Where 2.0 Preview - DARPA's TIGR Project Helps Platoons Stay Alive

A modern soldier depends as much on good intel as a reliable rifle. Gone are the days when decision-making happened at the highest levels of command and the non-coms just did what they were told. In a modern world of insurgencies and roadside bombs, the soldier on the ground needs to have as much data as they can, as quickly as they can. And when DARPA decided to try and solve the problem, their solution was TIGR, the Tactical Ground Reporting System. Sam Earp, President of Multisensor Science, works as a consultant to DARPA and Mari Maeda is the program manager at DARPA. Both will be speaking about TIGR at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in May.

James Turner: Why don't you start by describing the problem that soldiers on the ground face today and how TIGR tries to help?

Mari Maeda: Okay. Well, just as you described, the problem is that in the past, the military has focused on feeding the information up the chain-of-command. The decision-makers are the colonels and generals, and so the soldiers on the ground are just collecting information so they can make big decisions. Now in Afghanistan and Iraq, really it's the patrol leaders, soldiers on the ground, lower echelon soldiers, captains, lieutenants who need to make decisions. Are they going to take this route or the other route? Should they knock on this door or that door? Has this person ever been seen before or cited before? Does he have useful information? All of those day-to-day decisions are being made at the lowest echelon and we really needed a tool to serve those low-level soldiers. And that's why TIGR was created.

JT: Can you describe a little bit about exactly what TIGR gives to the platoon level?

MM: Yes. TIGR has a map-based user interface. And so instead of having a folder full of reports telling you what happened here and who they met with, here's a patrol debrief, instead of having Word files or Power Point slides, TIGR's a map-based application where you can go and do searches by defining an area. It could be a rectangle, a circle, a polygon or a route even. And it'll pull back all of the events and people and places, information along that route or in that region. And it ranges from census collection that was done in the location, names of all of the schools, pictures of schools, videos of an attack that might've taken place. Very rich multimedia information will be returned to you for the area that you defined.

And so instead of just writing a patrol report that says this happened and hoping someone might read it, you're just really looking for geospatially relevant information for the mission at hand. If you're going to take this route and you're not familiar with this route that you're thinking of taking, you can look and see how many attacks have taken place; what kind of attacks have taken place; who's been there before. So all of that information is at your fingertips. Sam, do you have anything to add to that?

(continue reading)

Where 2.0 Preview - Building the SENSEable City

Much of the information we have about how cities work (or don't) comes through direct, intentional observation and study--but could we learn as much or more by mining the data that citizens generate in their day-to-day lives, through cell phone traffic and internet usage? That's one of the questions that Andrea Vaccari, a research associate at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, is trying to answer. Andrea will be speaking on the research that the SENSEable City Project is doing at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in May.

James Turner: So why don't you start a little bit by talking about what the charter of the SENSEable City Lab is?

Andrea Vaccari: Sure. The SENSEable City Lab is a recent initiative; a new initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which focuses on studying how digital technologies are evolutionizing the way we live in cities. And, therefore, how we can leverage these technologies; how we can make use of it through understanding how cities are using it; how we can design better cities. And then we can create cities that are more sustainable, more livable and automatically more efficient.

JT: A lot of data that governments gather about cities -- the example I think of is the little things they put across the roads to find out traffic going over a road, but that's almost like just a point source data. Can you compare that to the kind of data that you're able to extract through the records you can get access to?

AV: Sure. The problem with past data in all aspects of the urban planning and social studies is that the data is usually punctual, so it refers to very specific points in space and also in time. And that's because the methods that were used to gather this information were very expensive. They required either to deploy infrastructures or to employ people to count manually cars, people, vehicles. And, therefore, it was impossible to have a real-time flow of information. What we are trying to do is to leverage the pervasive systems that enhance our cities today. And I'm referring to telecommunication networks, wireless networks, transportation systems or any other sort of digital system that interacts on a daily basis -- on a real-time basis -- with the citizens. What happens is that with these systems, interactions between the user and the system creates logs of their activity. And these logs can be used to understand the urban dynamics, to understand how people move in living cities and how cities themselves evolve in time.

JT: Now, you showed me some of the examples of the datasets that you've been playing with, and it seems like largely it's cell phone data and wifi data and then secondarily, things that are more voluntary like Flickr uploads.

AV: Yes.

JT: Wifi data you can pretty much get to a hotspot. And as Google has demonstrated with cell phone data, you can get fairly good positioning. But what kind of resolution do you get out of say cell phone data?

