Vocabulary > Technology > PC, computers

Andy Singer

Cagle

31 March 2009

Andy Singer

Cagle

18.8.2009

silicon

a single piece of silicon

Silicon Valley        USA
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/california/siliconvalley/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/us/california-housing-market-braces-for-facebook-millionaires.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/technology/apple-woos-educators-with-trips-to-silicon-valley.html
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/a-silicon-bubble-shows-signs-of-reinflating/

chip / semiconductor chips
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/intel_corporation/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/science/31compute.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/technology/companies/17chip.html
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1807882,00.html

chip designer > ARM Holdings
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/arm-holdings-plc/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/technology/20arm.html

chip maker
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/technology/04chip.html

Julius Blank        1925-2011
mechanical engineer
who helped start a computer chip company in the 1950s
that became a prototype for high-tech start-ups
and a training ground for a generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/technology/julius-blank-who-built-first-chip-maker-dies-at-86.html

memory chip

chipset

microprocessor

component

superconductor
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2724217

computing engine

Intel        USA
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/intel_corporation/index.html

processor

processing speed

performance

power

power-efficient

heat

circuitry

transistor

chip maker Texas Instruments Inc.

semiconductor

low-power semiconductors

semiconductor maker

nanotechnology

ILLUSTRATION BY JONAS BERGSTRAND FOR CIA

'Stop juggling and try 10-pin bowling'

To kick off the new year,

our columnists have joined forces to show you how to reshape your working life

- whether you're an entrepreneur, a homeworker or just plain idle ...

The Guardian        Work        p. 2

Saturday January 7, 2006
http://money.guardian.co.uk/work/story/0,1456,1680947,00.html

personal computer        PC
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/technology/as-new-ipad-debut-nears-some-see-decline-of-pcs.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03roberts.html
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/story/0,,1832849,00.html

quantum computers        2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/may/06/quantum-computing-physics-jeff-forshaw

PC tuneup
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/technology/personaltech/28basics.html

computer
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/technology/personaltech/28basics.html

supercomputer
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/science/26planetarium.html

computerized surveillance systems
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/science/02see.html

MITS Altair, the first inexpensive general-purpose microcomputer
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03roberts.html

The world's first multi-tasking computer - video
We take the ability to multi-task on our computers for granted,
but it all started with the Pilot Ace Computer and the genius of mathematician Alan Turing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2011/mar/01/pilot-ace-computer-alan-turing
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/people/alan_turing

wall computers
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1945938,00.html

surface computing
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2007-05-29-microsoft-surface_N.htm

 IBM PC
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1838497,00.html

 the IBM PC 5150 computer

construction of the ENIAC machine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1943
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/26/first-computers-john-von-neumann

HECToR, the UK's fastest machine
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/02/computing.climatechange

computer services company

laptop / notebook
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/jun/16/buying-a-laptop-saving-money
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2006-07-23-laptop-secure_x.htm

widescreen wireless notebook

tablet PC
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/technology/26apple.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/technology/05tablet.html

tablet computers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/tablet-computer

tablet computer > Amazon's Kindle Fire        2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/technology/personaltech/
amazons-fire-some-say-may-become-the-edsel-of-tablets.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/28/us-amazon-tablet-idUSTRE78Q6MJ20110928

Jack Tramiel (born Jacek Trzmiel in Lodz, Poland)        1928-2012

a hard-charging, cigar-chomping tycoon
whose inexpensive, immensely popular Commodore computers
helped ignite the personal computer industry
the way Henry Ford’s Model T kick-started the mass production of automobiles

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/technology/jack-tramiel-a-pioneer-in-computers-dies-at-83.html

David Leigh Waltz        1943-2012

computer scientist whose early research in information retrieval
provided the foundation for today’s Internet search engines

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/science/david-l-waltz-computer-science-pioneer-dies-at-68.html

John McCarthy        1927-2011

computer scientist who helped design
the foundation of today’s Internet-based computing
and who is widely credited with coining the term for
a frontier of research he helped pioneer, Artificial Intelligence, or A.I.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/science/26mccarthy.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/25/james-murdoch-shareholders-news-corp

Kenneth Harry Olsen        1926-2011

Ken Olsen helped reshape the computer industry 
as a founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation,
at one time the world’s second-largest computer company

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/technology/business-computing/08olsen.html

Max Palevsky, pioneer in computers        1924-2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/us/07palevsky.html

H. Edward Roberts, PC pioneer        1941-2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03roberts.html

John von Neumann        1903-1957

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/26/first-computers-john-von-neumann

Andy Singer

No Exit

Cagle

27 December 2009

bit

terabit

hardware

computing

computing pioneer > Steven J. Wallach
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/technology/business-computing/17machine.html

computer

computer science
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/technology/07spinrad.html

perform

task

idle

start

restart

turn on / off

shut down

disconnect

run

install

uninstall

update

set up

settings

save

store

implement

delete

clear

remove

delete

send

import

scan

check

search

search and destroy

index

clear

select

hide

The Guardian        Evaluation        p. 1

12.7.2005

slashdot

hi-tech

gizmo

computer geek / geek
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/06/us-apple-jobs-design-idUSTRE7954DN20111006
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/technology/26digi.html

nerd

technorati
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html

server

software
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/12/google-microsoft-chromebook-laptop

Betty Jean Jennings / Bartik        1924-2011

one of the first computer programmers and a pioneering forerunner
in a technology that came to be known as software
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/business/08bartik.html

a standard bit, 0 or 1

programmer

project developer

upgrade / upgrade

operating system
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/technology/companies/08operate.html

Novell's open-source software platform > Linux
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-11-02-windows-linux_x.htm

open-source software movement

hole

Windows secret blueprint / source code

operating system > Windows 8
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/technology/microsoft-tries-to-woo-mobile-developers-with-windows-8.html

operating system > Windows 7
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/windows-7
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/22/windows-7-review
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jul/22/windows7-rtm-release

operating system > Vista
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2575634,00.html
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2001815,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2007-01-25-microsoft-vista-strategy_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2006-11-29-vista-rollout_x.htm

bug
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1781895,00.html

bug-free

security patch

data

scrapped computers > dead disks > identity thieves
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1840396,00.html

file

backup file

folder

back up

back door

PIN

PDA

word processor

interactive features

user friendly

click on

click and drag

click, drag and drop

cut and paste

mouse

type

type in

software

real-time software
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/technology/business-computing/21stream.html

a piece of software

software maker

spyware

counterfeit software ring
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/technology/07piracy.html

malware
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Retail-Data-Breach.html

shareware

widget - compact, single-purpose programs
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/24/technology/personaltech/24pogue.html

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/billgates
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/02/paul-allen-microsoft-bill-gates-ideas
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/24/microsoft-paul-allen-rivals-evil
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/30/microsoft-paul-allen-bill-gates

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/02/paul-allen-microsoft-bill-gates-ideas
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/24/microsoft-paul-allen-rivals-evil
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/30/microsoft-paul-allen-bill-gates

Microsoft
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/microsoft_corporation/index.html

Microsoft > Office
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/28/us-microsoft-idUSTRE75R03D20110628
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/05/12/technology/tech-us-microsoft-office.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/technology/12soft.html

Google vs Microsoft
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/05/12/technology/tech-us-microsoft-office.html

Apple vs Microsoft
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/technology/27apple.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/26/apple-gains-upper-hand-over-microsoft

1.44 MB floppy drive

USB stick
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/03/catholic-ireland-gay-porn-slideshow

128mb USB flash drive

crash

crash

hard disk

colour screen

flat screen

touch screen
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/technology/03touch.html
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4019906.ece

keyboard
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Gates-Goodbye-Keyboards.html

store, share and transfer data

digital camera

flat-bed scanner

headset microphone

joystick

gamepad

data base

edit

print

print out

CD Re-Writer

DVD-ROM drive

DVD (Digital Versatile Disc)

burn

DVD burner notebook

rip and burn

monitor

all-in-one printer, scanner, copier and fax

Kirk Anderson

Cagle

16.12.2004
http://cagle.slate.msn.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/anderson.asp

computer wizardry

computer graphics

animator

special-effects artist

hyper-realistic digital model
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1078082,00.html 

graphic

click-through graphic

interactive graphic

Sony's PS3
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2006-11-17-ps3-debut_x.htm

EA > the world's biggest video game publisher
http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,12589,1592742,00.html
http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,12589,1592388,00.html

develop video games

bring out new games

be developed into feature films

turn the games into film or television productions

own the intellectual property

develop, publish and distribute

gaming console

video game industry / games industry
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/games/story/0,,1778693,00.html

the next generation of video game console hardware

computer monitor

artificial intelligence        A.I.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/science/15essay.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/us/04selfridge.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/technology/14artificial.html

researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/technology/14artificial.html

robot
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/science/05robots.html

robotic
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/science/05robots.html

computer scientists

software engineers

Computers Make Strides in Recognizing Speech        June 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/science/25voice.html

gesture-recognition technology
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/technology/30chip.html

Computers

Date taken: 1961

Photographer: Walter Sanders

Life Images
 

As New iPad Debut Nears, Some See Decline of PCs

March 5, 2012
The New York Times
By NICK WINGFIELD

The chief executive of Apple, Timothy D. Cook, has a prediction: the day will come when tablet devices like the Apple iPad outsell traditional personal computers.

His forecast has backing from a growing number of analysts and veteran technology industry executives, who contend that the torrid growth rates of the iPad, combined with tablet competition from the likes of Amazon.com and Microsoft, make a changing of the guard a question of when, not if.

Tablet sales are likely to get another jolt this week when Apple introduces its newest version of the iPad, which is expected to have a higher-resolution screen. With past iterations of the iPad and iPhone, Apple has made an art of refining the devices with better screens, faster processors and speedier network connections, as well as other bells and whistles — steadily broadening their audiences.

An Apple spokeswoman, Trudy Muller, declined to comment on an event the company is holding Wednesday in San Francisco that is expected to feature the new product.

Any surpassing of personal computers by tablets will be a case of the computer industry’s tail wagging the dog. The iPad, which seemed like a nice side business for Apple when it was introduced in 2010, has become a franchise for the company, accounting for $9.15 billion in revenue in the holiday quarter, or about 20 percent of Apple’s total revenue. The roughly 15 million iPads Apple sold in that period was more than twice the number it sold a year earlier.

In the fall, Amazon introduced the iPad’s first credible competitor in the $199 Kindle Fire. Although Amazon does not release sales figures for the device, some analysts estimate it sold about four million in the holiday quarter. Later this year, tablets from a variety of hardware manufacturers based on Windows 8, a new, touch-screen-friendly operating system from Microsoft, could further propel the market.

“Tablets are on fire, there’s no question about that,” said Brad Silverberg, a venture capitalist in Seattle at Ignition Partners and a former Microsoft executive, who hastened to add that he was speaking mainly of the iPad, which dominates current sales.

Tablets are not there yet. In 2011, PCs outsold tablets almost six to one, estimates Canalys, a technology research company. But that is still a significant change from 2010, the iPad’s first year on the market, when PCs outsold tablets 20 to one, according to Canalys. For the last two years, PC sales were flat, while iPad sales were booming. The Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook gave the market an additional lift over the holidays. Apple is banking on the tablet market. Its iPad brought in nearly 40 percent more revenue during the holidays than Apple’s own computer business, the Macintosh, did.

“From the first day it shipped, we thought — not just me, many of us thought at Apple — that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market, and it was just a matter of the time that it took for that to occur,” Mr. Cook of Apple said recently at a Goldman Sachs investor conference.

Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, estimated that Mr. Cook’s prediction would come true in 2017, but others contend tablets will be on top sooner than that.

For example, in a blog post on Friday, Horace Dediu, an analyst with Asymco in Finland, made a detailed argument that tablet sales would pass traditional PC sales in the fall of 2013. His projections rest heavily on an assumption that Apple will face more serious competition in the tablet market from Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Windows 8 and a wave of other devices based on Google’s Android, an operating system that has been mostly successful in the smartphone market.

Tim Bucher, an entrepreneur who has held senior positions at Apple, Microsoft and Dell, said tablet sales would “absolutely” pass those of PCs, a trend he argued would become even more pronounced as a younger, tablet-savvy generation ages.

“I think the older generation does not pick up on the way of interacting with the new devices,” Mr. Bucher said, contrasting older people with the next generation. “I don’t know how many YouTube videos there are out there showing everyone from babies to animals interacting with iPads.”

Where does that change leave the PC, the lowly machine that defined computing for decades?

At a technology conference in 2010, Steven P. Jobs, then Apple’s chief executive, heralded what he called the post-PC era and compared personal computers to the trucks that prevailed in the automobile industry until society began moving away from its agrarian roots. PCs are “still going to be around and have a lot of value,” said Mr. Jobs, who died in October. “But they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”

Even Mr. Cook in his recent speech said he was not predicting the demise of the PC industry, although he did say the iPad was cannibalizing some computer sales, more Windows PCs than the much smaller market for Macs. One category of PCs where that is especially true is netbooks, the inexpensive notebook computers that have had a steep decline in shipments in the last couple of years. “What the iPad is doing is taking growth away from the PC market that would have gone to a secondary or tertiary device,” said Mr. Dediu. “It’s not so much people are going to drop PCs. They’re going to add this additional device.”

Traditional PCs are not standing still. Boxy desktop computers are an ever-diminishing part of the PC business, while Apple’s MacBook Air and a category of Windows laptops with Intel processors called ultrabooks have reinvented traditional clamshell notebooks as superthin devices that turn on instantly like tablets.

Microsoft’s introduction of Windows 8 promises to shake up computer designs further. Microsoft and its hardware partners have shown laptops with keyboards that can be swiveled around or removed altogether, turning them into tablets.

“The tablet and PC markets are all going to blur,” said Tim Coulling, an analyst at Canalys. “We’re going to see a lot of form-factor innovation. We’ll be asking, What is a tablet and what is a traditional PC?”

    As New iPad Debut Nears, Some See Decline of PCs, NYT, 5.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/technology/as-new-ipad-debut-nears-some-see-decline-of-pcs.html

John McCarthy, 84, Dies; Computer Design Pioneer

October 25, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

John McCarthy, a computer scientist who helped design the foundation of today’s Internet-based computing and who is widely credited with coining the term for a frontier of research he helped pioneer, Artificial Intelligence, or A.I., died on Monday at his home in Stanford, Calif. He was 84.

The cause was complications of heart disease, his daughter Sarah McCarthy said.

Dr. McCarthy’s career followed the arc of modern computing. Trained as a mathematician, he was responsible for seminal advances in the field and was often called the father of computer time-sharing, a major development of the 1960s that enabled many people and organizations to draw simultaneously from a single computer source, like a mainframe, without having to own one.

By lowering costs, it allowed more people to use computers and laid the groundwork for the interactive computing of today.

Though he did not foresee the rise of the personal computer, Dr. McCarthy was prophetic in describing the implications of other technological advances decades before they gained currency.

“In the early 1970s, he presented a paper in France on buying and selling by computer, what is now called electronic commerce,” said Whitfield Diffie, an Internet security expert who worked as a researcher for Dr. McCarthy at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

And in the study of artificial intelligence, “no one is more influential than John,” Mr. Diffie said.

While teaching mathematics at Dartmouth in 1956, Dr. McCarthy was the principal organizer of the first Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

The idea of simulating human intelligence had been discussed for decades, but the term “artificial intelligence” — originally used to help raise funds to support the conference — stuck.

In 1958, Dr. McCarthy moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, with Marvin Minsky, he founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was at M.I.T. that he began working on what he called List Processing Language, or Lisp, a computer language that became the standard tool for artificial intelligence research and design.

Around the same time he came up with a technique called garbage collection, in which pieces of computer code that are not needed by a running computation are automatically removed from the computer’s random access memory.

He developed the technique in 1959 and added it to Lisp. That technique is now routinely used in Java and other programming languages.

His M.I.T. work also led to fundamental advances in software and operating systems. In one, he was instrumental in developing the first time-sharing system for mainframe computers.

The power of that invention would come to shape Dr. McCarthy’s worldview to such an extent that when the first personal computers emerged with local computing and storage in the 1970s, he belittled them as toys.

Rather, he predicted, wrongly, that in the future everyone would have a relatively simple and inexpensive computer terminal in the home linked to a shared, centralized mainframe and use it as an electronic portal to the worlds of commerce and news and entertainment media.

Dr. McCarthy, who taught briefly at Stanford in the early 1950s, returned there in 1962 and in 1964 became the founding director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or SAIL. Its optimistic, space-age goal, with financial backing from the Pentagon, was to create a working artificial intelligence system within a decade.

Years later he developed a healthy respect for the challenge, saying that creating a “thinking machine” would require “1.8 Einsteins and one-tenth the resources of the Manhattan Project.”

Artificial intelligence is still thought to be far in the future, though tremendous progress has been made in systems that mimic many human skills, including vision, listening, reasoning and, in robotics, the movements of limbs. From the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, the Stanford lab played a vital role in creating some of these technologies, including robotics and machine-vision natural language.

In 1972, the laboratory drew national attention when Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, wrote about it in Rolling Stone magazine under the headline “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.” The article evoked the esprit de corps of a group of researchers who had been freed to create their own virtual worlds, foreshadowing the emergence of cyberspace. “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people,” Mr. Brand wrote.

Dr. McCarthy had begun inviting the Homebrew Computer Club, a Silicon Valley hobbyist group, to meet at the Stanford lab. Among its growing membership were Steven P. Jobs and Steven Wozniak, who would go on to found Apple. Mr. Wozniak designed his first personal computer prototype, the Apple 1, to share with his Homebrew friends.

But Dr. McCarthy still cast a jaundiced eye on personal computing. In the second Homebrew newsletter, he suggested the formation of a “Bay Area Home Terminal Club,” to provide computer access on a shared Digital Equipment computer. He thought a user fee of $75 a month would be reasonable.

Though Dr. McCarthy would initially miss the significance of the PC, his early thinking on electronic commerce would influence Mr. Diffie at the Stanford lab. Drawing on those ideas, Mr. Diffie began thinking about what would replace the paper personal check in an all-electronic world.

He and two other researchers went on to develop the basic idea of public key cryptography, which is now the basis of all modern electronic banking and commerce, providing secure interaction between a consumer and a business.

A chess enthusiast, Dr. McCarthy had begun working on chess-playing computer programs in the 1950s at Dartmouth. Shortly after joining the Stanford lab, he engaged a group of Soviet computer scientists in an intercontinental chess match after he discovered they had a chess-playing computer. Played by telegraph, the match consisted of four games and lasted almost a year. The Soviet scientists won.

John McCarthy was born on Sept. 4, 1927, into a politically engaged family in Boston. His father, John Patrick McCarthy, was an Irish immigrant and a labor organizer.

His mother, the former Ida Glatt, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, was active in the suffrage movement. Both parents were members of the Communist Party. The family later moved to Los Angeles in part because of John’s respiratory problems.

He entered the California Institute of Technology in 1944 and went on to graduate studies at Princeton, where he was a colleague of John Forbes Nash Jr., the Nobel Prize-winning economist and subject of Sylvia Nasar’s book “A Beautiful Mind,” which was adapted into a movie.

At Princeton, in 1949, he briefly joined the local Communist Party cell, which had two other members: a cleaning woman and a gardener, he told an interviewer. But he quit the party shortly afterward.

In the ’60s, as the Vietnam War escalated, his politics took a conservative turn as he grew disenchanted with leftist politics.

In 1971 Dr. McCarthy received the Turing Award, the most prestigious given by the Association of Computing Machinery, for his work in artificial intelligence. He was awarded the Kyoto Prize in 1988, the National Medal of Science in 1991 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2003.

Dr. McCarthy was married three times. His second wife, Vera Watson, a member of the American Women’s Himalayan Expedition, died in a climbing accident on Annapurna in 1978.

Besides his daughter Sarah, of Nevada City, Calif., he is survived by his wife, Carolyn Talcott, of Stanford; another daughter, Susan McCarthy, of San Francisco; and a son, Timothy, of Stanford.

He remained an independent thinker throughout his life. Some years ago, one of his daughters presented him with a license plate bearing one of his favorite aphorisms: “Do the arithmetic or be doomed to talk nonsense.”

    John McCarthy, 84, Dies; Computer Design Pioneer, NYT, 25.10.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/science/26mccarthy.html

Computer Wins on ‘Jeopardy!’: Trivial, It’s Not

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — In the end, the humans on “Jeopardy!” surrendered meekly.

Facing certain defeat at the hands of a room-size I.B.M. computer on Wednesday evening, Ken Jennings, famous for winning 74 games in a row on the TV quiz show, acknowledged the obvious. “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords,” he wrote on his video screen, borrowing a line from a “Simpsons” episode.

From now on, if the answer is “the computer champion on “Jeopardy!,” the question will be, “What is Watson?”

For I.B.M., the showdown was not merely a well-publicized stunt and a $1 million prize, but proof that the company has taken a big step toward a world in which intelligent machines will understand and respond to humans, and perhaps inevitably, replace some of them.

Watson, specifically, is a “question answering machine” of a type that artificial intelligence researchers have struggled with for decades — a computer akin to the one on “Star Trek” that can understand questions posed in natural language and answer them.

Watson showed itself to be imperfect, but researchers at I.B.M. and other companies are already developing uses for Watson’s technologies that could have significant impact on the way doctors practice and consumers buy products.

“Cast your mind back 20 years and who would have thought this was possible?” said Edward Feigenbaum, a Stanford University computer scientist and a pioneer in the field.

In its “Jeopardy!” project, I.B.M. researchers were tackling a game that requires not only encyclopedic recall, but the ability to untangle convoluted and often opaque statements, a modicum of luck, and quick, strategic button pressing.

The contest, which was taped in January here at the company’s T. J. Watson Research Laboratory before an audience of I.B.M. executives and company clients, played out in three televised episodes concluding Wednesday. At the end of the first day, Watson was in a tie with Brad Rutter, another ace human player, at $5,000 each, with Mr. Jennings trailing with $2,000.

But on the second day, Watson went on a tear. By night’s end, Watson had a commanding lead with a total of $35,734, compared with Mr. Rutter’s $10,400 and Mr. Jennings’ $4,800.

But victory was not cemented until late in the third match, when Watson was in Nonfiction. “Same category for $1,200” it said in a manufactured tenor, and lucked into a Daily Double. Mr. Jennings grimaced.

Even later in the match, however, had Mr. Jennings won another key Daily Double it might have come down to Final Jeopardy, I.B.M. researchers acknowledged.

The final tally was $77,147 to Mr. Jennings’ $24,000 and Mr. Rutter’s $21,600.

More than anything, the contest was a vindication for the academic field of computer science, which began with great promise in the 1960s with the vision of creating a thinking machine and which became the laughingstock of Silicon Valley in the 1980s, when a series of heavily funded start-up companies went bankrupt.

Despite its intellectual prowess, Watson was by no means omniscient. On Tuesday evening during Final Jeopardy, the category was U.S. Cities and the clue was: “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest for a World War II battle.”

Watson drew guffaws from many in the television audience when it responded “What is Toronto?????”

The string of question marks indicated that the system had very low confidence in its response, I.B.M. researchers said, but because it was Final Jeopardy, it was forced to give a response. The machine did not suffer much damage. It had wagered just $947 on its result.

“We failed to deeply understand what was going on there,” said David Ferrucci, an I.B.M. researcher who led the development of Watson. “The reality is that there’s lots of data where the title is U.S. cities and the answers are countries, European cities, people, mayors. Even though it says U.S. cities, we had very little confidence that that’s the distinguishing feature.”

The researchers also acknowledged that the machine had benefited from the “buzzer factor.”

Both Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter are accomplished at anticipating the light that signals it is possible to “buzz in,” and can sometimes get in with virtually zero lag time. The danger is to buzz too early, in which case the contestant is penalized and “locked out” for roughly a quarter of a second.

Watson, on the other hand, does not anticipate the light, but has a weighted scheme that allows it, when it is highly confident, to buzz in as quickly as 10 milliseconds, making it very hard for humans to beat. When it was less confident, it buzzed more slowly. In the second round, Watson beat the others to the buzzer in 24 out of 30 Double Jeopardy questions.

“It sort of wants to get beaten when it doesn’t have high confidence,” Dr. Ferrucci said. “It doesn’t want to look stupid.”

Both human players said that Watson’s button pushing skill was not necessarily an unfair advantage. “I beat Watson a couple of times,” Mr. Rutter said.

When Watson did buzz in, it made the most of it. Showing the ability to parse language, it responded to, “A recent best seller by Muriel Barbery is called ‘This of the Hedgehog,’ ” with “What is Elegance?”

