TECHNOLOGY REPORT

CES 2012 is the world’s top technology conference, and it brings over 100,000 industry insiders and about 2500 technology exhibitors from all over the world to a city that is already one of the world’s top tourism destinations, Las Vegas.     The CES conference is usually the biggest of the year in Las Vegas, and it tends to fill all of the strip hotels.   However, if you need a nice room at the last minute OR you are traveling on your own dime, OR you want to do your company a favor and stay inexpensively, consider the many excellent downtown hotels in the area known as “Fremont Street”.      Ironically, the look and feel of Freemont Street is a lot more like the Las Vegas many know from movies, even recent ones.   Unlike the strip where the hotels – several of the world’s largest – have thousands of rooms in sprawling resorts that can be as long as a city block, in downtown Las Vegas you’ll find much smaller venues.    Recent renovations of several of the properties in the Fremont Street Area as well as the addition years ago of a massive overhead canopy with a spectacular hourly light show have made the downtown area a lot more appealing.    On top of that, the wildly successful Zappos shoe empire will soon move its offices to this area in the hopes of helping to rennovate and stabilize the economy of downtown Las Vegas.

Here are some nice travel tips from the CES Official Website, CESweb.org :  CES Travel Tips

Although CES conference buses do NOT serve the downtown hotels (at least I’ve never seen that in my several years at the conference), you can catch “the deuce” bus pretty much any time which will take you down the strip to the Venetian where CES has a very regular shuttle back and forth to the Convention Center.   Taxis are more expensive but also a quick way to get to the Convention Center. I’d recommend you avoid trying to take the city bus from downtown to the Convention Center or to the Monorail station at the Sahara because the transfers can be tricky and they don’t run nearly as often as “the deuce”.

The Deuce costs $3 per ride (a bit ironic, since I believe the name originally referred to the $2 fare), or you can purchase a daily pass for $7 or a 3 day for $15.      There’s also an express strip bus that runs a similar route to the deuce.     Information about that is here and you should print out this route map to orient yourself between the strip and downtown, a distance of a few miles:  http://www.rtcsouthernnevada.com/transit/route/stripdowntown/stripdowntown(09-18-11).pdf

Ford’s Alan Mulally Talks Technology
Copyright Technology Report , use with credit.

The CES Innovation Power Panel  happens at 9am on January 11 in the Las Vegas Hilton Theater.    The panel will feature three top American CEOs who will discuss the roles that innovation has played in the success of their respective companies.

At the 2009 CES Mulally impressed the crowd with Ford’s technology and forward looking corporate world view.    I asked him then if Ford would be “needing bailout money” and he answered that he didn’t think so.    Impressively, Ford never did take any bailout money.    In fact some sources suggest that Mulally recently had pressure from no less than the President Obama to pull an advertisement that mentioned how the other car makers took bailout money.    The format was  the Ford “press conference” where a Ford buyer mentions he did not want to buy a “bailout” money car.     Here’s more on that issue:   http://www.autoblog.com/2011/09/27/ford-yanks-bailout-ad-amidst-controversy-w-video/

Biographies of the Innovation Panel CEOs at CES 2012 from CES Website.

Ursula Burns, chairman and CEO of Xerox Corporation, has been with Xerox since 1980. She began her career with the company as a mechanical engineering summer intern before working her way up to lead various organizations including Xerox’s global research as well as product development, marketing and delivery. She was named CEO in July 2009 and has since been instrumental in driving the acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services, which has transformed Xerox into the world’s leading enterprise for business process and document management. Burns has been recognized for her leadership by both Fortune and Forbes magazine’s “Most Powerful Women” lists.  Also, under Ursula’s watch Xerox has been named to Bloomberg Businessweek’s ”The World’s 25 Most Inventive Companies.”

Lowell McAdam was named president and CEO of Verizon Communications in August 2011, having previously served as the company’s president and COO. He also held key executive positions at Verizon Wireless since its inception in 2000, and built the company into the industry’s leading wireless provider, with the nation’s largest, most reliable wireless voice and 4G broadband data network. Additionally, he has served as vice president of international operations for AirTouch Communications. McAdam currently serves as chairman of the Verizon Wireless Board of Representatives, and on the board of directors of Verizon Communications.

Alan Mulally, president and CEO of Ford Motor Company, joined Ford in 2006, after serving as executive vice president of The Boeing Company and president and chief executive officer of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. He is known for his innovative and focused industry leadership, while working to transform Ford into a lean, global enterprise. He has served as a past president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and is a former president of its Foundation. Mulally was named Chief Executive Magazine’s “CEO of the Year” in 2011, “Businessperson of the Year” by the readers of Fortune Magazine in 2010, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2009 and “Person of the Year” in 2006 by Aviation Week magazine.

