Sensing oxygen: This implantable sensor measures the concentration of dissolved oxygen in tissue, an indicator of tumor growth.
Credit: Technical University of Munich
Monday, October 10. 2011
Japanese company "REAL-f" makes really f-ing accurate 3-D copies of your face
Saturday, October 08. 2011
Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet
Photo courtesy of Bryan William Jones
A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.
The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.
Drones have become America’s tool of choice in both its conventional and shadow wars, allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives. Since President Obama assumed office, a fleet of approximately 30 CIA-directed drones have hit targets in Pakistan more than 230 times; all told, these drones have killed more than 2,000 suspected militants and civilians, according to the Washington Post. More than 150 additional Predator and Reaper drones, under U.S. Air Force control, watch over the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. American military drones struck 92 times in Libya between mid-April and late August. And late last month, an American drone killed top terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki — part of an escalating unmanned air assault in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabian peninsula.
But despite their widespread use, the drone systems are known to have security flaws. Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S. forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.
The lion’s share of U.S. drone missions are flown by Air Force pilots stationed at Creech, a tiny outpost in the barren Nevada desert, 20 miles north of a state prison and adjacent to a one-story casino. In a nondescript building, down a largely unmarked hallway, is a series of rooms, each with a rack of servers and a “ground control station,” or GCS. There, a drone pilot and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of screens. In the pilot’s hand is the joystick, guiding the drone as it soars above Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other battlefield.
Some of the GCSs are classified secret, and used for conventional warzone surveillance duty. The GCSs handling more exotic operations are top secret. None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to the public internet. Which means they are supposed to be largely immune to viruses and other network security threats.
But time and time again, the so-called “air gaps” between classified and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs and removable drives. In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. The Pentagon is still disinfecting machines, three years later.
Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.
In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. “But the virus kept coming back,” a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort.
The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. “We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,” says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. “We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover.”
However, insiders say that senior officers at Creech are being briefed daily on the virus.
“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says. “But no one’s panicking. Yet.”
Wednesday, October 05. 2011
What is Apple’s Siri, and will anyone use her?
Via ExtremeTech
By Sebastian Anthony
-----
The Apple “Let’s Talk iPhone” event has concluded. Tim Cook and a slew of Apple execs have taken it in turns to tell us about the latest and greatest Apple goodies, and rather underwhelmingly there’s no iPhone 5 and just significant takeaways: a cheaper and faster iPhone 4S, and an interesting software package called Siri. You can read all about the iPhone 4S on our sister sites Geek and PC Mag — here we’re going to talk about Siri.
If we look past the rather Indian (and feminine) name, Siri is a portable (and pocketable) virtual personal assistant. She has a speech-recognition module which works out what you’re saying, and then a natural language parser combs through your words to work out what you’re trying to do. Finally, an artificial intelligence gathers the possible responses and works out which one is most likely to be accurate, given the context, your geographical location, iOS’s current state, and so on.
Siri
is, in essence, a computer that you can interrogate for answers, kind
of like a search engine that runs locally on your phone. If you’ve seen IBM’s Watson play Jeopardy,
Siri is basically a cut-down version. She isn’t intelligent per se, but
if she has access to enough data, she can certainly appear intelligent.
Siri’s data sources are open APIs, like Wikipedia or Wolfram Alpha, and
in theory there’s no limit to the number of sources that can be added
(though it does require significant developer time to add a new data
set). For now you can ask Siri about the weather or the definition of a
word, but in the future, if Apple links Siri up to United Airlines,
you’ll be able to book a plane ticket, just by talking. Because Siri
runs locally, she can also send SMSes or set reminders, or anything else
that Apple (or app developers) allow her to do.
Artificial intelligence isn’t cheap in terms of processing power, though: Siri is expected to only run on the iPhone 4S, which sports a new and significantly faster processor than its predecessors, the A5. Siri probably makes extensive use of Apple’s new cloud computer cluster, too, much in the same way that Amazon Silk splits web browsing between the cloud and the local device.
Noise
That’s enough about what Siri is and how it works. Let’s talk about whether anyone will actually use Siri, which is fundamentally a glorified voice control search engine. Voice commands have existed in some semblance since at least as far back as the Nokia 3310, which was released in 2000. Almost every phone since then has had the ability to voice dial, or in the case of modern smartphones, voice activate apps and features.
