Data Mining Your Deskto

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter work well because people enjoy sharing their lives with friends. At the office, however, social networking with colleagues can feel forced. Many businesses are adopting social-networking tools in hopes of fostering collaboration, but if employees don't sign up or participate, the effort fails.

To get around this problem, HP Labs has created a workplace social network that builds itself. The Web application, dubbed the Collective Project, tracks internal documents created or opened by about 10,000 Hewlett-Packard employees. It assigns topic words to each document by mining its content, and then computes similarity to create knowledge maps and family trees centered around employees and subject areas. The project's goal is to show how people within a large organization can automatically be connected based on "inferred expertise," providing a resource that staff can tap into for answers to questions.

"You don't have to update a profile, you don't have to declare your interests or expertise, you don't have to search," says Ruth Bergman, director of HP Labs Israel, part of the research division of the company. "The tool makes knowledge instantly accessible, rather than being a laborious process of discovery and input," she says.

In recent years, startups such as Yammer and large companies like IBM have released social and collaborative tools aimed at workplaces. Bergman says many have mimicked consumer services such as Facebook or Twitter, places where people go to socialize and have their voices heard. But at work, she says, people are usually looking to solve problems quickly, so a more passive and automated network can be more efficient.

Within the Collective Project, HP employees can search keywords and see results that recommend useful documents and employees closely connected to those files. Staff can view files they discover, as long as they have access permissions. At very large organizations, this kind of data mining could encourage serendipitous connections between coworkers working in different countries. Bergman herself used the tool at a conference and met a colleague with similar interests with whom she now collaborates.

The system doesn't yet mine e-mails to detect work patterns, but that feature could be added once the Collective Project is expanded to all of HP, Bergman says. She says it would have to be done carefully, since privacy is a concern. Currently, users can customize permissions to share the full content of some documents, or instead only allow the system to analyze information in a document, but prevent its retrieval by others.

Eventually, Bergman says, the company might market the program as a product to other large businesses that require faster ways to connect internal experts. For now, the project is expanding within Hewlett-Packard. As the program crawls new document troves, associated employees are automatically added to the network.

There will, however, be fewer employees to add. Hewlett-Packard, one of the world's largest technology companies, is rumored to be laying off up to 30,000 jobs, or 10 percent of its workforce, this week. An HP spokesperson declined to comment.

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Researchers Hack Mobile Data Communications

 

Researchers plan to show today how to break the encryption that protects information sent over the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), a standard commonly used to send data to and from mobile devices, and from other devices such as smart meters. This breach makes it possible to listen in on data communications such as e-mail, instant messages, and Web browsing on smart phones, as well as updates from automated industrial systems. 

The researchers, who will make their announcement at the Chaos Communication Camp, a hacker event taking place near Berlin, Germany, previously cracked the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), which is used to carry calls among 80 percent of the world's mobile phones. GPRS is an older technology that often supplements GSM, for example when faster 3G connections are unavailable. Smart phones, including the iPhone, use GPRS when operating on Edge networks (when the network connection says "E" rather than "3G"). Phones that don't support 3G use GPRS all the time. Both GSM and GPRS are used worldwide, though in the United States some major carriers, including Verizon and Sprint, use a competing standard. 

Phones might be the most familiar devices affected by the research, says Karsten Nohl, founder of Security Research Labs, a Berlin-based research consultancy that conducted the work. But the standard is also used in some cars, automated industrial systems, and electronic tollbooths. "It carries a lot of sensitive data," Nohl says.

Security researchers haven't looked at the GPRS standard much in the past, Nohl says, but since more and more devices are using GPRS, he believes the risk posed by poor security is growing.

Nohl's group found a number of problems with GPRS. First, he says, lax authentication rules could allow an attacker to set up a fake cellular base station and eavesdrop on information transmitted by users passing by. In some countries, they found that GPRS communications weren't encrypted at all. When they were encrypted, Nohl adds, the ciphers were often weak and could be either broken or decoded with relatively short keys that were easy to guess. 

The group generated an optimized set of codes that an attacker could quickly use to find the key protecting a given communication.  The attack the researchers designed against GPRS costs about 10 euros for radio equipment, Nohl says.

GPRS has not suffered very many security problems in the past, says Jukka Nurminen, a professor of data communications at Aalto University in Finland who spent 25 years at the Nokia Research Center. If the researchers have truly achieved what they claim, Nurminen says, many mobile communications could be much less secure. Depending on mobile operator and subscription plan, some devices maintain a GPRS connection at all times, particularly those whose users access e-mail and instant message applications from their phones. 

