An Easy Interface for the Internet of Things

Amid a wide range of new platforms to manage streams of data from the Internet of things, a simple version emerges that anyone can use.

With the advent of the Internet of things, potentially billions of devices will report data about themselves, making it possible to create new applications in areas as diverse as factory optimization, car maintenance, or simply keeping track of your stuff online. But doing this today requires at least some degree of programming knowledge. Now Bug Labs, a New York City company, is trying to make it as easy to create an Internet of things application as it is to put a file into Dropbox.

With a new service called Freeboard, Bug Labs is giving people a simple one-click way to publish data from a “thing” to its own Web page (Bug Labs calls this “dweeting”). To get a sense of this, visit Dweet.io with your computer or mobile phone, click “try it now,” and you’ll see raw data from your device itself: its GPS coordinates and even the position of your computer mouse. The data is now on a public Web page and available for analysis and aggregation; another click stops this sharing.

Freeboard, expected to be launched Tuesday, makes sense of such streams of data. A few more clicks create quick graphical displays of the shared information, such as location, temperature, motor speed, or simply whether a device is on or off. “We are trying to make the Internet of things far simpler, and far more accessible, to anybody,” says Peter Semmelhack, CEO of Bug Labs, a business that initially focused on the development of open-source modular hardware (see “Bug Labs Adds New Modules”), but which now develops software platforms.

Freeboard is not the most technically sophisticated Internet of things application platform. Many others are emerging, including Axeda, Etherios, and OpenRemote (see “Free Software Ties the Internet of Things Together”), with different business models and levels of complexity. Big companies like General Electric are developing factory-monitoring software platforms.

Yet Freeboard stands out among the various platforms because “it’s the easiest to use,” says Venkatesh Prasad, group and technical leader for vehicle design and infotronics at Ford Motor.

Prasad showed how Freeboard could quickly unlock the value of vehicle-generated data. He’s been experimenting with Freeboard using a car data interface called Open XC. Prasad took data on the on-off state of windshield wipers to come up with a prototype of a warning alert that could someday be dispatched to a car a few kilometers back to warn the driver of wet roads. “I set it up and did it in a matter of a few minutes—and I don’t code for a living,” he says.

In theory, anything could be connected: a bicycle or other object could get wired with the help of an emerging class of cheap gadgets that report GPS coӧrdinates to cellular networks (see “The Internet of Things, Unplugged and Untethered”) and easily be turned into a “dweet stream” of location or other data. Semmelhack showed off one application – a Freeboard dashboard of a whiskey still in Washington built by of one of his developers’ fathers. It showed real-time temperature and humidity and a video stream of the apparatus.

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Shape-Shifting Touch Screen Buttons Head to Market

An iPad accessory launching later this year will bring transparent morphing buttons to the device’s screen to aid touch-typing.

As they peck out text on the featureless glass surface of their phone or tablet, some people still mourn the passing of the physical keyboard. Now technology is heading to mass production that can offer the best of both worlds: a featureless surface for watching video and buttons that rise out of it when you need to type.

That technology was developed by startup Tactus Technology, which uses tiny fluid-filled channels and elastic blisters to make buttons rise up from a device’s screen and then disappear without trace when they’re no longer needed (see “Demo: A Shape-Shifting Smartphone Touch Screen”).

Electronics manufacturing giant Wistron has now modified equipment at one of its factories in China to produce touch-screen panels with the shape-shifting technology inside. Wistron is one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers; it’s made devices for brands including BlackBerry, Apple, and Acer. The company also recently became an investor in Tactus.

The first fruit of the tie-up will go on sale later this year in the form of a protective case with Tactus technology inside for Apple’s iPad Mini. The design includes a transparent screen protector that covers the front of the device. However, sliding a mechanical control on the side of the case raises up a transparent set of buttons or guides on the screen protector, over the touch keyboard, to make typing easier. Sliding the control back will cause those buttons to melt away, leaving a clear, smooth pane of glass.

“Users will still type on the screens as they do today, but with better performance, confidence, and satisfaction,” says Tactus CEO Craig Ciesla.

Tactus won’t reveal the exact design of the case launching this year, or of a similar one slated to launch next year. Nor will it say which brands are behind them. But it did let MIT Technology Review try out an internal prototype case for the iPad Mini with the same basic design.

Sliding the control on the left pushed fluid into a set of guides that rose up between keys on the virtual keyboard. That they were ever there is discernable only by a close examination of the screen protector in the right light. But the panel feels noticeably less smooth to a finger swiping the surface.