When was the last time you saw someone talk to their phone? Driving and other hands-otherwise-occupied activities don’t count. When was the last time you walked down the street and heard someone loudly dictate “call mom” into their phone? Can you really see yourself saying “Siri, I want a kebab” in public?
It might lose its social stigma if everyone talks to their phone, but isn’t it already annoying enough that people swan down streets with hands-free headsets, blabbing away? It’s not like voice recognition is at the stage where you can whisper or mumble a command into your phone, either: you’re going to have to say, nice and clearly, “how do I get to the bank?” in public. Now imagine that you’ve just walked past the guy who’s talking to Siri — is he asking you for directions, or Siri? Now imagine what it would be like if everyone around you is having a one-sided phone conversation or talking to Siri.
Finally, there’re practical implications to consider, which Apple usually ignores in its press events. For example, will Siri only recognize my voice? What if I leave my phone in the living room and my girlfriend shouts out “honey, we should go to that Italian restaurant” — will Siri then make a reservation? On a more nefarious note, will my wife be able to say “Siri, show me my husband’s hidden email.” When walking down a street, will Siri overhear other conversations and react accordingly?
Siri will be fantastic in the car, that’s for certain. She will also be very accommodating when you’re on your own — imagine shouting across the room “Siri, do I need to wear a jacket today?” or “Siri, download the latest episode of Glee.” Siri will be unusable in public, though, while on the move — and that’s the one time where you really don’t want to be looking down at that darn on-screen keyboard.
Tuesday, October 04. 2011
15 cool things Windows 8 does that Windows 7 doesn't
Via TechRadar
By Mike Williams
-----
When Microsoft released the Windows 8 Developer Preview last month it warned that it was unstable, incomplete, a very early build which has a long way to go before it's ready for release.
That doesn't sound too promising - but on installing it we were surprised to see just how many great new features Windows 8 already contained.
From the shiny new Metro interface and interesting Explorer tweaks, to new applets and major performance enhancements, Windows 8 is - even at this early stage - packed with essential functionality.
Here are 18 cool things Windows 8 does that Windows 7 doesn't
1. Boot quickly - by default
Yes, we know - every version of Windows promises boot time improvements. But this time Microsoft has really delivered.
Our test Dell Inspiron 1090 (a seriously basic laptop) took 48 seconds to launch Windows 7 from the boot loader.
Choose the Windows 8 option, though, and the Metro screen appeared in only nine seconds - more than five times faster.
How does it work? There are many tweaks, but maybe the most important happens when the system shuts down. It closes all your programs as normal, but the kernel is now hibernated, its RAM contents saved to your hard drive. This doesn't take long, and when you reboot your system can be reinitialised far faster than before.
2. Display alerts immediately
Your Windows 8 laptop won't just load faster, it'll also display useful information right away, without you having to do anything at all.
And that's because your lock screen, where you'll normally log in, can now be customised with apps which show you details on waiting emails, your schedule, RSS feeds, whatever you like.
So Windows 8 means you won't necessarily have to turn on your laptop, wait for an age as it loads, then wait even longer to launch an application, just to discover some really basic item of data: it could be available on the lock screen in seconds.
3. Log on without passwords
If you already have more than enough passwords to remember, then the good news is that Windows 8 will offer you an unusual alternative: the picture password.
You'll be able to point Windows to a picture you'd like to use, which you then click, tap or draw on with your mouse or using a touch screen. So if you choose a picture of your house, say, you might draw an outline around the roof, then tap on a window and the front door. Windows will remember your gestures, and won't allow anyone to log in later unless they can repeat them.
If that doesn't sound appealing, don't worry - you can continue to log in with a regular alphanumeric password if you prefer, just as before.
4. Enjoy a dynamic desktop
The Windows 8 Metro interface doesn't give you static shortcuts to launch its applications. Instead you get dynamic tiles, which you can change in size to reflect an app's importance, and freely organise into whatever groups best suits your needs.
And, again, these tiles aren't just used to launch the apps. They can also display information from them, so if something interesting has just appeared on an RSS feed you're watching, then you'll get to see it right away.
