#MARKETING: "CEA Gives Away Free Booth at CES 2013"

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has become the premiere conference for all things electronics, what with the demise of Comdex and other industry oriented shows. And startups will be featured at CES 2013 in the Eureka Park for which the CEA is running a contest to give away free booth space next month. Don't miss out--entries are free, and even if you don't win your entry is likely to garner publicity at next month's CEA Line Shows conference in NYC: R. Colin Johnson

Here is what EETimes says about the Eureka Park Challenge: Innovation is driving U.S. competitiveness, especially in the consumer electronics segment, according to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), which next month will sponsor the Eureka Park Challenge contest for a free exhibit space at next year's Consumer Electronics Show, according Brian Markwalter, senior vice president of research and standards for the CEA.

The CES sponsoring organization, the CEA, has for 75 years been producing consumer standards referenced by the EPA, FCC and other government agencies which are adhered to by millions of electronic devices. Markwalter oversees the CEA's American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited standards development operation, which spends about $1 million annually doing extensive market research to track sales data and to forecast trends related to digital television, broadband access, spectrum management, intellectual property (IP), smart grid and energy efficiency.

Markwalter was previously director of Intellon Corp. (acquired by Atheros in 2009), the semiconductor specialist in power-line communications where he helped launch the HomePlug Powerline Alliance for networking over residential power lines. Markwalter is currently also a board member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's  Smart Grid Interoperability Governing Panel.

According to Markwalter, innovation is the engine driving the rise of small businesses which are creating new jobs in the U.S. at an unprecedented rate. The CEA is doing its part to incubate startups by encouraging innovation.

The consumer electronics industry today is breaking the $200 billion mark in U.S., according to the CEA, which next month will sponsor the Eureka Park Challenge which will give away free exhibit space at CES 2013 to the winner..

To enter the Eureka Park Challenge contest, startups need to submit a never-been-seen-before product, service or app to WizeHive’s online contest manager. Ten finalists will be selected to compete for a free booth at the CES 2013. The winner will be announced at the CEA Line Shows (New York City, June 27-28, 2012).
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#ENERGY: "Eco-Friendly Dream Home Goes Interactive"

Virtual dream homes are all the rage...well maybe they will become the rage. At least that is the hope of LG Electronics which has created a Facebook page that any consumer can use to create their own vision of an eco-friendly dream home: R. Colin Johnson

Here is what LG says about its eco-friendly dream home: LG Electronics (LG) today announced a digital interactive campaign on Facebook called My Eco Home which will allow Facebook fans around the world to create and share their own personalized, virtual dream homes. An industry first, LG’s My Eco Home Facebook app reflects the company’s effort to interact with today’s customers in new, innovative ways.

The campaign will also introduce Facebook users to LG’s proprietary five Core Technologies – the Linear Compressor, Inverter Direct Drive, KOMPRESSOR™ technology, Lightwave and Plasmaster – and their eco-friendly benefits. Launching in approximately 30 countries on May 2, My Eco Home is a creative way to demonstrate how LG’s technologies can lead to greener, smarter lifestyles.

A click on the campaign tab on the LG Electronics Facebook page opens a microsite for creating Eco Homes. Participants can personalize the interior by choosing from a host of different decorations, appliances and photos of their friends on Facebook. Interior themes come in three exquisite choices: Antique, Modern or Zen. When an interior is modified, numbers on the Eco Index show how much energy is saved by selecting each item. When choosing LG appliances, the mechanism for each corresponding Core Technology will be clearly displayed to better illustrate how LG’s Core Technologies work to save energy.

