Technology Trends

Three months ago, I told you about a Boston-based company, Skyhook Wireless, which is using Wi-Fi networks to provide location-based services (LBS). But this solution relies on a static database of access points updated once a year. Now, a New-York-based start-up company, Navizon, offers a better solution, with its peer-to-peer wireless positioning system which relies on dynamic databases always up-to-date. Users need a free piece of software and a GPS device or a WiFi and/or Cellular enabled Pocket PC PDA. When you’re walking or driving, you’re able to get your exact location in real time, and companies can send you messages about a restaurant of a film opening near the place where you are. The beauty of this plan is that the company doesn’t need any support from big telcos or Wi-Fi providers. The company, which started the service last week in New York, Toronto and Miami, expects to be profitable soon.

Here is how the Peer-to-Peer “Software Only GPS” system works (Credit: Navizon).

“Software Only GPS”? Navigating without GPS? What does this mean? Here is Navizon’s answer.

Since Navizon knows the EXACT geographic locations of Wireless Access Points and Cellular Communications Towers in a specified city or neighborhood it’s able to use the Wireless Networking (WiFi 802.11) and/or Cellular Phone capabilities (or both) that are present within a similarly equipped Pocket PC device, to accurately determine your exact Latitude and Longitude on planet Earth (so let’s hope that’s the planet you’re on!) and then uses this positioning date to inform your Personal GPS Navigation Programs and other Location Based Software Applications on your Pocket PC.

The process is not totally automatic: you need to synchronize your PDA with the Navizon servers. Here is how this works (Credit: Navizon).

As I mentioned above, Navizon’s software is free for individuals. But the company plans to sell access to its databases to other companies. For example, a company giving restaurant ratings could access Navizon servers and give you the name of the best Japanese restaurant in your neighborhood. You also can think that taxi companies or delivering pizzas could track and optimize their fleets.

Of course, these applications will exist only if Navizon reaches a critical mass of users.

But the company doesn’t need to wait for big telcos and doesn’t need large investments. Contrary to Skyhook who relies on people to circle a city to check for updates, Navizon’s users will update the city landscape in real time. And Cyril Houri, who founded the company with own money, told me that he thinks that Navizon can be profitable in a near future.

Will this idea work? Will you download and use this software? Time will tell, but the concept itself is brilliant.

[Disclaimer: I met Cyril Houri once, but I have absolutely no financial ties with him or his company.]

Sources: Roland Piquepaille; Navizon web site

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In all networks, like road or airline traffic networks, the Internet, cancer tumors or industry supply chains, you need to pass packets from node to node, such as cars, information or data. But which are the most efficient, decentralized networks or hub-like centralized ones? According to Technology Research News (TRN), researchers from Oxford University, U.K., have designed a model which maps traffic congestion. This model combines roads going through the center of a city and other ones avoiding it. And they found that, from a cost point of view, it would be sometimes better to close roads going through cities than adding more. They also think that these conclusions can be applied to almost all kinds of networks, biological ones or created by humans. Read more…

Here are two of the opening paragraphs of the TRN article.

Researchers from Oxford University in England have tackled the problem [of network optimization] by examining the congestion costs within a network model that combines paths that go around the perimeter of the network and central hubs that provide shorter paths through the network. Real-world networks are too complicated to describe exactly mathematically. The researchers’ model is simple enough to solve exactly, yet realistic enough to provide insights into real networks.

The research is aimed at finding ways to ease bottlenecks in networks involving manufacturing, the Internet and traffic, and ways to disrupt networks like tumor blood flow and terrorist supply chains. The findings could also help design better networks.

Below are two examples of networks, the first one being a model of traffic analysis, while the second one is a real natural network (Credit: Oxford University).

On the figure above, the model network shows transport pathways through the central hub (thick lines) and around the ring (thin lines). The graph itself shows there is an optimal value for the number of connections, in this case 44 connections for 1,000 nodes.

And this photon scintillation image shows the nutrient distribution within a laboratory-grown fungus Phanerochaete velutina. Nutrient density increases going from blue to green to red.

As you can see from the network model above, traffic congestion in a city would increase if the number of roads to the center also increases after a certain point.

The model showed that above a certain number of roads to the center, adding a new road always increases the bottleneck to such an extent that the added benefit of a new route is outweighed by the time delay due to increased congestion in the center. “The interesting and counter-intuitive result that we found is that in such situations we should actually reduce the number of roads connecting to the center,” said Neil Johnson, Professor of Physics at Oxford University.

The problem can also be turned on its head, said Johnson. “Given the number of roads which exists to the center and which we assume cannot easily be changed, what cost should be imposed for passing through the center [so] that drivers between A and B experience a minimum journey time,” he said. “This charge could be an artificially induced time-delay — lights or ramps with long waiting times — or monetary.”

The researchers have applied their model to London, where you have to pay £5 to cross the center with your car, and concluded that such a flat fee leads to some inefficiencies.

The researchers’ model showed that in London, where a flat fee of five pounds is charged for passing through the center, a usage-dependent cost would make the network more efficient. “These costs could be advertised on electronic boards around the ring road so that people decide ahead of time whether to use the center or not,” said Johnson.

