bailouts" in the financial industry, that somehow, we need to continue to remain focused on the fact that we don't spend enough time or energy or money working at or thinking about science or technology based projects. I amazes me that for us to have "invented" the internet, not as Al Gore has stated, but literally out of DARPA work so long ago... and the funding for major portions of the infrastructure came out of the budget for the NSF...

Today (and for many of the last 8 years) we are ignoring, as a matter of public policy, money invested in topics such as

• Stem cell research (think about growing your own bone graft for your own spine, the far right has been successful in creating FUD around this topic)
• Solar electricity generation (I just installed solar PV on my roof, but it could have been so much less expensive, because Moore's Law effects are not being seen in this industry in spite of the fact that the manufacturing technology is the same as in CPUs and Memory)
• Solar electricity generation #2 (having read about small solar powered steam generators for the home - they generate electricity) is this worthwhile?
• Algae that make bio-diesel as a byproduct of "eating" the excrement of fish farms. Did you know that this fish poop stuff is terribly bad for the environment? This would clean it up and provide a stepping stone to getting off oil from countries that politically are not aligned with sensible policy

I am truly speaking investment, because the business climate is bad enough, particularly in solar, that you won't find companies in this country making research decisions along these lines. Just as in sales compensation, you need to provide the incentive to the salesman to sell a product by compensating him to do so, in R&D, sometimes a kick in the pants is needed to get things moving, particularly if the R&D is in the private sector...

Surely, if we can modify the tax code to provide a tax credit for a light truck (or SUV's classified as such) and thus provide the incentive for the small business owner to make that investment in his business, something smarter can come from Washington; like say an investment in PV manufactoring technologies, thus assuring growth rather than stagnation.

I know, the current administration is just about done, what with it's "faith based" initiatives and all, but what are the replacements suggesting? You don't know?

Get involved.

**update**
here are links (click here and here) to get you started, from a recent post from none other than Phil Plait on the ScienceDebate2008.

It’s hard to say if this is honesty from them, or whether we should chalk it up to pre-election empty promises. Both say some good things about science policy...

Technorama Last Episode

The last episode of Technorama was today, I'm sorry to hear this, having enjoyed the show for so long and participated a bit as well. My own contribution, that I found on Engadget, for the last show was this strange contraption, the Uno Electric Unicycle:

Interesting uses for the Wiimote

I ran across some of the work of Johnny Lee while listening to Phil Windley's Technometria the other day. You can read (and listen to) more at the Conversations Network, a great resource of ideas and material, or you can click the link above to Johnny's website at Carnegie Mellon University.

Because the Wiimote has bluetooth built in and an infrared camera, you can interact with it via your computer, reverse it's normal gaming orientation to the TV and expose a whole new range of potentials.

Here are some direct links to some of the YouTube video's he's posted regarding potential apps for the Wiimote, yes beyond just gaming...

Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote (my personal favorite)


also, see more...
Tracking fingers with the Wii Remote

Foldable Displays (tracked with the Wiimote)

Head Tracking for Desktop VR

Energy Efficiency

I have been listening to these Conversations Network podcasts for a series of lectures by Amory Levins while he was a visiting professor at Stanford University.

According to Amory Lovins, the way to design energy efficient buildings involves "thinking outside the box", or simply just giving up old ways of approaching the problem.

I found this lecture series entertaining and quite informative. The link above, and here pertains to Part 1 of design elements for building or renovating energy efficiency in buildings. This is a good "listen" and I recommend it for anyone interested in helping to solve the energy issues present in our society today.

Volunteer in your community

On November 13, I made a presentation of a check of $750 from the Verizon Foundation to the Woodside Elementary School PFC as a matching contribution for my volunteer hours as one of the parent volunteers in the traffic line, assisting kids to get safely to school each morning.

The Verizon Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Verizon Communications, is committed to improving literacy and K-12 education; fostering awareness and prevention of domestic violence; and promoting the use of technology in health-care delivery. In 2006, the foundation awarded more than $69 million in grants to nonprofit agencies in the United States and abroad. The foundation also matched charitable donations from Verizon employees and retirees, resulting in $29 million in combined contributions.

