How will new patent law affect tech sector?

The America Invents Act was signed on Sept 16, and it makes sweeping changes to the way patents work in the US.  Widely seen as pro-business and possibly detrimental to small time inventors, the new law will phase in over the next 18 months and change the way the technology field is implemented.

VTIP, the technology transfer office of Virginia Tech, is sponsoring an event to help sort out the facts from the myth.  Guest speakers will describe the effects on inventors and tech startups and answer questions.  The event is called “Making Connections” and will be held in 310 in the ICTAS building on Stanger Street on October 18 from 2-5 pm.  Anyone is welcome to attend, but seating is limited so register with Michael Miller using the information provided in the link.

Smart phones, the return….

As promised in an earlier edition (see Smart phones to be even smarter), we will look at the use of cognitive engines in mobile communications.

Dr. Bostian

Several years ago, Dr. Charles Bostian of the Mobile and Portable Radio Group at Virgnina Tech came up with a way to make radios smart enough to adapt to a changing frequency environment.  That means tune themselves to different frequency bands depending on who is talking to them.  His concept resulted in a patent for the utilization of a cognitive engine in mobile radio communications.

And who uses mobile radio communication devices?  Well, you do, if you have a cell phone.  Cell phones are just two-way radios with some fancy shmancy software.  Even though Bostian initially envisioned communications such as for emergency services like police and fire being able to talk to each other in an emergency, the principles apply equally well to cell phones.

In fact, they may apply even better to cell phones.  Because cell phones not only have to adapt to a multitude of scheduling issues, such as handover from cell to cell, signal strength variations, and data types, but they also will have to be frequency agile in the future.  That’s because most of the contiguous band assigned to cell phone use has been, well, used.  Now they are scavenging bandwith wherever they can find it, and that may actually be in different bands as you travel around the country based on who is using what in each region.  Ay! Carumba!

So, how does this work?  Well, to borrow some info from the VT website, “Cognitive radios are aware of their environment and intelligently adapt their performance to the user’s needs. A CR is a software defined radio with a “cognitive engine” brain. Conceptually, the cognitive engine responds to the operator’s commands by configuring the radio for whatever combinations of waveform, protocol, operating frequency, and networking are required. It monitors its own performance continuously, reading the radio’s outputs to determine the RF environment, channel conditions, link performance, etc., and adjusting the radio’s settings to deliver the needed quality of service subject to an appropriate combination of user requirements, operational limitations, and regulatory constraints. We call these processes “reading the radio’s meters” and “turning the radio’s knobs” for short.”

So, yeah.  There you have it.  Most importantly, that patent that Bostian got a couple of years ago is looking to be very important in enabling this technology for the future.

Holding it all together

microcircuit

When I was a kid, I loved tearing up stuff to see what was inside it.  I guess that’s just a normal guy thing, sort of like spitting off bridges or something.

Electronic devices had especially cool guts back in the day.  First there were tube radios that came with that eerie, 1950s sci-fi glow.  The tubes themselves were pretty cool, filled with all sorts of little metal screens and such.  Those were replaced by transistor radios which were less sci-fi but much more futuristic.

Today, I don’t get much pleasure out of tearing up stuff because all the innards are so integrated into modules that there is no longer anything interesting to look at.

Anyway, the point of this meandering reminesce is really to talk about what holds all those parts together.  In the old days, it was wires.  You could see them.  They were eventually replaced by printed circuit boards with flat metal traces instead of wires.  Now, even the connecting traces are often buried deep down in the circuit boards, or, even worse, designed into the silicon chips themselves.

But whether wires or traces or silicon pathways, something has to hold it all together, and that something has always been solder.  However, if VT Corporate Research Center company NBE Tech has it’s way, solder might be replaced by a new material made from silver nanoparticles.

Elimination of lead based solders has been a goal for many years.  Other types of solders can be used but the perfect combination of processing temperature and performance has not always been possible.  Investigation continues into other bonding methods, such as low temperature and pressure sintering of precious metals.  The new NBTech nanomaterial provides a way to bond semiconductor dice to substrates without solder, simply by applying a small pressure while simultaneously applying a relatively low temperature just over 200 degrees C.