5. Synchronise your settings
Of course, with so much functionality on the Metro desktop, it may take a while to set it up just the way you like. But don't worry, you only have to do this once, even if you've several Windows 8 PCs, because you'll be able to synchronise your Metro apps, their settings and application histories (as well as login details for applications and websites) across all your systems, entirely automatically.
6. Spot resource hogs
All this syncing, email-checking, RSS monitoring and so on could become a little expensive if you're using a metered 3G connection, of course. So it's just as well that the new Windows 8 Task Manager includes an App History feature which can show you exactly who's hogging all your network bandwidth (as well as your CPU time, hard drive and RAM).
7. Close apps automatically
Traditionally Windows has left it up to you to manage the programs you run. So you can launch as many as you like, and the system won't complain: it'll just get slower, and slower, and slower as you run out of RAM and it starts swapping to disk.
Windows 8 is fortunately a little different, at least when running Metro apps. If you're running short of resources then it'll close down anything you've not used for a while, to try to help out. Don't worry, the app's state is saved first, so you don't lose anything; relaunch it and you'll carry on exactly where you left off.
8. Share easily
Sharing something you've found online is an everyday experience for most web users, and so it's great to see Microsoft build that idea into Windows 8. If you've discovered a great photo or web page in IE10 then simply hit the Share button and you'll be able to send its link via any compatible app you've installed - and they'll then update your Twitter, Facebook or other account right away.
9. Work on files with ease
The Windows 8 Explorer now uses a ribbon-style interface, which brings many otherwise tricky to find options within very easy reach.
If you want to remove metadata containing personal information in Windows 7, for instance, you must right-click the file, select Properties, choose the Details tab, and click "Remove Properties and Personal Information".
In Windows 8, all you have to do is click the file and choose Remove Properties from the Properties list: much easier.
There are many similar shortcuts. But if they're not enough, then you can make any Explorer ribbon option even easier to access it by adding it to the Quick Access toolbar, which appears in the Explorer title bar. It'll then only ever be a couple of clicks away.
10. Back up automatically
Windows 8 includes a very easy-to-use File History feature, which can automatically back up whatever folders you like, at the frequency you specify.
This could be a complete system backup to a network drive, if you like. But it could also just save key folders like Documents and Pictures to a USB flash drive, and once you've set this up there's no further configuration required. Simply plug in the drive every few days, File History will automatically detect it, and your preferred files will automatically be backed up.
11. Download safely
Internet Explorer's SmartScreen filter is a handy technology which can check downloads against a database of known malicious sites and dangerous programs, blocking the file if it finds a match. Previously this was only available within IE, but in Windows 8 SmartScreen will be used system-wide, so you'll have an extra layer of protection no matter which browser you're using.
12. Mount ISO files
Windows 7 gained the ability to burn ISO images to disc, but if you just want to check or access their contents then Windows 8 goes one better. Just right-click the image, select Mount, and a new virtual optical drive will appear in Explorer. Double-click this to view the image contents, launch whatever programs it contains, or generally treat it just like any other disc.
13. Pause file copies
Once you've started a Windows file copy operation, that used to be it: you had to wait until it was finished. But not any more. The new File Copy dialog includes a tiny pause button, so if you need to do something else for a moment, just click to pause the copies, click again to resume.
14. Fix problems easily
If your PC is in a bad way then you've always been able to reinstall Windows. But you'd have to find your Windows disc, first, and pay close attention to the installation options to make sure you choose the one you need.
Windows 8 gets rid of all that hassle by introducing a "Refresh your PC" option (Control Panel > General). This also essentially reinstalls Windows, but there's no disc required, no complex options to consider, not even very long to wait: we've used it two or three times and it's quickly repaired any glitches we encountered.
15. Run other operating systems
If, despite all of this, you still feel that Windows 7 has some advantages - then that may not be a problem. Because Windows 8 now includes Microsoft's Client Hyper-V virtualisation platform, which allows you to install other operating systems onto virtual machines and run them on your desktop.
You will need to be running 64-bit Windows, however, and have a CPU which supports Second Level Address Translation (that's Intel's Core i3, i5 and i7 and AMD's Barcelona processors).
But if your system qualifies then you'll find this is a far better and more powerful solution than Microsoft's Virtual PC, or Windows 7's XP Mode, and should be ideal for running most legacy applications on your Windows 8 system.
