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by Peter van Ooijen.
Original Post: Sunspots, cyborgs and ambient intelligence in Groningen
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In the Dutch city of Groningen is the Mediacentrale:
It's a former power plant which has been transformed into a centre for multimedia and other IT business. Yesterday, march 16th, it was stage for Amigro, a 1 day conference on ambient intelligence.(Google for variations). Organized by the department of AI of the Groningen university in cooperation with the local platform for the stimulation of ICT. Every year they have something special; last year and the year before that is was a robot competition (including the .NET wonder on wheels).
So this year it was a conference on "ambient intelligence" which is the effect of having intelligent devices everywhere. A very good speaker on such devices was Rob Tow who works for Sun Research labs
He had a very good story which went form the ancient Greeks to the emerging ecosystem of intelligent devices and ended with a demonstration such a creature. The Sunspot; soon for sale, is an intelligent matchbox containing sensors, leds, a wireless network, IO-ports and is running a Java virtual machine called Squawk. The sensors include an accelerometer, so the device can sense motion. You can do great things with that. Take this way to transfer data from one sunspot to the other. The magic is done by waving the spot towards the receiving one and pretend it is sprinkling it with some data. By including figures like circles (counter) clock wise a rich instruction set can be built.
Especially with the combination of the (three color) leds it just looks like magic. Patents pending, no kidding.
Another speaker took the road inside. Professor Kevin Warwick became world famous for implanting himself with a RFID chip. Opening the door to his lab or logging now only took a hand waive. The application has been followed by quite a lot of others. In Holland we had a bar where waving your injected RFID was a way to pay the bill. Was tested in court and considered in conflict with standing practice. But Kevin has gone further and has implanted set of electrodes which make direct contact with a nerve in his arm. The electrodes can be plugged into whatever what, including a network adapter. After 6 weeks of training he could control a robot hand by his own hand-movements. Sitting next to it or over the internet on the other side of the world.
Human to human communication is also possible.
(picture ripped from beamer projection, sorry about that)
His wife has a colored-leds (also) collier with a a receiver and Kevin has plugged in a transmitting bracelet. Now the activity in Kevin's nerves steers the glow in his wife's collier. Cyborgs coming to a conference near you. In (er gaat niets boven) Groningen.
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