@ETech: Wednesday Morning Keynotes

by Jimmy Guterman | comments: 0

Another day, another set of expansive keynotes.

John McCarthy, father of LISP, a giant in artificial intelligence, gave a sit-down high-level talk about Elephant 2000, a proposed programming language intended for transaction processing and electronic data interchange. He described Elephant in terms of its ability to capture "speech acts," which I'll define roughly as words that lead to actions. (One of McCarthy's examples: "I now pronounce you man and wife.") McCarthy said these words "create obligations." They're promises, questions, requests, etc. As anyone who has read the code to programs I've written (many of which include the words "hello" and "world" in the title) will know that I'm no expert. If anyone in the ETech audience can do an ace job of explaining the most provocative line in McCarthy's talk, "ascribing beliefs to thermostats is like adding 0 and 1 to the number system," I'll send you a free O'Reilly book of my choice.

Steve Cousins of Willow Garage proposed an open source platform for personal robots. Those personal robots would perform useful activities, and he showed some very enjoyable film clips of humanoid robots performing basic tasks such as picking up a living room. And Willow Garage is balancing its philosophical and business imperatives:The company is privately funded and "focused on impact before the return of capital...The goal is to produce 10 robots and make them available to researchers so we can all be on a common platform."

Kathy Sierra, who ran an inspiring storyboarding tutorial on Monday, told us how to kick ass. Her talk was not merely a paean to mastery, but also a brisk walk through recent neuroscience to "show that the difference between world-class and average is not about natural talent." The research, she said, reveals "that most common thread separating world-class and average is the ability to put in the time, to focus, concentrate, and practice." Expertise, she noted, is not so much about what you know, but what you do. She showed how mirror neurons let us run similations of another persons bran inside our brain -- but she emphasized that the quality of simulation depends on experience. There's still only one way to get to Carnegie Hall.

(Then Tom Coates spoke about fire eagle. My post about that is here.)

Finally, Peter Semmelhack, CEO and founder of Bug Labs, talked about community electronics, a term intended to turn the tradition term "consumer electronics" on its head. He posited a long tail of gadgets. Today, there are relatively few devices, marketed to millions. In the future, he's hoping for millions of devices targeted for the few. To develop these niche devices and custom gadgets, Bug is building a hardware innovation platform that goes from idea through functional spec, all the way to manufacturing. It's not the only way, Semmelhack noted, but it's the way Bug is trying to make it happen.

And now to the breakout sessions: Why are there always two I want to go to scheduled at the same time?

@ETech: fire eagle Launches

by Jimmy Guterman | comments: 1

Most of the Yahoo news these days is about its possible absorption by Microsoft, but there are still new projects coming out of the company. Right now Tom Coates is onstage at ETech, launching fire eagle, an open location information-brokering service. You can share your location online with sundry sites and services. It's liberal with what it takes in, but precise in what it puts out. There are plenty of controls put in, both for developers and real people using the services. Right now there are many services trying to capture location, but really nothing that ties together the applications that capture location information with applications that use location information. This does that. You can find fire eagle here. If you're not at ETech, Tom will be talking at Where 2.0 in May.

You can read Brady Forrest's previous coverage of rire eagle on Radar and our resident geo wiz will post further thoughts on this shortly. He can't now -- as the program chair of ETech, Brady is onstage right now, too.

Today's ETech Hack is Tomorrow's Critical Infrastructure...

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 0

My friend Jordan Schwartz just gave me the perfect example of how quickly a cool hack can turn into Critical Infrastructure.  Jordan wrote "How to build an SMS Service" and created SwaggleSMS as a demonstration of how to do group chat with SMS.  It's a hack that he created as an experiment (it's super-useful for conference afterparty coordination).

Jordan and I were talking about some of the interesting ways that Twitter is being used by mainstream emergency management (see: FactoryJoe, Radar post).  Jordan then showed me a message he discovered while checking logs after an upgrade:

"Tom1132 to OurTownFD: Possible drowning in bay"

If it's not obvious... this is fire department who has apparently been using the service for a while.  It's a perfect example of how quickly a hack can become critical infrastructure without the creator knowing, let alone being prepared for it.  The picture to the right is the "Swaggleplex"... fully operational.

