In the spirit of Father’s Day, I’m guessing everyone has probably heard the phrase “it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.” Well, MIT is actually applying that concept to a new automated program that rates your body language as you talk to someone.

Shown in the video embedded below, MIT’s My Automated Conversation coacH (MACH for short) is software that takes the form of an automated person for you to interact with. The representation of a person pops up on a screen and allows you to ask and answer questions. The software then reads facial expressions, speech patterns, and performs behavioral analysis.

The point of MACH is to help people realize when they do things like not make eye contact with someone or do things that might come off as overly nervous or just plain strange. MIT notes that social phobias plague over 15 million adults in the U.S. alone, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Software like this could really come in handy for those who just aren’t good with social interaction — especially if they’re trying to get a new job.

Education is already accessible online. Now it’s going open source too.

Nonprofit edX is less well known than Coursera and Udacity, its for-profit competition. But it also offers online courses from top universities for free.

Today, the organization is making available some of the code that powers its site open source. EdX announced that it will be releasing source code to its XBlock software on GitHub under the Affero General Public License.

Anant Agarwal, the MIT professor who serves as edX’s president, said in an interview that online learning is the “greatest innovation in education since the printing press.”

This is a first step toward open sourcing the entire edX software platform, a vision Agarwal has been committed to from the beginning. But for now, the interactive course modules built around this code will only be usable with the edX service.

Edx was founded by MIT and Harvard, and has subsequently grown to 12 university partners. Founded in 2011, it is one of the pioneers of massive open online courses, dubbed “MOOCs.”

Educational institutions and independent developers can use the code to deliver a collaborative learning experience — not just simple text and video. In the future, edX plans to offer consulting services, similarly to RedHat for Linux, to bring in additional revenues, which it will share with its university partners.

One of edX’s major goals is for universities to offer credit to students who complete a course. Along with its competitor Coursera, edX is working with the American Council of Education (ACE) to recommend courses that are worthy of college credit.

In California, online education is being widely-discussed as a potential solution for budget-strapped colleges. With thousands of students unable to register for oversubscribed courses, a bill has been proposed in the Senate to force the state’s colleges and universities to give credit for online courses.

photo credit: National University via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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 To my English major brain, it seems that “fabless” should be the state of lacking fabulousness. This logic (using the term loosely) does not apply to the technology realm, where fabless is actually an outsourced method of manufacturing computer chips.

Fabless semiconductor company Arctic Sand has raised $9.6 million in its first round of funding. The technology was first developed at MIT and consolidates multiple power components onto one chip to maximize the power of electronic devices. Arctic Sand is commercializing the technology for mass markets, like telecom, datacom, industrial and mobile. Its Transformative Integrated Power Solutions platform converts power inside devices to significantly reduce energy loss.

Data centers suck up a lot of resources, both financial and ecological. In a statement issued by Arctic Sand, CEO and founder Nadia Shalaby said that data centers spend more than $50 billion annually on electricity and emit large amounts of carbon dioxide. By reducing the amount of power-conversion losses, these chips save energy, space, and money.

“A staggering 80% of energy generated worldwide is lost as heat due to power-conversion losses,” said Shalaby. “Such excessive power inefficiency results in both unnecessary electricity expenses and significantly oversized distribution and generation in serving the world’s rapidly expanding computing and data storage needs.”

Arctic Sand has won a trophy case of prestigious awards, including the 2011 NASA Game Changer Award, the US Department of Energy U-Launch Award and the NREL Industry Growth Forum Grand Prize Award, as well as the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 grant. Institutional investors include Arsenal Venture Partners, Northwater Capital, and Ray Stata. Strategic investors include Dialog Semiconductor and Energy Technology Ventures, a joint venture involving energy corporations ConovoPhillips, GE, and NRG Energy.

The financing will go towards bringing the power-conversion chips to market. Arctic Sand is based in Cambridge, Mass. Read the press release.

The hacktivist group Anonymous defaced the web site of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for its role in the events that led to the suicide of online activist Aaron Swartz.

The cyber attack, as reported by Cnet, came just hours after MIT president Rafael Reif said the school would investigate MIT’s involvement in the events that led to the prosecution of Swartz, a Reddit co-founder who killed himself on Friday. He was arrested in July 2011 and accused of hacking MIT’s network in order to download almost 5 million documents from JSTOR, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers. If convicted, he could have faced $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison.

Swartz committed suicide, the Wall Street Journal reports, just days after prosecutors refused to accept a plea bargain that didn’t include jail time.