It showed its facility with medical diagnosis. With the answer: “You just need a nap. You don’t have this sleep disorder that can make sufferers nod off while standing up,” Watson replied, “What is narcolepsy?”

The coup de grâce came with the answer, “William Wilkenson’s ‘An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia’ inspired this author’s most famous novel.” Mr. Jennings wrote, correctly, Bram Stoker, but realized he could not catch up with Watson’s winnings and wrote out his surrender.

Both players took the contest and its outcome philosophically.

“I had a great time and I would do it again in a heartbeat,” said Mr. Jennings. “It’s not about the results; this is about being part of the future.”

For I.B.M., the future will happen very quickly, company executives said. On Thursday it plans to announce that it will collaborate with Columbia University and the University of Maryland to create a physician’s assistant service that will allow doctors to query a cybernetic assistant. The company also plans to work with Nuance Communications Inc. to add voice recognition to the physician’s assistant, possibly making the service available in as little as 18 months.

“I have been in medical education for 40 years and we’re still a very memory-based curriculum,” said Dr. Herbert Chase, a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University who is working with I.B.M. on the physician’s assistant. “The power of Watson- like tools will cause us to reconsider what it is we want students to do.”

I.B.M. executives also said they are in discussions with a major consumer electronics retailer to develop a version of Watson, named after I.B.M.’s founder, Thomas J. Watson, that would be able to interact with consumers on a variety of subjects like buying decisions and technical support.

Dr. Ferrucci sees none of the fears that have been expressed by theorists and science fiction writers about the potential of computers to usurp humans.

“People ask me if this is HAL,” he said, referring to the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” “HAL’s not the focus, the focus is on the computer on ‘Star Trek,’ where you have this intelligent information seek dialog, where you can ask follow-up questions and the computer can look at all the evidence and tries to ask follow-up questions. That’s very cool.”

    Computer Wins on ‘Jeopardy!’: Trivial, It’s Not, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17jeopardy-watson.html

Progress in Artificial Intelligence Brings Wonders and Fears

February 14, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

STANFORD, Calif. — At the dawn of the modern computer era, two Pentagon-financed laboratories bracketed Stanford University. At one laboratory, a small group of scientists and engineers worked to replace the human mind, while at the other, a similar group worked to augment it.

In 1963 the mathematician-turned-computer scientist John McCarthy started the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The researchers believed that it would take only a decade to create a thinking machine.

Also that year the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart formed what would become the Augmentation Research Center to pursue a radically different goal — designing a computing system that would instead “bootstrap” the human intelligence of small groups of scientists and engineers.

For the past four decades that basic tension between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation — A.I. versus I.A. — has been at the heart of progress in computing science as the field has produced a series of ever more powerful technologies that are transforming the world.

Now, as the pace of technological change continues to accelerate, it has become increasingly possible to design computing systems that enhance the human experience, or now — in a growing number of cases — completely dispense with it.

The implications of progress in A.I. are being brought into sharp relief now by the broadcasting of a recorded competition pitting the I.B.M. computing system named Watson against the two best human Jeopardy players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Watson is an effort by I.B.M. researchers to advance a set of techniques used to process human language. It provides striking evidence that computing systems will no longer be limited to responding to simple commands. Machines will increasingly be able to pick apart jargon, nuance and even riddles. In attacking the problem of the ambiguity of human language, computer science is now closing in on what researchers refer to as the “Paris Hilton problem” — the ability, for example, to determine whether a query is being made by someone who is trying to reserve a hotel in France, or simply to pass time surfing the Internet.

If, as many predict, Watson defeats its human opponents on Wednesday, much will be made of the philosophical consequences of the machine’s achievement. Moreover, the I.B.M. demonstration also foretells profound sociological and economic changes.

Traditionally, economists have argued that while new forms of automation may displace jobs in the short run, over longer periods of time economic growth and job creation have continued to outpace any job-killing technologies. For example, over the past century and a half the shift from being a largely agrarian society to one in which less than 1 percent of the United States labor force is in agriculture is frequently cited as evidence of the economy’s ability to reinvent itself.

That, however, was before machines began to “understand” human language. Rapid progress in natural language processing is beginning to lead to a new wave of automation that promises to transform areas of the economy that have until now been untouched by technological change.

“As designers of tools and products and technologies we should think more about these issues,” said Pattie Maes, a computer scientist at the M.I.T. Media Lab. Not only do designers face ethical issues, she argues, but increasingly as skills that were once exclusively human are simulated by machines, their designers are faced with the challenge of rethinking what it means to be human.

I.B.M.’s executives have said they intend to commercialize Watson to provide a new class of question-answering systems in business, education and medicine. The repercussions of such technology are unknown, but it is possible, for example, to envision systems that replace not only human experts, but hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs throughout the economy and around the globe. Virtually any job that now involves answering questions and conducting commercial transactions by telephone will soon be at risk. It is only necessary to consider how quickly A.T.M.’s displaced human bank tellers to have an idea of what could happen.

To be sure, anyone who has spent time waiting on hold for technical support, or trying to change an airline reservation, may welcome that day. However, there is also a growing unease about the advances in natural language understanding that are being heralded in systems like Watson. As rapidly as A.I.-based systems are proliferating, there are equally compelling examples of the power of I.A. — systems that extend the capability of the human mind.

Google itself is perhaps the most significant example of using software to mine the collective intelligence of humans and then making it freely available in the form of a digital library. The search engine was originally based on a software algorithm called PageRank that mined human choices in picking Web pages that contained answers to a particular typed query and then quickly ranked the matches by relevance.

The Internet is widely used for applications that employ a range of human capabilities. For example, experiments in Web-based games designed to harness the human ability to recognize patterns — which still greatly exceeds what is possible by computer — are generating a new set of scientific tools. Games like FoldIt, EteRNA and Galaxy Zoo make it possible for individuals to compete and collaborate in fields like astronomy to biology, medicine and possibly even material science.

Personal computing was the first step toward intelligence augmentation that reached a broad audience. It created a generation of “information workers,” and equipped them with a set of tools for gathering, producing and sharing information. Now there is a cyborg quality to the changes that are taking place as personal computing has evolved from desktop to laptop and now to the smartphones that have quickly become ubiquitous.

The smartphone is not just a navigation and communication tool. It has rapidly become an almost seamless extension of almost all of our senses. It is not only a reference tool but is quickly evolving to be an “information concierge” that can respond to typed or spoken queries or simply volunteer advice.

Further advances in both A.I. and I.A. will increasingly confront the engineers and computer scientists with clear choices about how technology is used. “There needs to be an explicit social contract between the engineers and society to create not just jobs but better jobs,” said Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and author of “You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto.”

The consequences of human design decisions can be clearly seen in the competing online news systems developed here in Silicon Valley.

Each day Katherine Ho sits at a computer and observes which news articles millions of Yahoo users are reading.

Her computer monitor displays the results of a cluster of software programs giving her almost instant updates on precisely how popular each of the news articles on the company’s home page is, based on her readers’ tastes and interests.

Ms. Ho is a 21st-century version of a traditional newspaper wire editor. Instead of gut and instinct, her decisions on which articles to put on the Yahoo home page are based on the cues generated by the software algorithms.

Throughout the day she constantly reorders the news articles that are displayed for dozens of demographic subgroups that make up the Yahoo readership. An article that isn’t drawing much interest may last only minutes before she “spikes” it electronically. Popular articles stay online for days and sometimes draw tens of millions of readers.

Just five miles north at Yahoo’s rival Google, however, the news is produced in an entirely different manner. Spotlight, a popular feature on Google’s news site, is run entirely by a software algorithm which performs essentially the same duties as Ms. Ho does.

Google’s software prowls the Web looking for articles deemed interesting, employing a process that is similar to the company’s PageRank search engine ranking system to make decisions on which articles to present to readers.

In one case, software-based technologies are being used to extend the skills of a human worker, in another case technology replaces her entirely.

Similar design decisions about how machines are used and whether they will enhance or replace human qualities are now being played out in a multitude of ways, and the real value of Watson may ultimately be in forcing society to consider where the line between human and machine should be drawn.

Indeed, for the computer scientist John Seely Brown, machines that are facile at answering questions only serve to obscure what remains fundamentally human.

“The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them,” he said.

    Progress in Artificial Intelligence Brings Wonders and Fears, NYT, 14.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/science/15essay.html

Ken Olsen, Who Built DEC Into a Power, Dies at 84

February 7, 2011
The New York Times
By GLENN RIFKIN

Ken Olsen, who helped reshape the computer industry as a founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, at one time the world’s second-largest computer company, died on Sunday. He was 84.

His family announced the death but declined to provide further details. He had recently lived with a daughter in Indiana and had been a longtime resident of Lincoln, Mass.

Mr. Olsen, who was proclaimed “America’s most successful entrepreneur” by Fortune magazine in 1986, built Digital on $70,000 in seed money, founding it with a partner in 1957 in the small Boston suburb of Maynard, Mass. With Mr. Olsen as its chief executive, it grew to employ more than 120,000 people at operations in more than 95 countries, surpassed in size only by I.B.M.

At its peak, in the late 1980s, Digital had $14 billion in sales and ranked among the most profitable companies in the nation.

But its fortunes soon declined after Digital began missing out on some critical market shifts, particularly toward the personal computer. Mr. Olsen was criticized as autocratic and resistant to new trends. “The personal computer will fall flat on its face in business,” he said at one point. And in July 1992, the company’s board forced him to resign.

Six years later, Digital, or DEC, as the company was known, was acquired by the Compaq Computer Corporation for $9.6 billion.

But for 35 years the enigmatic Mr. Olsen oversaw an expanding technology giant that produced some of the computer industry’s breakthrough ideas.

In a tribute to him in 2006, Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, called Mr. Olsen “one of the true pioneers of computing,” adding, “He was also a major influence on my life.”

Mr. Gates traced his interest in software to his first use of a DEC computer as a 13-year-old. He and Microsoft’s other founder, Paul Allen, created their first personal computer software on a DEC PDP-10 computer.

In the 1960s, Digital built small, powerful and elegantly designed “minicomputers,” which formed the basis of a lucrative new segment of the computer marketplace. Though hardly “mini” by today’s standards, the computer became a favorite alternative to the giant, multimillion-dollar mainframe computers sold by I.B.M. to large corporate customers. The minicomputer found a market in research laboratories, engineering companies and other professions requiring heavy computer use.

In time, several minicomputer companies sprang up around Digital and thrived, forming the foundation of the Route 128 technology corridor near Boston.

Digital also spawned a generation of computing talent, lured by an open corporate culture that fostered a free flow of ideas. A frequently rumpled outdoorsman who preferred flannel shirts to business suits, Mr. Olsen, a brawny man with piercing blue eyes, shunned publicity and ran the company as a large, sometimes contentious family.

Many within the industry assumed that Digital, with its stellar engineering staff, would be the logical company to usher in the age of personal computers, but Mr. Olsen was openly skeptical of the desktop machines. He thought of them as “toys” used for playing video games.

Still, most people in the industry say Mr. Olsen’s legacy is secure. “Ken Olsen is the father of the second generation of computing,” said George Colony, who is chief executive of Forrester Research and a longtime industry watcher, “and that makes him one of the major figures in the history of this business.”

Kenneth Harry Olsen was born in Bridgeport, Conn., on Feb. 20, 1926, and grew up with his three siblings in nearby Stratford. His parents, Oswald and Elizabeth Svea Olsen, were children of Norwegian immigrants.

Mr. Olsen and his younger brother Stan lived their passion for electronics in the basement of their Stratford home, inventing gadgets and repairing broken radios. After a stint in the Navy at the end of World War II, Mr. Olsen headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering. He took a job at M.I.T.’s new Lincoln Laboratory in 1950 and worked under Jay Forrester, who was doing pioneering work in the nascent days of interactive computing.

In 1957, itching to leave academia, Mr. Olsen, then 31, recruited a Lincoln Lab colleague, Harlan Anderson, to help him start a company. For financing they turned to Georges F. Doriot, a renowned Harvard Business School professor and venture capitalist. According to Mr. Colony, Digital became the first successful venture-backed company in the computer industry. Mr. Anderson left the company shortly afterward, leaving Mr. Olsen to put his stamp on it for more than three decades.

In Digital’s often confusing management structure, Mr. Olsen was the dominant figure who hired smart people, gave them responsibility and expected them “to perform as adults,” said Edgar Schein, who taught organizational behavior at M.I.T. and consulted with Mr. Olsen for 25 years. “Lo and behold,” he said, “they performed magnificently.”

One crucial employee was Gordon Bell, a DEC vice president and the technical brains behind many of Digital’s most successful machines. “All the alumni think of Digital fondly and remember it as a great place to work,” said Mr. Bell, who went on to become a principal researcher at Microsoft.

After he left Digital, Mr. Olsen began another start-up, Advanced Modular Solutions, but it eventually failed. In retirement, he helped found the Ken Olsen Science Center at Gordon College, a Christian school in Wenham, Mass., where an archive of his papers and Digital’s history is housed. His family announced his death through the college.

Mr. Olsen’s wife of 59 years, Eeva-Liisa Aulikki Olsen, died in March 2009. A son, Glenn, also died. Mr. Olsen’s survivors include a daughter, Ava Memmen, another son, James; his brother Stan; and five grandchildren.

    Ken Olsen, Who Built DEC Into a Power, Dies at 84, NYT, 7.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/technology/business-computing/08olsen.html

Advances Offer Path to Shrink Computer Chips Again

August 30, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF
 

Scientists at Rice University and Hewlett-Packard are reporting this week that they can overcome a fundamental barrier to the continued rapid miniaturization of computer memory that has been the basis for the consumer electronics revolution.

In recent years the limits of physics and finance faced by chip makers had loomed so large that experts feared a slowdown in the pace of miniaturization that would act like a brake on the ability to pack ever more power into ever smaller devices like laptops, smartphones and digital cameras.

But the new announcements, along with competing technologies being pursued by companies like IBM and Intel, offer hope that the brake will not be applied any time soon.

In one of the two new developments, Rice researchers are reporting in Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society, that they have succeeded in building reliable small digital switches — an essential part of computer memory — that could shrink to a significantly smaller scale than is possible using conventional methods.

More important, the advance is based on silicon oxide, one of the basic building blocks of today’s chip industry, thus easing a move toward commercialization. The scientists said that PrivaTran, a Texas startup company, has made experimental chips using the technique that can store and retrieve information.

These chips store only 1,000 bits of data, but if the new technology fulfills the promise its inventors see, single chips that store as much as today’s highest capacity disk drives could be possible in five years. The new method involves filaments as thin as five nanometers in width — thinner than what the industry hopes to achieve by the end of the decade using standard techniques. The initial discovery was made by Jun Yao, a graduate researcher at Rice. Mr. Yao said he stumbled on the switch by accident.

Separately, H.P. is to announce on Tuesday that it will enter into a commercial partnership with a major semiconductor company to produce a related technology that also has the potential of pushing computer data storage to astronomical densities in the next decade. H.P. and the Rice scientists are making what are called memristors, or memory resistors, switches that retain information without a source of power.

“There are a lot of new technologies pawing for attention,” said Richard Doherty, president of the Envisioneering Group, a consumer electronics market research company in Seaford, N.Y. “When you get down to these scales, you’re talking about the ability to store hundreds of movies on a single chip.”

The announcements are significant in part because they indicate that the chip industry may find a way to preserve the validity of Moore’s Law. Formulated in 1965 by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, the law is an observation that the industry has the ability to roughly double the number of transistors that can be printed on a wafer of silicon every 18 months.

That has been the basis for vast improvements in technological and economic capacities in the past four and a half decades. But industry consensus had shifted in recent years to a widespread belief that the end of physical progress in shrinking the size modern semiconductors was imminent. Chip makers are now confronted by such severe physical and financial challenges that they are spending $4 billion or more for each new advanced chip-making factory.

I.B.M., Intel and other companies are already pursuing a competing technology called phase-change memory, which uses heat to transform a glassy material from an amorphous state to a crystalline one and back.

Phase-change memory has been the most promising technology for so-called flash chips, which retain information after power is switched off.

The flash memory industry has used a number of approaches to keep up with Moore’s law without having a new technology. But it is as if the industry has been speeding toward a wall, without a way to get over it.

To keep up speed on the way to the wall, the industry has begun building three-dimensional chips by stacking circuits on top of one another to increase densities. It has also found ways to get single transistors to store more information. But these methods would not be enough in the long run.

The new technology being pursued by H.P. and Rice is thought to be a dark horse by industry powerhouses like Intel, I.B.M., Numonyx and Samsung. Researchers at those competing companies said that the phenomenon exploited by the Rice scientists had been seen in the literature as early as the 1960s.

“This is something that I.B.M. studied before and which is still in the research stage,” said Charles Lam, an I.B.M. specialist in semiconductor memories.

H.P. has for several years been making claims that its memristor technology can compete with traditional transistors, but the company will report this week that it is now more confident that its technology can compete commercially in the future.

In contrast, the Rice advance must still be proved. Acknowledging that researchers must overcome skepticism because silicon oxide has been known as an insulator by the industry until now, Jim Tour, a nanomaterials specialist at Rice said he believed the industry would have to look seriously at the research team’s new approach.

“It’s a hard sell, because at first it’s obvious it won’t work,” he said. “But my hope is that this is so simple they will have to put it in their portfolio to explore.”

    Advances Offer Path to Shrink Computer Chips Again, NY, 30.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/science/31compute.html

Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime

August 24, 2010
THe New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Just another day at the gym.

As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom.

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests.

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average.

Today’s game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts.

“Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,” he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, “have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments.”

Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits.

“I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime,” Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order.

Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn’t want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact.

“It’s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,” he said. “I told my girlfriend that I’m more tired since I got this thing.”

In the parking lot outside the bagel shop, others were filling up moments with their phones. While Eddie Umadhay, 59, a construction inspector, sat in his car waiting for his wife to grocery shop, he deleted old e-mail while listening to news on the radio. On a bench outside a coffee house, Ossie Gabriel, 44, a nurse practitioner, waited for a friend and checked e-mail “to kill time.”

Crossing the street from the grocery store to his car, David Alvarado pushed his 2-year-old daughter in a cart filled with shopping bags, his phone pressed to his ear.

He was talking to a colleague about work scheduling, noting that he wanted to steal a moment to make the call between paying for the groceries and driving.

“I wanted to take advantage of the little gap,” said Mr. Alvarado, 30, a facilities manager at a community center.

For many such people, the little digital asides come on top of heavy use of computers during the day. Take Ms. Bates, the exercising multitasker at the expansive Bakar Fitness and Recreation Center. She wakes up and peeks at her iPhone before she gets out of bed. At her job in advertising, she spends all day in front of her laptop.

But, far from wanting a break from screens when she exercises, she says she couldn’t possibly spend 55 minutes on the elliptical machine without “lots of things to do.” This includes relentless channel surfing.

“I switch constantly,” she said. “I can’t stand commercials. I have to flip around unless I’m watching ‘Project Runway’ or something I’m really into.”

Some researchers say that whatever downside there is to not resting the brain, it pales in comparison to the benefits technology can bring in motivating people to sweat.

“Exercise needs to be part of our lives in the sedentary world we’re immersed in. Anything that helps us move is beneficial,” said John J. Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.”

But all things being equal, Mr. Ratey said, he would prefer to see people do their workouts away from their devices: “There is more bang for your buck doing it outside, for your mood and working memory.”

Of the 70 cardio machines on the main floor at Bakar Fitness, 67 have televisions attached. Most of them also have iPod docks and displays showing workout performance, and a few have games, like a rope-climbing machine that shows an animated character climbing the rope while the live human does so too.

A few months ago, the cable TV went out and some patrons were apoplectic. “It was an uproar. People said: ‘That’s what we’re paying for,’ ” said Leeane Jensen, 28, the fitness manager.

At least one exerciser has a different take. Two stories up from the main floor, Peter Colley, 23, churns away on one of the several dozen elliptical machines without a TV. Instead, they are bathed in sunlight, looking out onto the pool and palm trees.

“I look at the wind on the trees. I watch the swimmers go back and forth,” Mr. Colley said. “I usually come here to clear my head.”

    Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime, NYT, 24.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/technology/25brain.html

Electronics Maker Promises Review After Suicides

May 26, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID BARBOZA

SHENZHEN, China — Struggling to cope with a rash of suicides at his company’s electronics factories here, the chairman of an electronics maker that supplies Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard said Wednesday that he was doing everything possible to find a solution.

“We are reviewing everything,” Terry Gou, the chairman of the Hon Hai Precision Industry Group of Taiwan and one of Asia’s richest men, said after traveling here from the company’s headquarters in Taiwan. He said the company was reviewing labor practices, hiring psychiatrists and putting up safety nets on the buildings.

“We will leave no stone unturned,” Mr. Gou said, “and we will make sure to find a way to reduce these suicide tendencies.”

Mr. Gou spoke at a hastily organized news conference and media tour on the campus of Foxconn Technology, the Hon Hai subsidiary that operates some of the world’s biggest factories and produces a wide range of electronics for global brands, including American computer makers.

Foxconn, which has about 420,000 employees on two campuses in Shenzhen, is known for its military-style efficiency, the awesome scale of its production operations and for manufacturing popular products like the Apple iPhone. But this year the company has come under intense scrutiny because of a string of suicides by distressed workers between the ages of 18 and 24.

The most recent took place early Tuesday, when a 19-year-old employee fell to his death here. The police have already ruled the death a suicide.

It was the ninth suicide this year by an employee at one of Foxconn’s two Shenzhen campuses, police said. Two additional workers survived suicide attempts with serious injuries.

Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard say they were now investigating conditions at Foxconn amid growing concern about the suicides. The companies say that all their manufacturers are required to comply with international labor standards.

But several labor rights groups have called for an independent investigation into the suicides and labor conditions at Foxconn, saying some deaths appear to be suspicious. Some advocates have also accused the company of running huge sweatshops that regularly violate Chinese labor laws and treat workers harshly.

Those assertions have been bolstered in recent weeks by China’s state-run newspapers, which have published a series of sensational reports about the suicides alongside exposés detailing the harsh conditions inside Foxconn factories.

Some articles describe the heavy burdens workers face in trying to meet Foxconn’s production quotas, cramped dormitories that sometimes house 10 to a room and meager salaries of about $150 a month before overtime.

Foxconn executives, though, strongly defend the company’s labor practices and the conditions on its huge campuses, which they say have modern dormitories, swimming pools and shopping and recreational facilities.

While company executives acknowledge a sharp rise in the rate of suicides on the Shenzhen campuses this year, they say the causes are largely because of China’s social ills and personal problems that arise when migrant workers travel long distances to find jobs.

Foxconn is still investigating the circumstances surrounding the suicides, but company executives say they have no evidence they were caused by poor labor conditions.

“There is a fine line between productivity and regimentation and inhumane treatment,” said Louis Woo, an aide to Mr. Gou at Hon Hai. “I hope we treat our workers with dignity and respect.”

To help ease the crisis, Foxconn says, it has invited university scholars and mental health experts to its campuses in recent weeks. At the news conference at one campuses Wednesday, some of those experts said the rising number of suicides may be the result of complex social factors, including the nation’s rising income gap and even something known as suicide contagion — a tendency for copycat suicides to occur after reports of other suicides.

Health experts say the suicide figures from Foxconn are troubling but far below the national rate of about 14 per 100,000 in China, according to the World Health Organization.

Still, Mr. Gou, who rarely grants interviews and almost never allows journalists to visit the campuses of Foxconn, made an unusual show of concern and openness in Shenzhen on Wednesday, bowing several times at the news conference, apologizing for the tragedies and asking mental health experts to help find a solution. He even led dozens of journalists on a tour of Foxconn’s campus, visiting dormitories, a campus hospital, a production line and an employee care center.

And he appealed to the media to stop sensationalizing the suicides at Foxconn, which he said could fuel even more suicide attempts.

“I’m appealing to the press to take social responsibility,” he said. “Do not sensationalize this. But later, he said Foxconn was re-examining the way it operated. “We can be a better company,” he said.


Bao Beibei contributed research.

    Electronics Maker Promises Review After Suicides, NYT, 26.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/technology/27suicide.html

Attached to Technology and Paying a Price

June 6, 2010
The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO — When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it.

Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up.

“I stood up from my desk and said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ ” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.”

The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing. (View an interactive panorama of Mr. Campbell's workstation.)

While he managed to salvage the $1.3 million deal after apologizing to his suitor, Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.

His wife, Brenda, complains, “It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”

This is your brain on computers.

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.

“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess.

Technology use can benefit the brain in some ways, researchers say. Imaging studies show the brains of Internet users become more efficient at finding information. And players of some video games develop better visual acuity.