The guides provide physical feedback when the fingers don’t directly hit a key, something that’s lacking on a typical touch screen. In a few minutes of testing, it seemed to help my fingers learn how to hit their targets better. Tactus says it has been testing different-shaped guides but won’t say which the first products will use.

The relationship with Wistron could lead morphing buttons to appear in tablets and other devices. Tactus has demonstrated both a prototype seven-inch tablet with its technology fully integrated into its display and an off-the-shelf tablet modified to include the technology. When the buttons are built into a device in that way, their movements are driven by a small electric pump. On the demonstration prototypes, the buttons automatically pop up when the keyboard appears.

“We are only at the beginning of what we expect to be a multiyear partnership, where the Tactus solution will be brought to multiple markets, starting with mobile computing,” says Ciesla. He says the two companies have begun working on the design of products and prototypes for carriers, electronics brands, and retailers. One project is a notebook-style device that has a second, morphing screen where the keyboard would usually be.

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Pocket Printer secures Kickstarter cash

An Israeli start-up plans to release a printer early next year that is small enough to fit inside its owner's pocket but works with any-sized paper.

Zuta Labs is proceeding with the project after raising over $435,000 (£260,000) via a crowdfunding site.

Rather than feeding paper through a machine, the project fits an ink cartridge to a small robot that crawls over a document to create it.

However, its relatively slow speed may limit its appeal.

The current prototype can only print about one page per minute in greyscale and offers a significantly lower resolution than traditional desktop inkjets.

But the Jerusalem-based engineers said they hoped to make improvements before the first devices shipped to backers of the Kickstarter campaign in January.

The current prototype uses a black ink Hewlett-Packard cartridge

"We can now order smaller and stronger engines to make it move faster," Tuvia Elbaum, the firm's chief marketing officer, told the BBC.

"The resolution is very low because we are using an old cartridge, but we are talking to several manufacturers to use smarter and newer versions of smaller cartridges."

Print and run

The Pocket Printer features several wheels in its base to let it turn and drive in different directions. The team says the final product will be controlled by a PC or smartphone via Bluetooth, but the current prototype still needs a wired connection.

The engineers plan to cover the internal mechanism with a smooth tear-shaped plastic skin, and said the device would be 10cm (3.9in) tall, 11.5cm (4.5in) wide, and weigh 300g (0.7lb).

"It's for someone who wants to print one, two or three pages on the go," added Mr Elbaum.

"A memo, a small contract, notes or even an e-ticket before a flight.

"Way further along the roadmap we want a colour version and we want it to print on different surfaces - people have asked for tiles, T-shirts and walls, which would require different types of ink."

He added that it was likely to cost $240 (£140) when it went on sale to the public in 2015.

Education opportunity

The Valiant Turtle, launched in 1983, was one of the first robot printers

One observer suggested the firm should rethink its business strategy, bearing in mind other manufacturers already offered portable colour printers at lower prices, albeit ones that were more bulky and limited to certain paper sizes.

"I personally can't see an effective use case that you would have above and beyond what is already available - boarding passes and stuff like that are moving to the phone," said Stuart Miles, founder of gadget review site Pocket-lint.

Economatics's BBC Buggy could be fitted with a pen to create drawings

"It reminds me of the turtle printers that were around for BBC Micro computers all those year ago, which you would program and off they'd go - and I think it would have more sense to target it at an education market."

Jason Fitzpatrick, director of the UK's Centre for Computing History, agreed with this analysis adding that schools were actively seeking modern equivalents to the Valiant Turtle and BBC Buggy to help them teach children how to use Raspberry Pi computers.

"When you can do a bit of programming and make it control something in the real world, everything sort of opens up," he said.

"Having another device that you could mess about with would be great.

"But you can already buy small printers that print things like business cards and labels, and there are other alternatives out there that fulfil mobile users' needs."

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Brain Mapping

A new map, a decade in the works, shows structures of the brain in far greater detail than ever before, providing neuroscientists with a guide to its immense complexity.

Neuroscientists have made remarkable progress in recent years toward understanding how the brain works. And in coming years, Europe’s Human Brain Project will attempt to create a computational simulation of the human brain, while the U.S. BRAIN Initiative will try to create a wide-ranging picture of brain activity. These ambitious projects will greatly benefit from a new resource: detailed and comprehensive maps of the brain’s structure and its different regions.