However, Nurminen adds, it might be possible to mitigate the risk by encrypting communications when they are sent, using common e-mail and Web-browsing tools. He notes that GPRS security is also affected by regulations in different countries, and that some laws undermine security by requiring governments to be able to break into communications if necessary.  

The GSM Association, a London-based organization representing mobile operators, handset makers, and other industry interests, regulates GPRS as well as GSM. The organization says it is reviewing Nohl's research but has not yet learned enough to comment. 

Nohl says companies will be negligent if they ignore the risks. He suggests that mobile applications take steps now to use encryption such as SSL, which already protects much of the sensitive information sent over the Internet. Nohl hopes that cellular network companies will require better authentication among devices and base stations communicating over GPRS. He also believes the ciphers used by the standard should be upgraded.

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Thin Displays as Wristbands

The U.S. Army is testing a prototype "watch" that's lightweight and thin and has a full-color display. This display is built on flexible materials encased in a rugged plastic case and can be worn on a wristband to display streaming video and other information. It uses newly developed phosphorescent materials that are efficient at converting electricity into red, blue, and green light, which means the display needs less power to work.

Most phones, laptops, and TVs today use liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) controlled by electronics built on glass. To make more energy-efficient displays that are controlled by flexible electronics, which are lightweight and won't shatter like glass, many companies are turning to organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). The pixels in OLED displays replace the layers of electronics and filters in LCDs with organic dye molecules that emit light in response to electrical current.

For consumers, flexible OLEDs promise portable electronics with beautiful screens that don't drain battery life and won't shatter when dropped. But so far, no companies have developed economically viable manufacturing methods for producing flexible OLEDs with long enough lifetimes and consistent quality. The U.S. military has been funding development with the aim of providing soldiers with rugged, thin communications devices that can display maps and video without adding too much weight to their load.

The new display prototypes use efficient OLED materials developed by Universal Display of Ewing, New Jersey, and are built on foil-backed electronic controls developed by LG Display, headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. The devices were designed by L-3 Display Systems of Alpharetta, Georgia. The display is 4.3 inches. As part of military demonstration tests, the device has been used to stream real-time video from unmanned air vehicles.

"These prototypes represent not so much one major advance but continued progress on many fronts," says Janice Mahon, vice president of technology development at Universal Display. Those fronts include the OLED materials themselves, the electronics that control them, and the integration and packaging of the device.

The first generation of OLED materials, used today in glass-backed cell-phone displays and some small TVs, can convert only 25 percent of electrical current into light; the rest is lost as heat. Universal Display is designing and developing materials that work by a different mechanism and that have a theoretical efficiency of 100 percent. The prototypes for the Army use a full set of phosphorescent materials; the companies have not released specifications about power consumption, but Mahon says displays made with these materials use one-fourth the power of a conventional OLED.

Samsung Mobile Display, the biggest maker of OLED displays, currently uses Universal Display's red phosphorescent materials in its products; Samsung and other companies are currently evaluating green materials. Phosphorescent materials that work with higher energy light such as blue tend to be less stable over time and have been slower in coming. The companies have not disclosed information on the expected lifetime of the all-phosphorescent displays.

Universal Display applied the light-emitting layer to electronic controls made by LG Displays. The electronics are an array of amorphous-silicon transistors built on stainless steel foil instead of glass. Other companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Samsung, are developing flexible amorphous-silicon transistor arrays, mostly on sheets of plastic. Working with metal poses some challenges because the surface is rough, which can disrupt the structure of the transistors, but metal can withstand higher processing temperatures than plastic can. That's an important trait when it comes to laying down the silicon. High-temperature processing results in silicon crystal that's not only higher quality but also more stable over time.

"The broader story is that we're starting to see some good-looking demos of flexible OLED displays," says Nicholas Colaneri, who heads the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University. Sony and Samsung Mobile Display have both demonstrated flexible displays built on sheets of plastic; both companies have been tight-lipped about these technologies. But, Colaneri notes, "just because you can do it doesn't mean you can afford to do it."

A major hurdle remains before displays like the prototype made for the Army will arrive on store shelves. Amorphous-silicon transistor arrays can be made at temperatures suitable for flexible electronics, and the LCD industry has created a lot of infrastructure for making them. But over time, they're not the best electronics for controlling OLEDs. The electrical currents required to switch OLED pixels burn out these transistors; the pixels that are on most frequently start to malfunction.

Canadian startup Ignis Innovation is developing software and other controls to extend the lifetime of the transistor arrays by ensuring that no single pixel is on too often. Colaneri says its initial prototypes are promising. In the meantime, Colaneri and other researchers are developing alternative transistor materials such as metal oxides to make OLED electronics that won't burn out.

The companies that made the Army prototype are not disclosing the metal-silicon electronics used to run it, but say they have met the Army's specifications.

