Synopsis: Ict:

#Laser-Radio links Upgrade the Internet The rise of Wi-fi and cellular data services made Internet access more convenient and ubiquitous.

Now some of the high-speed backhaul data that powers Internet services looks set to go wireless, too.

in wireless hops of up to 10 kilometers at a time, is in trials with three of the largest U s. Internet carriers.

It is also being rolled out by one telecommunications provider in Mexico, and is helping build out the Internet infrastructure of Nigeria,

a country that was connected to a new high-capacity submarine cable from Europe last year. AOPTIX, the company behind the technology, pitches it as a cheaper and more practical alternative to laying new fiber optic cables.

Efforts to dig trenches to install fiber in urban areas face significant bureaucratic and physical challenges.

says Chandra Pusarla, senior vice president of products and technology at AOPTIX. He says a faster way to install new capacity is to use his company wireless transmission towers to move data at two gigabits per second.

AOPTIX technology takes the form of a box roughly the size of a coffee table with an infrared laser peering out of a small window on the front,

AOPTIX teamed up the laser and radio links to compensate for weaknesses with either technology used alone.

while millimeter wave radio signals are absorbed by rain. Routing data over both simultaneously provides redundancy that allows an AOPTIX link to guarantee a rate of two gigabits per second with only five minutes or less downtime in a year,

whatever the weather conditions, says Pusarla. A typical fiber connection might be 10 or more times faster than that, due to the limitations of the radio frequency link.

But AOPTIX says the convenience of its technology makes up for that and it could be increased to four gigabits or more in the future.

The radio and laser equipment inside an AOPTIX device move automatically to compensate for the swaying of a cell tower caused by wind.

AOPTIX originally developed its laser technology for the Pentagon, designing systems that actively steer laser beams to keep data moving between ground stations, drones, and fighter jets.

Pursala declined to identify the three U s. carriers that have been testing AOPTIX technology over the past year or so,

or its Nigerian customer. Other early customers are being more open. The Mexican telecommunications company Car-sa recently switched on the first of several links it plans to use to link up cellular towers

and provide Internet to corporate customers. And before the end of the year, Anova Technologies, a networking company that specializes in the financial industry,

will use AOPTIX technology in New jersey to shave nanoseconds off the time it takes data to travel between the computers of Nasdaq Stock market and the New york stock exchange e

#A Battery to Prop up Renewable Power Hits the Market A new kind of battery that stores energy from solar

and transmits data over a cellphone network connection. The data transmitted includes the location of a gun

or viewed on a smartphone. Founded in 2013 Yardarm started out making a consumer product for monitoring a firearm location.

and devices to come with Internet connectivity. The gun industry is gradually taking notice of these trends.

Yardarm plans to start selling the hardware and tracking service in mid-2015. The next goal is to capture the direction in

and imaging technologies assembled into a single workstation. It combines a touch screen camera, infrared depth sensors, projector, touch-sensitive whiteboard,

and a conventional printer and scanner. Youe encouraged to hook it up to a 3-D printer,

like the one HP launched alongside the Sprout. All that is supposed to make Sprout into a powerful new tool for designers and other creatives.

You might use the device to scan, say, a Buddha statuette in 3-D, and then use a stylus to modify the digital scan once it is projected onto the workstation touch-sensitive surface.

After you made your change, you could print the new design out in 3-D. Sprout shows signs of HP history of making PCS and printers,

with matte grey casing and the bulbous contours of a Ford taurus. But it is clearly the product of some very clever engineering and an ambitious product strategy.

While computer processers and memory have advanced over the decades, we have continued to interface with them via monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

More recently, tools for making things in the physical world have changed a lot too, with the advent of maker spaces and affordable, computer-controlled lathes, mills,

and 3-D printers. But in neither of these cases do you have the opportunity to take control of the world of physical outputs

and software-based design and computing together. Sprout is a clunky device to gaze upon,

but it dreaming in a big way about the very nature of work. You can do things with Sprout that had previously only had been possible by piecing together at least a half dozen different devices.

