Cochlear Implants

I've spoken to people about cochlear implants a lot lately. Its the first sense that we've created an FDA approved implant for. They are relatively new, but over 100,000 people as of 2005 have them. As soon as a human sense is subject to the exponential curve of all technology, one can just imagine the potential. These are by no means a perfect replacement for normal hearing - yet! But as our understanding of how the normal signals a human ear sends to the auditory nerve grows, implants will eventually become better than a human ear. One could build in telephony technology for cell phone replacement. Why not just have a wireless computer connection for virtual reality? I wrote a blog about retinal implants currently in trials a month or so ago - http://climbingthecurve.blogspot.com/2006/10/silicon-retina-implants.html.

Here is a link to National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) discussing cochlear implants in case you would like more information.

http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/coch.asp

Costs
According to the American Academy of Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS), a cochlear implant is more expensive than a hearing aid, with "the total cost of a cochlear implant including evaluation, surgery, the device, and rehabilitation is around $40,000. Most insurance companies provide benefits that cover the cost. (This is true whether or not the device has received FDA clearance or is still in trial.)"

http://www.entnet.org/healthinfo/ears/cochlear-implant.cfm


Here is an interesting segment from Wikipedia about efficacy of these devices:

Efficacy
A cochlear implant will not cure deafness or hearing impairment, but is a prosthetic substitute for hearing. Some recipients find them very effective, others somewhat effective and some feel overall worse off with the implant than without. For people already functional in spoken language who lose their hearing, cochlear implants can be a great help in restoring functional comprehension of speech, especially if they have only lost their hearing for a short time.

British Member of Parliament Jack Ashley received a cochlear implant in 1994 at age 70 after 25 years of deafness, and reported that he has no trouble speaking to people he knows one on one, even on the telephone, although he might have difficulty with a new voice or with a busy conversation, and still had to rely to some extent on lipreading. He described the robotic sound of human voices perceived through the cochlear implant as "a croaking dalek with laryngitis". Even modern cochlear implants have at most 24 electrodes to replace the 16,000 delicate hair cells that are used for normal hearing. However, the sound quality delivered by a cochlear implant is often good enough that many users do not have to rely on speech-reading (lipreading). Rush Limbaugh, U.S. talk radio show host, says that everything sounds normal except that he cannot pick out the melody of new music that he had not heard prior to becoming deaf.

Adults who have grown up deaf often find the implants ineffective or irritating because their brain is unable to interpret sound after such a long period of time. Some who were orally educated and used amplifying hearing aids have been more successful with cochlear implants, as use of the hearing aid functioned to maintain perception of sound.

For small children, there have been mixed results. Almost all children with implants hear quite well with a cochlear implant, but for a rare few, the auditory nerve is unable to be stimulated. Patients without a viable auditory nerve are usually identified during the candidacy process. Fewer than 1% of deaf individuals have a missing or damaged auditory nerve, which today can be treated with an Auditory Brainstem Implant. Recent research has suggested that children and adults can benefit from bilateral cochlear implants in order to aid in sound localization and speech understanding. (See Offeciers et. al. 2005)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant

Palmisano Gets a Second Life

OK, so my blog is starting to look like a Second Life promotion! It just seems more and more likely that this company has the kind of vision necessary to create one of the first virtual worlds that will grab a mass audience - rather than just gamers. Here IBM is committing $100 million in a new business unit to explore the potential of new technologies like virtual worlds in commerce, e-learning, and customer service.

Palmisano Gets A Second Life
IBM is embracing the virtual world of avatars--and other big companies are close behind

It's not every day that you hear the captain of a $90 billion multinational gleefully bragging about his alter ego in the online world. But these days, so-called virtual worlds are all the rage, and IBM (IBM ) Chief Executive Samuel S. Palmisano is about to make his mark as the first big-league CEO to appear in a virtual-world setting. "I have my own avatar," boasts Palmisano. He likes the sound of that so much that he says it again: "I have my own avatar."

Actually, Palmisano has two avatars--a casual Sam and a buttoned-down one--who exist in Second Life, the most popular of a handful of newfangled 3-D online virtual worlds. It's the square Sam, complete with Palmisano's signature eyeglasses and dark suit, who will be taking a virtual stage in a virtual version of China's Forbidden City on Nov. 14.