If you want to learn more about this research, the latest work has been published by Physical Review Letters in February 2005 under the title “Effect of Congestion Costs on Shortest Paths Through Complex Networks” (Volume 94, Number 5, Article 058701, February 11, 2005). Here are two links to the abstract and to the full paper — thanks to arXiv.org (PDF format, 4 pages, 242 KB). The above illustrations come from this paper.

Finally, here is a link to an article from New Scientist about the same subject, “New roads can cause congestion,” published on February 1, 2005

Sources: Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News, July 27/August 3, 2005; and various web sites

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Wi-Fi networks are becoming increasingly common, but the one deployed on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado, one of my preferred cities in the U.S., is unique. It is the only solar-powered wireless network in the U.S. according to internetnews.com. The first access points are now operational since July 15. This solar-powered network is composed of four dual units and needed only $10,000 to be deployed. And the company which developed this new kind of wireless access points, Lumin, is thinking to make portable and secure wireless networks in developing countries. Update (August 15, 2005): Jamais Cascio notes on WorldChanging that the Boulder’s solar wi-fi network is NOT the first one in the U.S.: for previous examples, check this entry at Daily Wireless.

Before going further, here is the official logo for this operation initiated by the Downtown Boulder Business Improvement District (BID) (Credit: BID).

You’ll find more details about this initiative by reading Surf for Free on the Bricks! and you’ll find other versions of the above logo on this informational flyer (PDF format, 2 pages, 569 KB).

Here are more details from internetnews.com about this project.

Lumin designed the units with more remote areas in mind, locations where there is little or no available power — obviously not the case in downtown Boulder. But the environmentally-friendly power source enticed the Pearl Street planners into becoming the first clients. The network cost $10,000 to deploy, but upkeep costs will essentially be nil. The rechargeable batteries need to be swapped out every so often, but the solar panels are built to run for 25-30 years.

Now, let’s look at the access points from Lumin.

Lumin’s first-generation product is the LightWave AP-1000 solar-powered access point, which comes in two models, single and dual. The Pearl Street deployment utilizes four dual units, each of which is located out of sight on a well-chosen rooftop, and features two hinged solar panels. (The single unit LightWave includes only one panel.) While each access point has a potential range of up to 30 miles, this deployment, which only covers a six-block area, required four APs due to the number of trees interfering with line-of-sight along the cobblestoned outdoor mall.

Below is a picture of one of these LightWave AP-1000 solar-powered wireless network access points mounted on a rock (Credit: Lumin LLC). And here is a link to a detailed description of the product.

I really like Boulder, but deploying solar-powered communication units there would not have been my first choice because of the weather which can be rainy or snowy. But the company says I’m wrong.

“The solar panels are so sophisticated that we can register a charge from the moon,” says Lumin co-founder Sally Lyon. “It’s a myth that it can only be used in the Southwest. In the complete, pitch black night is the only time when there’s no charge. On a cloudy day, it’s charging.”

“Even if you were in a complete snowstorm for a couple of days, you’ve still got a system running,” says Lyon. “The reality is, for all practical purposes, it’s a reliable system with an abundant energy source, and in the long term, it’s extremely cost-effective.”

And it can be exported too. After all, today’s company motto is “From Boulder To Baghdad.”

This first solar-powered wireless network went largely unnoticed outside Colorado. But several newspapers there mentioned it. Here are two links to articles from the Rocky Mountain News, “Solar WiFi: Boulder’s answer to surf and sun” and from the Denver Post, “16th St. Mall shopping for wireless.”

Sources: Naomi Graychase, internetnews.com, August 8, 2005, 2005; and various web sites

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There are few places outside South Korea where you can today access and transmit data at 100 megabits per second. Now, the Lightwave Architectures for the processing of Broadband Electronic Signals (LABELS) EU-funded project intends to bring data to European homes at speeds of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). In this article, IST Results writes that Spanish researchers have developed prototypes of optical Internet Protocol (IP) routers. In preliminary tests, which were using the existing fiber-optic infrastructure, they’ve already reached transfer rates of 20 Gbps with these IP routers and hope to reach 40 Gbps soon. If all goes well, this technology will be in your homes within five years.

Here is why the LABELS project was initiated.

“Consumers are soon going to want data streams of 100 megabits per second in their homes and eventually 1 gigabit per second,” says José Capmany, a researcher at Valencia Technical University in Spain and the coordinator of the IST programme-funded project. “There are two ways to do this: lay more cable, which involves public works and is expensive and disruptive, or create technologies that allow existing cable to be used to its utmost potential, which is what we are doing.”

LABELS is developing two key optoelectronic technologies to expand the capacity and speed of fixed-line communications using fibre-optic cables and to improve the processing of radio frequency (RF) signals in wireless networks. Both techniques overcome bottlenecks in the flow of data and, though still in the experimental stage, are proving their potential to vastly improve data flow right along the chain.

Let’s focus only here on the first technology.

In the case of fibre-optic networks, the LABELS project is developing a groundbreaking technique to transmit data faster while using fewer resources. The system is expected to play a role in a future generation of optical Internet Protocol (IP) routers, as opposed to the electronic ones in use today. The major advantage of using light wave architectures for processing is that they can send and receive data over multiple wavelengths as opposed to the single bandwidth that electronic systems are confined to, allowing the full potential of optical networks to be utilised.