Here at Technology Report we’ve always been fans of ASUS for their innovative designs combined with power and low prices.    Their early netbooks were among the first in that line, and now they appear to be coming up with a tablet that will exceed the iPAD in some specifications, including a very clever detachable keyboard that solves one of my main concerns about tablets – they are MUCH harder to write with than a netbook, desktop, or laptop unless you plug in a keyboard, making them … cumbersome.     ASUS appears to have solved this challenge with a very thin, light, and sleek detachable keyboard that appears to also act as a cover, making this device – to my frame of mind – a lot more logical than the standard format tablet computer.     We’ll have more at CES where I’m sure ASUS will be showing these off a lot:

Here at Technology Report we really enjoy covering the Computer Electronics Show “CES” held early every January in Las Vegas.   CES 2012 is the most influential consumer technology event in the world, where thousands of vendors meet with hundreds of thousands of industry insiders to exhibit, sell, pitch, plan, and enjoy the latest and greatest gadgets available to the consumer market.    For attendees CES is a window into what’ll be big and what may be a bust in consumer electronics in the coming year.

CES isn’t really “cutting edge” technology in the sense that this is a showcase of what’s going to be marketed to the masses in the coming year rather than stuff from “test labs”.  However some of the exhibitors like Intel, IBM, and Microsoft will usually have some amazing displays using the best processors and display technologies.

CES 2012 won’t just be about exhibits.  CES is also a major computer conference also and there are *hundreds* of conference sessions about topics from international development and technology to USB technical specifications.   This year we’ll be looking to cover both general topics and also focus on technologies that affect seniors and retirement lifestyle choices.  Retire USA is a blog about retirement options and retirement topics for seniors who are seeking general retirement information and also choosing new places to live.

One of the strangest posts in the tech blogosphere is yesterday’s rant at TechCrunch, suggesting that blog owner AOL may shake up things and remove TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington:
techcrunch.com/2011/09/06/the-end/

TechCrunch has arguably been the most influential technology blog for some time, especially for startup news and inside information.   Spawned by Silicon Valley insider Mike Arrington, TechCrunch has been a key source of news, inside information, and gossip about the Silicon Valley Startup scene.

The AOL dispute appears to have come from concerns over potential conflicts of interest by Arrington as he launches a new venture capital fund that will support companies covered by TechCrunch.

Facebook Facts from Facebook.com as of August 2011:

These are Facebook facts as described by the company in August of 2011 – if you read this post later than that it’s likely most of these numbers have *increased*.       Very notable in my view is the huge number of “active users”, the huge collective time they spend online, and the fact that mobile users are twice as active as non-mobile, though this last point does not necessarily mean that use will increase as far more people flow into mobile use – rather it may simply indicate that early adopters in mobile are more active users and thus mobile use will trend along the lines of regular use as more mainstreamers start accessing Facebook on mobile devices.

Facebook  Facts:

More than 750 million active users

50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

Average user has 130 friends

People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

Social Media Activity on Facebook

There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events

Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month

More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

Facebook’s Global Reach
More than 70 translations available on the site
About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

Facebook’s Social Media Platform
Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform
People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day
Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites
Since social plugins launched in April 2010, an average of 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day
More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites

Facebook’s Mobile Exposure
There are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

SyNAPSE Project AI Neuromorphic Chip

IBM’s Aug 18th Press Release announced another significant milestone for the DARPA SyNAPSE project, the world’s best funded and arguably the “most likely to succeed” approach to creating a general artificial intelligence.

The release notes that the new chips represent a departure from traditional models of computing:

…. cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember – and learn from – the outcomes, mimicking the brains structural and synaptic plasticity.

To do this, IBM is combining principles from nanoscience, neuroscience and supercomputing as part of a multi-year cognitive computing initiative. The company and its university collaborators also announced they have been awarded approximately $21 million in new funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 2 of the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project.

As we’ve noted here many times, another remarkable project is the Blue Brain Project in Europe spearheaded by Dr. Henry Markram.     That team has joined with many others and is in the process of applying to the European Union for substantial funding – perhaps as much as 1.6 billion dollars.    Although Blue Brain tends to shy away from stating that their objective is a general artificial intelligence,  I would argue that they should have that goal and also that they are much more likely to be funded by stating that goal in no uncertain terms.

Unfortunately there remain many both in and outside of technology circles who believe the search for a general artificial intelligence is either dangerous or a waste of time and money.   Both these scenarios are possible but unlikely.   Sure, intelligence can be dangerous but given human history compared to technology history it seems odd to argue that we are more likely to create a Frankenstein than a helpful machine process.    Computers don’t kill people, people kill people.

In terms of a waste of time and money, clearly we humans have overrated our intelligence for some time – probably since the beginning of self-awareness.   There are few rational reasons to reject the idea that we cannot duplicate processes that are similar to our own thinking in a machine.   The advantages of machine based intelligence are likely to be  substantial – probably on the order of a new human age with vastly improved resource efficiency, poverty reduction, and more.  Thus the costs – currently measured in the low tens of millions – pale in comparison to almost all other government projects – many with massively dubious and negative ROIs.

Dr. Dharmendra Modha and his SyNAPSE gang recently published an excellent paper about “Cognitive Computing” that updates what appears to be excellent progress in the effort to create a general artificial intelligence:

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/8/114944-cognitive-computing/fulltext

One of the paper’s most notable items asserts that within a decade the project expects to have the computational scale needed for human level modelling, though it also notes that this is not the same as creating a model of the human brain – this may require computational structures yet to be invented.    However on balance it would seem the SyNAPSE project continues to build on their core assumptions, taking us ever closer to the holy grail of technology – a general artificial intelligence.

More at Dr. Modha’s blog , where we learn more about the new approaches the SyNAPSE team at IBM will take in an effort to achieve human quality cognition in a machine:

18 Aug 2011: Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) researchers unveiled a new generation of experimental computer chips designed to emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition. The technology could yield many orders of magnitude less power consumption and space than used in today’s computers.

In a sharp departure from traditional concepts in designing and building computers, IBM’s first neurosynaptic computing chips recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems, such as the brain, through advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry. Its first two prototype chips have already been fabricated and are currently undergoing testing.

Called cognitive computers, systems built with these chips won’t be programmed the same way traditional computers are today. Rather, cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember – and learn from – the outcomes, mimicking the brains structural and synaptic plasticity.

Here, from PBS, is an interesting interview with Marvin Minsky, one of the key pioneers of Artificial Intelligence research.    Although Minsky remains somewhat optimistic about developing a general artificial intelligence, he believes that the current approaches are misguided and too narrow – that researchers are now looking for “a magic bullet”, and that it’s going to take a lot longer to create generalized AI than if we applied a more general approach:

How hard is it to build an intelligent machine? I don’t think it’s so hard ….   The basic idea I promote is that you mustn’t look for a magic bullet. You mustn’t look for one wonderful way to solve all problems. Instead you want to look for 20 or 30 ways to solve different kinds of problems. And to build some kind of higher administrative device that figures out what kind of problem you have and what method to use.

Now, if you take any particular researcher today, it’s very unlikely that that researcher is going to work on this architectural level of what the thinking machine should be like. Instead a typical researcher says, “I have a new way to use statistics to solve all problems.” Or: “I have a new way to make a system that imitates evolution. It does trials and finds the things that work and remembers the things that don’t and gets better that way.” And another one says, “It’s going to use formal logic and reasoning of a certain kind, and it will figure out everything.” So each researcher today is likely to have one particular idea, and that researcher is trying to show that he or she can make a machine that will solve all problems in that way.

I think this is a disease that has spread through my profession. Each practitioner thinks there’s one magic way to get a machine to be smart, and so they’re all wasting their time in a sense.

I was surprised to see his lack of optimism in the face of so much progress in areas I’d argue are very generalized indeed.     The DARPA  SyNAPSE project we’ve discussed several times here at Technology Report remains the best funded AI research to date, and lead researchers seem to feel optimistic that progress there could lead to a human scale general intelligence within several years rather than several decades that Minsky implies may be required given the new approaches.

Simply put, DARPA SyNAPSE  is creating a computing infrastructure to rival the human brain in terms of connectivity, and counting on the possibility that we are dealing mostly with *quantity of connections* rather than *quality of connections* when we talk about human level intelligence.

The other very promising project for generalized AI is somewhat at odds with the DARPA SyNAPSE view.    The Blue Brain project is also a promising development ground for general artificial intelligence, but the approach is very different as described by Dr. Henry Markram, the project manager at Blue Brain.      The Blue Brain team is focusing more on “reverse engineering” animal brains and eventually a human brain.

Given the new level of enthusiasm and funding from DARPA, it seems likely that progress will continue at a faster pace that at anytime in the past.

Ironically I think Minsky’s early optimism in the 1950s  was more justified than his current pessimism, though his observation that academics are working in too much isolation is certainly true.    I’m often surprised how many technologists don’t seem to understand many simple aspects of human biology and evolution and vica versa.     Human intelligence, though intriguing, continues to be overrated as an phenomenon of exceptional quality.    We’re a somewhat arrogant creature by evolutionary design, but that does not justify our self importance.    Machines surpass most of us in most compartmentalized aspects of intelligence and many aspects of creativity  (mathematics / translation and language / game playing / music / information retrival, etc, etc).    It seems reasonable that what we call “consciousness” may only require massive connectivity – perhaps something as simple as creating a fast, multitasked conversation between different parts of an artificial brain.

Google just announced a new computing platform called “Chromebook” that looks very promising.    Working with partners Samsung and Acer, the new computers will optimize the computing experience for the web, taking advantage of Google’s Android operating system, the Google Chrome browser, gmail, Google documents, Google maps, and the many other great web-centric products Google has cooked up since they began their amazing online journey from obscure search engine to online advertising juggernaut.

As with most Google developments, the user advantages come at the expense of Google competitors like Microsoft and perhaps even Apple.    Chrome as a browser has not caught on as well as Google would have hoped, but this may be their opportunity to more broadly showcase that excellent product which in my opinion offers superior “browsing and multitasking” capabilities.     Although the iPad market seems almost impenetrable, tablet computers using android may reach a price point that starts to challenge Apple dominance in this market.    However I would not bet on that … yet.   Apple has an amazing ability to market and mine the public’s enthusiasm for style in ways that keep them on top of the gadget market even with their relatively expensive lines of gadgets.

The new Chromebooks are available June 15 in the US and UK

Official Google Blog: A new kind of computer: Chromebook

Intro to Chromebook