Under the foundation's Verizon Volunteer initiative, one of the nation's largest employee-volunteer programs, company employees and retirees have also contributed nearly 3 million hours of community service since Verizon's inception in 2000. In 2006 alone, volunteers contributed 600,000 hours. This latter Verizon Volunteer initiative is the grant program that I applied for. For more information on the foundation, visit http://www.verizon.com/foundation.

Many corporations have similar programs. Does your employer offer such a program that might “double up” the volunteer hours or contributions you may already be providing to the school, the PFC, or elsewhere in the community? Please check. If you are not already, consider volunteering for one of the many positions of the Woodside PFC or elsewhere in our community.

Update on Analog TV

A little bit ago, I reported on the death of analog TV, but one should note what the industry is trying to do... Here is an excellent story on what the future holds.

(this link is to an MP3 file, which will probably play just fine on your computer... You will need speakers to listen to the story)

Analog TV Death Delayed

as reported by SOSF,

This decision will require both network and cable broadcasters to continue providing an analog feed to their customers even though all of them have spent literally multi-millions of dollars gearing up and getting ready for the new digital age of television viewing.

I have analog coming into my home right now, mostly because it's cheaper than digital plus the cable company wanted to charge me a lot of money for "home-runs" to the TV's. At the time I had no digital TV's either.

Today, I don't really have digital TV yet (it's been an expense thing) -- I have a lot of component video and I do IP streaming from the video server near my router to the living room.

Until you get a larger and more recent TV in place, it's hard to justify the extra expense, both to install and recurring.

Once the incoming signal is digital, you will need these digital-to-analog converters for each analog TV you have. At the store, if you have to buy them, it's going to cost you about $20-30. Not counting whatever equipment your cable company wants to charge you (probably built into a set-top-box)

Note that some of the problems with DRM have been reported, and also all of that DRM code in Windows Vista has had various folks up in arms.

DRM strikes yet again

Wil Wheaton (yes that Wil Wheaton) posted problems with his DirectTV-HDMI connectivity. All due to software which "protects the content" from people who have legally paid for the content.

DRM is totally a mess right now, and it's not going to get better until customers speak up and force the content management and delivery mechansims to change.

Wil: How many DirecTV customers are currently hosed by this DRM-related nightmare? I'm not sure, but I can tell you what the number would be if the damn studios and networks weren't so dead set on treating their customers like criminals: zero.

Breakfast Computing

Heard recently on the pod-a-sphere:

"My inbox is full of SPAM and BACN.
I burn my CD's with Toast.
I get my podcasts with Juice.
Are there any other breakfast computing items out there?"

Gavin, forum/member on Buzz Out Loud.

Amazon Web Services

This review of the components of Amazon Web Services is a must "listen" for anyone interested in how to quickly deploy a service without having to make a huge investment in infrastructure... Amazon has done it for you...

Jeff Barr, Senior Manager, Web Services Evangelism at Amazon.com is interviewed by Phil Windley and others for Phil's personal podcast, "Technometria". A great listen, right on the page noted in the link and with further links for more detailed reading.

We need to fund basic science research

As some of you might know, I often write about technology topics in Telecommunications or Electrical Engineering. Today, however, I thought it important to pick a slightly different slant…

This weekend, I was listening to my backlog of podcasts and included in what I listened to were two different podcasts for TechNation where

• Dr. Moira Gunn (the host) interviews Greg Lucier, the Chairman and CEO of Invitrogen. In the interview, the point that is put across on why society needs to fund basic science research.
• Science journalist David Ewing Duncan discusses the "The Bio-Issue of the Week" with Dr. Gunn, in which drug spending (R&D) is up, but results in the from approved drugs are down and some drugs are about to come off patents, so revenues for these companies will eventually dry up.
  

In both cases, as I’m hearing and reading many other articles on diverse topics, it may be because our country doesn’t support the basic science research enough. For example, in the latter podcast, the point was made that there is a mountain of data out of the human genomics project that really needs detailed analysis; e.g. we know what a gene does, what we don’t know is exactly how it does it. Or considered another way, the genes that a human shares with a mouse is really a high percentage, something approaching 98%+, but what makes the difference between the human and the mouse is when and how the gene does it’s job.

Without interested people, without post-doc programs to provide research topics, … well, would you work in a field that is apparently drying up? But, it’s not really drying up, other countries, like Korea, China, and Australia have tremendous programs for this sort of thing. We are giving our best and brightest lost of reasons to leave this country.