More broadly, cellphones and computers have transformed life. They let people escape their cubicles and work anywhere. They shrink distances and handle countless mundane tasks, freeing up time for more exciting pursuits.

For better or worse, the consumption of media, as varied as e-mail and TV, has exploded. In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.

The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.

“We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” he said. “We know already there are consequences.”

Mr. Campbell, 43, came of age with the personal computer, and he is a heavier user of technology than most. But researchers say the habits and struggles of Mr. Campbell and his family typify what many experience — and what many more will, if trends continue.

For him, the tensions feel increasingly acute, and the effects harder to shake.

The Campbells recently moved to California from Oklahoma to start a software venture. Mr. Campbell’s life revolves around computers. (View a slide show on how the Campbells interact with technology.)

He goes to sleep with a laptop or iPhone on his chest, and when he wakes, he goes online. He and Mrs. Campbell, 39, head to the tidy kitchen in their four-bedroom hillside rental in Orinda, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, where she makes breakfast and watches a TV news feed in the corner of the computer screen while he uses the rest of the monitor to check his e-mail.

Major spats have arisen because Mr. Campbell escapes into video games during tough emotional stretches. On family vacations, he has trouble putting down his devices. When he rides the subway to San Francisco, he knows he will be offline 221 seconds as the train goes through a tunnel.

Their 16-year-old son, Connor, tall and polite like his father, recently received his first C’s, which his family blames on distraction from his gadgets. Their 8-year-old daughter, Lily, like her mother, playfully tells her father that he favors technology over family.

“I would love for him to totally unplug, to be totally engaged,” says Mrs. Campbell, who adds that he becomes “crotchety until he gets his fix.” But she would not try to force a change.

“He loves it. Technology is part of the fabric of who he is,” she says. “If I hated technology, I’d be hating him, and a part of who my son is too.”

Always On

Mr. Campbell, whose given name is Thomas, had an early start with technology in Oklahoma City. When he was in third grade, his parents bought him Pong, a video game. Then came a string of game consoles and PCs, which he learned to program.

In high school, he balanced computers, basketball and a romance with Brenda, a cheerleader with a gorgeous singing voice. He studied too, with focus, uninterrupted by e-mail. “I did my homework because I needed to get it done,” he said. “I didn’t have anything else to do.”

He left college to help with a family business, then set up a lawn mowing service. At night he would read, play video games, hang out with Brenda and, as she remembers it, “talk a lot more.”

In 1996, he started a successful Internet provider. Then he built the start-up that he sold for $1.3 million in 2003 to LookSmart, a search engine.

Mr. Campbell loves the rush of modern life and keeping up with the latest information. “I want to be the first to hear when the aliens land,” he said, laughing. But other times, he fantasizes about living in pioneer days when things moved more slowly: “I can’t keep everything in my head.”

No wonder. As he came of age, so did a new era of data and communication.

At home, people consume 12 hours of media a day on average, when an hour spent with, say, the Internet and TV simultaneously counts as two hours. That compares with five hours in 1960, say researchers at the University of California, San Diego. Computer users visit an average of 40 Web sites a day, according to research by RescueTime, which offers time-management tools.

As computers have changed, so has the understanding of the human brain. Until 15 years ago, scientists thought the brain stopped developing after childhood. Now they understand that its neural networks continue to develop, influenced by things like learning skills.

So not long after Eyal Ophir arrived at Stanford in 2004, he wondered whether heavy multitasking might be leading to changes in a characteristic of the brain long thought immutable: that humans can process only a single stream of information at a time.

Going back a half-century, tests had shown that the brain could barely process two streams, and could not simultaneously make decisions about them. But Mr. Ophir, a student-turned-researcher, thought multitaskers might be rewiring themselves to handle the load.

His passion was personal. He had spent seven years in Israeli intelligence after being weeded out of the air force — partly, he felt, because he was not a good multitasker. Could his brain be retrained?

Mr. Ophir, like others around the country studying how technology bent the brain, was startled by what he discovered.

The Myth of Multitasking

The test subjects were divided into two groups: those classified as heavy multitaskers based on their answers to questions about how they used technology, and those who were not.

In a test created by Mr. Ophir and his colleagues, subjects at a computer were briefly shown an image of red rectangles. Then they saw a similar image and were asked whether any of the rectangles had moved. It was a simple task until the addition of a twist: blue rectangles were added, and the subjects were told to ignore them. (Play a game testing how well you filter out distractions.)

The multitaskers then did a significantly worse job than the non-multitaskers at recognizing whether red rectangles had changed position. In other words, they had trouble filtering out the blue ones — the irrelevant information.

So, too, the multitaskers took longer than non-multitaskers to switch among tasks, like differentiating vowels from consonants and then odd from even numbers. The multitaskers were shown to be less efficient at juggling problems. (Play a game testing how well you switch between tasks.)

Other tests at Stanford, an important center for research in this fast-growing field, showed multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.

Researchers say these findings point to an interesting dynamic: multitaskers seem more sensitive than non-multitaskers to incoming information.

The results also illustrate an age-old conflict in the brain, one that technology may be intensifying. A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.

Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.

“Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get everyone’s brain thinking,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford. “But we’ve got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can’t ignore it.”

Mr. Nass says the Stanford studies are important because they show multitasking’s lingering effects: “The scary part for guys like Kord is, they can’t shut off their multitasking tendencies when they’re not multitasking.”

Melina Uncapher, a neurobiologist on the Stanford team, said she and other researchers were unsure whether the muddied multitaskers were simply prone to distraction and would have had trouble focusing in any era. But she added that the idea that information overload causes distraction was supported by more and more research.

A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that people interrupted by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with those left to focus. Stress hormones have been shown to reduce short-term memory, said Gary Small, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Preliminary research shows some people can more easily juggle multiple information streams. These “supertaskers” represent less than 3 percent of the population, according to scientists at the University of Utah.

Other research shows computer use has neurological advantages. In imaging studies, Dr. Small observed that Internet users showed greater brain activity than nonusers, suggesting they were growing their neural circuitry.

At the University of Rochester, researchers found that players of some fast-paced video games can track the movement of a third more objects on a screen than nonplayers. They say the games can improve reaction and the ability to pick out details amid clutter.

“In a sense, those games have a very strong both rehabilitative and educational power,” said the lead researcher, Daphne Bavelier, who is working with others in the field to channel these changes into real-world benefits like safer driving.

There is a vibrant debate among scientists over whether technology’s influence on behavior and the brain is good or bad, and how significant it is.

“The bottom line is, the brain is wired to adapt,” said Steven Yantis, a professor of brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. “There’s no question that rewiring goes on all the time,” he added. But he said it was too early to say whether the changes caused by technology were materially different from others in the past.

Mr. Ophir is loath to call the cognitive changes bad or good, though the impact on analysis and creativity worries him.

He is not just worried about other people. Shortly after he came to Stanford, a professor thanked him for being the one student in class paying full attention and not using a computer or phone. But he recently began using an iPhone and noticed a change; he felt its pull, even when playing with his daughter.

“The media is changing me,” he said. “I hear this internal ping that says: check e-mail and voice mail.”

“I have to work to suppress it.”

Kord Campbell does not bother to suppress it, or no longer can.

Interrupted by a Corpse

It is a Wednesday in April, and in 10 minutes, Mr. Campbell has an online conference call that could determine the fate of his new venture, called Loggly. It makes software that helps companies understand the clicking and buying patterns of their online customers.

Mr. Campbell and his colleagues, each working from a home office, are frantically trying to set up a program that will let them share images with executives at their prospective partner.

But at the moment when Mr. Campbell most needs to focus on that urgent task, something else competes for his attention: “Man Found Dead Inside His Business.”

That is the tweet that appears on the left-most of Mr. Campbell’s array of monitors, which he has expanded to three screens, at times adding a laptop and an iPad.

On the left screen, Mr. Campbell follows the tweets of 1,100 people, along with instant messages and group chats. The middle monitor displays a dark field filled with computer code, along with Skype, a service that allows Mr. Campbell to talk to his colleagues, sometimes using video. The monitor on the right keeps e-mail, a calendar, a Web browser and a music player.

Even with the meeting fast approaching, Mr. Campbell cannot resist the tweet about the corpse. He clicks on the link in it, glances at the article and dismisses it. “It’s some article about something somewhere,” he says, annoyed by the ads for jeans popping up.

The program gets fixed, and the meeting turns out to be fruitful: the partners are ready to do business. A colleague says via instant message: “YES.”

Other times, Mr. Campbell’s information juggling has taken a more serious toll. A few weeks earlier, he once again overlooked an e-mail message from a prospective investor. Another time, Mr. Campbell signed the company up for the wrong type of business account on Amazon.com, costing $300 a month for six months before he got around to correcting it. He has burned hamburgers on the grill, forgotten to pick up the children and lingered in the bathroom playing video games on an iPhone.

Mr. Campbell can be unaware of his own habits. In a two-and-a-half hour stretch one recent morning, he switched rapidly between e-mail and several other programs, according to data from RescueTime, which monitored his computer use with his permission. But when asked later what he was doing in that period, Mr. Campbell said he had been on a long Skype call, and “may have pulled up an e-mail or two.”

The kind of disconnection Mr. Campbell experiences is not an entirely new problem, of course. As they did in earlier eras, people can become so lost in work, hobbies or TV that they fail to pay attention to family.

Mr. Campbell concedes that, even without technology, he may work or play obsessively, just as his father immersed himself in crossword puzzles. But he says this era is different because he can multitask anyplace, anytime.

“It’s a mixed blessing,” he said. “If you’re not careful, your marriage can fall apart or your kids can be ready to play and you’ll get distracted.”

The Toll on Children

Father and son sit in armchairs. Controllers in hand, they engage in a fierce video game battle, displayed on the nearby flat-panel TV, as Lily watches.

They are playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a cartoonish animated fight between characters that battle using anvils, explosives and other weapons.

“Kill him, Dad,” Lily screams. To no avail. Connor regularly beats his father, prompting expletives and, once, a thrown pillow. But there is bonding and mutual respect.

“He’s a lot more tactical,” says Connor. “But I’m really good at quick reflexes.”

Screens big and small are central to the Campbell family’s leisure time. Connor and his mother relax while watching TV shows like “Heroes.” Lily has an iPod Touch, a portable DVD player and her own laptop, which she uses to watch videos, listen to music and play games.

Lily, a second-grader, is allowed only an hour a day of unstructured time, which she often spends with her devices. The laptop can consume her.

“When she’s on it, you can holler her name all day and she won’t hear,” Mrs. Campbell said.

Researchers worry that constant digital stimulation like this creates attention problems for children with brains that are still developing, who already struggle to set priorities and resist impulses.

Connor’s troubles started late last year. He could not focus on homework. No wonder, perhaps. On his bedroom desk sit two monitors, one with his music collection, one with Facebook and Reddit, a social site with news links that he and his father love. His iPhone availed him to relentless texting with his girlfriend.

When he studied, “a little voice would be saying, ‘Look up’ at the computer, and I’d look up,” Connor said. “Normally, I’d say I want to only read for a few minutes, but I’d search every corner of Reddit and then check Facebook.”

His Web browsing informs him. “He’s a fact hound,” Mr. Campbell brags. “Connor is, other than programming, extremely technical. He’s 100 percent Internet savvy.”

But the parents worry too. “Connor is obsessed,” his mother said. “Kord says we have to teach him balance.”

So in January, they held a family meeting. Study time now takes place in a group setting at the dinner table after everyone has finished eating. It feels, Mr. Campbell says, like togetherness.

No Vacations

For spring break, the family rented a cottage in Carmel, Calif. Mrs. Campbell hoped everyone would unplug.

But the day before they left, the iPad from Apple came out, and Mr. Campbell snapped one up. The next night, their first on vacation, “We didn’t go out to dinner,” Mrs. Campbell mourned. “We just sat there on our devices.”

She rallied the troops the next day to the aquarium. Her husband joined them for a bit but then begged out to do e-mail on his phone.

Later she found him playing video games.

The trip came as Mr. Campbell was trying to raise several million dollars for his new venture, a goal that he achieved. Brenda said she understood that his pursuit required intensity but was less understanding of the accompanying surge in video game.

His behavior brought about a discussion between them. Mrs. Campbell said he told her that he was capable of logging off, citing a trip to Hawaii several years ago that they called their second honeymoon.

“What trip are you thinking about?” she said she asked him. She recalled that he had spent two hours a day online in the hotel’s business center.

On Thursday, their fourth day in Carmel, Mr. Campbell spent the day at the beach with his family. They flew a kite and played whiffle ball.

Connor unplugged too. “It changes the mood of everything when everybody is present,” Mrs. Campbell said.

The next day, the family drove home, and Mr. Campbell disappeared into his office.

Technology use is growing for Mrs. Campbell as well. She divides her time between keeping the books of her husband’s company, homemaking and working at the school library. She checks e-mail 25 times a day, sends texts and uses Facebook.

Recently, she was baking peanut butter cookies for Teacher Appreciation Day when her phone chimed in the living room. She answered a text, then became lost in Facebook, forgot about the cookies and burned them. She started a new batch, but heard the phone again, got lost in messaging, and burned those too. Out of ingredients and shamed, she bought cookies at the store.

She feels less focused and has trouble completing projects. Some days, she promises herself she will ignore her device. “It’s like a diet — you have good intentions in the morning and then you’re like, ‘There went that,’ ” she said.

Mr. Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room.

“The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other,” he said. “It shows how much you care.”

That empathy, Mr. Nass said, is essential to the human condition. “We are at an inflection point,” he said. “A significant fraction of people’s experiences are now fragmented.”

    Attached to Technology and Paying a Price, NYT, 6.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html

Max Palevsky, a Pioneer in Computers, Dies at 85

May 6, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Max Palevsky, a pioneer in the computer industry and a founder of the computer-chip giant Intel who used his fortune to back Democratic presidential candidates and to amass an important collection of American Arts and Crafts furniture, died on Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 85.

The cause was heart failure, said Angela Kaye, his assistant.

Mr. Palevsky became intrigued by computers in the early 1950s when he heard the mathematician John von Neumann lecture at the California Institute of Technology on the potential for computer technology. Trained in symbolic logic and mathematics, Mr. Palevsky was studying and teaching philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, but followed his hunch and left the academy.

After working on logic design for the Bendix Corporation’s first computer, in 1957 he joined the Packard Bell Computer Corporation, a new division of the electronics company Packard Bell.

In 1961, he and 11 colleagues from Packard Bell founded Scientific Data Systems to build small and medium-size business computers, a market niche they believed was being ignored by giants like I.B.M. The formula worked, and in 1969 Xerox bought the company for $1 billion, with Mr. Palevsky taking home a 10 percent share of the sale.

In 1968 he applied some of that money to financing a small start-up company in Santa Clara to make semiconductors. It became Intel, today the world’s largest producer of computer chips.

A staunch liberal, Mr. Palevsky first ventured into electoral politics in the 1960s when he became involved in the journalist Tom Braden’s race for lieutenant governor of California and Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency.

Mr. Palevsky pursued politics with zeal and whopping contributions of money. He bet heavily on Senator George McGovern — who first began running for the presidency in 1972 — donating more than $300,000 to a campaign that barely existed.

His financial support and organizing work for Tom Bradley, a Los Angeles city councilman, propelled Mr. Bradley, in 1973, to the first of his five terms as mayor. During the campaign, Mr. Palevsky recruited Gray Davis as Mr. Bradley’s chief fund-raiser, opening the door to a political career for Mr. Davis that later led to the governorship.

Mr. Palevsky later became disenchanted with the power of money in the American political system and adopted campaign finance reform as his pet issue. Overcoming his lifelong aversion to Republican candidates, he raised money for Senator John McCain of Arizona, an advocate of campaign finance reform, during the 2000 presidential primary. Mr. Palevsky also became a leading supporter of the conservative-backed Proposition 25, a state ballot initiative in 2000 that would limit campaign contributions by individuals and ban contributions by corporations.

Mr. Palevsky donated $1 million to the Proposition 25 campaign, his largest political contribution ever. “I am making this million-dollar contribution in hopes that I will never again legally be allowed to write huge checks to California political candidates,” he told Newsweek.

His support put him in direct conflict with Governor Davis, the state Democratic Party and labor unions, whose combined efforts to rally voter support ended in the measure’s defeat.

Max Palevsky was born on July 24, 1924, in Chicago. His father, a house painter who had immigrated from Russia, struggled during the Depression, and Mr. Palevsky described his childhood as “disastrous.”

During World War II he served with the Army Air Corps doing electronics repair work on airplanes in New Guinea. On returning home, he attended the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill, earning bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and philosophy in 1948. He went on to do graduate work in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and U.C.L.A.

Money allowed him to indulge his interests. He collected Modernist art, but in the early 1970s, while strolling through SoHo in Manhattan, he became fixated on a desk by the Arts and Crafts designer Gustav Stickley. Mr. Palevsky amassed an important collection of Arts and Crafts furniture and Japanese woodcuts, which he donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

He also plunged into film production. He helped finance Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” in 1973, and, with the former Paramount executive Peter Bart, produced “Fun With Dick and Jane” in 2005, and, in 1977, “Islands in the Stream.” In 1970 he rescued the foundering Rolling Stone magazine by buying a substantial block of its stock.

Mr. Palevsky married and divorced five times. He is survived by a sister, Helen Futterman of Los Angeles; a daughter, Madeleine Moskowitz of Los Angeles; four sons: Nicholas, of Bangkok, Alexander and Jonathan, both of Los Angeles, and Matthew, of Brooklyn; and four grandchildren.

Despite his groundbreaking work in the computer industry, Mr. Palevsky remained skeptical about the cultural influence of computer technology. In a catalog essay for an Arts and Crafts exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2005, he lamented “the hypnotic quality of computer games, the substitution of a Google search for genuine inquiry, the instant messaging that has replaced social discourse.”

He meant it too. “I don’t own a computer,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2008. “I don’t own a cellphone, I don’t own any electronics. I do own a radio.”

    Max Palevsky, a Pioneer in Computers, Dies at 85, NYT, 6.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/us/07palevsky.html

H. Edward Roberts, PC Pioneer, Dies at 68

April 2, 2010
The New York Times
By STEVE LOHR

Not many people in the computer world remembered H. Edward Roberts, not after he walked away from the industry more than three decades ago to become a country doctor in Georgia. Bill Gates remembered him, though.

As Dr. Roberts lay dying last week in a hospital in Macon, Ga., suffering from pneumonia, Mr. Gates flew down to be at his bedside.

Mr. Gates knew what many had forgotten: that Dr. Roberts had made an early and enduring contribution to modern computing. He created the MITS Altair, the first inexpensive general-purpose microcomputer, a device that could be programmed to do all manner of tasks. For that achievement, some historians say Dr. Roberts deserves to be recognized as the inventor of the personal computer.

For Mr. Gates, the connection to Dr. Roberts was also personal. It was writing software for the MITS Altair that gave Mr. Gates, a student at Harvard at the time, and his Microsoft partner, Paul G. Allen, their start. Later, they moved to Albuquerque, where Dr. Roberts had set up shop.

Dr. Roberts died Thursday at the Medical Center of Middle Georgia, his son Martin said. He was 68.

When the Altair was introduced in the mid-1970s, personal computers — then called microcomputers — were mainly intriguing electronic gadgets for hobbyists, the sort of people who tinkered with ham radio kits.

Dr. Roberts, it seems, was a classic hobbyist entrepreneur. He left his mark on computing, built a nice little business, sold it and moved on — well before personal computers moved into the mainstream of business and society.

Mr. Gates, as history proved, had far larger ambitions.

Over the years, there was some lingering animosity between the two men, and Dr. Roberts pointedly kept his distance from industry events — like the 20th anniversary celebration in Silicon Valley of the introduction of the I.B.M. PC in 1981, which signaled the corporate endorsement of PCs.

But in recent months, after learning that Dr. Roberts was ill, Mr. Gates made a point of reaching out to his former boss and customer. Mr. Gates sent Dr. Roberts a letter last December and followed up with phone calls, another son, Dr. John David Roberts, said. Eight days ago, Mr. Gates visited the elder Dr. Roberts at his bedside in Macon.

“Any past problems between those two were long since forgotten,” said Dr. John David Roberts, who had accompanied Mr. Gates to the hospital. He added that Mr. Allen, the other Microsoft founder, had also called the elder Dr. Roberts frequently in recent months.

On his Web site, Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen posted a joint statement, saying they were saddened by the death of “our friend and early mentor.”

“Ed was willing to take a chance on us — two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace — and we have always been grateful to him,” the statement said.

When the small MITS Altair appeared on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics, Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen plunged into writing a version of the Basic programming language that could run on the machine.

Mr. Gates dropped out of Harvard, and Mr. Allen left his job at Honeywell in Boston. The product they created for Dr. Roberts’s machine, Microsoft Basic, was the beginning of what would become the world’s largest software company and would make its founders billionaires many times over.

MITS was the kingpin of the fledgling personal computer business only briefly. In 1977, Mr. Roberts sold his company. He walked away a millionaire. But as a part of the sale, he agreed not to design computers for five years, an eternity in computing. It was a condition that Mr. Roberts, looking for a change, accepted.

He first invested in farmland in Georgia. After a few years, he switched course and decided to revive a childhood dream of becoming a physician, earning his medical degree in 1986 from Mercer University in Macon. He became a general practitioner in Cochran, 35 miles northwest of the university.

In Albuquerque, Dr. Roberts, a burly, 6-foot-4 former Air Force officer, often clashed with Mr. Gates, the skinny college dropout. Mr. Gates was “a very bright kid, but he was a constant headache at MITS,” Dr. Roberts said in an interview with The New York Times at his office in 2001.

“You couldn’t reason with him,” he added. “He did things his way or not at all.”

His former MITS colleagues recalled that Dr. Roberts could be hardheaded as well. “Unlike the rest of us, Bill never backed down from Ed Roberts face to face,” David Bunnell, a former MITS employee, said in 2001. “When they disagreed, sparks flew.”

Over the years, people have credited others with inventing the personal computer, including the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Apple and I.B.M. But Paul E. Ceruzzi, a technology historian at the Smithsonian Institution, wrote in “ History of Modern Computing” (MIT Press, 1998) that “H. Edward Roberts, the Altair’s designer, deserves credit as the inventor of the personal computer.”

Mr. Ceruzzi noted the “utter improbability and unpredictability” of having one of the most significant inventions of the 20th century come to life from such a seemingly obscure origin. “But Albuquerque it was,” Mr. Ceruzzi wrote, “for it was only at MITS that the technical and social components of personal computing converged.”

H. Edward Roberts was born in Miami on Sept. 13, 1941. His father, Henry Melvin Roberts, ran a household appliance repair service, and his mother, Edna Wilcher Roberts, was a nurse. As a young man, he wanted to be a doctor and, in fact, became intrigued by electronics working with doctors at the University of Miami who were doing experimental heart surgery. He built the electronics for a heart-lung machine. “That’s how I got into it,” Dr. Roberts recalled in 2001.

So he abandoned his intended field and majored in electrical engineering at Oklahoma State University. Then, he worked on a room-size I.B.M. computer. But the power of computing, Dr. Roberts recalled, “opened up a whole new world. And I began thinking, What if you gave everyone a computer?”

In addition to his sons Martin, of Glenwood, Ga., and John David, of Eastman, Ga., Dr. Roberts is survived by his mother, Edna Wilcher Roberts, of Dublin, Ga., his wife, Rosa Roberts of Cochran; his sons Edward, of Atlanta, and Melvin and Clark, both of Athens, Ga.; his daughter, Dawn Roberts, of Warner Robins, Ga.; three grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

His previous two marriages, to Donna Mauldin Roberts and Joan C. Roberts, ended in divorce.

His sons said Dr. Roberts never gave up his love for making things, for tinkering and invention. He was an accomplished woodworker, making furniture for his household, family and friends. He made a Star Wars-style light saber for a neighbor’s son, using light-emitting diodes. And several years ago he designed his own electronic medical records software, though he never tried to market it, his son Dr. Roberts said.

“Once he figured something out,” he added, “he was on to the next thing.”

    H. Edward Roberts, PC Pioneer, Dies at 68, NYT, 2.5.2010,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03roberts.html

Just a Touch Away, the Elusive Tablet PC

October 5, 2009
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE and ASHLEE VANCE

SAN FRANCISCO — The high-tech industry has been working itself into paroxysms of excitement lately over an idea that is not exactly new: tablet computers.

Quietly, several high-tech companies are lining up to deliver versions of these keyboard-free, touch-screen portable machines in the next few months. Industry watchers have their eye on Apple in particular to sell such a device by early next year.