As part of the Human Brain Project, an international team of researchers led by German and Canadian scientists has produced a three-dimensional atlas of the brain that has 50 times the resolution of previous such maps. The atlas, which took a decade to complete, required slicing a brain into thousands of thin sections and digitally stitching them back together with the help of supercomputers. Able to show details as small as 20 micrometers, roughly the size of many human cells, it is a major step forward in understanding the brain’s three-dimensional anatomy.

To guide the brain’s digital reconstruction, researchers led by Katrin Amunts at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany initially used an MRI machine to image the postmortem brain of a 65-year-old woman. The brain was then cut into ultrathin slices. The scientists stained the sections and then imaged them one by one on a flatbed scanner. Alan Evans and his coworkers at the Montreal Neurological Institute organized the 7,404 resulting images into a data set about a terabyte in size. Slicing had bent, ripped, and torn the tissue, so Evans had to correct these defects in the images. He also aligned each one to its original position in the brain. The result is mesmerizing: a brain model that you can swim through, zooming in or out to see the arrangement of cells and tissues.

At the start of the 20th century, a German neuroanatomist named Korbinian Brodmann parceled the human cortex into nearly 50 different areas by looking at the structure and organization of sections of brain under a microscope. “That has been pretty much the reference framework that we’ve used for 100 years,” Evans says. Now he and his coworkers are redoing ­Brodmann’s work as they map the borders between brain regions. The result may show something more like 100 to 200 distinct areas, providing scientists with a far more accurate road map for studying the brain’s different functions.

“We would like to have in the future a reference brain that shows true cellular resolution,” says Amunts—about one or two micrometers, as opposed to 20. That’s a daunting goal, for several reasons. One is computational: Evans says such a map of the brain might contain several petabytes of data, which computers today can’t easily navigate in real time, though he’s optimistic that they will be able to in the future. Another problem is physical: a brain can be sliced only so thin.

Advances could come from new techniques that allow scientists to see the arrangement of cells and nerve fibers inside intact brain tissue at very high resolution. Amunts is developing one such technique, which uses polarized light to reconstruct three-­dimensional structures of nerve fibers in brain tissue. And a technique called Clarity, developed in the lab of Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist and bioengineer at Stanford University, allows scientists to directly see the structures of neurons and circuitry in an intact brain. The brain, like any other tissue, is usually opaque because the fats in its cells block light. Clarity melts the lipids away, replacing them with a gel-like substance that leaves other structures intact and visible. Though Clarity can be used on a whole mouse brain, the human brain is too big to be studied fully intact with the existing version of the technology. But Deisseroth says the technique can already be used on blocks of human brain tissue thousands of times larger than a thin brain section, making 3-D reconstruction easier and less error prone. And Evans says that while Clarity and polarized-light imaging currently give fantastic resolution to pieces of brain, “in the future we hope that this can be expanded to include a whole human brain.”

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What the heck is Aereo, anyway?

Aereo is a streaming video service that costs $8 a month. It is a new way to watch and record shows on local television stations.

Now Aereo's legality is before the Supreme Court. Is it, as Aereo argues, a legal and innovative way for consumers to get more control over how they watch TV? Or is it what some of the country's biggest broadcast networks say -- a business built on a blatant violation of copyright law?

How does it work? Using thousands of miniature TV antennas, Aereo scoops up the freely available signals of local stations. Then it delivers the signals to smart phones, tablets or computers via the Internet. Subscribers pick what to watch through a traditional on-screen guide. They can also record shows and stream them later.

Where is Aereo available? Aereo started in the New York City metropolitan area. It is now online in New York and 10 other markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Detroit, and Miami.

What can you watch with it? Users can watch pretty much whatever is broadcast over the public airwaves in a given area. In New York, that includes major networks like ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and Univision, as well as an assortment of public access programming. The service also includes one cable channel, Bloomberg TV.

What can't you watch with it? Anything on cable (with the exception of Bloomberg TV). Cable channels are not beamed across the public airwaves, so they are not available to Aereo. Some Aereo users also subscribe to video-on-demand services like Netflix to supplement what they can see through Aereo.

If you can't watch cable TV with Aereo, what's the point? Nielsen says the average American watches more than five hours of TV a day. Cable and satellite subscriptions make this easy to do.