Thursday, September 29. 2011
Wi-Fi networks could detect your breathing and pinpoint your location
Via dvice
-----
Well, this is a little unsettling: it turns out that Wi-Fi signals are slightly affected by people breathing, and with the right tech someone could pinpoint where you are in a room from afar using just Wi-Fi.
This was discovered when University of Utah researcher Neal Patwari was looking for a way to monitor breathing without using uncomfortable equipment. If you can track breathing using just a Wi-Fi signal, it'll make sleep studies easier for both researchers and subjects. And it worked! By laying in a hospital bed surrounded by a bunch of wireless routers, they were able to accurately estimate his breathing rate within 0.4 breaths per minute.
Now that this is known, it's only a matter of time until there's a way to detect people in rooms using Wi-Fi signals. But don't worry! If you're nervous, there's a simple solution: stop breathing.
-----
Wednesday, September 28. 2011
This is why you'll want a 3D printer for Christmas
Via dvice
-----
MakerBot's Thing-O-Matic 3D is a toy-printing badass.
Robot Santa's going to be busy this year. With all the shiny new gadgets he needs to deliver, his elves will have it hard. You want one toy? Pfft. What you want is a whole elf workshop of your own — a place that pumps out unlimited amounts of toys — or at least, something similar. That's a 3D printer.
The ultimate present this year is a 3D printer — a machine that makes, err, "prints" toys. Who needs to keep asking for gifts from people, when you can print some new ones whenever you want to?
We've already rounded up the six most affordable 3D printers you can buy right now, but here's a taste of the printers in action, because photos can only excite you so much.
New DoCoMo smartphone case able to detect radiation
Via Asahi shimbun
-----
NTT DoCoMo Inc. has developed a smartphone case featuring a function that measures radiation levels.
The case has a sensor on it that identifies radiation levels, and the results show up on the screen. A special application must be installed to take advantage of the service.
The new feature, using technologies developed by a domestic dosimeter maker, can determine radiation levels from 0.01 microsieverts to 100 millisieverts per hour, the company said. The device also allows people to access measured values by time on a map using the global positioning system available with the carrier's smartphones.
NTT DoCoMo also developed smartphone cases that enable measurements of ultraviolet rays and body fat percentages. These cases can be switched to monitor various health conditions, the company said. Specific dates for marketing the cases have yet to be decided.
Prototypes of the three cases will be exhibited at Ceatec Japan 2011, Japan's largest exhibition on IT and electronics, to be held Oct. 4-8 at the Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba Prefecture.
Thursday, September 22. 2011
Dr. Watson - Come Here - I Need You
Via big think
The next time you go to the doctor, you may be dealing with a supercomputer rather than a human. Watson, the groundbreaking artificial intelligence machine from IBM that took on chess champions and Jeopardy! contestants alike, is about to get its first real-world application in the healthcare sector. In partnership with health benefits company WellPoint, Watson will soon be diagnosing medical cases – and not just the everyday cases, either. The vision is for Watson to be working hand-in-surgical-glove with oncologists to diagnose and treat cancer in patients.
The WellPoint clinical trial, which could roll out as early as 2012, is
exciting proof that supercomputing intelligence, when properly
harnessed, can lead to revolutionary breakthroughs in complex fields
like medicine. At a time when talk about reforming the healthcare system
is primarily about the creation of digital health records, the
integration of Watson into the healthcare industry could really shake
things up. By some accounts, Watson
is able to process as many as 200 million pages of medical information
in seconds – giving it a number-crunching head start on doctors for
diagnosing cases. In one test case cited by WellPoint, Watson was able
to diagnose a rare form of an illness within seconds – a case that had
left doctors baffled.
While having super-knowledgeable medical experts on call is exciting, it also raises several thorny issues. At what point – if ever - would you ask for a “second opinion” on your medical condition from a human doctor? Will “Watson” ever be included in the names of physicians included in your HMO listings? And, perhaps most importantly, can supercomputers ever provide the type of bedside manner that we are accustomed to in our human doctors?