Tablets have been around in various forms for two decades, thus far delivering little other than memorable failure. Nonetheless, the new batch of devices has gripped the imagination of tech executives, bloggers and gadget hounds, who are projecting their wildest dreams onto these literal blank slates.

In these visions, tablets will save the newspaper and book publishing industries, present another way to watch television and movies, play video games, and offer a visually rich way to enjoy the Web and the expanding world of mobile applications.

“Desktops, laptops — we already know how those work,” said Brian Lam, editorial director of the popular gadget site Gizmodo, which reports and hypothesizes almost daily about these devices. Tablets, he said, “are one of the last few mysteries left.”

Tablet computers were first conceived as a way to supplant plain old paper, in the same way that PCs replaced the typewriter.

In 1993, Apple’s Newton MessagePad, with its expansive screen and stylus pen, became known less for its innovative features than for being lampooned in “Doonesbury,” which ridiculed the device for its flawed handwriting recognition. Steven P. Jobs killed the Newton when he returned to Apple in 1997.

Then in 2001, at Comdex, the industry trade show, Bill Gates introduced new Windows software for tablets with a bold prediction: within five years, he said, tablets “will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.” It didn’t happen, of course. Tablets running Windows sell only a few hundred thousand units a year, mostly in business fields like health care and financial services.

There were basic problems with these early tablets: they cost too much and did not do enough.

“Software engineers got ahead of the hardware capabilities,” said Paul Jackson, a consumer product analyst at Forrester Research. “But we may be finally getting to the point where the dreams and aspirations of those designers are actually meeting capable and reasonably priced technology.”

You can thank Moore’s Law and the immutable advance of technology for that. Integrated microchips now combine wireless connectivity and support for features like multimedia, GPS functions and rich graphics. They are also more energy-efficient.

At the same time, the iPhone and its imitators have demonstrated that new tactile touch screens work and that people are comfortable with them, in a way they never got accustomed to using earlier tablets and stylus pens.

“We darn well should be about ready to take advantage of this stuff. It’s time,” said Bill Buxton, a researcher at Microsoft who has been working on multitouch systems for 20 years, and has a comprehensive collection of tablets and touch screens he keeps in his office in Toronto.

The drumbeat of tablet product introductions has already begun. In June, Archos, a French consumer electronics company, began selling a small touch-screen tablet running Google’s Android software. Later this month, it will introduce another tablet that runs on Microsoft’s Windows 7, which has built-in support for touch screens.

“A road warrior doesn’t want to take a big clamshell netbook with him,” said Frédéric Balaÿ, vice president for marketing at Archos.

The industry blog TechCrunch has also commissioned its own Web tablet, called the CrunchPad, which it has said it will start selling later this year.

Despite its past bruises in the tablet business, Microsoft appears ready to try again. In September, images of a booklike Microsoft device called Courier, with two 7-inch color screens, surfaced on Gizmodo.

In an interview, Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, would not discuss that product in particular, but said the company devises such prototypes all the time, so it can take them to its hardware partners. Still, rumors of a Microsoft tablet computer sparked interest. “I got an e-mail from some customer who said, ‘I want that,’ ” Mr. Ballmer said.

Apple’s rumored tablet is the most highly anticipated of the lot. Analysts expect Apple to introduce it early next year — a sort of expanded, souped-up version of the iPod Touch, priced at around $700.

Last week, Apple rehired the original chief marketer of its old Newton, Michael Tchao, who was working at Nike. Mr. Tchao’s former Apple colleagues believe he will help market this new device.

Colin Smith, an Apple spokesman, declined to comment on the company’s recruitment or product plans. But Apple’s tablet will most likely have little in common with the Newton, which was essentially a personal digital assistant. The new crop of tablets is being viewed as more flexible — gadgets that combine elements of the iPhone, e-book readers like the Kindle and laptops.

Apple has been working on such a Swiss Army knife tablet since at least 2003, according to several former employees. One prototype, developed in 2003, used PowerPC microchips made by I.B.M., which were so power-hungry that they quickly drained the battery.

“It couldn’t be built. The battery life wasn’t long enough, the graphics performance was not enough to do anything and the components themselves cost more than $500,” said Joshua A. Strickland, a former Apple engineer whose name is on several of the company’s patents for multitouch technology.

Another former Apple executive who was there at the time said the tablets kept getting shelved at Apple because Mr. Jobs, whose incisive critiques are often memorable, asked, in essence, what they were good for besides surfing the Web in the bathroom.

The success of the iPhone may have partially helped to answer that question. As of last month, developers had created 85,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch — video games, social networking software, restaurant finders and more. Analysts believe that all those programs will immediately work on the new tablet while developers begin to tailor new software for the larger screen.

Despite the preponderance of apps, there is still the persistent question of whether regular people will really find a use for tablet computers. Smaller cellphones are increasingly multipurpose and fit nicely in a jacket pocket. And low-end laptops are inexpensive, run a full-fledged operating system and offer the luxury of a keyboard.

“I can imagine something like the iPhone with a much bigger screen being a gorgeous device with great capacity, but I don’t know where I would fit that into my life,” said a former Apple executive, who declined to be named because of Apple’s secrecy policies, but who anticipates an Apple tablet next year. “Those are the debates that have been happening inside Apple for quite some time.”

    Just a Touch Away, the Elusive Tablet PC, NYT, 5.10.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/technology/05tablet.html

Robert Spinrad, a Pioneer in Computing, Dies at 77

September 7, 2009
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

Robert J. Spinrad, a computer designer who carried out pioneering work in scientific automation at Brookhaven National Laboratory and who later was director of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center while the personal computing technology invented there in the 1970s was commercialized, died on Wednesday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 77.

The cause was Lou Gehrig’s disease, his wife, Verna, said.

Trained in electrical engineering before computer science was a widely taught discipline, Dr. Spinrad built his own computer from discarded telephone switching equipment while he was a student at Columbia.

He said that while he was proud of his creation, at the time most people had no interest in the machines. “I may as well have been talking about the study of Kwakiutl Indians, for all my friends knew,” he told a reporter for The New York Times in 1983.

At Brookhaven he would design a room-size, tube-based computer he named Merlin, as part of an early generation of computer systems used to automate scientific experimentation. He referred to the machine, which was built before transistors were widely used in computers, as “the last of the dinosaurs.”

After arriving at Brookhaven, Dr. Spinrad spent a summer at Los Alamos National Laboratories, where he learned about scientific computer design by studying an early machine known as Maniac, designed by Nicholas Metropolis, a physicist. Dr. Spinrad’s group at Brookhaven developed techniques for using computers to run experiments and to analyze and display data as well as to control experiments interactively in response to earlier measurements.

Later, while serving as the head of the Computer Systems Group at Brookhaven, Dr. Spinrad wrote a cover article on laboratory automation for the Oct. 6, 1967, issue of Science magazine.

“He was really the father of modern laboratory automation,” said Joel Birnbaum, a physicist who designed computers at both I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard. “He had a lot of great ideas about how you connected computers to instruments. He realized that it wasn’t enough to just build a loop between the computer and the apparatus, but that the most important piece of the apparatus was the scientist.”

After leaving Brookhaven, Dr. Spinrad joined Scientific Data Systems in Los Angeles as a computer designer and manager. When the company was bought by the Xerox Corporation in an effort to compete with I.B.M., he participated in Xerox’s decision to put a research laboratory next to the campus of Stanford.

Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center pioneered the technology that led directly to the modern personal computer and office data networks.

Taking over as director of the laboratory in 1978, Dr. Spinrad oversaw a period when the laboratory’s technology was commercialized, including the first modern personal computer, the ethernet local area network and the laser printer.

However, as a copier company, Xerox was never a comfortable fit for the emerging computing world, and many of the laboratory researchers left Xerox, often taking their innovations with them.

At the center, Dr. Spinrad became adept at bridging the cultural gulf between the lab’s button-down East Coast corporations and its unruly and innovative West Coast researchers.

Robert Spinrad was born in Manhattan on March 20, 1932. He received an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Columbia and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In addition to his wife, Verna, he is survived by two children, Paul, of San Francisco, and Susan Spinrad Esterly, of Palo Alto, and three grandchildren.

Flying between Norwalk, Conn., and Palo Alto frequently, Dr. Spinrad once recalled how he felt like Superman in reverse because he would invariably step into the airplane’s lavatory to change into a suit for his visit to the company headquarters.

    Robert Spinrad, a Pioneer in Computing, Dies at 77, NYT, 7.9.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/technology/07spinrad.html

PC Touch Screens Move Ahead

June 3, 2009
The New York Times
By ASHLEE VANCE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The computer industry has a lot riding on your fingers.

For years, companies have dabbled with the touch-screen technology that lets people poke icons on a display to accomplish tasks like picking a seat at an airport check-in kiosk. Apple elevated such technology from a novelty to a must-have feature on mobile devices with its iPhone. People can flip through pictures with a flick of a finger or make a document larger by pressing two fingers against the screen and stretching them out.

Now both personal computer manufacturers and software makers hope to do more with touch on larger devices by giving people a 10-fingered go at their screens.

“You don’t even operate your TV with two fingers,” said Amichai Ben-David, the chief executive officer of N-trig, which produces touch-screen technology for PC makers. “In order for this to feel really natural, you need more than two fingers for sure.”

The PC industry hopes the feature spurs sales. PC makers like Hewlett-Packard and Dell have been clobbered during the recession as struggling businesses drop computer upgrades to the bottom of their to-do lists. Consumers have shown more interest in new machines, but they are buying cheap, tiny laptops rather than decked-out goliaths.

H.P., Dell, Intel and Microsoft expect that when companies and consumers increase their spending, touch technology will be one of the things that nudge them to upgrade. Computers with the special screens will probably cost consumers about $100 more than standard machines.

H.P. has been selling a PC with an early version of touch technology. The $1,150 TouchSmart PC has been popular, H.P. says, particularly in kitchens as a family computer. But outside of science-fiction films, touch computers have been met with lukewarm reactions. Tabletlike computers that ship with plastic pens for marking on screens remain a niche in the overall PC market, as do pure touch machines. Mr. Ben-David said that about two million of about 300 million PCs sold last year were touch computers.

H.P. has already been pushing touch technology to large businesses. It sells a custom touch interface for both desktops and laptops. Customers can turn these machines into bespoke kiosks for, say, ordering merchandise at a sporting event or flipping through a menu while waiting at a restaurant.

The PC industry wants to make touch functions more sophisticated and widespread. On-screen objects could be twisted and turned with several fingers, mimicking the action used in real life. The next version of Windows from Microsoft, Windows 7, will usher in a new era of touch technology when it appears on PCs later this year, according to Mr. Ben-David. Backed by Microsoft, Israel-based N-trig uses a combination of software and sensors to create a special type of computer screen that can interact with pens and fingers. N-trig’s technology works by pumping an electrical signal through the screen. When a finger hits the screen, the electricity is discharged. Software interprets that to move graphics on the screen. The company claims that its technology works better on the larger displays of laptops and PCs since it handles many inputs at once.

Working together, Microsoft and N-trig have created a type of software interface that lets other companies add touch functions to their programs. Such touch software can handle lots of fingers hitting a screen at once rather than just relying on one or two digits, as most of today’s touch screens do.

N-trig hopes to build more momentum later this year, when three more PC makers are set to join H.P. and Dell as backers of the touch technology. It did not disclose the names of those companies.

The big question is whether companies can create software that makes touch useful rather than a mere curiosity.

Corel, which makes document and photo editing software, also plans touch products that rely on N-trig’s technology for Windows 7.

SpaceClaim, which makes software for designing objects in 3-D, has taken a business-oriented approach to touch. Its software, which will work with Windows 7, creates 3-D models that can be turned, pinched and altered via two-handed touches. Frank DeSimone, the head of development urges other software makers to try something new and stick with the technology rather than just replicating the functions of a mouse.

“A lot of people say they will support touch, but they do a disservice to everyone by not doing anything interesting,” he said.

    PC Touch Screens Move Ahead, NYT, 3.6.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/technology/03touch.html

Intel Adopts an Identity in Software

May 25, 2009
The New York Times
By ASHLEE VANCE

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Intel has worked hard and spent a lot of money over the years to shape its image: It is the company that celebrates its quest to make computer chips ever smaller, faster and cheaper with a quick five-note jingle at the end of its commercials.

But as Intel tries to expand beyond the personal computer chip business, it is changing in subtle ways. For the first time, its long unheralded software developers, more than 3,000 of them, have stolen some of the spotlight from its hardware engineers. These programmers find themselves at the center of Intel’s forays into areas like mobile phones and video games.

The most attention-grabbing element of Intel’s software push is a version of the open-source Linux operating system called Moblin. It represents a direct assault on the Windows franchise of Microsoft, Intel’s longtime partner.

“This is a very determined, risky effort on Intel’s part,” said Mark Shuttleworth, the chief executive of Canonical, which makes another version of Linux called Ubuntu.

The Moblin software resembles Windows or Apple’s Mac OS X to a degree, handling the basic functions of running a computer. But it has a few twists as well that Intel says make it better suited for small mobile devices.

For example, Moblin fires up and reaches the Internet in about seven seconds, then displays a novel type of start-up screen. People will find their appointments listed on one side of the screen, along with their favorite programs. But the bulk of the screen is taken up by cartoonish icons that show things like social networking updates from friends, photos and recently used documents.

With animated icons and other quirky bits and pieces, Moblin looks like a fresh take on the operating system. Some companies hope it will give Microsoft a strong challenge in the market for the small, cheap laptops commonly known as netbooks. A polished second version of the software, which is in trials, should start appearing on a variety of netbooks this summer.

“We really view this as an opportunity and a game changer,” said Ronald W. Hovsepian, the chief executive of Novell, which plans to offer a customized version on Moblin to computer makers. Novell views Moblin as a way to extend its business selling software and services related to Linux.

While Moblin fits netbooks well today, it was built with smartphones in mind. Those smartphones explain why Intel was willing to needle Microsoft.

Intel has previously tried and failed to carve out a prominent stake in the market for chips used in smaller computing devices like phones. But the company says one of its newer chips, called Atom, will solve this riddle and help it compete against the likes of Texas Instruments and Qualcomm.

The low-power, low-cost Atom chip sits inside most of the netbooks sold today, and smartphones using the chip could start arriving in the next couple of years.

To make Atom a success, Intel plans to use software for leverage. Its needs Moblin because most of the cellphone software available today runs on chips whose architecture is different from Atom’s. To make Atom a worthwhile choice for phone makers, there must be a supply of good software that runs on it.

“The smartphone is certainly the end goal,” said Doug Fisher, a vice president in Intel’s software group. “It’s absolutely critical for the success of this product.”

Though large, Intel’s software group has remained out of the spotlight for years. Intel considers its software work a silent helping hand for computer makers.

Mostly, the group sells tools that help other software developers take advantage of features in Intel’s chips. It also offers free consulting services to help large companies wring the most performance out of their code, in a bid to sell more chips.

Renee J. James, Intel’s vice president in charge of software, explained, “You can’t just throw hardware out there into the world.”

Intel declines to disclose its revenue from these tools, but it is a tiny fraction of the close to $40 billion in sales Intel racks up every year.

Still, the software group is one of the largest at Intel and one of the largest such organizations at any company.

In the last few years, Intel’s investment in Linux, the main rival to Windows, has increased. Intel has hired some of the top Linux developers, including Alan Cox from Red Hat, the leading Linux seller, last year. Intel pays these developers to improve Linux as a whole and to further the company’s own projects like Moblin.

“Intel definitely ranks pretty highly when it comes to meaningful contributions,” Linus Torvalds, who created the core of Linux and maintains the software, wrote in an e-mail message. “They went from apparently not having much of a strategy at all to having a rather wide team.”

Intel has also bought software companies. Last year, it acquired OpenedHand, a company whose work has turned into the base of the new Moblin user interface.

It has also bought a handful of software companies with expertise in gaming and graphics technology. Such software is meant to create a foundation to support Intel’s release of new high-powered graphics chips next year. Intel hopes the graphics products will let it compete better against Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices and open up another new business.

Intel tries to play down its competition with Microsoft. Since Moblin is open source, anyone can pick it up and use it. Companies like Novell will be the ones actually offering the software to PC makers, while Intel will stay in the background. Still, Ms. James says that Intel’s relationship with Microsoft has turned more prickly.

“It is not without its tense days,” she said.

Microsoft says Intel faces serious hurdles as it tries to stake a claim in the operating system market.

“I think it will introduce some challenges for them just based on our experience of having built operating systems for 25 years or so,” said James DeBragga, the general manager of Microsoft’s Windows consumer team.

While Linux started out as a popular choice on netbooks, Microsoft now dominates the market. Microsoft doubts whether something like Moblin’s glossy interface will be enough to woo consumers who are used to Windows.

Intel says people are ready for something new on mobile devices, which are geared more to the Internet than to running desktop-style programs.

“I am a risk taker,” Ms. James of Intel said. “I have that outlook that if there’s a possibility of doing something different, we should explore trying it.”

    Intel Adopts an Identity in Software, NYT, 25.5.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/technology/business-computing/25soft.html

I.B.M. Unveils Real-Time Software to Find Trends in Vast Data Sets

May 21, 2009
The New York Times
By ASHLEE VANCE

New software from I.B.M. can suck up huge volumes of data from many sources and quickly identify correlations within it. The company says it expects the software to be useful in analyzing finance, health care and even space weather.

Bo Thidé, a scientist at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, has been testing an early version of the software as he studies the ways in which things like gas clouds and particles cast off by the sun can disrupt communications networks on Earth. The new software, which I.B.M. calls stream processing, makes it possible for Mr. Thidé and his team of researchers to gather and analyze vast amounts of information at a record pace.

“For us, there is no chance in the world that you can think about storing data and analyzing it tomorrow,” Mr. Thidé said. “There is no tomorrow. We need a smart system that can give you hints about what is happening out there right now.”

I.B.M., based in Armonk, N.Y., spent close to six years working on the software and has just moved to start selling a product based on it called System S. The company expects it to encourage breakthroughs in fields like finance and city management by helping people better understand patterns in data.

Steven A. Mills, I.B.M.’s senior vice president for software, notes that financial companies have spent years trying to gain trading edges by sorting through various sets of information. “The challenge in that industry has not been ‘Could you collect all the data?’ but ‘Could you collect it all together and analyze it in real time?’ ” Mr. Mills said.

To that end, the new software harnesses advances in computing and networking horsepower in a fashion that analysts and customers describe as unprecedented.

Instead of creating separate large databases to track things like currency movements, stock trading patterns and housing data, the System S software can meld all of that information together. In addition, it could theoretically then layer on databases that tracked current events, like news headlines on the Internet or weather fluctuations, to try to gauge how such factors interplay with the financial data.

Most computers, of course, can digest large stores of information if given enough time. But I.B.M. has succeeded in performing very quick analyses on larger hunks of combined data than most companies are used to handling.

“It’s that combination of size and speed that had yet to be solved,” said Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata, a technology industry research firm.

Conveniently for I.B.M., the System S software matured in time to match up with the company’s “Smarter Planet” campaign. I.B.M. has flooded the airwaves with commercials about using technology to run things like power grids and hospitals more efficiently.

The company suggests, for example, that a hospital could tap the System S technology to monitor not only individual patients but also entire patient databases, as well as medication and diagnostics systems. If all goes according to plan, the computing systems could alert nurses and doctors to emerging problems.

Analysts say the technology could also provide companies with a new edge as they grapple with doing business on a global scale.

“With globalization, more and more markets are heading closer to perfect competition models,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with Gabriel Consulting. “This means that companies have to get smarter about how they use their data and find previously unseen opportunities.”

Buying such an advantage from I.B.M. has its price. The company will charge at least hundreds of thousands of dollars for the software, Mr. Mills said.

    I.B.M. Unveils Real-Time Software to Find Trends in Vast Data Sets, NYT, 21.5.2009,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/technology/business-computing/21stream.html

Oliver Selfridge, an Early Innovator in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 82

December 4, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

Oliver G. Selfridge, an innovator in early computer science and artificial intelligence, died on Wednesday in Boston. He was 82.

The cause was injuries suffered in a fall on Sunday at his home in nearby Belmont, Mass., said his companion, Edwina L. Rissland.

Credited with coining the term “intelligent agents,” for software programs capable of observing and responding to changes in their environment, Mr. Selfridge theorized about far more, including devices that would not only automate certain tasks but also learn through practice how to perform them better, faster and more cheaply.

Eventually, he said, machines would be able to analyze operator instructions to discern not just what users requested but what they actually wanted to occur, not always the same thing.

His 1958 paper “Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning,” which proposed a collection of small components dubbed “demons” that together would allow machines to recognize patterns, was a landmark contribution to the emerging science of machine learning.

An early enthusiast about the potential of interactive computing, Mr. Selfridge saw his ideas summarized in a famous 1968 paper, “The Computer as a Communications Device,” written by J. C. R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor and published in the journal Science and Technology.

Honoring Mr. Selfridge, the authors proposed a device they referred to as Oliver, an acronym for On-Line Interactive Vicarious Expediter and Responder. Oliver was one of the clearest early descriptions of a computerized personal assistant.

With four other colleagues, Mr. Selfridge helped organize a 1956 conference at Dartmouth that led directly to creation of the field of artificial intelligence.

“Oliver was one of the founding fathers of the discipline of artificial intelligence,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. “He has been well known in the field for his early and prescient writings on the challenge of endowing machines with the ability to learn to recognize patterns.”

Oliver Gordon Selfridge, a grandson of H. Gordon Selfridge, the American who founded Selfridges department store in London, was born in London on May 10, 1926. The family lost control of the business during the Depression and emigrated to the United States at the onset of World War II.

Mr. Selfridge attended Middlesex School in Concord, Mass., and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he graduated at 19 with a degree in mathematics. After service in the Navy, he embarked on graduate study at M.I.T. under Norbert Weiner, the pioneering theorist of computer science. He became one of Weiner’s collaborators but plunged into the working world of computer science before earning an advanced degree.

In the 1960s Mr. Selfridge was associate director for Project MAC, an early time-shared computing research project at M.I.T. He did much of this work at the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory, a federally financed research center for security technology. He then worked at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, now BBN Technologies, which develops computer and communications-related technology. In 1983 he became chief scientist for the telecommunications company GTE.

He began advising the nation’s national security leaders in the 1950s, among other tasks serving on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Security Agency.

His first marriage, to Allison Gilman Selfridge, and his second, to Katherine Bull Selfridge, ended in divorce. Besides his companion, his survivors include their daughter, Olivia Selfridge Rissland of Belmont; three children from his first marriage, Peter Selfridge of Bethesda, Md.; Mallory Selfridge of Eastford, Conn.; and Caroline Selfridge of Saratoga, Calif.; a sister, Jennifer Selfridge MacLeod of Princeton Junction, N.J.; and six grandchildren.

Along with producing scholarly papers and technical books, Mr. Selfridge wrote “Fingers Come in Fives,” “All About Mud” and “Trouble With Dragons,” all books for children. At his death he was working on a series of books he hoped might one day become an arithmetic equivalent of summer reading projects for schoolchildren.

Mr. Selfridge never stopped theorizing, speaking and writing on what he saw as the future of artificial intelligence.

“I want an agent that can learn and adapt as I might,” he once told a meeting organized by I.B.M. Such an agent would “infer what I would want it to do, from the updated purposes it has learned from working for me,” he went on, and “do as I want rather than the silly things I might say.”

    Oliver Selfridge, an Early Innovator in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 82, NYT, 4.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/us/04selfridge.html

Burned Once,

Intel Prepares New Chip Fortified by Constant Tests

November 17, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

HILLSBORO, Ore. — Rows and rows of computers in Intel’s labs here relentlessly torture-tested the company’s new microprocessor for months on end.

But on a recent tour of the labs, John Barton, an Intel vice president in charge of product testing, acknowledged that he was still feeling anxious about the possibility of a last-minute, show-stopping flaw.

After all, even the slightest design error in the chip could end up being a billion-dollar mistake.

“I’m not sleeping well yet,” Mr. Barton said.

Intel’s Core i7 microprocessor, code-named Nehalem, which goes on sale Monday, has already received glowing technical reviews. But it is impossible for Mr. Barton to predict exactly how the chip will function in thousands of computers running tens of thousands of programs.

The design and testing of an advanced microprocessor chip is among the most complex of all human endeavors. To ensure that its products are as error-free as possible, Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., now spends a half-billion dollars annually in its factories around the world, testing the chips for more than a year before selling them.

There is good reason for the caution. In 1994, the giant chip maker was humbled by a tiny error in the floating point calculation unit of its Pentium chips. The flaw, which led to an embarrassing recall, prompted a wrenching cultural shift at the company, which had minimized the testing requirements of the Pentium.