This isn't all fun and games. IBM foresees a sizable business in providing the software, computers, and chips that power 3-D worlds, and in advising clients on how to take advantage of them to market or sell products. At a real-life town hall meeting for 8,000 employees in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, Palmisano will announce just before his virtual escapade that IBM is setting up a new organization to pursue the business. It's one of a handful of initiatives he'll lay out that emerged from an online "innovation jam" the company held for worldwide employees and business partners in September. All told, Big Blue plans to spend $100 million on these projects.

WIMBLEDON IN 3-D
IBM's foray is the latest sign that the virtual world phenomenon is going mainstream. Until recently, Linden Lab's Second Life had mostly been a playground for individuals who enjoy exploring, communing with like minds, and setting up virtual mom-and-pop businesses.

In the last few months, though, all sorts of established companies have been planting their flags. They're marketing goods, trying to sprinkle coolness on their brands, and testing new kinds of online meetings. About 40 corporations have established themselves on Second Life, which has gone from zero members to 1.2 million in just three years. Among them are Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Reebok, Starwood Hotels & Resorts (HOT ), and Reuters (RTRSY ), which assigned a reporter full-time to hang out and chronicle the goings-on.

IBM stumbled into virtual reality thanks to the curiosity of British IBM software strategist Ian Hughes (avatar: ePredator Potato), who is a longtime PC gamer. Hughes started raving about virtual worlds on his internal IBM blog and, before long, IBM scientists and programmers worldwide were buying virtual islands in Second Life and using them for group collaboration or solving computer science problems.

Hughes on Nov. 7 led a guided online tour of Second Life that showed just how diverse virtual reality can be. Stops included a replica of the Wimbledon tennis club, where Hughes runs 3-D replays of actual championship games, an IBM meeting center, a Reebok store, and (whoops!) a casino complete with virtual naked female avatars. "Being the Internet, you never know what you'll find!" quips Hughes.

The most impressive locale on the tour was the scale replica of The Forbidden City being created by IBM designers, which will be the scene of Palmisano's virtual debut. The setting was unfinished, but designers had rendered a platform, chairs, and podium. The visitors' avatars wandered around and tried out the chairs, until they were unceremoniously kicked offline. The reason: IBM needed to rehearse the Palmisano appearance. Apparently, in virtual reality it's tricky for those avatars to get their applause just right.

By Steve Hamm

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_47/b4010068.htm?chan=search

Second Life Lessons

Here's another Second Life article from BusinessWeek. It is discussing what major corporations are doing, why, and what it's doing for them. I keep pressing that this is just a precursor of what's to come!

And here is a particularly important quote from the article (which has more information online if you have a BusinessWeek subscription):

Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, says the supporting technology is continually advancing. "Second Life is improving in resolution and functionality at the rate of Moore's Law. The real world isn't getting better by the day."

NOVEMBER 27, 2006 INSIDE INNOVATION -- IN SIDE

Second Life Lessons
You may have heard the hype about popular 3D online universe Second Life, but setting up shop there presents unique challenges

For real-life companies from Warner Bros. to Adidas to Intel seeking to brand themselves as hip and forward-thinking, virtual community Second Life has quickly become a trendy marketing and advertising outlet. Opening virtual offices or shops, selling and market-testing digital replicas of products, and creating 3D online personas or "avatars" in Second Life are becoming items on the to-do lists of those eager to tap into the nascent market. The three-year-old Web-based world has more than one million "residents" who spent $9 million in October on virtual land, products, and services. And while advertising's traditional outlets are losing eyeballs, so far this year the population of Second Life has increased 995% -- a growing potential consumer audience for marketing messages.

Second Life, of course, is still a work in progress. None of the companies spending real money to launch campaigns can yet gauge how successful their efforts will be, and virtual campaigns aren't without their own unique dangers. One problem is hackers, who periodically shut down Second Life. Linden Lab, the company behind the site, recently met with federal authorities to address this cybercrime. In addition, many long-time residents view the arrival of big brands as a threat to established mom-and-pop entrepreneurs. Annoyed vigilante residents have set off bombs -- via malicious computer code -- that destroy virtual buildings or cause the application on your computer to freeze. American Apparel has had to deal with virtual protesters scandalized by the scantily clad models in the company's real-world ads. And there is one weird technical glitch: When a space is swamped with visitors (more than 60 to 90), a bug in the system can make avatars' clothes disappear.

But Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, says the supporting technology is continually advancing. "Second Life is improving in resolution and functionality at the rate of Moore's Law. The real world isn't getting better by the day." Rosedale views Second Life not as a multiplayer online role-playing game, like World of Warcraft, or in the same category as Will Wright's forthcoming Spore, which allows players to design their own species. Rather, he sees it as a new social-networking platform, like MySpace.

In the future, Rosedale conceives of Second Life as a possible 3D Web browser. The ambitious idea, as he explains, is that instead of using your mouse to click on links, you would direct your avatar to walk into a 3D Amazon.com shop, browse shelves, buy books, and chat over a virtual cup o' joe with other people visiting the site.

The current flood of companies announcing a Second Life presence echoes the late 1990s, when every CEO wanted an e-commerce site. Yet while Second Life is cool and timely, it's not easy to make real money selling virtual goods (cars go for $2 each). Why? Not enough volume. The registered population has passed a million, but only 10,000 people on average are online at any one time.

What sets Second Life apart is that the big-brand products offered can be customized by virtual users. And Second Life is an interactive, intensely social environment where companies hope not only to find customers and strengthen their brands but one day also to connect remote employees to one another and recruit new hires.

Clearly, for a company considering jumping into Second Life now, serious homework is needed. Turn the page to see which real-world industries have Second Lives and learn what steps to take and mistakes to avoid.

By Reena Jana and Aili McConnon

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_48/b4011413.htm

'Grey goo' engulfs virtual world

I've written a number of times about Second Life. This article is interesting and could potentially raise awareness of the potential of real world grey goo from future nanotechnologies. The other interesting aspect of the article is about a program someone introduced called CopyBot that can copy any object in Second Life. Since many people are actually making a living or earning some money from creating virtual objects, there is conjecture that future earnings in Second Life will mostly/only come from services. So will people be less inclined to spend time designing cool objects that people were willing to buy? The article makes intellectual property seem worthless as it would be futile to combat piracy - will this be true in the future, vastly more rich virtual environments? I picture people willing to pay for information, but if you can't protect it...

"The problem is, if you can see the object, you have to have the information in some form," she says. "A clever reverse engineer will likely always be able to grab that information."

Seems like there will be solutions to this. For example, off the top of my head - If the processing was done on a secure system and only the visual of the object is passed, then a copy would be similar to the video tapes some pirates make of new movies while they're still only in the theater - a reasonable representation, but not perfect. I'm not technical enough to know if this is reasonable. Perhaps the copy is really that good. Maybe the copies will be that good for just these rudimentary virtual environments, but perhaps future objects/information will be much richer and just coping the visual aspects of it won't capture the real information (encapsulation). We may have to wait to find out! :)

'Grey goo' engulfs virtual world
18:13 20 November 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Will Knight

The increasingly popular virtual world Second Life was overwhelmed by a flood of "self-replicating" objects, dubbed "grey goo", on Sunday.

The trouble began with the appearance of a virtual gold rings in several areas of the virtual world. As users touched these rings, they starting replicating wildly and, eventually, the servers on which the game is hosted began creaking under the strain of the additional activity.

From 2245 GMT on Sunday, for about half-an-hour, tens of thousands of Second Life users were locked out of the world while staff removed the objects. The objects were dubbed "grey goo", after the concept of out-of-control self-replicating nanotechnology (See How safe is nanotech).

"An attack of self-replicators is causing heavy load on the database, which is in turn slowing down in-world activity," an administrator wrote on the official Second Life blog on Sunday evening (GMT). "We have isolated the grey goo and are currently cleaning up the grid. We’ll keep you updated as status changes."

Simple hack

Experienced Second Life residents dismissed the incident as unremarkable, although inconvenient. "Grey goo is not a clever hack or anything ingenious," says Aimee Weber, who develops virtual objects within Second Life for companies and research institutes. "You could write one in 5 minutes."

Weber notes that self-replicating objects have been released before and says the ability to create such objects is, in fact, a crucial aspect of the world. "Linden Lab considered making self replication impossible – it's certainly within their power to do so," she told New Scientist. "But there were enough legitimate and cool uses for self replication that they decided to keep it."

