• A collaboration between US healthcare’s leading IT association and the next-generation Internet2 consortium to explore the use of Internet2 for private, secure, and very fast health information exchange; and
• A photonic chip from Intel, likely to be on the market by the time GM is mass-producing hydrogen cars.

The acceleration in computing power will continue to accelerate our understanding of biology. A new “SETI@Home”-style program will use online game machines (which already have far more power than your PC) to study protein folding and its effects in the body.

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Other news:

• One of the media’s more savvy technology reviewers has concluded that automatic speech recognition (ASR)software is ready for prime time. The days of the keyboard and mouse, at least as the primary means of interfacing with the computer, are already over for those whose primary use of computers is for capturing words in documents and emails.
• Thanks to the richness of data accessible over the Internet, artificial intelligence is closing the gap between promise and performance. One of the promises of AI has been automatic language interpretation (ALI). The report (above) that ASR — prerequisite for interpretation — is ready for prime time, coupled with the kind of developments reported at AI’s main US conference, gives hope that the shortage of interpreters in hospital emergency departments may soon have an ALI solution.
• Luddite journalists look out! The machines are coming after your job. But for the moment, they still need your human touch.
• An “emotionally aware” computer is able to reveal an individual’s mood by analyzing facial expressions.

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The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and Internet2 have created a partnership to develope a next-generation network offering the health sciences and healthcare sectors a private and secure medium for exchanging health information. It may contribute to the creation of a US National Health Information Network (NHIN).

HIMSS has 20,000 individual and more than 300 corporate members. Internet2 is a consortium of 208 US universities and over 100 industry and government members, who have operated an advanced nationwide Internet for the research and academic community since 1999.

A major upgrade to Internet2 already under way will provide members ten times the capacity and speed of its current infrastructure (reaching 100 Gigabits per second in 2007). Internet2 has also developed authentication and authorization technologies for “active privacy management.”

The new partnership has established four working groups to explore:

• Identity Management, for identification and authentication of individuals regardless of their physical location.
• Privacy & Security, to focus on tools and techniques for the privacy and security of information that travels on the network.
• Biomedical (Health Sciences and Healthcare) Education, to focus on the unique needs and providing access to the resources required for biomedical education.
• Telehealth, to focus on the implications for clinical practice when a reliable advanced network is available.

In addition, members of both organizations will work for the development and implementation of the network with other partnerships and collaborations, including Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE).

Silicon-Indium Photonic Chips

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Cheap and abundant silicon can do almost anything with light except generate it well. Indium phosphide generates light very well but is rare and costly. Intel and University of California researchers have found an easy and inexpensive way to manufacture hybrid silicon-indium phosphide chips that will move data far more quickly than conventional chips and slash the cost of broadband telecommunication network components.

“This marks the beginning of highly integrated silicon photonic chips that can be mass-produced at low cost,” a researcher told the BBC News.

The hybrid chip could be on the market by 2010.

IBM Plans 1.6 Petaflop World Champion

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Later this year IBM will start delivery to the Los Alamos National Laboratory of a supercomputer four times more powerful than the current world’s fastest, IBM’s “BlueGene/L.” When delivery is completed in 2008, it will cover 12,000 square feet (1,100 square metres) of floor space.

“Roadrunner,” as the new machine is codenamed, will use 16,000 standard supercomputer processors and 16,000 “Cell” chips, each of which has eight processors and is capable of 256 gigaflops (billion calculations per second). (Cell chips are also used in Sony’s PlayStation 3 (PS3) game machine.) Roadrunner is intended for US nuclear weapons stockpile monitoring. It will provide 1.6 petaflops (1,600 trillion calculations per second) of performance at peak speed. By comparison, BlueGene/L is theoretically capable of “only” 367 teraflops (367 trillion calucaltions per second.)

Stanford University has also announced plans to take advantage of the PS3 Cell chips by distributing to online gamers a program similar to the SETI@home project, which uses idle PCs connected to the Internet to process radio telescope data to find signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence. The Stanford program will run on gamers’ networked PS3s while the machines are idle, to examine how the changing shape of proteins as they “fold” affects diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and many cancers.

Just 10,000 PS3s running the program would have a performance equivalent to one petaflop, but the Stanford team hopes to enlist 100,000 of them.

MRAM Has Arrived

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Freescale’s magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) chip -– “the most significant development in computer memory for a decade,” according to one analyst — stores data magnetically rather than electronically. That means the data are still there even after the power is cut, unlike the standard RAM chips in today’s computers. Flash memory is also impervious to power cuts, but MRAM has faster read and write speeds and does not degrade over time. The chips might one day be used to store the entire operating system, so system start-up would be nearly instantaneous. Freescale produced the four-megabit chips for two months to build up levels of stock before offering it to customers, of which it claims to have several, in July.

ASR Has Arrived

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“Well, I’ll be darned. It’s really on and it’s really working. I’m wearing a headset, talking, and my PC is writing down everything I say in Microsoft Word. I’m speaking at full speed, perfectly normally except that I’m pronouncing the punctuation (comma), like this (period). Let’s try something a little tougher. Pyridoxine hydrochloride. Antagonistic Lilliputians. Infinitesimal zithers. Hm! Not bad.”

So began New York Times technology columnist David Pogue in a thorough review of one automatic speech recognition (ASR) program.

He concluded: “. . . dictation software is ready for prime time; the state of this art has attained nearly ‘Star Trek’ polish.”

AI Lives On

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Artificial intelligence (AI) passed its 50th anniversary this year, still alive despite persistent overpromise and underdelivery. It survives because the two are coming closer to balance, thanks to the data richness of the Web environment.

AP writer Brian Bergstein gives two examples of that better balance, demonstrated at the American Association for Artifical Intelligence annual conference in July:

• Microsoft demonstrated “JamBayes,” running on a handheld computer showing a map of Seattle highways. JamBayes combines real-time road sensor data with historical information about weather patterns, traffic flows at certain times of day and even pro sports schedules, the color-coded map was indicating how long drivers could expect to wait before gridlock hit each artery. The program can signal when drivers would be surprised, pleasantly or unpleasantly, by conditions on a certain road. 

   

• SRI International demonstrated a program that can schedule meetings, delegate tasks, and book trips for people, asking for human guidance only if conflicts arise. 

Software Writer

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The Thomson Earnings News service, aimed at financial advisers, brokers, and investment managers, delivers two types of articles generated by a computer, reports Anick Jesdanun of the Associated Press. In one type, the computer compares a company’s quarterly earnings report with analyst forecasts then produces a story stating whether earnings exceeded or fell short of expectations. The second type monitors minute changes in analysts’ outlooks on various companies and can generate articles based on company or industry trends.

Human reporters sometimes expand on the computer-generated stories. The company says it is simply “a tool that can be used by journalists to create a more interesting story so they are not spending time pouring over databases to (spot) some anomaly.”

Launched earlier this year, the service has about 12,000 individual subscribers in the United States.

Mind Reading

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“Imagine a computer that could pick the right emotional moment to try to sell you something, a future where mobile phones, cars and Web sites could read our mind and react to our moods,” a scientist involved in the development of an “emotionally aware” computer told Patricia Reaney of Reuters.

The system is able to reveal an individual’s mood by analyzing facial expressions for boredom, interest, confusion, or agreement/disagreement. Applications could include improving driving skills, tailoring advertising to people’s moods, and determining whether a student understands what is being explained. The team says it is “working with a big car company and they envision this being employed in cars within five years.”

The joint UK/US development team hopes to get the system to accept other inputs such as posture and gesture as indicators of mood.