A series of bugs last year in the Barcelona microprocessor from Intel’s main competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, was equally devastating.

A.M.D., based in Sunnyvale, Calif., had been making steady progress, offering new processor technologies long before Intel and handily winning the power-efficiency war. But the quality problems that slammed A.M.D. cost the company revenue for several quarters and landed it in a hole from which it has yet to dig out.

If Nehalem is a hit for Intel, it will represent vindication for Andrew Grove, the company’s former chief, who acknowledged that he had been blindsided by the Pentium problems and then set out to reform the company.

The Pentium bug badly damaged Intel’s brand with consumers. The company quickly became a laughingstock as jokes made the rounds of the Internet: Q: Know how the Republicans can cut taxes and pay the deficit at the same time? A: Their spreadsheet runs on a Pentium computer.

After initially appearing to stonewall, Intel reversed course and issued an apology while setting aside $420 million to pay for the recall.

The company put Mr. Grove’s celebrated remark about the situation on key chains: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

Those words weigh heavily on the shoulders of Mr. Barton and his colleagues — as does the pressure from Intel’s customers around the world whose very survival is based on the ability to create new products with the company’s chips at their heart. Nehalem is initially aimed at desktop computers, but the company hopes it will eventually be found in everything from powerful servers to laptops.

“Our business model is now predicated on saying to the consumer, ‘You will get a new set of functionality by a particular date,’ ” Mr. Barton said. “We did get a new dimension of business pressure that says we can’t take our merry time turning it out whenever we feel like it.”

The pressure for a successful product is especially intense now as the overall technology industry faces a serious slump. Intel’s chief executive, Paul S. Otellini, said last month that the company was getting “mixed signals” from customers about future spending. Intel’s stock fell 7.7 percent on Friday to $13.32, a six-year low, in a broad market drop.

With Nehalem, Intel’s designers took the company’s previous generation of chips and added a host of features, each of which adds complexity and raises the possibility of unpredictable interactions.

“Now we are hitting systemic complexity,” said Aart de Geus, chief executive of Synopsys, a Silicon Valley developer of chip design tools. “Things that came from different angles that used to be independent have become interdependent.”

Trying to define the complexity that Mr. Barton and his team face is itself a challenge. Even in the late 1970s, chips were being designed that were as complicated as the street map of a large city.

Mr. Barton’s love affair with the world of electronics began as a child, when he took apart a walkie-talkie his father had given him and counted its transistors: a total of seven. The change in his lifetime, he said, has been “mind-boggling.”

Going from the Intel 8088 — the processor used in the IBM PC 27 years ago — to the Nehalem involves a jump from 29,000 transistors to 731 million, on a silicon chip roughly the same size.

Mr. Barton equates the two by comparing a city the size of Ithaca, N.Y., to the continent of Europe. “Ithaca is quite complex in its own right if you think of all that goes on,” he said. “If we scale up the population to 730 million, we come to Europe as about the right size. Now take Europe and shrink it until it all fits in about the same land mass as Ithaca.”

Even given a lifetime, it would be impossible to test more than the smallest fraction of the total possible “states” that the Nehalem chip can be programmed in, which are easily more plentiful than all the atoms in the universe.

Modern designers combat complexity by turning to modular design techniques, making it possible to simplify drastically what needs to be tested.

“Instead of testing for every possible case, you break up the problem into smaller pieces,” said G. Dan Hutcheson, chief executive of VLSI Research, a semiconductor consulting firm.

After the Pentium flaw, Intel also fundamentally rethought the way it designed its processors, trying to increase the chance that its chips would be error-free even before testing. During the late 1990s it turned to a group of mathematical theoreticians in the computer science field who had developed advanced techniques for evaluating hardware and software, known as formal methods.

“For several years Intel hired everyone in the world in formal methods,” said Pat Lincoln, director of SRI International’s Computer Science Laboratory.

The Intel designers have also done something else to help defend against the errors that will inevitably sneak into the chip. Nehalem contains a significant amount of software that can be changed even after the microprocessor leaves the factory. That gives the designers a huge safety net.

It is one that Mr. Barton and his team are hoping they will not have to use.

    Burned Once, Intel Prepares New Chip Fortified by Constant Tests, NYT, 17.11.2008,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/technology/companies/17chip.html

A Computing Pioneer Has a New Idea

November 17, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO — Steven J. Wallach is completing the soul of his newest machine.

Thirty years ago, Mr. Wallach was one of a small team of computer designers profiled by Tracy Kidder in his Pulitzer Prize winning best seller, “The Soul of a New Machine.”

It was Mr. Wallach, then 33, who served as the architect and baby sitter for his “microkids,” the young team that designed the Data General MV 8000, the underdog minicomputer that kept the company alive in its brutal competition with the Digital Equipment Corporation.

At 63, he is still at it. He plans to introduce his new company, Convey Computer, and to describe the technical details of a new supercomputer intended for scientific and engineering applications at a supercomputing conference in Austin, Tex., this week.

Mr. Wallach thinks he has come upon a new idea in computer design in an era when it has become fashionable to say that there are no new ideas. So far, he has persuaded some of the leading thinkers in the high performance computing world that he might be right. Both Intel and a second chip maker, Xilinx, have joined as early investors.

“Steve comes from a long history of building successful machines,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who helps maintain the list of the world’s fastest 500 computers. “He understands where the bottlenecks are.”

After leaving Data General, Mr. Wallach helped found Convex in 1982 to build a low-cost supercomputer.

Mr. Wallach may be one of the few people remaining to recall a bold generation of computer designers once defined by Seymour Cray, the engineer who created the world’s first commercial supercomputers during the 1960s.

His newest effort in computing design is intended to tackle one of the principal limitations in the world of supercomputing. Typically supercomputers are intended to excel in solving a single class of problems. They may simulate the explosion of a nuclear weapon or model global climate change at blinding speed, but for other problems they will prove sluggish and inefficient.

Today’s supercomputers are assembled from thousands or even tens of thousands of microprocessors, and they often consume as much electricity as a small city. Moreover, they can prove to be frightfully difficult to program. Many new supercomputers try to deal with the challenge of solving different classes of problems by connecting different kinds of processors together Lego-style. This can give programmers fits.

For decades, computer designers have struggled with different ways to sidestep the complexity of programming multiple chips, in order to break up problems into pieces to be computed simultaneously so that they can be solved more quickly.

Mr. Wallach came up with his new design idea in 2006 after he found himself rejecting many of the start-up companies who were coming to the venture capital companies he was advising.

“I would say, ‘No, no, no, they’re clueless,’ ” he said. “I find it difficult to think of myself as the old man of the industry, but it feels that the same as it was in the early 1980s.”

One of the venture capitalists grew frustrated with Mr. Wallach’s repeated criticisms and said to him, “All right Mr. Bigshot, what would you?”

Two weeks later, Mr. Wallach had a new idea. He had long been fascinated with a chip technology called Field Programmable Gate Arrays. These chips are widely used to make prototype computer systems because they can be easily reprogrammed and yet offer the pure speed of computer hardware. There have been a number of start-ups and large supercomputer companies that have already tried to design systems based on the chips, but Mr. Wallach thought that he could do a better job.

The right way to use them, he decided, was to couple them so tightly to the microprocessor chip that it would appear they were simply a small set of additional instructions to give a programmer an easy way to turbocharge a program. Everything had to look exactly like the standard programming environment. In contrast, many supercomputers today require programmers to be “heroic.”

“The past 40 years has taught us that ultimately the system that is easiest to program will always win,” he said.

Mr. Wallach approached Applied Micro Devices about partnering, but it was skeptical. So he went to Intel, where he knew Justin Rattner, the company’s chief technology officer and a veteran supercomputer designer.

“We’ve had enough debates over the years that Justin has some respect for me,” he said.

The Convey computer will be based around Intel’s microprocessors. It will perform like a shape-shifter, reconfiguring with different hardware “personalities” to compute problems for different industries, initially aiming at bioinformatics, computer-aided design, financial services and oil and gas exploration.

Mr. Wallach acknowledges that starting a company going into a recession in the face of stiff competition from Cray, I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and more than a dozen smaller companies is daunting. However, Convey was put together in just two years on a shoestring. It has raised just $15.1 million.

“In a lot of ways, it’s easier than it was in 1982,” he said. “You need less money and I don’t think a lot of people have grasped this.”

One who does get the idea and who is enthusiastic about it is Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who is director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the University of California, San Diego. He believes that the most important quality of the Convey computer is that it will be a green supercomputer.

“The I.T. industry is going to become the boogeyman for global warming,” he worries.

Three decades after designing the computer that brought the idea of computing into the public consciousness, Mr. Wallach gives no hint that he is slowing down.

He still wears the earring that he began wearing 15 years ago when his daughter suggested that he was getting old.

“Isn’t that required to be a computer architect?” he asked recently.

    A Computing Pioneer Has a New Idea, NYT, 17.11.2008,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/technology/business-computing/17machine.html

Op-Ed Contributor

The Rise of the Machines

October 12, 2008
The New York Times
By RICHARD DOOLING

Omaha

“BEWARE of geeks bearing formulas.” So saith Warren Buffett, the Wizard of Omaha. Words to bear in mind as we bail out banks and buy up mortgages and tweak interest rates and nothing, nothing seems to make any difference on Wall Street or Main Street. Years ago, Mr. Buffett called derivatives “weapons of financial mass destruction” — an apt metaphor considering that the Manhattan Project’s math and physics geeks bearing formulas brought us the original weapon of mass destruction, at Trinity in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

In a 1981 documentary called “The Day After Trinity,” Freeman Dyson, a reigning gray eminence of math and theoretical physics, as well as an ardent proponent of nuclear disarmament, described the seductive power that brought us the ability to create atomic energy out of nothing.

“I have felt it myself,” he warned. “The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

The Wall Street geeks, the quantitative analysts (“quants”) and masters of “algo trading” probably felt the same irresistible lure of “illimitable power” when they discovered “evolutionary algorithms” that allowed them to create vast empires of wealth by deriving the dependence structures of portfolio credit derivatives.

What does that mean? You’ll never know. Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, “toxic” financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers. Or maybe we are lost in space, with Dave the astronaut pleading, “Open the bank vault doors, Hal.”

As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth’s nervous system (the Internet), it’s worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers. After all, the Wall Street titans loved swaps and derivatives because they were totally unregulated by humans. That left nobody but the machines in charge.

How fitting then, that almost 30 years after Freeman Dyson described the almost unspeakable urges of the nuclear geeks creating illimitable energy out of equations, his son, George Dyson, has written an essay (published at Edge.org) warning about a different strain of technical arrogance that has brought the entire planet to the brink of financial destruction. George Dyson is an historian of technology and the author of “Darwin Among the Machines,” a book that warned us a decade ago that it was only a matter of time before technology out-evolves us and takes over.

His new essay — “Economic Dis-Equilibrium: Can You Have Your House and Spend It Too?” — begins with a history of “stock,” originally a stick of hazel, willow or alder wood, inscribed with notches indicating monetary amounts and dates. When funds were transferred, the stick was split into identical halves — with one side going to the depositor and the other to the party safeguarding the money — and represented proof positive that gold had been deposited somewhere to back it up. That was good enough for 600 years, until we decided that we needed more speed and efficiency.

Making money, it seems, is all about the velocity of moving it around, so that it can exist in Hong Kong one moment and Wall Street a split second later. “The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good,” George Dyson writes. “The problem starts, as the current crisis demonstrates, when unregulated replication is applied to money itself. Highly complex computer-generated financial instruments (known as derivatives) are being produced, not from natural factors of production or other goods, but purely from other financial instruments.”

It was easy enough for us humans to understand a stick or a dollar bill when it was backed by something tangible somewhere, but only computers can understand and derive a correlation structure from observed collateralized debt obligation tranche spreads. Which leads us to the next question: Just how much of the world’s financial stability now lies in the “hands” of computerized trading algorithms?

•

Here’s a frightening party trick that I learned from the futurist Ray Kurzweil. Read this excerpt and then I’ll tell you who wrote it:

But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. ... Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Brace yourself. It comes from the Unabomber’s manifesto.

Yes, Theodore Kaczinski was a homicidal psychopath and a paranoid kook, but he was also a bloodhound when it came to scenting all of the horrors technology holds in store for us. Hence his mission to kill technologists before machines commenced what he believed would be their inevitable reign of terror.

•

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us. Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can’t help building machines and machine intelligences, even if, from time to time, we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom.

We are still fearful, superstitious and all-too-human creatures. At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers’ apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss.

As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make — “derive” — and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?

When Treasury Secretary Paulson (looking very much like a frightened primate) came to Congress seeking an emergency loan, Senator Jon Tester of Montana, a Democrat still living on his family homestead, asked him: “I’m a dirt farmer. Why do we have one week to determine that $700 billion has to be appropriated or this country’s financial system goes down the pipes?”

“Well, sir,” Mr. Paulson could well have responded, “the computers have demanded it.”

Richard Dooling is the author of “Rapture for the Geeks: When A.I. Outsmarts I.Q.”

    The Rise of the Machines, NYT, 12.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12dooling.html

In Digital Age, Federal Files Blip Into Oblivion

September 13, 2008
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — Countless federal records are being lost to posterity because federal employees, grappling with a staggering growth in electronic records, do not regularly preserve the documents they create on government computers, send by e-mail and post on the Web.

Federal agencies have rushed to embrace the Internet and new information technology, but their record-keeping efforts lag far behind. Moreover, federal investigators have found widespread violations of federal record-keeping requirements.

Many federal officials admit to a haphazard approach to preserving e-mail and other electronic records of their work. Indeed, many say they are unsure what materials they are supposed to preserve.

This confusion is causing alarm among historians, archivists, librarians, Congressional investigators and watchdog groups that want to trace the decision-making process and hold federal officials accountable. With the imminent change in administrations, the concern about lost records has become more acute.

“We expect to see the wholesale disappearance of materials on federal agency Web sites,” said Mary Alice Baish, the Washington representative of the American Association of Law Libraries, whose members are heavy users of government records. “When new officials take office, they have new programs and policies, and they want to make a fresh start.”

Richard Pearce-Moses, a former president of the Society of American Archivists, said, “My biggest worry is that even with the best and brightest minds working on this problem, the risks are so great that we may lose significant portions of our history.”

The Web site of the Environmental Protection Agency lists more than 50 “broken links” that once connected readers to documents on depletion of the ozone layer of the atmosphere.

At least 20 documents have been removed from the Web site of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. They include a draft report highly critical of the civil rights policies of the Bush administration.

Problems in the White House e-mail system have been well publicized in court cases and Congressional hearings. Officials at other federal agencies acknowledge that their record-keeping systems are not much more advanced or reliable.

Businesses and state and local governments face similar problems, on a smaller scale.

“We are overwhelmed by the challenge of preserving digital information,” said Robert P. Spindler, the chief archivist at the Arizona State University Libraries.

For the federal government, the challenge of preserving records grows each month, as employees create billions of e-mail messages. E-mail often replaces telephone conversations and meetings that would not have been recorded in the past.

In an effort to save money, federal agencies are publishing fewer reports on paper and posting more on the Web. Increasingly, federal officials use blogs, podcasts and videos to announce and defend their policies. Growing numbers of federal employees do government business outside the office on personal computers, using portable “flash drives” and e-mail services like Google Gmail and Microsoft Hotmail.

In the past, clerks put most important government records in central agency files. But record-keeping has become decentralized, and the government has fewer clerical employees. Federal employees say they store many official records on desktop computers, so the records are not managed in a consistent way.

“The Achilles’ heel of record-keeping is people,” said Jason R. Baron, the director of litigation at the National Archives. “We used to have secretaries. Now each of us with a desktop computer is his or her own record-keeper. That creates some very difficult problems.”

Experts worry that items preserved in digital form may not be readily accessible in the future because the equipment and software needed to read them will become obsolete.

“All of us have stored personal memories or favorite music on eight-track tapes, floppy disks or 8-millimeter film,” said Allen Weinstein, the archivist of the United States. “In many cases, these technologies are now relics, and we have no way to access the stored information. Imagine this problem multiplied millions and millions of times. That’s what the federal government is facing.”

The National Archives is in the early stages of creating a permanent electronic record-keeping system, seeking help from the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, and from some of the nation’s best computer scientists.

The electronic archive is behind schedule and over budget. But officials say they hope that the project, being developed with Lockheed Martin, will be able to take in huge quantities of White House records when President Bush leaves office in January.

Kenneth Thibodeau, director of the electronic records archives program at the National Archives, said that 32 million White House e-mail messages had been preserved as records of the Clinton administration. He expects to receive hundreds of millions from the Bush White House.

Disputes over White House records occurred at the end of the last three administrations, and federal officials are bracing for more of litigation in January.

Courts have imposed severe penalties on companies that failed to provide electronic records sought in litigation, and the government is subject to similar penalties. A federal district judge found the Environmental Protection Agency in contempt of court for destroying certain electronic records at the end of the Clinton administration.

Warnings about the possible loss of electronic records come from many quarters.

In a recent report, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, described widespread violations of federal record-keeping requirements. At several large agencies, the report said, “e-mail records of senior officials were not consistently preserved.” Some officials keep tens of thousands of messages in their e-mail accounts, where they “cannot be efficiently searched,” and are not accessible to others.

The inspector general of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration found similar problems. He surveyed 40 top officials and found that 93 percent of them were violating federal requirements for preserving e-mail correspondence.

He reported that NASA might lose some of its “institutional memory” and might have already lost records needed to protect the legal and financial rights of the government.

The same federal laws apply to electronic and paper records, defined as materials — in any form — that document government activities, policies or decisions. A formal schedule defines how long each type of record must be kept. In general, records cannot be deleted or destroyed without prior authority from the National Archives, which permanently preserves records judged to be of historical value.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, said: “Agency employees do not understand their record-keeping obligations. At the most basic level, many agency employees do not even understand what a federal record is, much less how it must be preserved.”

In interviews, employees agreed.

“I don’t have a very good understanding of what the rules are — what we are supposed to keep and what we don’t have to keep,” said Christina Pearson, an assistant secretary of health and human services. “We are trying to clarify how our policies apply to new electronic media like Web sites and e-mail.”

At federal agencies, the most common method of preserving important e-mail messages and attachments is to print them on paper and store them in paper files. Officials confirmed this at the Labor Department, the Transportation Department and the Justice Department.

Thomas A. Scully, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, had job discussions with prospective employers while he was a federal official in 2003. When questions were raised about the propriety of those discussions, he tried to find some of his old e-mail messages. But he said: “They were gone. I could not find anything. I was told that all my e-mails had been deleted.”

When President Bill Clinton left office, the National Archives preserved snapshots of agency Web sites as they existed on or just before Jan. 20, 2001. The Archives decided recently that it would not take such snapshots at the end of the Bush administration. “Most Web records do not warrant permanent retention,” because they do not have “long-term historical value,” the Archives said.

Many historians disagree. Several university libraries and the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library based in San Francisco, are starting to do what the federal government refuses to do: copy government Web sites, so they remain available after Mr. Bush leaves office.

Alarmed at the possible loss of White House e-mail messages, the House passed a bill in July that would require agencies to preserve more electronic records. The vote was 286 to 137. Republican opponents said the requirements would be onerous and costly. Mr. Bush has threatened to veto the bill, saying it could “interfere with a president’s ability to carry out his or her constitutional and statutory responsibilities.”

    In Digital Age, Federal Files Blip Into Oblivion, NYT, 13.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/13records.html?hp

Military Supercomputer Sets Record

June 9, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO — An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.

By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time — compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers — petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.

“This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.

Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and business products.

Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and development spending on technology shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that trend is evident in the design of the world’s fastest computers.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”

The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system’s hardware.

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

“We’ve proved some skeptics wrong,” said Michael R. Anastasio, a physicist who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “This gives us a window into a whole new way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have never seen before.”

Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few years personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for new techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some experts, however, are skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will provide useful examples.

“If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu you’re driving will benefit from this,” said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Tex.

Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.

Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title of the world’s fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by I.B.M. reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.

“It’s a sign that we are maintaining our position,“ said Peter J. Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that “the real competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the machines.”

Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, I.B.M. is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing. “You do these record-setting things because you know that in the end we will push on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be the leader,” said Nicholas M. Donofrio, an I.B.M. executive vice president.

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.

    Military Supercomputer Sets Record, NYT, 9.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/technology/09petaflops.html

James Yang

They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know.

NYT

9.3.2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09digi.html

Digital Domain

They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know.

March 9, 2008
The New York Times
By RANDALL STROSS

ONE year after the birth of Windows Vista, why do so many Windows XP users still decline to “upgrade”?

Microsoft says high prices have been the deterrent. Last month, the company trimmed prices on retail packages of Vista, trying to entice consumers to overcome their reluctance. In the United States, an XP user can now buy Vista Home Premium for $129.95, instead of $159.95.

An alternative theory, however, is that Vista’s reputation precedes it. XP users have heard too many chilling stories from relatives and friends about Vista upgrades that have gone badly. The graphics chip that couldn’t handle Vista’s whizzy special effects. The long delays as it loaded. The applications that ran at slower speeds. The printers, scanners and other hardware peripherals, which work dandily with XP, that lacked the necessary software, the drivers, to work well with Vista.

Can someone tell me again, why is switching XP for Vista an “upgrade”?

Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.

Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”

Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.

It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows.

Their remarks come from a stream of internal communications at Microsoft in February 2007, after Vista had been released as a supposedly finished product and customers were paying full retail price. Between the nonexistent drivers and PCs mislabeled as being ready for Vista when they really were not, Vista instantly acquired a reputation at birth: Does Not Play Well With Others.

We usually do not have the opportunity to overhear Microsoft’s most senior executives vent their personal frustrations with Windows. But a lawsuit filed against Microsoft in March 2007 in United States District Court in Seattle has pried loose a packet of internal company documents. The plaintiffs, Dianne Kelley and Kenneth Hansen, bought PCs in late 2006, before Vista’s release, and contend that Microsoft’s “Windows Vista Capable” stickers were misleading when affixed to machines that turned out to be incapable of running the versions of Vista that offered the features Microsoft was marketing as distinctive Vista benefits.

Last month, Judge Marsha A. Pechman granted class-action status to the suit, which is scheduled to go to trial in October. (Microsoft last week appealed the certification decision.)

Anyone who bought a PC that Microsoft labeled “Windows Vista Capable” without also declaring “Premium Capable” is now a party in the suit. The judge also unsealed a cache of 200 e-mail messages and internal reports, covering Microsoft’s discussions of how best to market Vista, beginning in 2005 and extending beyond its introduction in January 2007. The documents incidentally include those accounts of frustrated Vista users in Microsoft’s executive suites.

Today, Microsoft boasts that there are twice as many drivers available for Vista as there were at its introduction, but performance and graphics problems remain. (When I tried last week to contact Mr. Shirley and the others about their most recent experiences with Vista, David Bowermaster, a Microsoft spokesman, said that no one named in the e-mail messages could be made available for comment because of the continuing lawsuit.)

The messages were released in a jumble, but when rearranged into chronological order, they show a tragedy in three acts.

Act 1: In 2005, Microsoft plans to say that only PCs that are properly equipped to handle the heavy graphics demands of Vista are “Vista Ready.”

Act 2: In early 2006, Microsoft decides to drop the graphics-related hardware requirement in order to avoid hurting Windows XP sales on low-end machines while Vista is readied. (A customer could reasonably conclude that Microsoft is saying, Buy Now, Upgrade Later.) A semantic adjustment is made: Instead of saying that a PC is “Vista Ready,” which might convey the idea that, well, it is ready to run Vista, a PC will be described as “Vista Capable,” which supposedly signals that no promises are made about which version of Vista will actually work.

The decision to drop the original hardware requirements is accompanied by considerable internal protest. The minimum hardware configuration was set so low that “even a piece of junk will qualify,” Anantha Kancherla, a Microsoft program manager, said in an internal e-mail message among those recently unsealed, adding, “It will be a complete tragedy if we allowed it.”

Act 3: In 2007, Vista is released in multiple versions, including “Home Basic,” which lacks Vista’s distinctive graphics. This placed Microsoft’s partners in an embarrassing position. Dell, which gave Microsoft a postmortem report that was also included among court documents, dryly remarked: “Customers did not understand what ‘Capable’ meant and expected more than could/would be delivered.”

All was foretold. In February 2006, after Microsoft abandoned its plan to reserve the Vista Capable label for only the more powerful PCs, its own staff tried to avert the coming deluge of customer complaints about underpowered machines. “It would be a lot less costly to do the right thing for the customer now,” said Robin Leonard, a Microsoft sales manager, in an e-mail message sent to her superiors, “than to spend dollars on the back end trying to fix the problem.”

