Daily Archives: March 19, 2017

Forbes

Technology Is Going To Take Away Your Freedom To Put Other People At Risk Forbes The New York Times has an interesting story about how automakers are creating technology that will allow cars to tell when drivers are sleepy. The article reports that drowsiness detection software that monitors the movements of the car has existed for ...

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Technology Is Going To Take Away Your Freedom To Put Other People At Risk - Forbes

New Intel Technology Bridges Gap Between Speedy Conventional Memory, Longer-Term Storage Wall Street Journal (subscription) The new storage drives, which Intel is making widely available on Sunday, are based on technology called 3D XPoint. The company bills the technology, which it says it spent more than a decade developing, as a new memory category, bridging the gap. and more »

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New Intel Technology Bridges Gap Between Speedy Conventional Memory, Longer-Term Storage - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Guest columnist: Deployed technology in our daily lives now, soon and future Tri-City Herald (blog) To realize this vision and increase awareness of PNNL as a world-class scientific research institution, PNNL's science and technology strategy centers on accomplishing national-level outcomes. Conducting research in these strategic areas often leads to ...

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Guest columnist: Deployed technology in our daily lives now, soon and future - Tri-City Herald (blog)

In a region largely shaped and driven for more than a century by federal spending on the military, President Donald Trumps first budget proposal last week triggered cheers from defense hawks and cries from researchers, academic leaders and others concerned about funding cuts to San Diego Countys scientific, medical and high-tech industries.

Economists agree that Trumps 2018 fiscal plan could buoy the regions defense sector, which has lagged for three years after budget tightening designed to trim the federal deficit. But theyre unsure whether those gains would outpace what could be deep downsizing of federal programs that support non-defense technology, biomedical and environmental exploration in an area that has long tried to diversify its economy yet still relies predominantly on the armed forces and a constellation of related companies.

Were not quite as boom or bust as we were before, but (the military-defense complex) is still a huge part of our economy, said economist Kelly Cunningham with the National University System Institute for Policy Research.

The one detail that the president is really planning on is a $54 billion increase in defense spending. Thats pretty key for San Diego. We still have the most military personnel based here in the nation and any increase there is going to help, as far as dollars flowing into San Diego.

In 2016, the federal government inked $8 billion in contracts with San Diego County businesses $14.9 billion less than in 2009. That was because of the sequestration legislation that Congress had passed in 2011 to cap most federal discretionary spending, especially for the military. The belt-tightening began to bite in 2013, triggering significant cuts to weapons procurement and maintenance projects across the region.

Even with the diminished spending, the county still brought in more than $23 billion in federal funding last year for wages, procurement projects and veterans benefits, according to an analysis overseen by Lynn Reaser, the chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene Universitys Fermanian Business & Economic Institute.

Federal defense outlays last year directly generated one out of every five local jobs and as the spending rippled through the region triggered $21.4 billion in additional economic activity, Reasers team found.

Military and otherwise, the federal government is the single largest employer in greater San Diego.

Reaser predicted that the bulk of Trumps proposed budget, if enacted, would help mend the militarys readiness problems created by nearly two decades of wars overseas and the sequestration cuts. That would initially mean more spending on equipment, parts, training, infrastructure improvements and extra troops to ease Navy and Marine Corps deployments overseas.

Trump also wants the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to get a $4.4 billion boost, which could trickle down to the roughly 230,000 former service members who live in the county, Cunningham and Reaser said.

Trumps budget blueprint may be telegraphing future splurging on Navy warships, aircraft and drones, which Reaser said could help local firms and workers in later years, too.

About 10,000 people toil in local shipyards, notably General Dynamics-NASSCO and BAE Systems. Meanwhile, San Diegos Northrop Grumman and General Atomics are leading makers of unmanned aircraft.

Christopher Thornberg, a founding partner of Los Angeles-based Beacon Economics, affirms the militarys leading role in San Diego County but wants residents to pay more attention to what he sees as Trumps assault on most non-defense agencies.

If youre looking at the defense spending and going rah-rah Trump when youre in San Diego, youre really missing the point, he said.

Thornberg pointed to $5.8 billion in proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health, Americas largest underwriter of biomedical research. The president also envisions hefty reductions for agencies that underwrite climate change science, some types of medical training and international relations all things with a notable footprint in this region.

In particular, San Diego Countys life-science and medical industries together employ tens of thousands of people. More than 20,000 work on the Torrey Pines Mesa in La Jolla alone. Dominated by UC San Diego, the mesa annually pulls in about $400 million in NIH funding.

