Monthly Archives: May 2017

Bill Joy, in 2003.

Bill Joy, the Silicon Valley guru and Sun Microsystems Inc. co-founder, sees the future of energy in a battery that can take a bullet.

The venture capitalist formerly with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers LLC is now dedicating most of his time to Ionic Materials Inc., a Woburn, Massachusetts-based startup developing lithium batteries that wont burst into flames. Theyre strong enough to withstand being pierced by nails and even getting shot, as the company demonstrates in a promotional video.

The effort is part of a global race to devise better storage systems for hand-held devices, cars, trucks and electrical grids. The problem is conventional lithium-ion batteries contain liquid electrolytes that wear out quickly and have a nasty habit of spontaneously combusting, sometimes aboard jetliners. Ionic Materials says its solved those problems by crafting batteries from a solid plastic-like material.

If you can make the battery out of a solid, these problems essentially disappear, Joy said in a phone interview, speaking from a boat in the South Pacific. Its really a breakthrough in cost, safety and performance.

Quick Take: Read more about headaches with lithium-ion batteries.

That could fill a need, said Yayoi Sekine, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Safer stationary storage batteries are definitely welcome in the industry, she said by email.

Joy, who was chief scientist at Sun Microsystems until 2003, first toyed with the notion of a solid battery about 10 years ago when he and colleagues at Kleiner Perkins came up with a list of grand challenges.

The idea was to imagine the technological breakthroughs that could change the world. For example, what if concrete could be made without producing carbon dioxide? Could sugar be extracted from wood chips and other non-edible plant scraps and made into biofuel? And is it possible to develop a battery without volatile liquid electrolytes?

With a list of transformative ideas in hand, Joy and his colleagues scoured laboratories, universities and beyond looking for scientists on the cusp of solving any of these grand challenges. If everything penciled out, Kleiner Perkins would invest.

Thats a different approach than most venture people, Joy said. They typically have people knock on their door and give them story pitches. We went out and looked.

Joy and his partners came up with about 25 grand challenges and found about 15 projects to fund. About half of those have evolved into viable businesses. They include Renmatix Inc., a biofuel company that received $14 million in funding last year from investors led by Bill Gates and the French oil giant Total SA.

The answer to Joys solid-state battery questions came viaMike Zimmerman, aTufts University professor and Bell Laboratories veteran who was already working on the technology and foundedIonic Materials in 2011. Joy sponsored an initial Kleiner Perkins investment that year. He has since invested personally in the company and sits on its board. My major commitment right now is helping with Ionic, Joy said.

It wont be easy. The energy-storage market is crowded with companies and researchers pushing to come up with technology to dethrone conventional lithium-ion batteries.

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Ionic Materials has about 25 employees, and its working to scale up production. Manufacturing may begin within two to three years, Zimmerman said. The company plans to bring the cost of its batteries down as low as $30 per kilowatt-hour within about five years -- significantly below the current $273volume weighted average cost of lithium-ion battery packs calculatedby Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

You will see this technology widely adopted, in everything from consumer electronics, to transportation to energy storage for the grid, Joy said. Weve been pretty quiet about what weve got, but this can radically transform things.

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Technology Guru Bill Joy Is Betting on a Bulletproof Battery - Bloomberg

By Stephen Cohen, SeattlePI

Photo: VALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images

It may still be a while before flying cars, like this Aeromobil model revealed last month in Monaco, are ready for the public, and even then they may be reserved for the uber-rich. Perhaps the biggest issue will be figuring out where, when and how they will be able to take to the skies in compliance with government regulations.

It may still be a while before flying cars, like this Aeromobil model revealed last month in Monaco, are ready for the public, and even then they may be reserved for the uber-rich. Perhaps the biggest issue

Speaking of Uber, the ride-sharing company has been one of the industry leaders when it comes to self-driving cars, but its program had to be shut down briefly after a crash in Tempe, Arizona, in March. Apple, Google and Samsung are all working on their own versions of the driver-less vehicles.

