Intel’s flagship chip architecture and upcoming processor, codenamed “Haswell,” will be introduced at Computex in Taiwan amid much fanfare and is expected to inspire a range of sleek touch-based devices. But according to the man who came up with the codename the naming process was pretty mundane.

"Haswell" is the internal codename of 4th generation Intel Core processors.

“It’s not very romantic at all,” said Russ Hampsten about the process. “I’ve done a bunch of them and they’re actually more painful than romantic.”

Intel’s legal department takes some fun out of the naming process, according to Hampsten and others, requiring that internal codenames be existing geographical, non-trademarked places in North America that can be found on a map. “Molalla” was originally considered as the codename and met the legal conditions, but Hampsten, a strategic product planner in the Intel Architecture Group, nixed the name even though it was derived from a town in his native Oregon.

“No one could spell it or pronounce it so we looked for something a little bit better,” he said.

Hampsten took the naming project home with him. Late one night while sitting with his laptop on a “boring brown couch in his living room” he found Haswell, Colo.

“I did a zip code search for something easy to spell, simple and catchy,” he said. “I started with Oregon and then moved out by state while staying in the West. I wanted a city at the time. I didn’t want to go for a mountain range or something like that.”

After running the finalists through a self-performed trademark search, Hampsten submitted “three or four” options to Intel attorneys and Haswell, population 68, according to the 2010 census, became the codename for what is officially called 4th generation Intel Core processors.

“But that’s the easy part,” he said. “Then you have to get the team to buy into it. On that front, luckily there was no major pushback. I don’t think anyone said it’s great, it’s fantastic, but they said it was fine — we just need a name.

“I like ‘Haswell.’ It’s quick, easy, everyone knows how to pronounce it. We’re a worldwide company, and sometimes if you have things that are hard to pronounce or spell people mess it up. I’m an old engineer. I’m practical, not too romantic in my ways, so I kinda like it simple and easy.”

The post Haswell: Origin of an Intel Codename appeared first on Intel Free Press.

“Honored” and a bit surprised is how the mayor of Haswell, Colo., population 68, feels about the codename for Intel’s 4th generation Core processor being a namesake for her town.

With a single worker, the largest employer in the town of Haswell, Colo. is the U.S. post office, a facility "we had to fight tooth and nail to keep," according to former mayor Pam Lessenden. Photo courtesy of Alan Robinson

“This is a very unexpected honor. I’d say only one-third of us have computers,” said Michelle Nelson about the residents of rural Haswell, located 132 miles southeast of Denver. Nelson, elected to the town’s top post in 2010, is a home-based professional agronomist who owns an HP Intel Core i3 laptop. So does her husband, Mark, a heavy equipment operator for Kiowa County, Colo. “We have a lot of senior citizens who aren’t comfortable with that type of technology.”

Nelson’s mayoral predecessor, Pam Lessenden, is among the majority of Haswellians who don’t own a computer; she stays connected with her Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and if she ever needs a computer, there’s one in the community center “that just got wireless.” As for TV, Lessenden said that since the FCC required stations to convert to digital in 2009, the townsfolk watch more DVDs than broadcast programming. Just part of the charm of a town located “in the middle of nowhere,” according to the former mayor.

Haswell was platted in 1908 as a cattle stop along the Missouri Pacific Railroad line. While there’s no debate on how “Haswell” became the internal codename of an Intel microarchitecture, some folks believe that their town is named after a prominent man of the era while others say the name came from the fact that the old railroad section house “has a well.”

The current mayor, whose in-laws are early settlers, describes her town as “a good place to raise kids where everyone knows everyone and we all care about each other.” Calling Haswell small would be an understatement by Nelson’s definition. The town’s largest employer is the U.S. post office with one worker. (The gas station has two, “but that doesn’t count because they’re of the family that owns it,” she said.) As for the community center, the building was once a school. Since Haswell Elementary closed in 1992, the town’s children have been bussed 22 miles to and from Eads, a larger city to the east.

“Our school kids are always the first ones on and the last ones off,” Lessenden said.

The biggest point of interest in the town is also the littlest. Measuring 12 feet by 14 feet, Haswell claims to have the smallest jail in the country. “That’s what brings people in,” Lessenden said. “That and we’re on the main bicycle route. [U.S.] 96 isn’t as populated as 50 and 287. In the summer they come to and from California, give our gas station a lot of business and sleep in the park overnight. They’re really nice people.”

As for a prominent processor being a namesake for humble Haswell, Lessenden had this to say: “It’s pretty exciting. I think what’s going to happen is people will Google it and then come out of their way to come here, like they do already to see the nation’s smallest jail.”

The post Haswell: Low-Tech Town appeared first on Intel Free Press.

"This technology gives the community a chance to have power and resources to get at issues that may seem intractable," said Mary Peveto, founder of Neighbors for Clean Air.

As the mother of an asthmatic, Mary Peveto has long been concerned about air pollution, but not until she stumbled across a USA Today report did she fully understand the threat to her daughter’s health. Discovering data that revealed air quality around her child’s elementary school in Portland, Ore. ranked among the worst in the nation transformed her into an activist. Now, Peveto is part of an experiment that is putting technology into the hands of individual residents so they help improve air quality monitoring.

Peveto and 16 other Portlanders are participating in a research experiment led by Intel Labs that uses common, low-cost sensors to gather air quality data. Data from the sensors feeds directly to websites that analyze and present visualizations of the data that are readily understandable.

Peveto’s involvement with air quality issues dates back to 2009. That’s when she first discovered the high pollution levels in her neighborhood on the USA Today website.

“We were astounded to find out that our neighborhood school ranked among the worst in the country,” she said.

That realization prompted the mother of three to found Neighbors for Clean Air, a public health advocacy group focused on air quality in Oregon, and ultimately forge an agreement with a local metal foundry to cut emissions. The experience also made her recognize the importance of technology in understanding air quality.

“The problem with air pollution today in America is that most of it is no longer visible,” said Peveto. “In the 1970s we were dealing with smog and envisioning L.A. and these basins of yellow smog. Today the insidious air pollution problem is largely invisible to the naked eye, so having the technology that can make the invisible visible through data and numbers is important to realizing change because we need awareness before we have change.”

Plug-and-Play Sensor Technology

Sensors are the technology that provide air quality data in the Portland pilot project. The ostrich egg-sized sensors will share minute-by-minute air quality measurements that could provide a better understanding of toxic exposure risks in their area, and eventually identify patterns for any given day, week, month or year.

“They couldn’t be simpler to use,” said Richard Beckwith, a research psychologist at Intel Labs. “You plug in the power and Ethernet and it starts sending data automatically.”

The sensors weigh less than a pound and are built using an open-source Arduino microcontroller that is available on Amazon and at many electronics stores. The sensors measure carbon and nitrogen dioxide emissions, temperature and humidity, and can be upgraded to measure particulate matter, ozone conditions and volatile organic compounds.

In addition to the 17 in Northwest Portland, there are more than 200 other “egg” sensors around the world now feeding real-time air quality data for anyone to see. Once a sensor is installed and registered at the Air Quality Egg website, its live data can be seen online at Xively, a public cloud service for the Internet of things.

Ostrich egg-sized air quality sensors that can be mounted to a window were provided to 17 northwest Portland residents by Intel Labs to measure CO and NO2 emissions, temperature and humidity, allowing individuals to stream real-time data to the Internet, where people can see visualizations of toxicity levels the air around them.

If the experiment works, Beckwith says it could expand to other at-risk neighborhoods. If demand for this technology grows, it could drive individual sensor prices down below $100, which is about 100 times cheaper than the sensors used today by the Environmental Protection Agency.

In Oregon, air quality data is collected by a sensor network operated by the state Department of Environment Quality and combined with data from the EPA. Though Beckwith contends that air quality data currently available from government agencies doesn’t provide detailed enough measurements within particular neighborhoods, he does acknowledge the limitations of cheaper sensors.

“The downside is that these low-cost devices are not high-precision sensors,” he said. “We need good correlation for interpolation to work, but we don’t really know how densely these should be deployed. We will probably install one every other block and adjust as needed.”

Although this experiment is about collecting, sharing and assessing air quality data, Beckwith says it’s “more about the small data that really matter for you.” New data economies could emerge if more people contribute to and benefit from this type of information, he said.

Air Quality Sensors Feed the Big Data Economy

Individuals equipped with sensors can improve accuracy of real-time data about pollution in a particular area. Researchers, such as Ken Anderson, anthropologist and senior researcher at Intel Labs, believe that could lead to new applications. These would be even more robust than the Environmental Protection Agency’s AIRNow and for people to better manage their health and wellness using personal computing devices.

Anderson also wants to see if the air quality pilot project in Northwest Portland will raise awareness of how people spend or use their data. “People think of the data as inalienable, but it is not,” he said. When people control their own data and can blend it with other openly accessible data from government entities or businesses, “it’s going to be a game changer,” according to Anderson.

Peveto, a former Nike and Adidas marketing manager, is continuing her work to help communities make a case for reducing levels of toxic emissions and believes that data can be an empowerment tool.

“This technology gives the community a chance to have power and resources to get at issues that may seem intractable,” she said. “If I can assess the risk, I can adapt, and having good data allows people to do that. This technology is a personal empowerment tool that puts information in the hands of individuals, and that knowledge can help motivate or otherwise give people tools to advocate for change.”

The post Big Data Makes Invisible Air Pollution Visible appeared first on Intel Free Press.

"Say you're located in one area of Portland (Ore.) and want to travel outdoors to another area. This data visualization shows what paths you can take to avoid specific trees so you get optimal air quality," said Adam Laskowtiz, a researcher at Intel Labs.

Itchy eyes, sneezing, stuffy and runny noses, coughing and even asthma attacks are rites of spring that come with blooming plants and skyrocketing pollen counts, but big data could spell big relief for allergy sufferers. Data visualizations available online today can help people plot routes that will allow them to avoid high-pollen areas and in the future this information could be made accessible on mobile devices.

“If you’re allergic to ash trees, then it’s important to know when the trees are pollinating so you can avoid them,” said Adam Laskowtiz, a researcher at Intel Labs.

A visualization program developed by Laskowitz and other Intel researchers allows people to identify pollen activity by specific types of trees and plot a block by block route to avoid specific allergens.

“Say you’re located in one area of Portland (Ore.) and want to travel outdoors to another area. This data visualization shows what paths you can take to avoid specific trees so you get optimal air quality,” Laskowitz said, adding that this is just one of many new ways public data can be put to purposeful use in people’s daily lives.

“The city collected this data to record where species of trees are located and really manage all tree-related operations,” he said. “We are using it for something entirely different.”

The species data that feeds the visualization comes from the city of Portland’s Parks and Recreation Urban Forestry Department. It’s based on a public tree inventory, something other cities across the nation are starting to do as well. That’s combined with other publically available data, including pollination periods, historical temperature, wind direction and speed, and precipitation, that is displayed on a digital street map with yellow dots indicating specific tree types.

