This Week In Emerging Technology - July 24th

Here are the emerging technologies stories for the week of July 21st.

Put the CPU in the Fridge - An interesting project at Purdue University where researchers are working on a terchnique to use micro components to refrigerate PC processors.

Highly Predictive Security - The folks over at SANS and SRI will be presenting a service that uses detailed analysis methodologies and DShield to improve network blacklisting techniques.

Your Next Gadget CPU - Intel is talking about their next line of system on a chip processors which are destined for the next generation of gadgets.

The Future Rosie the Robot - A French company is offering a humanoid robot at a comparatively low price. Though still very high for essentially a toy.

Video: Discussing the Challenges of the Internet

Click here to watch the video

At the Berkman@10 conference at Harvard, I had a chance to speak to some of the many attendees and speakers at the conference about the challenges facing the internet today and in the near future.

Phillip Hallam-Baker, author of the dotCrime Manifesto, says stability is the missing ingredient in the Internet in the fight against Internet crime; Kathy Higgins, Educational Technologies, Dept. of Education, N.H., sees a shift to more use of social networking and community voices gaining traction; and Dr. Jim Morris if Carnegie Mellon University comments on the battlegrounds forming for the soul of the Internet.

Click here to see the video of these interviews at Berman@10 about the fate of the Internet.

Video: The Future of the Berkman Center and the Internet

Click here to watch the video
At last week's Berkman@10 conference I had the chance to sit down with John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

In this interview we spoke about the conference itself, some of the changes happening now at the Berkman Center, and about the future of the Center and the Internet.

Click here to watch my video interview with John Palfrey.

And while I had the chance to do some interviews at the Berkman@10 event, I also had the tables (or camera) turned on me and was the subject (along with many other attendees) of a video interview.

Click here to see my response to the question, what is the future of the Internet?

Live from Berkman@10: Politics, Innovation and the Internet

Just starting to wrap up day one here at the Berkman@10 Conference. The second session of the day was hosted by center Executive Director John Palfrey and focused on politics and the Internet.

John brought in lots of the distinguished members of the audience to talk about the effect of the blogosphere on politics and elections and the efforts to censor the Internet in many parts of the world. One interesting site mentioned was opennet.net, which tracks censorship of the Internet around the world.

This was followed by a session that included Berkman professor Yochai Benkler and Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia and Wikia.

The focus of this session was cooperation, specifically focused on issues such as crowdsourcing and community-built resources, with Wikipedia being the prime example.

Live from Berkman@10: The Future of the Internet

Here I am live at the Berkman@10 conference at Harvard, an event that celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and also is looking at some of the key issues facing the Internet today.

Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Center, just finished a talk on the future of the Internet. Not surprisingly, the talk was based mainly on his book, titled (surprise, surprise) "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It."

The main arguments that he is making is that demands for security and reliability on the Internet will lead to a lockdown of systems and Internet access that will result in an Internet very different from the one we have now, one lacking the freedom and transparency of today's Internet and also one that would be much less of an engine for innovation (especially for individuals).

Berkman Center for Internet & Society Turns 10

The Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society is about to celebrate its tenth anniversary. What, you don't know about the Berkman Center?

Well, if you don't know about the Berkman Center itself you almost certainly know about some of the major technology initiatives that have sprung from the center, such as Creative Commons and Chilling Effects. And there's also a good chance that you know of some of their noted alumni and current staff, including Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain.

I recently had a chance to speak with John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center, law professor at the Harvard Law School and himself a noted cyber law expert (Palfrey is currently finishing up a book on digital natives or what is also called the millennial generation).

We had a chance to speak about some of the past accomplishments of the Center and also look forward to what they think the key issues of the Internet will be in the next ten years.

Emerging Technologies Bring Promise and Danger

Click to see the slide show

When you cover and analyze emerging technologies, it's easy to get caught up in the excitement and the promise of these new technologies. And it's even easier to look at these technologies only from a positive angle.

And what's not to like? After all, most emerging technologies were designed from the ground up to bring about positive ends. Their creators want to improve people's lives, boost productivity, cure disease, provide security and bring about new waves of technology where anything is possible.

But almost any new technology that has a positive side also has a negative and more dangerous side. Technologies that can cure disease can also cause disease. Products that provide convenience imperil safety and privacy. Tools that ensure security also help secure criminals from law enforcement.

Such is the nature of innovation. But some new technologies are more dangerous than others. With that in mind, here is my list of the 10 most dangerous new technologies either available today or being worked on for the near future. Please comment below and let me know what technologies would make your list.

And, oh yeah, I decided to limit this list specifically to computing technologies, so that's why there aren't any biotech or genetics entries.

This Week In Emerging Technology - February 13th

Here are the emerging technologies stories for the week of February 11th.

More Android Sightings - At the World Mobile Congress in one of my favorite cities, Barcelona, there have been several interesting demos of the Google-based Android mobile operating system.

Speeding up Secure Connections - Interesting white paper on research into improving the performance of SSH and SCP connections.

Integrating Identity Management - Expect to see more integration between products in the Identity Access Management market.

The Holy Grail of Nanotech - Researchers at the Brookhaven National Lab have created a three dimensional nanoparticle, a key step in the advancement of nanotechnologies.

More Terabytes Please - IBM is announcing plans to deliver terabyte drives for their data center systems.

Canon Keeps an Eye on Watermarking - Canon has filed for a patent on a technology that takes an image of the photographers retina when taking a picture and then using this image as an embedded watermark to help protect photograph copyrights.

Giving Robots Better Vision

Click here to see more photos
Robotics technology has seen some impressive improvements in recent years, whether it was in cars that (sort of) drive themselves or in advanced remote-controlled robots deployed in military and emergency situations.

But whether it was an advanced AI-controlled vehicle moving through the desert in the DARPA Challenge or a bomb detection robot remote-controlled by a specialist, all of these robots have one common weakness: They can't see very well.

Typically these robots use a combination of technologies to try to figure out where they are going. These include standard video cameras, object detection systems and laser radar, or LADAR, systems.

LADAR technology has typically been used in military guidance systems and simpler mechanical LADAR has also been used in some robots (for example some that competed in the DARPA Challenge).

But for the most part these technologies have come up short, leading to problems on both the serious side (such as a remote operator not being able to tell true distance or see through obstacles) and the comical side (such as a robotic hummer stopped in its tracks by a small bush).

Hollywood Jumps to MIT

At an MIT event the director and star of the film Jumper team up with physicists to discuss the science and fiction of teleportation.

Most people understand that MIT is not your average place. But at a special media panel held there last night some of the differences really stood out.

After all, there aren't that many other places where two renowned physicists would receive as much applause, cheers and enthusiasm as successful Hollywood director Doug Liman (who has directed major hits such as Swingers and The Bourne Identity) and major movie star Hayden Christensen (aka Anakin Skywalker aka Darth freaking Vader!).

But what was the purpose of this strange panel? Well, Liman and Christensen were there to talk about the upcoming science fiction film Jumper (based on the 1992 novel by Steven Gould) and for the first time show extended clips of the film to a live audience. But why the physicists?

Well, the plot of Jumper centers around a young man who discovers that he has a genetic trait that makes it possible for him to teleport himself to anyplace he can see, knows well or that he sees in a photograph.

So to help ground the idea of teleportation in some hard science, the panel included Dr. Edward Farhi and Dr. Max Tegmark, both MIT professors and esteemed physicists.