The power unit is a rectangular slab about the size of a movie theater screen. It mounted on a thick steel post,

#Google's Secretive Deepmind Startup Unveils a Neural Turing Machine""One of the great challenges of neuroscience is to understand the short-term working memory in the human brain.

At the same time computer scientists would dearly love to reproduce the same kind of memory in silico. Today Google s secretive Deepmind startup which it bought for $400 million earlier this year unveils a prototype computer that attempts to mimic some of the properties of the human brain s short-term working memory.

The new computer is a type of neural network that has been adapted to work with an external memory.

The result is a computer that learns as it stores memories and can later retrieve them to perform logical tasks beyond those it has been trained to do.

Deepmind s breakthrough follows a long history of work on short-term memory. In the 1950s the American cognitive psychologist George Miller carried out one of the more famous experiments in the history of brain science.

During the 1990s and 2000s computer scientists repeatedly attempted to design algorithms circuits and neural networks that could perform this trick.

Such a computer should be able to parse a simple sentence like Mary spoke to John by dividing it into its component parts of actor action and the receiver of the action.

So in this case it would assign the role of actor to Mary the role of action to the words spoke to

They begin by redefining the nature of a neural network. Until now neural networks have been interconnected patterns of neurons

But the fundamental process of computing contains an important additional element. This is an external memory

and read from during the course of a computation. In Turing s famous description of a computer the memory is the tickertape that passes back and forth through the computer and which stores symbols of various kinds for later processing.

This kind of readable and writable memory is absent in a conventional neural network . So Graves and co have added simply one.

This allows the neural network to store variables in its memory and come back to them later to use in a calculation.

This is similar to the way an ordinary computer might put the number 3 and the number 4 inside registers and later add them to make 7. The difference is that the neural network might store more complex patterns of variables representing for example the word Mary

. Since this form of computing differs in an important way from a conventional neural network Graves

and co give it a new name they call it a Neural Turing Machine the first of its kind to have been built.

The Neural Turing Machine learns like a conventional neural network using the inputs it receives from the external world

but it also learns how to store this information and when to retrieve it. The Deepmind work involves first constructing the device

They compare the performance of their Neural Turing Machine with a conventional neural network. The difference is significant.

The conventional neural network learns to copy sequences up to length 20 almost perfectly. But when it comes to sequences that are longer than the training data errors immediately become significant.

Once again the Neural Turing Machine significantly outperforms a conventional neural network. That is an impressive piece of work. Our experiments demonstrate that our Neural Turing Machine is capable of learning simple algorithms from example data

and of using these algorithms to generalize well outside its training regime say Graves and co. That is an important step forward that has the potential to make computing machines much more brainlike than ever before.

But there is significant work ahead. In particular the human brain performs a clever trick to make sense of complex arguments.

An interesting question that follows from Miller s early work is this: if our working memory is only capable of handling seven chunks how do we make sense of complex arguments in books for example that consists of thousands or tens of thousands of chunks?

To Miller the brain s ability to recode in this way was one of the keys to artificial intelligence.

He believed that until a computer could reproduce this ability it could never match the performance of the human brain.

Google s Deepmind has stated that its goal is solving intelligence. If this solution is anything like human intelligence a good test would be to see

#A Credit card Terminal That Takes Apps Last year Osama Bedier then the head of Google Wallet decided he was on the wrong side of the payments business.

The sleek-looking $299 touch-screen gadget accepts cards with embedded chips which will soon be widespread as well as digital payments

Google s digital payment app Google Wallet offers consumers a number of payment-related features including a quick way to pay at stores by tapping a phone that contains a near-field

Although adoption of Google Wallet has been slow NFC technology is gaining in popularity and that is likely to accelerate with the introduction of a similar system from Apple called Apple Pay (see With Apple Pay Forget Cash Just Pull out Your Phone).

