Technology Trends

I’m sure that many of you are sick and tired to carry their laptops during your trips. Of course, you can use a USB key ring to carry your data to access it from any other PC. But what about having a handheld device, such as an iPod, containing the full image of your computing environment, and restoring this whole environment on another PC anywhere in the world? Thanks to researchers from IBM, it is now possible to use the SoulPad system, a portable device carrying a stack of software. The host PC, which can be of any variety, “boots an auto-configuring operating system (Knoppix) from the SoulPad, starts a virtual machine monitor, and resumes a suspended virtual machine that has the user’s entire personal computing environment.” Now, the IBM team is thinking to use cell phones as well to carry the SoulPad system as soon as they have enough disk storage capacity. This day, it will feel easier to travel…

Before going further, here is a diagram showing the multi-tiered architecture of the SoulPad (Credit: IBM Research).

Here are more details from IBM Research.

Essentially, SoulPad enables a user to hibernate a PC session to a pocket form-factor device and carry the device to some another PC and resume his session on that PC. SoulPad has minimal dependencies on PCs that can be used to resume a user session.

In specific, PCs are neither required to be network connected, nor have any pre-installed software. The only requirement is the support of a high speed local connection to a SoulPad device for an acceptable suspend/resume times and acceptable runtime performance.

The researchers note that their approach is very different from the Intel’s Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR) project because SoulPad doesn’t require a known stack of software on the second PC.

As you might guess, the second PC doesn’t boot instantaneously. But suspending and restoring times are very similar to the time it takes for your laptop to move to hibernating mode, about 2 minutes using a USB 2.0 connection.

And what about security if your SoulPad is stolen?

To protect user data if a SoulPad is misplaced or stolen, we encrypt the disk partition that holds the VM images using the AES128 block cipher. We used the publicly available loop-aes package for Linux in our implementation.

The encryption key is generated by hashing a usersupplied passphrase. After the Host OS boots, it prompts the user to enter the passphrase. If the user supplies an incorrect passphrase, the resulting hash will not correspond to the AES key and the mount operation will fail since the decrypted data will not correspond to a valid filesystem. In order to defeat brute force attacks that attempt to guess the passphrase, the loop-aes package requires the passphrase to be at least 20 characters long. For convenience, we permit users to supply this passphrase via an auxiliary USB flash key.

But will a friend allow you to use his PC? You can tell him that the SoulPad system doesn’t touch anything on his machine and will not leave any traces either.

The SoulPad project was presented at MobiSys 2005, the Usenix Third Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, which was held on June 6-8, 2005, in Seattle, WA.

The researchers received an award for Best Paper for “Reincarnating PCs with Portable SoulPads.” Here are two links to the abstract and to the full paper (PDF format, 14 pages, 187 KB).

The IBM Research site also provides a link to a video showing how the SoulPad concept works (5 minutes and 53 seconds, 14 MB).

Finally, you might want to read two other articles about the SoulPad project, “System carries PC soul” from Technology Research News and “Pocket-sized computer ’soul’ developed” from New Scientist.

Sources: IBM Research Project page about SoulPad, 2005; and various web sites

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• Computers
  


• Handhelds
  


• IBM
  


• Innovation
  


• Pervasive Computing
  


• Software
  


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Admit it, typing an SMS on a cell phone takes time, and writing an e-mail on a PDA is only marginally better. But according to the San Jose Mercury News, a researcher at IBM has found a solution to this vexing problem. Instead of typing words on these ridiculous small keyboards, with the SHARK, an abbreviation for ShortHand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding, you use a grid and a stylus. The grid appears on the screen of your portable device. You put a stylus on the first letter of the word you want to type. Then you drag the stylus to draw a line connecting all the other letters of the word. When you release the stylus, the word appears almost magically. With SHARK, you can type between 50 and 80 words per minute, which is almost miraculous. So far, IBM hasn’t yet decided to release this software as a product. But if enough of you download it, which is currently free, and say you want it, IBM could release it as a paying product within a few months.

Here is the introduction of the Mercury News article.

Humans in their long history have invented only two ways for individuals to produce text: handwriting and typing on a keyboard.

Shumin Zhai, an IBM scientist, may have invented another way: SHARK, an abbreviation for ShortHand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding.

SHARK is intended for writing text with a stylus on small touch-sensitive screens, such as those found in cell phones and personal digital assistants. It uses a radically different approach that is easy to learn and fast.

Here is how the system works. Below is a screen capture of a user trying to finishing to type “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” On this capture, the user is moving its stylus to create the word “jumps” (Credit: IBM Almaden Research Center).

If you want to see SHARK in action without downloading it, here is a link to a video demo (4 minutes and 24 seconds, 29.7 MB). The above image comes from this video.

Here is how the Mercury News describe the system.

To write a word, you put the stylus on the first letter of the word and then drag the stylus to draw a line through the alphabet cluster, touching every letter in the word. When you lift up the stylus after hitting the last letter, SHARK figures out what word you want and displays it on the screen.

If SHARK makes a mistake, you tap the word and get a list of the most likely alternatives based on the path you traced through the grid.

You can check the system by yourself, and even download a beta version on the IBM SHARK Shorthand web site.

CNET News.com also described the SHARK system last week in “New-age keyboard: Trace, don’t write.”

But for more technical information, here is a link to the recent publications of Shumin Zhai and his colleagues.

In particular, you should read “In Search of Effective Text Input Interfaces for Off the Desktop Computing” (PDF format, 18 pages, 255 KB).

For the moment, the system is only working with a database of English words. If IBM ever needs beta testers for a French version, I’m available. Typing text messages is just a nightmare right now…

Sources: Mike Langberg, San Jose Mercury News, July 15, 2005; and various web sites

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• Human Computer Interface
  


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The LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) telescope is a new IT radio-telescope which will use about 20,000 simple radio antennae when it’s completed in 2008. At this time, it will cover an area with a diameter of 360 kilometers centered over the Netherlands. Its small radio antennae will detect radio wavelengths up to 30 meters, and because the ionosphere can bend some of these radio waves, the Lofar images might be somewhat blurry. So all the information captured by these antennae will be digitized and sent to a computing facility at a rate of 22 terabits/second today, and almost 50 terabits/second in 2010. This is the reason why Lofar needs Stella, an IBM supercomputer installed recently in Groningen, also in the Netherlands, to process signals from up to 13 billion light years from Earth. Stella consists of 12,000 PowerPC microprocessors and has a computing power of 27.4 teraflops. Read more…

Let’s start with the opening paragraphs of an article from New Scientist, “Huge radio telescope boasts supercomputer brain.”

One of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is to be the brain of a revolutionary new radio telescope called LOFAR. The telescope will look back to the time of the very first stars, map our galaxy’s magnetic field and perhaps discover the mysterious sources of high-energy cosmic rays.

Instead of one large rigid dish, LOFAR will use thousands of simple radio antennae. Their signals will be woven together at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands by STELLA, the new supercomputer, which was launched on Tuesday and is unofficially ranked as the third most powerful on the planet.

LOFAR needs its own supercomputer because it aims to detect radio wavelengths of up to 30 metres. Such long-wave radio images are blurry, and the only way to make them sharper is to build a vast array of detectors spread over hundreds of kilometres.

Now, let’s move to the General Information section of the LOFAR website for more specific information.

LOFAR is the first telescope of this new sort, using an array of simple omni-directional antennas instead of mechanical signal processing with a dish antenna. The electronic signals from the antennas are digitised, transported to a central digital processor, and combined in software to emulate a conventional antenna. The cost is dominated by the cost of electronics and will follow Moore’s law, becoming cheaper with time and allowing increasingly large telescopes to be built.

So LOFAR is an IT-telescope. The antennas are simple enough but there are a lot of them - 25000 in the full LOFAR design. To make radio pictures of the sky with adequate sharpness, these antennas are to be arranged in clusters that are spread out over an area of ultimately 350 km in diameter. (In phase 1 that is currently funded 15000 antenna’s and maximum baselines of 100 km will be built).

Below is a general diagram of the LOFAR-STELLA interaction picked from the System section of the LOFAR website (Credit: LOFAR).

Details are scarce about the STELLA supercomputer, built by IBM using some of its Blue Gene/L technology. Reuters gave some information last week in “Europe’s Biggest Supercomputer Eavesdrops on Stars.”

Running on 12,000 PowerPC microprocessors, the computer can execute 27.4 Teraflops, or 27.4 trillion floating-point operations, per second.

The new computer will consume 150 Kilowatts of power — the equivalent of 2,500 60-watt light bulbs — which is considered economical for a supercomputer, IBM said.

If you understand Dutch, you also can read this news release about this supercomputer.

Now we have to wait to see if the happy couple of Lofar and Stella can produce images as beautiful as Hubble gave us during the last decade.

Sources: Various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Astronomy
  


• IBM
  


• Space
  


• Supercomputers
  

You probably receive dozens of emails every day about various aspects of your business or personal life. And because your email program doesn’t understand the relationship between messages, except for the occasional thread, you have to manage your activities by looking through lists of emails. But now, two computer scientists from University College Dublin (UCD) and IBM have developed the Active Email Manager (AEM) and have even filed patents for a ’smart’ email program. Their prototype can make the difference between work-related tasks — and assign them to a workflow — and personal email. This software could be integrated in commercial products from IBM within two years. Read more…

Here are some details about the project.

A University College Dublin (UCD) scientist has filed a patent application for a new technology that he believes can turn email into a much more effective business tool. US-born Dr Nicholas Kushmerick, a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at UCD, has developed the technology over the past year during his part-time position as visiting scientist on IBM’s Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) initiative.

Kushmerick developed the technology, known as Active Email Manager (AEM), in concert with New York-based IBM researcher Tessa Lau. Together they developed a machine-learning algorithm that automatically keeps track of tasks and associated emails, in order to build up a work flow for each task.

“The vision is that rather than come in and download all your emails, you could just call up your to do list and manage your activities,” Kushmerick explains.

Now, the two researchers have developed a prototype of the software and are busy testing it. And IBM wants to use the technology in some of its future products.

The technology is currently being appraised by two separate research groups within IBM, with the aim of turning into a commercial product. One of these is the Massachusetts-based product development team that develops IBM’s suite of collaboration software, Lotus Workplace. “There are some pretty intensive discussions going on now to see if we can get enough attention and convince them that our idea is feasible and that they would put it into their product pipeline,” says Kushmerick.

The research work has been presented at the 2005 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2005) which has been held on January 9-12, 2005, in San Diego, California. You can find the abstract of the paper called “Automated Email Activity Management: An Unsupervised Learning Approach” in the 2005 Conference Program.

Many structured activities are managed by email. For instance, a consumer purchasing an item from an e-commerce vendor may receive a message confirming the order, a warning of a delay, and then a shipment notification. Existing email clients do not understand this structure, forcing users to manage their activities by sifting through lists of messages. As a first step to developing email applications that provide high-level support for structured activities, we consider the problem of automatically learning an activity’s structure. We formalize activities as finite-state automata, where states correspond to the status of the process, and transitions represent messages sent between participants. We propose several unsupervised machine learning algorithms in this context, and evaluate them on a collection of e-commerce email.

Please note that this work received a Honorable Mention for Outstanding Paper Award at IUI 2005.

For more information, here is a link to the full version of this paper (PDF format, 8 pages, 234 KB), available from Kushmerick’s website.

Finally, you might want to read an article from Technology Research News on this subject, “Software organizes email by task.”

Sources: Brian Skelly, Silicon Republic, Ireland, April 6, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Email
  


• Human Computer Interface
  


• IBM
  


• Patents
  


• Software
  

A vast majority of long-term patients in the world don’t take their medication in time, intentionally or not. In the U.S. alone, this represents an additional $100 billion yearly expense due to unexpected emergency hospital admissions. It is therefore crucial to gather accurately patient medical data in real time. For this purpose, a team at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory has developed a mobile health toolkit to perform this task. With this toolkit consisting of a Java-based middleware and Bluetooth-enabled sensors, all the medical patient data can be wirelessly exported to a doctor’s office via a PC or a cell phone. Read more…

Here are some facts to start with.

About 55% of all long-term patients in the US and in Europe, it is estimated, do not take their medication (either not taking the prescribed medication at all or more than 14 hours late) Around 12% of all hospital admissions in the UK are due to this non-compliance, the damage to the US taxpayer is an estimated USD 100 billion a year. Most of the patients that do not comply are simply forgetful (about 10% deliberately do not want to take the medication).

So how can we solve this problem?

Gathering current patient medical data promptly and accurately is vital to proper health care. The usefulness of electronic data capture (EDC) has been demonstrated in applications such as the home monitoring of at-risk heart patients via devices that transmit blood pressure from the home to a central database. Removing transcription effort (and associated inaccuracies) alone is worth the institution of EDC; but the side benefit of timeliness offers the hope of identifying and responding to trends as they occur, perhaps preventing a dangerous event, instead of simply allowing its diagnosis after the danger has manifest.

This is why IBM has developed its mobile health toolkit, “for gathering measurement data from a range of devices, and present it to management software via a well defined, and easily implemented interface.”

This illustration shows various devices, such as “a Bluetooth attached blood pressure cuff (left) and pill box (right) sending data to the mobile phone via Bluetooth. The mobile hub software integrated into the mobile phone (center) forwards the data to a care centre for monitoring (screen in the back) and returns reminders or alarms in an emergency.” (Credits: IBM and a former article in ERCIM News, “Remote Monitoring of Health Conditions.”)

Here are some details about this toolkit.

The IBM mobile health toolkit provides a Java-based middleware — using J2ME MIDP 2.0 (Java Mobile Information Device Profile) and JSR 082 (Java APIs for Bluetooth) — running on a personal (mobile) hub device to which sensors can connect wirelessly. We can perform local processing on the data, and forward the result to one or more fixed network connections. Data-handling modules can easily be added to the MIDlet suite (application suite compliant with Java Mobile Information Device Profile) on the hub, as can drivers for new sensor devices.

Using a wireless link from the hub to the devices allows the hub to be placed in an unobtrusive location, saves the user from fiddling with cables, and saves the sensor manufacturer the trouble of finding an acceptable case location for the data connector. By requiring only Bluetooth, MIDP support, and a network connection from the hub, the range of suitable hardware choices for the hub extends from full PCs, through OSGi home gateway units, all the way to cellular phones.

For more information, you can visit the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory website, and more specifically, the IBM Mobile Health Toolkit page, which states the following.

Solutions based on the IBM mobile health toolkit can improve the quality of patient monitoring while reducing overall healthcare costs. Moreover, it ensures that more timely information is available to medical caregivers. Medication-compliance systems can leverage the toolkit as a basis for intelligent reminders. For example, patients can be prompted to take their medication if the system detects that it is overdue.

Finally, for a more relaxed tone — say, less corporate –, you can check the site of one of the IBM researchers involved in this project, Dirk Husemann.

Sources: Dirk Husemann and Michael Nidd, IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, in ERCIM News No. 60, January 2005; and other IBM web pages

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• IBM
  
  
• Medicine
  
  
• Networking
  
  
• Pervasive Computing
  
  
• Sensors
  
  
• Wireless
  

It’s a well-known fact that we’re living in an era of data explosion, and that’s it not about to stop. So it’s not really surprising that IBM researchers are eyeing 100T-byte tape drives. Yes, you read correctly. They want to increase the capacity storage of their largest units by 250 times, from 400 GB to 100 TB. In order to achieve this goal, they’re borrowing “nanopatterning” techniques derived from the microprocessor division. Today, the size of a tape track is about 10 microns. They want to reduce it to 0.5 micron — or 500 nanometers — in about five years. IBM doesn’t really say when a 100-Terabyte tape drive will be available. But more importantly, the company doesn’t say a word about future data transfer rates, which today reach a 80 MB/s. Read below for more comments on this problem…

Here is the introduction of the article.

IBM has begun work on new technologies designed to boost the capacity of tape storage devices by 250 times. Using “nanopatterning” techniques derived from the company’s microprocessor division, researchers say they expect to one day build cartridges that can store as much as 100T bytes of data.

To reach this goal, it’s no longer enough to shrink the size of the magnetic tracks.

That’s where the microprocessor techniques come in. The Almaden researchers are now exploring ways they can use chip techniques such as reactive ion etching (a very precise method for putting patterns on film) or sputter deposition (a method of applying film in a very well-controlled way) to increase the storage capacity of tape.

The ultimate goal is to shrink the size of those tape tracks so that more data can be squeezed onto the same area of tape. “The track size now is in the neighborhood of about 10 microns,” said Spike Narayan, a senior manager with IBM Research. His group of ten researchers hopes to shrink that size down to about 0.5 micron, or 500 nanometers, within the next five years. “This will carry us all the way to the 100T byte regime,” he said.

Essentially, IBM researchers plan to change the magnetic patterns on tape media from something that is large and uncontrolled to something much smaller and tightly controlled, Narayan said, meaning the tape of the future will have much smaller magnetic particles that are densely packed into rows, somewhat like dimples on a golf ball.

When will we see these tape devices?

Though Narayan was reluctant to predict when IBM might bring its first 100T byte tape devices to market, he said cartridges that can store a terabyte of data will hit the market within 18 months. The 3580 tapes can store 400G bytes of uncompressed data at present.

Now, it’s time to look at the other story: data transfer rates.

Where were we 20 years ago? We had 9-track tapes containing 200 MB and able to transfer data at about 2 MB/s. In 20 years, capacity increased 2,000 times to 400 GB, while speed only increased 40 times, from 2 to 80 MB/s.

If history repeats itself, this means that if capacity increases by a factor of 250 in the coming years, transfer rates will increase by a more modest factor of 5, to reach a respectable 400 MB/s.

So let’s do some simple math. Even if such a speed of 400 MB/s was sustainable, it would take 250,000 seconds to read or write 100 terabytes. In other words, it will take about 70 hours of 3 days.

Is this acceptable? I doubt. So if anyone has information about how data transfers will be handled with this next-generation of tape device, please post your comments below. Thanks.

Source: Robert McMillan, IDG News Service, December 17, 2004

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• IBM
  
  
• Storage
  
  
• Technology