Digital mobile sensors can save your life, and reduce healthcare costs

This is a very interesting and informative 17-minute video that gives an overview of some of the wireless medical sensing devices that are available to consumers today. The speaker (Eric Topol) gives statistics on chronic diseases (diabetes, heart failure, sleep apnea), and their cost impact in money and quality of life. He cites Wired magazine articles that show the consumer acceptance of continuous monitoring of physiological processes.


Please take the 17 minutes to view this video.

Order your Virtual Personal Assistant around with your voice

There are a lot of services planned for the semantic web (SemWeb), many of which are not about the human interface. The SemWeb is supposed to be optimized for data to interact and for machines to interact, but at some point, it must deliver value to humans or we won't build them.

'Agent' is used to describe an action such as conduct a search, make a reservation, buy tickets... Examples of more complex actions may be to infer your intent and initiate a series of actions now and in the future based on a set of contextual conditions, like a sell order to your stock broker.

Wouldn't it be great to have a digital personal assistant that understands your intent, in the correct context, that will continuously learn who you are, your preferences and decision criteria, and slave away endlessly without taking offense even when you're surly and not politically correct?

Here's a 43:18 minute video in which Tom Gruber of Siri explains a lot, at great length, and gives a great demo. It is worth your time and attention. Siri is an iPhone app launched in mid-2009 and is 'free.' It's not 'real' artificial intelligence, not 'real' natural language... but still quite compelling. Tom will explain.

KEYNOTE: The Game Changer: Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistant from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

Predictions: Future of the Web in 2020

My summary of a long article at:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/010410-outlook-vision.html?page=1
13-slide slideshow with data on web usage. That page has links to related content and whitepapers
http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2010/010410-outlook-vision.html

My comment
Most of the research projects mentioned in the article will fundamentally change the architecture and premise of the TCP/IP protocol. I hope Vint Cerf (now with Google) will improve our understanding of the relative impact of these research projects and the risks and opportunities for commercialization. Or give the Google point of view on which vendors might take which critical roles to bring which of these innovations to market.

Article Summary
These innovations might be implemented on the Internet in 10-15 years. They will be tested now on a virtual networking lab being built by BBN Technologies called GENI for the Global Environment for Network Innovations.

Key Topics with brief opinions by moi

• Virtual networks like GENI
• Content-centric networking where content types are assigned names so end users can choose content types to 'subscribe' to, thereby getting more relevant data and avoiding some spam.
  
• Software defined networking intends to shift intelligence to an external, user-programmable controller, giving users more control. Bad news for router folks.
  
• "Floating Cloud' concept where only the tier value is sent, to manage immense routing tables. The problem with all abstractions is information loss.
  
• "Sometimes On" wireless networks, aka 'opportunistic networks' where one device that does not have access can leverage a peer, connected device to relay messages.
• Davis Social Links intends to substitute the universal addressability of IP addresses with social links to provide a layer of security, like in Facebook where the propagation of a message is authenticated by 'verified friends status.'

Wonderful Mobile Applications

I love it that the mobile phone is becoming the 'most accepted' mobile device, so vendors are packing more and more features into it. Of course most users use it for voice calls and texting, but the integrated camera is opening many new ways to use the mobile phone. Most people don't know that many mobile phone camera also have rudimentary photo editing capabilities too. I take a picture of something and send it by phone to someone to show him/her that what I see, and ask them to comment.

Some TV shows demonstrate how the police are using the cameras in their mobile phones to take photos of suspects to send to colleagues and witnesses thereby getting information faster and keeping third parties safer. Forensics shows tell us that cell phones can help law enforcement people track the time and location of phone calls. We see that by-standers are capturing photos and VIDEOS with important information for law enforcement and the news media.

We already know that browser-enabled phones let us browse the web, such as to 'do' email, use search or map addresses. The problems are often, the display on the phone is very small so it's hard to see detailed web pages; and the keyboards are small and often require repeating several key strokes to enter information. There are shortcuts and built-in auto-text, but most people don't want to make the effort to learn and train their devices -- and rightly so. Devices must be intuitive and easy to use. Well, better user interface have already been built. A large virtual display as well as virtual keyboards and other ways to control the display were developed for the heads-up-display and user interface for fighter pilots. Voice input is also available, as is eye-movement tracking. The hurdles to consumerizing those technologies are market acceptance and cost.

There's a web application where you take a picture of the bar code of an item with your mobile phone, then the application searches the web, and using its GPS (or by communicating with the cell tower closest to your location), it tells you where the same item is available nearby and the price of that item. Helps you to shop better!

Many, many diverse, useful, charming and ingenious applications are available if only people knew about them! There are so many choices of ways that mobile applications can improve our lives.

The type of application that I am currently enthusiastic about is 'augmented reality.' No, it's not a game or like those 3D movies. Such applications give more information about your surroundings, based on what you ask it to find out. F'instance, you're driving in an unfamiliar part of town and want to know whether there is a police station or hospital nearby. Or you're a child who's lost and wants to let your mother know how to find you. By taking a few photos of your immediate surroundings, the mobile application will figure out where you are and you can send that information to your Mom. Augmented reality applications can help you.

