Researchers are using IBM's Roadrunner to analyze tens of thousands of genetic sequences from individuals with HIV.
(Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Physicist Tanmoy Bhattacharya and HIV researcher Bette Korber are creating an evolutionary genetic family tree based on samples taken by the international Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology consortium, in order to compare the evolutionary history of more than 10,000 sequences from more than 400 people with HIV.
If they can identify common features of the virus as it is transmitted, researchers might be able to create a vaccine that recognizes the virus before the body's immune system reacts to--and mutates--it.
What already sounds like a lot of data, however, could balloon further, hence the importance of Roadrunner. "We are at the cusp of being able to obtain more than 100,000 viral sequences from a single person," Korber said. "For this new kind data to be useful, computational advances will have to keep pace."
Roadrunner, developed by IBM for the Department of Energy (and occupying about 6,000 square feet at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico), first broke the petaflop barrier (which means it performed more than one million billion calculations per second) in May 2008. It may soon be known for helping develop a "specially designed" HIV vaccine, Bhattacharya says:
The petascale supercomputer gives us the capacity to look for similarities across whole populations of acute patients. At this scale we can begin to figure out the relationships between chronic and acute infections using statistics to determine the interconnecting branches--and it is these interconnections where a specially-designed vaccine might be most effective.
In addition to helping map the HIV genetic tree, Roadrunner has also recently simulated the Big Bang in an attempt to better understand dark matter, calculating the physics behind 64 billion proto-galaxies, each about the size of a billion of our suns. Once it crunched those numbers (all in a day's work, right?), Roadrunner's results predicted five times more dark matter than astronomers have thus far observed.
In 2007, Kia Motors America and several design firms devised a taxi that could display its destination and indicate whether a passenger was interested in splitting a fare.
(Credit: Candace Lombardi/CNET)You got a better idea on how taxis should work? New York City is all ears.
On Tuesday, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) put out a request for information on how it can improve its taxi technology.
The TLC, in conjunction with the Design Trust for Public Space, staged an elaborate display at the New York International Auto Show in 2007 of taxis with innovative ideas on sustainability and design. Now it seems that the TLC wants to ensure that the public is aware of its interest in tech beyond hybrids.
The city's contracts with service providers for its tech tools program--referred to as the Taxicab Passenger Enhancement Program, or T-PEP--expire in about two years. The TLC seems to be shopping for options on how "to enhance the technology systems in each taxicab for the benefit of passengers, drivers, and owners alike," according to the announcement.
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SAN FRANCISCO--The fact that you now can explore the ocean through Google Earth isn't going to make Google much money directly. But the move is nonetheless smart.
Google generated early-stage goodwill from being the best answer to the online search problem. But the company is large and getting larger, especially as it shows a better ability to withstand the recession than rivals, and that goodwill won't last forever.
Google showed off new ocean views at its Google Earth 5.0 launch event.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Google Earth, though, gives the company a new way to bring its brand to the world, notably with students for whom the software will help supplant atlases and encyclopedias. And in the long run, as Google Earth and Maps--either as standalone software or used through a browser--will likely become a widely used virtual window on the real world. Google will control the technology and commercialization of that portal.
Will the visibility of the ocean depths on Google Earth make money directly? Not likely. But it adds incrementally to the overall utility of the software, which in the long run keeps it relevant.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt introduces Google Earth 5.0. Click photo for a slideshow of Monday's event.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)"The near-term opportunity is in local search," for example people looking for restaurants or hotels, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps, in an interview.
Google has begun experimenting with advertisements on Google Maps and Google Earth, added Peter Birch, product manager of Google Earth, at the launch event. Since people often need to discover information about a place before going there, Google Earth and Maps could prove a lucrative endeavor. It may take years to get there, and it'll cost Google dearly in server hardware and network bandwidth, but Google has shown patience in subsidizing long-term projects.
Though Hanke wouldn't reveal the expense of Google's geographic services, some of the economics are in the company's favor. Just as Google's search engine takes advantage of innumerable information that others put on the Internet, Google Earth is a platform that houses information supplied by outsiders that Google doesn't have to pay. It's the Internet's user-generated content story, but this time it's data that can be overlaid on a map of the Earth.
And in the case of the ocean work, there are prestigious users generating high-quality content. Many ocean researchers gathered at the Google Earth 5.0 launch, and several showed there's pent-up demand for a way to conveniently display their data somewhere. And it's not just to share sea surface temperature data with fellow Ph.D.s, but also to try to educate the public.
Ken Peterson, communications director for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, was excited about his layer in Google Earth that shows the location of various types of fish--along with ratings for people about whether they should eat those varieties or substitute others. Barbara Block of Stanford University and Patrick Halpin of Duke University were eager to show the tracks of shark travels recorded by radio transmission to satellites. Ross Swick of the University of Colorado-Boulder showed a Google Earth animation of the gradually shrinking Arctic ice cap over the last 29 years. And Philip Renaud of the Living Oceans Foundation has supplied underwater video of the Red Sea as part of the foundation's mission to chronicle the state of coral reefs.
