Exploring the future with modern information technology

European researchers are seeking to create a global computer model named FuturICT, a collective analysis platform for a better understanding of the world. The visionary idea is to design this knowledge accelerator in order to make better predictions about imminent techno-socio-economic crises and suggestions on how to alleviate or even prevent them.

Among other things, the 'FuturICT' project is looking to model what impact political decisions have globally on society, the environment and the economy (image source: www.futurict.eu)

Among other things, the 'FuturICT' project is looking to model what impact political decisions have globally on society, the environment and the economy (image source: www.futurict.eu)

Never before has mankind faced challenges as great as those of today. Climate change, destruction of the environment, conflicts, crises on the financial markets, and many more, are all problems linked to human behaviour. They are not isolated from each other, but interconnected with one another and interdependent in a complicated way. No human being can entirely comprehend this complexity, and much less foresee the consequences that social or economic activities will have elsewhere in the world.

A group of researchers, led by complexity scientist Dirk Helbing from ETH Zurich, has now proposed a visionary project, FuturICT, with which they want to address these big challenges. The project will develop a platform – the “Living Earth Simulator” – that allows techno-commercial-sociological-ecological systems to be simulated and analysed, to investigate, for example, how political or economic decisions affect our world. The computer model is planned to be capable of simulating systems on a global scale, considering interactions between up to 10 billion individuals.

A knowledge accelerator is needed

Scientific project coordinator Dirk Helbing says, “We need this knowledge accelerator to enable better informed decisions that are to be made in a techno-socio-economic-ecological context.” The “Living Earth Platform” is designed, amongst other things, to help minimise, or even prevent, unwanted side effects. For example, bio-fuel production has unexpectedly led to food price increases by competing with the conventional use of cultivated acreages. The consequence was, and still is, social unrest in various parts of the world.

The fact that the time is ripe for this project is illustrated by the financial crisis, which caused dramatic losses within a very short time period and would have ruined whole nations without global intervention and the European rescue system stepping in. It shows that economists and financial specialists failed to recognise the imminent dangers early enough, and were unable to keep the risks sufficiently under control. This is also why voices calling for better models, particularly models of systemic risks, are becoming louder.

However, FuturICT aims not only to recognise imminent financial or economic crises at an early stage, but also to link different areas together. Various “Crisis Observatories” dealing with financial markets, the real economy, epidemics, conflicts or environmental changes, will be integrated into one “Living Earth Platform”.

With EU flagships to new knowledge horizons

The initiative still exists only as a research proposal submitted to the EU Research Commission. FuturICT currently stands in first place among the 26 submitted projects. It is planned that the winning project will receive one billion euros over ten years. The Commission will make the final choice in 2012. Until then, the researchers have time to work out their applications in detail, for which the EU Commission has provided 1.5 million euros.

One billion euros sounds like a lot of money. However, major projects in physics (CERN, ITER), the engineering sciences (Galileo) or biology (Human Genome Project) are often ten times as expensive, and up to now, the financial crisis has cost more than a thousand times as much. The duration and size of the project also put this figure into perspective: hundreds of researchers are taking part in FuturICT to fill the serious knowledge gaps about our techno-socio-economic systems, as quickly as possible.

A perfect example of interdisciplinarity

The project’s alignment will be exceptionally interdisciplinary and will combine a broad spectrum of scientific expertise to overcome specialisation and ivory tower thinking. Computer scientists, ICT experts, and complexity scientists are needed, as well as economists, sociologists, and experts in sustainability and systemic risks. The purpose of this collaboration is firstly, to lead to a new renaissance of the social and economic sciences and secondly, to lead to a harmonious, sustainable “co-evolution” of technology and society through the development of information and communication systems that adapt to their users’ needs.

Success in this venture needs, in particular, a modern platform that can record and analyse gigantic amounts of data, transfer them into computer simulations and make them usable by everyone. That is also why the term ICT, which stands for “Information and Communication Technologies”, appears in the project title. Operating the Living Earth Simulator needs data sets collected in real time, as well as new approaches to data mining.

The data sources can be population statistics, for example, as well as freely accessible Internet data. This also shows one of the difficulties that the researchers must deal with: how much and which data does this kind of model really need? Helbing assures that “we don’t collect just all the data that is available, otherwise one would drown in a sea of data.”