NBE founder GQ Lu invented the material and then set up a company to commercialize it based on a license from Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties.  Since then he has worked to improve the performance and develop a manufacturing process suitable for commercial application.  He recently received an independent verification of the value of his invention by the Fraunhofer Institute.  Researchers there published a paper last fall that indicates sintered bonding using the nanomaterial paste produced stunningly better performance that solder-based attachments.  In one test, nanomaterial and solder bonded parts were subjected to heating/cooling cycles of 45-175 degrees C.  Using the data obtained, it was projected that the sintered parts would withstand up to 160 million cycles, where the soldered components failed after 40,000 cycles.

Local Tech Companies Nominated for Awards

It’s almost May, and you know what that means:  The NewVa Corridor Technology Council has announced a list of companies nominated for the various awards handed out at the annual awards banquet.  You can find a link to the NCTC website to register for the awards ceremony here.

Awards are handed out in the categories of Rising Star, Educator, Entrepreneur, Leadership, and Innovation.  Sometimes they hand out another special award for a local technology leader whose contributions don’t fit exactly into any of the single categories.  It’s a fun networking opportunity and a chance to reward the technology leaders who help drive the local economy.  This year it will be at the Hotel Roanoke, in beautiful downtown…er, …..Roanoke.

The list of nominees is provided by the local newspaper here.

Now, a comment about the NCTC name.  I liked it better before, when it was the New Century Technology Council.  Apparently they decided that once the New Century had cut it’s first teeth, it would seem passe’ to keep that reference.  So instead, they decided to use the terribly expensive “NewVA” brand (I don’t know who paid for it, or who came up with it – it wasn’t the NCTC as far as I know, but a regional re-branding.).  NewVA is sort of short for New Virginia, as if Old Virginia would be something distasteful, or old fashioned, maybe.  I’m not going to gripe about it too much, except to note that “NewVA Corridor Technology Council” does not roll off the tongue as smoothly as “New Century Technology Council”.

Smart phones will be even smarter

From this…

It was only about thirty years ago that we saw the first mobile phones.  They were the size of small suitcases and usually came attached to a car.  I still recall purchasing a new vehicle in the early 1980s when there was a mobile phone promotion:  Free car phone with purchase of a new car.  Of course, you had to sign up for a 2-year service plan @ $1200 per year, which in 1983 was a lot of money for a guy straight out of school with a family to support.  In fact, very few people used them outside of business or Hollywood.  They weren’t very practical, and at the time, we didn’t yet consider ourselves so important that we needed to be accessible to every telemarketer 24 hours a day.

…to this?

Cell phones eventually became ubiquitous, and once the texting feature was discovered by teenage girls, the world would never be the same. If you doubt the power of teenage girls with cell phones, just look at who wins American Idol every year. Now, we carry computers around in our pockets that rival the power of mainframes of the 1970s and have all the features of Dick Tracy’s fabled wrist TV. Each year brings out newer models that are smaller, lighter and more powerful, like the iPhone 5 seen at right.

OK, so that’s just a mock up based on the current rumors of what it will look like when it actually hits the streets, later this month.  HA!  Anyway, the ever-increasing demand for data delivery on smartphones has created a number of obstacles and challenges for the folks who bring you cell service and hardware.  They have to continually search for more available bandwith while at the same time finding new ways to cram more data into the existing bandwith.

The next generation service, built around theLong Term Evolution (LTE) standards, will be a much smarter system than any in the past, perhaps rivalling the SkyNET of movie fame.  As the handset moves from cell to cell, it is essentially functioning as a tiny internet connection with all the bells and whistles of your desktop computer and the problems of radio communication on top.  The handsets will be increasingly smart to effect smooth handover from cell to cell without sacrificing quality of service.

Expect to see a heavy reliance on new techniques, variously called software defined radio (SDR) and Cognitive Engines which will be the framework for implementing the adaptability needed for the mobile computing and communication future.

More details on these new technologies will follow shortly.

Robot Skeleton Army….for real

If I mention Craig Ferguson, everybody knows who I am talking about, right?  He’s the hilarious host of the Late Late Show on CBS that airs from 12:30 – 1:30 am each night.  He’s a wonderful comedian, actor, writer, and musician with an irreverent wit that is one part Scot (single malt) and one part American.

OK, so one of Craig’s running gags is an obsession with robots and skeletons.  In fact, he calls his Twitter followers his “Robot Skeleton Army”.  Craig is also a huge fan of the show Mythbusters, and he convinced their resident mechanical genius, Grant Imahara, to design and build a Robot Skeleton sidekick for his talk show.  You can see some videos of the robot on YouTube, here.

