Spacewalk and Science Proficiency in the US : A Tale of Two Worlds

To spin a popular Charles Dickens opening line somewhat differently, "It is the best of science, it is the worst of science".

"Rocket Science" is a metaphor for complex tasks that demands superiority in science and math. While the Russian milestones starting with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin's first spaceflight are no less noteworthy and even though the ISS coalesced technical partnerships of a broad coalition and not just the US, yet America's leading role in space technology (i.e. "rocket science") is beyond question.  It was the lead country to adopt a sustained national space program with establishment of NASA. 

The milestones have been nothing short of spectacular - moon landing, Skylab, Mars missions, Cassini Saturn mission, space station, reusable space shuttles, communication satellites, GPS and on and on. I am reminded of that excellence every time US astronauts aboard the space station do a space walk to replace Hubble telescopes' lens or to fix the ammonia leak of thecooling system as they did yesterday - while orbiting the earth at 5 miles per second. 

But here is the paradox... as of 2011, the same country with so much to claim on real rocket science only had a 32 percent proficiency rate in math among its high school students.

 While the Curiosity rover crawls on real Martian soil looking for water, the humbling down-to-earth 2010 fact is that US students scored 23rd in math and 31st in science when compared to 65 other top industrial countries. Curiously enough, there is very little uproar.

 If the media is any reflection of the collective psyche of the country, it seems we are more fixated on reality TV, American Idol or the juvenile antics of our lawmakers trying to satisfy their respective lobbies.

Encouragingly, there is a growing awareness and movement to improve and expand STEM (Science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education in the US. I only hope the momentum builds fast enough to change the course. As I noted in an earlier blog, science and technology have proven to be the most important force of true progress in improving human life and civilization. 

Vending Machine - A Glittering Journey from Gum ball to Gold

On my first trip to the US, I was en route to Cincinnati via JFK airport. One of the few things I still remember from the first of many JFK layovers was the ubiquity of vending machines disgorging shiny red cans of coke. Little did I know then that over the next few years, I would have many up-close interactions with these coin-sucking, coffee-spouting machines during  many late night hours at graduate school.

A vending machine of course is hardly a subject for reflection on a technology blog. We take them for granted and they come in handy - that's all. But the more I think of it, they actually are an essential part of our urban life. They too have evolved with technology, much like other gadgets such as TVs or phones.  And, in a way, they reflect the tastes or preference of society.

The History:

The notion of mechanized self-service is actually pretty old. The Greek mathematician Hero seems to have gotten the ball rolling in 215BC, when he invented a machine to vend holy water in an Egyptian temple at Alexandria. In 1076 A.D., a coin-activated pencil dispenser was developed in China. In post industrial revolution Europe, one of the earlier instances of vending machines goes back to 1880 when commercial coin-operated vending machines were introduced in London to dispense post cards. Once ubiquitous gumball vending machines in the US were first introduced in 1907.

Since then, the basic technology of vending machines remained somewhat same - mechanism to test and check the coins (or paper bill) and then a mechanical or electric  motor actuation of the feeder trays to release the item. 

Fast forward to 21st Century: 

Machines in the 21st century are of course a little more sophisticated. They may now come with touchscreen for selection, LCD display, and connectivity for credit card validation. Today, like everything else, they too are increasingly fitted with wireless chipsets, connected to the internet  to transmit real-time transaction, enabling purchase through smartphones. In the age of Internet of Things (IoT), 'remote vending' that permits vendors to remotely scan and manage stock and to even change pricing on the fly may soon become the norm.

Supporting social preferences or even crisis mitigation:

While Pepsi, Coke, Coffee and snack vendors  dominate today's vending machines in the US, vending machines in some parts of Europe can serve up Pizza. In Japan, the vending machine economy is probably more diverse than anywhere else in the world serving everything from snacks and beverages to clothes, electronics and even beer! And in some parts of the world ravaged by AIDS, access to vending machines for condoms has actually become an effective tool for both government and NGOs (Non Government Organizations) to fight the spread of HIV.

The age of Internet of Things (IoT) changes everything:

Today in the US, smart vending machines are being equipped with connectivity technology that not only enables purchase by smartphones, but can locate and inform the nearest replenishing depot, so machines are refilled before popular products run out.  This  just-in-time inventory management is enabling automated kiosks for diverse businesses such as ticket sales and vending of high value items such as electronics.