Meanwhile the U s s major credit-card companies are mandating a shift to more secure credit cards that eschew the familiar magnetic strip for a chip that uses a unique string of numbers for each transaction (a standard known as EMV

Bedier a former Paypal executive who came to Google in 2011 saw an opportunity to switch his focus from the gadgets we can use to make payments to the ones used to handle the transactions:

Poynt s terminal is dominated by two touch screens that meet at an angle a seven-inch display that a store employee will use to ring up sales

and there s a built-in receipt printer that will spit out paper from an opening below the customer touch screen.

It accepts payments via NFC (used by services such as Google Wallet and Apple s new Apple Pay) and QR code.

It includes Bluetooth as well. Bedier showed me how it works during an interview conducted via Skype video.

The Poynt terminal he used said Welcome to Main St. Bakery on the customer screen

Merchants could use the screen for ads or store specials when not taking payments Bedier says.

and make a purchase using Apple Pay on an iphone: Bedier typed in the amount due

and the colleague tapped the terminal with his iphone while placing his finger on the iphone s home button

which on newer models is also a fingerprint reader to validate his identity. The Poynt terminal weighs a little over a pound

and contains a wireless modem and eight-hour rechargeable battery which means it could be carried around a store or restaurant if needed.

and Kabbage and releasing a software development kit in hopes of attracting other developers too o

#Internet-Connected Battery Could Bring Smoke alarms Online A startup has come up with a simple way to make smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors more useful:

a nine-volt battery with built-in Wi-fi. The battery can alert you on your smartphone

We were approaching the Internet-of-things space not from a perspective of##How can we build a whizzy new device that does something?

and not that are excluded currently from the growing throng of connected gadgets. Roost s first batteries which are based lithium

and meant to last for more than five years contain a Wi-fi chip and sensors for audio detection and voltage monitoring.

To get one working with a smoke alarm you d set it up with a forthcoming Roost smartphone app.

or kids bedroom) and connect it to your home Wi-fi and then insert it in the battery compartment of the alarm.

Right now Roost has a working prototype in a plastic box about the size of an external hard drive;

But the technology also offers a cheap way to pick up just about anythingabric, bags of chips, 50-pound boxes of paper, single pieces of paper, mobile phones.

#How Magic Leap s Augmented reality Works A Florida startup called Magic Leap announced Tuesday that it had received $542 million in funding from major Silicon valley investors led by Google to develop hardware

for a new kind of augmented reality hardware. The secretive startup has yet to publicly describe or demonstrate its technology,

what the company CEO and founder Rony Abovitz has called he most natural and human-friendly wearable computing interface in the world.

The filings describe sophisticated display technology that can trick the human visual system better than existing virtual reality displays (such as the Oculus Rift) into perceiving virtual objects as real.

The display technology used in most devices can show only flat, 2-D images. Headsets like the Oculus Rift trick your brain into perceiving depth by showing different images to each eye,

but your eyes are focused always on the flat screen right in front of them. When you look at a real 3-D scene,

the depth at which your eyes are focused changes as you look at objects at different distances away. f we leave out those focus cues we get an experience that not quite realistic,

They describe displays that can create the same kind of 3-D patterns of light rays, known as ight fields,

Earlier this year, Wetzstein and colleagues used that technique to create a display that allows text to be read clearly by people not wearing their usual corrective lenses (see rototype Display Lets You Say Goodbye to Reading Glasses.

He previously worked on glasses-free 3-D displays based on similar methods. And last year, researchers at chip company Nvidia demonstrated a basic wearable display based on light fields.

A trademark filing from July describes Magic Leap technology as earable computer hardware, namely, an optical display system incorporating a dynamic light-field display.

One of Magic Leap patents describes how such a device, dubbed a WRAP, for aveguide reflector array projector, would operate.