The visualization is being designed in Processing, an integrated development environment that Laskowitz says is widely used by the open source community.

"If you're allergic to ash trees, then it's important to know when the trees are pollinating so you can avoid them," said Adam Laskowtiz, a researcher at Intel Labs.

“It’s Java-based so it can easily be ported to Android or Javascript for the Web,” said Laskowitz. “Ideally, when we have our own sensors out in the world we will be able to gather highly local data that will impact the meaning generated from the data.”

Currently, the tree visualization doesn’t incorporate data from air quality sensors, but in the future that information could be included.

Having all of this data compiled in a visual, easy to understand way could help people manage their daily lives, according to Laskowitz. People could use the tool to navigate different levels of data such as adding pollen count with pollution levels and wind conditions, all depending on what a person wants at a particular time.

In the near future, personal devices may be able to access real-time data sources to automatically generate a walking or biking route that avoids high-pollution or pollen zones before a person steps out of the house.

The project points to how “we can make the data meaningful and valuable to individuals in specific places,” according to Laskowitz.

The post Can Big Data Prevent Allergy Attacks? appeared first on Intel Free Press.

Mobile apps are a dime a dozen — the Apple App Store just hit the 50-billion download milestone — but not many are the brainchild of a second grader. That didn’t stop 8-year-old Nicolas Come from pitching his idea for a nutrition-focused mobile app to potential backers and now the result, Nicolas’ Garden, is launching for iPhone and Android smartphones.

Nicolas Come takes a break in between live segments on a local news station to promote the launch of the Nicolas' Garden mobile app in the Apple App Store and Google Play. The second grader came up with the idea for the app that promotes healthy eating for children.

Armed with a hand-drawn wireframe of his concept for a social platform and mobile apps that promote healthy eating and cooking for children, Nicolas pitched his startup idea to nearly 100 technical experts last November at an Intel-sponsored hackathon at Hacker Lab near downtown Sacramento.

“It was at Cereal Hack II and I got up on a chair to present my idea,” said Nicolas. “My dad had told me that if I pitched my idea there he would help me, so I did it. It was exciting and cool.”

Representatives of AppMatrix, a mobile app development company, saw Nicolas’ pitch at the hacker event and now the company is bringing his idea to market with the launch of Nicolas’ Garden in the Apple App Store and Google Play.

“We’re very interested in the start-up craze and to see an 8-year-old do this was awesome,” said Tim Dement, senior executive vice president of the Rocklin, Calif. firm. At 8, having a vision like that and be able to wireframe it? That’s just ridiculous, it’s amazing.”

The wireframe that 8-year-old Nicolas Come drew for what would become Nicolas' Garden. Courtesy of Stephane Come

At launch the app will offer a cornucopia of healthy recipes, cooking tips, shopping guides and other nutrition-minded content. Enhancement plans include gamification, multiple language support and a calendar of local farmers’ markets and other healthful events.

“I want to add a ‘Cook Top’ game,” Nicolas said. “You drag and drop ingredients from the pantry and refrigerator while following recipes on the app or others that you can make up on your own. If you make your own recipe and it’s really healthy you get lots of points, and if you deep fry it your score goes way down.”

Nicolas is by far the youngest client within AppMatrix’s portfolio, which includes GolfChex, Intel, Patriot Memory and Rogue Running. “I think our next youngest is 18, maybe, but every entrepreneur we work with besides Nicolas is an adult,” Dement said.

The ideas around content are all Nicolas’, according to his father, Stephane Come, an advisor at Hacker Lab and co-founder, president and CEO of LCS Technologies, an Oracle solutions consulting company that earlier this year entered into a business relationship with AppMatrix. “Nick comes up with the ideas and as his dad I help enable it. He doesn’t know you need to talk to a lawyer when starting a company, for example.”

Nicolas, through a trust, is part owner of the company that was spawned by his pitch at the hackathon. The experience of starting a business has allowed the second grader to work directly with the adults doing the coding that is making his idea a reality.

The Nicolas' Garden mobile app on the Apple iPhone.

“It was fun to get help from others and work as a team,” said Nicolas of his collaboration with designers Devon Latzen and Jay Miller, who helped design the app, and Kathryn Lastufka, a social media coordinator for LCS Technologies, who worked on that end of Nicolas’ Garden.

Nicolas’ father sees it all as a valuable learning experience.

“Is it going to work? I don’t know. This can fail,” he said. “Today Nicolas is on TV, the next month there could be no one using the app. Either way it’s a good life lesson.”

And as for Nicolas’ head getting bigger if Nicolas’ Garden grows? Not on Dad’s watch.

“I don’t want this to be like a Honey Boo Boo,” his father said. “That’s not what this is about.”

The post Second Grader’s Mobile App Launches appeared first on Intel Free Press.

Futurist Paul Saffo may have been the first to proclaim the PC dead back in 1991. Six years later PC Week editor John Dodge refuted Saffo’s position, claiming the PC was not dead, but that it “will be with us a long time.” Ironically, these two were on the front lines of a more than two-decade-long debate over the life and death of the PC that continues to this day amid the rapid rise of tablets and smartphones and slowing growth for traditional PCs. When contacted recently, both offered interesting perspectives on the cycles they’ve observed including the one the PC industry finds itself in today.

"It's not just about the hardware being dead anymore. This is about changing the whole paradigm, and I'm not optimistic about what the new order is," said futurist Paul Saffo.

In a New York Times op-ed published Oct. 13, 1991, Saffo declared that “today’s personal computers are headed for technological oblivion because they are fundamentally standalone devices designed to accommodate a wide range of tasks at the expense of doing any one particularly well. PCs will still be around, but relegated to an obscurity similar to that reserved for typewriters today.”

Saffo, who teaches at Stanford University and is co-founder and managing director of Discern, a San Francisco-based analytics firm, claims his original remark was rooted in his opinion that PCs “didn’t make sense for ordinary users.” He said, “In 1991 PCs seemed to be at right angles from what most users would want to do. It took a while for the industry to make devices that fit the general user.”

Today, Saffo has refined his position somewhat as he has seen the PC evolve — not that he still doesn’t think the PC is fading. “I’d say the same thing but I’d qualify it. I’d say the PC is dead but, but we’re going to be stuck with its corpse a lot longer than we want.”

Remarkably, Saffo also says the era of “personal” may be over, too. “The era of personal, locally controlled information was brief,” he said. “Today, for instance, information you post on Facebook and the books you read on Kindle are not owned by you. Facebook can delete your account and Amazon can remove the books you’re reading. It’s not just about the hardware being dead anymore. This is about changing the whole paradigm, and I’m not optimistic about what the new order is.”

A Different Perspective

In the late 1990s PCs and Internet use were growing rapidly, and John Dodge was editor of PC Week, a thick magazine bulging with advertising pages. In 1997, Dodge wrote that the PC “will be with us a long time.” His view ran counter not only to Saffo’s, but also to Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle, who was espousing a new era of so-called network computers. Just two years earlier, in 1995, Ellison had called the PC a “ridiculous device” that had become obsolete and would soon be replaced by simple diskless terminals that relied on the network and servers for information processing.

"The big question mark is whether the PC remains a Windows platform," said John Dodge, Enterprise CIO Forum community manager and former PC Week editor.

At the time, Dodge dismissed the stance that Saffo, Ellison and others were taking by writing in his column, “I think the discussion of whether the PC is dead, is dead.”

Dodge, who is now community manager of Enterprise CIO Forum, recently looked back on that PC Week column and believes that his prediction has largely held up.

“In 1997 the PC was at its peak and probably still had 10 years of peaking to do,” he said. “Now, of course, things are leveling off. There are many more form factors. The tablet is very, very popular, obviously. Screen interfaces are very easy to use. But people still use keyboards … there’s nothing like a good keyboard.”

Dodge, who uses a Mac as well as a tablet today, certainly recognizes the decline, but doesn’t think it’s a simple equation.

“We’ve seen a slight decline in PC sales, but it isn’t like all of a sudden the bottom is going to fall out,” he said. “They’re still very price-competitive, they’re very functional, they’re very business-oriented. The PC will be with us for a number of years more, there’s no doubt about that.”

While he believes the traditional PC will eventually be replaced, Dodge thinks it will happen slowly and decries the proclamations that he says are often made to get attention.

“Eventually it will get replaced, but I think it will be slow descent,” he said. “It’s not like people en masse will be giving up their PCs. If you take that Paul Saffo statement from the early ’90s … he’s a futurist. It’s his job to look into the future. Sometimes such proclamations are made to get attention. I see research firms do it all the time. They try to coin new phrases. They say ‘This is dead,’ ‘Everyone’s moving into the cloud’ — it’s like a zero-sum game. It’s like, ‘Enterprise IT is all of a sudden going to drop this platform in favor of this platform,’ and it never happens that way. Migrations tend to be slow, they tend to be piecemeal and they tend to be thought out.”

As for the future, Dodge still sees a lot of evolution happening, but ultimately believes PCs will “morph” into something else. In the meantime, PCs aren’t going away, he says, but he also thinks it won’t be a “Windows only” world for PCs going forward.

“The PC, if you look at Windows 8, is evolving,” Dodge said. “You can have a touchscreen and you can have a keyboard. You can have the best of both worlds in theory. I’m not necessarily sure that’s what people want. The big question mark is whether the PC remains a Windows platform. Does it have to be based on the Windows platform? I think it’s going to morph into something else. You will hardly notice the transition because it will take place over so many years. I don’t think something all of a sudden is going to come along and knock off the PC sort of as we know it. I don’t think you wake up one morning and there’s no more PC.

“I think people are going to buy PCs, they’re going to buy tablets and they’re going to buy smartphones. They all have different purposes and they’re all affordable.”

Futurist Paul Saffo may have been the first to proclaim the PC dead, but he wasn't alone. Over more than two decades, as networked devices, mobile devices and most recently tablets have come to market, a host of industry figures and observers have continued to predict the death of the PC. --Click to view larger--

The post Is the PC Dead? Looking Back on Two Decades of Debate appeared first on Intel Free Press.

IBM introduced the 5150 personal computer on Aug. 12, 1981. Powered by an Intel 8088 processor, it wasn’t the first PC, but is widely considered to be the machine that sparked the PC revolution. Just 9 days earlier, Carolyn Jen suited up for her first day of work in an Intel fabrication facility and began a career that spans 3 decades of the PC’s evolution.

Carolyn Jen (left) and a co-worker in bunny suits inside Intel's Fab 5 in Aloha, Ore.

Days before she retired after a 32-year career with Intel, Jen recalled her first day on the job at Intel’s second-oldest fabrication plant in Oregon, Fab 5 in Aloha.

“I still remember my first day at work in Fab 5, suiting up and entering the factory,” she said. “I could not identify anything in sight, with only one exception: the analog clock mounted to the wall. Even my trainer disappeared into a sea of white-suited people as I slowly scanned this foreign, yet, oh-so-clean environment.”

Jen quickly learned her way around the fab and how to tell her bunny-suited co-workers apart. Looking back she thinks that the fab workers of today would hardly recognize the less-formal and predominantly female fab environment where she began her career.

“It was quite a social place and everything was very manual,” she said. “We used to carry lot boxes of [silicon] wafers by hand. When I started they were phasing out 3-inch wafers and starting 4-inch, and the [silicon] recipe was on an accordion-style cards. Now everything is done by robots.”

Carolyn Jen using an IBM Displaywriter in 1984 at Intel. At the time, one PC was shared by an entire department.

After 3 years in the fab, Jen moved into training and staffing where she spent the remainder of her Intel career supporting each of the Oregon fab, sort and development factories. Among her most recent projects was the Intel Collaborators Intern Program, which brings together cross-disciplinary teams of graduate and undergraduate students, part of the company’s goal to double the number of internships offered to U.S. engineering students.

Beyond her experience in the fab, Jen points out that she grew up in the company — she started at Intel shortly after high school graduation — and that most of her career training took place on the job.

“I was able to develop a skill set that allowed me to instruct and lead training for top-level engineering Ph.D.s even though I didn’t have a B.A.,” she said. “It’s always been about ‘can you deliver,’ not the letters behind your name — Intel manages by performance.”

Jen, an avid bicyclist, plans to continue training and development projects in her retirement. She recently founded “Ride Like a Girl,” a Portland-based group to help inexperienced cyclists improve their skills.

The post Intel Retiree Hangs Up Bunny Suit after 32 Years appeared first on Intel Free Press.

Sixth-grade technology students at Gold River Discovery Center near Sacramento, Calif.

If you could give Mom any type of technology for Mother’s Day, what would it be? Students of the sixth-grade technology class at Gold River Discovery Center in suburban Sacramento answered that that question with responses ranging from devices available in stores today to future tech that might arrive by 2050.

One child — name kept anonymous — had no problem throwing his mother under the bus: “I would put a satellite in space that would not allow my mom to drive over the maximum speed so she can’t get any more speeding tickets.”

Here’s what some of the other digital natives said about the best tech for their mom this Mother’s Day:

Mobile Mother’s Day Gifts

“My mom would love a new iPhone. Hers is slow, old and out of date. Once she sat on the couch for 50 minutes waiting for something to load. Guess what? It never did. What she needs . . . is an iPhone 5. Or a blender.” — Jacob Kopitske

Alexis Munoz

“My mom needs a new phone. Her phone is too small. One time she sounded like Darth Vader with a creepy, echoing voice.” — Alexis Munoz

“My mom doesn’t know how to do anything that involves technology, so I need to get her a phone case that doesn’t allow you to press any buttons. She doesn’t know how to answer a call or turn down her volume so her ringtone goes off every five seconds.” — Cole Milne

“I would get my mom a Samsung Galaxy S3. Currently she has the iPhone 3GS. Whenever she tries to charge [the phone] it doesn’t work. She always gets so mad at it and says, ‘Stupid phone!’ or ‘I hate this phone!’ She sometimes sounds like a 5-year-old throwing a temper tantrum.” — Marisa Minjarez

“My mom needs a new iPhone. She has an iPhone 4S, but it doesn’t have a lot of space to get all the songs, and she needs more apps that help her cheat on her games that she plays on her phone. She [also] needs a timer so she doesn’t burn my toast in the morning.” — John Schaffer

Mother’s Day Computing Gifts

“For Mother’s Day I would get my mom a new computer. One reason is that her computer is so slow and so terrible that it doesn’t even work. Also, my mom is very communicative on Facebook. Without Facebook, I guess her life is sorta ruined.” — Max Buchanan

Rachel Abbett

“I would buy my mom a computer because she always borrows my computer for work when she travels. Whenever I get it back it always has the settings messed up and she complains that it is too complicated and this and that. I’d help her with her new computer.” — Rachel Abbett

“If I could get my mother anything for Mother’s Day, it would be a MacBook Pro. Recently she had to get a new computer because her old MacBook top came off completely. I would always joke about how she decapitated her computer (but, of course, she didn’t do it on purpose).” — Marisol Andrade

“I would get my mom a vacuum to clean up all the many messes taking place in my house or an Ultrabook so she can find new quick and easy recipes while keeping in touch with her Facebook friends. Overall I know that mom deserves endless happiness.” — Nattalie Saso Sanchez

Augie Eriksson

“I would buy her a new Windows 8 computer for her work and home, and very good anti-virus software. Even though she uses [her existing] computer every day, she doesn’t know much and downloads viral content that is obvious. It’s just ridiculous.” — Augie Eriksson

“My mom makes scrapbooks on her computer. A faster computer would make loading pictures quick and easy. The computer she has is very slow and confusing to use. All the time she is asking me, ‘Claire, I don’t understand how to put this picture here. Oh! Never mind, I think I got it. Oops, wait. Help me do this!’ And when she finally figures out how to use it, she forgets the next time.” — Claire Blanford

“My mom needs a new computer because I stole it from her for games, movies and music. I told my mom that she is never going to get it back.” — Kylee Grannes

Olivia Sloss

“My mom is also my sixth-grade teacher. I want to give her a MacBook computer so our technology class can edit a school television show called ‘Miner’s Media.’ They have been unable to do this because the iMovie on her computer is cutting every video in half. When this occurs, she practically pulls her hair out!” — Olivia Sloss

“My mom despises her laptop. Almost every day it crashes, then she yells at it. I call those ‘explosion moments.’ What she really needs is a new Ultrabook. Her laptop is nearly 10 years old, it’s practically a dinosaur.” — Julia Limon

“I would like to buy my mom a laptop tutor so she can learn how to use a laptop successfully without asking for my help.” — Matthew Duong

Futuristic Mother’s Day Gifts

“I would give her a robot that cooks because she doesn’t know how to cook. She burns everything she makes. She would definitely benefit from a robot that cooks for her because she could relax and not try to burn the house down.” — Kennedy Ice

Jack Mumm

“I would buy her a robot that would slice onions and handle/prepare raw meat. My mom hates cutting out the juicy, bloody, disgusting organs and crunching the bones.” — Jack Mumm

“My mom needs a robot maid like in ‘The Jetsons’ so that the house will be sparkly clean all day and my mom will enjoy the day without having to clean up the messy things around the house.” — Emma Hillenburg

“I would buy my mother a ‘Mom-Bot,’ a smart, self-automated robot that would successfully clean the bathroom for her. It would be able to clean all the toothpaste out of the sink, scrub the toilet seat until it was whiter than a cloud, and make the bathtub suitable for the queen.” — Toby Keys

“I would get my mom a robot that will teach her how to use all kinds of technology and help her do things around the house. We will name it Mom2-1000 in honor of my mother.” — Jayla Bolton

Jayla Bolton

“I would get my mom a robot to hold her 100-pound purse at the mall so I don’t have to.” — Ella Makovey

“By far it would be a ‘Where Are My Glasses?’ tracker. One time my mom was looking for her glasses and needed everyone to look for them. About 90 seconds later we all realized that her glasses were sitting on top of her head.” — Sydney Heglund

“My mom is a superhero, chauffeur, personal chef, homework helper, cheerleader and an awesome mom. However, if she had a personal robot, imagine how happy she would be! She could spend time doing other things that she enjoys instead of waking up every cold, grueling morning at 6:30 looking like a ghost. I mean no offense to my mom or anything, but she could use some sleep!” — Ariana Barrett

The post Top Tech Gift Ideas for Mother’s Day appeared first on Intel Free Press.

When was the last time you cleaned out the files on your old PC? If you’re having trouble seeing your desktop or if it’s a real chore to find anything you’ve filed away on your hard drive, odds are your older computer could use a bit of cleanup and reorganization, too. Here’s a list of things you should and should not do as you straighten things up:

1. Move Items off Your Desktop

Your PC desktop can quickly become a parking lot for all the applications, folders, files and shortcuts that you download or create. It might be because you’re in a hurry; maybe you haven’t noticed where items are going when you save them; or perhaps you just haven’t decided where to file everything. In any case, start your cleaning process with the desktop of your old PC:

• Keep your desktop for “works in progress.” If you expect to have a lot of these, create a folder specifically for them (call it “WIP” or something similar). When done, move the finished product to an appropriate folder within your PC.
• Place a folder on the desktop as a hold-all for the various application shortcuts (for printers, Web browsers, applications and other vitals) — assuming you really need all of these items. Some of the shortcuts, in particular, could be dumped and run from the source apps if needed.
• Don’t be afraid to use your Quick Launch taskbar for some of the application shortcuts you frequently use. Just drag your shortcut to the taskbar, then delete the original.
• You can also cluster things in your desktop to certain areas to stay more organized. For example, put your apps on the left side of your desktop and work in progress documents on the right side. Be sure to turn off the Windows desktop icon Auto Arrange if you use this method. (Right-click your desktop, select View, and uncheck Auto Arrange.)
• Your My Documents folder should remain on your desktop, as should your Recycle Bin.

2. Find “Forgotten” Clutter on Your Old PC

It’s easy to lose track of clutter. Some of it ends up in places you would not expect. A disk management application can help reveal where your largest files are located and help you decide ones that might be able to be tossed away. Also, assuming you want to keep all of your actual documents, you might scan your old PC for these space-eating files and consider deleting some of them:

• Photos. It’s OK to have a few for your desktop background. But if you’re getting low on space, or simply overwhelmed with clutter, you might consider how many you really need to keep on your main drive (an external drive is a great place for these). Also consider how many could be replaced because they’re outdated or obsolete.
• Music and videos. The No. 1 source of clutter on an old PC, because they’re so “invaluable.” Carefully consider how many songs you’re really going to listen to — especially at work.
• Downloads. Many people forget that once they download an item, they probably don’t need it anymore. This is especially true for software, which often gets updated (and downloaded) multiple times over the app’s lifetime.
• Outdated/obsolete applications. Odds are, you have apps installed on your old PC that once served a purpose, but haven’t been used in a while. Check your Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features folder to see what’s stashed away.
  • Note: If you don’t recognize an app on your computer, think twice about deleting it. Some applications and their updates are critical to keeping your PC running properly. You can cause serious damage to your system if you delete the wrong files.
  • Your trash can. It may sound strange, but people often forget to empty their PC’s Recycle Bin and permanently delete the contents. Even if you dump all your unwanted files, you save no disk space if they sit in the virtual garbage.

3. Create a Paperless File Cabinet

In this “green” era, file cabinets may seem passé. But virtual file cabinets are fully in style. Simply create folders the same way you would if they were made of paper, and store them in a specific location in your computer:

A traditional method is file naming by relation. In this case, you give a folder a name based on its content, and you insert appropriate subjects (e.g. “To Do” > “On Monday” > “For Pat” > “Account Updates”). One drawback here: It’s easy to have multiple folders with the same name (imagine every content folder with a “To Do” subfolder). This would make searching for the folder confusing, if not ridiculously difficult.

An alternative is the library card system; create a series of folders and name each one after a letter in the alphabet. You then place an appropriately named file or within each lettered folder. Remember to be consistent and logical with naming. For example, you would want to store all hacker-prevention files in a folder of that name, not in individual folders for “Anti-Virus,” “Malware,” “Spyware” and “Spam.” Otherwise, you risk spending a good chunk of time trying to remember what you called a folder.

Then there’s the “by the numbers” approach, where they give a folder a name and a date. For example, if you have a face-to-face meeting every quarter, add a date to the end of the file name (“F2F 1Q 2013″). This works only if you’re good about putting specific files in these folders, and can remember those files several weeks or months later when you need them.

4. Adopt These Best Practices to Keep Your Old PC Clean

Every filing system only works when it is actually used, and used properly. To keep yours in working order, remember to:

• File your files away when you save them, not when your desktop becomes covered with icons.
• Try to keep files within four subfolders deep. You don’t want to have to scroll through multiple layers of folders to find something.
• Also remember that the more folders and subfolders you use, the longer your file name becomes, making it harder to find a file. Try to keep actual file or folder names down to about a dozen characters or less.
• Avoid similar file names that differ only by numbers (“PowerPoint 1,” “PowerPoint 2,” “PowerPoint 3,” etc.). Those might work now, but in a few weeks, you might not be able to tell the difference.

The post 4 Tips to Clean Your Old PC appeared first on Intel Free Press.

Rani Borkar has been with Intel since 1988 and currently leads key engineering teams that design and develop Intel’s Core, Atom, Xeon and Itanium processors. As vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, she’s also been tasked with a big challenge: leading Intel’s efforts to design a new crop of SoCs. These integrated system-on-chip designs incorporate core functions into the silicon for PCs, tablets and servers as well handheld devices where Intel is considered lagging. Recently, Borkar discussed the shift in focus from designing traditional microprocessors to SoCs and how Intel stacks up to the competition.

"Winning in SoCs is not just about changing how we build chips. Intel is in the midst of a huge and critical transformation. No one organization can do it alone, and many pieces have to come together to make us a successful SoC company," said Rani Borkar, vice president and general manager, Intel Architecture Group.

One of her first major projects she worked on in her Intel career was the P6 CPU that first came to market with the Pentium Pro in 1995. Since that time she has been involved with several major architectural developments at Intel, including Intel’s Pentium 4 and leading the engineering team behind Intel’s 4th generation Intel Core processor, which is expected to be launched soon. In this conversation, Borkar speaks about Intel’s SoC efforts as well as an issue she believes strongly in: bringing more women into science and engineering careers.

What’s required for Intel to compete in SoCs?

There are three guiding principles for SoC development. One, you need leadership features, which are essential to deliver breakthrough experiences. The strides we’ve made in our development methodology have made us more nimble, but we’re in an extremely dynamic environment. We have to take some risks. Two, cadence is important. You have to go very, very fast, and you have to establish a cadence so that the market knows what’s coming — they are expecting it. The third thing is cost. And, which is where I truly believe we can leverage our IDM [integrated device manufacturer] advantage against our competition.

At the beginning of 2012 the company had zero percent market share in phones. Today, there are Intel-powered phones shipping in more than 20 countries. How does Intel get from where it is now to being a major player in mobile?

Until January of last year we didn’t have a single phone in the market. Now we have a dozen designs shipping with Atom SoCs. I carry one of them [Borkar holds up her Orange smartphone]. We didn’t have a tablet SoC, now we have “Clover Trail” [the codename for the dual-core Intel 32nm Atom SoC]. Will we win in 2013? We are making progress and building momentum.

I was here back when we were nowhere on servers and look where we are today on servers. The difference with SoCs is that the pace is changing in this market and some of the parameters have changed. It’s a multi-OS, fragmented environment, and there are a lot of players, but Intel has the software expertise and assets to deliver Windows and Android products.

"The strides we’ve made in our [SoC] development methodology have made us more nimble, but we’re in an extremely dynamic environment. We have to take some risks," said Rani Borkar, vice president and general manager, Intel Architecture Group.

If you look at [Intel] from outside, who has the assets we do? Forbes called Intel “the biggest software company you’ve never heard of.” We have the latest process technology in-house and the manufacturing capacity to scale. There are a lot of fabless companies, but we have the luxury of working directly with our manufacturing partners. When I say that I believe we will get there, I’m not just saying it as a philosophical belief; I’m saying it because I look at what we have.

How big is the transition from a CPU focus to a SoC focus?

Winning in SoCs is not just about changing how we build chips. Intel is in the midst of a huge and critical transformation. No one organization can do it alone, and many pieces have to come together to make us a successful SoC company. The strength of the collaborative spirit within Intel is amazing from software to platform to silicon and we have to work well across the organization to deliver the end product.

In the past, we were the CPU supplier. We tuned our process technology to our products. Our OEMs and ODMs had the system expertise, and they put the software stack and hardware together.

That’s changed. Now, to deliver the best end-user experience, we need to significantly invest in software and software-hardware co-design. On top of that, we have to deal with the challenges of a rapidly changing and fragmented OS ecosystem.

When you start to think about, “OK, what does the chip look like?” It’s not sufficient to lead in traditional areas like CPU and graphics, we need to be the best in emerging capabilities like display, media, imaging, and so on. As computing goes mobile, these are the capabilities end users really care about. We’ve invested a great deal in those capabilities and we’ve led in those areas for years. So it’s a shift to an outside-in view versus inside-out.

How much more complexity is there with SoCs?

There have always been interdependencies, but with SoCs it’s growing exponentially because there are parts that you’re not building yourself. There are things that we get externally. There are things we get from other groups within Intel.

Software is a key thing — it doesn’t matter if my silicon is ready, I need the software to be ready. We are co-designing and co-developing so that we find issues early because every time you spin new silicon it interrupts your process and that has the potential to slow the cadence and increase time to market.

How far is Intel along the path to being a major player in SoCs?

To build a house first you have to lay a foundation. I can’t start thinking about chandeliers and faucets and appliances if I haven’t poured the cement. So we have poured the cement — we have identified areas of improvement and made focused investments that have started to pay off. We’ve invested in FFRDs, we have a strong IP portfolio and we’ve increased our investments in software to support hardware-software co-design.

We are not done completely but we continue to put that tension in the system. So the foundation is laid. The machine is cranking. This year we’ve introduced a 32nm low-power Atom SoC [codenamed "Lexington"] for value smartphones and a 32nm dual-core Atom SoC [codenamed "Clover Trail+"] platform for smartphones and Android tablets. This year we’ll also be introducing a 22nm quad-core Atom SoC [codenamed "Bay Trail"] and the 4th Generation Core 22nm SoC [codenamed "Haswell"].

"There have always been interdependencies, but with SoCs it's growing exponentially because there are parts that you’re not building yourself," said Rani Borkar, vice president and general manager, Intel Architecture Group.

As someone who has worked in the tech industry for nearly 25 years, what do you think is needed now to bring more women into technical fields?

It has to start as early as the middle school level. By the time women get to high school, they’ve made up their mind on a lot of things. Maybe they go to college and change, but not that dramatically from non-engineering to engineering or even non-science to science. It has to start in middle school at least if not earlier.

If I reflect upon myself, I can still remember the encouragement from my grade 8 math and science teacher. It was a long, long time ago when I was in 8th grade, but yet I can remember their faces, I can remember the support.

Each one of us who is in the field has to make sure that we are sharing our experiences, how we handle challenges and we must be honest. Do I want to give up my child’s [musical] performance today and go to some big meeting? No. I have to prioritize that because I’m not just an exec at Intel, I’m also a wife and a mother. It applies to men, too. They have to make choices too. I don’t see that as a gender one. We talk a lot about it as women because we think this is something we can’t overcome, but all you have to do is basically say what your priorities are and how you’re going to address them. There’s a whole, big community out there who’s willing to help you if you let them.

The post The Woman Behind Intel’s Leading Architectures appeared first on Intel Free Press.

"We said let's make a ubiquitous plug on a computer so that any device that's plugged in just starts working. You don't have to know what kind of board, the speeds and feeds or get the [driver] disks to make it run. We wanted to make something that you could just plug in and start using," said USB co-inventor Ajay Bhatt

USB became the most common plug for consumer electronics in large part because it moved the PC to the center of people’s digital universe. Today, USB co-inventor Ajay Bhatt is working on technologies that will bring new experiences to the PC just as the now-ubiquitous plug-and-play USB cable did 20 years ago.

Bhatt helped invent USB, or universal serial bus, in 1994 just 4 years after he joined Intel. Today, he said, some 2 billion USB-equipped computers, smartphones, tablets, cameras, printers, music players and other digital devices now ship each year. The unmitigated success of USB turned Bhatt into a tech industry celebrity — an actor portrayed him in a commercial. But the Intel Fellow and chief platform architect for Intel’s PC Client group hasn’t rested on his USB laurels. He holds 33 patents, eight of them related to USB, and has been recognized for his work with Accelerated Graphics Port, PCI Express and power management technologies, and this year received the Asian Award in Science and Technology and was nominated for a European Inventor Award.

In a recent interview, Bhatt discussed his work to reinvent the PC and how USB sparked new uses for computers while giving manufacturers a single standard for data transfer and power.

Before USB, what was computing like?

In the early 1990s, computers were used by technical people to do technical things. They were not suitable for a common consumer.

Prior to the advent of USB, each of the plugs on a computer were unique plugs. I got my inspiration from looking at a power plug on the wall. The thinking was, you plug in your toaster and it works or you plug in a computer and it works — a user doesn’t have to know, they just plug in the device and flick a switch and you get the power. We said let’s make a ubiquitous plug on a computer so that any device that’s plugged in just starts working. You don’t have to know what kind of board, the speeds and feeds or get the [driver] disks to make it run. We wanted to make something that you could just plug in and start using. That’s how USB came about.

Do you know how many USB devices are in the world today?

Every year there are more than 2 billion devices shipped. These days just about every phone, computer and tablet has a USB built in, and today most people can’t imagine life without USB.

"When you're at your desk, it has a keyboard, all of the ports in the back and a large screen, but when you want to leave your office and just enjoy simple consumption then you can eject the screen, remove it and you have a tablet," said Ajay Bhatt, Intel Fellow and chief platform architect for Intel's PC Client group, about the next evolution of the PC.

Your work on the USB changed computing. What are you working on today?

These days I’m working on transforming PC experiences. The PC has been around for about 30 years, and every so often it goes through a transformation. We went from desktop to mobile computing and once they were mobile we made them wireless. Now we’re trying to make it ultraportable, very light, thin yet have all-day battery life and new technologies such as touch, sensing and ubiquitous connectivity.

I’m working on a computer that will last all day long. If it is on standby, the battery will last more than 2 weeks and it will have all of the performance that you always had in a personal computer. We’re in the midst of reinventing the PC once again.

Imagine a computer that is the best of both worlds. When you’re at your desk, it has a keyboard, all of the ports in the back and a large screen, but when you want to leave your office and just enjoy simple consumption then you can eject the screen, remove it and you have a tablet.

With wireless data and charging technologies improving, will USB still be around in the future?

Wireless gives you great freedom in most situations. However, you always face a situation where wireless won’t work reliably. That’s when you need one wire. That one wire is going to be USB. The same wire that allows you to talk to a peripheral can also supply enough power to the PC to charge it.

"Every year there are more than 2 billion devices shipped. These days just about every phone, computer and tablet has a USB built in, and today most people can't imagine life without USB," said USB co-inventor Ajay Bhatt.

Has the PC evolved beyond being the center of people’s digital life?

We’ve gone away from personal computing to ubiquitous computing so we’ll all have smart cars, smart devices, smart homes, so smartness will be around us and on us, whether it is a watch or wearable computer or glasses. We will see smart things all around and these things, known as the ‘Internet of Things,’ will work seamlessly to give you a contiguous computing experience.

In 2009, an actor portrayed you in an Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow ad. Were you disappointed that the actor looked nothing like you?

That’s not the real Ajay Bhatt. I’m the real Ajay Bhatt.

The History of USB

• USB was first developed in 1994 by Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel.
• Ajay Bhatt and others from Intel worked on the standard.
• First integrated circuits supporting USB were produced by Intel in 1995.
• The original USB 1.0 specification was introduced in January 1996 with data transfer rates between 1.5 Mbit/s and 12 Mbit/s.
• First widely used version of USB was 1.1, which was released in September 1998.
• USB 2.0 specification was released in April 2000 after Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lucent Technologies (now Alcatel-Lucent), NEC and Philips led development to increase data transfer rate to 480 Mbit/s, a 40-times increase over the original USB 1.1 specification.
• The USB 3.0 specification was released November 2008 with data transfer rate up to 5 Gbit/s, decrease power consumption, increase power output and backwards-compatible with USB 2.0.
• The first USB 3.0 SuperSpeed-equipped devices hit the market in January 2010 and by late 2013 speeds are expected to increase from 5 to 10 Gbit/s.

The post From USB to Ubiquitous Computing appeared first on Intel Free Press.

With the exception of Jane Shaw, center, who retired from Intel’s board of directors in 2012, these are the people who are choosing the next Intel CEO.

Front row (left to right):

• James Plummer, John M. Fluke Professor of Electrical Engineering and Frederick E. Terman Dean of the School of Engineering at Stanford University. On the board since 2009.
• Frank Yeary, principal of private investment and advisory firm Darwin Capital Advisors. On the board since 2009.
• Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky, senior international partner at law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. On the board since 2004.
• John Donahoe, president and CEO of eBay. On the board since 2009.

Back row (left to right):

• David Yoffie, Max and Doris Starr professor of International Business Administration at Harvard Business School. On the board since 1989.
• Susan Decker, principal of consulting and advisory firm Deck3 Ventures. On the board since 2006.
• Reed Hundt, CEO of the non-profit Coalition for Green Capital and the principal of strategic advice firm REH Advisors. On the board since 2001.
• Andy Bryant, board chairman and a member since 2011.
• Jane Shaw, former board chair (2009-2012). She joined the board in 1993 and retired in 2012.
• Paul Otellini, president and CEO of Intel. On the board since 2002. He has announced that he will retire in May 2013.
• David Pottruck, chairman and CEO of private equity firm Red Eagle Ventures. On the board since 2009.

The post Meet the People Who Will Select the Next Intel CEO appeared first on Intel Free Press.

Desire for new ways to interact with computer devices is bringing attention to companies that specialize in touchscreen, sensor, haptic, camera and digital voice technologies. Apple’s Siri voice assistant, Samsung’s eye tracking and Leap Motion’s gesture recognition device that will be used in future PCs by HP are instances where these technologies are helping smartphone, tablet and computer makers innovate and differentiate products. For users, this means personal computers and devices are becoming more human with perceptual hardware and software that bring sight, hearing and touch interactions.

"The way people are interacting with smartphones using voice and data has moved down to simple phones and extended to tablets and Ultrabook computers," said Andy Keane.

Voice technologies may be the tip of the spear for these ways of interacting. In a recent interview, Ben Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, said that beyond touch interfaces, advancements in voice command and control technology will push other modes of so-called perceptual computing such as gesture, facial recognition and eye tracking interfaces into mainstream products.

One of the companies working with voice is Audience, a maker of digital voice and audio processors for mobile devices. According to Andy Keane, former vice president of marketing for the company, its technology, designed after the human hearing system of two ears, utilizes two microphones on a device to separate out a voice, enhance it and then transmit higher-quality voice over mobile network. In an interview conducted before Keane, who left the company earlier this year, said that noise canceling technology brings clear-sounding voice but also improves talking experiences on the phone. It also has huge implications for machine learning, giving people the ability to control their devices, search the Internet and understand their surroundings wherever they go just by using their voice.

Audience has focused on voice technologies since 2000. Over a decade into it, what technologies are changing your business?

Voice is playing an increasingly critical role in mobile technologies and cloud services. Mobile technologies, especially smartphones, have rapidly evolved as a tool for voice to a tool for data and sensing the world around us. The cloud is an incredibly important advance because it’s allowing consumers to use their mobile devices to do new things. When voice is turned into data cloud computing installations can take the voice and produce Internet search results or find information about the world around you.

What innovation is happening around voice technologies?

By extracting the voice from any surrounding noise and enhancing it we can now make that voice appear very clear to the listener at the other end. No matter if you’re in a restaurant, train station or on the street, you can actually talk on your mobile phone and be heard clearly while talking in a normal voice. This enhances overall communication by allowing mobile devices to be useful anywhere.

By enhancing the voice, speech recognizer technology can find and deliver accurate results regardless of the environment around you. Now voice can be a very natural way of interacting with a mobile device. High-quality voice is becoming more important as voice command experiences become more mainstream.

Europe is leading the way with an initiative called HD Voice, a set of voice call quality standards as the industry moves to wideband. It is analogous to television’s development from black and white to color and today’s HD TV. Moving to HD Voice will bring higher-quality voice on devices in a quiet or noisy environment.

The other advances are happening in the network. For example, LTE gives a much bigger pipe for data to and from the consumer, so more bandwidth is available for very natural voice call quality and device interaction.

Do you see trends or shifts in the way people are using voice to interact with their computing devices?

The most dramatic trend is that the way people are interacting with smartphones, using voice and data, has moved down to simple phones and extended to tablets and Ultrabook computers. New technology really drives consumers. You put a new capability into consumers’ hands and ultimately what happens is they start doing things no one anticipated. As these phones become part of people’s lifestyles it drives what types of devices and capabilities we design in the future.

The biggest challenge is meeting consumers’ expectations now that incredibly capable smartphones are in the hands of many more people. They want experiences in real time, like video and instant access to information wherever they are. Ultimately, devices, networks and applications and the infrastructure delivering this content need to keep pace with consumer expectations.

It’s like the movie business. Every new movie that comes out needs to have something a little better, it needs to have more of a wow factor. To keep people consuming content and purchasing new devices we have to keep improving that experience at the pace that meets consumer expectations.

Do people use voice technologies differently in various parts of the world?

With the advent of smartphones being so capable with fast processors, large screens, good voice quality, feature phones, the kind designed primarily for voice calls are being left behind. These feature phones have been the primary device for many people in emerging markets, so we’re moving voice quality technologies once only found in smartphones down to low-cost feature phones.

What are some new uses that might evolve as voice quality improves?

Smartphones know where they are because they have GPS. It can connect to the cloud and bring in the language based on your location or stick to your device’s language preference. We have this fantastic power in the cloud to adapt to an individual. Imagine that all of the different languages of the world lived in the cloud. So you don’t have to have all of the flavors of Indian dialects or the dialects that exist in Spain stored on the personal device.

Consumers to some extent like new capabilities but what they really like is to have a much simpler experience. Today, we see people aggregating applications on to their devices, but what if you could simply tell the device what you want and it would know how to respond?

The post Talk with Your Device: The Future of Voice Control appeared first on Intel Free Press.

New technologies aren’t typically built in a day or even weeks, but after years and sometimes decades of research and development. SRI International has fine-tuned a technology development process that serves the research needs of clients such as the U.S. government and Apple. Over the years that process has produced what became the first computer mouse and the digital voice command technology now known as Siri. It may appear to be magic, but according to the man who leads the non-profit research institute, it all boils down to talented people, agreeing on the meaning of innovation and unwavering discipline for turning innovations into viable businesses.

"The problem is finding a viable way to make a business out of it. People have lots of ideas and those ideas morph and go through transformations. Oftentimes the hardest part is coming up with that business model," said Curt Carlson, CEO and president, SRI International.

SRI was established by Stanford University in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in what would become Silicon Valley. It became independent of the university in 1970 and today is one of the largest contract research institutes in the world. SRI holds more than 1,000 patents and has incubated and spun off scores of ventures such as Intuitive Surgical and Nuance Communications.

Curt Carlson, the CEO and president of SRI, and Bill Mark, its vice president of information and computing sciences, recently appeared at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. to discuss innovation. John Markoff of the New York Times, fresh off a Pulitzer win, moderated their conversation, which was part of the museum’s “Revolutionaries” series sponsored by Intel.

Carlson and Mark pointed out areas of innovation to watch, including education, biotechnology and ubiquitous computing along with a rapid evolution of user interfaces. After leaving the stage, they sat down for an interview to discuss the importance of a framework for successful innovation, the decades-long process behind Siri and how a shortage of talented people is leaving billion-dollar opportunities on the table.

What is the state of innovation in Silicon Valley today?

Bill Mark: It’s popping. Silicon Valley has been and is right now a hugely innovative space. There’s just all kinds of things going on that you’re going to be hearing about for the next decade.

Not to downplay that enthusiasm, but innovation is a word that’s hard to escape these days. Is the term overused?

Curt Carlson: I don’t think it’s overused. I don’t think it’s used precisely. There should be agreement within the company about what it actually means. Some people say it’s an idea or its something novel or it’s an invention and to us [SRI International] that’s not what it is. Innovation, to us, is the creation and delivery of new customer value in the marketplace with a sustainable business model for those who are producing it. We spell it out. People almost always forget the sustainable business model part of it. If it doesn’t have sustainable value for the company, it’s not innovation. It may be a smart idea, but it doesn’t do the company any good.

Creating sustainable business models is essential for SRI, so how do you know the right time to move research into the product phase?