Vending by Twitter: One South African beverage company recently made news by launching Twitter-activated vending machines as part of a promotion in Capetown. Consumers who send a tweet to vending machines in select locations, while standing in front of it, receive free samples of its local branded iced tea. The IP-enabled, wirelessly connected 'smart' vending machine is programmed such that all tweets with a certain hashtag are streamed to the machine. It then checks every tweet's location and if it is within a certain proximity of itself, it dispenses the beverage! What a deal! 

Mother of all vending machines:

Let me end this blog with what I thought was the mother of all vending machines! The Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi has reportedly installed the world's first Connected gold vending machine in its lobby. The Gold To Go machine from Ex Oriente Lux  serves 24-carat gold bars and coins in a nice gift box. But here is the kicker! The buyers make menu choices via a 19-inch touch screen interface and the prices get updated wirelessly every hour via a link to the company's online shop. The inventory is monitored with RFID tags supported by a 24/7 security camera and an ID scanner to prevent money laundering.

Just make sure you have a well funded credit card before you try the bullion dispenser. Save the loose change for the good old coke machine ! 

Why health care can get a boost from big data and cognitive computing

Modern medicine does wonders when it comes to targeted healing of our specific ailments - especially when it comes to mechanical malfunction of a body part. Surgeons can go to very precise organs and fix or even replace them with bionic parts.

While the health care system trains doctor to test, scan and treat targeted ailments, every now and then, we come across anecdotes of physicians not being able to think holistically to produce the correct diagnosis. Today's diagnosis is often done by individual symptoms or test results - not by connecting the dots of myriad other discrete symptoms or past health history of the patient. In other words, even the best medical technology is still ways off from treating the human body as a super-complex system.

A friend of mine has been seeing doctors for years with many individual but apparently unrelated issues - backache, fatigue, recurring eye redness and on and on. Every time she received "adequate" treatments for the specific conditions but they all kept coming back. Not until she, at the behest of another friend with similar history, researched and consulted multiple experts could she find her real underlying degenerative chronic auto-immune condition.

So what have big data and artificial intelligence got to do with this? Could be a lot.

In an engineering conference for the automotive industry (where I work), Rob High, CTO of IBM Watson Solutions, made a case for 'big data' and cognitive computing in solving complex problems including medical diagnostics. Integrating myriad medical data and past history in to a cohesive medical diagnosis can be a computing challenge. Even if we ignore the lack of holistic approach, modern health care in many ways is becoming victim of its own rapid progress. According to Dr. High, new medical information and discoveries now double every two years. Nearly, 80000 pages of new medical information are created daily. Yet, a typical medical practitioner hardly keeps in touch with a meager fraction of these new discoveries. An average doctor, processes no more than 5% of this growing knowledge base and is often miserably outdated. 81% of physicians don't even spare five hours per month to keep up.

In 2011, IBM demonstrated its own progress in artificial intelligence, data analytics and cognitive computing when its Watson computer program bested Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter - the all time best Jeopardy! champions in a three-day competition. What Watson demonstrated was its capability to understand the clues and contexts hidden in an 'answer' and then to analyze all relevant information and prior learning from its very large memory and produce the most statistically relevant outcome. Clearly the same technology has potential to lend a hand to develop more integrated medical diagnoses.

I am encouraged that Cleveland Clinic is looking to apply this technology for its expert "diagnosticassistant'. I also hope that someday, smart evidence-based (if not fully holistic) treatment as indicated by this Youtube demo about oncology treatment may become routine.

Happy New Year!

Another year bids us goodbye as we zoom in to 2013. 

While the world continues to stay mired in war, politics, religious fanaticism - the world of technology and science continues to push its frontier ensuring that progress will indeed be made. If 2011 was the year that made  smartphones, tablets and social media a global phenomenon, the biggest stories in 2012 were really about the basic sciences. 

In fact, the most memorable scientific milestones of 2012 happened in space, far away from our home, in Mars, where NASA's 2-ton rover Curiosity flawlessly landed on Mars and became our explorer extraordinaire in the red planet. Videos available in YouTube show how technologically challenging and awesome a feat it was. I wish the popular media spent as much time on it as the dog-fight between Apple and Samsung.

 I will also remember 2012 as the year of yet another feat that combined science with man's indomitable spirit of adventure, when FelixBaumgartner jumped off the edge of the space, from 127,000 feet of altitude breaking both sound barrier and few  world records and providing vital information for NASA's space research. In some sense, this was the mother of all reality-TVs, where precise calculations, space science, preparation, and sheer human grit all came together.