Personalization in My Eco Home app goes beyond simply choosing from a list of items. By accessing the microsite from the participant’s own Facebook account, the virtual home can be decorated with the participant’s own accessories. The app offers intelligent customization to let homebuilders add photos and names of family members and friends to their dream homes, adding a personalized touch to the interior. When finished, the completed Eco Home is then transformed into an interactive movie to be shared and enjoyed with friends and family.
Further Reading

#MEMS: "Speech Controls Home Automation System"

The Distant Speech Interaction for Robust Home Applications (DIRHA) project in the European Union will install MEMS microphones from STMicrosystems all around new houses, enabling dwellers to just speak their commands to the smart house no matter where they are in it. Capitalizing on the progress that neural networks have made in recent years to recognize nearly every language in the world, the multilingual houses will respond to commands spoken in any language: R. Colin Johnson

Here is what DIRHA says about the Distant Speech Interaction for Robust Home Applications: The DIRHA project addresses the development of voice-enabled automated home environments based on distant-speech interaction in different languages. A distributed microphone network is installed in the rooms of a house in order to monitor selectively acoustic and speech activities observable inside any space, and to eventually run a spoken dialogue session with a given user in order to implement a service or to have access to appliances and other devices. The multi-microphone front-end is based on the use of arrays consisting of analog microphones or Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) digital microphones. The targeted system analyses the given multi-space acoustic scene in a coherent way, by processing in a parallelized fashion simultaneous activities which occur in different rooms, and in case by supporting at the same time the interaction with users who may speak in different areas of the house.

These very challenging objectives require advances in different scientific and technical fields. In fact, based on the given network of microphone arrays, multi-microphone front-end processing includes, among the others, tasks as speaker localization, acoustic echo cancellation, speech enhancement, acoustic event segmentation and classification. It is then necessary to have robust technologies for distant-speech recognition and speaker identification (and verification). Effective solutions for language modeling in the selected languages, speech understanding, concurrent management of spoken dialogue interaction, together with user interface and integration between the resulting technological components, will also represent fundamental features for the implementation of the proposed smart home interface. The final prototype will be integrated in an automated home and evaluated by real users.

Here is what ST says about DIRHA: The world-class expertise in MEMS microphone and audio processing technologies of STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM), a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, will play a pivotal role in the European research project on ‘Distant Speech Interaction for Robust Home Applications’ (DIRHA). The three-year program aims to investigate and prototype solutions for natural voice-enabled interaction between humans and machines in tomorrow’s smart homes.

The DIRHA project sets to address the challenge of distant speech interaction in multi-noise, multi-speaker situations of a home environment. The goal is to create a pervasive, always-listening sound space, where users needn’t speak into the microphone to get recognized and understood, but the system reaches out, acoustically, to the speakers regardless of their position within the home.

The physical and acoustic parameters of ST’s MEMS microphones perfectly fit the challenging requirements of distant-speech interaction systems. The small form factor allows the researchers to easily embed entire arrays of microphones in the walls, desks, or speech-enabled appliances of the automated home, while the microphones’ excellent acoustic characteristics, coupled with sophisticated signal-processing technologies, will make it possible to identify and capture an individual speaker from several meters away, in a crowded room with music playing.

The distant-speech interaction capability will not only dramatically change the way people interact with technology, but can make a real difference for those who can’t easily move around, such as the elderly or the motor-impaired. In addition to the home scenarios, the distant-speech interaction systems can find use in robotics, telepresence, surveillance and industry automation.

The DIRHA program is organized into a number of work packages, spanning a total duration of 36 months, and the total cost of the project is 4.8 million euros. The main fields of research include multi-channel acoustic processing, distant-speech recognition and understanding, speaker identification/verification, and spoken-dialogue management in four languages - German, Greek, Italian and Portuguese. The final prototypes will be integrated in pilot households and evaluated by real users.

The DIRHA participants are Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy (project coordinator); Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information Communication & Knowledge Technologies, Greece; DomoticArea, Italy; INESC ID - Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computatores, Investigacae e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa, Portugal; NewAmuser, Italy; STMicroelectronics, Italy; and Technische Universitaet Graz, Austria.
Further Reading

#SECURITY: "AI Prevents Vertical Takeoff UAV from Self-Terminating"

Pandora, the new vertical-takeoff unmanned areal vehicle (UAV) from Aerovel, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to take over control from operators if they give it commands that would amount to suicide. Since Pandora--which can fly like a plane or hover like a chopper--is unable to "self-terminate" (in the manner of T2) it is expected to survive even when flown by inexperienced operators: R. Colin Johnson



