Sure, you know cloud computing. You also know a bit about so-called “private clouds,” which enterprises and government agencies are exploring as an option to combine the power and scale of virtualized cloud architectures with security and control over data.
But what do you know of Cloudlets? They may just be a key to the future of mobile computing.
That’s a possible conclusion from the results so far of a Microsoft Research family of projects called MAUI, short for Mobile Assistance Using Infrastructure. The MAUI approach is to enable a new class of CPU-intensive, and data-intensive, applications for mobile devices – but enable them in a new way. Today’s mobile devices can’t run such apps, at least not well. And if they stick to the cloud they may never do so.
I’ve just read a fundamental MAUI paper published last month in the IEEE’s Pervasive Computing journal: “The Case for VM-based Cloudlets in Mobile Computing” (November 2009, co-authored by MSR’s Paramvir Bahl along with colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University, AT&T Research, and Lancaster University).
There’s a lot going on at this week’s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC 09); it’s a traditional launchpad for cool new stuff. I thought I’d point out several of the government-relevant announcements and technology roll-outs.
I specifically want to spotlight something called Codename Dallas, and how NASA and others have begun using it. In the keynote this morning Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie told PDC attendees (and his streaming-video audience) that a landslide of new sensors and observational systems are changing the world by recording “unimaginable volumes of data… But this data does no good unless we turn the potential into the kenetic, unless we unlock it and innovate in the realm of applications and solutions that’s wrapped around that data.”
Here’s how we’re addressing that, with a bit of step-by-step context on the overall cloud-computing platform enabling it. The steps are: 1. Azure, 2. Pinpoint, and 3. Dallas.
Tim O’Reilly created a bit of a stir last night in the tech world by writing a thoughtful essay entitled “The War for the Web.” He’ll be expanding on his thoughts in his keynote address today at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. From the essay, here’s the core argument:
“[W]e’ve grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we’ve been readying ourselves for one dominant social network. But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I’ve been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications.
It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. [emphasis added] Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.
… P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.
If that title seems a bit LSD-fueled, the subject matter warrants it. Here comes some Chemistry gone wild!
First, have a look at this bizarre video. It stars a soft robot, or chemical robot – “ChemBot.” Even the experienced geeks at IEEE Spectrum are calling it “by far one of the coolest and weirdest robot prototypes we have ever seen.”
This particular prototype by iRobot and University of Chicago researchers was just unveiled, at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems this past week. (More on the conference here.) It was built in response to DARPA’s interest in chemical robots, a program run by Dr. Mitchell Zakin.
The DARPA “ChemBots” page describes the program as creating “a convergence between materials chemistry and robotics through the application of any one of a number of approaches, including gel-solid phase transitions, electro- and magneto-rheological materials, geometric transitions, and reversible chemical and/or particle association and dissociation.”
What’s the anticipated DoD mission use? In DARPA’s words, “With ChemBots, our warfighters can gain access to denied spaces and perform tasks safely, covertly, and efficiently.” Or, as CNet’s “Crave” gadget blog puts it, “the weird little blob inflates and deflates parts of its body, changing size and shape–and scaring the living daylights out of us. We don’t know exactly when ChemBot will join the Armed Forces, but we can only beg: please, oh please, keep it away from us.” 🙂
Does Mitch Zakin Dream of Electric Sheep?
With that kind of geeky appeal, this video has been gathering some Internet buzz over the weekend, appearing on several tech blogs. But the better story is the scientist behind the science. Several of us have been following Mitch Zakin’s work for a while, primarily because he is also the PM for the Programmable Matter Program — the “novel physics” of “a new functional form of matter, based on mesoscale particles, which can reversibly assemble into complex 3D objects upon external command.”
There is revolutionary promise for such composability in multiple fields, not just defense. Zakin described it several years ago in a speech as “a concept so simple, yet so revolutionary that it pushes even the DARPA envelope. A vision that has profound implications for how we think about chemistry and materials. A vision that could provide our warfighters with meaningful technological surprise.”
Zakin is a demonstrably brilliant scientist, of the sort you expect to find at DARPA. Indeed, in that same speech (“The Next Revolution in Materials“) which he gave at DARPA’s 25th Systems and Technology Symposium a couple of years ago, Dr. Zakin said: “I joined DARPA because it is unfettered by conventional wisdom.”
One area where he has been exploring beyond traditional boundaries is in developing “the infochemistry project,” which combines the powers of chemistry and information technology. In an exotic illustration, Dr. Zakin is directing a research program on “Chemical Communications,” which I’m not sure I fully understand but which sounds like some sort of holographic persistent Twitter:
The Chemical Communications Program is exploring innovative methods to develop self-powered chemical systems that can encode an input string of alphanumeric characters (i.e., a message), convert the message to a modulated optical signal, and transmit it repetitively to a receiver.
The ultimate goal of this program is to develop a small replicator device, with the form factor of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or cell phone that―
Permits the user to input an arbitrary 60-character alphanumeric message.
Translates the message into an appropriate set of modulated chemistries.
Embeds these chemistries into a disposable substrate (the transmitter).
Ejects the substrate for deployment.
The replicator device will enable warfighters to generate disposable optical transmitters in real time, each with a user-specified message. It will be compact, lightweight, and powered by batteries or solar cells. – DARPA website, Chemical Communications Program
With projects like these under his belt, Zakin is credited with reviving the chemistry discipline at DARPA, which had fallen away over the years. But now he’s scheduled to leave the agency in 2010. He is uncertain where he’s heading, but perhaps he can be persuaded to spend some time with like-minded souls in Microsoft Research; I suspect many there would find his infochemistry approach very appealing.