And on October 10, a privately built robotic cargo capsule aboard the unmanned Dragon spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station to make the first-ever commercial cargo delivery to the orbiting lab 250 miles high up in the space. Even if it is only a small transition from public to commercial enterprise, the event symbolically takes space exploration to a new frontier.

To me,  iPad Mini, Windows phone, launch of Lytro camera were all good news, but I am glad that fundamental scientific progress continues to happen to build foundation for even greater future technology.

We can't wrap up 2013 without the recent visibility of the science of probability and uncertainty - as personified by NateSilver during the last US presidential election.  Silver’s prediction model — based on a weighting of the public polls available in each swing state — continued to suggest that the incumbent was a strong favorite. Silver achieved a rock star status and in the process made 2012 a memorable year for statisticians, data geeks, number-crunchers, and  political junkies. 

Looking forward to more progress and technology wonders in 2013 !

Social Media and Social Etiquette

This is the decade of social media. 

I was doing my usual scan of technology news.  Sure enough, there was yet another new media app. Samsung is releasing ChatOn2.0 as warm-up to CES 2013. It's like a mother of all chat apps - you can chat with up to five connected devices on a single account, you can do group chats, invite friends to conversations from different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Weibo, mix multi-media in your chat and on and on. 

It seems niche social networking apps are popping up almost weekly, connecting us in our virtual world in myriad ways - keeping track of our friends, sharing our media, arranging a game, check-in to your place of interest, finding a date and on and on. In other words, short of hugging your friend, you can pretty much connect to your friends in all possible ways without leaving your leaving room sofa.  

The beauty of these tools is that you can connect without really being connected. Your Facebook settings are configured to send birthday wishes to your friends while you are asleep. Before the clock strikes midnight on Dec 31, your pictures from Times Square will find its way to your friends so you can celebrate the New Year together - no need to be really together!

Don't get me wrong.  I am a personal fan of social networking and continue to be excited about things I could not have done without these tools. It is nice to be able to stay linked to people across the globe who may share the same hobbies or went to same school and be able to share ideas, location, media at the push of a button.

 I can't help wondering if the ease of our digital networking and sharing will someday take over our human connections or sometimes make us forget our basic human traits.

I was appalled and shocked last week to read about the most brutal andhorrific rape of a woman in India. I was appalled even more when I saw a picture of the woman from her hospital bed posted all over Facebook. Many of these people were well-intentioned and wanted to share their outrage. Did anybody pause to think about her privacy? Just because your smartphone can quietly take the picture and your social media app can post it instantly, should you not still remain concerned about some basic human protocol? 

Spectrum crunch – a new commodity problem

In a memo last week, Procter & Gamble told its 129,000 employees that they can no longer use the music-streaming site Pandora or the movie site Netflix at work. Apparently, the motivation was not censorship but bandwidth management. According to the memo, the company’s web capacity was over-taxed by employees’ over-access of streaming content at work. 

As more and more consumers, schools, and businesses need Web access and data-rich content to function, infrastructure and carriers are struggling with the so-called bandwidth "spectrum crunch." An educational site School 2.0 offers a nice calculator to show how quickly your 2mbps DSL connection can choke under the pressure of multiple data streaming.

Whereas streaming audio can vary between 64kbps and 128kbps, video streaming can very easily consume a throughput of 1mbps or higher (e.g., Netflix’s top HD streaming is about 4800kbps or 4.8mbps). The situation could get worse with the growing diversity of applications such as VoIP telephony, video conferencing, Skyping, streaming video, online gaming and any interactive apps needing constant exchange of data from the cloud or between peers. In fact, mobile, home and office data traffic is supposed to be doubling every year at least for the next 4 to 5 years.

Clearly, there is a gap between growing cloud computing and the availability of bandwidth to support and deliver the service. Think of it this way, suddenly a new system of on-demand beverage delivery is established where you do not have to stock cans of soda or bottles of juice or need coffee machines anymore. Instead you are asked to upgrade your home plumbing so that you can tap anything from the same faucet. Think of a scenario under this ‘cloud based beverage supply’ model where groceries stopped selling coke, tea or coffee. You are now completely dependent on this new high-tech plumbing. If your plumbing is not adequate, you have to wait for your soda because one of your family members is taking a shower and clogging the bandwidth with heavy-duty water streaming!!

Our life is increasingly morphing with the assumption of  24/7 connectivity. The only thing worse than a day without electricity is a day without internet. Yet the plumbing infrastructure for home, office or mobile is clearly in a catch up mode. While the media is abuzz with cloud computing, smart home, smart grid and smart everything, many rural US homes are still without adequate connectivity. The mobile connections are still largely 2.5G to 3G. The broadband data-centric wireless LTE or 4G will continue to be a small slice of the market for a while. And it will be a much longer while, before they are affordable for the public. Are we having the proverbial cart of streaming content before the horse? 

