Inferring social networks automatically - personal sensors

Original Article

The Video

Social-networking sites such as Facebook require users to find and confirm connections with other people. But what if your cell phone could automatically identify the people you know, and even sort them into categories?

If that capability arrives, it will be thanks to reality mining, a field that Tanzee­m Choudhury pioneered as a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab. Working at Intel after graduation, she created a pager-size sensor pack--loaded with software plus microphones, accelerometers, and other data-gatherin­g devices--to collect and analyze data about human interactions and activity. For instance, by processing verbal utterances, she can identify the most influential people in a social network.

Now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth, Choudhury is conducting experiments with the sensor-laden iPhone. Within a few years, she says, simple versions of her software could be available for cell phones. --Kate Greene

Microsoft site makes digital photos into panoramas

http://www.photosynth.com

SEATTLE - Digital cameras have liberated awe-struck travelers and proud parents from worrying about the price of film processing. But showing off those megapixels of memories is still reminiscent of tedious living room slideshows _ and perhaps now worse, because instead of one blurry photo of the Eiffel Tower or the high school musical, there might be 50.

Most digital photo-sharing sites require viewers to click from an album to a bite-sized thumbnail of a picture, and then again to a large image, then sit through a slideshow of snapshots one by one. Microsoft Corp.'s newest Web tool, Photosynth, is designed to give viewers a much zippier way to take in the sights of Paris or an act of ‘HMS Pinafore.’

Here's how it works: After a quick software download, the photographer selects a collection of related images from her hard drive. The software crunches the files using the local computer's processing power, looking for pixels that are the same in each photo. Then, Photosynth stitches together the images into a panoramic scene.

There is an old-school analog to this: taped-together photo prints. But online the result is part photo gallery, part movie. One photo is shown clearly at a time; adjacent images appear faded, and others less closely related to the photo in focus are indicated with a ghostly scatter of pixels. Viewers can zoom in and out, and pan left and right, through the scene created by overlapping many different views of the same place or object.

The software, which works only on Windows PCs, latches on to similarities and ignores differences, so photos taken in the same room but at different times of day with different inhabitants can still match up.

Microsoft first opened Photosynth to employees and partners including the National Geographic Society, so the site already has many ‘synths’ on file. (Those ‘synths’ are all given numeric ‘synthy’ scores, indicating how many of the photos overlapped in a way the program could detect.)

One synth, from a National Geographic photographer, combines hundreds of images of Stonehenge; another, submitted by a Microsoft employee, lets the viewer follow a climber on a harrowing ascent of a rock face.

Synths can be embedded like videos into other sites, including blogs and eBay auction listings.

Photosynth, which was due to launch late Wednesday, doesn't yet allow more than one person to add photos to a ‘synth,’ which means strangers can't easily pool photos of a certain place or event, as is commonly done using tags on sites like Yahoo Inc.'s Flickr.

But Microsoft's David Gedye, manager for the Live Labs group that cooked up Photosynth, said eventually the program should allow not only small-scale collaborations but also global photo contributions. Those could be fed into Microsoft's mapping technology to fill in gaps where satellite images aren't available.

Apple, Amazon cloud snafus leave Microsoft sitting pretty

Original Article

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The effect of clouds on the new city is still evolving. Of note is up-time requirements and post-failure processes:

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When MobileMe falls on its face, and The Linkup goes belly up, Microsoft gets the last laugh -- and the outlook for cloud computing gets a bit cloudier.

TAGS: cloud computing

Pity the poor road warrior who tried to find his data on The Linkup, only to get this message when he logged in: "Unfortunately The Linkup service is no longer available. Please visit box.net for your storage needs." What's worse, the sales guy was on an extended trip through North and South America. That's a real story, told by one Jacob Sherman to our sister publication Network World. "I just want my data," he said.

Of course he does. And so did the people and companies (such as Twitter) whose day-to-day operations were stymied last month by an outage of Amazon.com's S3 cloud storage service. G-mail was down for several hours last week, and then, of course, there was the embarrassing debut of Apple's MobileMe. In that case, the service was so new, and so few 3G iPhones were actually in the hands of users, that I suspect the number of people seriously inconvenienced was relatively small. But even so ...