The incident follows a more controversial episode within Second Life – the release of a program called CopyBot, which can be used to copy any in-world object. CopyBot bypasses the game's in-built copy controls, analysing network communications in order to gather the information needed to replicate an object. As some users make money by selling virtual objects within Second Life, Weber says this program could transform the economy of Second Life from being based on objects to focussing on services.

In the long run, there may be no way to guard against programs such as CopyBot, she adds. "The problem is, if you can see the object, you have to have the information in some form," she says. "A clever reverse engineer will likely always be able to grab that information."

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg17723880.900-how-safe-is-nanotech.html

Big brother is listening to you

One major area of concern over new technologies is the tempting use of it to create a surveillance state. As I listed in a previous blog about what people think will come about in 10 years, they listed the ability of people to record their entire life - video and sound. Well, the same is true for government - they will be able to record all public areas (and I imagine private ones, legally or not, but I'm not big on conspiracies). Check out his new step in the Netherlands.

REVELLERS planning a night out in the Netherlands this weekend should keep their voices down.

To prevent fights breaking out, surveillance cameras in the city of Groningen have been adapted to listen out for voices raised in anger. Microphones attached to the cameras feed the sound signals to software that can detect voices that are aggressive in tone. "Aggressive people tend to tense their larynx, and the sound made by their vocal cords is distorted," says Peter van Hengel of developer Sound Intelligence, a spin-off of the University of Groningen. This means that high frequency vowel sounds span a broader frequency range. "A truly aggressive voice is very hard to imitate," he says.

In a trial earlier this year, police made three arrests after being alerted by the system. Tests are also under way in Rotterdam, on Dutch trains and in stations.

From issue 2578 of New Scientist magazine, 18 November 2006, page 27

http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/mg19225780.159-big-brother-is-listening-to-you.html

Launching a new kind of warfare

Very interesting article discussing the current state of robotics in our military, where it is going, and even a discussion of the ethical and social impacts (that both are and are not taking place). Some people may not realize how quickly this transformation is taking place. I remember a Wall Street Journal article discussing a Stealth Bomber pilot taking off from the US (Kansas or something like that), flying a bombing mission to Iraq, landing back in the US, and then picking his kids up from a little league game. I was pretty blown away by that at the time, but this is sure taking it to the next level. Good read.

Some selected quotes to whet the appetite:

“By 2015, the US Department of Defense plans that one third of its fighting strength will be composed of robots, part of a $127bn (£68bn) project known as Future Combat Systems (FCS), a transformation that is part of the largest technology project in American history.”

“The US military has 2,500 uncrewed systems deployed in conflicts around the world. But is it Star Wars or I, Robot that the US is bringing to reality? By 2035, the plan is for the first completely autonomous robot soldiers to stride on to the battlefield.”

“…scientists at Qinetiq told the Guardian two years ago that it had built a robot fighter plane. When flown on test flights, they said, the fighter is accompanied by two crewed fighters, whose role is to shoot it down if it malfunctions.”

“With the increasing likelihood of more autonomous systems being deployed, some US generals have also raised concerns about the reliability of software and its vulnerability to hacking and viruses, pointing out that a rogue robot could inflict considerable damage on humans on its own side in a battle.”

“This is a very historic period; we are now determining who will fight wars in the future and how we will fight them. The human monopoly on war is being broken. Science fiction has now become science reality and we are changing the rules of the game. It's something we have to discuss and it's better we talk now than afterwards."

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1930960,00.html

Computing, 2016: What Won’t Be Possible?

Interesting article about a symposium of major corporations about computing in 2016. I can't help but think they aren't going to disclose anything revolutionary, or else they might loose their competitive lead. But some interesting perspectives nonetheless. Here's a few interesting quotes from it:

“Biology, Dr. Karp said, is now understood as an information science. And scientists seek to describe biological processes, like protein production, as algorithms. “In other words, nature is computing,” he said.

“computer science is the systematic study of algorithms”

“Future trends in computer imaging and storage will make it possible for a person, wearing a tiny digital device with a microphone and camera, to essentially record his or her life.”