The Final Frontier - Space exploration and technology innovation – part I

My recent posts have been more about technology in the context of  mobile or personal computing, social media, communication, media and entertainment. I wanted to come back to my original intent, which is to discuss technology in the broader context of its impact on our society. And the more I think about it, Space exploration (the romantic ‘final frontier’), like nothing else, has been one of the single biggest catalysts of  technology innovation.

Arthur Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. A recent NPR interview by Neil deGrasse Tyson reminded me once again that nowhere is this magic demonstrated more than when an astronaut completes his or her spacewalk to fix the ISS or the Hubble telescope. Every time a space shuttle went into orbit, or a rover landed on Mars or someone completed yet another spacewalk, I couldn't stop marveling and wondering why that was not the biggest news on CNN or CBS or ABC that day  in place of comments by self-serving politicians!

Interestingly, passionate as Neil deGrasse Tyson was (while promoting his new book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier) about space exploration, he commented that “the most compelling reason to do it is we are fading fast on the world stage of economic strength”. In other words, developing space technology has implications for a nation’s economic strength.

A strong prevailing political position, however,  has been that investments in NASA-based space research is a waste of tax payers’ dollars and it may as well be left to the proverbial market to champion the cause of space innovation. This argument often avoids or misses the point that by its nature, space exploration touches not just the spaceship technology but a host of areas like materials, communication, biology, health, miniaturization, extreme temperatures, defense technology and hence elevates and impacts a whole plethora of our national and societal concerns directly and many other unforeseen applications, leading to many direct and indirect economic and strategic benefits.

National pride aside, this larger impact of space technology development is not lost on the global community. It's not a surprise that space exploration and related technology investment is a strategic part of all growing economic powers like countries in European Union,  Israel or BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China).

While Silicon Valley is rightfully perceived today as the hub of new technology, a case can be effectively made that NASA and all its centers have been the hub or catalyst that touches all major technology frontiers like electronics, computers, software, transportation, alternate propulsion, batteries, industrial automation, health and medicine, among others.

One could argue that the range of technologies that the space program has catalyzed  (some of which may not have passed market feasibility at that time and hence was rightfully considered an inefficient investment) has acted as the incubator of a broad technology capability  that has made the US a technologically sophisticated and developed society.

Now, to be fair, contrary to popular belief, NASA or JPL did not invent MRI, Velcro or Tang. But many other ideas – both software and hardware – came off work done for the space program, particularly in medical diagnostics, materials, mapping, imaging, information technology and communication.

Here are some common examples of these "Collateral Benefits" 

LIDAR (Light detection and ranging)  based imaging to ensure safe landing on hazardous Mars surface developed at JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) is now deployed widely in high end cars for collision avoidance saving lives. 

Fly by Wire: Developed as part of mission to the Moon, NASA’s fly-by-wire electronic guidance system is increasingly used now by the new state of the art commercial planes like Boeing’s new Dreamliner.

3D terrain rendering technology, commercialized by TerraMetrics as the TruEarth satellite imagery powers Google Earth and Google Maps.

Teflon-coated fiberglass developed in the 1970s as a new fabric for astronaut spacesuits has been used as a permanent roofing material for buildings and stadiums (like Atlanta’s Georgia dome’s fiber glass roof shown on left).

Many such innovations are on record, for which long term economic and quality-of-life impact are not hard to compute.

According to Tyson, the expenditure of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to NASA's entire 50-year running budget. Even though Tyson has a point here, dollar-based statistics often can be tricky – depending on what point one wants to make. But it is not a stretch to show that inefficient or otherwise, US investment in space research, like nothing else, has created innovations that are today saving lives, enabling medical services unthinkable before, running software, improving large scale agriculture, enhancing satellite communications, driving new defense technologies, not to mention the direct benefits of the knowledge of space and international pride, prestige and technology leadership.

Much ado about Google's integrated privacy policy

Google’s much publicized new privacy policy kicks in today. Reactions from online news, portals and related sites are varied – although the tone of unease and concern cannot be missed. 

To Google, it’s all about better data analytics and business efficiency. First, in place of many separate privacy policies and fine prints (assuming you read them), you have to read one. Second, by linking information about your online movements, interests and preferences - gleaned from Gmail, YouTube, Google search, Maps, Google can synthesize more complete individual profiles and hence serve up more targeted ads and more customized content.