In countries other than the US, mobile phone service providers have partnered with vendors to do bill processing. You can pay bills with your phone. In other words, your phone provides similar services as credit cards.

This post is quite long enough so I'll stop now, but my main message is, a personal mobile device such as the phone can improve our lives in many, many ways, in addition to making phone calls and sending text messages.

A very important problem that inhibits consumers from choosing and using so many capabilities is the relatively high cost of data services. That's a huge, complex topic that is receiving a lot of research and discussion. Maybe I'll do a little homework and write about it next time.

Managing online credentials

Managing one's web credentials is a very important topic that is especially relevant to privacy, especially for social media sites. Do web users have too many different credentials and find it troublesome to manage them? 

There are primarily three ways to 'remember' your credentials:

1. Use storage and retrieval methods that are at your end:

• biometric authentication e.g., your fingerprint recognized by your computer. Biometric authentication only controls access to your local, individual computer. What happens when there's a software error, for example, with your biometric software, or when you move from versions of operating systems, change computers, or are a victim of malware? Or when your computer is damaged? As of now, more intelligent authentication methods such as face-recognition are not yet commercialized.
  
• Cookies or Browser-based which means your username and passoword are stored on your computer.
  
• A pass-worded document on a hard-drive or a piece of text saved on another device such as a mobile hand-held
  
• (God forbid) a hard copy such as a Post-it note stuck to the bottom of your PC
  
• In your head or in your wife's head

1. Storage methods that are 'remembered' by the websites that you must log into such as your bank account, social networking sites like FaceBook, and/or other subscriptions. Some sites are more secure than others. Most just use cookies; others encrypt and validate through sophisticated methods. Most subscription log-in pages should have a way for you to ask them to email to you a new password, but you must get your username right or answer their security questions so that they can send the new password to the correct email address. The better ones will send you a new temporary password that you must change immediately.
   
   Many web sites that provide primarily content (such as newspapers or blogs) now post 'share' links to popular social networks like Facebook, del.icio.us... but they are relying on those networks to check your credentials.
   
   
2. Store your credentials in a central place on the web, either at a provider like Google or Verisign, or elsewhere.
   
   One such initiative is OpenID where groups of web sites agree to 'recognize' the log-in credentials of other web sites. You will see sites that say you can log in using, for example, your Facebook or Twitter credentials. Google has integrated their applications with a single sign-in. Once you log into Google, you can use many (if not all) Google applications such as the calendar, documents, Wave, Feedburner, etc.

The normal progression of a new product's path to the market is:

• introduce point solutions
• then offer a 'swarm' of incompatible solutions that don't work together,
  
• followed by ones that interoperate meaning they're not 'native' but do work together
  
• and, finally, after technologies, standards, licensing deals, APIs or open source code have been worked out, and the market is mature enough to support profitable pricing models, we will have 'end to end' or 'universal' solutions.
  

I hope we've attained the 'swarm' stage for tools to manage credentials. Some strategies that people on the social network have confessed to using:

• Use the same credentials everywhere. This is ok provided those credentials are 'strong.' "Strongness" means username and password that are hard to guess. There are programs that test for credentials so they're not just guessing.
• Use variants on the same credentials. This is better than 'the same' but the complexity might make it just as hard to manage as altogether different credentials. You can create 'protocols' for yourself like in the paragraph below after 'strong passwords.'
• Using your browser's 'remember me' is not very secure.
• Many sites now use your email address as a unique username. That is easy to find out or guess. Many people use their ISP's email address so when they change ISPs, it can become a problem (although ISPs have gotten smart and keep those users active instead of deleting those addresses). So, many web sites now rely 'solely' on your password for authentication.

Here are tips on how to create STRONG usernames and passwords:

• 8 characters or longer, use one or more capital letter(s), one or more number(s), one or more special characters (some authentication software have limitations such as you cannot use a dot, or underscore)
• A good way to make strong passwords is to use the first letters of words of song lyrics, such as "Oh Say Can You See! 1776" to create the password: "Oscys!1776"

It's a good idea to build two levels of credentials: high and low. For 'high,' such as to access your online bank account, change the password frequently. You can change only a part of it, for instance, from "OsCys!1776" to "Oscys!1778" for the month of August.

For low level credentials such as your subscription to a newspaper, it doesn't really matter that much if someone accesses your account. I make my username and password the same, such as "mariatseng" as username, and the same string, "mariatseng" as the password.

It is critical that you remember the rules (protocols) you made up to create usernames and passwords, such as 'same username and password for magazine subscriptions' but for important applications, use 'email ID as username and patriotic song for password.' It's ok to write your rules down because whoever is spying still must discern the specifics.

There's lots more to say about this topic, and there are lots of experts, entire fields in computer science for security and encryption.