The LABELS technique relies on subcarrier multiplexing and label swapping in packet data transfer, allowing nodes at different stages along the network to change the wavelength at which the data is being carried. It is considerably more flexible than existing Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) techniques which, though increasing data transfer speeds, lock signals to specific wavelengths.

And is this multiplexing technique really working and why?

“Existing WDM systems work like a telephone call: you first have to make a connection and then the information is transmitted, which is fine if it is being used for a long duration of time. It is not optimally suited to sending data over the Internet in packets, however, which is precisely what has made IP so successful and which is what we are applying in the optical domain,” Capmany says.

Preliminary tests of the LABELS system, which will be fully evaluated later this year in Valencia, have surpassed even the project’s own goals regarding data transfer rates. “We set out to achieve a rate of 10 Gbps but we saw that we could actually reach 20 Gbps with the current system,” the coordinator notes. “With further development that could even be expanded to 40 Gbps and beyond.”

Still, you’ll have to wait until 2010 before watching a movie with a transfer rate of one gigabit per second.

Finally, if you want more information, here is a link to a page which contains links to several publications about this project.

Source: IST Results, August 3, 2005

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City street networks are similar to other information networks, such as the Internet or social networks. Street and roads are the links while the crossroads are the nodes of these networks. So it is tempting to use physics to map city complexity, as is reporting Technology Research News. Several physicists from Sweden and Denmark have compared the complexity of finding an address in Manhattan and in several Swedish cities. Not surprisingly, Manhattan, with its checkered grid plan, is easier to navigate than the older European cities. The scientists think their model could be “used to allow city planners to see how street changes affect navigability.” But as cities don’t change very fast, it’s doubtful that this method can be used efficiently anytime soon. But read more…

Here is how Technology Research News describes the method used.

The information needed to navigate in a city can be used to quantify and compare the complexity of cities, said Martin Rosvall, a researcher at Umeå University [in Sweden]. The method could eventually be used to allow city planners to see how street changes affect navigability and could also be used to make other types of networks — like supermarket aisles and airways — work more efficiently, he said.

The researchers’ model assumes that a person traveling along the streets of the city gets all travel directions in the form of the sequence of roads that lead to the target road. In networking terms, these sequences are sets of nodes linked by intersections. From this perspective, all roads are the same regardless of how long they are. The number of intersections between roads is the measure of the information distance between them. This makes sense intuitively; the more turns there are along a route, the harder it is to follow.

The illustration describes the process used by the researchers (Credit: Martin Rosvall and his colleagues).

This figure illustrates a visitor’s perspective of an unknown city (a). The visitor asks a citizen about the way to a specific street. The citizen answers based on its perspective of the city as in (b), or rather the higher abstraction level in (c). This level is the dual map of the city, a network where streets are identified as nodes and intersections between streets as links between the nodes. We use this level to quantify the search information in (d): The minimum number of yes/no questions (bits) the visitor must ask the citizen to find a specific street (log₂ 36 bits from s to t).

Let’s move back to the Technology Research News article.

The model shows each main road as a central hub and each crossroad as a peripheral node connected to the hub. A grid of streets appears as a ring of nodes. Connections between streets form a many-pointed star inside the ring, with each of the star’s points meeting the ring at a node.

The researchers’ model confirmed the widely-held view that the roads of Manhattan are simpler in terms of information handling than cities with complicated road-construction histories. “Historical cities have an overabundance of short streets that make the cities more complex in the sense that they increase the information distance between streets,” said Rosvall.

In “The urban maze,” published on August 13, 2004 by Nature, Philip Ball, who read an early publication of this research work, added that you “don’t [have to] feel bad if you often get lost in cities.”

Rosvall, of Umeå University in Sweden, and his co-workers have tried to figure out why it is so hard for us to find our way around cities. Of course, the obvious answer is that cities have a lot of streets. And particularly if you live in an old city like London or Athens, those streets are messily arranged. But it turns out that the problem is a lot worse than that.

And he explains why the researchers have found it was more difficult to navigate a real city than a randomized one.

The crucial characteristic that complicates cities seems to be their inhomogeneity. A random network is more or less equally random everywhere. But cities, especially ones with a long history, have local “islands” of dense interconnections, containing streets that are hidden away in corners.

The research work has been published by Physical Review Letters on January 19, 2005 under the name “Networks and Cities: An Information Perspective.” Here is a link to the abstract.

Traffic is constrained by the information involved in locating the receiver and the physical distance between sender and receiver. We here focus on the former, and investigate traffic in the perspective of information handling. We replot the road map of cities in terms of the information needed to locate specific addresses and create information city networks with roads mapped to nodes and intersections to links between nodes. These networks have the broad degree distribution found in many other complex networks. The mapping to an information city network makes it possible to quantify the information associated with locating specific addresses.

The full paper is also available on line, either in a short version (PDF format, 1 page, 206 KB) or a longer one (PDF format, 4 pages, 237 KB).

The above illustration comes from the short version of this technical paper.