To be fair, the new policy is not about collecting new or more information. But it is about centralizing or merging all your trail from otherwise disconnected Google products. It is about building a more comprehensive profile by linking data crumbs from everywhere - YouTube, Gmail, Blogger, Google TV, Google+ and particularly from the history of surfing based on Goggle.com searches. 

Clearly this demonstrates the tension between better integration of consumers’ information (and hence better business value of the data) and underlying un-ease about more organized monitoring of our online behavior. And it raises a good question, e.g., is an immediate in-your-face targeted ad for weight-loss products a value or a violation of your privacy when you’re only making a discrete search for weight-loss solutions and/or listening to a motivational YouTube link on diet management? 

Data Mining the Social Media – The New Gold Rush

Our mobile connectivity, social media and hunger for apps have opened up the Pandora’s box of privacy breaches and their potential abuse. Not a week goes by when we don’t hear yet another story involving a breach by not just small app makers but giants like Google, Facebook or Apple. Government is weighing in, announcing a proposal for “Privacy Bill of Rights” or winning agreements with mobile leaders to enforce do-not-track or other privacy protection options.

Interestingly however, a recent study shows that users aren’t that concerned with privacy implications. For instance, according to a new study by Sociable Labs, more than half of the consumers (56%) regularly grant online retailers permission to use their Facebook data that range from access to basic profile like gender and name to details like birthday, product preferences and authorization to post status updates on Facebook walls.

Access to such data is proving to be a gold mine for the eCommerce industry. Online monitoring of  Social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Youtube is a new emerging tool for anyone fishing for trends with your personal data. 


The story is particularly interesting with Twitter. The chatter of millions of tweets is increasingly viewed as a potential indicator of society’s mood. In fact, some wall street funds and traders are text mining and analyzing the words in tweets as serious “crowd sourced” market intelligence. A 2010 study by Indiana University found strong correlation between the collective public mood and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. At a company specific level, a similar study by Pace University found that the popularity of product brands, as measured by Facebook “Likes” or Twitter followers, can be a lead indicator of their individual stock performance.

Next time you tweet, remember that many web analytics firms are collectively trawling and monitoring your stream too.


Retailers and advertisers are jumping into this fray as well. They are quickly finding out that experience shared in social networks about any product also has the potential to predict what consumers or their network buddies could potentially buy. Isn't this a great opportunity to influence future purchase decision through targeted ads!!  Knowing what people like or want, as evident from their tweets or Facebook wall “likes”, can also help retailers better manage their supply chain. In the past such information was proprietary and only available from transactional data through companies such as Visa or Mastercard.  But, thanks to consumers’ sharing their opinions and personal data, often complete with where they are, a new gold rush for market analytics and targeted ads has just begun.


Walmart, for example, has set up a digital analytics division @WalmartLabs which reportedly uses crowdsourcing techniques to determine which items the company should stock based on its tracking of popular social media sites including Facebook, Twitter and Google+. 

Where do we go from here? Will there be new applications of social media mining for common good? Or will it evolve to be primarily a tool for tracking and advertising? Will there be consumer backlash? Or will consumers’ unwillingness to share personal details always be over-ridden by the instant gratification of getting the next discount or the coupon? 


Please comment here or simply share your thought by blowing in a new tweet to the cyber-space!

Does Internet limit our deeper thinking abilities?

In a recent conference, one fellow attendee, who happened to run a navigation software business, was lamenting how in-car navigation and PNDs (Personal Navigation Device) have atrophied our sense of direction and location.

He clearly has a point, but isn’t that true of all new technology? When human society transitioned to locomotive train and then to cars, we had to sacrifice our horse riding skills in favor of driving. When technology makes old skills useless, it often also requires us to learn new skills. The acute sense of space and direction of a traveler of pre-cartography days got replaced by our ability to decipher complex visual information of a map. And then the map reading skills got replaced by the new device-savvy awareness of running navigation apps. We give up certain skills but perhaps become smarter in some other ways as we adopt new technology.

While this premise of technology 'taketh some skill and giveth some skill' may often be true, clearly there are trade-offs. The point is eloquently highlighted in the context of the Internet by a 2010 book by Nicholas Carr – “The Shallows” – where he builds on his 2008 article titled “IsGoogle making us stupid”. Delving in to recent developments in neuro-science, he makes a case that the internet, while generous in its access to dynamic knowledge, encourages “rapid, distracted sampling” of information potentially atrophying our capacity for contemplation and deep reflection. In contrast, the age old printed book, with all its limitations, serves to focus our attention, potentially promoting sustained creative thought.  The internet while democratizing our instant access to knowledge has also added to our sense of distraction as we nibble at news, blogs, podcasts, videos while surfing from link to link to get quick answers.

