Cutting Edge

Not so long ago, large, numerate brains got together to create a mathematical formula for choosing the right wife.

Not content with satisfying the need for perfection in human relationships, mathematicians have now dedicated themselves to creating equations for the perfect relationship with the physical world.

Yes, according to the Telegraph, a British math professor has created a formula for successfully slipping your car into a parking spot.

You might think this a trivial pursuit. You'd be right. However, Vauxhall Motors, which participated in this useful experience, claims that 15 percent of hardy Brits say that the the biggest challenge of their holiday period is finding a fine place to park their car.

Please don't be square-rooted to the spot this Holiday Season, unless you're very good at math.

(Credit: Cc David Hilowitz/Flickr)

So in drove professor Robin Blackburn of the University of London's Royal Holloway College to inscribe a few symbols and square roots in order to solve a real human problem.

The formula involves knowing such simple numbers as the radius of your car's curb-to-curb turning circle and the distance from the center of the front wheel to the front of your car.

Frankly, if you don't have these numbers stored at the very front of your brain, just behind seven pictures of Tiger Woods' alleged mistresses, then you have no business being on the road.

Professor Blackburn is merely putting all your most intimate numbers together for you. As he told the Telegraph: "Everyone has had the experience of ignoring a space because you're not sure if you can fit in or not. This formula solves that problem."

Indeed it does. Save for one small issue. You see, a U.K. government survey showed that almost 7 million Brits have math skills that are below the level of an average 11-year-old.

Many places in the US might have larger parking areas, but US math skills are not exactly proportionate. The National Assessment of Educational Progress suggests that only 4 out of 10 fourth- and eighth-graders are, well, any good at math at all. And only 42 percent of high school graduates left prepared for college-level math.

Professor Blackburn's formula is not simple. So I fear a new onset of holiday season accidents as willing but unable parkers attempt to enact his mathematical genius, only to plow into the silver Volvo in the adjacent parking space.

Balloon 10 was located at Centennial Park in Atlanta. Or, more precisely, N 33° 45' 33" W 84° 23' 33"

(Credit: DARPA)

MIT's Riley Crane only found out about DARPA's red balloon challenge a few days before it started. Yet his team went on to win the contest through its savvy use of the Internet.

The challenge posed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency asked people to find the coordinates of 10 red weather balloons floating above the U.S. in one day. Since no one individual could plot the location of all 10, participants had to figure out how to work with others to solve the puzzle.

Team MIT's strategy was to build a Web site designed to attract more and more followers--people who might know the balloons' locations themselves and those could bring aboard others who knew the coordinates, essentially creating a chain effect.

The five-member MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team consisted of group leader Crane and Manuel Cebrian, both post-doctoral research fellows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Rounding off the team were three students--Galen Pickard, Wei Pan, and Anmol Madan.

Crane holds a Ph.D in physics, while Cebrian has his in computer science. Both Pickard and Madan are Ph.D candidates, and Pan is preparing for his MS degree. As researchers in the Human Dynamics Group at MIT's Media Lab, the five study the science of how people interact with technology.

On Monday I spoke with Crane to discuss his thoughts on entering and winning DARPA's offbeat challenge.

First, congratulations on winning the challenge. Second, can you tell me how you entered the contest and what methods or strategies you used to find the positions of the balloons?
Crane: Sure, I think the key factor as to why our team ended up able to pull this off--I mean, we had some great competitors that we only learned about after the fact--is that we really designed a system that allowed people to [see it] as sort of a recursive incentive. So on the surface, I think some people see it as sort of a pyramid scheme, when in fact, it's exactly the opposite. I can illustrate it with an example of a friend of mine in Europe who wrote back and said "There's no reason I should join because I'm in Europe. I'm not going to find one of the balloons." And that's exactly the point. We designed this sort of recursive incentive. Of course, he's not going to find the balloons. But he might know someone in the U.S., and that person may find a balloon. And so if he can put us in contact with that person, then he should get some type of a reward as well.