Now that Microsoft faces a certified class action, a judge may be the one who oversees the fix. In the meantime, where does Microsoft go to buy back its lost credibility?

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley

and a professor of business at San Jose State University.

    They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know., NYT, 9.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09digi.html

Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web

February 25, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO — On sabbatical in 2001 from Macromedia, Kevin Lynch, a software developer, was frustrated that he could not get to his Web data when he was off the Internet and annoyed that he could not get to his PC data when he was traveling.

Why couldn’t he have access to all his information, like movie schedules and word processing documents, in one place?

He hit upon an idea that he called “Kevincloud” and mocked up a quick demonstration of the idea for executives at Macromedia, a software development tools company. It took data stored on the Internet and used it interchangeably with information on a PC’s hard drive. Kevincloud also blurred the line between Internet and PC applications.

Seven years later, his brainchild is about to come into focus on millions of PCs. On Monday, Mr. Lynch, who was recently named the chief technology officer at Adobe Systems, which bought Macromedia in 2005, will release the official version of AIR, a software development system that will power potentially tens of thousands of applications that merge the Internet and the PC, as well as blur the distinctions between PCs and new computing devices like smartphones.

Adobe sees AIR as a major advance that builds on its Flash multimedia software. Flash is the engine behind Web animations, e-commerce sites and many streaming videos. It is, the company says, the most ubiquitous software on earth, residing on almost all Internet-connected personal computers.

But most people may never know AIR is there. Applications will look and run the same whether the user is at his desk or his portable computer, and soon when using a mobile device or at an Internet kiosk. Applications will increasingly be built with routine access to all the Web’s information, and a user’s files will be accessible whether at home or traveling.

AIR is intended to help software developers create applications that exist in part on a user’s PC or smartphone and in part on servers reachable through the Internet.

To computer users, the applications will look like any others on their device, represented by an icon. The AIR applications can mimic the functions of a Web browser but do not require a Web browser to run.

The first commercial release of AIR takes place on Monday, but dozens of applications have been built around a test or beta version.

EBay offers an AIR-based application called eBay Desktop that gives its customers the power to buy wherever they are. Adobe uses AIR for Buzzword, an online word processing program. At Monday’s introduction event in San Francisco, new hybrid applications from companies including Salesforce, FedEx, eBay, Nickelodeon, Nasdaq, AOL and The New York Times Company will be demonstrated.

Like Adobe’s Flash software, AIR will be given away. The company makes its money selling software development kits to programmers.

Mr. Lynch and a rapidly growing number of industry executives and technologists believe that the model represents the future of computing.

Moreover, the move away from PC-based applications is likely to get a significant jump start in the coming weeks when Intel introduces its low-cost “Netbook” computer strategy, which is intended to unleash a new wave of inexpensive wireless connected mobile computers.

The new machines will have a relatively small amount of solid state disk storage capacity and will increasingly rely on data stored on Internet servers.

“There is a big cloud movement that is building an infrastructure that speaks directly to this kind of software and experience,” said Sean M. Maloney, Intel’s executive vice president.

Adobe faces stiff competition from a number of big and small companies with the same idea. Many small developers like OpenLazlo and Xcerion are creating “Web-top” or “Web operating systems” intended to move applications and data off the PC desktop and into the Internet through the Web browser.

Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox Web browser, has created a system known as Prism. Sun Microsystems introduced JavaFX this year, which is also aimed at blurring the Web-desktop line. Google is testing a system called Gears, which is intended to allow some Web services to work on computers that are not connected to the Internet.

Finally, there is Microsoft. It is pushing its competitor to Flash, called Silverlight. Three years ago, Microsoft hired one of Mr. Lynch’s crucial software developers at Macromedia, Brad Becker, to help create it. Mr. Becker was a leading designer of the Flash programming language.

The blurring of Web and desktop applications and PC and phone applications is further encouraged by the cellphone industry’s race to catch up with Apple’s iPhone. The industry is focusing on smartphones, or what Sanjay K. Jha, the chief operating officer of Qualcomm, calls “pocketable computing.”

“We need to deliver an experience that is like the PC desktop,” he said. “At the same time, people are used to the Internet and you can’t shortchange them.”

Much software will have to be rewritten for the new devices, in what Mr. Lynch said is the most significant change for the software industry since the introduction in the 1980s of software that can be run through clicking icons rather than typing in codes. This upheaval pits the world’s largest software developer groups against one another in a battle for the new hybrid software applications. Industry analysts say there are now about 1.2 billion Internet-connected personal computers. Market researchers peg the number of smartphones sold in 2007 at 123 million, but that market is growing rapidly.

“There is a proliferation of platforms,” Mr. Lynch said. “This is a battle for the hearts and minds of people who are building things.”

The battle will largely pit Microsoft’s 2.2 million .Net software developers against the more than one million Adobe Flash developers, who have until now developed principally for the Web, as well as a vast number of other Web-oriented designers who use open-source software development tools that are referred to as AJAX.

Microsoft executives said they thought the company would have an advantage because Silverlight has a more sophisticated security model. “Desktop integration is a mixed blessing. There is potentially a gaping security hole,” said Microsoft’s Mr. Becker. “We’ve learned at the school of hard knocks about security.”

Microsoft’s competitors challenge its intent and assert that its goal is retaining its desktop monopoly. “Microsoft is taking their desktop franchise and trying to move that franchise to the Web,” said John Lilly, chief executive of Mozilla. He faults the design of Silverlight for being an island that is not truly integrated with the Internet.

“You get this rectangle in a Web browser and it can’t interact with the rest of the Web,” he said.

He said Mozilla’s Prism offers a simple alternative to capitalize on the explosion of creative software development taking place on the Internet. “There are jillions of applications. A million more got launched today. The whole world is collaborating on this.”

Up to now, it has been a low-level war between Microsoft and Adobe. Silverlight, for instance, got high marks from developers for its ability to handle high resolution video, but Adobe quickly upgraded Flash last year in response.

“We said, ‘Let’s put this in right now,’ ” Mr. Lynch said. With revenue last year of $3.16 billion, Adobe is large enough to fight Microsoft.

Adobe, the maker of Photoshop, Acrobat and other software, also has a strong reputation as a maker of tools for the creative class. "We’re one of the best tool makers in the world," said Mr. Lynch, who worked on software design at MicroPro, the publishers of the Wordstar word processor, and at General Magic, an ill-fated effort to create what could be called a predecessor to today’s smartphones, before joining Macromedia.

“Adobe’s known for its designer tools, but they realize that development — for the browser, for the desktop, and for devices such as cellphones — is a huge growth market,” said Steve Weiss, executive editor at O’Reilly Media, a technology publishing firm.

    Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web, NYT, 25.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/technology/25adobe.html

Gates Sees Diminished Role for Keyboards

February 22, 2008
Filed at 10:28 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said.

''It's one of the big bets we're making,'' he said during the final stop of a farewell tour before he withdraws from the company's daily operations in July.

In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University.

Gates also said the software that is proliferating in various branches of science, including biology and astronomy must become even more advanced.

''They're dealing with so much information that ... the need for machine learning to figure out what's going on with that data is absolutely essential,'' he said.

Microsoft is trying to establish ties not only with university computer science departments but also with reseachers in other scientific areas ''to help us understand where new inventions are necessary,'' Gates said.

Gates plans to retire as Microsoft's chief software architect in July and focus on philanthropy.

    Gates Sees Diminished Role for Keyboards, NYT, 22.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Gates-Goodbye-Keyboards.html

Intel Previews a New Family of Power-Saving Chips

September 19, 2007
The New York Times
By LAURIE J. FLYNN

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 18 — Intel gave the first public demonstration on Tuesday of a new generation of computer processors that significantly increase performance without consuming more power.

The company’s chief executive, Paul S. Otellini, told developers at its semiannual technology conference that Intel expected to finish the new family of chips in the second half of 2008, in keeping with its promise of a new chip architecture every other year. The new family of chips, code-named Nehalem, will use as many as eight processing cores and will offer better graphics and memory-control processing.

Intel had been late to respond to technological challenges in energy efficiency and heat consumption, and it has spent the better part of two years racing to catch up with its smaller but feisty competitor, Advanced Micro Devices.

A year ago, Intel announced a painful corporate overhaul, including a round of cost-cutting that reduced the work force by 10 percent and trimmed $5 billion in expenses. Since then, the company has begun to regain lost market share, and last week raised its sales forecast for this quarter.

As part of the corporate revamping, Intel executives last year outlined what they called a tick-tock strategy, referring to the development of a new chip architecture every other year and to a new manufacturing technology in the alternate years. Mr. Otellini said the strategy would accelerate the pace of innovation.

The manufacturing-technology innovation, a new silicon technology component, is almost ready. Intel’s Penryn family of processors, to be introduced on Nov. 12, will be the industry’s first high-volume 45-nanometer processors. (the current standard is 65 nanometers.)

Mr. Otellini said the company planned to introduce 15 new 45-nanometer processors by the end of the year and 20 more in the first quarter of 2008. A.M.D. has said it will move to 45-nanometer technology in mid-2008.

“We expect our Penryn processors to provide up to a 20 percent performance increase while improving energy efficiency,” Mr. Otellini said.

He said that 32-nanometer technology, which is on track to begin production in 2009, would offer even greater performance. The 32-nanometer chips use transistors so small that more than 4 million of them could fit on the head of a pin.

“Smaller is better, smaller is cheaper,” Mr. Otellini said.

The company also disclosed plans for a new graphics-oriented product, called Larrabee, which will compete with products from Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia and Advanced Micro’s ATI graphics unit. Larrabee will include 12 cores, or computing brains.

On Monday, A.M.D. unveiled its own strategic change: a desktop chip with three cores, unusual in an industry that tends to grow in even numbers, routinely doubling performance. The announcement came as a surprise to analysts, as the company had promoted the advantages of four processors only last week.

A.M.D. executives, referring to a recent survey by Mercury Research, said that quad-core processors accounted for only 2 percent of all desktop computer systems, suggesting that they had been slower to catch on than expected.

It is hoping that its new three-core chip, called Phenom, will appeal to midrange customers who are looking for better performance than dual-core systems can provide, but do not see the need for quad-core systems. A corporate vice president, Robert Brewer, predicted that “it’s naturally going to resonate with customers,” who he said would appreciate having another choice.

But Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with Insight 64, a consulting firm in Saratoga, Calif., said the triple-core chip could prove confusing to customers. It is due in the first quarter of 2008, the quarter after Advanced Micro is scheduled to release its quad-core chip. In some cases, the triple-core chip may actually perform faster than a quad core.

    Intel Previews a New Family of Power-Saving Chips, NYT, 19.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/technology/19chip.html

Tell-All PCs and Phones Transforming Divorce

September 15, 2007
The New York Times
By BRAD STONE

The age-old business of breaking up has taken a decidedly Orwellian turn, with digital evidence like e-mail messages, traces of Web site visits and mobile telephone records now permeating many contentious divorce cases.

Spurned lovers steal each other’s BlackBerrys. Suspicious spouses hack into each other’s e-mail accounts. They load surveillance software onto the family PC, sometimes discovering shocking infidelities.

Divorce lawyers routinely set out to find every bit of private data about their clients’ adversaries, often hiring investigators with sophisticated digital forensic tools to snoop into household computers.

“In just about every case now, to some extent, there is some electronic evidence,” said Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, who also runs seminars on gathering electronic evidence. “It has completely changed our field.”

Privacy advocates have grown increasingly worried that digital tools are giving governments and powerful corporations the ability to peek into peoples’ lives as never before. But the real snoops are often much closer to home.

“Google and Yahoo may know everything, but they don’t really care about you,” said Jacalyn F. Barnett, a Manhattan-based divorce lawyer. “No one cares more about the things you do than the person that used to be married to you.”

Most of these stories do not end amicably. This year, a technology consultant from the Philadelphia area, who did not want his name used because he has a teenage son, strongly suspected his wife was having an affair. Instead of confronting her, the husband installed a $49 program called PC Pandora on her computer, a laptop he had purchased.

The program surreptitiously took snapshots of her screen every 15 seconds and e-mailed them to him. Soon he had a comprehensive overview of the sites she visited and the instant messages she was sending. Since the program captured her passwords, the husband was also able to get access to and print all the e-mail messages his wife had received and sent over the previous year.

What he discovered ended his marriage. For 11 months, he said, she had been seeing another man — the parent of one of their son’s classmates at a private school outside Philadelphia. The husband said they were not only arranging meetings but also posting explicit photos of themselves on the Web and soliciting sex with other couples.

The husband, who like others in this article was reached through his lawyer, said the decision to invade his wife’s privacy was not an easy one. “If I were to tell you I have a pure ethical conscience over what I did, I’d be lying,” he said. But he also pointed to companies that have Internet policies giving them the right to read employee e-mail messages. “When you’re in a relationship like a marriage, which is emotional as well as, candidly, a business, I think you can look at it in the same way,” he said.

When considering invading their spouse’s privacy, husbands and wives cite an overriding desire to find out some secret. One woman described sensing last year that her husband, a Manhattan surgeon, was distant and overly obsessed with his BlackBerry.

She drew him a bubble bath on his birthday and then pounced on the device while he was in the tub. In his e-mail messages, she found evidence of an affair with a medical resident, including plans for them to meet that night.

A few weeks later, after the couple had tried to reconcile, the woman gained access to her husband’s America Online account (he had shared his password with her) and found messages from a mortgage company. It turned out he had purchased a $3 million Manhattan condominium, where he intended to continue his liaison.

“Every single time I looked at his e-mail I felt nervous,” the woman said. “But I did anyway because I wanted to know the truth.”

Being on the receiving end of electronic spying can be particularly disturbing. Jolene Barten-Bolender, a 45-year-old mother of three who lives in Dix Hills, N.Y., said that she was recently informed by AOL and Google, on the same day, that the passwords had been changed on two e-mail accounts she was using, suggesting that someone had gained access and was reading her messages. Last year, she discovered a Global Positioning System, or G.P.S., tracking device in a wheel well of the family car.

She suspects her husband of 24 years, whom she is divorcing.

“It makes me feel nauseous and totally violated,” Ms. Barten-Bolender said, speculating that he was trying to find out if she was seeing anyone. “Once anything is written down, you have to know it could be viewed by someone looking to invade or hurt you.”

Ms. Barten-Bolender’s husband and his lawyer declined to discuss her allegations.

Divorce lawyers say their files are filled with cases like these. Three-quarters of the cases of Nancy Chemtob, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, now involve some kind of electronic communications. She says she routinely asks judges for court orders to seize and copy the hard drives in the computers of her clients’ spouses, particularly if there is an opportunity to glimpse a couple’s full financial picture, or a parent’s suitability to be the custodian of the children.

Lawyers must navigate a complex legal landscape governing the admissibility of this kind of electronic evidence. Different laws define when it is illegal to get access to information stored on a computer in the home, log into someone else’s e-mail account, or listen in on phone calls.

Divorce lawyers say, however, if the computer in question is shared by the whole family, or couples have revealed their passwords to each other, reading a spouse’s e-mail messages and introducing them as evidence in a divorce case is often allowed.

Lynne Z. Gold-Bikin, a Pennsylvania divorce lawyer, describes one client, a man, who believed his wife was engaging in secret online correspondence. He found e-mail messages to a lover in Australia that she had sent from a private AOL account on the family computer. Her lawyer then challenged the use of this evidence in court. Ms. Gold-Bikin’s client won the dispute and an advantageous settlement.

Lawyers say the only communications that are consistently protected in a spouse’s private e-mail account are the messages to and from the lawyers themselves, which are covered by lawyer-client privilege.

Perhaps for this reason, divorce lawyers as a group are among the most pessimistic when it comes to assessing the overall state of privacy in the digital age.

“I do not like to put things on e-mail,” said David Levy, a Chicago divorce lawyer. “There’s no way it’s private. Nothing is fully protected once you hit the send button.”

Ms. Chemtob added, “People have an expectation of privacy that is completely unrealistic.”

James Mulvaney agrees. A private investigator, Mr. Mulvaney now devotes much of his time to poking through the computer records of divorcing spouses, on behalf of divorce lawyers. One of his specialties is retrieving files, like bank records and e-mail messages to secret lovers, that a spouse has tried to delete.

“Every keystroke on your computer is there, forever and ever,” Mr. Mulvaney said.

He had one bit of advice. “The only thing you can truly erase these things with is a specialty Smith & Wesson product,” he said. “Throw your computer into the air and play skeet with it.”

    Tell-All PCs and Phones Transforming Divorce, NYT, 15.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/business/15divorce.html?hp

Reshaping the Architecture of Memory

September 11, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN JOSE, Calif. — The ability to cram more data into less space on a memory chip or a hard drive has been the crucial force propelling consumer electronics companies to make ever smaller devices.

It shrank the mainframe computer to fit on the desktop, shrank it again to fit on our laps and again to fit into our shirt pockets.

Now, if an idea that Stuart S. P. Parkin is kicking around in an I.B.M. lab here is on the money, electronic devices could hold 10 to 100 times the data in the same amount of space. That means the iPod that today can hold up to 200 hours of video could store every single TV program broadcast during a week on 120 channels.

The tech world, obsessed with data density, is taking notice because Mr. Parkin has done it before. An I.B.M. research fellow largely unknown outside a small fraternity of physicists, Mr. Parkin puttered for two years in a lab in the early 1990s, trying to find a way to commercialize an odd magnetic effect of quantum mechanics he had observed at supercold temperatures. With the help of a research assistant, he was able to alter the magnetic state of tiny areas of a magnetic data storage disc, making it possible to store and retrieve information in a smaller amount of space. The huge increases in digital storage made possible by giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, made consumer audio and video iPods, as well as Google-style data centers, a reality.

Mr. Parkin thinks he is poised to bring about another breakthrough that could increase the amount of data stored on a chip or a hard drive by a factor of a hundred. If he proves successful in his quest, he will create a “universal” computer memory, one that can potentially replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and flash memory chips, and even make a “disk drive on a chip” possible.

It could begin to replace flash memory in three to five years, scientists say. Not only would it allow every consumer to carry data equivalent to a college library on small portable devices, but a tenfold or hundredfold increase in memory would be disruptive enough to existing storage technologies that it would undoubtedly unleash the creativity of engineers who would develop totally new entertainment, communication and information products.

Currently the flash storage chip business is exploding. Used as storage in digital cameras, cellphones and PCs, the commercially available flash drives with multiple memory chips store up to 64 gigabytes of data. Capacity is expected to reach about 50 gigabytes on a single chip in the next half-decade.

However, flash memory has an Achilles’ heel. Although it can read data quickly, it is very slow at storing it. That has led the industry on a frantic hunt for alternative storage technologies that might unseat flash.

Mr. Parkin’s new approach, referred to as “racetrack memory,” could outpace both solid-state flash memory chips as well as computer hard disks, making it a technology that could transform not only the storage business but the entire computing industry.

“Finally, after all these years, we’re reaching fundamental physics limits,” he said. “Racetrack says we’re going to break those scaling rules by going into the third dimension.”

His idea is to stand billions of ultrafine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip — hence the name racetrack — and use electric current to slide infinitesimally small magnets up and down along each of the wires to be read and written as digital ones and zeros.

His research group is able to slide the tiny magnets along notched nanowires at speeds greater than 100 meters a second. Since the tiny magnetic domains have to travel only submolecular distances, it is possible to read and write magnetic regions with different polarization as quickly as a single nanosecond, or one billionth of a second — far faster than existing storage technologies.

If the racetrack idea can be made commercial, he will have done what has so far proved impossible — to take microelectronics completely into the third dimension and thus explode the two-dimensional limits of Moore’s Law, the 1965 observation by Gordon E. Moore, a co-founder of Intel, that decrees that the number of transistors on a silicon chip doubles roughly every 18 months.

Just as with Mr. Parkin’s earlier work in GMR, there is no shortage of skeptics at this point.

Giant storage companies like Seagate Technology are starting to turn toward flash to create a generation of hybrid storage systems that combine silicon and rotating disk technologies for speed and capacity. But Seagate is still looking in the two-dimensional realm for future advances.

“There are a lot of neat technologies, but you have to be able to make them cost-effectively,” said Bill Watkins, Seagate’s chief executive.

So far, the racetrack idea is far from the Best Buy shelves and it is very much still in Mr. Parkin’s laboratory here. His track record, however, suggests that the storage industry might do well to take notice of the implications of his novel nanowire-based storage system in the not too distant future.

“Stuart marches to a little bit of a different drummer, but that’s what it takes to have enough courage to go off the beaten path,” said James S. Harris, an electrical engineering professor at Stanford University and co-director of the I.B.M.-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center.

A visit to Mr. Parkin’s crowded office reveals him to be a 51-year-old British-American scientist for whom the term hyperactive is a modest understatement at best. During interviews he is constantly in motion. When he speaks publicly at scientific gatherings, his longtime technology assistant, Kevin Roche, is careful to see that Mr. Parkin empties the change from his pockets, lest he distract his audience with the constant jingling of coins and keys.

Today, a number of industry analysts think there are important parallels between Mr. Parkin’s earlier GMR research and his new search for racetrack materials.

“We’re on the verge of exciting new memory architectures, and his is one of the leading candidates,” said Richard Doherty, director of the Envisioneering Group, a computing and consumer electronics consulting firm based in Seaford, N.Y.

Mr. Parkin said he had recently shifted his focus and now thought that his racetracks might be competitive with other storage technologies even if they were laid horizontally on a silicon chip.

I.B.M. executives are cautious about the timing of the commercial introduction of the technology. But ultimately, the technology may have even more dramatic implications than just smaller music players or wristwatch TVs, said Mark Dean, vice president for systems at I.B.M. Research.

“Something along these lines will be very disruptive,” he said. “It will not only change the way we look at storage, but it could change the way we look at processing information. We’re moving into a world that is more data-centric than computing-centric.”

This is just a hint, but it suggests that I.B.M. may think that racetrack memory could blur the line between storage and computing, providing a key to a new way to search for data, as well as store and retrieve data.

And if it is, Mr. Parkin’s experimental physics lab will have transformed the computing world yet again.

    Reshaping the Architecture of Memory, NYT, 11.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/technology/11storage.html

A New Entry From A.M.D. in Chip Wars

September 10, 2007
The New York Times
By LAURIE J. FLYNN

Advanced Micro Devices is counting on a new high-performance computer chip to hold on to hard-fought market share it has won from its principal rival, Intel.

The company, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is set today to release the next generation in its Opteron line of processors for computer servers. The new chip puts four processors on one piece of silicon, a technology known as quad-core, allowing for faster calculating and greater energy efficiency, features sought by companies running large data centers and server farms.

Mario Rivas, executive vice president for computing products at A.M.D., said the latest Opteron chip is the company’s most significant new product in several years.

For Advanced Micro, the stakes are high, with the new chip arriving just as it struggles to maintain its hard-earned gains from Intel, its far larger rival. A.M.D.’s product introduction comes less than a week after Intel tried to upstage it with a server update of its own: new Xeon server processors that bundle together two chips that each have the circuitry of two processing engines.

In July, A.M.D. reported a $600 million loss for the second quarter, its third loss in a row, as it grappled with the renewed competition from Intel and falling chip prices. But it also said that shipments of microprocessors rose 38 percent from the first quarter, and that it had begun to win back market share after several quarters of slipping.

Intel and A.M.D. have been locked in a race to deliver high-performing chips for several years. A.M.D. was first to market with a dual-core chip more than two years ago as Intel struggled to get its dual-core strategy off the ground.

When A.M.D. introduced the Opteron server chip in 2003, the industry was slow to warm to the product, but the company says that this time will be different. Four years ago, Intel’s server processors were favored by nearly all major hardware suppliers. But delays at Intel induced Dell, I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems to gradually turn to the Opteron as an alternative.

A.M.D. gained market share, particularly in the desktop and server markets, though Intel managed to keep a tight grip on fast-growing notebook PCs.

In recent quarters, Intel has responded with a succession of processors, and has managed to win back some of the share it lost. Intel is now leading in the market for servers, analysts say.

Analysts expect the new Opteron to take off more quickly this time because the major hardware companies are already A.M.D. customers. “This chip will have a much faster impact on A.M.D.’s business,” said Nathan Brookwood of Insight64, a chip industry consulting firm, “but a lot will be riding on just how good it is.”

    A New Entry From A.M.D. in Chip Wars, NYT, 10.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/technology/10amd.html

Techies Ponder Computers Smarter Than Us

September 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:45 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- At the center of a black hole there lies a point called a singularity where the laws of physics no longer make sense. In a similar way, according to futurists gathered Saturday for a weekend conference, information technology is hurtling toward a point where machines will become smarter than their makers. If that happens, it will alter what it means to be human in ways almost impossible to conceive, they say.

''The Singularity Summit: AI and the Future of Humanity'' brought together hundreds of Silicon Valley techies and scientists to imagine a future of self-programming computers and brain implants that would allow humans to think at speeds nearing today's microprocessors.

Artificial intelligence researchers at the summit warned that now is the time to develop ethical guidelines for ensuring these advances help rather than harm.

''We and our world won't be us anymore,'' Rodney Brooks, a robotics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the audience. When it comes to computers, he said, ''who is us and who is them is going to become a different sort of question.''

Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Palo Alto-based Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which organized the summit, researches on the development of so-called ''friendly artificial intelligence.'' His greatest fear, he said, is that a brilliant inventor creates a self-improving but amoral artificial intelligence that turns hostile.

The first use of the term ''singularity'' to describe this kind of fundamental technological transformation is credited to Vernor Vinge, a California mathematician and science-fiction author.

High-tech entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil raised the profile of the singularity concept in his 2005 book ''The Singularity is Near,'' in which he argues that the exponential pace of technological progress makes the emergence of smarter-than-human intelligence the future's only logical outcome.

Kurzweil, director of the Singularity Institute, is so confident in his predictions of the singularity that he has even set a date: 2029.

Most ''singularists'' feel they have strong evidence to support their claims, citing the dramatic advances in computing technology that have already occurred over the last 50 years.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore accurately predicted that the number of transistors on a chip should double about every two years. By comparison, according Singularity Institute researchers, the entire evolution of modern humans from primates has resulted in only a threefold increase in brain capacity.

With advances in biotechnology and information technology, they say, there's no scientific reason that human thinking couldn't be pushed to speeds up to a million times faster.

Some critics have mocked singularists for their obsession with ''techno-salvation'' and ''techno-holocaust'' -- or what some wags have called the coming ''nerdocalypse.'' Their predictions are grounded as much in science fiction as science, the detractors claim, and may never come to pass.

But advocates argue it would be irresponsible to ignore the possibility of dire outcomes.

''Technology is heading here. It will predictably get to the point of making artificial intelligence,'' Yudkowsky said. ''The mere fact that you cannot predict exactly when it will happen down to the day is no excuse for closing your eyes and refusing to think about it.''

------

On the Web:

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, www.singinst.org

    Techies Ponder Computers Smarter Than Us, NYT, 9.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Superintelligent-Machines.html

Microsoft Unveils New Surface Computer

May 30, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:39 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SEATTLE (AP) -- Microsoft Corp. has taken the wraps off ''Surface,'' a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects.

The machines, which Microsoft planned to debut Wednesday at a technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah's Entertainment Inc.

Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.

Unlike most touchscreens, Surface can respond to more than one touch at a time. During a demonstration with a reporter last week, Mark Bolger, the Surface Computing group's marketing director, ''dipped'' his finger in an on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of hair.

With a price tag between $5,000 and $10,000 per unit, Microsoft isn't immediately aiming for the finger painting set. (The company said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in three to five years.)

Some of the first Surface models are planned to help customers pick out new cell phones at T-Mobile stores. When customers plop a phone down on the screen, Surface will read its bar code and display information about the handset. Customers can also select calling plans and ringtones by dragging icons toward the phone.

Guests sitting in some Starwood Hotel lobbies will be able to cluster around the Surface to play music, then buy songs using a credit card or rewards card tagged with a bar code. In some hotel restaurants, customers will be able to order food and drinks, then split the bill by setting down a card or a room key and dragging their menu items ''onto'' the card.

At Harrah's locations, visitors will be able to learn about nearby Harrah's venues on an interactive map, then book show tickets or make dinner reservations.

Microsoft is working on a limited number of programs to ship with Surface, including one for sharing digital photographs.

Bolger placed a card with a bar code onto Surface's surface; digital photographs appeared to spill out of the card into piles on the screen. Several people gathered around the table pulled photos across the screen using their fingertips, rotated them in circles and even dragged out the corners to enlarge the images -- behavior made possible by the advanced graphics support deep inside Windows Vista.

''It's not a touch screen, it's a grab screen,'' Bolger said.

Historically, Microsoft has focused on creating new software, giving computer programmers tools to build applications on its platforms, and left hardware manufacturing to others. (Some recent exceptions include the Xbox 360 and the Zune music player, made by the same Microsoft division that developed Surface.)

For now, Microsoft is making the Surface hardware itself, and has only given six outside software development firms the tools they need to make Surface applications.

Matt Rosoff, an analyst at the independent research group Directions on Microsoft, said in an interview that keeping the technology's inner workings under wraps will limit what early customers -- the businesses Microsoft is targeting first with the machine -- will be able to do with it.

But overall, analysts who cover the PC industry were wowed by Surface.

Surface is ''important for Microsoft as a promising new business, as well as demonstrating very concretely to the market that Microsoft still knows how to innovate, and innovate in a big way,'' said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

    Microsoft Unveils New Surface Computer, NYT, 30.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Microsoft-Coffee-Table-of-the-Future.html

Red Hat Launches New Linux System

March 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:22 a.m. ET
The New York Times

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Red Hat Inc. has unveiled the latest version of its Linux operating system as the open-source software company continues to combat Microsoft's market-dominating Windows platform.

Developers for the Raleigh-based company touted Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as more flexible and more manageable than its prior versions, and said they worked for two years on the product.

''Our customers are an integral part of the development process,'' said Paul Cormier, Red Hat's executive vice president for engineering, echoing the open-source tenet that users be allowed to view and edit the software's code.

Resoundingly, Cormier said, customers wanted less complexity.

The new operating system supports ''virtualization,'' which Red Hat said will help companies consolidate their technology workload onto one server -- saving energy, space and money.

''Customers have figured out that they've got rooms full of racks and servers,'' said Nick Carr, the marketing director for the operating system. ''They're taking up heat and power and space, but they're only 15 percent loaded. They want to know how they can use what they have more efficiently.''

For desktop computers, Red Hat touted its advances in security to protect systems from external and internal attacks.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, which recently launched its long-awaited Windows Vista operating system, still dominates the software market. Red Hat says Linux can be found in the majority of Fortune 500 companies, where savvy tech departments have switched to Linux to cut down on costs.

Along with the new Linux product, Red Hat launched several new service programs to help companies migrate their data centers to Linux and to help customers get support for a variety of different open-source programs.

Red Hat's business model is based around service. Unlike Microsoft's proprietary software, Red Hat delivers its products for free but makes money by selling subscription packages for service.

Shares of Red Hat fell 19 cents Wednesday to close at $22.52 on the New York Stock Exchange.

    Red Hat Launches New Linux System, NYT, 15.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Red-Hat-Linux.html

Intel Says Chips Will Run Faster, Using Less Power

January 27, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has overhauled the basic building block of the information age, paving the way for a new generation of faster and more energy-efficient processors.

Company researchers said the advance represented the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago.

The microprocessor chips, which Intel plans to begin making in the second half of this year, are designed for computers but they could also have applications in consumer devices. Their combination of processing power and energy efficiency could make it possible, for example, for cellphones to play video at length — a demanding digital task — with less battery drain.

The work by Intel overcomes a potentially crippling technical obstacle that has arisen as a transistor’s tiny switches are made ever smaller: their tendency to leak current as the insulating material gets thinner. The Intel advance uses new metallic alloys in the insulation itself and in adjacent components.

Word of the announcement, which is planned for Monday, touched off a war of dueling statements as I.B.M. rushed to announce that it was on the verge of a similar advance.

I.B.M. executives said their company was planning to introduce a comparable type of transistor in the first quarter of 2008.

Many industry analysts say that Intel retains a six-month to nine-month lead over the rest of the industry, but I.B.M. executives disputed the claim and said the two companies were focused on different markets in the computing industry.

The I.B.M. technology has been developed in partnership with Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s main rival. Modern microprocessor and memory chips are created from an interconnected fabric of hundreds of millions and even billions of the tiny switches that process the ones and zeros that are the foundation of digital computing.

They are made using a manufacturing process that has been constantly improving for more than four decades. Today transistors, for example, are made with systems that can create wires and other features that are finer than the resolving power of a single wavelength of light.

The Intel announcement is new evidence that the chip maker is maintaining the pace of Moore’s Law, the technology axiom that states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years, giving rise to a constant escalation of computing power at lower costs.

“This is evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary, but it will generate a big sigh of relief,” said Vivek Subramanian, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

For several decades there have been repeated warnings about the impending end of the Moore’s Law pace for chip makers. In response the semiconductor industry has repeatedly found its way around fundamental technical obstacles, inventing techniques that at times seem to defy basic laws of physics.

The chip industry measures its progress by manufacturing standards defined by a width of one of the smallest features of a transistor for each generation. Currently much of the industry is building chips in what is known as 90-nanometer technology. At that scale, about 1,000 transistors would fit in the width of a human hair. Intel began making chips at 65 nanometers in 2005, about nine months before its closest competitors.

Now the company is moving on to the next stage of refinement, defined by a minimum feature size of 45 nanometers. Other researchers have recently reported progress on molecular computing technologies that could reduce the scale even further by the end of the decade.

Intel’s imminent advance to 45 nanometers will have a huge impact on the industry, Mr. Subramanian said. “People have been working on it for over a decade, and this is tremendously significant that Intel has made it work,” he said.

Intel’s advance was in part in finding a new insulator composed of an alloy of hafnium, a metallic element that has previously been used in filaments and electrodes and as a neutron absorber in nuclear power plants. They will replace the use of silicon dioxide — essentially the material that window glass is made of, but only several atoms thick.

Intel is also shifting to new metallic alloy materials — it is not identifying them specifically — in transistor components known as gates, which sit directly on top of the insulator. These are ordinarily made from a particular form of silicon called polysilicon.

The new approach to insulation appears at least temporarily to conquer one of the most significant obstacles confronting the semiconductor industry: the tendency of tiny switches to leak electricity as they are reduced in size. The leakage makes chips run hotter and consume more power.

Many executives in the industry say that Intel is still recovering from a strategic wrong turn it made when the company pushed its chips to extremely high clock speeds — the ability of a processor to calculate more quickly. That obsession with speed at any cost left the company behind its competitors in shifting to low-power alternatives.

Now Intel is coming back. Although the chip maker led in the speed race for many years, the company has in recent years shifted its focus to low-power microprocessors that gain speed by breaking up each chip into multiple computing “cores.” In its new 45-nanometer generation, Intel will gain the freedom to seek either higher performance or substantially lower power, while at the same time increasing the number of cores per chip.

“They can adjust the transistor for high performance or low power,” said David Lammers, director of WeSRCH.com, a Web portal for technical professionals.

The Intel development effort has gone on in a vast automated factory in Hillsboro, Ore., that the company calls D1D. It features huge open manufacturing rooms that are kept surgically clean to prevent dust from contaminating the silicon wafers that are whisked around the factory by a robotic conveyor system.

The technology effort was led by Mark T. Bohr, a longtime Intel physicist who is director of process architecture and integration. The breakthrough, he said, was in finding a way to deal with the leakage of current. “Up until five years ago, leakage was thought to increase with each generation,” he said.

Several analysts said that the technology advance could give Intel a meaningful advantage over competitors in the race to build ever more powerful microprocessors.

“It’s going to be a nightmare for Intel’s competitors,” said G. Dan Hutcheson, chief executive of VLSI Research. “A lot of Mark Bohr’s counterparts are going to wake up in terror.”

An I.B.M. executive said yesterday that the company had also chosen hafnium as its primary insulator, but that it would not release details of its new process until technical papers are presented at coming conferences.

“It’s the difference between can openers and Ferraris,” said Bernard S. Meyerson, vice president and chief technologist for the systems and technology group at I.B.M. He insisted that industry analysts who have asserted that Intel has a technology lead are not accurate and that I.B.M. had simply chosen to deploy its new process in chips that are part of high-performance systems aimed at the high end of the computer industry.

Intel said it had already manufactured prototype microprocessor chips in the new 45-nanometer process that run on three major operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

    Intel Says Chips Will Run Faster, Using Less Power, NYT, 27.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/technology/27chip.html

Researchers Go Molecular in Design of a Denser Chip

January 25, 2007
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

Scientists have built a memory chip that is roughly the size of a white blood cell, about one-2,000th of an inch on a side.

Although the chip is modest in capacity — with 160,000 bits of information — the bits are crammed together so tightly that it is the densest ever made. The achievement points to a possible path toward continuing the exponential growth of computing power even after current silicon chip-making technology hits fundamental limits in 10 to 20 years.

The scientists, led by James R. Heath of the California Institute of Technology and J. Fraser Stoddart of the University of California, Los Angeles, will report their findings today in the journal Nature. As far back as 1999, Dr. Heath and Dr. Stoddart reported on aspects of their work , which included specially designed molecular switches and a novel technique for making ultrathin wires. The new work pulls the components into an integrated circuit.

“Our goal always was to develop a manufacturing technique that works at the molecular scale,” said Dr. Heath, a professor of chemistry. “It’s a scientific demonstration, but it’s a sort of a stake in the ground.”

The density of bits on the chip — about 100 billion per square centimeter — is about 40 times as much as current memory chips, Dr. Heath said. Improvements to the technique could increase the density by a factor of 10, he said.

But Dr. Heath said he did not know if this technique would be commercially useful. “I don’t know if the world needs memory like this,” he said. “I do know if you can manufacture at these dimensions, it’s a fundamentally enabling capability.”

For example, the wires used in the chip are about the same width as proteins, and that could make possible tiny circuits that could detect cancer or other diseases. The researchers are making transistors and simple logic circuits using similar techniques, Dr. Heath said.

A crucial component of the chip is its molecular switch, designed by Dr. Stoddart. The switch, which belongs to a class of molecules known as rotaxanes, looks like a dumbbell with a ring that can slide along the central bar. Voltage pulses push the ring between two positions on the bar, which represent the zeros and ones used by computers to store data. The dumbbell shape keeps the ring from sliding off.

To build the chip, the researchers etched 400 parallel wires, each less than a millionth of an inch wide and separated by about one-750,000th of an inch from its neighbors. On top of the wires, they deposited a layer of the molecular switches, the dumbbells standing vertically, and then a second set of 400 wires turned 90 degrees to the first set.

Each crossing point between two perpendicular wires, with about 100 of the molecular switches wedged in between, is the storage location of one bit of information.

While many researchers are looking for ways to make molecular-size electronics, most are still building circuits containing only a handful of bits, compared with the 160,000 in the new chip. That suggests the new process Dr. Heath and Dr. Stoddart developed can be scaled up to a viable manufacturing process, said Vivek Subramanian, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

“This is sort of the capstone in that they’ve pulled all this together,” said Dr. Subramanian, who was not involved in the research.

Not everything about the chip works yet. When the researchers tested a small part of it, they found that only 30 percent of the bits actually worked. But it is possible to use only the working parts of the chip, and the researchers successfully wrote and read information to those parts, though even there the success was temporary. The switches routinely broke after being flipped about 10 times.

The researchers readily concede that their chip is merely a demonstration and is not refined enough for any applications. “We’re just happy it works,” Dr. Heath said.

    Researchers Go Molecular in Design of a Denser Chip, NYT, 25.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/science/25chip.html

Microsoft Unveils Vista Operating System

November 30, 2006
Filed at 10:37 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) -- For the first time in five years, Microsoft Corp. is finally unveiling a new system for operating personal computers. Now the company must persuade PC buyers that the launch really matters to them.

Beginning Thursday, businesses that buy Windows licenses in bulk have first crack at the new operating system, called Vista. Consumers can get Vista on home PCs beginning Jan. 30.

Microsoft and computer vendors contend that Vista will make Windows machines more secure, powerful and graphically dynamic, especially when combined with other products Microsoft is releasing simultaneously. Those include new back-end server software for businesses, as well as Office 2007, which brings sweeping changes to widely used programs such as Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint.

Much is at stake for Microsoft. Most of its revenue and almost all of its profit comes from Windows and Office, funding the company's sexier ventures in video games and music players.

But even with all the touted improvements, analysts expect Vista to only gradually emerge, especially in big organizations where upgrading can be a costly, complicated affair. Gartner Dataquest predicts that it will be 2010 before Vista outnumbers the previous operating system, Windows XP, on business computers.

A company with 10,000 employees, for example, likely has 1,000 business applications, many of which need to be tested on Vista before a company can switch its PCs to the new operating system, said Gartner analyst Michael Silver. That process often takes 12 to 18 months and lots of labor by the technology staff. (In other words, for a large business to implement Vista right away would probably require it to have been an eager-beaver type that experimented with Vista during its ''beta'' phase that began in mid-2005).

In the meantime, the last operating system, Windows XP, works just fine for most companies -- especially with a security-enhancing patch known as Service Pack 2 that Microsoft released in 2004.

PC makers say Vista will enable computers to do things that previously were difficult or costly. For example, Lenovo Group Ltd., the world's No. 3 PC maker, says Vista greatly enhances data-backup tools it builds into its machines.

''All those capabilities are going to be one step better with Vista,'' said Clain Anderson, Lenovo's director of software peripherals.

But many buyers want more dramatic reasons to change their PCs.

Kamal Anand, chief technology officer for TradeStone Software Inc., a Gloucester, Mass.-based provider of supply-chain software, examined test versions of Vista and Office and found ''no compelling need'' to upgrade his company's 100 PCs and laptops anytime soon. Instead, Anand expects Vista and Office to slowly permeate TradeStone as it buys new PCs for employees in coming years.

''Nobody wants to go through the extra time and effort and money to upgrade an existing, well-working system,'' he said.

The programs in Office 2007 have been overhauled in many ways. Generally they can make it easier for people to collaborate on documents and to manage information from multiple sources. Excel in particular packs a wallop, with vastly increased number-crunching abilities. The Outlook e-mail program performs noticeably faster searches for tidbits buried in messages.

Some Office programs also have scrapped their familiar menu structure in favor of a ''ribbon'' atop the screen that reorders how command choices are presented to the user. While that new interface unlocks many features that were hard to find in previous generations of Office software, it will require some time to get used to, which might give tech buyers pause.

Another potential drag for Office is that the world has changed considerably since the last major release in 2003. Inexpensive, open-source alternatives to Office have gained traction. And rivals such as Google Inc. are increasingly delivering spreadsheets, word processing and other tools for free over the Internet, an attractive choice for smaller companies.

At Tabblo Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that lets people assemble, print and share online photo collections, CEO Antonio Rodriguez expects to upgrade many, though not all, of the company's 25 PCs to Vista throughout 2007. Tabblo's staff expects Vista to make it easier to back up files and synch data over multiple computers. Rodriguez and crew also have energetically adopted Microsoft's latest Web browser, Internet Explorer 7.

But Office 2007 holds few such attractions for his company. Tabblo employees have largely abandoned Excel and Word for free programs on the Web, praising the flexibility that comes with having files stored online. Just about the only Office program Rodriguez still uses is PowerPoint for presentations.

''To me, Office 2007 is a complete non-event. I have no interest in an upgrade,'' he said. ''Most of what I like about computing now lives online.''

------

On the Net:

Microsoft's guide to Vista:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista

    Microsoft Unveils Vista Operating System, NYT, 30.11.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Microsoft-Vista.html

Essay

Computing, 2016: What Won’t Be Possible?

October 31, 2006
The New York Times
By STEVE LOHR

Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the “universal machine” in the late 1930’s — the idea that a computer in theory could be made to do the work of any kind of calculating machine, including the human brain — all that remained to be done was mere engineering.

The more generous perspective today is that decades of stunningly rapid advances in processing speed, storage and networking, along with the development of increasingly clever software, have brought computing into science, business and culture in ways that were barely imagined years ago. The quantitative changes delivered through smart engineering opened the door to qualitative changes.

Computing changes what can be seen, simulated and done. So in science, computing makes it possible to simulate climate change and unravel the human genome. In business, low-cost computing, the Internet and digital communications are transforming the global economy. In culture, the artifacts of computing include the iPod, YouTube and computer-animated movies.

What’s next? That was the subject of a symposium in Washington this month held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, which is part of the National Academies and the nation’s leading advisory board on science and technology. Joseph F. Traub, the board’s chairman and a professor at Columbia University, titled the symposium “2016.”

Computer scientists from academia and companies like I.B.M. and Google discussed topics including social networks, digital imaging, online media and the impact on work and employment. But most talks touched on two broad themes: the impact of computing will go deeper into the sciences and spread more into the social sciences, and policy issues will loom large, as the technology becomes more powerful and more pervasive.

Richard M. Karp, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, gave a talk whose title seemed esoteric: “The Algorithmic Nature of Scientific Theories.”

Yet he presented a fundamental explanation for why computing has had such a major impact on other sciences, and Dr. Karp himself personifies the trend. His research has moved beyond computer science to microbiology in recent years. An algorithm, put simply, is a step-by-step recipe for calculation, and it is a central concept in both mathematics and computer science.

“Algorithms are small but beautiful,” Dr. Karp observed. And algorithms are good at describing dynamic processes, while scientific formulas or equations are more suited to static phenomena. Increasingly, scientific research seeks to understand dynamic processes, and computer science, he said, is the systematic study of algorithms.

Biology, Dr. Karp said, is now understood as an information science. And scientists seek to describe biological processes, like protein production, as algorithms. “In other words, nature is computing,” he said.

Social networks, noted Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell, are pre-technological creations that sociologists have been analyzing for decades. A classic example, he noted, was the work of Stanley Milgram of Harvard, who in the 1960’s asked each of several volunteers in the Midwest to get a letter to a stranger in Boston. But the path was not direct: under the rules of the experiment, participants could send a letter only to someone they knew. The median number of intermediaries was six — hence, the term “six degrees of separation.”

But with the rise of the Internet, social networks and technology networks are becoming inextricably linked, so that behavior in social networks can be tracked on a scale never before possible.

“We’re really witnessing a revolution in measurement,” Dr. Kleinberg said.

The new social-and-technology networks that can be studied include e-mail patterns, buying recommendations on commercial Web sites like Amazon, messages and postings on community sites like MySpace and Facebook, and the diffusion of news, opinions, fads, urban myths, products and services over the Internet. Why do some online communities thrive, while others decline and perish? What forces or characteristics determine success? Can they be captured in a computing algorithm?

Social networking research promises a rich trove for marketers and politicians, as well as sociologists, economists, anthropologists, psychologists and educators.

“This is the introduction of computing and algorithmic processes into the social sciences in a big way,” Dr. Kleinberg said, “and we’re just at the beginning.”

But having a powerful new tool of tracking the online behavior of groups and individuals also raises serious privacy issues. That became apparent this summer when AOL inadvertently released Web search logs of 650,000 users.

Future trends in computer imaging and storage will make it possible for a person, wearing a tiny digital device with a microphone and camera, to essentially record his or her life. The potential for communication, media and personal enrichment is striking. Rick Rashid, a computer scientist and head of Microsoft’s research labs, noted that he would like to see a recording of the first steps of his grown son, or listen to a conversation he had with his father many years ago. “I’d like some of that back,” he said. “In the future, that will be possible.”

But clearly, the technology could also enable a surveillance society. “We’ll have the capability, and it will be up to society to determine how we use it,” Dr. Rashid said. “Society will determine that, not scientists.”

    Computing, 2016: What Won’t Be Possible?, NYT, 31.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/science/31essa.html

A Challenge for Exterminators

October 9, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

REDMOND, Wash., Oct. 5 — On a whiteboard in a windowless Microsoft conference room here, an elegant curve drawn by a software-testing engineer captures both five years of frustration and more recent progress.

The principle behind the curve — that 80 percent of the consequences come from 20 percent of the causes — is rooted in a 19th-century observation about the distribution of wealth. But it also illustrates the challenge for the builders of the next generation of Windows and Office, the world’s largest-selling software packages.

As they scramble to get the programs to users by the end of the year, the equation is a simple one: making software reliable for most personal computer users is relatively easy; it is another matter, in a PC universe with tens of thousands of peripherals and software applications, to defeat the remaining bugs that cause significant problems for some users.

The effort to overhaul the Windows operating system, originally code-named Longhorn and since renamed Vista, was meant to offer a transformation to a new software foundation. But several ambitious initiatives failed to materialize in time, and the project started over from scratch three years ago. The result is more an evolutionary shift, focusing on visual modernization and ease of use.

Still, the company is within a month of completing work on new versions of both Windows and Office, having apparently overcome technical hurdles that as recently as August seemed to signal a quagmire.

“It looked bleak; it was a slog, but in the end this was a technical problem, and there was a turning point,” said Bharat Shyam, 37, a computer scientist who is director of Windows program management. “We’ve confounded the analysts and the press.”