Mr. Carr ultimately wonders if our over-exposure to online content is re-wiring our brains, making us shallow, addicted to quick bites of information, freeing us from the need to devote sustained attention to thinking as we constantly dip in and out of online content. Along with our power to get any content right away comes the inherent distraction that Carr argues may be changing our capacity to focus. The distraction is further accentuated by the fact that a single web page contains many different chunks of media – texts, audio, video, widgets, hyperlinks, advertisements – creating a “cacophony of stimuli”.

In a world of abundant content, ubiquitous connectivity and dynamic access, distraction is perhaps inevitable as we have the easy luxury of navigating content with the flash of a click.  But how this influences the style and depth of our thinking and adds to our cognitive load is the crux of Carr’s concern. Reading print material in many ways is a linear process allowing more stable attention, unlike the navigation of networked, dynamic content, peppered with hyperlinks, widgets and advertisements, which according to Carr constantly adds an element of being “distracted from distraction by distraction” (using the words from T.S.Elliot’s first of “Four Quartet”). Add to this the fact that our brains are not wired for multi-tasking (see my blog “Efficient Multitasking – the myth..” March27, 2011) and the challenge of fast cyber-hopping to our cognition and our capacity for deep thinking gets even bigger.

In today’s world of fast tweets, real time analysis and instant gratification, Carr’s concerns deserve attention as we grapple with the fire hose of everyday information.

Or, perhaps on a lighter note, all these may just be part of our evolution and at some time in the deep future, our brains will re-wire the neural connections, handle our online information without losing our capacity for deeper dive and focused contemplation.  After all, as Carr himself quotes the 17^th century Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega, some of the same concerns existed 400 years back too about proliferation of printed books -

“So many books – so much confusion

All around us an ocean of print

And most of it covered in froth”

Next Wave of Social Media - Will They be more Privacy Friendly?

Facebook is the biggest marketplace in the world where people gather, chat, share their personal data, play games and where advertisers have access to close to a billion people on the earth. Whatever may have been  the original intent or business plan, Facebook sure has become a dream-come-true for marketers, merchandisers and whoever else needs instant reach to a huge volume of consumers and their tastes, preferences and habits. It’s not a surprise that the impending public launch of this social networking platform is promising to be the biggest IPO ever – bigger than even the giants like Google, Apple and Amazon. It’s all about the lure of the biggest marketplace…..

So everybody wins. To the grandma keeping in touch with her far-flung grand-kids or to the boomer who just linked up with his or her high-school friends, to the high-school teen sharing the latest vacation pictures, Facebook is priceless; to the marketers it is a gold mine, and to the company shareholders, the $100Bn valuation may only be the beginning.

The insane money-making potential aside, will Facebook be able to extend its innovation to something bigger or should we be looking elsewhere for the next wave in Social media?

With our pervasive GPS tools, we all are increasingly fascinated by the location-based connections – not just with people but with places we visit and with things we do, We want to know where our friends are, if any of them is in the neighborhood and what's around us (without having to mess with any unwieldy paper maps). We want to geo-tag everything, geo-fence some of our connections and play geo-caching games… (I suggest Wikipedia if these were not in your current vocabulary!) There are even GPS dating apps – for your romantic networking, e.g., SmartDating app whose ‘People near me’ feature pulls up all the users (potential dates?) that are in your area! If SoLoMo (Social-Local-Mobile) is the new paradigm, will Facebook be still the reigning king or will it be up to the Twitters, Foursquares, Instagrams of the world to claim the next stake?

Whatever is the next wave, one thing is sure, social media will always need and thrive on our personal data. And that always brings up the dark side of our dependence and exuberance with social media. Should we be concerned with the recent disclosures that Twitter and other social networking companies are reaching into people's smartphones and retrieving their personal contact information without getting explicit permission? Twitter acknowledged that its "Find Friends" feature on smartphones (Android and iPhone) was merrily sending phone number and emails found in the address book to its back-office without clearly alerting the consumer.

Stories like this have a familiar ring … Every now and then a report of privacy breach leaks out, the company concerned apologizes, calls it a mistake and everybody moves on until the next story leaks out. Google, Apple, Facebook – all have been there. It all goes back to the premise that, benefits aside, all social media apps and platforms are a gold mine for marketers – where there are too many consumers ready to be tracked and lured.