So the system we built is as simple as that. If you heard about our Web site and went to sign up directly, and you found a balloon, you would get $2,000, and $2,000 would go to charity. If instead you signed up and then you told your friends, and one of your friends found a balloon, that person would still get $2,000 because they found the balloon. And you, because you signed someone up who found the balloon, would also be rewarded with $1,000, and then $1,000 would go to charity.

We think this recursive incentive allowed people to feel as though they were a part of a team helping to solve this proverbial needle in the haystack challenge. And they could participate in a meaningful way, even if they really had no chance of finding a balloon themselves. We had a lot of feedback of "We won." And people really felt they were a part of the team because of this.

One of the interesting things is that in trying to understand what we actually did, a lot of people might think of viral marketing. But again, this is the wrong point because it's not that our approach was to get a message out. It was more that we wanted people to send information back to us. You could really see a fun way of engaging people that they can see how influential and how resourceful they could be at getting people to join this challenge and recruiting them for the greater good.

So it was kind of a snowball effect?
Crane: Absolutely. The key is to try to make this as self-propagating as possible so that we can really get as many people engaged.

Riley, do you have a sense of how many people were engaged through your site?
Crane: The shocking thing on our side is that I actually only found out about the challenge four days ago. A friend of mine sent me a link and said, "Oh, I guess you must have a team over there at MIT." And we were kind of joking around within our group and very quickly hit upon this idea. In two days, I built a site and got it running. And then we only officially launched the site on Thursday evening. We sent out five e-mails because there are five members of the team. And within 48 hours, we had gone up to 5,000 [e-mails]. And we had something on the order of a few hundred thousand page views of people who may not have signed up but came and took a look. So it was an incredible bootstrapping approach that really got us up to speed.

Do you have a sense of what tools or sites other people used to spread the word? Did they use traditional social-networking sites like Facebook or Twitter or other resources?
Crane: I'm not entirely sure, but I do know of a few other competitors, one of which used an iPhone application. I think there was another one, a videologger, who had a few hundred thousand followers and a pool of thousands of people that they could call and ask them to verify [the locations of the balloons].

How were you were able to verify the responses from people who sent you the coordinates of the balloons?
Crane: That's the only thing we can't discuss at this point. I can tell you that we received a lot of spam and had indirect, private communications with one of the other teams who was happy they had been so successful at spamming us. We received a lot of Photoshopped images of balloons in different places in the U.S. It was a very exciting Saturday for us in our lab up here in the Human Dynamics group. But as for the actual way we did it, we'll discuss in a forthcoming release.

As far as the prize money, it sounded like whatever amount goes to a single individual, that same amount would also go to charity?
Crane: Not the same amount. Each balloon had a value of $4,000. If you came directly to us without a referral, you got $2,000, and the charity got $2,000. If you came with one referral, if one person referred you to us, then you still got your $2,000, the referrer gets $1,000 and the charity gets $1,000. This goes on from $2,000, $1,000, $500, $250, $125, and so on. This goes on down the chain. It essentially gets to the point where you would be splitting pennies if the chain were extremely long.

So if you took the $40,000 cash money, can you extrapolate how much would go to participants and how much would go to charity?
Crane: We would be able to, but at this point we haven't looked at the data. We're trying to be as transparent as possible. So we've actually asked the MIT auditing department within the greater Massachusetts Institute of Technology to verify our results and make it official so that there's complete transparency in how the process is handled.

Do you know yet which charity would be the recipient of any of the funds?
Crane: No. That will be announced at some point, how that would be done. But at this point, we have no comment on that.

And if I could add, from our point of view, what the message of this was. I think it's important to point out that there's a tremendous scientific opportunity in all of this, and from our side, we were never in it for the 10 balloons. Of course, that was the challenge, and that was exciting. But from a broader scientific perspective, we were in it to understand how to mobilize the vast resources of the human network, to face challenges and explore opportunities in living in such a connected society. And as a footnote to that, I think some of the applications that might come out of this would be: Can we use this technology we've developed to find missing children or something along those lines where there's an incentive for people to really participate and help out? Often, the police will offer a reward for finding a missing child. Can we restructure that in a way that we tap the vast resources of this network? Again, maybe you don't live in the state where a child was abducted, but maybe you know someone who does. Or during an emergency, maybe we need to find 10 people in a region who can operate heavy machinery, maybe a building collapsed. And how can we use these new tools to solve those challenges to help society? That's kind of the broader message that comes out of this from our side.