Speaking of Uber, the ride-sharing company has been one of the industry leaders when it comes to self-driving cars, but its program had to be shut down briefly after a crash in Tempe, Arizona, in March. Apple,

If mass transit is more your thing, high-speed rail keeps on getting better and better. The world's first bullet trainopened in Japan in the mid-1960s and traveled at a top speed of 130 mph, but Shanghai's Maglev -- a magnetic levitation train -- can go more than twice as fast.

If mass transit is more your thing, high-speed rail keeps on getting better and better. The world's first bullet trainopened in Japan in the mid-1960s and traveled at a top speed of 130 mph, but Shanghai's

Looking further afield, the countdown to widespreadprivate spaceflight appears alreadyto have begun. Companies like Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic (whose founder, Richard Branson, is shown here with the SpaceShip Two VSS Unity in 2016) could start ferrying consumers out of this world in the next few years.

Looking further afield, the countdown to widespreadprivate spaceflight appears alreadyto have begun. Companies like Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic (whose founder, Richard Branson, is shown here

If keeping things compact is more your style, a jet pack (like this one used by "Rocket Man" during a Texas football game in 2014) might be the thing, but it doesn't seem close to being a legitimate form of personal transportation.

If keeping things compact is more your style, a jet pack (like this one used by "Rocket Man" during a Texas football game in 2014) might be the thing, but it doesn't seem close to being a legitimate form of

The water-powered jet pack, however, looks like a lot of fun.

The water-powered jet pack, however, looks like a lot of fun.

Hoverboards are nothing like what we were led to believe in "Back to the Future," as evidenced here by Jennifer Lopez's dancers on their versions, which are really just motorized, two-wheeled, sideways skateboards (and are also prone to spontaneously catch fire).

Hoverboards are nothing like what we were led to believe in "Back to the Future," as evidenced here by Jennifer Lopez's dancers on their versions, which are really just motorized, two-wheeled, sideways

However, there are some legitimate hoverboard options in development, like the Fly Board Air, which designer Franky Zapata rode for a world-record 7,388 feet on April 30, 2016 in Marseille, France.

However, there are some legitimate hoverboard options in development, like the Fly Board Air, which designer Franky Zapata rode for a world-record 7,388 feet on April 30, 2016 in Marseille, France.

We're still nowhere with time machines. Thanks for nothing, science.

We're still nowhere with time machines. Thanks for nothing, science.

Artificial intelligence has allowed for the proliferation of smart homes, like this package from Sky that uses "information from the company's various smart home devices to learn homeowners' habits to then automatically set things like the thermostat, lighting and locks and will check in with users before performing certain functions."

Artificial intelligence has allowed for the proliferation of smart homes, like this package from Sky that uses "information from the company's various smart home devices to learn homeowners' habits to then

You could eventually fill your smart home with all sorts of futuristic items, like Buddy, the companion robot from Blue Frog Robotics. He might be part home security system, part smartphone and part adorable-looking toy, but it will never wisecrack as well as Rosie from "The Jetsons."

You could eventually fill your smart home with all sorts of futuristic items, like Buddy, the companion robot from Blue Frog Robotics. He might be part home security system, part smartphone and part

Not only can you plan trips and get directions using aGPS-enabled device like your smartphone, games like "Pokemon Go" gave users the opportunity to capture imaginary monsters while running into other people on the sidewalk.

Not only can you plan trips and get directions using aGPS-enabled device like your smartphone, games like "Pokemon Go" gave users the opportunity to capture imaginary monsters while running into other people

And while virtual reality hasn't become the kind of ever-present, computer-generated wonderland we all thought it might be in the 1990s, heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Sony are all developing their own VR-related products.

And while virtual reality hasn't become the kind of ever-present, computer-generated wonderland we all thought it might be in the 1990s, heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Sony are all

Flying cars and 'the technology of tomorrow' today

People have been dreaming of flying cars since shortly after the invention of actual cars. It's said Henry Ford himself predicted the combination of automobile and airplane back in 1940.

Well, we have some good news. It may have taken longer than Ford expected, but the flying car is finally a reality.

Sort of ... maybe ...

Kitty Hawk, a Silicon Valley startup backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, was among the flying-car companies profiled in The New York Times last week. There's even some footage of the company's "Flyer" prototype, which looks a little bit like a Jet Ski mated with a drone. According to the piece, the company hopes to start selling to consumers by the end of the year.