AV: Sure. The resolutions that we get for the cell phone is aggregated at the antenna level. So we don't get information about the individuals because we strongly respect privacy. And what we basically know is how many calls, how many text messages, how much traffic is served by each antenna in a city. And, of course, we know the position of the antenna and we can estimate the coverage of these antennas. So we can fairly understand what are the dynamics going on in the area of coverage. But, again, we don't get information about individuals.

(continue reading)

Where 2.0 Preview - Tyler Bell on Yahoo's Open Location Project

Location can be a vague concept to pin down. To a surveyor, location means latitude and longitude accurate to a few millimeters, while to a cab driver, a street address would be much more useful. If you're German, I can tell you that I live in the United States. To a Californian, I live in New Hampshire. And to someone from Manchester, I live in Derry. Unfortunately, the way that location is currently stored and presented online is both non-uniform and frequently at a level of precision inappropriate for the end-user. That's part of what Open Location is trying to fix. Tyler Bell, who took his doctorate from Oxford to Yahoo, is currently the product lead for the Yahoo Geo Technology Group. At O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference, he'll be discussing Open Location.

James Turner: So first off, can you describe what the Geo Technologies Group does?

Tyler Bell: The Geo Technologies Group at Yahoo oversees all technologies that relate to geography and geographic information. So it's largely self-evident. But this is what I mean by that: it's really we own and oversee the maps and mapping technologies. So the visualizations and placements of geographically informed data. We also own user location technologies. So here, we're dealing with different methods of detecting user location, managing user location, and ensuring that users receive geo-relevant results whenever they log onto Yahoo or use a Yahoo service. And then lastly, we have something which is slightly more esoteric. It's called the Geoinformatics Group. And that's the organization which uses geography to inform data. And we do this without ever showing a map. So it's really how we add value and power to information wholly based upon where things are and where our users are.

JT: That's like returning relevant search information to what you know about the user's location.

TB: That's correct. That's the end product of search groups consuming the geo technologies services on the back-end. But what we also need to do is actually organize the geographic information. So instead of searches, they're the specialists at Yahoo about matching user intent to the results that are returned; it's our job on the Geoinformatics Group, for example, to say that when a user queries against Springfield or they're searching for Springfield, which of the countless Springfields in the United States, in the world do you mean? So we need to be able to recognize that this is a place. We need to identify all of the places of a particular place name. And then we need to be able to do a so-called geo-geo disambiguation to ensure that when you mean Springfield, when you mean Campbell, when you give us a city name, which is otherwise nonspecific, we are very likely to return the most direct and accurate results.

(continue reading)

Where 2.0 Preview - Pelago's Jeff Holden on Creating Stories Out of Your Life

Tools like Twitter and Facebook have let people share in near real-time what they are doing. Now with a new generation of location-aware mobile devices, you can tell your friends or the entire world where you're doing it. Jeff Holden's company, Pelago, is one of many trying to come up with a killer application that blends location, images, text, and social networking to create a new kind of group awareness. Before starting Pelago, Jeff had a long career as the Senior Vice President of Consumer Websites for Amazon and before that, the Director of Supply Chain Optimization Systems. He'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference on "Footstreams: Clickstreams for the Physical World."

James Turner: Pelago's first product is Whrrl. Can you start by describing what Whrrl is and what the experience to date has been?

Jeff Holden: Yeah. Sure. So Whrrl actually, there's a little complexity there because we just launched Whrrl V. 2.0, which is the prize we're focused on. And Whrrl V. 2.0 is a real-time storytelling product for people's daily lives.

JT: When you say storytelling, I've seen a lot of people talk about storytelling with these new social network things. What concretely does that mean to you?

JH: The most important aspect of what we mean by that is the organization of the content as the story unit. So the unit of content inside Whrrl is the story. And a story for us is something that has a beginning and an end. It can have multiple people involved in the story who can all share and contribute to a single story together. It has a location associated with it. And then people basically inject into those containers, those story containers, photos and text. As they're doing that, that's actually being shared out to any number of friends that they choose. And those friends can then jump in and actually comment on the story which then becomes part of the story as well. And so that's what we mean by it is we're focused on this -- I think some people use that term generically. We're using it very specifically to refer to the core unit of content in Whrrl.

JT: From a practical standpoint, apart from people who are chronic Twitterers and would just use it every moment of their life, what would you see a typical story being?