Social media apps have brought people together, added many conveniences in our daily life and made the world a better place in many senses and I look forward to seeing continued innovation. We all however need to be aware of that its commercial value lies in reaching out to its captive base of the users and in knowing their tastes, preferences and whereabouts. May be, someday we all will ride out the hype-cycle of social media, or be just fatigued by our own over-exposure, find the sweet-spot of moderation and re-learn the pleasure self-reflection in our privacy.

Until then, Happy Tweeting. Look forward to you next Face-book update

Carrier IQ - Wake-up call or simply an evolutionary milepost in mobile tech?

Recent media noise around Carrier IQ software once again highlights the tension between personal data tracking/analysis and its potential benefits to consumers and/or service providers.

What reinforces the sense of scare though is not necessarily the technology or the software itself but the semi-stealth nature of its deployment and implications of its abuse in the wrong hands. It is the after-the-fact discovery of such data collection that enhances our imagery of Big Brother.

For average consumers, privacy often seems to be less sacrosanct and more a commodity with a price.  Don’t we often end up signing off our privacy rights every-time we launch a phone or tablet  app to find a favorite restaurant or to check-in to our favorite social network or to navigate through our weekend drive to a different city? In fact, I was surprised, if not shocked, to get a glimpse of the extent to which the US phone companies already track and keep our everyday call logs, text messages, IP addresses surfed - all tagged with time and location stamp. 

While the bigger question of how an Orwellian government or other rogue authority might abuse such easy and detailed exposure of its citizen’s private data is an open issue that society has to eventually deal with, what probably is more relevant today is how best the business honestly neutralizes the nefarious side of personal data collection by transparent opt-ins and clear demonstration of value. In the end, in a truly open and civic society, it may just be an issue of rightly framing the Value Proposition – what or when data is collected, how it is used and what is offered to the consumer in return, i.e. what perks or rewards am I trading-in for my privacy –  a mature and honest quid-pro-quo.

The truth is that with continuous growth in cloud computing, back-office analytics, GPS-enabled location knowledge and 24/7 online connectivity, the envelope of the technology and its seeming  intrusion on our location, communication and surfing habits will only grow.  Transparency, an equitable value proposition and adequate legal protection are the three tracks on which this train must run. 

Commoditization of Face Recognition Technology – Is there a dark cloud lurking behind?

I continue to be intrigued by the notion of a public camera looking at an individual and matching up his or her personal information for whatever purpose. So I wanted to do a little follow up on my last blog. Just like the Brazilian world cup soccer initiative, facial recognition algorithms have already been applied successfully to many public security applications. .

The question is what happens when it becomes part of everyday technology, commoditized into apps that are available universally to all.

Think of the movie Minority Report, the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie, where cameras captured and read Tom Cruise's face, and then customized ads for his character pop up. Immersive Labs, a New York startup, recently introduced its smart billboard technology that combines video analytics with multiple data sources such as Twitter or Foursquare information to select the most suitable ad to display to the consumer nearby. The software seemingly understands the geometry of faces enough to determine the gender and approximate age range of the face looking at the webcam of the billboard – not exactly the more prying technology shown in Minority Report, but certainly a step in that direction.

The advertising billboards of the future will promote a product by analyzing  the audience to display items that the viewer is more likely to buy. The concept is not new. Last year NEC Corp. demonstrated  its  interactive digital signage solution, now popular in Japan. A built-in camera captures an image of anyone looking at the signage. The system then compares it to more than 10,000 stored patterns to determine the gender and approximate age.  Finally it displays an image that is most likely to appeal to the audience.

Digital Signal Corp.  seemingly wants to move further in that direction using 3D long-range facial recognition. The Virginia based start up’s laser radar system can provide a range of biometric data which, among other things, can tell you whether someone appears to be particularly nervous or tense.

A recent article nicely summarized my emotions - the technology is both “exciting and creepy”. 

10% of digital signage by 2020 is expected to have facial identification technology to provide personalized advertisement.   The day may be close when you’ll walk into a restaurant, the host will greet you by name and suggest a menu that will appeal to your palate; or you may be greeted with a sign announcing the price and location of items you may be most interested in as you walk into a department store.

I don’t want to add an Orwellian twist to such free market innovations, but I certainly bristle at the thought of a prying billboard camera that scans  my face every time I stand in front of it and searches  through a database of my personal information to create an ad that I simply won’t be able to ignore. The nagging thought in my mind is not about the technology but about a scenario when the technology is available to the masses.  

