Today I ran across this great comic by Sydney Padua on the BBC News web site. In the 19th century, Charles Babbage invented the Difference Engine, a mechanical precursor of computers.
The difference engine was never completed during Babbage’s lifetime, but here is a link to a photo of one at the London Science Museum built recently.
AB — 9 July 2009
The wave of post-election violence that enveloped Kenya early in 2008 has given rise to a new movement that uses crowdsourcing to provide real-time reporting on unfolding crises.
Ushahidi.com, a project spearheaded by a group of African bloggers and software developers, is creating an open-source platform “that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web — and map them,” according to the organization.
Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, began as a web site during the crisis in Kenya. According to Megha Bahree, writing for Forbes (see “Citizen Voices“), Ushahidi began when Ory Okolloh, a Harvard-educated lawyer and blogger living in Johannesburg, South Africa, went home to Kenya in late 2007 to vote in her country’s elections.
When riots and looting erupted in response to alleged corruption in the election process, conventional news media “went black for three days,” writes Bahree. During that time, though, Okolloh continued to blog and to receive reports from around the country from multiple sources, including journalists and government sources.
The stream of information coming to her reached such a volume that she appealed to tech-oriented contacts to assist with converting the stream of reports into a map-based visual form, a mash-up of reports of violence using Google Earth. The following gives an idea of the original mashup presentation on Ushahidi.com:
Speaking in a February 2009 TEDTalk, Erik Hersman, one of the builders of Ushahidi, describes the application as “a system that would allow anyone with a mobile phone to send in information and reports on what was happening around them.” (See “How texting and GoogleMaps helped Kenyans survive crisis“)
Since mobile phones are increasingly available in Africa, Hersman says they make a good “common denominator” as a way for on-the-scene reporters to contribute to an overall view of what is happening during a crisis situation, such as a tumultuous political event, an armed conflict, or a natural disaster.
Hersman says that in the wake of the Kenya crisis, the Ushahidi group decided they needed to do more: “We needed to take what we had built and create a platform out of it so it could be used elsewhere in the world.”
Since then, the platform has been used by Al-Jazeera in Gaza, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in South Africa to “map xenophobic attacks perpetrated against non-South Africans,” according to Ushahidi, and is now being used in India to monitor that country’s general elections.
However, the “next big thing,” Hersman believes, has to do with coping with information overload and evaluating the accuracy of reporting during crises:
What we’re finding out is that we have this capacity to report eyewitness accounts of what’s going on in real time — and we’re seeing this in events like in Mumbai recently — where it’s so much easier to report now than it is to consume [the reporting].
There’s so much information, what do you do? … How do you decide what is important? What’s the veracity level of what you’re looking at? … we find that there’s this great deal of wasted crisis information. Because there’s just too much information for us to actually do anything with right now.
During the initial hours when a crisis breaks out, says Hersman, a great deal of information can be streaming out of the crisis area — in the form of mobile messages, blogs, web postings, emails,or Twitter messages. But the world outside the crisis zone, and indeed the citizens inside it, have no way to aggregate and process the extreme volume of reporting, as well as to evaluate the accuracy and truthfulness of it.
Hersman’s group is now working on a filtering process and technology that will “take the crowd and apply them to the information,” using peer ratings to evaluate, refine, and weight the reliability of data coming out of a crisis zone — “so that we have a better understanding of the probability of something being true or not.”
One key application of the Ushahidi crowdsourcing platform is to help relief organizations assess the situation in a crisis zone in real time and direct aid to the area as quickly as possible. “The idea is to get immediate attention and relief to strife zones, and fill the gap left by news organizations that have slashed their foreign bureaus,” writes Bahree in her Forbes article. She relates one experience of how this worked during the Kenya crisis:
A ranger in Bogoria (northeast of Nairobi), William Kimosop, was driving to check on a remote outpost one evening in January when he stumbled across several hundred women, old people and children, lost in a ravine as they fled their villages where the men were still fighting. Four babies were born in that ravine, and supplies were running out.