Watch: Comcast's future for your TV

But for those who watch less and don't want to pay for a bundle of cable channels, Aereo may provide a useful alternative to cable or an antenna. The service also makes TV more portable: An Aereo subscriber can start watching a network TV morning show on a smart phone at home and keep watching on the way to work or school.

Who is using it? Aereo has never disclosed how many subscribers it has. That has spurred speculation it has a small user base, possibly in the tens of thousands. Right now, what Aereo represents is more important than what Aereo actually is.

Why are broadcasters trying to shut it down? Aereo undermines an important revenue stream for local stations: retransmission fees. Right now, cable and satellite companies pay stations for the right to retransmit their signals, even though the signals are available for free over the public airwaves. Aereo doesn't pay those fees.

 

Aereo's case for disrupting cable TV

Broadcasters says Aereo is violating copyright law because it is publicly performing TV shows without the permission of the copyright holders. Aereo says its streams do not meet the legal definition of "public performances" because each user tunes an individual antenna. (Time Warner, the parent company of CNN and this website, has filed paperswith the court siding with the broadcasters.)

Who's right? The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case on Tuesday. The court is expected to rule sometime this summer. 

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Extreme password protection...how hackers keep themselves safe

Want to stay safe on the Internet? It's time to rethink all your passwords.

That's what David Kennedy did. He's a security researcher and "ethical hacker," and remembers only one: It unlocks a password vault, an encrypted database that stores dozens of his other passwords. Each one ranges from 30 to 50 characters long.

"Even if hackers got access, it's protected and encrypted and keeps it in encrypted format," said Kennedy, who has the tech skills to crack passwords easily.

Web security tools are increasingly in focus as people scramble to change their passwords following asoftware bug called Heartbleed, which enabled security holes on sites thought to be secure.

Along with strong passwords and safe password storage, Kennedy also says 2-factor verification is a must for anyone signing in to a website. With this process, you enter your regular password, but that triggers a text message or a phone call with an additional code you must enter before signing on.

Related: This drone can hack your phone

Robert Hansen, Vice President of Labs, WhiteHat Security, advises people not to use the same password for different websites. As a security researcher who understands hacker communities, Hansen is extreme when it comes to his own security.

"When I close my browser, the cache and cookies are removed...all third party cookies are removed," he said. "All ads are removed. All tracking systems are disabled."

Both Kennedy and Hansen agree: In an increasingly hackable web, passwords are antiquated.

"We need to move to different technologies that support something other than a password," Kennedy said.

One solution: biometrics.

Apple's iPhone 5s and Samsung Galaxy S5 include a fingerprint scanner. Other companies are also building out biometric technology. A company called Bionym recently created a wristband that recognizes a user's cardiac rhythm for authentication purposes.

But passwords aren't going anywhere any time soon, Kennedy said, and the impact of the Heartbleed bug will be felt for a long time.

"Heartbleed is probably one of the largest security exposures that we've ever seen," he said. "It's a big deal and it's not going away soon."

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Apparently This Matters: Virtual soda drinking

(CNN) -- I haven't had a single Diet Coke in 2014. It was a conscious health decision, and the only real side effect, now, is that the world is awful and I hate everything.

Including puppies.

Quite frankly, my life was much better when I drank Diet Coke. It had purpose.

"Apparently This Matters" Is Jarrett Bellini's weekly (and somewhat random) look at social-media trends.

Mind you, that purpose was to spend seven hours a day in front of a urinal. But some really good ideas came out of that.

"Andrew, we should totally build an ark."

I've actually written before about my Diet Coke addiction. It was legitimately bad. There was even a short period where it was pretty much all I drank.

For instance, I would come home from a jog, tired and dehydrated having just spent a whole 20 minutes mildly exerting myself, and then I'd take long, deep pulls from a two-liter bottle, fresh and cold right out of the fridge.

Just do it.

Of course I miss Diet Coke, and I still get the urges. But it usually ends after about an hour when one of the neighbors sees me crying in the street without pants and calls the cops.

Thankfully, however, all that seems to be a thing of the past, because now there's a new virtual reality video game that lets youdigitally enjoy the greatest pleasure in all the world.

It's called Soda Drinker Pro. And it's totally real.

I played it.

The game was created by 33-year-old Will Brierly of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and, like all good innovations, it was inspired by laziness.

This is the title screen. It literally took minutes to make.

"I woke up in the middle of the night and needed a soda," he told me via e-mail. "Unfortunately, I didn't have one, so I decided to make a simulated soda."