A recent start-up Viewdle is bringing a cool little addition to your Android phone. You shoot your friends and family, it recognizes faces (after you teach it who's who), then automatically tags photos for Facebook. Perfect for Facebook users!

Your smartphones will now be able to do these simple face recognition calculations in real time, compare faces to images previously stored and identified. The company’s website features a video of five women walking towards your camera when labels pop up to identify them and post their Facebook comments in real time.

Google Goggles is an exciting little app  for object recognition.  What would be the implications of a possible mash-up facial recognition technology with Goggles?  There are some interesting use cases as reported here . You meet someone, say in a conference, that you can’t remember the name of. You simply take a quiet flash-free photo, upload it into your device and let an app find out any tags associated with the photo, essentially launching a search engine to find name and any other details available on the web. Really cool!

But what about that person in the bar shooting your photo incognito to search your profile in a web database with less honorable motives? What about that stalker who can secretly take a photo in the street and then pull up all your information tagged to your pictures in cyberspace?

I am sure a company like Google, with its demonstrated effort to do public good, intends to make sure there is no abuse of people’s privacy from the use of its tools. But things go wrong, as evidenced in Google’s settlement with FTC over released email contacts associated with the launch of Google Buzz.  In a similar vein, Pandora internet radio was served with a subpoena as part of a Federal grand jury investigation of personal data collection through its popular Android and Iphone app. Google also got into trouble for seemingly collecting private information with its Street View data collection.

Clearly leaks happen when it comes to personal information – with or without malicious intent.

  

Recent reports that iPhone and iPad are regularly recording the device position and storing it in a hidden unencrypted file will do little to assuage consumers’ concerns about their personal data being used or potentially abused.  A similar situation exists for Android phones as well. Technically, these are all opt-in, yet the story followed in WSJ indicates that the data contained a unique identifier tied to an individual’s phone (but not to the user’s name) and is not totally anonymous.

Don’t get me wrong. I am sure all the kinks will be ironed out and  all these possibilities will eventually be more about convenience and quality of life and less about surveillance or loss of personal data.  As I indicated in an earlier blog, technology after all has overwhelmingly been the biggest driver of human progress.  Despite the nuclear disasters in Three Mile Island (US -1979), Chernobyl (Ukraine - 1986) and Fukushima Daiichi (March 2011),  today over 440 nuclear power plants worldwide are running safely to generate 14% of global  electricity. The benefits of nuclear fission technology decisively out-weighs the pitfalls. 

So, I hope, will be the case with all the commercial recognition techniques. 

RoboCop, Facial Recognition and the Leap of Innovation from Fantasy to Reality

Last week, road testing of a high tech mobile facial recognition system by Brazil police evoked the memories of the 1987 movie Robocop from journalists and bloggers all over the globe. The parallel to the high-tech helmet worn by Robocop Alex Murphy was unavoidable. The system the Brazilian police are planning to use during the 2014 World cup soccer tournament combines a high power camera equipped with face recognition technology connected via wireless link to a back-office computer.  Face recognition algorithms are being perfected for many years now, have been used by police, airport security systems and many other surveillance systems. The Brazilian application is an interesting mobile version of a similar system. The police will have  sunglasses with cameras that can scan 400 faces per second. The camera has a wireless link to a database that can cross-check 46,000 points on the face with 13 million mug shots of known criminals to find a match.  

Physicist and futurologist Michio Kaku in a recent CNN interview suggests that we take cues from Sci-Fi to get a sense of the future.  “Physics makes science-fiction happen” was his prescient comment as he sprinkled examples from Matrix, Predator, Blade Runner and Star Trek to paint a notion of the world twenty, fifty or hundred years from now.

He definitely has a point. Kaku’s real hero Einstein once said “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions”. The same imagination that motivates creators of sci-fi novels or movies can morph into reality in the hands of scientists and engineers.

Examples are many. While the notion of a submarine existed in the 19^th century, Jules Verne in his 1870 novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the sea” first imagined a submarine named Nautilus  that could stay and  travel under water for many days, driven by an ultra-quiet engine that runs on processed fuel. A little under a century later, the world’s first long-distance nuclear submarine USS Nautilus made its maiden voyage in 1954. Verne’s 1865 novel “From the Earth to the Moon” presaged a close parallel of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969. 

And, long before Steve Jobs envisioned the iPad, Gene Roddenberry already created his own celluloid version in Star Trek – the Next Generation.

So next time you discount those odd gizmos in a late night Sci Fi movie, think again, right there may be an idea for the next big invention !