The Anonymous message (posted above) said that the government’s prosecution of Swartz, whether it contributed to his suicide or not, was a “grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for — freeing the publicly funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it.”

Anonymous called for a reform of computer crime laws, copyright and intellectual property laws, and a renewal of a commitment to a “free and unfettered internet.”

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they have created the smallest transistor yet from a material that could one day replace silicon in semiconductor chips.

Silicon has ruled for decades. But the team at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories has created a 22-nanometer chip made of the compound material indium gallium arsenide.  (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter). The material is a promising candidate to eventually replace silicon in computing devices, said co-developer Jesús del Alamo, a professor at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), who built the transistor with EECS graduate student Jianqian Lin and fellow electrical engineering professor Dimitri Antoniadis.

For years, chip makers have successfully shrunk the dimensions of electrical circuits etched in silicon, allowing huge numbers of transistors to be squeezed onto chips. But the amount of power that can be fed through those tiny circuits is limited, since the chips run the risk of melting down. This has led to fears that Moore’s Law — the prediction by Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on microchips will double every two years — could be about to come to an end, del Alamo says.

An alternative is the compound indium gallium arsenide, which is already used in fiber-optic communication and radar technologies. The researchers have shown it is possible to build a tiny metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) — the type most commonly used in logic applications such as microprocessors — using the material.

“We have shown that you can make extremely small indium gallium arsenide MOSFETs with excellent logic characteristics, which promises to take Moore’s Law beyond the reach of silicon,” del Alamo said. “Through a combination of etching and deposition we can get the gate nestled [between the electrodes] with tiny gaps around it.”

The research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Semiconductor Research Corporation.

The team is presenting its work this week at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Robots are on their way into your workplace, but you may not be there to complain about it.

“Many of us will live to see the day where we have physical, non-human colleagues,” says Matt Beane, a researcher at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Beane’s research addresses what he calls “The Avatar Economy”, where remote workers operate robots. Such robots are already used for tasks which require highly skilled labour and physical presence but where it’s either too dangerous or extremely expensive to use human beings. Aerial and ground-based robots were used in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, for example, to help assess system and structural integrity and evaluate demolition plans. 

According to Beane, the next wave of robotic workers will be in retail, security and remote supervision of manufacturing operations. Telepresence robots like those made by DoubleRobotics (and their human operators) will help you to find the right TV in a retail store or allow an operations supervisor in Chicago to do quality control on an assembly line in Shanghai. 

But robots are just one small slice of our automated future. Google’s driverless car depends on the company’s massive sensing, mapping and data sorting network. Technologies like Big Data, the Internet of Things, Speech Recognition and Machine Learning will make robots smarter but that’s the least of their applications. “Robots will not be a discrete element of the change in the economy, but rather the physically extensible part of this ever-expanding bubble of underlying technology.”

“The next frontier for automation is non-routine work,” explains Beane. “Some of the biggest changes in work could be at the high end. These jobs can be automated without a physical avatar.” So while taxi drivers and farm workers can be replaced by robots operated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) or a human operator, it’s still expensive to manufacture that hardware. “Most automation will be intangible. It’s progressing very rapidly and is much less expensive than physical production. Once you have got good AI, it’s replicable at almost zero cost.” That, gentle reader, means you. Replacing lawyers or software developers or technology journalists with AI could result in the ultimate scalable business. 

These developments raise some rather uncomfortable questions for non-extensible human beings. “Who am I if this robot can do my job?” says Beane. He points to surgeons as an example of highly skilled workers who already work with robots and will face this dilemma. “This is one of the most narcissistic, ego-driven working cultures you can imagine and many of us owe our lives to that culture. Being decisive in the face of imminent death or disability takes an almost inhuman amount of confidence and skill,” he elaborates.

A surgeon’s whole identity is based on incredibly high status, skill and autonomy relative to other professions. “Yet when they use a Da Vinci surgical robot, if they stray outside the surgical field, the robot can be programmed to resist. They get force feedback on the manipulators. Even the best surgeon in the world can be told by the robot, multiple times during an operation ‘You shouldn’t be doing that.’”

So is all automation bad for humans? Beane has studied hospitals using Aethon’s Tug robots, which move supplies around the building. No jobs were lost. In hospital pharmacies Tugs were used to deliver drugs. “Pharmacy technicians spend two to four years in schooling and certification but they were spending eighty percent of their time ferrying drugs around. Now the technicians are doing the things they were trained to do and have much higher job satisfaction.”