“But clearly, the technology could also enable a surveillance society. “We’ll have the capability, and it will be up to society to determine how we use it,” Dr. Rashid said. “Society will determine that, not scientists.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/science/31essa.html?_r=3&ref=science&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Tuning In to Crowdcasting

For some reason it hasn't been posted on Business 2.0's website, but the printed article is very interesting. Crowdcasting is like Donald Trump's show, The Apprentice, sans reality TV. You get a bunch of MBA teams to work on a specific problem in a competition and big league companies (e.g. , Hilton, Eli Lilly) get to tap into young bright minds. I would love to participate in one of these. I found the concept intriguing, but it also shows more companies who are organized around the production of creativity and the creation of intellectual property. Idea Crossing (which runs the Innovation Challenge) and Innocentive are two they mention in the article.

If Business 2.0 posts this article, I will update this - if someone finds it, please leave it in the comments section. Thanks!

In the meantime, Wikipedia has an entry on Crowdcasting, and also culled some of the information from the B2.0 article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdcasting

Tuning into Crowdcasting: Business 2.0 - November 2006 Volume 7; Issue 10 page 66

The Semantic Web & Best-kept secret agent revealed

I've sent this Scientific American, article wirtten by Tim Berners-Lee, to many of friends, including one recently interviewing at companies asking him what Web 2.0 means to him. It really gives a great roadmap to the web. Web services are starting to make the web more friendly for the kinds of computer agents they discuss. I just read an article in Computer Weekly about how these computer agents' domains have just expanded signifcantly. Read the first page of the Scientific American article; it illustrates a great example of how smart agents will be able to make our lives easier once the sematic web is realized. This article was written in 2001. Berners-Lee is quite the visionary and sits on many important internet standards bodies.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2006/10/12/219087/Best-kept+secret+agent+revealed.htm

Rerouting Brain Circuits with Implanted Chips

Here's a pretty cool breakthrough. I think I've blogged about Ciberkinetics, but if I haven't you should check these guys out: http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/content/index.jsp

Though while Cyberkinetics is connecting brains to computers (to control keyboards and electronic wheelchairs as starting points), these University of Washington (go Dawgs!!) researchers are connecting nerves to other nerves via a computer link. This has many implications, but one of the most immediate applications has to do with people with spinal injuries.

"The findings also have implications for the development of neural prosthetics. For example, the device could be connected directly to the spinal cord or muscle rather than to another part of the brain. "If a person had a spinal-cord injury and the link from brain to muscle is impaired, this connection could bypass that injury and reconnect brain cells to the muscle," says Fetz. His group is currently working on this application. "

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17678&ch=biotech&sc=&pg=2

Researchers teach computers how to name images by 'thinking'

Some Penn State researches have "taught" a computer to identify images with a 330 word vocabulary. By creating words from an image, whole image collections can easily be searchable without the need to manually tag each image. The software seems to work pretty well already, but will obviously need to get a little more "education"!

Selected Quote:

"By inputting tens of thousands of images, we have trained computers to recognize certain objects and concepts and automatically annotate those new or unseen images," Wang said. "More than half the time, the computer's first tag out of the top 15 tags is correct."

In addition, for 98 percent of images tested, the system has provided at least one correct annotation in the top 15 selected words. The system, which completes the annotation in about 1.4 seconds, also can be applied to other domains such as art collections, satellite imaging and pathology slides, Wang said."

http://physorg.com/news81606726.html

A.I. Makes Music

I saw this short but great segment on CNN last month about David Cope, a professor of Music at UC Santa Barbara. He spent 7 years to write 20,000 lines of code that uses A.I. to create musical composures based on the styles of others. Some people have been having problems with computers generating music that's actually artful, as it symbolizes a revered area of "human only" that is being ceded to computers.

The video is only viewable via CNN's Pipeline, which is a subscription service, but you can read more about him in the following Wired article:

"The houselights darken, and a half-dozen musicians dressed in black take the stage with violins, a viola, a violone, and a violoncello. A woman sits down at the harpsichord; another tunes a lutelike instrument called a theorbo. The audience hushes, and the ensemble begins: A single, piercing violin races through Vivaldi-esque arpeggios while the rest of the strings measure out a deep, deliberate complement. The second movement is different – slower, sadder, carried along by mournful viola. During moments of quiet beauty or apparent emotion, it is jarring to consider what the music means to Emmy – numbers, built on patterns, built on a database of more numbers."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/posts.html?pg=3