As October arrived, a vote of confidence came from Wall Street when a Goldman Sachs analyst, Richard G. Sherlund, wrote that he expected the product to be introduced on time. “The Vista development organization has made rapid progress delivering improvements to Vista’s performance, reliability, and compatibility,” he said.

[On Friday, the company released what it said would be the final test version of Vista, named Release Candidate 2. If the response from testers is positive, the software will go into production by the end of the month.]

The debugging process has been urgent, with Microsoft scheduled to introduce Windows Vista and Office 2007 to corporate customers by the end of the year, and to home users early next year.

This coordinated introduction is a multibillion-dollar proposition for Microsoft, which has Windows running on some 845 million computers worldwide and Office on more than 450 million, according to the market research firm Gartner.

Indeed, it was the vast scale of the Windows testing program that saved the software development projects. Over the summer, the company began an extraordinary bug-tracking effort, abetted by volunteers and corporate partners who ran free copies of both Windows and Office designed to send data detailing each crash back to Microsoft computers.

The Office package, for example, has been tested by more than 3.5 million users; last month alone, more than 700,000 PC’s were running the software, generating more than 46 million separate work sessions. At Microsoft, 53,000 employee computers are running test versions.

Vista has also been tested extensively. More than half a million computer users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have sent crash data back to Microsoft.

Such data supplements the company’s own testing in a center for Office referred to as the Big Button Room, for the array of switches, lights and other apparatus that fill the space. (A similar Vista room has a less interesting name — Windows Test Technologies.)

This is where special software automatically exercises programs rapidly while looking for errors.

The testing effort for Windows Vista has been led by Mario Garzia, Microsoft’s director of Windows reliability. A former Bell Labs software engineer, Mr. Garzia says the complexity of the Vista and Office effort dwarfs anything he undertook for the nation’s telephone network.

“Everything is easy if you do it for a limited number of things,” he said. “When I was at Bell Labs, the problems were complex, but nothing compared to this.”

The test data from the second beta release of Vista alone generated 5.5 petabytes of information — the equivalent of the storage capacity of 690,000 home PC’s.

The resulting complexity can be seen in the dance that has gone on in recent months between Microsoft’s designers and its partners, who have been tailoring software and hardware to work with Vista.

On Sept. 1, for example, Microsoft released a version of Vista called Release Candidate 1 to a large group of outside testers, hoping to take advantage of their free time over the Labor Day weekend.

Immediately, Mr. Garzia recalled, a wave of crash data fed back to Microsoft disclosed a newly introduced bug that had been created by incompatibility with a software module (referred to as a device driver) written by a partner company.

That company was alerted to the problem, and a remedy was transmitted directly to the testers’ computers over the Internet within four days — a vast improvement in the gap between detection and repair, he said.

Despite the impending commercial arrival of the two software projects — which between them have involved the labors of more than 5,000 programmers and testers here — there is still uncertainty in the industry about how long it will take for Vista in particular to gain acceptance.

“We’ve been impressed with the progress, and they deserve a lot of credit,” said David Smith, a Gartner vice president, but that does not mean that Windows Vista will soon be in standard workplace use. Its deployment on a significant scale will not begin at most companies until 2008, Mr. Smith said.

Microsoft executives contend that such calculations are overly conservative, and they have been making the case that the use of Vista could pay for itself in saved labor and related costs in less than a year.

A more fundamental question for the industry is whether Vista will represent a new era for computing or be the last great push of the current epoch.

While Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman, Bill Gates, was able to turn his company abruptly in the mid-1990’s to respond to the challenge posed by Netscape, Microsoft has proved less effective in blunting a similar challenge to its dominance from Google.

Moreover, the rise of Google and other companies moving toward Internet-based software development raises doubts about the value of giant efforts like Windows and Office, which can take more than five years.

Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has said he believes that the rise of advertising-supported Web services will increasingly undercut Microsoft’s software development model — using a proprietary software development system and selling shrink-wrapped applications.

In an internal company memo titled “Don’t Bet Against the Internet,” he wrote recently, “Almost no pure PC software companies are left (all is on the Internet), most proprietary standards (I’m thinking of Exchange e-mail and file systems protocols from Microsoft) are under attack from open protocols gaining share rapidly on the Internet.”

The larger struggle has had little influence on Ben Canning, who began his career at Microsoft testing software nine years ago after getting a graduate degree in philosophy from Reed College.

Rather, his days are consumed with working his way down that whiteboard curve.

Mr. Canning acknowledges that his degree prepared him for little beyond teaching philosophy — with the possible exception of finding and killing bugs in software, because philosophers are trained to analyze and solve particularly hard logical problems. For the last few months, his mind has been focused on the hard problems at the end of the curve.

“If you look at the mean time to crash for most Office customers, it’s very high,” he said. “There is a small minority that crash all the time, and they hate us, and we want to help.”

    A Challenge for Exterminators, NYT, 10.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/technology/09vista.html

A Chip That Can Transfer Data Using Laser Light

September 18, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 17 — Researchers plan to announce on Monday that they have created a silicon-based chip that can produce laser beams. The advance will make it possible to use laser light rather than wires to send data between chips, removing the most significant bottleneck in computer design.

As a result, chip makers may be able to put the high-speed data communications industry on the same curve of increased processing speed and diminishing costs — the phenomenon known as Moore’s law — that has driven the computer industry for the last four decades.

The development is a result of research at Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Commercializing the new technology may not happen before the end of the decade, but the prospect of being able to place hundreds or thousands of data-carrying light beams on standard industry chips is certain to shake up both the communications and computer industries.

Lasers are already used to transmit high volumes of computer data over longer distances — for example, between offices, cities and across oceans — using fiber optic cables. But in computer chips, data moves at great speed over the wires inside, then slows to a snail’s pace when it is sent chip-to-chip inside a computer.

With the barrier removed, computer designers will be able to rethink computers, packing chips more densely both in home systems and in giant data centers. Moreover, the laser-silicon chips — composed of a spider’s web of laser light in addition to metal wires — portend a vastly more powerful and less expensive national computing infrastructure. For a few dollars apiece, such chips could transmit data at 100 times the speed of laser-based communications equipment, called optical transceivers, that typically cost several thousand dollars.

Currently fiber optic networks are used to transmit data to individual neighborhoods in cities where the data is then distributed by slower conventional wire-based communications gear. The laser chips will make it possible to send avalanches of data to and from individual homes at far less cost.

They could also give rise to a new class of supercomputers that could share data internally at speeds not possible today.

The breakthrough was achieved by bonding a layer of light-emitting indium phosphide onto the surface of a standard silicon chip etched with special channels that act as light-wave guides. The resulting sandwich has the potential to create on a computer chip hundreds and possibly thousands of tiny, bright lasers that can be switched on and off billions of times a second.

“This is a field that has just begun exploding in the past 18 months,” said Eli Yablonovitch, a physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, a leading researcher in the field. “There is going to be a lot more optical communications in computing than people have thought.”

Indeed, the results of the development work, which will be reported in a coming issue of Optics Express, an international journal, indicate that a high-stakes race is under way worldwide. While the researchers at Intel and Santa Barbara are betting on indium phosphide, Japanese scientists in a related effort are pursuing a different material, the chemical element erbium.

Although commercial chips with built-in lasers are years away, Luxtera, a company in Carlsbad, Calif., is already selling test chips that incorporate most optical components directly into silicon and then inject laser light from a separate source.

The Intel-Santa Barbara work proves that it is possible to make complete photonic devices using standard chip-making machinery, although not entirely out of silicon. “There has always been this final hurdle,” said Mario Paniccia, director of the Photonics Technology Lab at Intel. “We have now come up with a solution that optimizes both sides.”

In the past it has proved impossible to couple standard silicon with the exotic materials that emit light when electrically charged. But the university team supplied a low-temperature bonding technique that does not melt the silicon circuitry. The approach uses an electrically charged oxygen gas to create a layer of oxide just 25 atoms thick on each material. When heated and pressed together, the oxide layer fuses the two materials into a single chip that conducts information both through wires and on beams of reflected light.

“Photonics has been a low-volume cottage industry,” said John E. Bowers, director of the Multidisciplinary Optical Switching Technology Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Everything will change and laser communications will be everywhere, including fiber to the home.”

Photonics industry experts briefed on the technique said that it would almost certainly pave the way for commercialization of the long-sought convergence of silicon chips and optical lasers. “Before, there was more hype than substance,” said Alan Huang, a former Bell Laboratories researcher who is a pioneer in the field and is now chief technology officer of the Terabit Corporation, a photonics start-up company in Menlo Park, Calif. “Now I believe this will lead to future applications in optoelectronics.”

    A Chip That Can Transfer Data Using Laser Light, NYT, 18.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/18/technology/18chip.html

In 1981 these men changed how we live

The IBM PC was born 25 years ago this week,
but not all of its inventors were as lucky as Bill Gates

Sunday August 6, 2006
The Observer
David Smith, technology correspondent

'IBM Corporation today announced its smallest, lowest-priced computer system - the IBM Personal Computer,' ran the press release 25 years ago this week. 'Designed for business, school and home, the easy-to-use system sells for as little as $1,565. It offers many advanced features and, with optional software, may use hundreds of popular application programs.'

On 12 August 1981 no one could guess quite how profound an impact the announcement from International Business Machines would have on hundreds of millions of lives. Nor how wildly divergent would be the fortunes of three men who were there at the genesis of the IBM PC 5150 - a invention to rank in importance with the motor car, telephone and television.

One of those men was David Bradley, 57, a member of the original 12 engineers who worked on the secret project and who is still amazed by its profound consequences, from email and iPods to Google and MySpace. Speaking from his home in North Carolina last week, he said: 'Computers have improved the productivity of office workers and become a toy for the home. I don't want to assert that the PC invented the internet, but it was one of the preconditions.'

The man with perhaps most cause to toast the industry standard PC's 25th birthday on Saturday, even more than the engineers who built it, is Bill Gates. His software for the IBM PC, and nearly all the computers that followed it, made him the world's richest man. But for IBM, the story was arguably one of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

Bradley was also working on a similar machine when, in September 1980, he was recruited to the IBM team and sent to Boca Raton in Florida to come up with a PC that would rival the pioneering Apple II. A few months later the team had grown and got its leader - Don Estridge, a photographer's son from Florida who had worked for the army and Nasa. Racing against a 12-month deadline, the engineers scoured the country for components, and asked Intel, then a manufacturer of memory chips, to deliver the central processing unit, or 'brain'.

IBM also needed operating system software. The man in the right place at the right time was a young geek who had dropped out of Harvard. Bill Gates of Microsoft specialised in more modest computer languages but assured the IBM team that he could come up with an operating system for their new machines in just a few days. After Estridge's task force had left for their hotel, Gates went around the corner to a tiny company which had written a system for the Intel processor and bought it out for £26,000. He then customised the system for IBM and sold it to them for £42,000. Critically, Gates retained the right to license the system to other manufacturers who could, and would, clone the IBM design. A quarter of a century later, he has an estimated wealth of £26bn.

IBM's failure to secure exclusive rights to Gates's software is often regarded as a blunder comparable to that of the music executives who spurned The Beatles. But Bradley disagrees, saying that there was a higher purpose - he and his colleagues used 'open architecture', off-the-shelf parts which others could acquire, and so defined a standard that allowed others to build compatible machines capable of running the same software.

Experts generally regard this as the result of haste rather than altruism on IBM's part, but Bradley points out that in the spirit of openness it published technical manuals to explain how the PC worked. Unlike Apple, who stuck by its proprietary system and lost the lion's share of the market, the IBM PC was an invitation to rivals eager to imitate and improve upon it.

Bradley said: 'I believe the primary reason it was so successful is that it was an open system. There was a microprocessor from Intel and an operating system from Microsoft. We published everything we knew so that if you wanted to work on an application program you had all the information to do it and you could be reasonably confident IBM wouldn't change things later.

'The participation of the rest of the industry was important because IBM alone could not possibly have invented all the applications that people would want.'

The IBM PC 5150 weighed 25lbs, stood just under six inches high and had 64 kilobytes of memory and a five-and-a-quarter inch floppy disk drive. Initial sales forecasts expected 242,000 to be sold over five years, but the figure was exceeded in single month. It was a personal triumph for Estridge, the 'father of the PC', but he would not live to see its full legacy in the democratisation of computing.

On 2 August 1985 Estridge was on Delta Air Lines Flight 191 from Fort Lauderdale, Florida approaching Dallas-Fort Worth airport. It was caught in a freak wind and plummeted to the ground, bursting into flames. Of 152 passengers on board, 128 died, including 48-year-old Estridge, his wife and several IBM executives.

IBM was overtaken in the PC market by Compaq in 1994. IBM sold its PC division to Chinese giant Lenovo for £628m last year. 'I'm sad and disillusioned that IBM got out of the computer business since I was there at the very beginning,' added Bradley. 'But as an IBM stockholder I think it was an extremely sensible business decision.'

Bradley quit IBM in 2004 after 28 years and lives in comfortable retirement. He mused: 'I have no regrets about what happened. I was there when it was just a glimmer in everybody's eye and it's a privilege to still be here to talk about it. And no, I don't envy Bill Gates.'

    In 1981 these men changed how we live, O, 6.8.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1838497,00.html

Windows Is Ready to Tout PC’s as Gaming Devices

July 18, 2006
The New York Times
By SETH SCHIESEL

Quick, name the world’s most popular electronic game system.

If PlayStation or Xbox popped into your head, that’s understandable. Sony and Microsoft, the companies that make those machines, have spent rafts of cash over the years trying to make those brands synonymous with video games. But however understandable, if you answered PlayStation or Xbox or even Nintendo, you were also wrong.

In fact, the world’s most popular game machine is the personal computer. And that doesn’t mean Macintoshes; Macs are essentially nowhere in the game world. That means PC’s based on Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Hundreds of millions of people around the world use Windows PC’s and in Microsoft surveys about half of them report playing games. That doesn’t include the legions of office-bound Solitaire and Minesweeper addicts who don’t even think of themselves as gamers. (You are, though!)

But as popular as PC gaming is and has been, the general public has never really thought of the home computer as a primary game system. That is no accident. For the first few decades of the digital age, Microsoft’s top goal was to get computers into as many homes as possible. Bill Gates and friends knew that a family was more likely to spend $1,000 on its first computer if was meant to help little Johnny with his homework, or send baby pictures to Grandma, or help with the taxes, rather than if the family was thinking about the PC’s ability to send them into outer space or the depths of a dragon’s lair.

Well, here come the dragons.

After years of treating games, game players and game makers as the vaguely disreputable loons of the PC family, Microsoft is making a major strategic shift. Just as games are becoming a core part of mainstream entertainment, Microsoft is beginning to embrace gaming as a core part of using a computer. That means marketing the PC as the world’s most powerful gaming system and revamping Windows to make it more game-friendly.

Now that the computer business is about convincing people who already have PC’s to buy new ones (rather than their first one), Microsoft executives say they have realized that emphasizing games is a great way to do that.

“Previously we’ve had game technology built into Windows, but we didn’t approach gaming as one of Windows’ fundamental applications, and that’s what we want to start to do,” Rich Wickham, the director of Microsoft’s Windows gaming group, said during a recent visit to New York. “That means supporting developers more closely, seeding great games, making games easier to install and play, and having a unified marketing presence.”

The bigger picture is that PC gaming is surging these days even without Microsoft’s help. A few years ago, the conventional wisdom in game circles (even at Microsoft) was that PC gaming was stagnant, a niche backwater that would soon be swamped by consoles like PlayStation and Xbox.

The tsunami most game executives didn’t see coming was the rise in subscription-based online PC gaming, which wasn’t reflected in the retail sales charts that dominate big screens in boardrooms. Online PC games like Lineage II and World of Warcraft are on pace to take in more than $2 billion this year worldwide.

At the same time, publishers are coming to appreciate that having a strong portfolio of PC games can help them through the tough times that accompany the transition to a new generation of consoles every few years. With the introduction of the Xbox 360 just last November and the scheduled debuts of Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii this fall, game publishers have been suffering as customers adjust and wait for the new consoles. Perhaps the biggest hit of the year has been the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a game with a fanatical PC fan base (though the game has sold more copies for the Xbox 360).

So with the two new Japanese consoles coming this fall, Microsoft will try to blunt their impact in two ways. The first is an all-but-certain price cut on the Xbox 360. The second will be a new marketing and branding campaign around Windows gaming. That means advertising, but just as important, it also means some long overdue help for the sad patch of real estate known as the PC games section in stores.

“There’s no question about it: Windows games at retail is a disaster,” Mr. Wickham said, “and we’re going to fix that.”

This is what he means: If you walk into a game store or the game section at a Wal-Mart these days, the PlayStation games have a clearly marked area of their own. All the PlayStation game boxes look somewhat similar, and the overall impression is that PlayStation is a unified community of games and products. Same with the Xbox area. Same with the Nintendo area. This is because Sony, Microsoft’s Xbox group and Nintendo try to make their products as attractive as possible in stores and offer financial incentives to retailers to make that happen.

The PC games area, however, usually looks like a dump. Games may be organized haphazardly, they all look different, and they are probably stacked on some dusty shelf in the back of the store. For decades PC games have been the children of a hundred mothers, with each publisher pursuing its own retail strategy, if any at all. Having learned how to do retail marketing correctly with the Xbox, look for Microsoft to apply most of those lessons to PC games this fall.

So there will certainly be some new buzz around computer games this holiday season. But that will hardly compare with what the general public should expect to hear about PC gaming from Microsoft early next year as the company trots out its next version of Windows, called Vista. As Microsoft tries to persuade millions of people around the world to upgrade to Vista, enhanced support for gaming is going to be one of the main selling points.

So even if your current computer does the taxes just fine, there may be dragons in your future.

    Windows Is Ready to Tout PC’s as Gaming Devices, NYT, 18.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/technology/18vide.html

Brainy Robots Start Stepping Into Daily Life

July 18, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

Robot cars drive themselves across the desert, electronic eyes perform lifeguard duty in swimming pools and virtual enemies with humanlike behavior battle video game players.

These are some fruits of the research field known as artificial intelligence, where reality is finally catching up to the science-fiction hype. A half-century after the term was coined, both scientists and engineers say they are making rapid progress in simulating the human brain, and their work is finding its way into a new wave of real-world products.

The advances can also be seen in the emergence of bold new projects intended to create more ambitious machines that can improve safety and security, entertain and inform, or just handle everyday tasks. At Stanford University, for instance, computer scientists are developing a robot that can use a hammer and a screwdriver to assemble an Ikea bookcase (a project beyond the reach of many humans) as well as tidy up after a party, load a dishwasher or take out the trash.

One pioneer in the field is building an electronic butler that could hold a conversation with its master — á la HAL in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” — or order more pet food.

Though most of the truly futuristic projects are probably years from the commercial market, scientists say that after a lull, artificial intelligence has rapidly grown far more sophisticated. Today some scientists are beginning to use the term cognitive computing, to distinguish their research from an earlier generation of artificial intelligence work. What sets the new researchers apart is a wealth of new biological data on how the human brain functions.

“There’s definitely been a palpable upswing in methods, competence and boldness,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is president-elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. “At conferences you are hearing the phrase ‘human-level A.I.,’ and people are saying that without blushing.”

Cognitive computing is still more of a research discipline than an industry that can be measured in revenue or profits. It is pursued in various pockets of academia and the business world. And despite some of the more startling achievements, improvements in the field are measured largely in increments: voice recognition systems with decreasing failure rates, or computerized cameras that can recognize more faces and objects than before.

Still, there have been rapid innovations in many areas: voice control systems are now standard features in midpriced automobiles, and advanced artificial reason techniques are now routinely used in inexpensive video games to make the characters’ actions more lifelike.

A French company, Poseidon Technologies, sells underwater vision systems for swimming pools that function as lifeguard assistants, issuing alerts when people are drowning, and the system has saved lives in Europe.

Last October, a robot car designed by a team of Stanford engineers covered 132 miles of desert road without human intervention to capture a $2 million prize offered by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Pentagon. The feat was particularly striking because 18 months earlier, during the first such competition, the best vehicle got no farther than seven miles, becoming stuck after driving off a mountain road.

Now the Pentagon agency has upped the ante: Next year the robots will be back on the road, this time in a simulated traffic setting. It is being called the “urban challenge.”

At Microsoft, researchers are working on the idea of “predestination.” They envision a software program that guesses where you are traveling based on previous trips, and then offers information that might be useful based on where the software thinks you are going.

Tellme Networks, a company in Mountain View, Calif., that provides voice recognition services for both customer service and telephone directory applications, is a good indicator of the progress that is being made in relatively constrained situations, like looking up a phone number or transferring a call.

Tellme supplies the system that automates directory information for toll-free business listings. When the service was first introduced in 2001, it could correctly answer fewer than 37 percent of phone calls without a human operator’s help. As the system has been constantly refined, the figure has now risen to 74 percent.

More striking advances are likely to come from new biological models of the brain. Researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland, are building large-scale computer models to study how the brain works; they have used an I.B.M. parallel supercomputer to create the most detailed three-dimensional model to date of a column of 10,000 neurons in the neocortex.

“The goal of my lab in the past 10 to 12 years has been to go inside these little columns and try to figure out how they are built with exquisite detail,” said Henry Markram, a research scientist who is head of the Blue Brain project. “You can really now zoom in on single cells and watch the electrical activity emerging.”

Blue Brain researchers say they believe the simulation will provide fundamental insights that can be applied by scientists who are trying to simulate brain functions.

Another well-known researcher is Robert Hecht-Nielsen, who is seeking to build an electronic butler called Chancellor that would be able to listen, speak and provide in-home concierge services. He contends that with adequate resources, he could create such a machine within five years.

Although some people are skeptical that Mr. Hecht-Nielsen can achieve what he describes, he does have one successful artificial intelligence business under his belt. In 1986, he founded HNC Software, which sold systems to detect credit card fraud using neural network technology designed to mimic biological circuits in the brain. HNC was sold in 2002 to the Fair Isaac Corporation, where Mr. Hecht-Nielsen is a vice president and leads a small research group.

Last year he began speaking publicly about his theory of “confabulation,” a hypothesis about the way the brain makes decisions. At a recent I.B.M. symposium, Mr. Hecht-Nielsen showed off a model of confabulation, demonstrating how his software program could read two sentences from The Detroit Free Press and create a third sentence that both made sense and was a natural extension of the previous text.

For example, the program read: “He started his goodbyes with a morning audience with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, sharing coffee, tea, cookies and his desire for a golf rematch with her son, Prince Andrew. The visit came after Clinton made the rounds through Ireland and Northern Ireland to offer support for the flagging peace process there.”

The program then generated a sentence that read: “The two leaders also discussed bilateral cooperation in various fields.”

Artificial intelligence had its origins in 1950, when the mathematician Alan Turing proposed a test to determine whether or not a machine could think or be conscious. The test involved having a person face two teleprinter machines, only one of which had a human behind it. If the human judge could not tell which terminal was controlled by the human, the machine could be said to be intelligent.

In the late 1950’s a field of study emerged that tried to build systems that replicated human abilities like speech, hearing, manual tasks and reasoning.

During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the original artificial intelligence researchers began designing computer software programs they called “expert systems,” which were essentially databases accompanied by a set of logical rules. They were handicapped both by underpowered computers and by the absence of the wealth of data that today’s researchers have amassed about the actual structure and function of the biological brain.

Those shortcomings led to the failure of a first generation of artificial intelligence companies in the 1980’s, which became known as the A.I. Winter. Recently, however, researchers have begun to speak of an A.I. Spring emerging as scientists develop theories on the workings of the human mind. They are being aided by the exponential increase in processing power, which has created computers with millions of times the power of those available to researchers in the 1960’s — at consumer prices.

“There is a new synthesis of four fields, including mathematics, neuroscience, computer science and psychology,” said Dharmendra S. Modha, an I.B.M. computer scientist. “The implication of this is amazing. What you are seeing is that cognitive computing is at a cusp where it’s knocking on the door of potentially mainstream applications.”

At Stanford, researchers are hoping to make fundamental progress in mobile robotics, building machines that can carry out tasks around the home, like the current generation of robotic floor vacuums, only more advanced. The field has recently been dominated by Japan and South Korea, but the Stanford researchers have sketched out a three-year plan to bring the United States to parity.

At the moment, the Stanford team is working on the first steps necessary to make the robot they are building function well in an American household. The team is focusing on systems that will consistently recognize standard doorknobs and is building robot hands to open doors.

“It’s time to build an A.I. robot,” said Andrew Ng, a Stanford computer scientist and a leader of the project, called Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, or Stair. “The dream is to put a robot in every home.”

    Brainy Robots Start Stepping Into Daily Life, NYT, 18.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/technology/18brain.html

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