Amazingly, over the course of one day, Brierly created the first five levels of Soda Drinker Pro. Which is probably why the graphics are what some experts might call complete and utter crap.

But that's part of the Soda Drinker Pro charm. It's purposefully absurd, and, remember, this thing was built in a day.

So, the game isn't exactly Rome.

It's more like Tulsa.

And the rules are pretty simple. You walk around different environments with a virtual soda in your hand, click left to put the straw up to your mouth, and then click right to simulate drinking.

You hear the sound of draining fluid, and your soda levels deplete as you hold down the click.

And that's pretty much it. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Truth be told, I didn't actually play long enough to get past levels one and two (the beach and the park, respectively), but I'm sort of hoping that one of the now 100-plus levels is a drainage ditch in Tijuana so I can recreate some of my darkest moments with Diet Coke.

Not sure if this is an old man with a chess board, or a young lady with a pizza. Either way, I have soda.

"Señor, usted está asustando a los niños."

Now, this might all sound a bit silly, and the bad graphics and simplistic game play are fine for goofing off on your Mac or PC, but Brierly has actually taken his "first person soda" to the next legitimate level of gaming.

He proudly boasts that it has Kinect support for Xbox One, and that console will also offer exclusive levels of drinking soda throughout time.

Like the Roaring 20s. Or, say, 1972.

And Soda Drinker Pro even has Oculus Rift support.

(Note to Dad: Oculus Rift is that incredible virtual reality software Facebook bought for $2 billion.)

(Note to Dad: Facebook is that website mom is always on.)

(Note to Dad: Virtual reality is ... oh, screw it. Never mind.)

Game designer Will Brierly with fans.

Beyond the fact that it's catching on at all -- albeit ironically -- it's also interesting that it's happening now. Brierly created the game six years ago, but it took a rather captive audience to get it off the ground.

He explains, "I didn't show anyone except some friends, but last year I did a presentation of Soda Drinker Pro at a soda drinking convention in Providence."

You read that correctly.

There's literally something called the Providence Soda Club, and apparently they hold a convention.

Which, I suppose, shouldn't be that unexpected. Rhode Island is so weird. It's not even an island.

It's more like Tulsa.

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Windows Phone 8.1 Becomes Available to Devs and Risk Takers

Microsoft has been seriously lagging in the mobile market, but Windows Phone 8.1 -- available to devs and consumers willing to scotch their warranties -- appears to be as feature-rich as Android and iOS. In at least one important respect, it may surpass them. WP 8.1 has a digital assistant, Cortana, who seems considerably more capable than Siri or Google Now.

After an 18-month lull, Windows Phone took a step closer to an upgrade on Monday as Microsoft released version 8.1 of the operating system to developers.

Unlike most developer versions of software, however, consumers can download and run the latest edition of Windows Phone on their mobile device -- as long as they're willing to void its warranty until their carrier OKs the upgrade.

Although developers and brave consumers can get their hands on Windows Phone 8.1 this week, it will be a few months before its fortunes in the market can be determined.

Catching Up

"It's a little too early to judge it," Yankee Group Research Director Carl Howe told TechNewsWorld.

"Is it going to take the world by storm?" he mused. "Only when people can get it. Most people aren't going to void the warranty on their phone to get Windows 8.1."

Consumers familiar with the major mobile operating systems, Android and iOS, will find many of the new features in Windows Phone familiar.

"A number of the features seem like catch-up features," said Ross Rubin, principal analyst with Reticle Research, told TechNewsWorld.

Features like a "shade" that can be pulled down to view recent notifications sent to the phone and a speaking digital assistant are already in Android and iOS, he noted. Word Flow is similar to the Android app Swype, a method for using a virtual keyboard by swiping keys instead of poking them.

Nevertheless, the new version will help keep Windows Phone in parity with its competition in the market, Rubin said.

New Digital Assistant

With WP 8.1, Microsoft has improved the software's distinctive home screen, increasing the number of columns available for live tiles, adding transparency to the tiles, and allowing them to be sized to taste. In addition, a user can choose a favorite photo as a background for the tiles.

Connecting to free wireless hotspots should be easier with Wi-Fi Sense, a feature that automatically connects to free hotspots and networks previously logged into.

The new version of Windows Phone offers tools for managing data, storage and power. Data Sense provides a picture of data use and offer solutions for conserving it. Storage Sense helps manage storage on a phone, including making recommendations when data should be shipped to an SD card in order to conserve on-board storage. Battery Saver can extend battery life by shutting down all but essential features as the battery's juice supply dwindles.