At any one time, the university is conducting more than 100 drug trials. It frequently collaborates with nearby private biomedical centers such as the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and The Scripps Research Institute.

The mesa also boasts research units from pharmaceutical giants, including GSK, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.

In addition, Thornberg said Trumps budget proposal shouldnt be evaluated without scrutinizing his foreign policies.

Trump continues to threaten trade wars, tougher immigration restrictions and increased taxes on commercial shipments from Mexico, actions that Thornberg said could harm the San Diego and Tijuana economies.

Research in 2014 led by UC San Diego said the CaliBaja region Baja California and San Diego and Imperial counties generated $200 billion in annual economic activity and accounted for more than 70,000 northbound commercial and passenger crossings daily.

Economists have said it takes a sustained, multi-year pattern of major shifts in federal spending to make a lasting impact on a metropolitan region, even in a place like San Diego thats heavily reliant on one economic sector.

How did San Diego become such a defense hub?

It started in 1885, thanks to then-rival Los Angeles and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad.

When they built the transcontinental railroad, it ended up going through L.A., said Cunningham at National University. L.A. and Long Beach developed a shipping industry because thats where you came to unload or load up the railroads. San Diego missed on all that. They tried, but partly the geography the mountains made it difficult. After they missed out, the forefathers of San Diego said, Well, what can we do?

Around the same time, a former bellhop moved from Minnesota and eventually came to San Diego. William Kettner took up the insurance and real estate trades, then ran for Congress in 1912. The pro-business Democrat was championed by Republicans who coined the campaign slogan, Why not Kettner? It was part of a bipartisan bid to remake a San Diego still agog over the visit of Americas Great White Fleet four years earlier.

When you look at it historically, that was a strategic decision San Diegos leaders made to depend on the economy of defense spending, Cunningham said.

Although he was a freshman lawmaker, Kettner outmaneuvered the San Francisco delegation to win a $249,000 appropriation from Congress to dredge San Diegos harbor, making it navigable for large ships. (The Great White Fleets warships hadnt been able to enter San Diego Bay because it was too shallow. They moored off Coronado, which wasnt lost on Kettner, who served as chair of the welcoming committee.)

Kettner also secured funding to finish the Armys coastal artillery defenses at Fort Rosecrans and the Navys Point Loma coaling station the first American stop for vessels steaming north from the new Panama Canal.

He curried favor with fellow Democrats like President Woodrow Wilson and a rising assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who looked favorably on San Diegos warm-water port.

Back home, business leaders sweetened Kettners Capitol Hill deals by donating land and buildings for the Navy to use for training. They also piggybacked on the naval aviation experiments of flight pioneer Glenn Curtiss.

Federal defense spending in San Diego County spiked during World War I and continued as the Navy built a Pacific fleet. It surged again in World War II under Roosevelt, now the nations president, and rose yet again when troops went off to fight in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, according to Cunninghams research.

cprine@sduniontribune.com

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Will defense gains offset budget cuts to science, technology in San Diego? - The San Diego Union-Tribune

I attended the Experiential Technology Conference (XTech) in San Francisco this week to hear talks about creating virtual experiences that truly immerse you in another world. It showed me that virtual reality has only scratched the surface. I liked the event, curated by Zack Lynch of Jazz Venture Partners, because it reminded me of the long view of VR and how much of a role that research and development still has to play in it.

VR has made our eyes feel like weve gone to someplace else, but thats only one of our senses. We have 3D sound as well, but we need more than that to achieve real immersion, said Tal Blevins, head of media at UploadVR, in a panel at XTech.

Above: Adam Gazzaley of UCSF at XTech. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

The illusions wont seem absolutely real until all of our senses are immersed in an artificial reality. Joe Michaels, chief revenue at AxonVR, a maker of touch technology for VR, and Tom Carter, chief technology officer of Ultrahaptics, said that touch will deliveran extra sense of realism.

One of the fundamental aspects of realism in VR is touch, said Michaels, whose company has spent four years developing that sense of touch. One of the things you feel when you come out of the womb into the world is touch.

David Edwards, cofounder of Onotes, is making digital scent technology that is like a speaker for your sense of smell.

Its not just visual and sound. Its a bit unfortunate. The last few years, VR has been about putting on a head-mounted display and looking around, Edwards said. It should include hitting all the senses that we can to make you feel immersed in that environment.

When your senses agree with what you are seeing, it completely transforms the experience, said Brent Bushnell, CEO of Two Bit Circus.