There were no government officials or police around. He sent a text message to a friend in Nairobi, asking her to get help from aid agencies. The friend forwarded his plea to a few people, after which it got picked up by Ushahidi and within six days a Red Cross truck reached him.
AB — 22 April 2009
In a recent article on his Content Nation site, John Blossom of Shore Communications discussed the possibilities for the new Google Noticeboard application as an Internet and computing tool for the world’s 5 billion people who are too poor to have Internet access.
Blossom is a respected expert in the content industry, and his new book, Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives and Our Future, explores the future of society in light of social media.
In the recent article, “The Other Five Billion: Google Focuses on Truly Universal Publishing for Content Nation,” I learned of Blossom’s interest in the Hole in the Wall project, in which, Blossom writes:
… in the back alleys of New Delhi poor children with no previous exposure to computers were given access to the Web via a PC embedded in the wall of a building. Almost immediately they became what an adult would consider “computer literate” and started teaching one another how to publish and how to collaborate on content.
The Hole in the Wall has also has also attracted my attention for its lessons on human-computer interaction. For more on the Hole in the Wall, see my blog entry “The Hole in the Wall: Computing for India’s Impoverished.”
The Google Noticeboard application Blossom discusses allows people to use publicly-shared computers to send text or voice messages through public Noticeboards. The application is designed such that it can be used by people with no computer experience, or even people who are illiterate.
The following series of images gives an idea of the interaction design:
AB — 1 April 2009
Below is a blog entry I posted a few years ago when I was working for TMCnet. I wanted to refer to it in an upcoming post, but it has disappeared from the TMCnet web site.
Transferred over on 31 March 2009 from Al Bredenberg’s VOIP & CRM Blog (linking here to the Wayback Machine’s archived version):
VoIP for the Developing World
Rich Tehrani wrote a fascinating blog entry today about the potential connection between MIT’s $100-laptop program and the future possibilities for VoIP in developing countries. See his essay at:
In part, Rich writes:
… imagine if there was a way to get computers into the hands of more children. What would this do for the world’s developing nations and how would it help children? Imagine they would now be able to compute inexpensively and have access to the Internet and also speak for free with others.
This is a huge deal because in many parts of the world there aren’t telephones or even telephone lines. Many children don’t even understand the concept of the telephone. What if we could get them to access the web, allow them to compose documents, blog and talk for free? What an amazing world that would be. What an exciting place to live. What a more interconnected planet we would live on.
This reminds me of the fascinating story of “The Hole in the Wall,” which I heard about a couple of years ago.
Sugata Mitra, a computer scientist in India, decided to place a computer with a high-speed Internet connection in a hole in the wall that separated the high-tech company he worked for from the slum next door. He found that the kids from the neighborhood, who had never seen a computer, very quickly figured out how to use it and how to perform complexe tasks over the Internet. The last I heard, he was institutinga program making public-access computers available in poor neighborhoods in many areas of India.
One of the incidents I recall from the story was that a reporter asked one of the kids how he learned to use a computer so well, and the kid answered, ‘What’s a computer?’
AB — 10/3/05
Today I learned about SixthSense, a wearable gestural computer interface developed at MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group, a research group devoted to the design of interfaces that are “more immersive, more intelligent, and more interactive.”
Here’s how the group describes the interface:
The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques.
These images give you an idea how the prototype works and the kind of functionality it presages:
Here’s a link to a video that shows some great demos of SixthSense.
Fluid Interface Group’s work makes me think of one of the best film portrayals of a futuristic computer interface: the one Tom Cruise uses in the film Minority Report. In the movie, Cruise’s character uses virtual-reality gloves to manipulate a large interface virtual interface in front of him — very exciting to see.
This work of the Fluid Interface Group touches on the “Internet of Things,” an idea I first heard put forward by the Auto-ID Labs, a group working in the area of networked RFID. One of our ILO Institute reports on new directions for RFID discussed some of the possibilities for this Internet of Things:
If miniature Web pages and servers could be embedded in building materials, components of vehicles and aircraft, furniture, appliances, apparel, and other places, this could have huge implications for marketing, communication, and provision of services, not to mention changing the very nature of the world around us.