Microsoft has added its own digital assistant, Cortana, to the new Windows Phone OS.

"It's the most exciting thing about Windows Phone 8.1 from a user's perspective," said Van L. Baker, a Gartner research vice president for mobility.

"We'll have to see how well it performs, but it does appear to be a step up from some of the other virtual assistant technologies like Google and Siri," he told TechNewsWorld.

Deeper Intergration

While taking its cues from Siri, Cortana adds depth to the technology.

"I see Cortana as a more advanced personal assistant than Siri -- at least it promises to be," said Rob Sanfilippo, an analyst with Directions On Microsoft.

"It can call in the functionality of apps on a phone," he told TechNewsWorld. "As long as the developer of an app allows Cortana to access an app, Cortana can perform functions within an app. Siri can't do that."

With WP 8.1, Microsoft also is making an attempt to return to the good graces of enterprise managers. It has included VPN support, secure WiFi support, and S/MIME support for email.

"That makes Windows Phone a stronger player in the enterprise, which is where Microsoft has traditionally been strong," Sanfilippo said.

"It's a play by Microsoft to show that Windows Phone is an enterprise-capable phone OS," he added.

"Microsoft changed strategy when it went from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone," noted Sanfilippo. "Windows Mobile was very much directed at enterprise use. Windows Phone was very much geared toward consumers. Now they're filling in the gap between the consumer features of Windows Phone and the needs of the enterprise." 

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Microrobots, Working Together, Build with Metal, Glass, and Electronics

Someone glancing through the door of Annjoe Wong-Foy’s lab at SRI International might think his equipment is infested by ants. Dark shapes about a centimeter across move to and fro over elevated walkways: they weave around obstacles and carry small sticks.

A closer look makes it clear that these busy critters are in fact man-made. Wong-Foy, a senior research engineer at SRI, has built an army of magnetically steered workers to test the idea that “microrobots” could be a better way to assemble electronics components, or to build other small structures.

Wong-Foy’s robotic workers have already proved capable of building towers 30 centimeters long from carbon rods, and other platforms able to support a kilogram of weight. The robots can work with glass, metal, wood, and electronic components. In one demonstration, they made a carbon truss structure with wires and colored LEDs mixed in to serve as the lab’s Christmas tree.

“We can scale to many more robots at low cost,” says Wong-Foy, who thinks his system could develop into a new approach to manufacturing. Many electronic components are the right size to be handled by his microrobots, he says, and teams of them might prove a good way to lay them out onto circuit boards.

SRI wants to create a version of the microrobot system that could be sold to other research labs and companies to experiment with. “We’ve demonstrated the basic platform and are now looking at how we can transfer out of the lab as a research platform,” says Rich Mahoney, director of robotics at SRI. “You should be able to buy this on the shelf.”

SRI’s microworkers are simple: just small magnetic platforms with simple wire arms on top. They can move only when placed on a surface with a specific pattern of electrical circuits inside. Sending current through the coils beneath exerts a force on the magnets and steers the robots around. Wong-Foy has written software to do that, and used it to choreograph the movement of over 1,000 tiny robots in a complex circulating pattern. That shows it should be possible to have them work in large teams, he says.

The robots’ wire arms are unable to move independently. But creating teams of robots with different types of arms makes it possible to do complex work.

Building a truss structure requires three types of workers. One operates a kind of toothpick dispenser, pushing a lever to release a toothpick-sized carbon rod. Another robot dips its arms into a water trough to put droplets on the ends of its arms, and then uses surface tension to pick up the rod. A third robot visits a glue station, dipping its arms and then applying the glue to the structure under construction. Finally, the robot that picked up the rod presses it into place and waits for an ultraviolet light to switch on to cure the glue. Then it can withdraw to pick up a new rod.

The software controlling the robots can also move the platform they are sitting on. It moves the platform each time a new layer is complete so the robots’ working space stays the same as the structure they’re building grows.

Much like 3-D printing technology, microrobots promise to be a more efficient way to make complex objects in small quantities than conventional mass-production technology, says Mahoney. That’s partly because the microrobots can be reprogrammed to do completely new tasks, and partly because they’re inexpensive. “We sometimes call this megahertz manipulation,” he says. “We can think of manipulation at rates we’re used to seeing in information processing.”