JH: What we're seeing right now is a lot of the families are using the product to share stories. And, in fact, just this morning Alison Sweeney, she's the host of the Biggest Loser and she was on Days of Our Lives for years. She's a really famous soap opera actress. She just started using Whrrl today. And she visited the set of Days of Our Lives with her family. And so it's actually entitled, "Family Visits Days." And we feature that story because it's such a cool -- and she did it publically. And it's a really cute story about her kids and the visit with the cast of Days of Our Lives. So we're seeing a lot of that kind of thing. We're seeing people at a more general level are viewing kind of very, very funny things like Melissa Pierce, who's a really very successful video blogger and just general blogger; she's done a number of very, very funny stories. She did one called "Lonely Bear" about this gummy bear lost in the world. And through a sequence of photos and text updates, she told the story of Lonely Bear and kind of left it dangling and was going to have a follow-up segment. And is actually going to be collaborating with people to build the next story.

So people are using it in different ways. And it's really kind of unleashing a lot of creativity.

(continue reading)

Where 2.0 Preview: Eric Gunderson of Development Seed on the Promise of Open Data

When we think about how government uses geographic information, we tend to think about USGS maps or census data, very centralized and preplanned projects meant to produce a very specific set of products. But Development Seed believes that there is a lot more that could be done if these types of data could be mashed up easily with each other as well as with alternate sources such as social networks. Eric Gunderson, President of Development Seed, will be speaking at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in June, and he recently took some time to speak to us about the potential benefits that open access to government data brings.

James Turner: Can you start by talking a bit about Development Seed and how you came to be involved with it?

EG: We're a strategy organization in Washington, D.C., and what sets us apart from a lot of other strategy organizations in town is the fact that we do a lot of the building. And we build [it] all on open source tools. We particularly work with international development organizations, and the knowledge silos there are pretty fierce. For the last couple of years, we've worked on a lot of projects where you have really good data and bad technology's slowing it down. So we work on a host of projects whether they're internal internets or external mapping sites.

JT: If we focus, first of all, on our government, what are the problems with how the government manages data today?

EG: Right. Well, first, a lot of times it's not even released. I mean people aren't putting it out there in any kind of way where we can access it. But even when it is, for example, like a mandate by an agency to report on food prices or a certain statistic, sometimes it's baked into PDFs. And it's put out in a way that you can't really do much with it, you know, interact with it, parse it out, discover what's there. So that said, that's starting to change. I mean there's been some folks that are saying, "Wait a minute. We've already collected this data, and if we spend a little extra time packaging it, we can put it out there. And it will essentially have a whole new lifecycle and start adding value back to the community--the tax payers that paid for it."

(continue reading)

Marc Bohlen: Finding the Intersection of Art and Technology

Artist-Engineer Marc Bohlen uses some fairly advanced technology to express his artistic visions. It's not often you find an artist with a degree from CMU in robotics, or an engineer with an Masters in Art History. Bohlen's projects explore how people and technology interact, ranging from the bickering robots Amy and Klara, to his latest project, the Glass Bottom Float. In advance of his appearance at the Emerging Technology Conference in March, Bohlen talked to us about how he approaches art, and just what art is.

James Turner: This is James Turner for O'Reily Media. I am speaking today with Marc Bohlen, who seems to collect degrees like some people collect comic books. He has a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado, a Masters in Art History from the University of Zürich, a Masters in Robotics from CMU, and a MFA, also from CMU. He's been a visiting professor in universities from Zürich to California. His work explores the boundaries between Machine Intelligence, technology, art and society. He will be speaking at O'Reily's Emerging Technology Conference in March. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

Marc Bohlen: My pleasure.

JT: So let me begin by asking: do you consider yourself an artist, an engineer, a social commentator or a melange of all of them?

MB: A melange of all of them, but I think artist-engineer is quite precise actually.

JT: What led you to that fusion of art and technology?

MB: Well, I was working in Art History, on Marcel Duchan and Joseph Beuys at the time, trying to figure out how the materials that they used in their work generated meaning. So the traditional art historian methodology just didn't work anymore. I was forced to start to look into domains of knowledge that were not part of artist textbooks or repertoire. So I wandered off into engineering, trying to solve those problems, and in the process of doing that I jumped into this field which, at the time of the late 80's and early 90's, started to formulate itself as an art technology complex, art technology endeavors, and I never looked back since then.