MIT’s Sanjay Sarma tells ILO researchers that this Internet of Things is “going to have a huge impact,” and that RFID is one of the key enabling technologies. He points out that RFID creates a greatly increased connection between the physical world and the world of information by connecting more data to physical things and transferring it at much greater speeds in much greater volumes. “We used to connect data to the physical world through keyboards, but there’s only so much data you can get in through the keyboard. But with RFID it’s automatic and it’s happening all the time.”
Sarma says that the Internet of Things will allow you to “have control in your enterprise in a way that is completely unprecedented.” Sarma calls this control “high-resolution management—management with eyes everywhere, as opposed to management by gut reactions and guesswork.”
The high volume and extreme complexity of this Internet of Things presents unique opportunities and challenges for the technology provider. “If you are in this market,” says Sarma, “you should be looking more and more at distributed computation, and you should be looking at embedded computations, at areas related to distributed software, at software related to data acquisition, and at software related to process change. They’ll all be changing in the next ten years.”
(“Directions for New RFID Initiatives,” ILO Institute, Aug. 23, 2006)
AB — 17 March 2009
BBC is carrying an interesting story today about some initial successes in trials of a bionic eye — see “Bionic eye gives blind man sight.”
Moorfields Eye Hospital in the UK is carrying out trials of the technology with three patients suffering from retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease that causes retinal degeneration. Eighteen patients around the world are participating in trials.
The bionic eye is able to send “meaningful visual stimuli” to the brains of patients, according to a retinal surgeon.
As an example of what it can do, one patient quoted in the BBC article says the device allows him to sort light from dark laundry.
Here’s a video that gives an idea how the technology works.
AB — 4 March 2009
Porting this post over from Socialtext:
I was struck by this article on the BBC:
Amateur sleuths keep cold cases alive
It struck me that this is another application of the open-source model — Internet technology can possibly be used in crime investigations to bring many dedicated minds to bear on problems that can’t be solved by the efforts of a few professional investigators.
AB — originally posted 23 April 2007
For the past couple months I’ve been re-reading Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” science fiction series. Or rather, I’ve been enjoying the series on audio tape while traveling to and from work — a reading technology I could perhaps have imagined but didn’t, when I first read these books about 30 years ago.
In the original trilogy, “Foundation,” “Foundation and Empire” and “Second Foundation,” Asimov’s treatment of technology forces me to reflect on how much our vision of the future is colored by current technology, our own human limitations and the near unpredictability of developments to come.
Asimov wrote his initial three novels in the 1940s and 1950s. The saga is set many thousands of years in the future, after humanity has established a galactic empire. The premise of the story: Scientist Hari Seldon has foreseen that the galactic empire will crumble. To head off the 30,000 years of barbarity that would otherwise result, Seldon sets up a Foundation that will survive the decline and later establish a new (and, we assume, kinder and gentler) galactic empire.
When I read fiction, I always imagine a movie in my mind. Interestingly, when I read the “Foundation” novels, the movie I see doesn’t look like “StarWars” or “Star Trek: Voyager.” It looks more like “Plan Nine From Outer Space” or “Forbidden Planet,” movies of Asimov’s era (and my childhood). Cardboard sets, banks of toggle switches and Bakelite knobs, characters dressed in shiny collar-less tunics.
I suppose the reason might partly be the association of this story with the long-gone days of my own youth. But I think it has more to do with Asimov’s 1950 view of the future and the technology available at the time. His future universe is missing elements that are de rigueur in today’s movies.
The most obvious lack: Here is a galactic civilization that has had hyper-space travel for thousands of years, yet has virtually no computers! Scarcely a mention in the entire first three novels. The computer finally does appear in the sequel, “Foundation’s Edge,” written in the 1970s.
In reality, this isn’t surprising. How many people, even scientists like Asimov, could foresee how vital computers would become in business, industry, transportation, even everyday life, only 50 years later?