"We've all had dreams of flying effortlessly," Page said in a statement to the Times. "I'm excited that one day very soon I'll be able to climb onto my Kitty Hawk Flyer for a quick and easy personal flight."

There are, admittedly, a lot of issues that will need to be sorted out before flying cars become the next big thing, including noise and safety concerns, as well as the development of a potential air-traffic control system designed to handle an influx of consumer-driven aircraft.

But even if it doesn't look like you'll be able to park your very own flying car in your driveway (or helipad or runway) any time in the near future, it got us thinking about other technological advancements that seemed like science fiction only a few decades ago -- say, when Seattle hosted the World's Fair in 1962 -- that are a reality (or close to it) today.

Check out the gallery above to see how close -- or how far away -- some of the technology of tomorrow is today.

Visit seattlepi.com for more Seattle news. Contact reporter Stephen Cohen at stephencohen@seattlepi.com or @scohenPI.

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Flying cars and 'the technology of tomorrow' today - seattlepi.com

(TNS) -- On Aug. 31, the pilot of an American Airlines Boeing 777 arriving from Hong Kong spotted a white, diamond-shaped drone as the aircraft made its final descent into DFW International Airport.

The drone was 100 feet below and 100 feet to the right of the plane, according to a Federal Aviation Administration report, and didnt require any evasive action. The plane landed safely, but airport police were notified about the drones unauthorized intrusion into the airspace, one of 44 reported at North Texas airports through the first nine months of 2016.

None of the cases resulted in planes being struck and just one, a small Beechcraft plane, had to alter its flight course to avoid a collision at an elevation of 10,500 feet near DFW Airport.

But airport officials and U.S. aviation regulators are increasingly worried about potentially catastrophic encounters as drones become more widely used by businesses and hobbyists.

The bottom line is that anyone who flies a drone in and around the airspace near airports can pose a serious safety risk, said Michael OHarra, said Michael OHarra, a deputy regional administrator for the FAA.

For the last week, the FAA and several partners have been testing new technology at DFW Airport thats meant to quickly identify drones in restricted airspace.

The tests are set up like a high-tech game of hide and seek, with a team of operators flying a drone on the west side of the airport, while engineers for Gryphon Sensors use a combination of radar, radio-frequency and optical sensors to identify and ultimately pinpoint the aircraft.

The tests at DFW are the sixth and final in a series of tests around the country evaluating different technologies for drone detection.

OHarra said DFW Airport, which has about 1,800 daily take offs and landings, provided an ideal place to test the technologies in a heavily congested airspace. One of many challenges facing the sensors is being able to differentiate between unauthorized drones; other, authorized aircraft and even non-aircraft objects like wildlife or stray plastic bags blowing in the wind.

The research also allows the FAA to compare different proposed system, gauge how many sensors would be needed to monitor a given area and see what combination of different sensors provide the quickest and most accurate detection.

The FAA recorded about 1,800 reports of unmanned drones, or sometimes model planes, in 2016, relying for now on visual sightings by pilots or people on the ground. Thats up 50 percent from the roughly 1,200 sightings reported in 2015, a trend that FAA officials expect will continue as drones become more widespread.

We believe that most people who fly drones for fun or those who do so for commercial purposes intend to fly those drones safely, OHarra said. Some people dont understand exactly what flying safely means.

Hobbyists are not allowed to operate drones within five miles of an airport unless theyve received permission from airport and air traffic control officials.

Civil penalties for operating near an airport can range up to a fine of $27,500, according to an FAA official.

The testing being done at DFW and other airports is only the beginning stages of eventually incorporating these types of drone-detecting systems across the country. Researchers will analyze the data gathered and use it to develop minimum standards detection systems should meet.

From there, airport officials and regulators would still have to figure out how the systems would be incorporated into an airspace, who would be responsible for responding when a drone is identified and ultimately who would pay to install the technology.

The work represents a small but critical step toward safely incorporating more drones into the airspace.

We dont want pilots coming unexpectedly across a drone. You could run into impact issues...quite frankly it could be a distraction to the pilot if they werent expecting to see it. Were concerned about anything that could take the pilot's attention away from the flight theyre operating.