The lack of sensible policy at the federal level, the lack of proper funding, in cross-disciplined approaches, to projects that are going to benefit us all, … well, I fear for the future (next couple of decades)…

You might say this isn’t important, but you’d be missing the point. The direct investment that DARPA, NASA, and other agencies had with science and technology research provided some glamour for the space program stuff of the 60’s, but it also lead to communications satellites and other mundane things like cellular telephone networks and devices.

Some like to say that Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise “invented” the cell phone, because of the use of the communicator on each Star Trek episode, but the fact of the matter was that the imagination of a whole generation was sparked, because of the believability of those episodes, and a market demand (for cell phone technology) was later satisfied, not only by companies trying to make money, but by a whole generation of engineering and scientific students that brought a passion to creating not only the mobile phone technologies we take for granted today, but the internet, the progress toward improvements in the cancer situation (many people can live out their lives today in remission, whereas 20 – 30 years ago, cancer was a death sentence) and countless other technologies we so easily take for granted.

We need to continue to improve upon this situation. Can you imagine a world without Diabetes? Did you know, we stand on the brink of figuring out how to accomplish this? This isn’t a would it be nice thing to do, there are huge costs in both medical support and human suffering associated with just this one disease. Make the investment – reap huge benefits; just like we did in mobile phone and internet technologies.

I’d like to ask you today, to write your congressman, tell them this is important to us, as a country, to change this situation. Invest in science. It doesn’t have to be preachy, it doesn’t have to any more than a 1-2 minute phone call or a 1 paragraph email, but do something to be part of the solution to change from an almost anti-science policy to one where, similar to the 60’s, we are on the road to great things.

Sunrocket calls it quits

Just saw (via Reuters) that Sunrocket appears to have closed down.

Recently, I posted about the perils of IP and the US Patent office, and Vonage was still holding on.

Hype has to be balanced with flawless execution, which is certainly a hard thing to do. If you have more money, you can weather some large mistakes. We'll have to see what the news is as this story develops, certainly at this early stage almost anything could be "blamed" for what has happened to Sunrocket. The Truth will probably take some time to come out.

Siemens brings DECT to US

According to The Business VoIP Report, DECT technology is now shipping from Siemens.

Siemens has begun shipping to the U.S. a variety of cordless phones built around the Digital Enhanced Cordless Telephony (DECT) standards. The new Gigaset models include the S450 IP and SX762 WLAN DSL gateway. While DECT phones have been on the European market for over 10 years, the new models represent the first DECT devices Siemens has brought to the U.S. The line includes both IP and non-IP devices, and brings a wide variety of new features and feature-delivery mechanisms to the U.S. market.

Noting other news sources earlier, I had written about this interesting trend (about 8 months ago) in which a European technology innovation was finally getting to our shores after 10 years of maturity. Actually, some early Gigasets where able to be purchased back then, so with a little more fanfare, we have a DECT device offering that is being broadened.

• Here (where Siemen’s Gigaset was noted as being an example of among the first of the DECT models you could purchase then that is/was coupled with Yahoo! Messenger w/Voice capabilities) and
• here where more models where announced and expected to be showing up by 3Q2007.
  

Cheatsheets

I really, really love the web.

Just about any resource you'd like to find is there, and predictably, someone else will show you the way to find it. In this case, Marc Andreessen, yes that Marc Andreessen.

Link here- Essential HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, and miscellaneous cheatsheets

7 years later, still a good example of what was to come

I was looking for some other piece of information, but stumbled, instead, upon this gem of a film from 7 years ago.

This film, produced in 2000, was 3 minutes long, took 4 months to make, before the kinds of film making tools that are available today. Still, this work, rivaled what the major motion picture studios could produce.

Link here or here

you think you have problems - consider this

Excellent story about the Space Station astronaut's problems after the Columbia Disaster

Tech Nation

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1124.html

from GigaVox,

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with NASA's Christopher Jones, the Director for Solar System Exploration, about the hair raising return to earth of the astronauts left aboard the International Space Station after the Columbia disaster.

WAMU - Tech Tuesday – Musings on mobile phone technology

I’m a little behind on my podcast listening, but I caught one just this weekend, The Kojo Nnamdi Show, Tech Tuesday, is a technology review radio show, which is recorded and available for the public as a podcast or a web download. Often, his shows depict the social aspects of technology and how society shapes technology.