(continue reading)

ETech Preview: On The Front Lines of the Next Pandemic

With all of the stress and anxiety that humanity deals with on a daily basis--confronting the dangers of global warming, the perils of a financial system in meltdown and the ever-present threat of terrorism--the fact that there's yet another danger lurking out there ready to destroy mankind: the threat of a global pandemic, may be easy to forget. But although you and I may have driven thoughts of Ebola and the like from our minds, Dr. Nathan Wolfe worries about them every day. Dr. Wolfe founded and directs the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative which monitors the transfer of new diseases from animals to humans.

He received his Bachelor's degree at Stanford in 1993 and his Doctorate in Immunology and Infectious Diseases from Harvard in 1998. Dr. Wolfe was awarded the National Institute of Health International Research Scientist Development Award in 1999 and a prestigious NIH Directors Pioneer Award in 2005. He'll be speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in March. His session is entitled, "Viral Forecasting." Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Nathan Wolfe: My pleasure.

James Turner: So why don't we start by talking about the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative. How is it different from the work that the CDC and the WHO and similar organizations do monitoring disease spread?

NW: Well, what we do is we actually focus on the interface between humans and animal populations. When we looked back and investigated the ways in which disease got started, the ways that pandemics really originated, what we found is that really the vast majority of these things are animal diseases. So rather than monitoring for illness, at which point it could potentially be too late, we've taken it one step backward. We actually focus on people who have high levels of contact with animals. And we set up large groups of these individuals and monitor the diseases that they have, as well as the diseases in the animal population. So the idea is to be able to catch these things a little bit earlier.

JT: The last disease that really made a big splash with the media was Ebola, earlier in this decade. But we really haven't heard much recently. Have things calmed down as far as new and novel diseases? Or are we just hearing less about outbreaks these days?

NW: Well, I mean I think we've had really substantive important pandemics. If you take a look at SARS, for example. SARS really only infected about 1,200 individuals, but its impact was tremendous. It was billions of dollars of economic impact all throughout the world. Even in a place like Singapore, where you had a small number of cases, you had an incredibly substantive financial impact. And then, of course, right now we have H5N1 which is -- they call it the bird flu. Actually, most influenzas are bird influenzas, so it's a little bit of a misnomer. But H5N1 is a virus which is spreading around the world in birds. And if it does make a transition into humans, which some bird flu will over the next 20 to 30 years, it could be incredibly devastating. So I think that these are kind of constant and present dangers. They're things that are increasing over time simply because of the way that we're connected as a human population.

(continue reading)

ETech Preview: Science Commons Wants Data to Be Free

John Wilbanks has a passion for lowering the barrier between scientists who want to share information. A graduate of Tulane University, Mr. Wilbanks started his career working as a legislative aide, before moving on to pursue work in bioinformatics, which included the founding of Incellico, a company which built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research and development. Mr. Wilbanks now serves as the Vice President of Science at Creative Commons, and runs the Science Commons project. He will be speaking at The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in March, on the challenges and accomplishments of Science Commons, and he's joining us today to talk a bit about it. Good day.

John Wilbanks: Hi, James.

JT: So science is supposed to be a discipline where knowledge is shared openly, so that ideas can be tested and confirmed or rejected. What gets in the way of that process?

This photograph is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license by Fred Benenson

JW: Well, most of the systems that scientists have evolved to do that: sharing, confirmation and rejecting, evolved before we had the network. And they're very stable systems, unlike a lot of the systems that we have online now, like Facebook. For science to get on the Internet, it has to really disrupt a lot of existing systems. Facebook didn't have to disrupt an existing physical Facebook model. And the scientific and scholarly communication model is locked up by a lot of interlocking controls. One of them is the law. The copyright systems that we have tend to lock up the facts inside scientific papers and databases, which prevents a lot of the movement of scientific information that we take for granted with cultural information.

Frequently, contracts get layered on top of those copyright licenses, which prevent things like indexing and hyperlinking of scholarly articles. There's also a lot of incentive problems. Scientists and scholars tend to have an incentive to write very formally. And the Internet, blogging, email, these are all very informal modalities of communication.

(continue reading)

ETech Preview: Creating Biological Legos

If you've gotten tired of hacking firewalls or cloud computing, maybe it's time to try your hand with DNA. That's what Reshma Shetty is doing with her Doctorate in Biological Engineering from MIT. Apart from her crowning achievement of getting bacteria to smell like mint and bananas, she's also active in the developing field of synthetic biology and has recently helped found a company called Gingko BioWorks which is developing enabling technologies to allow for rapid prototyping of biological systems. She will be giving a talk entitled Real Hackers Program DNA at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, March 9-12, in San Jose, California. And she's joining us here today. Thank you for taking the time.