I know DARPA seemed to go into the challenge with the same point of view. Their goal was not to have the positions of the balloons uncovered. Their ultimate goal was to gauge how the Internet and social networking could be used and harnessed for more widespread issues and problems and puzzles.
Crane: Yeah, I think there's a subtlety in there. I think it actually only works because there's a benevolent or greater good. You know, somebody had asked us if they thought we could use this to do something bad. And I think it really wouldn't work. The incentives were designed specifically so that people feel good about the fact that they're participating, that maybe if they don't solve it, that somehow they're helping charity or helping science in the greater good.

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has won $40,000 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for correctly finding the locations of 10 red balloons scattered across the U.S.

(Credit: DARPA)

Launched on Saturday, the DARPA Network Challenge released the 10 red balloons into the air, then dared contestants to find their latitude and longitude by the end of the day. Since no one person could track down all 10 in just one day, the point of the contest was to see how participants would use the Internet and social networking to team up with others to solve the quest.

DARPA said that more than 4,300 contestants registered for the challenge, of which 218 actually submitted answers. MIT was the first and only one to get all 10 answers right, finishing the contest in just under nine hours, though a few teams got at least eight correct.

Prior to winning the contest, Team MIT explained its strategy at its DARPA challenge Web site. Interested parties could register to submit the coordinates of any balloons they spotted. All people who signed up would be given their own individual Web pages, which they could publicize using Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites. A snowball effect would entice more people to join the effort. And apparently...that strategy paid off.

One contestant who managed to pinpoint eight of the 10 balloons called himself 10redballons. This person also reported that as the day progressed, most teams managed to find at least five of the balloons and had started to publish the coordinates on the Web. He also said many teams were scrambling for clues to uncover the last two balloons.

DARPA enjoys a reputation for launching offbeat research projects that it hopes will provide useful information.

"The Challenge has captured the imagination of people around the world, is rich with scientific intrigue, and, we hope, is part of a growing 'renaissance of wonder' throughout the nation," said DARPA's director Regina E. Dugan in a statement. "DARPA salutes the MIT team for successfully completing this complex task less than 9 hours after balloon launch."

DARPA kicked off the Network Challenge, marking the 40th anniversary of the Internet, to see how social networking could be used to tackle broad problems and issues. The agency said it plans to meet with MIT and other contestants to learn what strategies they used to track down the locations of the balloons.

Intel's 48-core Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) processor

(Credit: Intel)

SAN FRANCISCO--Pushing several steps farther in the multicore direction, Intel on Wednesday demonstrated a fully programmable 48-core processor it thinks will pave the way for massive data computers powerful enough to do more of what humans can.

The 1.3-billion transistor processor, called Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is successor generation to the 80-core "Polaris" processor that Intel's Tera-scale research project produced in 2007. Unlike that precursor, though, the second-generation model is able to run the standard software of Intel's x86 chips such as its Pentium and Core models.

The cores themselves aren't terribly powerful--more like lower-end Atom processors than Intel's flagship Nehalem models, Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said at a press event here. But collectively they pack a lot of power, he said, and Intel has ambitious goals in mind for the overall project.

"The machine will be capable of understanding the world around them much as humans do," Rattner said. "They will see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble human-like capabilities, and will demand as a result very (powerful) computing capability."

A new DARPA contest is using balloons to test our social-networking skills.

After kicking off the Internet 40 years ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is again tapping into the Net for a new challenge. The DARPA Network Challenge will award $40,000 to the first person who can identify the latitudes and longitudes of 10 red weather balloons positioned at different parts of the sky across the continental United States.