A typical Tech Tuesday always includes the political or social implications of any new innovation, and explores the unexpected ways in which change creeps (or steam rolls) into our lives.

This particular show, from 5/22, had a few guests on the program, one gentleman from India and his efforts to bring internet to the public in less than metro areas of India, via wireless internet kiosks (not your typical internet access) for the farmer to provide agricultural product pricing, access to government services, for example… A second man talked about his company’s efforts in Cambodia, to bring a higher class of work to people there, via simple data entry jobs, since the work can be outsourced practically anywhere now…

This piece should remind us that our view of the “internet” resource isn’t necessarily the only one. Even mobile phone technology can be deployed differently in the 3rd world and allow different types of “applications” to be deployed. As an example, forget the “near” 100% coverage we have here in the U.S., think instead about coverage that might be “good enough” – and coupled with lower infrastructure costs as technology has improved, and you have a fixed-wireless phone system that doesn’t rely on mobility so much, but does indeed provide basic telephone service to a rural area, since to provide “real” fixed telephone service, with fiber, copper wires, and traditional telco switches is just too costly, indeed it’s unreasonable to consider in this environment.

Myself, I’m reminded about a deployment of SMS related technology I did for my last company. The scene: an African tribal herdsman. The problem: Moving his herd of cattle from one place to another. Why? Because of hoof and mouth disease, all cattle movement is strictly controlled by the government. The herdsman has to go to a government office, fill out some paperwork, come back the next day for his permit to go from point A to point B with his cattle.

These native African herdsmen are fiercely independent, often they’d rather distrust the government, but the hoof and mouth disease problem is endemic in parts of Africa and the situation does need to be improved upon.

The solution? My company worked with one of the local mobile phone companies to deploy an SMS based forms system that interconnected the farmer with the government. The technology was off the shelf web servers, so that “SMS applications” could be deployed with simple HTML tags in the basic web pages of a web app that already existed. What we added was a network based browser that rendered this HTML, on one side, and interfaced to the mobile provider’s SMS gateways. The special HTML tags identified specifically the text that was meaningful in the SMS messages, whereas the remaining text would be worthwhile to the typical computer screen.

So, how did this all work? Like this…

• The farmer decides he wants to move his herd. He knows where they are currently and he knows where he wants to go…
• He pulls out his mobile phone (and they do have and use them there) and sends a text msg to a specific number, for the government’s form for cattle movement.
• In response, he receives a “fill-in the blanks” msg, which he replies to, which allows him to fill-in the info that the government needs: name, number of cattle, that sort of thing. He sends it back, and receives a separate SMS msg, with an authorization code.
• The tribesman begins moving his herd.
• He comes to a government checkpoint, shows his SMS authorization code on his phone to the guard at the checkpoint, the guard sends the code number to the app on his own phone, and now the herdsman can proceed to the next checkpoint.
• Continuing on his journey, the herdsman repeats the checkpoint process with each guard he has to proceed through.
• Arriving at this destination, the herdsman sends his own authorization code back, just as the guards have been doing at each checkpoint, which closes out the herdsman’s cattle movement

So, the government gets to monitor herd movement within their country, the herdsman didn’t have to go to any government office, he simply used a tool he already had (his mobile phone). Even the guards didn’t have any paperwork to fill-out and submit. Everyone makes out for the better.

The interesting thing is this was deployed about 10 years ago, with existing SMS technology. Today, people might be thinking about web browsers in the phones, and a traditional web app or a mobilized web app, but the point is – for this service, we used an existing web app, modified HTML slightly, and inserted our network server, which

• rendered the pages, as if it were a user,
• extracted the special SMS tags and pertinent textual data,
• pushed this data onto the SMS gateway,
• upon response from the gateway, the text from the herdsman is formatted
• the HTML response is sent back to the application

No “special” phones or WAP browsers, just plain ole text msging.

Now don’t ask me about how the herdsman would charge his phone, while I suspect he had a solar charger, I never did find that out for sure.

New "terms" in the telephony business

I can't remember where I read this, but now that VoIP is a pretty common technology offering and that more and more of the common man is aware of what it is and what it does, it's fair that new terms are coming to the forefront...