Big Science, not Big Brother Science

FuturICT is definitely not intended to be a citizen surveillance instrument either, he explains. Quite the opposite: the scientists want to use this project to point out new pathways and solutions to enable better privacy protection in the digital age. Helbing says, “we have no interest in what individuals are doing, the aim is to understand the bigger picture.”

For example, FuturICT could inform us about the effects of the Japanese earthquake on the global supply and production network or on social cohesion. Social upheavals, migration, conflicts – there’s a certain interconnection between all of them. Dirk Helbing says, “We want to use FuturICT to gain a better understanding of these relationships to enable better, more sustainable decisions in the future, because global interdependencies have increased enormously. Had we understood them, it is unlikely that a financial crisis of this magnitude would have emerged.”

The ETH Zurich professor and the research community behind FuturICT also aim to use the project and the planned participatory platforms to strengthen democracy. “Most of all, technological development should not endanger democracy”, he says. That is why FuturICT will, among other things, be concerned with how data that is freely available on the Internet can and should be handled. “There is still no consensus between the economy and society here.” He does not at all share the opinion that privacy is an obsolete concept in the digital age. He says, “a society cannot function without the privacy of the individual. The public and private spheres are two sides of the same coin; the public domain is definable only by drawing a boundary between it and privacy.”

Privacy and individual participation taken seriously

Helbing points out the particular challenge is to develop new technical methods of data encryption, storage and processing that allow the kind of data mining that benefits individuals and society, but which also protects individual privacy and confidential commercial data. Nevertheless, it must remain possible to inspect data in a limited, democratically controlled way where this is necessary to combat corruption and terrorism. Until now there has been a lack of technical solutions that can satisfy all three requirements.

Furthermore, Helbing stresses “the main priority is to find ways of giving back control of personal data to the user”. The World Economic Forum is now making the same recommendation. He also emphasises that the research within the FuturICT project will have a strong emphasis on ethical questions and a clear code of values. He says, “FuturICT will give top priority to protecting sensitive data and will be fully transparent and democratically controlled. Among all the activities working with large volumes of data, this is the most transparent project. Without such a project it will hardly be possible to learn about the dangers of large data sets and to take effective action to protect society from these dangers”.

Finally, it is important to point out that FuturICT does not want to be a tool that is restricted to a number of privileged political or economic decision makers. Just like the Internet empowers individuals and small organizations with a global reach and unlimited access to information, the project intends to create a participatory platform allowing everyone to access and utilize the data and models developed by the project for their own purposes and applications. 

One billion for EU flagship programme

Under its seventh Research Framework Programme, the EU tendered for major projects, so-called flagship initiatives, in the field of Future and Emerging Technologies (FET). With the FET flagships, the EU is looking to promote large-scale, ambitious research projects with a visionary goal in information and communications technology (ICT) by offering EUR one billion over a period of ten years. Twenty-six consortiums submitted projects. In March this year the six most promising candidates were nominated, including two projects with considerable ETH-Zurich involvement: ‘FuturICT’ and ‘Guardian Angels’. The finalists their projects publicly at the second FET conference and exhibition in Budapest on 4-6 May. The research groups will then have until May 2012 to put together a detailed proposal, which the final decision will be based upon. The successful consortiums will finally be able to start work in 2013.

How Wearable Cameras Could Help Diagnose Dementia

 A new way to analyze the lifestream data from wearable cameras could lead to an objective measure of dementia. 

 

One of the problems with " life recorders", wearable video cameras that record your every movement, is making sense of the huge datasets they produce. Given a day's worth of inane footage--get up, wander into bathroom, brush teeth etc--what can you usefully do with it? 

Various groups have proposed that such ameras could make excellent aide memoires, immediately locating lost car keys and remembering old faces. They'd also allow you to relive memories with otherwise forgotten detail--what was she wearing the day we met?

That's all well and good but there is a serious practical problem. How can a computer make sense of the endless stream of footage? 

Scene change detection is relatively straight forward in many videos such as TV programs and movies because a scene change usually coincides with a change in the camera's perspective. All you have to do is look for theses changes, a task that is made easier if the images are well lit and have relatively little blur, as is the case in most professional recorded films. 

Life stream videos are different. Here the camera's perspective is always the same while the individual frames are often blurred by movement, washed out in scenes with too much light or blacked out in scenes with too little. All of this makes the task of scene change recognition that much harder. 

Today, Svebor Karaman et amis at the University of Bordeaux in France say they have taken a step towards solving this problem with a new way of categorising daily activities in footage taken from a shoulder-mounted camera. 