An interesting profile of Dr. Zakin in the journal Analytical Chemistry notes that “Academia is one option. Venture capitalism is another. Zakin has launched so many basic science research projects that have the potential of becoming commercial products that he says, ‘it’s almost a sin not to look at all that from the other side.’ ”
How do intelligence analysts handle the long-discussed problem of information overload? (The same question goes for information workers and government data of any kind.)
The future of social computing is in the integration of various services and technologies – but the fun is already available now. Here’s a nifty demo of the integration of cloud computing’s services with increasingly powerful mobile computers (smartphones or netbooks). Developers can take advantage of far more computational power both locally on the device – faster, cheaper processors thanks to Moore’s Law – and computational power residing on networked data centers. Think of a business or social activity, and thanks to platforms like the iPhone, Android, and the new Windows Phones, “There’s an app for that.” Or there soon will be.
This quick little demo feels like nothing fancy today – but ten, even five years ago it would have seemed like sci-fi. In fact it’s available now, and uses a new Windows Phone, in this case a Samsung Intrepid, making use of Tellme software from Microsoft integrated with Bing Search web services. The demo intregrates some longtime technologies in their state-of-the-art condition today using cloud-services delivery:
Speech-to-text
GPS-enabled location-based services
Web search
Voice-enabled dialing
Social media (crowdsourced ratings integrated in search results)
Hardware UI (a dedicated TellMe button on the Samsung Intrepid phone)
My intention with this blog is always to write medium-length “think-pieces,” about technology, government, or preferably both. I’m working on several (the Jefferson Gov 2.0 piece, the Evil Twin 2.0 piece, and one on “whither the multilingual web”), but they do truly require thought and some free time, so they percolate a bit.
In the meantime, readers like the latest cool demo videos, so for Friday fun here’s another one (watch below or on youTube), which was featured on TechCrunch last night (“Bing comes to the iPhone via Robotvision”), with an augmented reality app for the iPhone which uses Bing Maps and Bing’s real-time data (website here). The company describes itself this way:
What is the “user interface of tomorrow”? In the past I have chronicled some cool Microsoft Research prototypes of flexible touchscreen interfaces – and even touchless interfaces! And now this month one of my friends in MSR, Mary Czerwinski, has written in Venture Beat that “those types of interfaces could be the tip of the iceberg”:
A whole new set of interfaces are in the works at various stages of research and development… I have colleagues working on tongue-based interaction, bionic contacts lenses, a muscle-computer interface, and brain-computer interaction.” – Mary Czerwinski
Not bad! But working devices along those lines are several years away, so for now we’re stuck with the tablet form-factor as the primary basis for natural input. I’ve used a tablet PC on and off for the past five years, happily. My wife now uses an HP tablet.
So I’ve been eagerly following the blogosphere’s hyperventilation about the much-rumored, still-unseen Apple tablet computer, which has been variously described as being close to launch, far from launch, and non-existent.
Here’s a nifty demo of a very small piece of software, that could find daily use for large numbers of people in any large enterprise, or any shopper in a mall – anywhere someone’s wandering in a large building or complex looking for a specific office, conference room, storefront, or location – especially indoors where GPS is of no use.
It’s called GoMap, and I think it could have great applicability for government complexes, which have lots of rabbit-warren hallways, lots of constantly-reassigned workers, and lots of visitors.
I missed GoMap’s first public unveiling today because I’m on the east coast this week, mostly for the Cybersecurity “Leap Ahead” conference in Arlington Virginia which wrapped up today; I will write about the conference separately.
But that meant I had to miss the bar-camp-style WinMoDevCamp today on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. There was a lot of buzz around this DevCamp, and there’ll be others in 6 more cities soon (Austin, London, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, and Toronto) as developers gear up for the upcoming release of the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system. You can get registration information about the future events at the main WinMoDevCamp site (props to Todd Bishop on his TechFlash blog for highlighting the series).
The GoMap prototype makes innovative location-aware use of Microsoft Tag and TagReader (the high-capacity color barcodes developed by Microsoft Research), to solve the problem of having no GPS capability indoors – check out the short video.
WinMoDevCamp is an indication that there’s a real explosion of app development going on in the Windows Mobile world, to match the equally exciting iPhone app and Android app activity. There’s been a feeling in Microsoft that our best advantages are the large installed base through third-party WinMo phone manufacturers, plus Microsoft’s long experience nurturing app developers on other platforms (.Net as a good example). But I personally think that superior innovation is going to be the battleground, and we’re well positioned for that as well, with a lot of exciting things emerging from Microsoft Research and different advanced development labs in product groups. GoMap’s one example.
Not sure of the timeline for GoMap, but you can use TagReader right now, without the GoMap piece. It’s a free download on the Tag webpage, or you can get it on any mobile phone (yes, even the exploding iPhone) at http://gettag.mobi.
Here’s a quick post, about a talk I gave this week – but as an excuse to link to a much more compelling presentation given at the TED Talks recently. Yesterday I had the good fortune to deliver the “Technology Keynote” address at the annual International Field Directors and Technology Conference, in Delray Beach, Florida. The IFD&TC is a well-known group in its field – no pun – of the world’s leading academic and government researchers, conducting large-scale and longitudinal social-scientific research studies.
As an example, think of the U.S. Census – and indeed I had the opportunity to spend some time with Cheryl Landman, Chief of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Demographic Surveys Division. You know those large studies drawn from every decade’s data? She runs them. That division’s work should feature prominently (I hope) in the forthcoming U.S. government’s “Data.gov” set of services.
My intention with this blog is always to write medium-length “think-pieces,” about technology, government, or preferably both. I’m working on several (the Jefferson Gov 2.0 piece, the Evil Twin 2.0 piece, and one on “whither the multilingual web”), but they do truly require thought and some free time, so they percolate a bit.
Shepherd's Pi 