The 8-foot balloons are scheduled to lift off on Saturday at 7 a.m. PST and remain in their locations throughout the day, until sunset. The contest will be open until December 14, so contestants will have a little more than a week to gather up and submit their answers.

But the contest has a twist. Since no one person can identify all 10 balloons across the States in one day, challengers will need to rely on social networks to team up with others to pinpoint the locations of the balloons. DARPA's goal here is not to see if people can answer the question but to gauge how we use social networks to resolve a problem.

DARPA plans to launch 10 red weather balloons, somewhat larger than the one shown here, around the continental United States, and competitors are invited to try to identify the precise latitudes and longitudes of all 10 balloons to win a $40,000 prize.

(Credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Chief Master Sgt. Gary Emery)

"We are not interested in the balloons. We already know where those are," Norman Whitaker, DARPA's deputy director of transformational convergence technology, said in a statement. "It's the techniques people use to solve the challenge we're focused on. We have people who are going to be actively watching from the sidelines to see how this plays out."

Whitaker is hoping the contest will offer insight into how the Internet and social networks can help people build teams and collaborate with each other to solve real problems and challenges.

DARPA is leaving it up to the contestants to best figure out how to work with others to track the balloons. One example posed by Whitaker is that of using a Web site to offer a portion of the prize to anyone who shares info about the locations of the balloons. Another idea is to work with a charity and donate your winnings. People can also naturally ask for help through Web-based tools such as Facebook or Twitter, connecting via computers or smartphones.

Although the challenge may be tough, Whitaker believes that at least one person will be able to solve it, whether it takes five minutes or all day. But if no one responds with the locations of all 10 balloons by the December 14 deadline, the agency will reward the $40,000 to the first person who tracked down at least five of them.

DARPA isn't sure yet what it will do with the information it finds. But that's never stopped the agency before. "We're DARPA," Whitaker said. "We like to do things that are really out of the box."

The agency enjoys a history of out-of-the-box challenges. Past contests have set up races between unmanned, robotic vehicles, including DARPA's 2005 Grand Challenge and its 2007 Urban Grand Challenge.

Are you willing to take the DARPA challenge? How would you use the Internet and social networks to win the prize?

And you thought computer chips were pervasive now.

In conjunction with a conference in Europe this week, Xerox has announced a new ink technology for printing electronic circuitry on everything from clothes to roll-up computer displays.

Xerox's process uses ink containing silver metal that can be used to wire up processing circuitry. It works on surfaces such as plastic that earlier have shown an inconvenient tendency to melt under the high temperature of liquid silver; Xerox's process works with an ink compound with a much lower temperature, the company said.

Xerox's process can print fine details of electronic circuitry on flexible plastic.

(Credit: Xerox)

"We've found the silver bullet that could make things like electronic clothing and inexpensive games a reality today. This breakthrough means the industry now has the capability to print electronics on a wider range of materials and at a lower cost," said Paul Smith, laboratory manager, Xerox Research Centre of Canada, in a statement. Smith is discussing the technology at the Printed Electronics Europe conference in Dresden, Germany.

So what might use it? Inexpensive e-book readers with flexible plastic displays, for one. Radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags, for another. Or smart pill dispensers that can help keep you taking your medicine at the appropriate pace.

The technology uses conventional inkjet printing methods, and though Xerox has used it with conventional desktop printers, the company expects that it would use continuous-feed printers that print on rolls rather than sheets of material. It doesn't require the super-clean environments needed for conventional silicon chip manufacturing.

The Xerox process actually requires printing three layers on a substrate: a semiconductor, a conductor and a dielectric. The silver ink is the layer that conducts electricity.

The silver ink technology now is available for testing by outside parties, and manufacturing the materials at production volumes isn't far off.

The content fill tool can replace a complicated background when objects are erased. This example shows the removal of a U-shaped white hair.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

The content fill tool can be applied with a paintbrush-like tool, in this case for removing line across a building.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

It looks as if Photoshop, already famous for its ability to make people look thinner and skies look bluer, could take digital erasure of unsightly objects to an entirely new level.