In general though, if automation significantly reduces the amount of work there is to go around, this could lead to fundamental structural problems in the economy such as higher concentration of wealth, greater inequality, fewer high-paying jobs and lower consumer spending. “We may automate ourselves into a recession,” concludes Beane. 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Affectiva absorbed $12 million in a third round of investment for its emotion measurement technology that helps brands and businesses gain insight about their consumers.

The company’s flagship products are Affdex, an automated facial coding platform, and Q Sensor, a wearable biometic sensor. Businesses, companies, and researchers can use these tools to read the emotional response of viewers to published video content.

Affdex can be integrated into ads, clips, and TV shows. Via webcam, it will read the emotional response of the viewer and provide an “accurate, scalable” emotional insight. These insights can then be used to improve the relevance of published content, ramp up traffic, increase revenue, and optimize ad performance, the company claims.

“Capturing and viewing online video has become mainstream. The ability to effectively measure real-time emotion while consumers are watching video has the potential to improve online engagement and satisfaction for users in addition to creating opportunities for marketers to more effectively determine what consumers care most about,” said venture capitalist Mary Meeker in a press release.

Companies can also use the Q Sensor to collect and analyze consumer data. Affectiva says that hundreds of universities and research institutions are already using the technology to develop healthcare apps.

Based on a large repository of naturally recurring emotion, Affectiva offers a deep glimpse into the way audiences react to what they see online. It was started as a spin-off of the MIT Media Lab in 2009 by professor Rosalind W. Picard and research scientist Rana el Kaliouby.

The company previously raised $7.7 million from WPP, Myrian Capital, and the Peder Wallenberg Charitable Trust. It has also won several National Science Foundation grants.

Today’s investment was led by prestigious venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures. The new funding will go towards further developing the technology and accelerating product development. It is based in Waltham, MA.

Liquid Metal Battery Corporation, which says it found the solution to storing energy from renewable sources, is getting a new charge in funding.

Led by cleantech investor Khosla Ventures, the battery tech company has raised $15 million in a second round of funding. LMBC has also attracted the attention of energy company Total and  investor Bill Gates, who returned for this second funding round.

The company is the brainchild of Dr. Donald Sadoway, an MIT professor who developed the battery technology to be low cost and easy to deploy.

“The way things stand today, electricity demand must be in constant balance with electricity supply,” Sadoway said in March during a Technology Entertainment and Design talk titled “The Missing Link to Renewable Energy.”

One big problem with renewable energy sources today is that there’s no good way to store power for when you actually need it (current battery technology hasn’t scaled well for this). LMBC’s liquid battery solves that problem, splitting energy demand from storage and allowing clean energy sources to have a hand in energy generation.

“With a giant battery, we’d be able to address the problem of intermittence that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal and gas and nuclear do today,” Sadoway said.

One of the biggest advantages to the battery is that it can be added to existing systems, eliminating the need for further build outs. This, coupled with its flexibility, means that the system is cheap — a factor that has kept much of energy investment focused on established technologies.

“We need to think about the problem differently. We need to think big. We need to think cheap,” Sadoway said in the TED talk.

Is it just me, or does it feel like the “future” we all see in TV shows and movies is getting closer and closer to reality? A team of researchers at MIT have created a small atmosphere, the ZeroN, where you can interact with objects floating in your own space. This could be the potential birth of a live user interface where we can touch, instruct, and play with objects and images in the air.

Lee, who researches with MIT’s Tangible Media Group, created the ZeroN, a small, unenclosed space that uses electromagnets to suspend a ball in mid-air. The ball (and the space holding it) can remember a human’s touch and mimic the movement in space. The ball can also move along per-programmed paths that are fed to the magnet and the machine holding the magnet using software.

“Even if the user moves the ZeroN to a different position, the system can re-stabilize and keep the ZeroN suspended,” said researcher Jihna Lee said in a video about the ZeroN

It can also act as a camera, recording 3D objects in its space, as well as work with a light source, showing how shadows would exist in real life on small models.

The magnet moves the ball, pulling and repelling it dependent on where it is commanded to go. The whole system exists on an arm that moves the magnet up and down and side to side, increasing the distance it can travel. The researchers used a “hall sensor,” which is constantly checking the ball’s position to record its movements.

“Our body and minds have developed great capacities for understand and manipulating physical environments,” said Lee. “The long-term vision is to embed computation and physical materials that can directly interact with us. In this way, we seek to redefine the relationships humans have with materials, space and digital information.”

The design industry could benefit from the technology, being able to build and interact with 3D models that can move and be manipulated without having to program it first into a computer. And as FastCo.Design points out, it could lead to even cooler inventions such as floating holograms that we can wrap around our arms and move in mid-air like Ironman.