Mark: The research that led up to Siri had been going on for decades — the research into speech, artificial intelligence, and artificial agent technology. What happened in that case was that a colleague of mine at SRI — Norman Winarsky — and I saw a disruption in the world of mobile telephony. The disruption was that voice revenues were going away and data services had not yet picked up. Everybody knew that. Our premise was that the reason that data services weren’t being used was that it was just too hard to use them. There were great data services out there, but they were just too hard to use. We thought that if you could have a spoken interface not just to do things like searching but to actually do things, to use those services via the mobile phone, things would take off. That’s how we knew the time was right for Siri, but even then it still took more than 2 years to get the value proposition right and get it funded.

"Silicon Valley has been and is right now a hugely innovative space. There's just all kinds of things going on that you're going to be hearing about for the next decade," said Bill Mark, vice president of information and computing sciences at SRI International.

So with a product like Siri that’s decades in the making, how do you decide whether a new technology is ready for prime time?

Carlson: In my definition of innovation I stress a sustainable business model. People have lots of ideas and those ideas morph and go through transformations. Oftentimes the hardest part is coming up with that business model. In the case of Siri, the 3 years we spent incubating it were not for the technology, not for the product so much — we knew how to do that — it was “how do we make money with this company?” That was the hard part. We had to piece lots of things together. We had to wait for the infrastructure to build so that we had a way to create a viable model for it.

At a place like Intel or SRI it’s inevitable that people will be early because they’re always thinking out 5 or 10 years just by the nature of what they do. So it’s having a disciplined process where you can incubate these things and where people know that the goal is not to form a company but to form a viable company. It’s easy to form a company, but forming a good solid company takes diligence. You have to stick to the fundamentals and you have to be convinced that you have a viable business model. That’s the hard part.

Some have criticized Silicon Valley, and particularly app- and advertising-centric businesses, for working on “small” problems instead of tackling “big” problems. Is that a valid critique?

Mark: I think some of Silicon Valley is focused on big things and there’s a difference here because some of the things that some people might think of as small can be very lucrative. So they’re big in the sense of monetization and I don’t blame anybody for focusing on things like that. However, I think that other parts of Silicon Valley, including SRI, are very focused on problems that we think are important to humanity going forward.

How big a barrier to innovation is access to talented people?

Carlson: The need for great people who have the passion and skills to do these things — that’s what’s slowing us down. How many billion-dollar opportunities are there in the world right now? One, 10, 100? It’s got to be thousands. They’re just sitting there and all it requires is a group of people with the right skills to identify them and put together the solutions to make them happen. That’s by far the limiting factor in my mind.

The post The Best Time for Innovation? appeared first on Intel Free Press.

Instead of stepping into a fitting room to try on new clothes, shoppers may soon activate an augmented reality body double on a retail kiosk or their personal device. Parents could carry around avatars of their children, making it easy to buy clothes that fit and match with other clothes already hanging in the closet at home.

Bringing mirror-like augmented reality to the shopping experience will require realistic clothing simulation that allows people to see how new clothes might fit and move on their body according to Intel Labs researcher Nola Donato.

Experiments with so-called digital dressing room technology have been around for years, including the multimedia bathroom mirror from the New York Times Research and Development Lab and the Magic Mirror avatar experience developed by Intel Labs researcher Nola Donato.

Recently, Nordstrom’s CEO said technology innovations such as digital fitting rooms will change the way people shop for clothes. It’s a trend that European retailers Tesco and Zalando are pushing ahead, as is Bodymetrics, which is using Microsoft Kinect technology to create full-body scanners to help Bloomingdale’s shoppers find the perfect-fitting pair of jeans.

However, it remains a technological challenge to create digital clothing that looks and moves as if the person were actually wearing it, according to Donato. The graphics software architect is tinkering with perceptual computing hardware and software algorithms that could someday let people put clothes on their own lifelike avatar using a personal device and do it with a fidelity that re-creates an augmented reality experience like looking in a mirror. In a recent interview, Donato described the difficulties of creating real-time clothing simulation and how the technology could make possible new shopping experiences.

Being able to touch fabrics, try them on and feel how they fit before you buy is hard to beat. Why would shoppers be attracted to using 3-D augmented reality shopping technology instead?

Today, when you go into a store you have to find what you like, try it on and sometimes you have to wait in a long line. That experience, for some, is unpleasant. When you look at the alternative of shopping online, you see little 2-D images and you have to make a buying decision based on that with no idea for how the items look on you. A lot of returns happen because people buy three sizes to find the one that fits them and then return the others. It would be nice if you could figure out what size fits you by first trying on the clothing.

Using clothing simulation technology you might be able to say, “I have this shirt at home and here I found a couple of pairs of pants … let’s try them on and see which one goes best with my shirt.”

You can also make shopping social and collaborative. You can shop with your friends who aren’t with you or your mom who lives in another city. Say you’re shopping for a dress and you want your mom’s opinion while you’re at the store in front of the kiosk. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could say, “Mom, take a look at this on my avatar and tell me what you think and should I buy it?”

The cloth simulator we’re working on basically takes dress patterns as a seamstress would make them and allows you to put them on to see how it fits and it matches with other clothes. The software drapes it on the avatar without using collision geometries, so you’ll be able to drape jackets over skirts over sweaters and layer the clothing just like you would in real life.

Stores like Lego have already brought 3-D augmented reality experiences to retail. Why is shopping for clothes still stuck in the 2-D world?

One of the most challenging things is to upgrade the quality to where you really think it [the kiosk or personal device screen] is a mirror. Tracking with a single-depth camera does not give you enough fidelity and cannot track you when you turn around. The [real-time experience] just completely falls apart and it doesn’t give you any way to show grace of body movement. Lower-quality rendering may be fine in a game where you’re fighting or something, but for [retail clothing] use we’ll need more than one camera and a better-performance tracking system.

We want to create a real-time experience where you can answer, "How does this look on me when I'm standing, twirling or walking, and does this style suit me, does this go with something that I already have?" said Nola Donato, a 3-D graphics architect at Intel Labs.

The solution that we’re working on this year involving photo-realistic rendering and very high-quality cloth simulation probably won’t run on a typical [mobile computing] client. In order to get a version [for tablet or smartphone] to have all of the capabilities, we have to stream the video from a server to a client. However, inside a store we can do all of the simulation calculation on the kiosk because it’s a very powerful client.

There are a lot of offline cloth simulators that although they’re not real time, produce very accurate results. But to get real time, you need very highly parallel [computer] architecture [that can process lots of information quickly]. We’re collaborating with UC Berkeley, James O’Brien’s group, to make it a parallel cloth simulator that will run in real time with fashion-quality results so that you can get an idea of what it would look like on you by modeling it virtually.

We want to create a real-time experience where you can answer, “How does this look on me when I’m standing, twirling or walking, and does this style suit me, does this go with something that I already have?”

And in the future we want to give access to a personal virtual closet that has clothes that you actually bought. You can mix and match to find the right personal look, then click a button and say, “Send me the stuff that I don’t already have.”

Computer scientists such as Michael Black have spent years creating mathematically accurate depictions of human body types, shapes and movements. If each of us had a lifelike avatar, where would we use it?

The first thing we’re going to do is to make a kiosk where you stand in front of it and it does what you do. It’s your body, your motion and the avatar lets you model outfits like you’re looking in a mirror. You’d be able to use gestures to select or use speech to ask it to show merchandise. It will be more like a personal style concierge or fashion consultant. We see this being in a retail establishment or in a mall.

The second thing we want to do is to have a version that lets you do online shopping. You can use your smartphone, tablet or laptop to find merchandise, see how it looks on you or somebody — say if you’re shopping for your son, daughter, wife or husband and you have their avatars already stored then you’d be able to shop and see how things look on them. You might even have access to their virtual closet so that you could make it match stuff they already have.

The post Can Augmented Reality Change How You Shop for Clothes? appeared first on Intel Free Press.

Big companies such as GE, Microsoft and Merck are turning to data scientists to help them find answers, patterns and intelligence that will help them innovate and make critical business decisions. Even for large enterprises, the resources required to marshal a team of these data analytics wizards can be a limiting factor, but a startup company is using crowdsourcing model to give companies access to an army of data scientists.

Kaggle founder and CEO Anthony Goldbloom has built an army of 85,000 data scientists that competes to find big data solutions. The startup is located in San Francisco's SoMa District across the street from AT&T Park (seen in the background).

Leading those legions of approximately 85,000 data scientists is Anthony Goldbloom, founder and CEO of Kaggle, a competition-based platform for predictive modeling and analytics. Drawing upon his admitted obsession with data analytics and experience with macroeconomic modeling for the Reserve Bank of Australia and Australian Treasury, Goldbloom founded the company in Melbourne in 2010. In 2011, he moved operations to San Francisco and in March launched the company’s signature product, Kaggle Connect, a platform that links companies to Kaggle’s growing community of data analytics experts.

Goldbloom’s accomplishments are impressive, especially for someone in his 20s — until June, that is. He’s twice been named to Forbes’ annual “30 Under 30” list of young technology leaders, has been featured in Fast Company’s “Who’s Next” series and is a featured speaker at the upcoming Data 2.0 Summit. Recently, Goldbloom sat down to discuss how Kaggle fits in the world of big data, where his company is going and that “terrible” name.

You had an internship at the Economist in 2008. Did that experience spark your interest in big data analytics and plant the inspiration for Kaggle?

That’s definitely the case. To give you some background, the Economist has an essay competition every year. I entered with an essay about sub-prime mortgages, which was a hot topic at the time. It was actually an unfortunate essay; I wrote why the sub-prime mortgage defaults weren’t a problem and I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Of course, that’s what caused the global financial crisis [GFC]. There couldn’t have been a worse conclusion to draw. Nonetheless, it was a strong enough essay that it won the competition and the prize was a three-month internship. I pitched a piece on big data and data science and my editor said I could write it. Being able to call people up and say, “Hi, I’m Anthony Goldbloom of the Economist, I’d like to speak to XYZ” and everybody answers your calls turned out to be a fabulous way to do market research. I noticed that a lot of the people I was speaking to within companies doing predictive modeling weren’t that strong. It was frustrating to me and it got me thinking of a business model in which meritocracy is the basis of what you can charge companies objectively for that type of work.

You’ve gone from covering big data to being enveloped by it. How do you define “big data”?

Big data is data that doesn’t fit into Microsoft Excel. It’s actually not my line. I got that from [senior data scientist] Monica Rogati of LinkedIn, but I like it a lot. Big data is a buzzword. I’m glad it exists because it makes people more interested in what we do. There’s an enormous amount of value to be had out of data. Ten years ago those decisions were made on gut feel and intuition and now we’ve had fabulous case studies both in business — I think of Tesco and the advent of the loyalty card as probably the most prominent business case study. There’s also the case study of the Oakland A’s and “Moneyball,” and another on predicting election outcomes. I think all of this comes to demonstrate why basing decisions on data leads to much better decisions than just relying on gut instinct.

So how does Kaggle work?

We manage a community of 85,000 that I would argue to be the world’s most elite statisticians and data scientists. We rank them objectively. We’re a marketplace that matches the best of them up with companies who are trying to get statistics or machine-running problems solved. We rank them objectively [through competitions] before they get selected or invited to Kaggle Connect. Those who perform best in the competitions get invited to Kaggle Connect. The competitions are a way to qualify talent and see who are the world’s best data scientists and what they’re good at and the Kaggle Connect piece is how they can monetize their competition performance.

You can objectively judge how good somebody is at doing data analytics and statistics by measuring how accurate their solutions are. It felt to me that rather than hiring somebody because they have a really nice CV, I really like the idea of meritocracy. What really appeals to me about competition, particularly those that are objectively judged, is that they’re really meritocratic. The best person wins because they have the best model.

A data visualization from a "starter" Kaggle competition designed to introduce people to data science and machine learning that analyzed which passengers were likely to survive the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic. Image courtesy of Kaggle

Is this crowdsourcing or more of a marketplace for data analytics?

Crowdsourcing is often associated with very low-value, high-volume work. I think it was reasonable for people to refer to Kaggle as crowdsourcing when all we did was competitions. That’s where the business started. Now that we do Kaggle Connect I’d say that defining us as a marketplace better reflects what we do.

If you turn a critical eye on Kaggle, what holes would you poke at?

I can certainly tell you the arguments people make against using us and I can also tell you how I refute them. People often wonder how a problem can be solved by someone who is not fully educated on or immersed in their industry. For example, Intel might question using someone who doesn’t necessarily know about chip design. The way I respond to that is working with Kaggle is the ultimate collaboration between a domain expert and a data scientist. A domain expert knows the business content — they know how the data was collected and how the output will fit in their operations. The data scientist dots with the domain expert, doing all the complex mathematics and extracts the value of the domain expert.

What’s an example of how Kaggle’s data scientists have helped a company?

We recently helped Ford with a really cool problem. It was a research project around a sensor that determined the alertness of drivers. They wanted to determine through sensor readings whether the driver was alert or not. They took three classes of variables: They took environmental variables like how sunny it was outside and what the temperature in the car was. They took sensor readings like body temperature, eye movements and heart rate. The third type was psychological — what type of mood is the driver in, that type of stuff. They wanted to see which of these characteristics contributed to a driver being more alert or less alert. It was a research project that was aimed at how to equip cars that would keep a driver alert.

We built them an algorithm that gave them feedback from the sensors. I know they were very happy, but I don’t know what the commercial implications were. We didn’t get a lot of feedback from them because they wanted to keep it pretty buttoned up, even with us.

How would you characterize the data scientists within the Kaggle community?

There are three classes of data scientists. There are those who compete in the competitions mostly for fun; they’re not really interested in income. You’ve got academics who want access to real-world problems, and the third group is very interesting and one that’s increasing, and they are the people who are starting to rely on Kaggle and also their Kaggle reputation to get full-time income. I found it interesting that the New York Times, for instance, put up a job advertisement; they’re looking for a data scientist. One of the first job requirements they put on it was “Has a Kaggle ranking.” So we’re a well-wearing credential which is kinda cool.

About that company name, where did “Kaggle” come from?

It’s a terrible name because most American’s pronounce it “‘kā-gəl,” [rhymes with "bagel"] which sounds like the pelvic floor exercises. Australians pronounce it “‘ka-gəl” [rhymes with "haggle"]. I didn’t have any money when I started the company to purchase a domain name so I built an algorithm that iterated phonetic domain names and printed out a list of what was available. My wife and I went through the list and “Kaggle” was the one we picked. It’s algorithmically generated. Apparently, “Sex and the City” did an episode on Kegel exercises. If not for that episode I wonder if anyone would have heard of Kegel exercises. When we moved the company away from Australia and to the U.S. that’s when we started being ridiculed.

The post A Marketplace for Data Scientists appeared first on Intel Free Press.

In a space no larger than a one-car garage, Russ Brown, an Intel engineering technician, puts electronic devices through hell. Torturing Ultrabooks is monotonous and noisy work — mechanical shock testing, for example, can mean several months of repeated banging to simulate a 3-foot drop onto concrete. But as Brown will attest, it makes for better computing devices.

Intel engineer Russ Brown tests an Ultrabook for mechanical shock. He is bracing a device that will crash down from a hydraulic platform to simulate a 3-foot drop onto concrete.

“It’s loud and repetitive, but that’s part of what it takes for better-designed and more durable products,” he said. Brown is part of a corporate quality network that punishes Intel-powered devices to collect data for the company’s product and technology development teams and OEM partners.

“Our teams are eager to know how different customer designs can affect the reliability of Intel products,” said Jagadeesh Radhakrishnan, a reliability engineer. “It also helps Intel understand how to design the next-generation product better in order to survive the growing expectations of new form factor designs such as convertibles and tablets.”

Data collected from testing has influenced product design of systems based on the upcoming 4th generation Intel Core processor, formerly codenamed “Haswell.”

“Evaluation of ‘Ivy Bridge’ Ultrabook models told us about printed circuit board size, thickness and component density,” Radhakrishnan said. “This data helps us understand the cost and design implications involved in reducing the Ultrabook form factor thickness when launching ‘Haswell.’

Findings from the “Ivy Bridge” tests also influenced the chassis material being used for initial 4th generation Intel Core systems.

“The information gained also helps define the next-generation package technology that our SoC [system-on-a-chip] CPUs will need as we go even thinner and lighter with each new generation of Ultrabooks,” Radhakrishnan said.

Ultrabook Tests Mimic Real-World Scenarios

Intel tests products for long-tern reliability as well as for survivability during normal use. In other words, Radhakrishnan said, “We want to ensure that Intel products can reliably operate for 3 to 5 years within a typical laptop or Ultrabook design.” That’s why putting products through torture is necessary.

“We have all had a clumsy moment with our precious high-tech gadgets — dropping our phone while trying to pull keys out of our pocket or a moment of carelessness flings the tablet on the floor,” said Maharshi Chauhan, an Intel customer quality manager.

Simply carrying a laptop or tablet can cause damage to it over time, which is why Intel performs a stress test that simulates the slight amount of twisting often borne by such mobile devices.

Test equipment slowly and slightly twists an Ultrabook to assess the device's ability to withstand the type of bending that often occurs when being carried.

“We subject Ultrabook models to mechanical stress for what we call low-cycle fatigue, in which a typical user could twist the device with his hands just by carrying it,” said Brian Long, a reliability engineer. “We collect strain data to see what risk is done to the chipset, processor and overall chassis. For example, knowing if or why LCDs crack is valuable to customers for producing higher-quality products.”

Long uses a specially made machine to test the amount of give in Ultrabooks models. Meanwhile, on the other side of Intel’s Folsom, Calif. campus, his colleague Brown is seeing how well similar devices hold up when dropped onto a hard floor. He and a teammate recently completed an eight-month project in which more than 30 Ultrabook models were tested for mechanical shock. Each was secured in a vice on top of a hydraulic platform and dropped in six different orientations — first bottom down, then top down, followed by right down, left down, front down and finally rear down. Three drops were performed for each orientation, making for a total of 18 drops per unit, or, in auditory terms, about 600 loud bangs.

“The data shows impact along with the motherboard response,” said Brown, who did not divulge how the systems fared due to the proprietary nature of his work.

Test Results Inform Ultrabook Design

Brown’s manager did share that the team is using a new testing methodology that can help OEMs quantify the leeway of a given design for testing criteria rather than provide basic pass/fail information.

“The new methodology uses strain gauges during mechanical shock testing in order to quantify the reliability margin of our products in our customer designs,” Radhakrishnan said. “A design that passes or fails a test condition doesn’t help our customer assess the design’s marginality. If it passes, did it barely pass or was there a huge margin that was adding to the cost of the design? If it failed, did it just fail by a small margin or was the design so poor that the design needs to be changed fundamentally?”

Being able to quantify with a number or other data helps Intel and OEMs assess the design for reliability, according to Radhakrishnan.

“Some of the OEMs don’t perform this testing yet, whereas such customers as Asus, Lenovo, HP and Dell have started to embrace this methodology as part of the product qualification,” he said.

The post Torture Testing Ultrabooks to Benefit Consumers appeared first on Intel Free Press.

Engineer, mountaineer, surfer, sailor, photographer, traveler — Dr. Albert Yu-Min Lin goes by many titles, but the two that have probably taken him the farthest both geographically and in prominence are emerging explorer for the National Geographic Society and research scientist at UC San Diego.

"I think engineering is, in a way, based on exploration. It's always about trying to ask questions, about being curious, being creative, said Dr. Albert Yu-Min Lin, National Geographic emerging explorer and UC San Diego research scientist.

A pioneer in non-invasive, computer-based technologies, Lin explores remote parts of the world using ground-, aerial- and satellite-based remote sensing to gather, synthesize and visualize data. A firm believer that exploring sacred places can be done without disturbance or disrespect — “There are many ways to look under the ground without having to touch it,” he’s observed — Lin has led a search for the tomb of Genghis Khan that has earned praise from the same Mongolians who had shun past efforts for fear that desecration could trigger a curse that would end the world.

Lin recently shared his thoughts on the fusion of exploration and technology, including a yarn about the significance Khan had early on in his adventure-filled career.

How important are science and technology to the exploration focus of National Geographic?

I think exploration and science go hand in hand. For example, one of the founders of National Geographic was Alexander Graham Bell, a technologist. Technology can change the way we look at the world, and that’s what exploration is about. It could be a new ship that allows you to sail across the world. Or it could be a new computer that can allow you to look at data in an entirely new way, and give you clues to something that’s age-old, very human.

I think engineering is, in a way, based on exploration. It’s always about trying to ask questions, about being curious, being creative. Exploration is the same thing, just applied to other kinds of questions. But as an engineer, in the work that I do now, it’s fundamental.

Where do connectivity and the cloud fit into the equation?

The consumer is smart. We’re so connected now, in so many ways, that you can literally be an expert in almost anything by just tapping your fingertips. So I think as this connectivity has increased our ability to have access to all this information, consumers are now able to [better] define what they want … [and] people want new things all the time.

Now that we’re putting all of our personal information into [the cloud], you can share data from one person to another by a click of the finger. I think that the idea of the cloud means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But to me, I think what it means is that our connectivity has been taken to the next level, and we’re going to see some remarkable things that we can do with it.

What things would you love to see?

I’m just excited to see what people do with technology. We’re in a time when we’re facing political shifts, changes in our climate, in our world. We’re facing a time in which the whole world is kind of in a make-it-or-break-it situation, and we’ve really got to address a lot of these key issues. I think now, with the way in which technology has developed at such a rapid pace, any individual has the power to make a real difference, and to have that connected to a bigger thing.