This last question has attracted much attention from medical practitioners and health industry thought leaders alike. Abraham Verghese,
a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine as well as
bestselling author, has been particularly outspoken about the inability
of computers to provide the type of medical handholding that we are used to from human doctors.
Verghese claims that the steady digitization of records and clinical
data is reducing every patient to an "iPatient" – simply a set of
digital 1’s and 0’s that can be calculated, crunched, and computed.
Forget whether androids dream of digital sheep – can they take a digital Hippocratic Oath?
Given that the cost of healthcare is simply too high, as a society we will need to accept some compromises. Once the healthcare industry is fully digitized, supercomputers like Watson could result in a more cost-effective way to sift through the ever-growing amount of medical information and provide real-time medical analysis that could save lives. If Watson also results in a significant improvement in patient treatment as well, it’s clear that the world of medicine will never be the same again. Right now, IBM envisions Watson supplementing – not actually replacing - doctors. But the time is coming when nurses across the nation will be saying, “Watson -- Come Here –- I Need You,” instead of turning to doctors whenever they need a sophisticated medical evaluation of a patient.
Friday, September 16. 2011
Data Analytics: Crunching the Future
The technicians at SecureAlert’s monitoring center in Salt Lake City sit in front of computer screens filled with multicolored dots. Each dot represents someone on parole or probation wearing one of the company’s location-reporting ankle cuffs. As the people move around a city, their dots move around the map. “It looks a bit like an animated gumball machine,” says Steven Florek, SecureAlert’s vice-president of offender insights and knowledge management. As long as the gumballs don’t go where they’re not supposed to, all is well.
The company works with law enforcement agencies around the U.S. to keep track of about 15,000 ex-cons, meaning it must collect and analyze billions of GPS signals transmitted by the cuffs each day. The more traditional part of the work consists of making sure that people under house arrest stay in their houses. But advances in the way information is collected and sorted mean SecureAlert isn’t just watching; the company says it can actually predict when a crime is about to go down. If that sounds like the “pre-cogs”—crime prognosticators—in the movie Minority Report, Florek thinks so, too. He calls SecureAlert’s newest capability “pre-crime” detection.
Using data from the ankle cuffs and other sources, SecureAlert identifies patterns of suspicious behavior. A person convicted of domestic violence, for example, might get out of jail and set up a law-abiding routine. Quite often, though, SecureAlert’s technology sees such people backslide and start visiting the restaurants or schools or other places their victims frequent. “We know they’re looking to force an encounter,” Florek says. If the person gets too close for comfort, he says, “an alarm goes off and a flashing siren appears on the screen.” The system doesn’t go quite as far as Minority Report, where the cops break down doors and blow away the perpetrators before they perpetrate. Rather, the system can call an offender through a two-way cellphone attached to the ankle cuff to ask what the person is doing, or set off a 95-decibel shriek as a warning to others. More typically, the company will notify probation officers or police about the suspicious activity and have them investigate. Presumably with weapons holstered. “It’s like a strategy game,” Florek says. (BeforeBloomberg Businessweek went to press, Florek left the company for undisclosed reasons.)
It didn’t used to be that a company the size of SecureAlert, with about $16 million in annual revenue, could engage in such a real-world chess match. For decades, only Fortune 500-scale corporations and three-letter government agencies had the money and resources to pull off this kind of data crunching. Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) is famous for using data analysis to adjust its inventory levels and prices. FedEx (FDX) earned similar respect for tweaking its delivery routes, while airlines and telecommunications companies used this technology to pinpoint and take care of their best customers. But even at the most sophisticated corporations, data analytics was often a cumbersome, ad hoc affair. Companies would pile information in “data warehouses,” and if executives had a question about some demographic trend, they had to supplicate “data priests” to tease the answers out of their costly, fragile systems. “This resulted in a situation where the analytics were always done looking in the rearview mirror,” says Paul Maritz, chief executive officer of VMware (VMW). “You were reasoning over things to find out what happened six months ago.”
In the early 2000s a wave of startups made it possible to gather huge volumes of data and analyze it in record speed—à la SecureAlert. A retailer such as Macy’s (M) that once pored over last season’s sales information could shift to looking instantly at how an e-mail coupon for women’s shoes played out in different regions. “We have a banking client that used to need four days to make a decision on whether or not to trade a mortgage-backed security,” says Charles W. Berger, CEO of ParAccel, a data analytics startup founded in 2005 that powers SecureAlert’s pre-crime operation. “They do that in seven minutes now.”