Carter of Ultrahaptics said that youll need other senses more than you realized when you are trying to grab something with your fingers.

Above: David Holz, founder of Leap Motion, shows off hand-tracking in VR. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

I saw that myself when I tried out Qualcomms new wireless stand-alone VR headset prototype at the Game Developers Conference a couple of weeks ago. The headset used sensors to detect my fingers, using software from Leap Motion. It was cool that I didnt have to use a touch controller. But as soon as I reached out the grab something in VR, it didnt feel real. That was because when my fingers closed around an object, I didnt feel anything. Theheadset didnt incorporate anytouch, or haptics, technology.

And thats the way it is going to be with VR. One improvement begs for another. As soon as we get wired VR headsets, we want wireless ones. As soon as we get touch controls, we want finger detection. As soon as we get finger detection, we want haptics. Thats why Edwards is working on smell.

Then it kind of hit me. This is an enormous undertaking. Its why long-term investors like Tipatat Chennavasin, cofounder of the Venture Reality Fund, say that its going to take decades before the full impact of VR, augmented reality, and mixed reality is realized.

It reminded me of a speech by Mike Abrash, chief scientist at Oculus, speaking last fall.

Everyone in this room has jumped in to make VR happen, and our reward is we are on the leading edgeof one of the most important technological revolutions of our lifetime, Abrash said. Thanks to all of our efforts, VR is going to leap ahead in the next five years.The reason we are all working on VR now is because of our vision of what VR will become.

Above: VR entertainment panelists: Margaret Wallace (left), Theresa Duringer, Noah Falstein, and Shiraz Akmal. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

And yet VR skeptics are worried about whats going to happen in 2017. We saw40 percent more VR startups created in 2016, but the headsets that debuted during the year only generated about 6.3 million units of sales, according to SuperData Research. Thats not going to produce enough software revenue to sustain many of those VR developers.

Theres going to be a reckoning, said Margaret Wallace, CEO of Playmatics, on my own panel on VR entertainment experiences.

And so we agreed that VR still needs patient investors, brand advocates, and passionate platform owners Oculus and Facebook, Intel, Qualcomm, Apple, Google, and Microsoft to sustain the investment in VR.

From what I have a sense of, theres still a lot of investment pouring in from the platform holders, said Shiraz Akmal, CEO of VR startup Spaces. Seven-figure deals are happening. But the difference, at least from my perspective, is that the early days were more of a spray-and-pray kind of situation.

He added, Now its more targeted. Hey, weve invested billions in this platform, and now we need a title that can help us sell the numbers that everyone was projecting a year ago.The competition for those dollars is more fierce. There are bigger stakes in the development community, especially those studios that have bet on VR. Consumer adoption is its adopting, but not as fast as wed all like.

Fortunately, other fields such as healthcare, enterprise, defense will help to drive it forward. Mike Wikan, creative director at Booz Allen Hamilton, said his company has 150 developers working on high-end VR experiences for those who will pay for it today: the military. The Department of Defense spends up to $7 billion a year on training, and if you can train people better in VR, that saves money.

Above: Adam Gazzaley of Akili and UCSF at the Experiential Technology Conference. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

The XTech event was also impressive in showing off the breadth of research going on in the space.

Adam Gazzaley, showed some fascinating research about what he called a closed loop system. In it, we would play a game in VR, and it would produce an effect in our brain and cause us to react. Gazzaleys brainwave sensors would capture data on the part of the brain that was stimulated. Then that data would serve as feedback for the game developers, who could refine the game to produce a better effect. The game could also adjust itself on the fly to become more difficult, as needed, for the player.

Gazzaley, whose startup is Akili, is trying to use VR to help people with attention disorders. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, also showed a cool vest that produces tactile feedback on your torso. He showed how a deaf person could hear by feeling the haptic feedback on the torso. Eagleman spoke a word into a microphone, which produced touch sensations on the vest. Then the deaf person wearing the vest spelled out the word that was spoken.

The research talks also made me think of another talk by Abrash at Facebooks F8 event last year. He said the brain doesnt see the raw data of reality. Rather, it absorbs what comes in from our senses and processes it. It discards data that it doesnt need and presents something that we can grasp. In other words, our eyes and senses and brain are interpreting reality for us, not presenting it.

That suggests the solution for challenges of VR. We dont have to reproduce reality. We simply have to trick the brain into thinking its reality. That means we dont have to use as much computing power and other technology as we think to achieve the aim of immersion.