• "Fuzzing" is essentially a denial-of-service attack against a VoIP system.
  
• "Footprinting" is using a search engine to find things like extension listings on the open Internet.
  
• "SIP Enumeration" means probing ports on a network to find one that isn't tightly locked down.

Nothing really new here as far as content, these security issues have been discussed before, what's new is the "catchy" terms themselves.

Railroads, Watches, and Sears

Catching the listener feedback for Technorama show 170, timezones and watches, well – it made me think about Richard Sears, who founded, with Alvah Roebuck, the whole Sears, Roebuck & Company mail order catalog industry.

Richard Sears was a station agent for the Railroad that ran through North Redwood, MN, not far from where I grew up. In the 1880’s, when he was in his 20’s, he was intrigued with the idea of products manufactured in one part of the country and sold (and delivered) to people in another part of the country. After all, his job as a station agent was somewhat in a value chain similar to this, in that farmers brought their grain to the railroad (no elevator companies existed right next to the railroad at that time; the grainery elevator's eventual purpose was to “cache” the grain for bulk transport at a later time). Among other things, Sears helped to get that grain shipped by rail to the mill, where it was processed into other grain products, like flour and cereals.

Many give him credit for observing other products being shipped via rail, through his station, and him getting the idea that if people could look at a product on a piece of paper, order it, have it delivered to them, well then such a company could revolutionize commerce. While this is somewhat true in hindsight, my father, who also was a small businessman in Minnesota, often talked about stories his grandmother had talked about when Richard Sears was doing his “thing” a few miles to the north of where I grew up.

Farmers had to get their harvested grain to the railroad, where someone loaded it onto a railroad car, and off it went. Railroads ran on a schedule, farmers ran by the sun, and as this was before cars/trucks; grain arrived via horse drawn cart. Sears had seen companies that were trying to sell pocket watches to the stores along the railway line, but the problem he was trying to solve was making sure the farmers got their grain to the railroad station on time. These watches were the answer, but he couldn’t afford any inventory, no money… so he got this idea of putting pictures of watches, along with a marked up price, in a loose leaf sort of book, which he planned to show to the farmers when they came to the station.

About this same time, a wholesaler had shipped an un-ordered consignment of pocket watches to a local retailer. This was a common practice at the time; wholesalers would then “offer” to sell the goods to a local retailer at a lower price, rather than have the goods shipped back. In this particular case, the retailer refused the entire consignment of pocket watches and Sears stepped in, offering to sell the watches for the wholesaler, but without having to pay for the consignment up-front.

Since he was a railroad station agent and when all the watches were sold, the farmers would look at his pictures of watches, trust him with taking an order, give him the money for the pocket watch, which he, in turn, used to purchase the watches, which were delivered by the railroad to him, and he delivered to the farmer.

He pocketed a profit of about $5,000 (good money at the time) from this consignment business and had these “orders” for more. Eventually, he moved to Minneapolis to start his company, which initially was putting advertisements in farm publications and ultimately developed a standalone publication, the Sears, Roebuck & Company catalog itself.

During this time, merchandising transactions in the United States were very risky (think unscrupulous sellers trying to fleece prospective buyers, ala the eBay issue of today). Bartering was the normal transaction and banks were just starting to come to rural parts of the country to handle larger money transaction exchanges (as escrow services do today).

I think that because of his railroad association, the “Eureka moment” of acting as the middle man between the watch maker and the farmer, and solving a common problem between the railroad and the farmer, this was the impetus for the mail order business becoming launched, indeed almost all commerce where money changes hands first, and goods later. The “deferred transaction” in commerce, where there is a time delay between money and merchandise changing hands, I believe started with Sears. (Of course, the refused consignment and his success at selling those pocket watches first, helped greatly because it gave him a financial "seed".) I have never heard of an earlier example of the deferred transaction model, and I have looked. As you probably know, Sears, Roebuck & Company eventually sold just about everything, including houses.

The famous Sears guarantee and a Cash-On-Delivery option helped to sway those who might be suspicious of unscrupulous merchants. Reputation still counts, after all… Indeed, Sears hired Roebuck at the very beginning in order to repair watches (so the guarantee could be met). Roebuck, of course, later became one of the company founders.

And all this from watches, being on-time, and the railroad.