Software seems to have caught up with the prodigious processing power of DNA microarrays, enabling exponentially faster genetic analysis.

MIT Media Lab continues to refine techniques — some sophisticated, some not — to make computers seem more human and likeable by endowing them with fake personality or the ability to read a person’s mood. Such machines would surely have therapeutic value.

The US government is planning to recover the lead in supercomputing from Japan. It will be interesting to see whether the Japanese will stand idly by and let this happen.

Fiber to the home or small business may not be needed for the holohaptic communications and applications of the future, if the use of ultrawideband protocols over power or coaxial cable catches on.

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Genomics Games

Genome analysis software that “can shorten a project from months to hours” according to Wired‘s Kristen Philipkoski, was programmed by video game developers. VizX’s GeneSifter standardizes data gathered over the web from public and private genome databases such as the US National Institutes of Health’s GenBank, the UK’s Ensembl, and Israel’s GeneCards, for comparison with local experimental data obtained from DNA microarrays. The comparison helps tease out meaningful DNA attributes from masses of data.

GeneSpring from Silicon Genetics is the market leader in this niche, but some savvy marketing deals with IBM and VWR International (the leading distributor of lab materials) could change all that, as could the fact that with GeneSifter — unlike its competitors — the data remain on servers and can be accessed via browser, enabling global collaboration in an experiment.

Reference: Philipkoski, Kristen (2004). “Better Science Through Gaming.” Wired News, June 28.

Human-Machine Interaction

In response to the research-based realization that people want computers that recognize their user’s emotional state, designers are building sensors into chairs to help determine from posture whether s/he is upright and therefore probably alert and interested, or slouching and therefore probably not, writes Shankar Vedantam in the Washington Post. Heart rate monitors detect stress, cameras catch furrowed brows. After processing, the emotional data enables software designed to respond appropriately to do so.

Robots at the MIT Media Lab are being programmed in this way, as is educational software. A less sophisticated approach to “affective [i.e., emotional] computing” is to “fool” people into believing that a machine — an airline reservation automated voice response system for example — is capable, friendly, and even flattering. The approach works well until the machine makes a mistake, breaking the spell — as would be true of a human we thought was capable, friendly, and flattering but then reveals the deception.

Reference: Vedantam, Shankar (2004). “Human Responses to Technology Scrutinized: Emotional Interactions Draw Interest of Psychologists and Marketers.” Washington Post, June 7.

New Supercomputer

The US Department of Energy is spending US$150 million-plus to build a 100 teraflop supercomputer by 2007, based on a Cray architecture. This would more than double the 35.86 teraflop capacity of the current world champion, NEC’s Earth Simulator. The department will also work with IBM to deploy and evaluate a five-teraflop BlueGene/L supercomputer to be used in part to devise a petaflop (1,000 teraflop) machine.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “U.S. labs team up for supercomputer.” Great Lakes IT Report (email subscription newsletter), June 7 (citing AutoTech Daily).

Ultrawideband Communications

Prototype “ultrawideband” chips made by a division of Motorola can transmit data at 110 Mbps, enough to transmit two HDTV movies. By next year, the chips will be transmitting at a gigabit per second, if regulatory challenges can be overcome. Neither Bluetooth nor WiFi can match ultrawideband’s bandwidth. Low-powered ultrawideband systems for the home will be able to transmit about 30 feet for high-definition TV (more for audio-only).

Intel and Texas Instruments are working on a different, incompatible approach to consumer ultrawideband. Pulse-Link Inc. makes ultrawideband chips that it says are compatible with both standards, and has also designed ultrawideband chips that work over a home’s electrical wiring or cable TV coax wires, providing much greater bandwidth than the wireless version and perhaps eliminating the need to run fiber to the home to meet future bandwidth demands. Running fiber to the home will cost up to US$3,700 per subscriber, a Pulse-Link executive told the Boston Globe‘s Hiawatha Bray, while an ultrawideband network would cost only $100 per customer.

Reference: Bray, Hiawatha (2004). “The next big thing is actually ultrawide.” Boston Globe, June 25.