Think about it this way. Bad VR gives us motion sickness. Theres a mismatch between what our eyes see and what our other senses are telling us, Bushnell said.

VR is such a strong medium that it can produce a physiological reaction in our bodies. But if we trick our bodies and our brain, we can get a desired effect from VR. Thats why one of the XTech talks about magic, or misdirecting the brain, made a lot of sense. Stephen Macknick, professor of the department of neurology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, said that our brain cant focus on everything, so it focuses on what it thinks matters. And that gives illusions a chance to make an impression on us.

Everything is a function of your perception and perspective and the contrast with the world around you, Macknick said. You get to decide the way you want to see the world.

Macknicks talk made an impression onNoah Falstein, chief game designer at Google.

I love that he puts up a diagram showing how youre focused on something, and the neurons receiving that image have other neurons that suppress the input from other areas, saidFalstein. Its not only that your brain highlights the thing youre focused on, but its also turning off everything else. Thats why you dont see things happening around you when you concentrate on one thing very intently.

Above: Two Bit Circus VR app made you feel like you were on a window-washing platform on a skyscraper. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

If we trick the brain into thinking that what it is seeing is real, then we dont get sick. The illusion seems realistic and more engaging.

But what if we want to trick our body in a physiological way? One VR app, The Walk VR, makes you feel like you are walking on a tightrope between the Two Towers. When I did that walk, I felt like I was going to fall.

Two Bit Circus did something similar at the event. Its VR app and motion platform took you up the side of a skyscraper on a window-washing platform. You get a sense of vertigo as you look over the edge. The motion platform shakes, and you feel like you are falling. Your body gives a physiological response, and everyone around you laughs at the experience, Bushnell said. The guy in the picture above freaked out when his friend grabbed him and shook him on the platform.

Theresa Duringer, meanwhile, used VR to trigger the opposite kind of physiological response. She has a fear of flying, and she created a VR app, Ascension VR, as a distraction to use on the flight. She wanted to suppress a physiological reaction, the fear of flying, and used VR to try to do that.

Above: John Favreau (left) and Adam Gazzaley. Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

All of the research and experimentation made me feel like VR is at the start ofa huge undertaking. John Favreau, a Hollywood director, actor, and VR enthusiast, reminded us that we have to find the humanity in the technology.

So much of the time people are reading about technologies, like theyre at a race track seeing what horse will win, he said. You have to realize its a one-way street. You dont know how the river is going to flow, but it is flowing in the direction. But if the only people who are involved with it are people who are unconcerned with the human impact of it, its going to shape the path. Whats the opportunity to humanize it?

And as Abrash pointed out in his talks, this is kind of like the Manhattan Project of our age. A lot of bright minds are working on it and debating the ramifications of this new technology, and the Brave New World that it will create.

This post by Dean Takahashi originally appeared on VentureBeat.

Tagged with: John Favreau, tal blevins, xtech

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Experiential Technology Event Shows How Far VR Has To Go - UploadVR

Scott D. Miller, formerly of Cambria County and a school administrator, has received the 2017 Pennsylvania Chief Technology Officer of the Year Award in Education at theannual Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference.

Miller, director of technology for Wayne Highlands School District, has seen changes in the past three years. He rebuilt the entire district network in Honesdale High School, Wayne Highlands Middle School, Lakeside Elementary, Stourbridge Primary Center, Damascus School and Preston School.

Miller secured Federal e-Rate Funding to help pay for the project, which included the setup of network redundancy, one-to-one iPads in the high school and access to iPad carts in all other buildings. Through his leadership, student email was enabled through Google Apps for Education.

Students and teachers now have access to newer computers, latest operating system versions for both PC (Microsoft Windows 10) and MAC (MacOS Sierra), and software applications from Microsoft Office 2016 through Adobe Studios 2017 Suites such as Photo Shop, Illustrator, Premier and more.

Miller has led three school districts across the statefor nearly 20years in educational technology as a school administrator at Central Cambria School District, Richland School District, and now Wayne Highlands School District.

He will now represent the entire state of Pennsylvania in education as the chief technology officer of the year at the national conference in 2018 as the candidate for the CoSN (Consortium for School Networking) Chief Technology Officer Withrow Award in Washington, D.C.

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Former Cambria County resident receives technology award - TribDem.com

SAS technology enables blind to 'visualize' graphs | News & Observer News & Observer SAS's Graphics Accelerator software, which was released last month, allows people with visual impairments to interact with charts and graphs created with SAS ... and more »

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SAS technology enables blind to 'visualize' graphs | News & Observer - News & Observer