“But Mike, what does this have to do with technology?” you ask.  That’s a good question, and one I am about to answer.  So just hold on a minute, ok?  Sheesh.

The point is, Craig’s Robot Skeleton (named Geoff Petersen) is pretty lame.  Now the Mythbusters are totally cool, in a nerdy sort of way, and Grant Imahara is a practical genius, but you have to admit that Geoff is just not really what you would expect for a real robot skeleton sort of guy, even as shtick for a late night talk show comedian.

Enter Dennis Hong and his RoMeLa group at Virginia Tech.  Dennis and a team of undergrad ME students have designed and built a real walking robot that makes Geoff look like a Neanderthal by comparison, robotically speaking.  The robot’s name is CHARLI (Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning Intelligence).

OK, so Dennis and the ME nerds are not really good at coming up with names for their gadgets (anything with “-a-tron” at the end would have been good…), but this is just so cool you can forgive them.  Watch this movie of CHARLI walking and you’ll see what I mean.

And that’s not all.  Browse around on the RoMeLa site and you’ll see a load of mechanical, robotic creepy crawlies that will set your nerd nerves all a tingle.  How cool would it be to work in Dennis’ lab?

So, Craig, anytime you want to trade that pile of lame scrap, Geoff Petersen, in for a real robot skeleton, just give Dennis Hong a call.  He can fix you up with any sort of robotic sidekick you want.

CHARLI walking in the RoMeLa labs

Futurama!

When I was a kid, one of my least favorite things was to sit in the barber shop on a Saturday morning for what seemed like hours waiting my turn for a two-minute haircut.  My father didn’t allow any of those new-fangled haircuts where it actually looked like you had some hair.  No, sir, we got the standard, GI type of haircut where all your personality was left on the floor to be swept up later.

But, one good thing that came of this experience, aside from the presumed character-building aspect, was that I got to read issues of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics.  Even though these issues were worn and tattered from handling by the army of ten-year-old boys who frequented the establishment, and were in fact possibly older than any of us, it was fascinating to imagine the world we would live in as adults where lasers and robots and other mechanical and electrical marvels would make life much more interesting than it was at that time.  Of course, we had not discovered girls yet.

But all of us in that age bracket agreed, flying cars were going to be so cool, and what’s more, they should have been ready for market by the time we got our driver’s licenses.  Ohhhh, yeaaaah.

Unfortunately, the flying cars never came, even though one was featured later in a James Bond movie.  It was my first great life disappointment.  I mean the lack of flying cars, not the movie, although that, too, was a disappointment.

So, all these many years later, I have come to accept that visions of the future rarely match the actual future.  Sometimes the actual future turns out to be pretty cool anyway, but reality has a way of spoiling the dreams of preteen boys who possess, at last accounting, approximately 99% of the world’s total creativity.

But hold on, I may have found an actual example of how prophetic Popular Science truly was.  Take a look at this website that describes a concept for next-generation living.  It’s called the Lumenhaus and it’s Virginia Tech‘s entry into the Solar Decathlon competition.  It’s chock full of cool materials like aerogel panels, solar panels and anti-hurricane roof vents, and it thinks for itself!  It opens and closes panels to heat or cool as necessary, and it can be operated from an iPhone application.  Dude.

OK, so it looks pretty small, and it is.  But it’s just a concept house.  However, built into the concept is the idea of living more efficiently in less space by using technology and futuristic Star Trek social ideas.  Imagine a house that reconfigured the space for the temporary use to which it was being put.  You really have to take a look at the flash animations on the site, which was apparently designed by up-and-coming web advertising company Modea.  Not only is the house itself cool, I really love the website.  Like the house, the site is just what it needs to be.

So, even though I have still not totally given up on the flying cars, until they come along I can dream about the next generation house.

When is technology a bad idea?

OK, I’m fully expecting to receive some flak about this post, but I’m going to write it anyway.

I remember a scene in the movie Jurassic Park where, after hearing the scientific explanation about how the dinosaurs were cloned and brought to life, Dr. Ian Malcolm (played by rakishly nerdy Jeff Goldblum) says something like, “Just because you can do a thing, doesn’t mean you should do it.”