The display would be made up of an array of many small curved mirrors; light would be delivered to that array via optical fiber,

and each of the tiny elements would reflect some of that light to create the light field for a particular point in 3-D space.

Multiple layers of such tiny mirrors would allow the display to produce the illusion of virtual objects at different distances.

That would allow the mirrors to be reprogrammed using a magnetic field to rapidly display points at different depths fast enough to fool the eye

Magic Leap greatest challenge may be to find a way to seamlessly integrate virtual 3-D objects created by that display with

and eye-tracking cameras on a wearable display to figure out at what depth a person eyes are focused.

Depth-sensing cameras are now relatively cheap and compact (see ntel Says Tablets and Laptops with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon.

But Wetzstein says Magic Leap will need likely to make major breakthroughs in computer vision software for a wearable device to make sense of the world enough for very rich augmented reality. hey will require very powerful 3-D image recognition,

running on your head-mounted display, he says. The company is recruiting experts in chip design and fabrication

apparently with a view to creating custom chips to process image data. Dedicated chips could make that work more energy-efficient, something important for a wearable device.

Magic Leap already employs Gary Bradski, a pioneer of computer vision research and software, notes Wetzstein.

manufacturing supply-chain management, 3-D sensing, artificial intelligence, and video game development. Altogether, many of the underlying techniques Magic Leap needs to realize highly realistic augmented reality have been demonstrated,

says Wetzstein. But the company will have to refine and combine them in ways no one has managed yet to do. think people are starting to realize this is the future of building consumer devices he says. ut it involves big challenges at the intersection of optics, electronics, algorithms,

and understanding the human visual system. h

#Technology and Inequality The signs of the gapeally, a chasmetween the poor and the super-rich are hard to miss in Silicon valley.

Twenty minutes away in San jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungleeputed to be the largest in the countryas taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe

Indeed, people are stoning buses transporting Google employees to work from their homes in San francisco. The anger in Northern California

The coauthor, with fellow MIT academic Andrew Mcafee, of The Second Machine Age, Brynjolfsson, like Piketty, has gained recently unlikely prominence for an academic economist.

While Piketty writing is sprinkled with references to Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac, Brynjolfsson talks of advanced robots and the vast potential of artificial intelligence.

and TV had broadened greatly the audiencesnd hence the rewardsor those in show business and sports. Thirty years later

and thanks to software and other digital technologies. Why hire a local tax consultant when you can use a cheap,

The ability to copy software and distribute digital products anywhere means customers will buy the top one.

Why use a search engine that is almost as good as Google? Such economic logic now rules a growing share of the marketplace;

and building a business becomes less capital-intensiveou don need a printing plant to produce an online news site,

In an article called ew World Order, published this summer in Foreign affairs, Brynjolfsson, Mcafee, and Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate and professor at New york University, argued that uperstar-based technical change is upending the global economy.

and Mcafee argument that the transformation of work is speeding up as technological change accelerates.

nor is concentrated such growth in computer-intensive sectors. According to Autor, the changes wrought by digital technologies are transforming the economy,

He says that because progress in robotics, artificial intelligence, and such high-profile technologies as Google driverless car are happening more slowly than some people may think.

Despite impressive anecdotal accounts, these technologies are not ready for widespread use. ou would be actually pretty hard pressed to find a robot in your day-to-day life,

As both a rock climber and a user of prostheses Herr has direct experience with frustratingly poor prosthetic designs

Herr worked with Pratt to develop a computer-controlled knee joint that uses a magnetorheological fluid a fluid

and postdocs working on projects is strewn with computer parts coffee cups wires rolls of tape random tools

This science he says is critical for designing the hardware and software control systems of bionic devices.

and reprogrammed the prosthesis with algorithms that would allow it to execute the necessary rotations.