Helping to make circuit boards in small batches for prototyping new electronic devices is one possible application. Hobbyists and small companies working on electronics hardware today make few prototype circuit boards due to the time it takes to assemble them by hand, and the expense and delay of paying for small runs at dedicated plants.

Wong-Foy also thinks his approach might be useful for assembling devices that combine electronic and optical components, for example to interface with fiber optic cables. Because silicon and optical components can’t be processed in the same step, that industry often uses manual assembly to put them together. “In the field of optical electronics people have not found a good way to integrate indium phosphide lasers with silicon components,” says Wong-Foy. “The scale of those things is the size of carbon rods we’re using here.”

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World Cup Mind-Control Demo Faces Deadlines, Critics

In less than 60 days, Brazil will begin hosting soccer’s 2014 World Cup, even though workers are still hurrying to pour concrete at three unfinished stadiums. At a laboratory in São Paulo, a Duke University neuroscientist is in his own race with the World Cup clock. He is rushing to finish work on a mind-controlled exoskeleton that he says a paralyzed Brazilian volunteer will don, navigate across a soccer pitch using his or her thoughts, and use to make the ceremonial opening kick of the tournament on June 12.

The project, called Walk Again, is led by Miguel Nicolelis, a 53-year-old native of Brazil and one of the biggest names in neuroscience. If it goes as planned, the kick will be a highly public display of research into brain-machine interfaces, a technology that aims to help paralyzed people control machines with their thoughts and restore their ability to get around.

“It’s going to be like putting a man on the moon—it’s conquering a level of audacity and innovation that the people outside Brazil aren’t used to associating with Brazil,” Nicolelis has told audiences. The kick, he has said, “will inaugurate a new era of neuroscience, [that of] neuroengineering.”

But the Walk Again project is drawing doubters. Saying the demonstration is as much publicity stunt as science, they question whether it will illustrate any real degree of thought control. That’s because it relies on a fairly old, imprecise brain-recording technology called EEG, or electroencephalography.

At least three other research groups have recently published reports of EEG-controlled exoskeletons. Yet so far, none have managed to do much more than send a start or stop signal. They let the robotic harness do the rest of the work on a preset trajectory, with plenty of outside assistance in balancing.

That suggests that the level of brain control could be disappointingly minimal, even if it’s presented as a breakthrough on TV. “What would happen if a gust of wind moved the ball by three centimeters right before the demo began?” asks Andrew Schwartz, a neuroprosthetics researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. “Everything you’ll see in the demo will be fancy robotics, not brain control, and it will probably all be preprogrammed.”

The demo is expected to take place ahead of the opening match between Brazil and Croatia. To pull it off, the Walk Again team says it intends to combine EEG signals with other (as yet undisclosed) strategies for giving the patient dynamic control over walking and kicking the ball.

“We are well aware of the limitations of EEG, but we decided to show what could be done,” says Alan Rudolph, vice president for research at Colorado State University and manager of the project. “People will see a control system that is new in terms of using and exploiting brain signals as well as body signals.”

Brazil’s federal innovation agency gave Nicolelis $15 million to carry out the project, a large sum by the standards of any country. The ceremonial kick will be seen by 70,000 people in São Paulo’s Itaquera stadium, and according to Brazil’s government, “billions of TV viewers will be able to follow what could become one of the biggest achievements in Brazilian and world science.” (In actuality, World Cup audiences seldom exceed 250 million people, and a far smaller number tune in to the opening ceremonies.)

Nicolelis has a well-developed knack for mixing science with show business and, in Brazil, with politics. He did not respond to a request for an interview but has been posting updates to a fan page on Facebook. “It’s a lot of flash, and that rubs some people the wrong way,” says Daniel Ferris, who studies EEG and the kinetics of walking at the University of Michigan. “I think Nicolelis is a very good scientist, and it doesn’t bother me how he gets in the media.”

Until now, Nicolelis has been an ardent defender of an entirely different approach to brain-machine interfaces: directly recording neurons inside the brain, using implantable chips.

In 2008, he transmitted signals from a monkey’s brain over the Internet to Kyoto, causing a bipedal robot to ambulate in Japan . That experiment was the origin of the Walk Again project, which now involves about 125 people from five continents, says Rudolph.

Nicolelis initially hoped to equip a human volunteer with a tiny implanted recording cube studded with 1,000 or more electrodes, each capable of directly recording an individual neuron inside the brain. By recording from many neurons at once, his research in monkeys had shown, it would be possible to capture fine details of intended arm and leg movements and reproduce them in a robot.