Now a second wave of startups is finding ways to use cheap but powerful servers to analyze new categories of data such as blog posts, videos, photos, tweets, DNA sequences, and medical images. “The old days were about asking, ‘What is the biggest, smallest, and average?’?” says Michael Olson, CEO of startup Cloudera. “Today it’s, ‘What do you like? Who do you know?’ It’s answering these complex questions.”
The big bang in data analytics occurred in 2006 with the release of an open-source system called Hadoop. The technology was created by a software consultant named Doug Cutting, who had been examining a series of technical papers released by Google (GOOG). The papers described how the company spread tremendous amounts of information across its data centers and probed that pool of data for answers to queries. Where traditional data warehouses crammed as much information as possible on a few expensive computers, Google chopped up databases into bite-size chunks and sprinkled them among tens of thousands of cheap computers. The result was a lower-cost and higher-capacity system that lots of people can use at the same time. Google uses the technology throughout its operations. Its systems study billions of search results, match them to the first letters of a query, take a guess at what people are looking for, and display suggestions as they type. You can see the bite-size nature of the technology in action on Google Maps as tiny tiles come together to form a full map.
Cutting created Hadoop to mimic Google’s technology so the rest of the world could have a way to sift through massive data sets quickly and cheaply. (Hadoop was the name of his son’s toy elephant.) The software first took off at Web companies such as Yahoo! (YHOO) and Facebook and then spread far and wide, with Walt Disney (DIS), the New York Times, Samsung, and hundreds of others starting their own projects. Cloudera, where Cutting, 48, now works, makes its own version of Hadoop and has sales partnerships withHewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL).
Dozens of startups are trying to develop easier-to-use versions of Hadoop. For example, Datameer, in San Mateo, Calif., has built an Excel-like dashboard that allows regular business people, instead of data priests, to pose questions. “For 20 years you had limited amounts of computing and storage power and could only ask certain things,” says Datameer CEO Stefan Groschupf. “Now you just dump everything in there and ask whatever you want.” Top venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Redpoint Ventures have backed Datameer, while Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, have helped finance Cloudera.
Past technology worked with data that fell neatly into rows and columns—purchase dates, prices, the location of a store. Amazon.com (AMZN), for instance, would use traditional systems to track how many people bought a certain type of camera and for what price. Hadoop can handle data that don’t fit into spreadsheets. That ability, combined with Hadoop’s speedy divide-and-conquer approach to data, lets users get answers to questions they couldn’t even ask before. Retailers can dig into not just what people bought but why they bought it. Amazon can (and does) analyze its website logs to see what other items people look at before they buy that camera, how long they look at them, whether certain colors on a Web page generate more sales—and synthesize all that into real-time intelligence. Are they telling their friends about that camera? Is some new model poised to be the next big hit? “These insights don’t come super easily, but the information is there, and we do have the machine power now to process it and search for it,” says James Markarian, chief technology officer at data specialist Informatica (INFA).
Take the case of U.S. Xpress Enterprises, one of the largest private trucking companies. Through a device installed in the cabs of its 10,000-truck fleet, U.S. Xpress can track a driver’s location, how many times the driver has braked hard in the last few hours, if he sent a text message to the customer saying he would be late, and how long he rested. U.S. Xpress pays particular attention to the fuel economy of each driver, separating out the “guzzlers from the misers,” says Timothy Leonard, U.S. Xpress CTO. Truckers keep the engines running and the air conditioning on after they’ve pulled over for the night. “If you have a 10-hour break, we want your AC going for the first two hours at 70 degrees so you can go to sleep,” says Leonard. “After that, we want it back up to 78 or 79 degrees.” By adjusting the temperature, U.S. Xpress has lowered annual fuel consumption by 62 gallons per truck, which works out to a total of about $24 million per year. Less numerically, the company’s systems also analyze drivers’ tweets and blog posts. “We have a sentiment dashboard that monitors how they are feeling,” Leonard says. “If we see they hate something, we can respond with some new software or policies in a few hours.” The monitoring may come off as Big Brotherish, but U.S. Xpress sees it as key to keeping its drivers from quitting. (Driver turnover is a chronic issue in the trucking business.)