Stuck with Office, and maybe safely so

When foul-ups like these happen, the only winner is Microsoft.

Here's what one angry user had to say: "Dear MS Outlook," Owen Schultz wrote, "I am so sorry about our breakup several years ago. I have been thinking about you a lot since then. Will you please consider taking me back? Just one more chance? I'm sorry about all the horrible things I said about you and your operating system. You were the best I ever had! MobileMe and I are finished!"

Remember, Office is still overwhelmingly popular, as measured by market share, despite noise from Google and other providers that claim to have cloud-based productivity apps that could replace the pricey suite. Over the years, there's been lots of discussion about storing data in the cloud, although it wasn't always called that. One big objection: "Suppose I can't get online?"

That used to be a pretty compelling downside, but now that bandwidth is plentiful, and a relatively cheap service connects your laptop or handheld anywhere there's cellular coverage, it's much less of a problem.

But then there’s a less tangible issue: trust.

I'm not a big fan of Microsoft software, but you know what? I don't worry about my Office data disappearing on me or inexplicably becoming unreachable. And corporate users don't have to worry (at least not too much) that there will be a widespread outage of Exchange servers.

Given the choice between Windows/Office/Exchange -- fault-filled, security-challenged, and annoying as they are -- and a cloud-based service that may or may not be there when you need it, the choice for business users is pretty darn obvious.

Sure, the variety of cloud computing that my colleagues and I have been writing about this year is an enterprise play. But the issue of trust is even more important on that level. I talk to a lot of IT execs in the course of my job, and I'm struck by how many have a serious interest in cloud computing. But as you'd expect, they are very cautious; seeing today's heavy-hitter cloud services like MobileMe, S3, and Salesforce, go down does nothing to overcome that caution.

Building trust is hard when services go offline

Salesforce.com, in many ways an early cloud provider, had some very public outages a few years ago. After a short period of denial, in which many tech and business writers (including me) happily beat on the company, Salesforce got its act together, explained what was going wrong, and why. The company quickly added a page to its public Web site, giving real-time information on the status of the service. And most important, it ironed out most of the early problems.

Apple could learn from that. Moreover, Jobs and company should know by now that launching an important data-related service before it is fully baked is foolish, arrogant, and above all contemptuous of its customers. (According to a post on the Macrumors site, MobileMe is now running about 96% of the time. Better, but hardly good enough.)

Jean-Louis Gassée, the long-time technologist and investor, likened the too-early launch to a game of chicken. "No one had enough brains and guts to risk humiliation, to raise a hand and say, 'Chief, we're not ready here, let's stop everything.' As a result, MobileMe badly crashed on launch," he wrote in his blog this week.

What a great point. It takes guts to raise your hand, but when you don't, it's the customer who suffers -- and Microsoft that wins.

A note to readers of last week's Cobol column: A number of you wrote in asking for referrals to Cobol-related jobs. I got so much mail, I couldn't answer every one. I wish I did know who's hiring these days, but I'm afraid I don't. Good luck.

(Disclosure: I hold a small number of shares in Apple and Microsoft.)

I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Reach me at bill_snyder@infoworld.com.

Posted by Bill Snyder on August 14, 2008 03:00 AM

A New View for Documents

Original Article
Browser-based technologies aim to make it easier to view documents online.

A new tool for embedding documents on Web pages is cropping up on sites as diverse as the storage service Drop.io; LabMeeting, a social network for scientists; and the Obama campaign's official blog. Launched earlier this year, the format, called iPaper, is technology from Scribd, a company that hopes to become the sort of clearinghouse for documents that YouTube is for videos. With iPaper, the company offers a browser-based system for viewing documents that retains their original formatting and can be employed by the 98 percent of Internet users who have installed Adobe Flash.

Although most Web pages are documents, they often don't display consistently from one browser to another, and it can be awkward to navigate through a large document if it's displayed as a series of connected pages on the Web. Alternatively, when individuals want to share documents with each other, they can have compatibility problems. For example, the new .docx format created by Microsoft's Office 2007 can't be accessed by many other programs, including earlier versions of Office. One traditional method to solve both of these problems has been Adobe PDFs, which preserve formatting and can be opened by most computer users.

However, Jared Friedman, chief technology officer of Scribd, sees a need for a solution to the problem that's built specifically for use through the browser. He says that browser-based versions have been built for most essential desktop programs. "In some sense, Adobe Acrobat is among the last programs to migrate online in a Web-based version," Friedman says.

Web-based software is typically stripped of some of the specialized features available in desktop versions but has added social features. IPaper is no exception. Users can convert documents, including PDFs, Word documents, and rich text files, into iPaper by uploading them to the Scribd website or to a website that supports Scribd's system. Readers can navigate documents by scrolling or flipping to a tile view, search them, and copy and paste. They can also share them, embed them on other sites, and, if the publisher chooses to allow it, download them in their original format to view offline.

FlashPaper, an earlier technology from Macromedia, inspired Scribd and iPaper, according to CEO and cofounder Trip Adler. Since Adobe didn't continue to support the product after it acquired Macromedia, Scribd decided to build its own version from scratch. The iPaper technology is built using Adobe Flash, and it streams documents to a Web page. This allows a reader to jump smoothly to page 500 of a document, for example, even if the rest of the document is still loading. Although Flash has recently become easier for search engines to index, Friedman says that streaming documents can still be a problem. Scribd supplements iPaper documents with a searchable format that crawlers can read.

Pages and pages: The iPaper viewer supports several ways of navigating a document, including scrolling, a tile-based view (above), and book mode, which shows pages two at a time. Credit: Scribd/Books iRead
Adler says that Scribd is still experimenting with business models, although the company has seen its technology adopted fairly widely. Storage companies such as Drop.io and Box use iPaper to allow their customers to view the items they have in storage without having to download them. Adler says that the Scribd site currently gets 21 million visitors a month. He notes that the company may make money through ads embedded in documents (a feature that's already available) or through buying and selling documents.

But Scribd may have more to worry about from Adobe than it thinks it does. Al Hilwa, program director for IDC's application development software research, says that Adobe has been working to fuse documents with Web presentation. He adds that the company has begun incorporating Flash into PDFs and making its various document technologies available through Acrobat.com.

Indeed, Adobe says that FlashPaper is not abandoned technology. Erik Larson, director of product management and marketing for Acrobat.com and the former product manager for FlashPaper at Macromedia, says, "FlashPaper as a product is no longer being developed, but FlashPaper as a concept is alive and well." He adds, "FlashPaper has become a set of Web services on a set of servers in the cloud."

Vyatta changes the networking game

Original Article

Got a spare server sitting around?

Nothing fancy — 512 Megs of RAM and a 1.8 GHz processor will work fine.

Now, want to turn that into a networking box? The equivalent of a Cisco or Juniper router with 1 Gbps capacity?

That’s the promise of the Vyatta 2501, shipping today at LinuxWorld. It’s almost beside the point to mention it’s all open source.

I chatted about all this last week with vice president of strategy Dave Roberts, the company’s vice president of strategy.

“The product is fundamentally the software that can be packaged, either in our own hardware or a customer’s own hardware,” he said.

In other words if you want something that looks like an expensive Cisco or Juniper box, Vyatta will sell you one. Or you can find a spare server in the closet and download it.

“A gigabit Ethernet card for a Cisco router costs $5,000. A gagabit Ethernet card for Vyatta costs $50 and you can buy it at Fry’s. Or call the Geek Squad. That’s a huge difference in the economics.

“They both perform the same way. In some ways the open solutions perform better. The same or better performance for one-quarter the cost.”

This has enormous implications for the corporate networking space, but perhaps even bigger implications in public networking, where telcos insist they can’t keep up with demand.

“We have many customers who are Tier II and Tier III hosting providers,” ISPs that need big connections to the Internet. Vyatta also lets you aggregate local traffic on ordinary servers, great if you can get control of some local customers.

So who is calling, I asked. Everyone, Roberts said. But especially companies that want to build their own server clouds.

“We’re getting a lot of interest from people with cloud environments. They can use it in ways they can’t use a physical unit.”

How so? “Vyatta is software. It all becomes about things like virtualization and the ability to reconfigure, to reprovision. The fact you’ve got network infrastructure that’s fungible is really interesting to folks who build out large scale.”

As much as people may rail about Microsoft, it’s the telcos and their high-priced suppliers who are the real bottleneck in terms of improved computing.

Vyatta has just blown them out of the water.

A Cool Fuel Cell

Original Article

A novel low-temperature electrolyte could make solid-oxide fuel cells more practical.

A new electrolyte for solid-oxide fuel cells, made by researchers in Spain, operates at temperatures hundreds of degrees lower than those of conventional electrolytes, which could help make such fuel cells more practical.

Jacobo Santamaria, of the applied-physics department at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, in Spain, and his colleagues have modified a yttria-stabilized zirconia electrolyte, a common type of electrolyte in solid-oxide fuel cells, so that it works at just above room temperature. Ordinarily, such electrolytes require temperatures of more than 700 °C. Combined with improvements to the fuel-cell electrodes, this could lower the temperature at which these fuel cells operate.

Solid-oxide fuel cells are promising for next-generation power plants because they are more efficient than conventional generators, such as steam turbines, and they can use a greater variety of fuels than other fuel cells. They can generate electricity with gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and hydrogen, among other fuels. But the high temperatures required for efficient operation make solid-oxide fuel cells expensive and limit their applications. The low-temperature electrolyte reported by the Spanish researchers could be a "tremendous improvement" for solid-oxide fuel cells, says Eric Wachsman, director of the Florida Institute for Sustainable Energy, at the University of Florida.

In a solid-oxide fuel cell, oxygen is fed into one electrode, and fuel is fed into the other. The electrolyte allows oxygen ions to migrate from one electrode to the other, where they combine with the fuel; in the simplest case, in which hydrogen is the fuel, this produces water and releases electrons. The electrolyte prevents the electrons from traveling directly back to the oxygen side of the fuel cell, forcing them instead to travel through an external circuit, generating electricity. Via this circuitous route, they eventually find their way to the oxygen electrode, where they combine with oxygen gas to form oxygen ions, perpetuating the cycle.

The electrolyte--which is a solid material--typically only conducts ions at high temperatures. Santamaria, drawing on earlier work by other researchers, found that the ionic conductivity at low temperatures could be greatly improved by combining layers of the standard electrolyte materials with 10-nanometer-thick layers of strontium titanate. He found that, because of the differences in the crystal structures of the materials, a large number of oxygen vacancies--places within the crystalline structures of the materials that would ordinarily host an oxygen atom--formed where these two materials meet. These vacancies form pathways that allow the oxygen ions to move through the material, improving the conductivity of the materials at room temperature by a factor of 100 million.

The material is still some way from being incorporated into commercial fuel cells. For one thing, the large improvement in ionic conductivity will require further verification, Wachsman says, especially in light of the difficulty of measuring the performance of extremely thin materials. Second, the direction of the improved conductivity--along the plane of the material rather than perpendicular to it--will require a redesign of today's fuel cells. What's more, the limiting factor for the temperature in fuel cells now is the electrode materials. Before room temperature solid-oxide fuel cells are possible, these will also need to be improved.

Yet if initial results are confirmed by future research, the new materials will represent a significant advance. Ivan Schuller, a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, says that this represents a major change in the performance of electrolytes. He adds, "It will surely motivate much new work by others."

Discovery uses solar power 24/7

Original Article

In what is being hailed as a major breakthrough in solar energy, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a way to use the sun’s abundant, non-polluting rays as a power source even when the sun isn’t shining.

“What we’re doing allows you to use (solar panels) 24/7, because you can use the fuel that they generate any time you want,” said Daniel Nocera, MIT’s Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and one of two men behind the discovery.

As the world’s demand for energy has grown, scientists have long looked toward the sun as a source of free, clean power.

Yesterday, Nocera and MIT postdoctoral fellow Matthew Kanan unveiled a low-cost, highly efficient way to use the sun’s energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The technology then recombines the oxygen and hydrogen inside a fuel cell to create carbon-free electricity, which may be used, even after dark, to heat or power a home.

“This is a major discovery with enormous implications,” said energy expert James Barber of Imperial College London.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan’s discovery is a new catalyst that produces oxygen from water; another catalyst produces hydrogen.

The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water.

When electricity runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen from water, the system can duplicate the water-splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

“It’s simple, easy to implement and cheap,” Nocera said.

He predicted that it could be household technology in 10 years.