Check out a video of the technology below. It’ll basically blow your mind.

via FastCo.Design

Researchers have shown they can use technologies to measure your emotional state of mind for market research, educational, and medical purposes. The technology could ultimately become part of a larger set of tracking tools that will help companies tailor products and services more precisely to people they’re targeting.

Rosalind Picard, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Affective Computing Research Group, gave a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo show in San Francisco yesterday where she spelled out how it’s possible to capture someone’s vital stats in real time to decipher his or her emotional state.

Picard and her researchers have figured out a number of ways to measure emotions, including putting palm sensors on volunteer subjects. The data can be put on a graph that can show off their emotional peaks and valleys; the researchers can get an exact match for the peaks and valleys by looking at a video that is synchronized with the graph.

Picard, who is also chief scientist and chairman of Affectiva, a startup that works with market researchers to measure consumer reactions, said the research is meant to help discern the emotions of people who can’t communicate them well, such as people with autism or language disabilities.

Picard showed video of a girl with a sensor that measures her skin conductivity, which records sweat levels and can be correlated to stress. The video shows that the girl’s stress levels go up when she gets on a swing and then subsides the more she gently rocks on the swing.

Sensors can give warnings about babies who are about to cry as well (although you have to make sure that the baby doesn’t eat the sensor).

Picard also showed a girl during a recital day at elementary school. The stress of performing a recital is clearly visible on a graph measuring the girl’s emotions. She relaxes for a while, but her stress level goes up when the girl suffers a bullying experience from another student.

Picard also showed how market researchers can make use of the technology by gauging the emotional reaction of an audience for a commercial or a movie. Of course, there are lots of privacy concerns here, so the technology has to be used with the consent of the user.

A webcam can also show how much somebody smiles while watching something. This link lets you analyze your smile as you watch a commercial in front of a webcam.

A new MIT project called Sikuli allows people to program using screenshots in lieu of written code. Basically, it lets you reference user interface elements like a Microsoft Word icon, Trash Can or search bar with pictures of the button or icon instead of script. (If you look at the picture to the right, you’ll see functions referencing icons and screenshots of buttons instead of text. It’s best explained in the video below.)

The idea is to make it dead-simple for casual computer users to write their own programs without having to know a programming language. Let’s say you’re building a location-based app that uses real-time bus locations to tell you when the next one is going to arrive. If the city transportation Web site keeps a map of where buses are at all times, you could take a screenshot of the map and instruct the program to send a notification when the marker pin reaches a certain point on the map, instead of entering latitude and longitude coordinates.

Sikuli catalogues user interface elements from online tutorials, computer books and documentation. It analyzes the text surrounding the icons in documentation, performs optical character recognition and uses cutting-edge computer vision techniques to figure out what different visual elements are responsible for.

The team behind Sikuli, which means ‘God’s Eye’ in the language of Mexico’s Huichol Indians, have also found other uses for their technology. You could use it as a visual search engine when you’re lost and don’t know what to do in specific application. If you’re clueless about what a certain button does, you could just take a screenshot of it and use it to search for help. Google’s Goggles mobile app has similar functionality but for landmarks, logos and business cards.

Solar powered WiFi — An Orlando, Florida company Solis Energy says it provides a system that among other things will let you use solar power to run WiFi routers in remote places. More here.

Bio-solar cells — Standard solar cells, based on silicon, convert sunlight into electrical current, but are expensive to make and need to be used for several years to cover their construction costs. So Shuguang Zhang and colleagues at the Laboratory of Molecular Self Assembly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology want to use biologically-derived molecules to harvest light instead. Their plan is to isolate light-harvesting molecules called chlorophyll from extremophile bacteria. But it’s early days: Lots of questions remain , for example, the cost and efficiency of the process, but Zhang has filed a patent nonetheless.

Sierra Nevada Solar raises $4.5M — There’s very little info on this Sacramento, Calif. solar energy startup, including no Web site, but regulatory filings show it has raised $4.5 million in a first round of funding, according to PE Wire. LinkedIn, however, does provide more info: Jonathan Bonanno, of EarthBright, has invested, as has Ryan Scott, who also has invested in Tesla.

Separately, clean energy continues to draw excess supply of capital — There aren’t enough companies to satisfy soak up the capital investors want to pump into them, according to New Energy Finance. Last year, venture capitalists invested only 73 percent of the total money available to them for clean energy companies, with $2 billion residing in funds and waiting to be invested, the report found (solar is just one subsector within clean energy). The excess supply of capital is driving up valuations, it said. See chart below, which shows investments continuing to grow: