Technology Trends

You probably don’t bother to convert an old cassette or a VHS tape to a CD or a DVD. Most of you just buy a new copy — at least if it’s available. But if you’re a museum, such as the Field Museum in Chicago, and that you own dozens of hours of invaluable information recorded more than 50 years ago, this is another story. You want to rescue these ‘endangered’ recordings. In order to give visitors some insights about over 6,000 artifacts of its permanent Pacific collection, the museum needed to read audio tapes named ’sonobands.’ Now, these voices which have been recorded on a state-of-the-art Walkie RecordAll system — in 1958 — have been saved to digital format with some creative engineering help. Read more…

Let’s first look at a picture of this Walkie RecordAll device, which dates from 1954.

Here is a link to a larger picture. And you also can see another image of the Walkie RecordAll device at the bottom of this page devoted to the history of sound recording technology.

Now, let’s go back to the Field Museum news release for an explanation of the problem it was facing.

In 1958, Field Museum curator of the Pacific, Roland Force, sat down with Captain A.W.F. Fuller to record more than 100 hours of comprehensive information about the 6,622 artifacts in Fuller’s Pacific collection that had been acquired over the previous half century. They used a Walkie RecordAll, then a state-of-the-art recording device, and write-able media tapes called sonobands. Today, the Museum is having these recordings converted to a digital format, which is proving to be quite a challenge.

Much as reel-to-reel tape recorders and eight-track cassettes have been relegated to the technological dustbin, the Walkie RecordAll and the sonoband medium on which the device etched sounds fell out of use in the 1970s. Today this technology is as imperiled as an endangered species, such as the panda or snow leopard. In fact, the full-service archival lab that the Museum contracted to preserve the recordings did not possess a machine of this type.

So what to do to save these ‘endangered’ recordings?

Fortunately, The Field Museum had kept the two Walkie RecordAll machines used for the Fuller-Force recording sessions. It has loaned these semi-functioning devices to the contractor, The Cutting Corporation (Macromedia Flash format), an audio production facility with a renowned sound preservation laboratory in Bethesda, Md., for this project. After studying and restoring the Museum’s Walkie RecordAll machines, The Cutting Corporation had to re-engineer its own Walkie RecordAll machine.

The sound preservation engineers at The Cutting Corporation have found that the most challenging part of preserving these recordings digitally is that the sonobands have become brittle over time. As a result, the grooves on the recordings have altered, making tracking difficult but achievable. Thus, through creative engineering, the voices describing the masks and skulls, weapons and tools, idols and boomerangs, will be saved.

Now, if you happen to visit the Field Museum, you’ll be able to see the entire Fuller’s Pacific permanent collection of artifacts and learn about them by listening to the restored voice of Captain A.W.F. Fuller.

Sources: The Field Museum, via EurekAlert!, May 3, 2005; and various websites

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Some students are luckier than others — or have more fun. For example, this Stanford University report says that some of the students there may have some hard and physical work to do: dancing. But in exchange, they’re working with sensors, cameras and computers to study how a dancer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company is moving. This must be exhilarating, especially after finding — and confirming — that he acts as a ‘biomechanical rebel.’

Here is the experience of Jonah Bokaer, a dancer from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, who was enrolled in the program.

The test subject danced wearing only blue shorts and the 50 silver balls the size of marbles that stuck to his skin, mapping out his physique.

“I know what I think my body is doing. But is it really doing that? I don’t really know, but I’d like to,” he said during a break in the afternoon session at the Motion and Gait Analysis Laboratory at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.

A member of the Merce Cunningham modern dance company, Jonah Bokaer said he couldn’t wait to see the results — a digital record of his skeleton’s behavior as it undulates, spins and leaps.

His moves are monitored by students of the Anatomy of Movement class which is now in its second year.

“We’re looking upside down, inside out, at the human body,” said course director Amy Ladd, MD, professor of orthopedic surgery. “It’s not the way any single discipline would frame the study of movement.”

Ladd added, “Each project reflects an integration of disciplines spanning the humanities and sciences to portray human movement.” The exercise was part of an extensive series of interdisciplinary art projects that were tied to Cunningham’s performances on campus last week.

So what methods are using these students to analyze a dancer’s movements?

Eight cameras in the lab tracked the motion of the silvery balls on their test subjects: Cunningham dancers Frank and Bokaer and course director Ladd, who also happens to be a trained ballet dancer.

“We thought that the study needed a comparison, and analyzing someone in pointe shoes would be a good contrast,” said Ladd, who has studied ballet for years. “So I reluctantly agreed.”

The cameras sent the data to a computer, operated by motion analysis lab’s engineer Erin Butler. The output includes motion capture of dancers as well as quantitative information.

But what do you learn from such interdisciplinary projects?

Projects like this, mixing science with art, are challenging to conceptualize, said Ladd. “We’re looking for projects that merge science and art. No one really knows how to do this well yet. It’s a difficult mix. It calls for a philosophical paradigm shift for people who have been trained to think in one realm or the other.”

Here is a link to the other projects at the Anatomy of Movement.

And as a conclusion, it’s not the first time that Stanford University is mixing several disciplines, such as arts, sports and science. Check for example this article from Technology Research News, “Sensors track martial arts blows.”

Sources: Rosanne Spector, Stanford University Report, March 16, 2005; and various websites

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If you happen to be around Ohio this coming fall, don’t miss an exhibit at the Mansfield Memorial Museum featuring the 7-foot-tall Elektro, the oldest U.S. robot with its 65 years. “Elektro is the only survivor of a group of eight robots created by Westinghouse in Mansfield between 1931 to 1940 for several hundred thousand dollars each,” according to this article from the Plain Dealer, Cleveland (free reg. is sometimes necessary). Back in 1939, Elektro was able to walk, talk, raise and lower his arms, turn his head and move his mouth as he spoke. It used a 78-rpm record player to simulate conversation and had a vocabulary of more than 700 words.Thousands of people enjoyed Elektro at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. It even appeared in a long-time forgotten movie, “Sex Kittens Go to College,” also known as “The Beauty and the Robot.” Read more…

Other information about this exhibit is featured on this page at the Mansfield & Richland County Convention & Visitors Bureau website.

“Elektro was the first true robot ever built in the United States,” said museum director, Scott Schaut. “Built in total secrecy by Westinghouse, Elektro was promoted as the ultimate appliance. In fact, it was thought that Elektro would one day be able to cook, do laundry and entertain the children.”

But let’s return to the Plain Dealer article.

[After being restored for $500 by Jack Weeks, whose father, John, helped create the robot in Mansfield for Westinghouse,] Elektro is back home — repaired, polished and drawing crowds to the Mansfield Memorial Museum. Recently, he was taken off display for repairs, but he will return in September.

“We had more than 4,000 people come to the museum to see Elektro since September,” said Schaut. “It was wildly popular, and a good way to get people to visit the museum.”

Elektro, like the other robots built by Westinghouse seventy years ago, was pretty expensive, but also brought back money.

Elektro is the only survivor of a group of eight robots created by Westinghouse in Mansfield between 1931 to 1940. The company predicted the robots — built for an estimated cost of several hundred thousand dollars each — would be the ultimate household appliances, handling daily drudge work such as washing dishes and cutting the grass.

[But] “they made millions off him,” Schaut said. “People came in from all over the world to see him at the New York World’s Fair. In the late 1940s and through the 1950s, Elektro traveled around the country from appliance store to store. People flocked to see him. It was a hugely successful promotion.”

Later, Elektro went to Hollywood.

Elektro did what many Californians do — he wound up in the movies. He played Thinko, a giant robot that handicapped horses, in the 1960 film “Sex Kittens Go to College (1960),” also known as “The Beauty and the Robot,” with Mamie Van Doren and Tuesday Weld.

Now that you’re a fan of Elektro, you might want to buy an image. From this page, you can buy one from Corbis. But be sure to have your credit card with you. A small version (7.29 x 9.11 cm) costs $90 while a larger one (17.09 x 21.36 cm) goes for $200! Personally, I think these prices are outrageous.

Sources: Michael Sangiacomo, The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, February 9, 2005; and various websites

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‘ArtGarden’ is a new search engine developed by British Telecom (BT) and tested by Tate Online. In “Smart search lets art fans browse,” BBC News reports it allows you to browse the Tate’s collection depending on what you like or not. Instead of typing an artist’s name, you will be shown an initial selection of pictures of paintings or sculptures. When you click on one image, the artificial intelligence component of ‘ArtGarden’ will choose the next set of pictures to show you. This choice will be partially based on keywords associated with each work of art, but unknown to you, partially on your previous preferences, and finally on plain luck. This technology should soon become available online. With ‘ArtGarden,’ it will be like jumping randomly from one aisle of the museum to another. Neat…

Here is a general description of the technology.

The technology uses a system dubbed smart serendipity, which is a combination of artificial intelligence and random selection. It ‘chooses’ a selection of pictures, by scoring paintings based on a selection of keywords associated with them.

So, for instance a Whistler painting of a bridge may have the obvious keywords such as bridge and Whistler associated to it but will also widen the search net with terms such as aesthetic movement, 19th century and water. A variety of paintings will then be shown to the user, based partly on the keywords and partly on luck.

Like many other technologies, this one has a very personal origin.

For Richard Tateson, [a BT's computing expert] who worked on the ArtGarden project, the need for a new way to search grew out of personal frustration. “I went to an online clothes store to find something to buy my wife for Christmas but I didn’t have a clue what I wanted,” he said.

The text-based search was restricted to looking either by type of garment or designer, neither of which he found helpful. He ended up doing his present shopping on the high street instead.

[Note: Yes, Tateson is his real name.]

BT gives additional details on the project in “Get what you want with ‘ArtGarden’,” starting with a description of the concept.

‘ArtGarden’ is designed for those of us who might not know the name of, say, every Dutch artist painting at the same time as Vermeer, but like his style and would like to see others in a similar vein. In other words, it’s designed for those times when you know what you like, would recognise it if you saw it, but can’t exactly describe it in words. ArtGarden takes advantage of broadband to show a range of art-works on screen, the choice of which may be quickly refined by the user.

You’ll find some more tidbits about the technology.

Behind the scenes ArtGarden uses artificial intelligence to keep track of each viewer’s preferences across a range of criteria. These ’scores’ are used to bias the random selector, which then picks the next item to display.

This way of browsing increases the pleasure of online art viewing because it strikes a balance between focusing browsing towards specific personal ‘likes’ and introducing some serendipity — lucky finds that a more blinkered approach might miss. It’s also simple to use — all you have to do is indicate your preferences using your mouse.

Finally, BT explains why the project is named ‘ArtGarden.’

The ArtGarden demonstration system allows online visitors to view a ‘garden’ or selection of art works, which are linked to others through a series of roots defined by the online curators or managers of collections. New items of interest are positively biased to bloom on the visitors’ screens as they select art according to their preference. Old or disliked items wither away from those displayed. After a few minutes’ browsing, the garden will be very different from the initial random selection.

Before ‘ArtGarden’ becomes available, you can search the Tate Collection with more traditional search engines, for example by searching by subject.

Sources: BBC News Online, January 28, 2005; and various websites

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It’s Saturday and I’m sure you have some free time to visit an exhibit named “The Feminine Face of Fiber,” which is partially about robots. If you live in the Chicago area, you can see the “Female Cyborg Series,” a collection of robot-inspired quilts created by Kathy Weaver, a former teacher and painter. According to this article from Pioneer Press, in Glenview, Illinois, Kathy started to create quilts featuring robots about seven years ago, partially because “she is a longtime collector of ’50s sci-fi memorabilia.” Admission is free and details are here. As Chicago is far from Paris, France, I doubt I’ll see these quilts. But if you happen to see them, please let me know…

Below are two quilts made by Kathy Weaver. You’ll find other ones in this gallery of robot quilts.

Please read the Pioneer Press article for more details about the artist. Here are selected excerpts about why she started to design quilts featuring robots..

Robots began appearing in Weaver’s work about seven years ago.

“I was teaching at the time in an elementary school and we’d been playing around with paper robots,” she recalled. Weaver noted that when the children moved the robots’ arms and legs even slightly, the paper figures became very animated.

“I started thinking these could really talk to somebody about different emotions,” she said.

The robots additionally appealed to Weaver because she is a longtime collector of ’50s sci-fi memorabilia.

“And I also see the robot as sort of a hopeful figure. I don’t see them as threatening,” Weaver said. “My dad was in electronics and always kept up with the latest gadgets. They are definitely part of our future.”

The artist doesn’t view robots as male-dominated figures, but rather as “a kind of figure that would be parallel to the soothsayer or the shaman.”

The exhibit, which started on January 5, 2005, will end on February 13, 2005. This exhibit is open to the public and admission is free. You’ll find all the details on this page from the Dittmar Memorial Gallery at the Norris University Center of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Here is how Kathy Weaver’s works are introduced.

Kathy Weaver uses the quilt medium and the robot persona to invite the viewer into a complex and intriguing alter world in her Female Cyborg Series. As a child of the fifties living amidst today’s technological modernity, the robot for Weaver represents a potential ranging from an ambiguously “friendly future” to a literal integration of robot into the human body in the form of pacemakers and piecemakers. In seven stunningly handcrafted large-scale works, the viewer is invited into the picture plane to see the modality of the robot’s disposition as it reflects the delicious complexity of human nature. The environment of the robot raises important questions about the intersections between technology and nature, between our skinned, armored world and our interior, emotional selves.

As I wrote above, please let me know what you think if you see Weaver’s ‘robotic’ quilts.

Sources: Myrna Petlicki, Pioneer Press, Glenview, Illinois, January 6, 2005; and various websites

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In this article, Computerworld describes several of the projects currently under way at Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab. For instance, CyLab just received “a $6.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation for an initiative called Security Through Interaction Modeling (STIM), which studies complex interactions between people, the computers they use and attacks from the outside.” CyLab is also looking at self-healing or autonomic computer systems. And in its Coral project, CyLab is developing network defense mechanisms for virus and worm attacks. But here I just want to focus on the Seurat project, named after the French impressionist painter Georges Seurat who invented the technique of pointillism. The goal of this project is to monitor network anomalies caused by buffer overloads or corrupted systems. The project was called Seurat because like his paintings, the Web has so many layers or points where a possible attack might occur. Read more…

Please read the article mentioned above or this page to know more about the research projects at CyLab.

And now, here are some specific details about the Seurat project as provided by Computerworld.

Another CyLab project takes the name of the French impressionist painter Georges Seurat, who painted vast canvasses with many tiny dabs, or “points,” of paint, a process dubbed pointillism. The Seurat team at CyLab is developing methods to monitor anomalous behavior that may be induced by buffer overloads and other glitches.

The Seurat technique compares a precomputed profile of how a system should be performing to the combination of all the application interactions with the operating system. “So it looks at a profile of what this system should be doing and says maybe this thing has been corrupted,” explains Mike Reiter, technical director of CyLab and a professor of computer engineering and science. “It can track accesses and changes across many machines all at once or in a short time period.”

The diagram above describes the pointillist approach to anomaly detection. Normal points are clustered by the dashed circle. The appearance of a new cluster consisting of three points suggests anomalous events on host A, B, and D. (Credit: Seurat team at CMU’s CyLab).

The Seurat project is so named because there are many layers, points or places where one might measure what is going on in a system in order to see evidence of an attack, much the same way the 19th century painter discovered that what we see comprises many points of color and light.

The Seurat technique is a broad-brush approach to security, and indeed, the overall scope of CyLab’s $10 million annual research mission is broad, says Pradeep Khosla, dean of the Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering and co-director of CyLab.

Here is a more detailed description of the Seurat project, coming directly from CyLab.

The goal of the project is to detect compromised or misconfigured hosts by correlating file system changes across different machines. Most of the current intrusion techniques result in modification, insertion, or deletion of system configuration files, binary files, libraries, log files, or system kernel.

However, as the operation system and application software become more and more complex, users, even system administrators usually lose track of the up to date machine configuration status and file system updates.

We propose a new approach to detect aggregated anomalous events automatically based on host file system updates. Our approach is based on a key observation that many host state transitions of interest have both temporal and spatial locality. Abnormal state changes, which may be hard to detect in isolation, become apparent when they are correlated with similar changes on other hosts.

Based on this intuition, we have developed a prototype system, called Seurat, to detect similar, coincident changes to the patterns of file updates that are shared across multiple hosts. Our evaluation shows that Seurat can successfully detect worm attacks with a low false positive rate.

For each alarm, Seurat identifies the suspicious hosts and files for further investigation, greatly facilitating root cause diagnosis and false alarm suppression.

For even more information, you can visit the Seurat Project home page.

The researchers have published their work which appears in the Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID2004), held in September 2004 in Sophia Antipolis, France, under the title “Seurat: A Pointillist Approach to Anomaly Detection.”

Here is a direct link to the full paper (PDF format, 20 pages, 717 KB). The above diagram was extracted from this paper.

And for those of you who are also interested by Georges Seurat’s works, here is what Wikipedia says about him, and a link to a picture of his “Grey weather, Grande Jatte” painting from 1888.

Sources: Matt Hamblen, Computerworld, November 22, 2004; and various websites

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