2017 The Dallas Morning News Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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FAA Testing New Drone-Sensing Technology to Avoid Airport Collisions - Government Technology

By Glenn Fleishman 05.02.17 | 8:00 am

Heres the thing about an ad: If you cant recognize it, its worth nothing to the advertiser. Thats the fatal flaw with web-based ads. No matter how much ad technology evades ad-blocking software by disguising itself, it still has to be recognizable to a user and potentially clickable.

Researchers at Princeton and Stanford believe they have shown how to end the escalating blocker/anti-blocker battle as a result of that crucial point, and in favor of user choice. While a war to win our eyeballs sounds like the theme of a Guillermo del Toro film, it describes the interplay between advertisers (and ad-technology companies) and the visitors who reject the panoply of tracking techniques and page bloat that come with current online ads.

Some sites go beyond just trying to route around blocking techniques used by Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, and others by showing a scolding message when they detect blocking action in use. A visitor often has to disable an ad blocker or add a rules exception to proceed to a site. But Princeton and Stanfords academics have determined its possible to identify ads with an extremely high degree of reliability without using any of the current ad-blocking tricks of identifying underlying page elements, domains, and the like, and also block counter-defenses from sites and adtech companies.

In a paper currently in draft form, the authors detail an interlocking set of theory, code, and legal reasoning about the state of ad blocking and the response by ad networks and site publishers. Its been assumed that the blocking and anti-blocking war would escalate indefinitely, with battles fought as a series of measures and countermeasures. The researchers lay out the case that browser users and browser makers have the upper hand, and that in any given skirmish, publishers will quickly lose.

Instead of looking at network and code, the proof of concept the authors first deployed as a Chrome plug-inwhich identifies ads on Facebookuses computer vision, optical-character recognition of text rendered as images, and other cues. It allows ads to load and scripts to run, at which point it can determine what on a page is an ad.

To discourage robots from automatically filling them out, text-based CAPTCHAs became ever more baroque to avoid scripts puzzling out the results, to the point where they frustrated many users as well as the bots. That cant work with ads; it even stopped working with CAPTCHAs, as scammers adopted deep-learning computer vision techniques. So long as advertisements, even malicious advertisements, are recognizable by users, you should be able to use these techniques to find them, says Grant Storey, a Princeton undergraduate in computer science who coauthored the paper with Arvind Narayanan and Dillon Reisman of Princeton and Jonathan Mayer of Stanford. (Mayer is currently at work in the FCCs enforcement bureau as chief technologist.)

Their approach relies in part on legitimate advertisers, ad networks, and publishers complying with U.S. regulations and with guidelines forindustry self-monitoring. Reputable ads have labels and other attributesthat make them stand out. It might be subtle to a user, but its obvious to a trained machine-learning system. (Other countries vary in their practices, though some have even stricter laws and industry self-monitoring.)

As the researchers note, In order to defeat a filter list [such as is used by conventional ad blockers], all that is required is moving an advertisement to a different URL; in order to defeat a perceptual ad blocker, an entirely new ad disclosure standard must be approved. The researchers limited their testing to ads on Facebook pages and ads that comply with regulations and industry practice. For this paper, our focus was on this well-behaved universe, where there are certain sort of norms that are being followed, Storey says.

The researchers system is modular and adaptable, and could be trained to recognize unlabeled ads, although the researchers have found that over time more advertising on more sites has proper labels and disclosure. Their framework doesnt encompass malvertising, or the delivery of malware via ads. Anti-malware, Google Safe Browsing, and other software and services better handle that separate from identifying them as ads. Nor does it block the trackers that are often part of ad serving, but are a concern because of privacy issues rather than than visual interaction.

In their testing, the Facebook extension, in the field for several months, matched 50 out of 50 ads, including those in both the news feed and sidebars. The four researchers also report they saw no false negatives or positives in their personal use over six months.

On the broader web, they tested a module that looks for disclosures under the AdChoices program, used in North America and Europe, and which the papers authors found was used in over 60% of ads in a sample of 183 ads from top news websites. Their AdChoices module correctly labeled over 95% of AdChoices ads from 100 sites randomly selected from the top 500 news sites.