Sources: Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News, June 29/July 6, 2005; and various web sites

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It’s a well-known fact that GPS devices perform better in rural areas than in urban ones, especially because their signals bounce upon buildings. This is not the case with Wi-Fi networks. So why not applying the concept of triangulation, central to GPS localization, to Wi-Fi? In “One more way to find yourself,” the Boston Globe tells us the story of a start-up company, Skyhook Wireless, which is using Wi-Fi networks to provide location-based services (LBS). When you’re walking or driving, your laptop or PDA can get the ID number of several Wi-Fi access points stored in Skyhook Wireless database, even if the signal is not strong enough to provide a connection. With these IDs, the company will plot a map of where you are. Neat idea, but will it work if people move from an area to another one, taking away their access points with them? Read more…

Let’s start with a diagram comparing the relative performances of the GPS and Wi-Fi signals depending on the area where you are. (Credit: Skyhook Wireless)

Here is a general description of the idea behind the Skyhook Wireless concept.

Their idea: map all of the known WiFi networks in a metropolitan area, then create software that would calculate a user’s location based on the WiFi networks his laptop (or any other WiFi-fluent device, like a PocketPC) could “see” at a given moment. [...] The more networks it can see simultaneously, the more accurate the locational fix. “If you can tune in to five to 10 access points, you can figure your accuracy within 20 to 30 meters,” Morgan says one of the founders.

In a city such as Boston and its suburbs,the company already has identified more than 50,000 Wi-Fi networks, which should be enough to find several access points near your location.

Here is how the system works.

A user of Skyhook’s software doesn’t actually need to log on to any of the WiFi networks to figure her position, and some of the networks may well be password-protected. But every WiFi base station will send out an ID number when hit with a blast of radio-frequency energy from the WiFi card inside a laptop or hand-held computer. And even if the signal is too weak for a laptop to connect to, it can still get the ID, which it then compares to Skyhook’s database and plots on a map.

Below is an illustration showing how the client part of the Skyhook Wireless system works. (Credit: Skyhook Wireless)

Here is how the company summarizes how the client part works: “Wireless device receives signals from Wi-Fi sites in range; Skyhook software compares these signals to its database of geographically known locations; and location data is used to direct safety services, provide driving directions and local information, etc.”

You’ll find larger images of these illustrations in the technology pages of Skyhook Wireless.

This new approach is certainly promising, but the company will need to constantly monitor the Wi-Fi networks to check for new ones or others which move from one location to another.

Anyway, I bet that we’ll see a mix of several technologies to guide us: GPS devices, cellphones triangulation, and LGS based on Wi-Fi networks.

Sources: Scott Kirsner, for the Boston Globe, May 23, 2005; and Skyhook Wireless website

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Based on ideas taken from Wikipedia and dodgeball, Cellphedia allows its members to broadcast questions to its community and receive answers, using SMS text messaging on cell phones. Here is how it works, according to “Cellphedia Melds Facts with Mobile Smart Mobs” from E-Commerce Times. First, you register for free on the site and you indicate what are your subjects of interest. If you want to ask a question, it is sent to all the members who expressed interest in this particular subject. Finally, the first answer received by Cellphedia is sent back to you. This means that later answers, which could have been more accurate, are discarded. But this service is still very young and its creator is working hard to improve it. Read more…

Here is a general description of this service, created by Limor Garcia as part of her thesis while at New York University.

Inspired by Wikipedia, the all-volunteer, online community encyclopedia, and Dodgeball, a cell phone-based social networking service, Cellphedia allows its members to broadcast questions to its community and receive answers, all through a mobile phone.

Registration for the service is free at the Cellphedia Web site. After registering, members choose areas that they’re interested in — art, architecture, food, music, etc. A member can ask a question in any area, but the questions go to people who have chosen the area as one that interests them.

Questions and answers are sent and received using SMS on your cell phone. And as I wrote above, only the first answer received by CellPhedia is sent back to the person who asked a question.

Unlike Wikipedia, answers to questions via Cellphedia aren’t subjected to community review to assess their accuracy. And while multiple members might answer a question, only the first answer received by the system is forwarded to an inquirer.

Garcia noted that group editing of answers is her next priority for the service. “I’m going to open it up for people to correct answers as well,” she said.

Interviewed for this article, Howard Rheingold, from Smart Mobs, said that Cellphedia was another example of the convergence between technologies such as cell phone, computers and Internet.

“The phone gives you instant communication wherever you are,” he explained. “And the Internet enables you to connect with people who share an interest. Combining that gives you the ability to create something like Wikipedia with a social network.”

“It remains a question about whether she’s going to get a sufficient critical mass,” he noted. “Wikipedia works because there’s a sufficient number of people working on it.”

Now, let’s look at some examples of questions and answers stored on the Cellphedia central server. As you can see, there are all kinds of requests.

• Short question, short answer
  Q: age new pope
  A: 78
  


• Short question, long answer
  Q: what’s a phreak
  A: a phreak is someone who is highly skilled in the use of phone systems. phreaksare considered a subset of hackers.
  


• Long question, short answer
  Q: does someone know how to install osx tiger on to an ipod for later installation on an ibook?
  A: not possible
  


• A question without answer
  Q: where can i find info on time travel?
  

For another point of view about this service, you can read this article from Wired News, “Put Some Wisdom in Your Pocket.”

And please keep in mind that the service is still young, so it remains to be seen if it can reach a ‘critical mass’ and become a hit.