They define a scene as a sequence of frames in which the camera is relatively still, which they can easily determine by measuring trajectory of the corners of the image. They then categorise each sequence according to the colours present in the frames, which remain relatively constant even when the individual frames are blurred or dim. Finally, they manually label these scense with titles such as "moving in the kitchen" or "moving in home office" . 

A computer can then use this information to detect similar patterns elsewhere in the footage. The result is a reasonably accurate picture of the activities that an ordinary person caries out on a daily basis. 

That has at least one important application. The motivating factor for Karaman and co is to find an objective way of studying the patterns of behaviour of people with dementia.

An objective measure would be hugely useful. Doctors usually rely on the accounts given by relatives or carers whose perception of whether a patient is better or worse can be coloured by all kinds of other factors. The data from a lifestreaming camera, on the other hand, can tell you exactly how many times a patient visited the kitchen on Wednesday, for example, and how that compared to the same period six months ago.

The hope, say Karaman and co, is that this kind of data can be an important tool in evaluating the onset of dementia and the way it is advancing. 

But they will have their work cut out to make this technique useful. At the moment, their technique gives information about behaviour only on a relatively coarse scale and requires significant input from a human to help "train" the program to recognise places such as kitchens and home offices. All this is site specific and will have to be repeated in other home environments. 

Unless they can find a way to automate this process or at least make it much easier and faster, this will limit the appeal of this software. 

On the other hand, the software may be a hugely useful research tool. The detailed study of the behaviour of dementia patients could throw up other indicators that could be used in understanding the progression of the disease. And that could ultimately be its greatest value.

A Whole New Technology for A Whole New World

Micromachines for a Safer World

 TAU researchers develop improved MEMS devices for sport, electronics and defense

Tiny sensors known as accelerometers are everywhere. The near-weightless technology can measure the impact of a dangerous tackle on a football player's helmet, control the flow of highway and runway traffic, analyze a golf pro's swing, orient the next generation of smart phones, and keeping fighter jets and missiles on target.

And as sensing devices improve, the possibilities for what they can measure are infinite. Teams of Tel Aviv University scientists are at the heart of the tiny world of MEMS — microelectromechanical systems — to make these systems even smaller, cheaper, and more sensitive by marrying old-school mechanics with advanced electrical engineering.

"The widespread penetration of miniature MEMS sensors into the devices surrounding us is transforming our way of life," says Dr. Slava Krylov of Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Engineering, where his theoretical and practical work is leading to applications that could transform multiple industries.

Adding mechanics to electronics

In a recent publication of the IEEE Sensors Journal, he and his doctoral student Assaf Ya'akobovitz outlined ways to improve the sensitivity of accelerometers by using an efficient yet simple and manufacturable design, which can be applied in sport, communication, transportation and defense.

Dr. Krylov and Ya'akobovitz showed, theoretically and experimentally, how amplification techniques developed at their lab can be used for improving the performance of micro-accelerometers. Instead of electronically amplifying the extremely small signals produced by the accelerometer, the researchers incorporated a mechanical amplification, a sort of a miniature clock hand, in order to generate a larger signal output, thereby reducing the devices' noise and improving their sensitivity.

Today, Dr. Krylov points out, almost every kind of machine used in transportation and communication relies on accelerometers. They are applied in high-end navigation devices for airplanes and missiles, and built into iPhones as motion sensors. His latest advances in sensitivity enhancement could be applied to all of these current uses, and in lucrative and untapped business applications as well, he says. In the car safety industry alone, the market is worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Keeping space missions on track

Dr. Krylov's device architecture uses a tiny electrode, a silicon chip, and a mechanical transformer coupled with an optical sensor to amplify the tiniest changes in motion and acceleration. Currently, the device is about 1 millimeter in diameter, but it can be manufactured at an even smaller size than that. "It's always better to be smaller," he says, explaining that the accuracy of the devices is especially critical on space missions, when a fraction of distance and time can alter the course of a space vehicle or satellite forever.

Designed to be created in mass numbers for the mass market, Dr. Krylov is also taking the core technology from his accelerometers to be applied in new mind-boggling directions — to harvesting clean energy and in novel medical applications. But these developments, he says, are farther in the future.

A Whole New Technology for A Whole New World

The semantic web made easy

A tool developed by computer scientists from the UPM and the UAM paves the way for the web of the future

In partnership with the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid’s Department of Informatics Engineering, researchers from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s Ontology Engineering Group, based at the Facultad de Informática, have developed a tool that simplifies the use of the semantic web. The new tool, called Fortunata, can be used by developers, graphic designers and end users without an in-depth knowledge of informatics.