The researchers technology could create a beneficial feedback loop, too, as users who might employ ad-detection software could complain to advertisers, sites, ad networks, state attorneys general, trade groups, and the FTC about commercial messages that were identifiable as out of compliance with regulations and industry guidelines. (In fact, this approach could be automated by nonprofit and governmental consumer-protection groups to identify out-of-compliance ads.)

On top of ad identification, the paper offers a further step in dampening the powder on the adtech side of this battle. Because the technology the researchers tested comes in the form of a browser extension, it has privileges that extend far beyond what JavaScript code can do in a browser. That allows developers to turn a loaded web page into a kind of brain in a jar, which they label a rootkit, because of its advantageous position in the browser. The researchers can use this fact to prevent anti-blocking software from determining whether an ad blocker is in use, even if the software detects thatits been sandboxed.

And, with a similar approach, the researchers tested whether its possible to create a differential examination of a page, by loading it once and applying ad blocking and then loading a shadow version that executes all page-modifying JavaScript code. The two versions could be compared to see if anti-ad blocking messages or changes took place. By figuring out what elements are being tracked, the extension could return responses that the publisher would expect only from a page showing its ads, thereby allowing it to block ads without detection. (The authors didnt implement this in code, but tested whether it would be effective.)

These techniques, and another exploration into blocking the execution of anti-blocking code altogether, raise ethical concerns thatare addressed briefly in the paper, because such tools could be used in advertising fraud, a large industry in which automated scripts attempt to rack up page views and perform clicks while appearing to be legitimate actions by humans.

The research might offer more insight to fraudsters in preventing detection by using extensions, but, Storey notes, there are still other ways to detect the ad-fraud bot that should available and these techniques dont work for fraud systems that load in a browser. The researchers also omitted a few details to prevent releasing full details on their technique.

The brain-a-in-jar method could be escalated further if browser makers go further and either provide deeper access for extension creators or build in ad blocking directly. Google reportedly is considering changes to Chrome that would prevent certain kinds of irritating ads from loading or bar all ads from loading on pages that use any of those forms of irritating ads.

The only way to win most wars is to avoid conflict in the first place. As web-ad revenue has slipped away to Facebook, Twitter, and mobile apps, among other places, publishers have developed adtech or signed up with networks that offer it. Thats led to heavier use of invasive techniques such as pop-up ads with hard-to-click Xs to close and auto-play video, as well as large downloads for the web code to support them.

JPMorgan Chase recently discovered that automated advertising on 400,000 sites brought clicks only from 12,000. It winnowed that list to 5,000 handpicked sites and saw no overall change in results. That would indicate that aggressive techniques to deliver ads to users arent working for advertisers, either.

Princeton and Stanfords research, combined with results like those from Chase, might force publishers to rethink ad approaches entirely. That could lead them to back out of the blocking/anti-blocking situation, finding a way to attract users into viewing well-behaved marketing and leaving the tricks behind.

Glenn Fleishman is a veteran technology reporter based in Seattle, who covers security, privacy, and the intersection of technology with culture. Since the mid-1990s, Glenn has written for a host of publications, including the Economist, Macworld, the New York Times, and Wired.

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Have These Researchers Created An Unbeatable Ad-Blocking Technology? - Fast Company

Manas Goyal operates the dome simulator at Aker Solutions training facility in Katy. It has high-quality animation technology that provides 3-D images. Photo: Cody Duty / 2011 Houston Chronicle

The old cast-iron pipes are corroding at BPs oil and gas gathering center on Alaskas North Slope. The company knew it had to replace them, at an enormous cost.

Then it plugged the project into a 3-D model. And the software revealed that the British oil major doesnt need to remove all the old piping, only some of it. Engineers can simply lay the new, stainless-steel pipe over the rest.

The digital subscription that allows BP to see its North Slope gathering center in augmented reality costs the company a few hundred thousand dollars a year. The adjustment to the pipe layout should, said BP executives at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, save the company tens of millions of dollars.

RELATED: Offshores big tech idea? Simplify, standardize and lower costs

Digital technology is changing the way companies drill for oil, examine reservoirs and rebuild refineries. And companies like BP say that, because the technology has largely been pioneered for other applications Microsoft builds 3-D software for gaming, not oil and gas they can access it for thousands, not millions, of dollars.