A feature called "content-aware fill" described in an Adobe video published Tuesday shows the technology used to remove buffalo, telephone wires, and a tree from various images and to clean up stray hairs from an imperfect scan of a print. Photoshop's existing cloning and spot-healing tools can take care of this to some extent, but the new version adds a lot of smarts to the process.

Specifically, instead of using one nearby patch of the image to fill the area that's being erased, it draws on multiple areas--and it uses image analysis to make informed guesses about how to reproduce complicated background. For example, the technology can reproduce the window frames, architectural patterns, a river shoreline, and clouds.

"What this algorithm is doing is copying multiple patches from the surrounding background to try to fit them inside the hole, unlike the old spot healing proximity match that was trying to find one match for each of these holes," said Dan Goldman, researcher in Adobe's Creative Technologies Lab, in the video. "This generally results in a very convincing fill for these holes."

Adobe developed the technology in collaboration with Princeton University and the University of Washington.

Adobe is showing new warping and bending options.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Every time Photoshop gets something like this, some folks--not without some reason in my opinion--get concerned that we can't trust the veracity of the images we see. But let's be clear: although the ease and sophistication of editing is increasing, photo manipulation has been going on for more than a century. And the way I see it, the profusion of digital cameras and ease of posting photos online probably means reality is being documented in unretouched form more comprehensively than ever.

Adobe touted other Photoshop features from the labs, too, in an earlier video released after the recent Photoshop World conference.

One of those new features aims to bring some realism to painting processes. Paint can be spread out and blended, and 3D models of various brushes simulate the behavior of actual brushes with different bristle configurations.

The other was a more sophisticated warping technology in which anchor points determine what parts of the image is fixed and other movable points are used to bend and stretch other parts of the image.

In addition, hinge points can make it possible to anchor the point of a person's elbow, for example, while moving the forearm.

Want more lifelike painting? Adobe is simulating actual brushes and paint behavior.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Don Eigler moved the first individual atom 20 years ago, and shortly afterward, he wrote IBM's name with 35 Xenon atoms.

(Credit: IBM)

When IBM researcher Don Eigler picked up and moved the first individual atom 20 years ago today, he paved the way for what arguably was the smallest publicity stunt ever: Big Blue's logo made from a precise arrangement of 35 Xenon atoms.

But moving tiny atoms had big consequences by making the idea of assembling devices atom by atom very real. And the company has built on that nanotechnology foundation, storing information on specific gold atoms, collecting carbon monoxide molecules into computer logic circuits, and pursuing a vision for vastly more compact computing technology.

Despite the progress, Eigler is cautious about when or even if his ideas for computing will bear fruit.

"We did the introduction, and we're in chapter 1," Eigler said. "This is way off in the future, if it ever comes about. I cannot conceive, under the best circumstances, this is going to happen in 10 or 15 years."

Boggled
Eigler, now an IBM fellow, said he was "boggled" that day he moved his first atom with an IBM device called a scanning tunneling microscope. He programmed the system to make the move, then held his breath while his screen went blank during the actual operation.

"You can't see it while you actually move it. Then you see the picture come in and say, 'Yes, it's there,'" Eigler said. He moved the atom back and forth three times to make sure that it really worked: "For us, that's (a) sort of sacred thing. The key thing and most important thing about science is reproducibility. If you can't reproduce your own result, you might as well forget it. It's as if you'd never done it."

Shortly after that, in November 1989, Eigler arranged the 35 atoms to spell IBM. There was, of course, publicity in it for the company, but Eigler had no complaints. For one thing, it demonstrated that IBM really could control atoms with atomic-scale precision and that its work wasn't just a fluke. For another, Eigler was grateful that IBM let him pursue his work.

"It was more than a publicity stunt. Emotionally, for me, it was much more important. This is going to sound hokey, but it's the truth. IBM picked me up off the scrap heap of science and gave me every opportunity a scientist could hope for to be successful," Eigler said. "As far as I was concerned, it was payback time."

No mass manufacturing
Eigler and colleagues have been working on the technology since, but so far, the benefits have been indirect. That's because moving and studying atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope and its offshoot, the atomic-force microscope, is a far cry from assembling computing devices that operate at much larger scales.