One computer-like device that does show up in the trilogy is the Second Foundation’s mysterious Prime Radiant, which is used over the centuries to track the progress of the Seldon Plan for re-establishing civilization. The Prime Radiant makes me think of today’s knowledge bases or collaborative workflow applications.
Another intriguing Foundation technology: The Galactic Lens, a 3D representation of the galaxy. A navigational aid, you can use the Galactic Lens to view any section of the galaxy from any viewpoint.
Nowadays we would use 3D imaging software to create the Galactic Lens. But as with the Prime Radiant, Asimov gives little idea of the underlying technology of the Galactic Lens. I don’t think he knew — he just liked the concept.
Here’s one touch I got a kick out of: When one of Asimov’s scientists has do some calculations, he whips out, not a scientific calculator, but that quintessential geek tool of my youth, the slide rule. Only this is no ordinary slide rule. This new gadget, the result of 20,000 years of nerd evolution, makes the slide rule look in some vague way ‘like a child’s toy.’
Without computers and networks, the communications technology of the trilogy sometimes comes across as amusingly clunky. No electronic messaging, no idea of a paperless office. Messages arrive in capsules, shot through tubes or teleported through hyper-space. When a capsule arrives, the message pops out on a piece of film, which — if it happens to be top-secret, as most are — shortly self-destructs a la “Mission Impossible.”
Young Arkady Darell, heroine of “Second Foundation,” doesn’t have a PC, laptop or PDA, but she does have a transcription machine with voice recognition functionality. Arkady speaks into the machine, and it prints out her words in a fancy calligraphic font. Although Asimov surely had no conception of a personal computer in the days he wrote these books, a form of fax machine had been around for many years, no doubt providing the germ of Arkady’s transcriber.
The sequel, “Foundation’s Edge,” reads much more like contemporary SF. Computers are ubiquitous and often mentioned. Asimov introduces an immersive computing experience leaning toward Gibsonesque cyberspace. The interface is interesting — you merely place your hands on a panel and communicate mentally with the computer, through your hands.
Reading the initial three stories, though, I get an overwhelming feeling that Asimov’s vision was limited by the technology that was current (or at least foreseeable) in his day. This is not in the way of a criticism — that would hardly be fair. In fact, what it does is to force me to think about our own current visions of the future. Surely we are just as much limited by the existing state of technology around us.
For seven years, I’ve listened to self-styled experts pontificate about ‘what the future holds for the Internet,’ and I’ve always thought what a lot of arrogant nonsense it is. When it comes to the Internet, I’ve always resisted the urge to predict longer than about six months into the future. Experience shows that as time goes on and human society gets more complex, the ability to predict the future becomes more and more nearly impossible.
I suppose I can see some trends that look promising. For example, convergence of media as the digital pipelines grow larger. I can also imagine a personal customized knowledge base with ubiquitous access, networked with other knowledge bases, both personal and public. It’s a system that uses artificial intelligence to learn and anticipate my needs and preferences. But there’s nothing surprising there. I certainly didn’t think it up myself. It’s an idea that’s already out there and is based on today’s thinking about the future and where technology is obviously heading.
I can imagine some possible technologies of the future — instantaneous travel by teleportation, time travel, telepathy. I can imagine living forever (although I don’t really think science or technology will be involved in the final solution to the problem of death). Right now, some of the staples of science fiction are genetic engineering, nanotechnology, cyberspace and artificial intelligence.
These are all projections of the future that exist in fiction, in religion, in the popular imagination, in the hopes of people. And no doubt some of them will come about. But even now, as with Isaac Asimov, our vision of the future is tied to what we see around us in the present. Big events and innovations that change our lives come in from left field and surprise us all. What inconceivable developments are just ahead? What profound limitations of vision are we right now laboring under?
We can make guesses, but realistically only some of us will guess only partly right only part of the time. Asimov was one of the better professional guessers of his time, so how far off must we amateurs be?
AB — Originally posted around 2001
A Thinking Person, a.k.a. Cogit8R 