Price points are drastically lower, said Dave Truch, technology director of digital innovation at BP. We could not have done this two decades ago.

Still, companies are spending more and more of their precious capital on digital. BP spent $14 billion last year on its upstream operations.

Increasingly, said upstream technology chief Ahmed Hashmi, more and more of that is going into digital technology.

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BP: 3-D technology to save millions of dollars - FuelFix (blog)

A privacy group is suing the NYPD for documents related to their secretive and unregulated facial recognition program. They say the technology can misidentify people, causing innocent people to be investigated or arrested.

The Center on Privacy & Technology (CPT), a university think tank at Georgetown Law, announced Tuesday that it filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the New York Police Department (NYPD) after the department refused to disclose documents relating their long-term use of facial recognition technology.

Facial recognition technology uses algorithms to analyze images of human faces and match them with photos in a database containing such images as driver's license photos, passport photos, police records and even public photos posted to social media or dating sites.

In January, the Center on Privacy & Technology (CPT) filed a Free of Information Act (FIOA) request with the NYPD for records relating to their facial identification unit. In response, the NYPD sent the CPT a single memo on procedures relating to the technology. The department claims no other records could be found.

The departments claim that it cannot find any records about its use of the technology is deeply troubling, said David Vladeck, the CPTs faculty director. The NYPD has been using face recognition for over five years. New Yorkers have a right to know how its using face recognition technology.

In March, a former NYPD official who helped establish the facial identification unit told the New York Daily News that the department had conducted more than 8,500 facial recognition investigations, with over 3,000 possible matches, and approximately 2,000 arrests since the program started in 2011.

In October, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) announced the city would begin installing advanced cameras and sensors with facial recognition software into the design of its bridges, tunnels, airports and other transit hubs to ultimately develop one system-wide plan.

There are currently no state or federal laws that control the NYPDs use of facial recognition technology. The documents that the CPT requested included their policies, manuals, user guides, training materials, contract obligations, audits, agreements and other documents would then be the only source of oversight on how the technology is used by the department.

If no records exist, that means that there are no controls on the use of face recognition technology and we ought to worry about that, the CPTs Vladeck said.

The information request from the CPT was part of a year-long study on how law enforcement agencies use facial-recognition technology, entitled The Perpetual Lineup.

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The October study found that more than 117 million American adults are enrolled in a criminal facial recognition network and one-fourth of all law enforcement agencies in 26 states have access to this database. However, the study found that few agencies have instituted meaningful protections to prevent the misuse of the technology. In many more cases, it is out of control.

In March, the US Government Accountability Office released a study of face recognition technology, which found the FBI had not fully adhered to privacy laws and policies and had not taken sufficient action to help ensure accuracy of its face recognition technology.

Face recognition is too powerful, and its price on privacy and civil liberties too high, to not be controlled by robust policies and training guides. If these records do in fact exist, it is against both New York law and the interests of the public to keep them secret, Clare Garvie, the associate at the Center on Privacy & Technology who filed the original document request said.

The CPT study also found the FBI had not conducted enough tests to assess the accuracy of the technology. While they claimed their technology could return a match at least 85 percent of the time, GAO reports that the FBI only tested their technology with a candidate list of 50 potential matches. In those tests, the FBI did not report the false positive rate, or how often the technology matched a person with the wrong photo in a database.

The study from CPT found the technology is less accurate than fingerprinting, and less accurate when used to identify African Americans. This means the technology could make a mistake and an innocent person could be investigated or charged with a crime they did not commit.

In 2015, Sergeant Edward Coello of the NYPD facial identification unit told WNBC theyhad identified 1,700 suspects and made nine arrests using the technology. But he also admitted that it had misidentified five people.

"Innocent people don't belong in criminal databases," Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of the CPT and co-author of the study, said, according to ARS Technica. "By using face recognition to scan the faces on 26 states' driver's license and ID photos, police and the FBI have basically enrolled half of all adults in a massive virtual line-up.

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NYPD sued for refusing to disclose face recognition technology docs - RT