Hanke envisions much broader information, though, including consumer-oriented material such as the best dive spots and kite-surfing areas. Ultimately, he wants "every single location" on Earth, land or sea, to have information.
Projects like Google Earth give Google cachet with influential people such as Al Gore.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)"We're trying to encourage our users to annotate all the places in the world. Part of what we're doing is seeding that ecosystem of spatial information," Hanke said. "That creates an opportunity for Google to provide location services on phones, mobile devices, in cars in the future, to guide people to the best places. Being a valued guide, the go-to source of information about the best places to go--that will be a powerful and valuable thing for Google."
Think of it as a second Internet in a way, only instead of using abstract names to locate information, you can use actual locations to locate information. Some refer to the idea as the "geographic Web."
The clearest illustration of the indirect benefits Google Earth can bring is the fact that the company could persuade former Vice President Al Gore, whose climate change documentary won him an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize, to bear the Google Earth standard. In effect, he provided an eco-halo that can offset the more down-to-earth capitalistic realities of Google's operation.
Google seems to share the altruistic, educational motivations of many researchers. But it's also got business in mind with Google Earth.
"We try to create products people love to use," Birch said. "We create value, then think of appropriate ways of monetization."
• Click here for more stories, and images, on Google Earth 5.0.
Election Day freneticism is the norm for the likes of candidates, journalists, poll workers, campaign staffers, and commentators. But this time around, an unlikely tech entrepreneur and his employees entered the fray.
Jeff Han demonstrates his company's multitouch system.
(Credit: Perceptive Pixel)Jeff Han is the man behind CNN's "Magic Wall" multitouch electronic wall map, the one reporter John King has been using all campaign season to illustrate election information and that was the target of a recent Saturday Night Live spoof (embedded at the end of this post). Han's company, New York-based Perceptive Pixel, has also provided its technology to Fox News Channel (Bill Hemmer's "Bill-board") and to ABC News, which unveiled its version of the map Tuesday night.
Han--a crowd favorite at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference in 2006 and 2007--even equipped, trained, and collaborated with SNL staff for the spoof skit in which cast member Fred Armisen gets carried away drawing a green cat over the country and moving Minnesota on top of Virginia.
CNN's John King shows off his "Magic Wall" election map that's built on Perceptive Pixel's multitouch system.
(Credit: Perceptive Pixel)"It was a ton of fun to be there and to work with creative people," he said of his time at SNL.
The TED show "was the launch of this whole thing," he said, noting that a video of his 2006 presentation quickly spread around the Web. That, of course was before the launches of Apple's iPhone and Microsoft's Surface, both of which also take advantage of touch technology.
Another key moment in Han's company's 2.5-year timeline was a military trade show where CNN executive producer David Bohrman just happened to be walking the floors. He took notice of Han's technology, which unlike traditional touch screens allows you to use more than one finger--or the fingers of multiple users--at a time.
A demo of Perceptive Pixel's multitouch screen using two hands.
(Credit: Perceptive Pixel)"He saw the technology in a different way than anyone else had," said Han, 32, who never conceived of his product's application in television news. "I hadn't thought of it that way, but I wasn't disagreeing," he said.
The result, in the case of CNN's map anyway, has been the ability to zoom in and out of states, change them to different shades of blue or red, quickly tally electoral votes under different scenarios, and more.
Han's employees were stationed at CNN, Fox, and ABC Tuesday night to help their graphics departments make sure things ran smoothly. But amid the frenzy of the day he said he was confident it would all go well--they had been working long and hard with the TV networks in preparation for the big night.
The applications for Perceptive Pixel's technology run the gamut--from defense and government to private companies--depending upon how the software toolkit is used. The TV news applications are actually a small fraction of the current uses, Han said, although they are the most challenging and have the highest visibility.
Perceptive Pixel founder Jeff Han
(Credit: Perceptive Pixel)With his background in computer graphics, Han said at one point it hit him that what he liked about the field was not so much the pretty, photo-realistic presentation of information, but interacting with the information, manipulating it, and moving things around. That's what led Han--who conducted research for and is still associated with New York University's computer science department--to start working on his multitouch system about six years ago.
So far, Han said his company is weathering the economic downturn and its user base continues to grow. He wants all new clients to see the SNL skit, which he said relays the important message that technology is just that. What matters is using it appropriately. Same for multitouch specifically, he said; there are times when it's the perfect solution. There are also times when other technologies are more appropriate.
"In the wrong hands, it doesn't work," he said, thankful that King was the one presenting his technology for the first time to much of the world.
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