The semantic web, or data web, is based on the idea of adding semantic information to the Internet contents. The goal is to improve the Internet by extending interoperability among software systems. The end result will be intelligent agents, that is, software programs capable of searching and interrelating information without human operators.

A developer untrained in semantic web technologies can use this tool to create web applications that use and generate semantic data. The web applications developed using this infrastructure are no different in appearance or functionality from traditional web applications, and application users are unaware that they are using or generating semantic information.

Early experiments show that users find the applications generated with this infrastructure to be very usable and satisfactory to use, irrespective of their knowledge of informatics.

Advanced knowledge

Advanced knowledge of web technologies and semantic technologies needs to be combined to develop web applications that exploit the semantic web. This calls for highly specialized developers. However, the new infrastructure simplifies the development of semantic web applications by chunking the development task across less demanding professional profiles, allocating specific tasks to each profile and minimizing interdependencies.

The process for applying this new tool is as follows. Firstly, the web designer is responsible for creating semantic templates, capable of rendering semantic data (data presentation templates) or gathering data from the user (data capture templates) that will be converted into semantic data. The experiments show that, with a little training and without any knowledge of semantic technologies, graphic designers can easily create attractive web templates using the tools provided.

Secondly, the developer (web applications creator) uses these templates to create web applications that render and/or create semantic data. They can use these templates with any programming language and without any knowledge of semantic web technologies.

Even people with no more than a basic knowledge of web technologies can benefit from these semantic templates. A Google gadget has been developed that helps users to insert a template in any web page. This gadget is easy to configure by just specifying the location of the semantic data that are to be rendered and the template to be used.

Adaptation for mobile phones

In the future, semantic agents will be able to select the template best suited to each user and adapt to the user device (e.g. mobile phone, TV, PC), user interactive characteristics (e.g. low vision, colour blindness) or user aesthetic preferences.

The results of this research, developed by Oscar Corcho and Mariano Rico, of the UPM’s Ontology Engineering Group at the Facultad de Informática, and David Camacho, of the UAM’s Department of Informatics Engineering, was published in Intelligent Distributed Information Systems (Volume 180, Issue 10, 15 May 2010, Pages 1850-1864).

A Whole New Technology for A Whole New World

Self-sustaining robot has an artificial gut

The robot, the Ecobot III, was developed by researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and will be presented at the Artificial Life conference in Denmark in August. The robot eats meals of partially processed sewage, using the nutrients within the mash for fuel and excreting the remains. It also drinks water to maintain power generation. 

The robot navigates towards a dispenser filled with the nutrient-rich mixture and "eats" what it needs. The meal is then processed in the robot's body by bacteria held in a stack of two tiers, each with 24 microbial fuel cells (MFCs).

Undigested matter passes via a gravity feed to a central trough from which it is pumped back into the feeder tanks to be reprocessed in order to extract as much of the available energy as possible. The waste is then purged every 24 hours by a peristaltic pump that works like the colon, using pressure waves to expel the waste from the tube into a litter tray.

 

The bacteria in each MFC metabolize the mixture, producing hydrogen atoms in the process. The hydrogen electrons are drawn to the fuel cell anode where an electric current is generated. Meanwhile the hydrogen ions enter the cathode chamber via a proton-exchange membrane and combine with oxygen in the water in the chamber to produce more water. The robot drinks water to replace losses through evaporation.

Director of Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Chris Melhuish, said MFCs had been tried before but an artificial gut was needed to solve the problem of previous models, which was that humans had to clean up the waste left by bacterial digestion. Melhuish said the robot was called Ecobot III, but admitted “diarrhea-bot would be more appropriate, as it’s not exactly knocking out rabbit pellets.”

This is a picture of the EcoBot II - a predecessor of the EcoBot III.

The robot has maintained itself unaided for up to seven days, but is so far extremely inefficient, using only 1% of the energy available within the food. It moves slowly and shows some intelligent behaviors such as moving toward light.

The inefficiency and slowness may make the robot less attractive than autonomous robots designed to extract energy from biomass by burning it rather than using MFCs — such as the "Energetically Autonomous Tactile Robot" being developed by the US military — but the Bristol team point out that MFCs can process a greater range of foodstuffs, including hard-to-burn matter such as waste water.

A Whole New Technology for A Whole New World