Whereas brain-machine interfaces would require invasive surgery for brain implants he wants to connect electronic devices to the peripheral nerves at the site of the injury allowing people to control bionic limbs with their existing nerves

Building an exoskeleton that makes movement easier is challenging the device must provide a benefit to the user that exceeds the burden of wearing it.

or building wearable devices that can dramatically boost its abilities. I admire Hugh s creativity and unique approach and his drive says Woodie Flowers SM 68 ME 70 Phd 72 an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering who helped supervise Herr s graduate research work.

and slick TV ads were said illegal, it, since they never been cleared by the agency. But Deboe, a mommy blogger and author of children books, found a way to get the health information she wanted anyway.

Using a low-budget Web service called Promethease she paid $5 to upload her raw 23andme data.

they are loading their DNA data into several little-known websites like Promethease that have become, by default, the largest purveyors of consumer genetic health services in the United Statesnd the next possible targets for nervous

and Mike Cariaso, a computer programmer. It works by comparing a person DNA data with entries in SNPEDIA,

consumers complained angrily about the FDA on the company Facebook page, where they also uploaded links to the Promethease website,

calling it a orkaround, a way to get xhaustive medical infoin reports that are imilar,

a professor at Stanford university who helped developed a DNA interpretation site called Interpretome as part of a class he teaches on genetics. s it going to be concentrated by medical associations,

or out there on the Internet so people can interact? Now a question is whether Promethease and sites like it could,

or should, be the next target of regulators. Lennon believes his service is outside the FDA reach,

and you have to shut down Webmd and Wikipedia, too. Reached by MIT Technology Review, the FDA said it has authority to regulate software that interprets genomes,

even if such services are given away free. The agency does not comment on specific companies. e know that they know about us

MIT Technology Review tested several interpretation-only sites using DNA data of anonymous donors posted publicly by the Personal Genome Project,

All the sites quickly reported gene variants contained in the files although the number of variants reported varied, from as few as 35 to as many as 17,667 for Promethease.

Two of the sites appeared designed to steer users toward alternative medicine. Genetic Genie, a free service that carries ads for vitamins,

That site, however, directed users to get an xplanationof the results by contacting chiropractors, dieticians,

and mind-body healers whose telephone numbers it provided. The Promethease report was the most detailed

although its clunky, barebones design is not easy to use. It organizes a person genetic variations under categories such as edical conditionsand edicines.

Users can then click to see information about individual genes that scientific research has suggested could raise,

they launched SNPEDIA as a site that would let themnd anyone elseeep tabs on what science was learning about each gene variant.

Lennon says the site was modeled on Wikipedia. hat was the promise of the genome, that it should be for everybody,

Its CEO, Anne Wojcicki, who is married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin, landed on magazine covers,

and a board member predicted that her startup would ecome the Google of personalized healthcare. It didn happen that way.

traffic to interpretation-only sites jumped. Interpretome maintained by Konrad Karczewski, a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital,

Lennon says the site averages between 50 and 500 reports per day, including a free version and a faster-running paid product.

After all, they named their software after Prometheus, the titan who defied the gods by stealing fire from Mt olympus and giving it to mankind.

#Apple's Quiet Attempt to Shake up Wireless Carriers Could Benefit Us All If you happened to pore over the details added to Apple website yesterday about its new ipads,

you might have noticed that models with cellular capabilities include something interesting on the wireless front.

They use a special SIM CARD-the tiny card that allows your device to connect to a carrier network-called Apple SIM.

You will be able to use a setting in ios to quickly switch from carrier to carrier right on the ipad

To start, you will be able to choose from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint in the U s,

the Apple SIM is added eventually to the iphone (and, perhaps, similarly flexible SIMS appear for other smartphones as well).

Not only would it make it easier to move from one carrier to another, but it could also make it more affordable for people all over the world to communicate.

I asked Apple why the company didn mention the feature during its ipad news event Thursday in Cupertino.

For now, it more of an intriguing footnote to Apple refresh of its ipad line

which account for much of its iphone sales and subsidize their cost to consumers. That said, Apple does have a lot of influence over wireless carriers.

It even convinced Cingular Wireless (which then became a part of AT&T) to agree to sell the first iphone without even setting eyes on the device.

and the prospect of far worse floods the nation is sophisticated developing computer models of climate precipitation hydrology sea level

Its strategies guided by sophisticated computer models include building some inland water barriers as a second line of defense;

What itunes Did for Music? The point-of-sale terminal at the CVS drugstore in Palo alto, California, can accept payments through a quick tap from a smartphone.

The clerk isn sure how it works, though he knows it does because few kidshave used it.

But one shopper tries it by taking out his Android phone and clicking on Google alletapp intended to allow instant payment and taps the terminal.

Nothing happens. Then he tries Paypal payment app. Nothing. Out comes the leather wallet. Over the past decade, tech companies including Google, ebay Paypal,

and upstart Square, along with mobile carriers, credit-card companies, and various retailers, have proclaimed all the eath of the wallet.

and phone carriers, and consumer indifference. Though mobile payments at U s. retail stores will nearly double this year, to $3. 5 billion, according to market researcher emarketer,

Standing in front of a photo of an overstuffed billfold, Apple CEO Tim cook unveiled its mobile wallet at a September 9 event where he also debuted new iphones and the Apple Watch.

When Apple Pay launches Monday on new iphone 6 models, all it will take to buy a sandwich at Subway

or an air-chilled chicken at Whole Foods Market is to hold your iphone near a wireless reader and press your thumb on the home button.

The iphone Touch ID fingerprint sensor already used to unlock the phone, recognizes it really you.

Behind the scenes, a payment processor such as Visa recognizes an encrypted version of your credit card such as the one in an itunes account,

along with a onetime security code for that particular transaction, and approves the salell in less than 10 seconds.

which require unlocking the phone, opening an app, checking into a store, typing in a code,

user friendly products helped it popularize and seize commanding positions in music players and smartphones. If Apple Pay works as promised, it could do something similar for payments,

making mobile wallets appeal to the masses, starting with its influential army of iphone users. obile payment is finally hitting that pivotal moment

when all the pieces are coming together, says Matthew de Ganon, senior vice president of product and commerce for Softcard, a rival mobile wallet joint venture of T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon.

In the U s. there are only about 220,000 merchant point-of-sale terminals featuring the wireless payment communications system known as near field communication (NFC.

because card numbers aren stored directly on the phone or on Apple servers. Instead, digital tokens, encrypted numbers that look like card numbers,

and stored on a secure chip in the phone. During a purchase, that token and a onetime transaction-specific code are sent to process the payment,

Though Google Wallet and others have used tokens, Apple Pay will deploy them more widely. Notwithstanding Apple own recent icloud breach that exposed nude celebrity photos

says David Brudnicki, chief technology officer for Sequent Software, which provides mobile wallet services to banks, retailers,

For one, only iphone 6 and eventually iphone 5 owners with an Apple Watch can use Apple Pay.

The Softcard mobile wallet joint venture of T-Mobile AT&T, and Verizon is touting its support of more than 80 Android phones

and the ability to pay at retailers including Mcdonald, Subway, and Walgreens. Paypal, soon to split off from ebay,

and Google continue to push their wallet apps as well. Individual retailers which have persuaded customers to use their own apps have no intention of replacing them with Apple Pay.

Starbucks, for instance, lets customers pay by launching an app and holding up the phone screen with a QR code to a reader on its cash registers.

But spokeswoman Maggie Jantzen says the bigger reason that 15 percent of Starbucks purchasesome six million transactions a weekre now completed via mobile is combined the appeal of payment

a rewards program, and a store locator all in one app. Apple will have to offer a lot more to merchants than it currently does

Payments experts think the company will allow outside software developers to create apps that can add such features to Apple Pay.

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