I’m really excited to see the ways in which technology enables the human side of things to stand up and make those choices, make those acts of change, and allow us to really focus ourselves on sustainability and on a positive future. I think that’s going to be the exciting thing over the next year.

Can you pinpoint when your love of engineering and exploring merged?

I grew up in the States where I was a little bit disconnected from my past. Because my grandfather had said that there may have been some influence from Mongolia in my family tree, I went to Mongolia during the summer when I was an engineering student. My idea was that I was going to buy a horse and I was going to go out in the middle of nowhere and live with the nomads if I could find them, and then come back, sell my horse, go home and learn something more about where I came from.

The crazy part is when I was on this train from Beijing to Mongolia I met these people who said, “If you do this, you’re going to die. There’s no way you’re going to do this.” But they ended up giving me a horse, and taking me out to the nomadic lands, and let me live with them. It taught me all about this ancient history that is connected to us today, by a person that was a fundamental founder in their entire way of being, this guy, Genghis Khan. I hadn’t learned much about him in my own history classes, because Mongolians look at him in a much different way [than what is taught in the United States].

And so I came home, and I started getting really obsessed about history. At the same time, I was getting my Ph.D. in engineering. When I finished I wanted to pursue an [area] I’m very curious about: my human heritage. I’m going to take all the tools that I’ve learned about in school as an engineer, and I’m going to combine the two.

Your passion hasn’t wavered?

Every single day I’m looking at ways in which engineering and these human things combine themselves to ask questions about ourselves that we’ve been asking for thousands of years. For example, there’s a whole revolution of how we can look at our own DNA. The fact that for a hundred bucks, you can figure out what your lineage is all the way back 50,000 years. It’s crazy, right? And one of the cool things about that they discovered that one in 200 men across the world is related to Genghis Khan.

How fortunate do you feel being able to take two passions and turn that into a career?

I think the best piece of advice that anybody ever gave me was that if you do what you love, then the money will come. But if you do what makes money, then you’re probably not going to be doing what you love. Figuring out what you love to do — that’s the hardest thing. And when you find it, stick to it.

Let me phrase that in a different way. I personally believe that we have a very short amount of time on this planet and we’ve got to make the most of it by just figuring out what you really care about and going all in. And that means really going all in and deciding, while you’ve built whatever you’ve built around you, there’s no time like today to decide that what you’ve always been passionate about is going to be the focus of your life.

The post Modern-Day Explorer Goes High-Tech Out of Respect appeared first on Intel Free Press.

Just as consumers are turning to mobile apps to track vital signs and manage their personal health, researchers believe that smart grid and sensor-based data collection technologies in homes could help people better manage their monthly utility bills.

"We've created a research test bed where people are opening their living rooms to enable solutions that will move the economy and improve the environment," said Brewster McCracken, president and CEO of Pecan Street Inc.

A glimpse of tomorrow’s smart homes can be seen today in Austin, Texas. There, several hundred homes are providing real-time data about gas, water, electricity and solar power use. The homes, a mixture of “green” and conventional housing, are part of an ongoing smart grid research project called Pecan Street. The research consortium is a collaboration among the University of Texas, the Environmental Defense Fund, Austin Energy and a number of other companies, including Intel, Oracle and Sony.

According to Brewster McCracken, president and CEO of Pecan Street Inc., this on-going experiment is giving valuable insights to residents, researchers, standards organizations and companies about how people use energy. Here, McCracken, who recently released a research study on consumer energy use based on Pecan Street, discussed how smart home data can lead to better consumer products and more energy- and resource-efficient homeowners.

How can consumers use technology to better manage their energy use?

There are several basic approaches for getting data on consumer electricity. There are smart meters that can give 1-hour to 15-minute snapshots of a home’s energy use. This provides some useful information, but it’s pretty limited. It’s almost like the old dial-up modems that let you do a few things on the Internet but nothing like watching a TV show through it.

If we want to get to the broadband Internet version of smart grid, we need what’s called a home energy measurement system or a hub device that reads the smart meter a lot more frequently than every 15 minutes. Looking at one minute versus 15 minutes of data can show more things. You can see even more details when you separate what’s happening on each circuit, like the consumption of the washer, dryer, dishwasher, television, air conditioner and when the refrigerator is being used.

Pecan Street Project turned the Mueller community of Austin, Texas, into a smart grid neighborhood of houses equipped with water, gas and energy use tracking technology. Photo Courtesy of Pecan Street Inc.

Are sensors the answer for providing people with real-time data they can act upon?

We know that the more information that can be gleaned from the home using technology, the more possibilities we have for new, useful applications. Information could be collected by very accurate, hardwired sensor systems, but they can be labor-intensive and expensive to install. Wireless systems are less labor-intensive, easy to install and have the ability to leverage the presence of the meter. These sensors become almost like the ones that report to the central computing system of a car to provide vehicle diagnostics. This is how you know if your tires are running low or if you have a problem with the fuel pump. The more sensors that you have in the home, the more your home begins to look like an OnStar system. These sensors could trigger a check engine warning light for the home.

It might work like a cable service and it might even come from your cable service. There could be a new device like the router for homes equipped with a smart meter. In addition to the TV, phone and Internet service from the cable company, they might offer all sorts of new services like security and diagnostics for their home. Or there might be a new type of device that reads the meter data every 10 seconds, something that the electricity companies bring in as a new value-added device that expands the capabilities of their smart meters.

Isn’t it a zero-sum game of adding energy consuming technology like big data centers to help people monitor, analyze and reduce their consumption of energy?

What we know is that decentralized systems that are mechanical in nature tend to be less efficient and decentralized systems that are information-based in nature tend to be more efficient. What history tells us is that transferring energy use to data centers from people’s inefficient air-conditioning systems would produce a positive environmental outcome. If people are making air-conditioning and heating maintenance decisions based on a software-driven report, that is a more efficient approach than not ever having the data center and letting people run their air-conditioning and heating inefficiently.

Research technology from Intel Labs is being used in some Pecan Project homes to analyze the electricity used by lights and appliances throughout the house. "In our research trials at Pecan Street, we hardwired the circuit so we get one second or minute interval reading of what each circuit is using," said Brewster McCracken, president and CEO of Pecan Street Inc.

There are three ways that a homeowner could figure out if he or she has leaking air ducts. One way is to bring out a maintenance crew on an annual basis, leave the house for the day, have the house tinted and sealed off and do a high-pressure blower test to see the duct leak percentage of the home, for which you’d spend a couple of hundred dollars to complete. The other option is to install sensor networks inside of the ducts that detect airflow rates, measure them and compare them to normal ranges then report those to a data system. That could happen someday, but that’s very expensive and fairly labor intensive. The third option is to have something like Intel’s technology that can read individual circuits in the home. That could read the air-conditioning compressor and fan cycle, then report information to a data center that in about 8 seconds of reading data signals could tell if there’s a duct leaking. That sounds more realistic.

Does opening the smart grid and allowing others to develop services on energy grid pose a competitive threat to the energy companies?

We see that when developers design applications that reply upon the capabilities of a grid, they have no interest in undermining the grid. Instead, they rely on its performance. When cable and mobile telecom opened to third-party developers it provided new, unexpected and enduring revenue streams for the grid operators. The cable companies are getting $40, $50 plus a month from all of us through broadband Internet, a steady revenue stream that previously didn’t exist.

The post Could Big Data Lower Your Power Bill? appeared first on Intel Free Press.

The difference between a smartphone and a tablet was once clear, but as new device sizes and categories emerge — such as the phablet — the line between form factors has blurred. Though hardware may be a moving target, consumers nonetheless expect to faultlessly view Web pages regardless of the screen size, which poses a thorny challenge for Web designers.

“As users have entered the world of Web portability, the expectation is that all content can be viewed properly on whatever device they’re using,” said Jason East, CEO of For Human Use, a San Francisco Web design agency.

Be it a smartphone, tablet Ultrabook, laptop or desktop all-in-one, the device that consumers choose to use at any given moment is largely defined by their location. Wherever they are, what they’re looking for is a consistent online experience perfectly adapted to the size of the screen they’re using and the device’s user interface.

“Behaviorally, we’ve seen that people are browsing all the time, and they are flowing from device to device based on where they are,” said Suzanne LeGette, Intel digital marketing specialist. “With their portable devices they’re able to be just as engaged as when they are at their desk using a desktop device.”

Developing Content to Browsers

To keep pace with this demand for engagement, Web designers are finding new ways to support content that is distributed through multiple devices in multiple formats. One method is so-called responsive Web design or RWD. Coined in 2010 by Web designer Ethan Marcotte, it refers to a website design approach, not a specific technology. However, responsive design is enabled primarily by CSS3 and JavaScript, which fall under the banner of HTML5.

“HTML5 is the backbone of the new and interactive features of responsive Web design,” said Matt Groener, Intel Developer Zone development team manager. “HTML5 is really maturing in terms of its functionality and, more importantly, its speed. Responsive design uses the same elements that will make HTML5 really successful, namely HTML, JavaScript and CSS3.”

“The common denominator with responsive Web design and HTML5 apps is that developers develop to a browser rather than a specific operating system or device,” said LeGette. “Responsive Web design is all about creating visual experiences that you can take across all devices.”

From the user perspective, the advantages of RWD are essentially invisible, which is exactly the point.

“The benefit is that we can satisfy the end user seamlessly across devices,” East said. “The user may not even be aware that their product has been modified to work on their specific device, but they’re satisfied with the experience.”

To make RWD work, designers need to rethink the content of their sites from the ground up. As the device screen size gets smaller, hard choices need to be made on how to organize and display content.

“Responsive Web design is pushing Web designers in a direction where they have to be visual and flexible, and they have to create something that’s dynamic,” said LeGette. “That’s what the audience expects these days.”

Taking user behavior into account is also a vital factor in design.

“Designers need to understand how the devices are used,” Groener said. “A person who’s walking while looking at their phone needs to be able to read that font really well, because if they have to trade between reading your font or missing a curb and falling they’re hopefully not going to read your font. Therefore, you need to make your font bigger.

“You need to understand that people are distracted on these mobile devices, and you need to give them an easy-to-use interface.

HTML5 Momentum

After a rocky start in some quarters, HTML5 is gaining in acceptance and credibility. A February 2013 survey by HTML5 toolkit provider Kendo UI found that 50 percent of mobile developers have already developed in HTML5, and 90 percent have plans to do so at some point this year. Intel has long supported HTML5 technologies and recently acquired appMobi’s HTML5 developer tools division.

“Developing in HTML5 benefits all of the ecosystems because you get to market faster,” Groener said. “You don’t create an iOS app and then, when time permits, bring it to Android or Windows. You can do it in any or all ecosystems at exactly the same time.

“It will only get better for developers as HTML5 matures, becomes faster and adds more features that put it on par with native application development. The future is more responsive rather than less responsive. I don’t see that ever changing.”

The post Delivering Consistent Online Experiences for Every Screen Size appeared first on Intel Free Press.