Sources: John P. Mello Jr., E-Commerce Times, May 19, 2005; and various websites

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If you’re inside a building, a GPS receiver cannot find you. But a $40 radio chip from Rosum Corporation will do it, with the help of TV signals. This start-up says that TV signals are 10,000 times stronger than GPS signals according to this article from Mercury News. Right now, these chips are at the prototype stage, but navigation products able to track an individual within a city should be available next year. And Rosum even thinks to integrate these radio chips in future cell phones. Meanwhile, the military envision to use the technology as a full GPS backup system or to track soldiers in dangerous environments. Obviously, privacy advocates warn that the technology could be used to locate and track people without their consent. Considering that one of Rosum’s investors is In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, we should look at this technology with caution. Read more…

Please read the full article for a complete background. Below are only short excerpts about the technology itself.

James Spilker, one of the original architects of the GPS satellite and founder of Stanford Telecommunications, launched Rosum in 2000 with Stanford University engineering Professor Matthew Rabinowtiz. They realized a synchronization feature in digital and analog television signals could be used for other purposes than to lock the vertical hold for older TVs.

The engineers created a radio receiver chip that could zero in on the TV signal and get the synchronization information. Using precision timing, they figure out how far a TV signal travels before it is picked up by a device equipped with Rosum chips. Next, they compare the measurements against other data that they collect with their own listening stations and then finally calculate the device’s position. The Rosum engineers call this process “multilateration,” which is akin to navigational triangulation.

To set up this system, customers have to put Rosum’s radio chips and the modules that house them into their equipment. These modules, about as big as a matchbook, cost about $40 to make, but could become cheaper and smaller over time with high-volume production. One of the main computational tasks of these devices do is to filter out the wrong signals, such as ghost images that have been reflected off of an object.

Below is a diagram showing the Rosum TV-GPS system components (Credit: Rosum Corporation on this page) about their technology.

The Rosum RTMM is a chipset which can be integrated into the user device to be located or tracked. The RTMM contains a TV tuner module, a digital signal processing module, and other supporting glue logic and memory.

And according to these examples, the technology really works.

Rosum’s vice president of engineering, Greg Flammel, says tests of the technology show it can track someone in the basement floor of the San Francisco Public Library. It also found a person in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district.

So a question remains. If the technology works so well, can it be used by anyone to look after any other person?

Kurt Opsahl, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, said Rosum apparently will operate a location server that will be able to record the movement history of any device being tracked. If the Rosum technology eventually is built into cell phones or other popular gadgets, the government could subpoena Rosum’s customers to track anyone’s movements.

“This is another step toward a surveillance society,” said Opsahl. “They could get your traffic patterns. This is fairly sensitive information.”

Right now, if you want to spy on a specific person without his approval, you need to obtain a court order. So we might be safe from this intrusion for a while…

Sources: Dean Takahashi, Mercury News, May 9, 2005; and various websites

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If you use a webcam to talk with your mom, this tool is not for you. But if you’re working for a company and that you have to routinely discuss about sensitive future projects or the possible acquisition of another company, you need more security, and this new video conferencing system based on quantum cryptography is a tool you need. According to this article from Nature, researchers from Toshiba have developed a system which can generate 100 quantum ‘keys’ every second, fast enough to protect every frame in a video exchange. This technology, which today is working over a distance of about 120 kilometers, could become commercially available within two years at an initial cost of $20,000. Read more…

Here is the introduction from Nature.

Scientists from Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Laboratory unveiled their invention to business leaders and government officials at Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry in London on 27 April.

Their system is capable of generating 100 quantum ‘keys’ every second. This is fast enough for every individual frame of video to be protected by its own encryption. “This makes the system highly secure,” says Andrew Shields, who leads the Cambridge team. “It would take an enormous computational resource to crack this frame by frame.”

Of course, today’s videoconferencing tools using conventional encryption are already pretty secure. But if the NSA wants to check your conversation, I bet it can. With quantum cryptography, this is a different story.

Quantum cryptography promises to stop such eavesdroppers. The system works by first establishing a ‘key’ that provides instructions on how to decode an incoming message. This key is built into the quantum state of photons. Intercepting a message breaks the key and alerts the sender and intended recipient to the security breach, because the very act of observing a quantum state changes it.

The Quantum Information Group at Toshiba gives more details on this subject on this page about Security from Eavesdropping. Below is a diagram illustrating the concept (Credit: Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Laboratory).

Using single photons to carry the bit material for the key prevents undetected eavesdropping. Because each bit is carried by a single photon, it is not possible for a hacker to tap in and remove part of the signal, as shown in the illustration. Single photons do not split, so if the hacker (Eve) measures the photons on the fibre, they will not reach the intended recipient (Bob). Only the photons that arrive at Bob are used to form the key, so Eve cannot gain any useful information by this crude ‘tapping’ attack.

The first commercial applications of quantum cryptography are now about one year old. However, this new system offers new levels of performances, according to Nature.

Unlike previous systems, which become unreliable when they heat up, this device can run continuously for more than four weeks, says Shields. The quantum information can only go so far before being corrupted by random interactions with surrounding material, however. “We’ve shown this can work over 120 kilometres of fibre,” says Shields.

Toshiba has already built a Quantum Cryptography Prototype. And the research work has been published by Applied Physics Letters (Vol. 84, Issue 19, Pages 3762-3864, May 10, 2004) under the title “Quantum key distribution over 122 km of standard telecom fiber.” Here is a link to the abstract.