Here is what Aerovel says about Pandora: Aerovel has just released this video (from Aug 11, 2011) of the transition between vertical and horizontal flight by its Flexrotor vertical take-off and landing small unmanned aircraft. The flight included a hover and vertical recovery. Flexrotor has been designed by the same people who developed the Insitu ScanEagle long-endurance small UAV and is designed for fully automatic vertcial take-off and recovery and an edurance of more than 36 hours. Launch and retrieval is from a portable fold-out rig with widely spaced parallel bars to support the wings.
Further Reading

#ROBOTICS: "Pure-Play Robots Few & Far Between"

Robot analyst Frank Tobe reports that very few companies hawking robotics are actually "pure-play" and that even seasoned investment advisors seem to be ignorant of this fact. In his latest rant on the subject, Picking Robotic Stocks is Complicated: Some are a Waste of Time he details what to look for when picking robot stocks: R. Colin Johnson

Here is the introduction to the latest article from The Robot Report: "Pure play" is an investment term that refers to a company which is exclusively focused on a particular product or service. An investor buys stock in pure play companies in order to obtain a market share in the industry as well as in the company. Robotics, to many, are just a tool to accomplish business tasks in an efficient way. To me, making robots to achieve those goals is an industry in itself and deserving of consideration for investment because of good prospects for the future. Hence the need to find pure play companies in the industry.
Further Reading

#MARKETS: "Tablets Replacing Netbooks, Not Laptops"

Tablets are replacing laptops for some users--I know because I have been using an iPad to file stories, create spreadsheets and presentation slides for over a year. However, according to Allied Business Intelligence Inc. (ABI Research, Oyster Bay, N.Y.) I am the exception, since most users are sticking with laptops and even planning to buy new ones in 2012: R. Colin Johnson

Here is what ABI Research says about laptops versus tablets: One in three respondents in an ongoing tracking study said they plan to purchase a laptop computer in the first half of 2012. Additionally, 16% of respondents to ABI Research’s Technology Barometer also said they plan to acquire a media tablet. Consumers expressed greater purchase intent in both computing form factors compared to the previous survey. 

Media tablets, however, are taking market away from the US netbook opportunities, which continue to see less purchase intention from consumers surveyed.  Netbooks remain a significant contributor to emerging markets, where home PC penetration remains low.

US PC desktop ownership fell, from 81% of respondents down to 75% in the latest results, while Windows PC laptop ownership climbed to 64% from 61%.  Apple laptops also continue to gain share, capturing 11% of respondents in the most recent survey, up from the previous 9%.  Amazon’s Kindle Fire, as well as other lower-priced media tablets, helped boost Android’s position, doubling its previous 3% share.  Apple meanwhile boosted its iPad position to 8% of respondents (up from 5%).

ABI Research’s two surveys, “Wave 3 US Computer Purchase Intent,” and “Wave 3 US Computer Ownership,” track consumer behavior, purchase intent, brand preferences, and devices within the digital home. 

Further Reading

#SECURITY: "White Box Encryption Debuts"

White-box encryption is a new paradigm that foils hackers even if they have access to the cryptographic algorithms and can watch them as they execute. Unlike traditional "black box" cryptography that assumes a hacker cannot look "inside the box", SafeNet white-box cryptography foils hackers even if they "pry open the lid": R. Colin Johnson

Black box encryption assumes that the bad guy is only able to eavesdrop on the encrypted data as it goes by (from Bob to Alice) Source: http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~bwyseur/research/phdPresentation.pdf

Here is what SmarterTechnology.com says about white-box cryptography: With hackers becoming increasingly sophisticated traditional “black box’ encryption techniques no longer cut it, necessitating a new era of “white box” encryption that is virtually uncrackable.

Traditional encryption techniques assume that the code that executes the security algorithms is hidden, so that hackers can only eavesdrop on what goes into and comes out of the “black box” making it very difficult to crack. Unfortunately, cryptographic algorithms that are executed in software can be extracted by enterprising hackers and executed in the broad daylight of their own or an untrustworthy platform.