Mikel Maron and I are presenting at ETech on Disaster Tech: What's Working, What's next and we'll be diving into this and other examples of just how quickly the world is changing.

@ETech: Tuesday Morning Keynotes

by Jimmy Guterman | comments: 0

Saul Griffith started the day with a sober, but ultimately hopeful, talk about energy literacy. The subtitle of the talk was "know what you can do, do what you can," and the core of his talk (we'll point to the slides when we get 'em) was the steps we need to take, individually and collectively, to be able to have a rational conversation about energy.

1. We need to understand the link between CO₂ and climate
2. Based on that understanding, make a temperature choice. The planet is warming. The question is how much. Where do you want to stabilize the earth temperature? He set the dial at different levels and sketched out the different consequences we have to accept at each level.
3. Based on the temperature we choose, we have to decide just how much carbon that allows us to release. He pointed out that temperature stabilization can take 100-300 years.
4. Based on the amount of carbon we choose to release, we have to decide how much fossil energy we can use.
5. Based on the usable fossle energy we can use, we have to decide what clean energy sources we need to supplement the fossil fuel.
6. Based on what clean energy sources we have access to, we have to determine a new energy mix -- and how we'll engineer.
7. Then -- and Griffith acknowledged that this "might be the hardest part" -- we have to turn off our use of existing carbon fuels."

He then showed how he is trying to change his lifestyle based on his decisions during those seven steps. He pointed out what we know already -- that even reasonable, moderate people in the developed world have a big carbon footprint -- and something I, for one, didn't know -- that public carbon-footprint calculators give low estimates.

As he listed the changes he's trying to make, Griffith noted that the things he wants to do to lower his carbon footprint are things he wants to do already (eat less, travel less, etc.). If you're optimistic about your ability to change, you can be optimistic about how we gets to his new life -- and how we can.

Then Megaphone founders Jury Hahn and Dan Albritton delivered a fascinating phone-game demo. Their combinations of tiny mobile devices with simple games those devices play on a big, communal screen were both technically interesting and fun to play. Albritton promised us something "really, really weird," and he delivered. You really haven't lived until you've sat next to someone next to you in a dimmed conference room standing up, yelling "ribbit" like a frog, and looking to see if his perfect match responds.

Eric Rodenbeck, CEO of Stamen Design walked through some of his firm's more high-profile visualization projects. Trulia Hindsight maps homes over time, but also reveals more (like where pollution is); Oakland Crimespotting reveals both patterns of crime -- and patterns of crime enforcement; a project for mySociety shows how multiple variables -- home prices, commute time -- can be elegantly combined in a single interactive visual.

Rodenbeck spent some time showing how information visualization, while it may be hot right now, nothing new. He displayed some century-old pre-computer infovis examples that were"both beautifully arranged and scientifically valuable." Then, as now, the best information visualizations are those where cool and useful overlap, where story and headline overlap. This dovetailed nicely with an obvservation Griffith made in his earlier talk, when he cited an 1896 article by one Svante Arrhenius that linked carbon with warming. We keep discovering the same things!

Sun Microsystems chief gaming officer Chris Melissinos, was there to talk about the company's J2SE-based, open source (via GPL v2) game-development platform Project Darkstar, but he had plenty of provocative one-liners and observations:

* "If we calculated the carbon footprint for World of Warcraft, we'd all vomit."
* "This is the first generation of gamers raising gamers."
* "Women over 35 comprise the largest segment of online game players."

Finally, Elizabeth Churchill, of Yahoo Research, reported on studies she made of public multi-touch displays, emphasizing how the real and the virtual interact. In particular, I was taken by her descriptions of how people learn to be part of communities of practice by watching -- or as the online world calls it, "lurking," an activity that is often dismissed. But Churchill maintained, "Lurking is an important practice. What we reveal in the virtual serve as the icebreaker for real life."

I'm only giving a quick taste of a strong, diverse session, but I want to get back into the breakout sessions, which have started already...