We report a demonstration of quantum key distribution over a standard telecom fiber exceeding 100 km in length. Through careful optimization of the interferometer and single photon detector, we achieve a quantum bit error ratio of 8.9% for a 122 km link, allowing a secure shared key to be formed after error correction and privacy amplification. Key formation rates of up to 1.9 kbit/s are achieved depending upon fiber length. We discuss the factors limiting the maximum fiber length in quantum cryptography.

Finally, here is a link to the full paper (PDF format, 14 pages, 68 KB).

Sources: Mark Peplow, Nature, April 28, 2005; Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Laboratory website

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Cryptography
  
  
• Networking
  
  
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In a very well-documented article, Computerworld describes the current status of building automation systems (BAS) that control heat, air conditioning or lighting and how these systems are merging with traditional IT infrastructures. Computerworld writes that they’re not enough standards in this industry and asks a fundamental question: who will administer these building networks, IT or facilities managers? Take for example Yale University which wants to connect 210 campus buildings, but also wishes “to integrate the BAS with the university’s accounting system for billing and chargeback.” Imagine the security risks involved with such an approach. Read more…

Let’s start with a an assessment of the current situation.

As building automation systems (BAS) that control heat, air conditioning, lighting and other building systems get smarter, they’re converging with traditional IT infrastructures. Emerging standards are enabling data sharing between building systems as well as with other business applications, improving efficiency and real-time control over building operating costs. Information security concerns, immature standards, the reluctance of vendors to give up proprietary technologies and ignorance among IT professionals of the convergence trend are all slowing the pace of this transformation, but it’s gathering momentum.

But who will control such networks? And are there enough standards in this industry?

Open standards are just beginning to evolve and will likely break down the silos between building systems ranging from physical security to elevator controls. And the data from those systems is likely to be shared with other business applications such as the accounting system. This will allow for more-efficient buildings as applications are developed that can capitalize on newly converged data streams and real-time access to data.

[Right now,] standardization has started from the bottom up. Proprietary cabling systems in networks that link sensors and other devices to controllers on individual floors have given way in recent years to two competing, open protocols, BACnet and LonTalk, while floor controllers are migrating onto IP backbones.

Barry Haaser, executive director of LonMark International, says LonTalk and BACnet will prevail at the device level for technical and cost reasons. Others aren’t so sure. “Instead of two guys running the IT and controls networks, why not one guy? I see IP going down to the individual device,” says Anno Scholten, chief technology officer at BAS vendor Plexus Technology Ltd. in Irving, Texas.

Let’s take the example of Yale University to see how complex can be the merge between control systems and IT infrastructure.

But sharing the IP backbone raises security concerns among network administrators. Yale University is starting a project to consolidate its BAS onto an IP network that will link 210 campus buildings, and it plans to tie the BAS into a room-scheduling system that will automatically control energy usage based on room occupancy. For security reasons, Bill Daniels, manager of systems and technologies for the university’s facilities group, has created an isolated, parallel network that’s protected by firewalls and uses nonroutable IP addresses to keep data off the Internet.

Jerry Hill, director of systems engineering at Yale, says security is paramount. “We don’t want a student to hack into our building management systems just because they can,” he says.

The problem is that Daniels wants to integrate the BAS with the university’s accounting system for billing and chargeback.

One thing is sure: I wouldn’t apply for an IT security job at Yale University. Too many nightmares…

Finally, this must-read article looks at how web technologies are used in building automation systems, such as the use of encrypted XML messages via SOAP to control heat and lights at an airport gate when needed.

Source: Robert L. Mitchell, Computerworld, March 14, 2005; and various websites

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In this long article, CIO Magazine reports that some cities, such as Indianapolis, are creating regional health information networks to share medical records between doctors and hospitals to save lives and money. In the example of Indianapolis, the “emergency rooms of the city’s five major hospital groups share patient data via an electronic medical network,” and 1,300 doctors have partial access to this network. The first goal of such networks is of course to save lives, but in the case of central Indiana, it also could save more than $500 million per year. Of course, there are many hurdles to overcome, many of them financial: finding money to fund the networks or convincing doctors to invest in new technologies. But the two biggest obstacles are human. First, less than a doctor over five is currently using electronic medical records (EMRs). And obviously, in our world where banks and payroll companies more or less routinely see some of their records leaked to the general public or even criminals, it’s a little bit scary to think about your medical records flying over not so secure networks. But read more…

Let’s focus on the Indianapolis example first.

In Indianapolis, the emergency rooms of the city’s five major hospital groups share patient data via an electronic medical network. And more than 1,300 doctors in the metropolitan area use an electronic messaging service, which is an extension of the ER system, to share laboratory results and other clinical information about their patients.

In Indianapolis, the three hospitals linked up to a pilot electronic medical network saved $26 per ER visit. And as the medical data-sharing system expands, the central Indiana region could save $562 million per year in health-care costs, says Dr. Marc Overhage, CEO of the nonprofit Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), formed to oversee that region’s data-sharing network.

Of course, it’s not that easy. You need to find money to deploy these networks, and many large departments of health or hospitals in the U.S. put their cash into other projects they think have higher priorities. And there also some local politics. Look at this example.