"Being able to put atoms together with atomic-scale precision at a level that allows you to deliver a marketable product is something that is largely hope and vision for our future," Eigler said. "We are not there yet."

There are other directions of nanotechnology research; Eigler called out graphene and topological insulators as possibilities. Eigler, though, remains excited to pursue his own long-term vision for computers that process information without today's reliance on the movement of electrons.

IBM Fellow Don Eigler in his lab.

(Credit: IBM)

Specifically, he's interested in using the quantum mechanical property called spin for computing. The conventional conception for this general idea, called spintronics, uses spin to control the flow of electric current, but Eigler wants to use spin alone.

"My goal is to do everything we need to do for computation--logic, storage, information transport--but without moving electrons around at all," Eigler said.

One advantage of the approach is that it avoids electrical current that produces the waste heat that's a major limiting factor in today's computers. Another is that it can enable three-dimensional computing designs much more densely packed with processing power than today's two-dimensional circuitry etched onto silicon wafers.

Spin engineering
The spin of one atom can affect that of its neighbor. The hard part is arranging atoms in order to harness that effect and perform useful computing operations.

"We have to learn how to engineer things so they work the way we want them to work. If you have two atoms, each has spin, and those spins are coupled together in usually two, three, or even four different ways," he said. "You have to place them in the appropriate relationship with one another."

One milestone toward this goal was work by Gerhard Meyer of IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory and others to store data in the form of electrical charges on individual atoms of gold, Eigler said.

In another, IBM's Christopher Lutz found that he could trigger a "molecule cascade," in which a series of carbon monoxide molecules could transmit information. The metastable molecules could store energy, then release it from one neighbor to another similar to a chain of balanced dominoes falling.

Lutz then found a way to arrange those molecules into basic logical processing units of computers, "and gates" and "or gates" that are foundations of today's computers. It didn't use spin, but it's a step in that direction, Eigler said.

Building blocks
One possible intermediate step between moving single atoms and mass manufacturing is what Eigler calls nano plug-ins. If physicists and engineers could figure out how to construct individual logic gates out of a complicated molecule, IBM chemists might be able to figure out a way to synthesize such units in quantity. Next would come the assembly process of snapping these units together appropriately.

"That strategy for building things that work on a very small scale may well be what we see in the future," Eigler said.

And it may arrive, even if his spin-based computation doesn't. "It may be (used with) regular conventional electronics, (or) with carbon nanotubes or graphene," he said. This brings him to the point about why IBM Research invests in such distantly useful technologies.

"The knowledge we're generating in the process of getting there," Eigler said, "is likely to feed into the industry much sooner than the actual outcome--if we ever get to that outcome."

(Credit: GKN)

The U.S. Department of Defense has contracted for the development of bullet resistant windows that dim instantly with a touch of a button, providing "on-demand" light control, privacy, and protection from heat, glare, and ultraviolet rays.

GKN Aerospace was awarded the $425,000 contract by the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office's VIP Protection Subgroup to incorporate dimmable films with armored glass to provide a "SmartShade" that conceals the location and identity of VIPs traveling in armored vehicles.

The Redditch, U.K.-based company will wed its bullet resistant glazing expertise with a "suspended particle device" technology called SPD-SmartGlass, licensed to it by Research Frontiers. GKN is the same company that designed and produced the windows for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

SmartGlass is already available for architectural and automotive applications, and the developers hope the armored variety will soon be an option on your car, too (view demo).

"This new development will have its initial application in the global counterterrorism market for government VIP armored personnel vehicles but also has real value in the civilian VIP market," said William Fischer, GKN's vice president of technology. "These SmartShade windows will give a level of control, protection, and privacy for vehicle occupants not available until now," he said.

The VIP Protection Subgroup's job is to provide "security enhancing technology" for your betters: recent projects include bulletproof cubicles, portable, air-conditioned rooms for VIPs to hold "sensitive discussions," and canine body armor (PDF).