You know, technology is a lot like that.  Just look at nuclear fission.  The same technology that could give us almost unlimited, inexpensive electrical power, can also be turned on us in the form of nuclear weapons.  Perhaps more to the point, it can also give us Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

I apply that same sort of caution to an otherwise laudable effort by Dr. Dennis Hong and his team to develop technology that would allow blind people to drive a car. You can read more about it here and here.  Dennis’ team is stepping up to the National Federation for the Blind‘s “Blind Driver Challenge“, sponsored by the Jernigan Institute.

I know.   That was my reaction at first, also.  Why in the world would we want blind people driving automobiles?  Sighted people have enough trouble.

So, now that I have that out  of my system, let’s talk about reality.  There is no doubt that Hong’s engineering team will come up with some amazing ways to augment automobile navigation and control.  But let’s face it, who will insure a blind driver?  See, (no pun intended), driving is one of those personal responsibility things.  If you hit somebody, it’s your fault.  Period.  The statistical tables are well understood for the insurance industry, which allows them to set rates based on likelihood of an accident for various population classes who drive.

Oh, and in case you didn’t know, the highest incidence of accidents is not reckless teenage boys with fast cars, as popular 1960s songs might lead you to believe.  Nope, it’s teenage GIRLS.  Not really a surprise, I suppose, is it?

Anyway, just imagine that Hong, or somebody, develops the technology to allow blind people to drive a car on the highway with everybody else.  And suppose some critical part of that technology fails, as technology is wont to do at the most inopportune moments.  And suppose this failure leads to an accident where, unfortunately, one or more people are killed.  Maybe even the blind person.

The lawyers will have a field day.  The blind driver’s family will sue the automaker and the people who developed the blind driving technology for misleading the blind driver into thinking it was safe to drive.  The families of anybody else involved in the accident will sue the blind driver, and probably all the people the blind driver sues as well.  Somebody will sue the regulatory agency that approved this fiasco.  Who knows where it might end?

Which is why I don’t think this technology will ever be used to enable blind people to driver cars on the highway.

BUT, it could have other purposes.  What would a foolproof blind driver system look like?  Well, it would navigate for you, locate obstacles for you, predict paths for you to avoid objects, and pretty much just take over the driving for you.

In fact, if such as system could work, we would all end up in a world where none of us would actually be driving our cars at all.  I mean, if it is that safe, then there would be a massive computer controlled road network with smart cars, no traffic jams, and pretty much no autonomy.

Might as well take a bus or a train….

So, what’s the end of this story?  Well, I think Hong’s work will actually lead to systems that make cars safer and more convenient for sighted drivers, not blind ones.  And while I completely sympathize with blind people and their limited autonomy in life, the usefulness of this technology to them will be limited to in-community, limited use roads such as within a retirement area.  And maybe that is enough.

Be sure to spend a few minutes browsing Hong’s research lab website, the ROMELA lab.  It’s full of very interesting and very, very creepy robotic things, including graduate students.

Hehe, just kidding.  The graduate students, while creepy like all graduate students, are not, in fact, robotic as far as I know.

But with Dennis, you can never be sure….

Tiny antennas could replace home wiring

If you’re like me, on the back of your television is a mangled mass of knotted electrical cables so dense I suspect that small rodents might actually be living in there.  In fact, there are so many cables running from DVRs, DVDs, audio systems, etc., that once I get it working properly, I’m afraid to touch any of it.

Well, technology in the form of tiny antennas may soon come to my rescue.  Researchers in the Wireless Technology and Antenna groups at Virginia Tech are researching ways to reduce the size of wideband antennas for use in handheld devices.  One potential commercial application of these new antennas could be in connecting all of your home entertainment equipment through short-range broadband communications links rather than the wires that we currently use.  Imagine connecting your Tivo and  BlueRay player to your television wirelessly!

One version of such an antenna is shown here.  While this test unit is only about the size of a quarter, newer prototypes are smaller still.  The small size means that such features would not only be easily integrated into various devices, but they would also be inexpensive enough to fit into current price ranges of home entertainment systems, for example.

Since I no longer have any teenagers around to explain how all my fancy electronics work, I am for anything that will simplify life and allow me to watch NCAA football…er, I mean…technology shows on the Discovery Channel or PBS.  Yeah, that’s it.

So, you folks in Electrical Engineering need to pull those thinking caps down a little tighter on your heads and move this stuff into the marketplace ASAP, because my man-cave is going to be ready for the 2010 fall football season at the end of August, and I am NOT going to try to connect all that stuff up again…