Doctors aren’t the only barriers to electronic information sharing. Over the past four years, those working to build Indianapolis’s medical data exchange have faced multiple roadblocks. According to Edward Koschka, CIO of the Community Health Network (a group of five hospitals in the Indianapolis area), the clinical messaging project was “doomed for failure” at three points over the past two years. The first time was when hospital CIOs met in June 2002 to talk about collaborating. “Everyone said, Wait a minute — this conflicts with my strategic plan for my hospital,” Koschka recalls. His team devoted three meetings to convincing the CIOs that they needed to collaborate on clinical messaging in order to reduce costs.

It’s also hard to convince doctors to invest money in these regional health networks.

Doctors must pay anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 to buy hardware and software and transfer their paper records to an EMR, says Dr. David Bates, chief of general medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston and a member of the organization working toward a statewide clinical data exchange in Massachusetts. Bates expects that insurers will reward doctors who share electronic records by paying them higher rates once they’ve installed the systems.

And it should be the hardest part, considering that doctors are not really using such systems today.

The biggest obstacle to medical information sharing, however, is the way that most doctors currently practice medicine. Right now, only 5 percent to 15 percent of doctors use electronic medical records (EMRs), and many physicians work in small practices with few extra resources or ties to large medical institutions. Doctors in such small practices don’t have the financial incentive to invest in the expensive hardware and software necessary to link into an electronic medical network.

But even if such medical networks are built, and save lives and money, will you trust them? Will your medical records be safe? Here is a doctor’s answer.

For Dr. Pierson in Whatcom County, the key to guaranteeing patient confidentiality is to offer patients and providers an audit trail of who has looked at the records. Under Whatcom County’s “shared care plan,” doctors and patients and their families have access to computerized records, and patients can note changes in symptoms or medications. If there is a breach in patient privacy, those responsible must be harshly punished, he says. “If someone breaches, they lose their job. There have to be significant penalties.”

So what’s your take? Do you think this kind of medical networks should expand? One personal clue: my answer is yes.

Source: Susannah Patton, CIO Magazine, March 1, 2005 Issue

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I’ve read several very interesting stories about social networking recently. In “From Contact to Contract” (neat title), Employee Management writes that many entrepreneurs and even professional recruiters are using services such as LinkedIn, Ryze.com, Spoke.com, or one of the two other dozen social networking sites to fill professional positions, even executive ones. Of course, human resources consulting firms are still also relying on more traditional tools, like their ‘real’ social networks. But in “‘Social Web’ Has Far To Go, But Much Promise,” the American Reporter is more skeptical about the usability of these social networking sites, saying that they are making contacts more difficult instead of easier. And Stowe Boyd, from Corante, concurs, by unlinking from social networking applications he subscribed to in a recent past (links to part 1 and to part 2). So what do you think about these applications? Have you ever used one? And if yes, have you seen some benefits? Read more before answering these questions…

Let’s start with the positive side, as reported by Employee Management.

“These tools take networking to the next level,” says Gerry Crispin, principal of CareerXroads, a human resources consulting firm in Kendall Park, N.J., and president of the New Jersey Metro Employment Management Association, a Society for Human Resource Management chapter. “These [sites] are no more than advanced databases that are extremely user-friendly.”

May be they are user-friendly, but are they efficient?

While the sites can be user-friendly, return-on-investment can vary. Social networking sites are best for finding passive candidates and for filling positions that are too specialized to be filled via traditional methods, users say.

Although LinkedIn boasts 1.2 million members, Crispin says fewer than 5 percent of corporate recruiters use social networking sites. The reason, he says, is partly because the sites are relatively new — most having started in the past three years — but also because it is easier to rely on traditional, familiar methods.

But recruiters are still experimenting new methods.

“The best recruiters I know say, ‘I use it some. I find people on LinkedIn, then I Google them and contact them myself,’” says Don Steiny, president of The Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy, a California-based nonprofit that studies social networking applications. “The best recruiters I know are fearless, and they’re just going to call them up.”

This long article also tells us about the dark side of social networking sites: sharing information.

“I don’t mind sharing that information with friends, but if it’s coming from a business computer, who else has access and how are they using it?” says says Susanne Wetzel, a computer science professor at The Stevens Institute for Technology in Hoboken, N.J., who specializes in computer security. “Too much of our information is floating around out there, and technology is becoming more and more sophisticated.”

Andy Oram, for the American Reporter looks less to privacy and more to ineffiencies.

I expect most members of online social networks are as inactive as I am, having tried them out and been unimpressed. For one thing, these networks are technologically rudimentary. They rely heavily on email, which is a reasonable place for a new medium to begin because it’s universal among Internet users. But how primitive email appears next to other ways of communicating! [...] Eventually, to really take off, social networks should provide alternatives to email rather than relying on it.

Second, the current offerings of social networks are imitations of things already available on the Internet: newsgroup, searches, and chat. There’s nothing here you can’t get elsewhere. The draw is not what you do on the social network, but whom you have a chance of doing it with.

This leads to the third major problem I’ve found with social networks: they make contacts more difficult instead of easier. Yes, broadcasting to friends of friends is trivially easy, so much so that I’ve tried to avoid checking my account because there’s so many irrelevant messages (often in languages I can’t read). But if I want to target someone for a specific purpose, I find it much easier to use a search engine or a private network of informal contacts than to go through the slow and unreliable process provided by the social network.

So Andy Oram is not very positive. But what do you think of Stowe Boyd, which writes in Corante that he’s totally giving up with these social networking sites? Here are some short quotes about his motivations.