How are IBM (IBM) and the other big players in the data warehousing business responding to all this? In the usual way: They’re buying startups. Last year, IBM bought Netezza for $1.7 billion. HP, EMC (EMC), and Teradata (TDC) have also acquired data analytics companies in the past 24 months.
It’s not going too far to say that data analytics has even gotten hip. The San Francisco offices of startup Splunk have all the of-the-moment accoutrements you’d find at Twitter or Zynga. The engineers work in what amounts to a giant living room with pinball machines, foosball tables, and Hello Kitty-themed cubes. Weekday parties often break out—during a recent visit, it was Mexican fiesta. Employees were wearing sombreros and fake moustaches while a dude near the tequila bar played the bongos.
Splunk got its start as a type of nuts-and-bolts tool in data centers, giving administrators a way to search through data tied to the low-level operations of computers and software. The company indexes “machine events”—the second-by-second records produced by computing devices to keep track of their actions. This could include records of every time a server stores information, or it could be the length of a cell phone call and what type of handset was used. Splunk helps companies search through this morass, looking for events that caused problems or stood out as unusual. “We can see someone visit a shopping website from a certain computer, see that they got an error message while on the lady’s lingerie page, see how many times they tried to log in, where they went after, and what machine in some far-off data center caused the problem,” says Erik Swan, CTO and co-founder of Splunk. While it started as troubleshooting software for data centers, the company has morphed into an analysis tool that can be aimed at fine-tuning fraud detection systems at credit-card companies and measuring the success of online ad campaigns.
A few blocks away from Splunk’s office are the more sedate headquarters of IRhythm Technologies, a medical device startup. IRhythm makes a type of oversize, plastic band-aid called the Zio Patch that helps doctors detect cardiac problems before they become fatal. Patients affix the Zio Patch to their chests for two weeks to measure their heart activity. The patients then mail the devices back to IRhythm’s offices, where a technician feeds the information into Amazon’s cloud computing service. Patients typically wear rivals’ much chunkier devices for just a couple of days and remove them when they sleep or shower—which happen to be when heart abnormalities often manifest. The upside of the waterproof Zio Patch is the length of time that people wear it—but 14 days is a whole lot of data.
IRhythm’s Hadoop system chops the 14-day periods into chunks and analyzes them with algorithms. Unusual activity gets passed along to technicians who flag worrisome patterns to doctors. For quality control of the device itself, IRhythm uses Splunk. The system monitors the strength of the Zio Patch’s recording signals, whether hot weather affects its adhesiveness to the skin, or how long a patient actually wore the device. On the Zio Patch manufacturing floor, IRhythm discovered that operations at some workstations were taking longer than expected. It used Splunk to go back to the day when the problems cropped up and discovered a computer glitch that was hanging up the operation.
Mark Day, IRhythm’s vice-president of research and development, says he’s able to fine-tune his tiny startup’s operations the way a world-class manufacturer like Honda Motor (HMC) or Dell could a couple years ago. Even if he could have afforded the old-line data warehouses, they were too inflexible to provide much help. “The problem with those systems was that you don’t know ahead of time what problems you will face,” Day says. “Now, we just adapt as things come up.”
At SecureAlert, Florek says that despite the much-improved tools, extracting useful meaning from data still requires effort—and in his line of work, sensitivity. If some ankle-cuff-wearing parolee wanders out-of-bounds, there’s a human in the process to make a judgment call. “We are constantly tuning our system to achieve a balance between crying wolf and catching serious situations,” he says. “Sometimes a guy just goes to a location because he got a new girlfriend.”
Monday, September 12. 2011
Implantable sensor can monitor tumors constantly to sense growth
Quicksearch
Popular Entries
- The great Ars Android interface shootout (129706)
- MeCam $49 flying camera concept follows you around, streams video to your phone (98701)
- Norton cyber crime study offers striking revenue loss statistics (96666)
- The PC inside your phone: A guide to the system-on-a-chip (56153)
- Norton cyber crime study offers striking revenue loss statistics (52895)
Categories
Show tagged entries
Syndicate This Blog
Calendar
|
March '25 | |||||
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 31 | ||||||