SafeNet provides many security solutions including format preserving tokenization (FPT) which uses tokens to preserve the length and format of sensitive data, ensuring that no changes to legacy databases are required in order to support a tokenization process. Source: SafeNet

"White box" cryptography, on the other hand, assumes that the hacker has somehow gained entry into the platform on which the encryption algorithms are running. However, by assuming that the adversary has full control over the execution environment, white-box encryption algorithms are go the extra mile to be inherently more trustworthy, since their engineering has been more thorough in making sure that the critical cryptography keys are never separately revealed--even in their encrypted form--thereby making the algorithm virtually uncrackable.
Further Reading

#SECURITY: How to Prevent Side-Channel Cyber Attacks"

Side-channel cyber attacks deduce information content by monitoring the activity of the computer system, rather than hacking directly into its data channels, an increasing problem for cloud-based computers that many users share. Next month MIT professor Shafi Goldwasser will present a method of foiling side-channel attacks at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC): R. Colin Johnson

Illustration from Adi Shamir invited talk in 2011 at the Computer Security course at Collège de France (Paris) Source: http://syhw.posterous.com/two-amusing-side-channel-attacks

Here is what MIT ways about side-channel attacks: In the last 10 years, cryptography researchers have demonstrated that even the most secure-seeming computer is shockingly vulnerable to attack. The time it takes a computer to store data in memory, fluctuations in its power consumption and even the noises it emits can betray information to a savvy assailant.

Attacks that use such indirect sources of information are called side-channel attacks, and the increasing popularity of cloud computing makes them an even greater threat. An attacker would have to be pretty motivated to install a device in your wall to measure your computer’s power consumption. But it’s comparatively easy to load a bit of code on a server in the cloud and eavesdrop on other applications it’s running.

Fortunately, even as they’ve been researching side-channel attacks, cryptographers have also been investigating ways of stopping them. Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and her former student Guy Rothblum, who’s now a researcher at Microsoft Research, recently posted a long report on the website of the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, describing a general approach to mitigating side-channel attacks. At the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) in May, Goldwasser and colleagues will present a paper demonstrating how the technique she developed with Rothblum can be adapted to protect information processed on web servers.

In addition to preventing attacks on private information, Goldwasser says, the technique could also protect proprietary software so that it can’t be reverse-engineered by pirates or market competitors — an application that she, Rothblum and others described at last year’s AsiaCrypt conference.

Today, when a personal computer is in use, it’s usually running multiple programs — say, a word processor, a browser, a PDF viewer, maybe an email program or a spreadsheet program. All the programs are storing data in memory, but the laptop’s operating system won’t let any program look at the data stored by any other. The operating systems running on servers in the cloud are no different, but a malicious program could launch a side-channel attack simply by sending its own data to memory over and over again. From the time the data storage and retrieval takes, it can infer what the other programs are doing with remarkable accuracy.

Goldwasser and Rothblum’s technique obscures the computational details of a program, whether it’s running on a laptop or a server. Their system converts a given computation into a sequence of smaller computational modules. Data fed into the first module is encrypted, and at no point during the module’s execution is it decrypted. The still-encrypted output of the first module is fed into the second module, which encrypts it in yet a different way, and so on.

The encryption schemes and the modules are devised so that the output of the final module is exactly the output of the original computation. But the operations performed by the individual modules are entirely different. A side-channel attacker could extract information about how the data in any given module is encrypted, but that won’t let him deduce what the sequence of modules do as a whole. “The adversary can take measurements of each module,” Goldwasser says, “but they can’t learn anything more than they could from a black box.”

The report by Goldwasser and Rothblum describes a type of compiler, a program that takes code written in a form intelligible to humans and converts it into the low-level instruction intelligible to a computer. There, the computational modules are an abstraction: The instruction that inaugurates a new module looks no different from the instruction that concluded the last one. But in the STOC paper, the modules are executed on different servers on a network.
Further Reading