I have participated in the various public social networks only passively — responding to others requests to connect, and occasionally passing along a request to connect to some contact.

I have wound up getting dozens of requests each month in the various networks by people more than two degrees away trying to reach people more than two degrees away, where I have little social capital involved, and I uniformally have been turning down those requests. In essence, these are a form of spam.

And as Boyd says, it’s not always easy to exit such a network.

I am annoyed that the SNAs [Social Networking Applications] don’t provide opt out at every juncture: please don’t involve me in requests like this, please don’t allow this person to contact me. please don’t contact me ever. The services vary widely in this regard. I was able to drop out of LinkedIn within a 24 hour period, although it does require sending a message to customer support.

I know, I’m asking you to read lots of interesting thoughts. But please do it before answering the above questions about the interest of social networking sites.

Are you using them or planning to dump them? Have they been useful for you? Have you ever fill a very long form asking for your interests? Finally, do you think these sites should be more user-friendly? Please post your comments below.

Sources: Lisa Daniel, for Employee Management, Winter 2005, Vol. 10, No. 1; Andy Oram, The American Reporter, Vol. 11, No. 2,588, February 23, 2005; Stowe Boyd, Corante, February 24 and February 28, 2005

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A Japanese designer has developed a mannequin robot, Palette, which can adapt its movements to the shoppers passing in front of it, according to this article from Agence France-Presse (AFP), “Striking a robotic pose.” Using motion-capture technology, Palette will be able to act as a supermodel. And with its specialized sensors and software, it also will be able to identify the sex and age of shoppers before transmitting them to store owners for marketing purposes. The price has not been set yet, but Palette should go on sale in 2005 in two versions: a body without legs to showcase clothings, and a torso model for jewelry. Read more…

Here is a short description of Palette.

“Mannequins have been static but this will pose for the nearest person by sensing his or her position,” robot designer Tatsuya Matsui told a news conference.

“It makes the product the mannequin wears look more attractive, increasing consumers’ appetite to buy,” said Matsui, who heads Flower Robotics Inc.

The female robot, code-named Palette, can draw inspiration from the world’s most beautiful women, using motion-capture technology to replay the movements of supermodels.

Palette will not only be a mannequin, it will be a spying marketing tool.

Palette will double up as an industrial spy, with the maker planning to program it to judge the age and sex of shoppers and even identify the bags they are carrying and pass along the information to stores for marketing purposes.

Matsui developed Palette with software company SGI Japan Ltd. and aim to start selling it this year for the fashion and service industries.

The price has not been set yet but SGI wants to make it “as close as possible to that of conventional mannequins,” said Hiroshi Otsuka, who is in charge of new business promotion at SGI Japan.

[Disclaimer: I worked in the past for SGI, but right now, I don't have any ties with this company.]

From what you can see in the above image, Palette has no human face, but it’s intentional.

“Consumer attention would be diverted to the face if there were one,” said Matsui, the designer, noting he wanted customers to focus on the clothes or jewellery the mannequin wears.

And as noted above, Palette will initially come in two versions, but Matsui might introduce other models in the future, such as male or child versions.

Sources: Agence France-Presse, via Independent Online, South Africa, February 28, 2005; and various websites

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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

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After a patient has been hospitalized for a surgical intervention, he usually wants to return to his normal life. But doctors would like to monitor him to be sure that the operation was successful. How can they manage this without being too intrusive? In “Health Care Monitoring of Mobile Patients,” Italian researchers offer a three-layer networking solution. First, a body area sensor network would continuously record your cardiac activity or your body temperature. A second level would involve a home sensor network, including for example a PC wirelessly receiving this information. Finally, this home network would be able to alert an hospital network if needed. Right now, this whole idea is at the proof-of-concept level, but it really looks promising. Read more…

How can you monitor patients without asking them to come back weekly at the hospital after a cardiac surgery? The answer of the researchers from two different institutes of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in Pisa, the Istituto di Fisiologia Clinica (IFC) and the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI) is to integrate several networks, from one located next to the patient, to remote ones, in hospitals which might be located in another part of the country.

The inner layer which provides monitoring support is organized as a body area sensor network. This network, hosted by the patient, combines the patient’s physiological data with information from the outer layers to support (basic) early diagnosis and produce (basic) alerts.

The outer layer (for example the patient’s domotic network) may include an environmental sensor network and one or more powerful nodes. Examples of such nodes could be an electrocardiograph offering diagnostic information or a PC receiving all the data and managing an advanced monitoring and alert detection service.

This layer interacts with outermost layer (the hospital network) to exchange physiological data, alerts and patient-related data. Wireless connections should be used where possible to support mobility and adaptability at the various levels of the network.

The system has been designed to minimize the burden of sensors on the patients and to optimize the amount of data to be transmitted over the different networks.

Of course, transmitting such sensitive data on public networks needs secure protocols. And the researchers are working on it.

Future work includes the study of dependable and secure communication protocols to connect the body area sensor network with domotic and hospital networks. These protocols should ensure confidentiality and protection against the transmission of malicious queries.

What do you think of this idea?

Source: Giuseppe Amato, Stefano Chessa, Fabrizio Conforti, Alberto Macerata and Carlo Marchesi, ERCIM News No. 60, January 2005

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