An intelligent personal secretary — that could double as a personal physician — on which the U.S. Defense Department has lavished a $29 million down-payment could very well, like the best secretaries, also read your mind.

Meantime, in the basement of your computer, where the operating system hums away, autonomous guards will fend off any computer worm or virus, even those not yet devised, that try to infect your secretary or anything else legitimately running on your computer.

If that operating system is the kind that crashes at the most inopportune moments, a new kind of non-volatile RAM will help ensure that your secretary doesn’t forget the un-saved events and instructions issued just before a crash.

How much data you can save may take an exponential leap with a way found to bypass the physics of magnetism and enable a trillion bits of data to be stored magnetically in a mere square inch. The downsizing of data storage is being matched by the downsizing of microchip circuitry to molecular levels, using DNA strands to make chip production templates.

Machines that Think . . .

LifeLog is a DARPA (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) program to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) system to record, analyze, and act upon everything a person sees, feels, and does.* DARPA insists it is not a backdoor into the discredited “Total (a.k.a. Terrorism) Information Awareness” system, but a means of making computers serve us better, as computerized assistants that learn our individual habits and proclivities.

The first fruit of $29 millions-worth of LifeLog-related research grants will be “PAL,” the Perceptive Assistant that Learns. Wired‘s Noah Shachtman described its potential thus: “If people keep missing conferences during rush hour, PAL should learn to schedule meetings when traffic isn’t as thick. If PAL’s boss keeps sending angry notes to spammers, the software secretary eventually should just start flaming on its own.”

It does not take much imagination to realize what such a system, given training in medicine, could do for individual self-care.

* We first reported on it in June.

References: Shachtman, Noah (2003). “Pentagon Wants to Make a New PAL.” Wired News, July 23; Shachtman, Noah (2003). “Helping Machines Think Different.” Wired News, July 29.

. . . and Read Your Mind

Automated phone response systems that recognize human speech have hitherto been affordable only to big businesses, such as airlines, which use them in reservation systems, and financial services firms, which use them to enable customers to make stock trades. But with less expensive systems such as Microsoft’s “Speech Server” soon to hit the market, smaller organizations can be expected to adopt the technology for a variety of applications.

Speech recognition technology has advanced significantly in just the past three years. IBM is working on a system that will interpret between two humans speaking different languages. The technology has “crossed the threshold where users will accept it,” according to IBM.

Microsoft’s AI-based “Yoda” experimental speech-to-text engine can turn casually or carelessly spoken speech into polished text, by “studying a person’s habits,” perhaps (Michael Kanellos does not say) through “MyLifeBits.”) It seems that by adding intimate knowledge of the speaker to the words actually spoken, the system can re-state more clearly what the speaker actually meant. While “still very primitive,” “Yoda” is “more intelligent than current applications.” Add video of the speaker, so the system can essentially read the face and lips, and the system does even better.

Reference: Kanellos, Michael (2003). “Talking computers nearing reality.” CNET News.com, July 9.

Self-healing Systems

Perhaps the ultimate answer to the plague of computer viruses and worms is an “immune program” that detects anything out of the ordinary — any bits that don’t belong — and automatically, autonomously destroys the suspect bits.

Far from a pipe dream, such AI-based software has been working successfully in trials for two years, and is now commercially available. It works by learning how application programs normally interact with the operating system on the host computer. Since a malicious virus or worm must necessarily interact in a new way with the operating system, the “immune program” can spot it and prevent it from doing damage.

HIPAA rules and general concern over the security of increasingly computerized patient records make this a welcome addition to medical informatics’ defensive arsenal, provided that the autonomous immune programs do not themselves lose a bit and go haywire. Like it or not, machine autonomy is one of the major trends in technology.

Reference: Roush, Wade (2003). “Computer Immunity Better anti-hacking tools attack invaders.” Innovation, July/August.

Non-volatile RAM

Computers, cell phones, and PDAs incorporating magnetoresistive random access memory, or MRAM, should be on sale by mid-2004. Unlike conventional static and dynamic RAM, but like a disk or tape drive, MRAM uses magnetism instead of electrical charges to store data. MRAM will mean up to six times faster bootup and operation of devices, reduced data loss, and increased battery run time. Because it also facilitates multi-function integration on a single chip, devices will grow even smaller.

Reference: Borin, Elliot (2003). “New Memory That Doesn’t Forget.” Wired News, July 9.

Cool Storage

It’s not enough for us to have 100 terabytes of storage in a mammoth array of magnetic drives. We’ll want that much in our cell phones, soon enough. But there are physical limits to how much storage density a magnetic storage medium will hold before the heat generated destroys the magnetism and with it, the data stored. Or, rather, there were physical limits, until an international team of researchers recently discovered a way to maintain magnetism even at densities greater than a terabit per square inch — densities made possible through our ability engineer storage material at the scale of atoms.

Reference: Unknown (2003). “Storage Material Helps Bits Beat Heat.” Technology Research News, June 24. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/rnb_062403.asp

DNA Circuits

A problem with making ever smaller devices, however (see “Cool Storage,” above), is that manufacturing their components using traditional lithography methods becomes harder. Duke University researchers are trying to replace those methods by programming strands of synthetic DNA to self-assemble, molecule by molecule, into templates that could then be used to mass-produce electronic circuits. The method could be ready for practical application in five years.

Reference: Unknown (2003). “DNA Makes Nano Barcode.” Technology Research News, June 27.