RESHMA SHETTY: No problem. Happy to be here.

JAMES TURNER: So first of all, how do you make bacteria smell nice, and why? I get an image of a commercial, "Mary may have necrotizing fasciitis, but at least her hospital room smells minty fresh."

RS: Well, the original inspiration for the project was the fact that for anybody who works in a lab, who works with E. coli, when you grow cultures of the stuff, it just smells really bad. It smells really stinky, basically. And so our thought was, "Hey, why don't we reengineer the smell of E. coli? It'll make the lab smell minty fresh, and it's also a fun project that gets people, who maybe aren't normally excited about biology, interested in it because it's a very tangible thing. I can smell the change I made to this bacteria."

JT: So what was the actual process involved?

RS: So the process was, you basically take a gene, we took a gene from the petunia plant, which normally provides an odor to the flower, and you place that gene into the E. coli cell. And by supplying the cell with an appropriate precursor, you make this minty smell as a result. So it's fairly straightforward.

JT: Your degree, biological engineering, is a new one to me. How is it different from biochemistry or microbiology or genomics or any of the other traditional biotech degrees?

RS: Well, biology and biochemistry, and so on, are concerned with studying the natural world. So I'm going to go out and figure out how the natural world works. Biological engineering, instead, is really all about saying, "Hey, we have this natural world around us. Biology is, in some sense, a new technology through which we can build new engineered biological systems." Right? So the idea is, what's the difference between physics and electrical engineering? Electrical engineers want to go build. So in biological engineering, we're interested in going and building stuff, too. But using biology, rather than physics, as the underlying science of it.

(continue reading)

ETech Preview: Inside Factory China, An Interview with Andrew Huang

China has become the production workhorse of the consumer electronics industry. Almost anything you pick up at a Best Buy first breathed life across the Pacific Ocean. But what is it like to shepherd a product through the design and production process? Andrew "bunnie" Huang has done just that with the Chumby, a new internet appliance. He'll be speaking about the experience at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. In an exclusive interview with Radar, he talks about the logistical and moral issues involved with manufacturing in China, as well as his take on the consumer's right to hack the hardware they purchase.

JAMES TURNER: Andrew "bunnie" Huang is the Vice President of Hardware Engineering and Founder of Chumby Industries. He's pretty much the consummate hardware geek who has used his doctorate from MIT in electrical engineering to do everything from designing opto-electronics to hacking the Xbox. The Chumby, an internet appliance that delivers a cornucopia of information, is his latest endeavor. And he'll be talking about the process of getting it manufactured in China at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in March. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

ANDREW HUANG: No problem.

JT: So I have to start by asking, were you one of those kids who took everything apart in your house?

AH: Oh, yeah. Yeah. My parents had a problem with that. There was lots of stuff taken apart. Not everything got back together again. Most things did. But there's definitely a few things that got hidden underneath the couch for a few days hoping my parents wouldn't notice, while I tried to find the last few screws and whatnot. They eventually figured out that the best way to try and contain me was to just give me other things to play with. So I got a computer and they got one of those 201 kits from Radio Shack for me to play with, so I would stop taking apart all of their alarm clocks and stuff.

JT: You know, you can't get those kits at Radio Shack anymore. It's very disappointing.

AH: I know. That is really sad. I mean those were really good kits. I mean I really learned a lot from the one that I had, and a couple other ones that were donated to me through friends or my friends' parents also were really engaging.

JT: So you used to spend a lot of your time deconstructing the security infrastructure that manufacturers put in place. What in particular drives you in that direction?

AH: The deconstruction of security infrastructure?

JT: Yeah.

AH: I mean a lot of it is just -- it's more like if you just put a Rubik's Cube in front of me, I'll play with it. It's kind of the same thing. A lot of it comes from the fact that I've actually been taking apart consumer electronic devices for decades now. And I always look at the construction and how it's built to learn something from it, because that's basically what I read to figure out the latest techniques for constructioning and costing and part selection.

And when I start seeing someone mentioning security features that have some relevance to the hardware level, I start poking at it some more just because it's really interesting and you can learn something from it.

(continue reading)

Recent Posts

• ETech Preview: Why LCD is the Cool New Technology All Over Again on February 11, 2009
• ETech Preview: Living the Technomadic Life on February 9, 2009