Writing in Scientific American in 2012, Nicolelis said that to control the robotic legs of an exoskeleton, it would be necessary to “implant electrodes into the brain to manipulate the robot.” He also firmly rejected the idea of using less-accurate EEG, which relies on recording from outside the skull, saying in 2011 that “low spatial resolution makes using EEG in interfaces like those created in our laboratory inviable.” In a book he published that same year, Nicolelis went further, describing “an almost insurmountable chasm” separating his intellectual goals from those of EEG researchers.

In the end, it was the pressures of the World Cup deadline and the difficultly of organizing a brain implant that proved insurmountable, says Rudolph. That motivated a second-half substitution of the more accessible EEG technology. Brazil’s government agreed to the demonstration only in January 2013, Nicolelis has said, leaving little time to prepare.

“We decided to show what could be done now [and] portend what is coming,” says Rudolph, adding that the Walk Again project still intends to adopt intracortical recordings at a future date. “It’s an aggressive project moving very quickly. Any time you have to demonstrate a new technology at a specific time and date, that is a challenge.”

Even so, the choice puts Nicolelis’s demonstration at the center of a debate over what EEG signals can actually do. Some, like Schwartz, say it’s a stalled technology that “hit a hard wall 20 years ago.” Others say it’s a practical avenue for brain control whose promise is still unfolding.

The clear advantage is that recording an EEG signal doesn’t require brain surgery, just an electrode-studded cap. The problem is that the electrical signal is collected outside the skull, the combined product of billions of neurons firing at once. That’s a bit like listening to an orchestra from a noisy avenue outside a concert hall. The notes of individual instruments are lost.

But if enough players raise their volume or tempo, that change can be detected—and used as a simple control signal.

Last year, biomedical engineer Bin He of the University of Minnesota published a video of a person controlling the movement of a toy helicopter. The subject did so by imagining clenching one fist or the other to move it left or right, or sweeping both hands upward to give it lift. With training, computer algorithms recognized the resulting changes to the EEG wave and used them to control the copter.

But there are practical limits. Generating and decoding willful changes to the EEG wave is slow and produces very small amounts of useful information—often just five to 50 bits per minute. It’s not nearly enough data to control anything as complex as the Walk Again exoskeleton, which Rudolph says has 17 degrees of freedom.

Researchers have hoped to get more information from the EEG signal but have been so far been disappointed, says Guy Chéron, a researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, who led a European initiative that spent $7 million developing an EEG-controlled exoskeleton and wrapped up last year.

Chéron’s group did get the exoskeleton to move forward on a command from a brain wave, evoked by a person thinking about walking. But Chéron considers the result something of a flop. “We are not convinced it’s linked to real neuronal signals controlling locomotion, and not an artifact,” he says. “I think we are far from this. It’s my dream, but it remains a dream. And Nicolelis knows very well what the problem is.”

In Brazil, Nicolelis has been facing down similar criticisms, leveled by former colleagues and by the Brazilian media. Last month, he told the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo that the switch to EEG “doesn’t diminish the scientific or clinical relevance of our initiative.”

In part, that’s because mind control isn’t the only technology involved. The World Cup demonstration is expected to pull together several technologies that are now pointing to new possibilities for paralyzed patients, particularly recent advances in exoskeletons.

Because of fast developments in robotics, it’s unclear what role brain-derived signals will ultimately play. Experts note that there are much easier ways than EEG to give a simple command—for example, pushing a button or using one’s voice. “Twenty years from now, there is going to be a whole sensor suite,” says Ferris of the University of Michigan. “Maybe some EEG, maybe muscle recordings, then inertial sensors, and things you control by leaning into them like a Segway. You should be able to come up with a pretty decent controller for a paraplegic. Coming up with something for a quadriplegic is a lot harder.”

Nicolelis thinks his demo will shed light on all these promising developments. But there’s not much time. Tests with patients started in February, according to the team’s Facebook page. Two exoskeletons arrived by plane in Brazil only in March. Nicolelis, posting a video of the exoskeleton taking its first steps on April 7, chose to add the soundtrack from Mission Impossible.

Whether or not the demo proceeds, and whatever its technical importance, Nicolelis may have already achieved his desired legacy for Brazil. “Believe it not … in Brazil, people are talking about neuroscience when they talk about World Cup,” he told an audience in Chicago this February. “That is already enough of an accomplishment. To have kids stop and talk about science instead of football.”

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