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A Flexible Color Display

Researchers at HP Labs are testing a flexible, full-color display that saves power by reflecting ambient light instead of using a backlight. The prototype display's pixels are controlled by fast-switching silicon transistors printed on top of plastic. If the technology can be commercialized, the display will compete with liquid crystal screens as well as other low-power color flexible displays in the works.

"Our goal is to make a display with the color saturation of newsprint that can be manufactured for about $10 per square foot," says Carl Taussig, director of the Information Surfaces Lab at HP's Palo Alto, CA, research center. At this price, reflective color displays could replace paper for applications such as signs and billboards, Taussig says, although he estimates that this will take a year or two at least.

HP is collaborating with Phicot, a subsidiary of Ames, IA-based Powerfilm, which prints high-performance transistors on plastic. HP plans to target both the e-reader and tablet PC markets.

The e-reader screen market is dominated by E-Ink, a company based in Cambridge, MA, that makes black-and-white reflective displays incorporating tiny microcapsules. E-Ink's screens have the look of paper, do not need a backlight, and do not require any power once the pixels have switched between black and white. But it is also too slow to show video and, as yet, is only available in black and white.

In contrast, Apple's iPad uses a more conventional liquid crystal display. This means it produces vibrant color, but it is also expensive, power-hungry, and vulnerable to glare. The display is also relatively fragile because it's built on top of glass. Many manufacturers believe there is still a market for low-power reflective displays.

Flexible display manufacturers are watching how consumers respond to the iPad. But they're also working to develop robust reflective displays built on plastic that use less battery life without giving up the functionality of LCDs.

"Color will make all the difference," says Nick Colaneri, director of the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University, which partners with most of the major display manufacturers on technology development. Without color, reflective displays will be limited to niche markets, he says. Using plastic transistor arrays, which promise better durability, will also be key, he says, although major manufacturing challenges remain.

"The first company to get one of these out will have a strong position, but at the end of the day it comes down to cost," Colaneri says. "There are several radically different approaches to manufacturing, and it's too early to say what the costs will be."

E-Ink is developing its own color technology, which uses side-by-side red, blue, and green filters. This means that, at any given time, each pixel might only be reflecting light from one third of its total area, which can compromise the brightness of the display.

HP hopes to deliver a brighter color reflective display technology by stacking red, green, and blue pixels in the same area. "If you want to show red, you can make the entire display red," says Taussig.

The challenge in stacking pixels is that light is lost as it travels into and out of the stack display. "If you get loss at each layer, you get a huge overall loss, so we're engineering the light path to prevent that," says Taussig. HP's best approach so far is to stack layers of red, green, and blue dye between electrically active mirrors that control whether or not light passes through each layer.

"The drawback is that it's complicated," says Taussig. With every layer that must be added during manufacturing, there's more potential for errors. So the company is also developing a single-layer multicolor reflective display that uses luminescent materials to harvest light and convert it into different colors, which are then re-emitted.

A potential advantage for HP is its association with Phicot, which already makes high-performance display backplanes by printing silicon on plastic using a roll-to-roll process. "We've got to get the glass out of there," Colaneri says.

Korean display company LG and Taiwanese company Prime View International are also printing silicon transistors on top of flexible materials, and both these companies have promised fully flexible displays in the coming year.

"Phicot's approach is completely different," says Colaneri. Instead of going through multiple rounds of etching to create a transistor array, which entails multiple opportunities for error, Phicot uses a single-step, three-dimensional lithography technique. Eliminating manufacturing steps is particularly important when working with plastic: if it bends or warps during the printing process, the layers won't line up with one another. If HP can clear these and other manufacturing hurdles, its reflective display technology could be appearing soon on a billboard near you.

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Energy-Harvesting Displays

Adding solar cells to liquid-crystal displays could help recover a significant amount of energy that's ordinarily wasted in powering them. Two research groups have created light filters that double as photovoltaic cells, a trick that could boost the battery life of phones and laptops.

Over 90 percent of the displays sold this year will use liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology. LCDs are, however, tremendously inefficient, converting only about 5 percent of the light produced by a backlight into a viewable image. The LCD in a notebook computer consumes one-third of its power.

This type of screen remains dominant because manufacturers can make LCDs inexpensively on a huge scale. More energy-efficient kinds of displays either are too expensive to manufacture or cannot produce high-quality images. "The LCD is very inefficient, but it works," says Jennifer Colegrove, an analyst at Display Search, a market-research and consulting firm.

Two independent groups—one at the University of California, Los Angeles, the other at the University of Michigan—are tackling two of the biggest culprits of wasted light in LCDs: polarizers and color filters. 

Polarizers filter out light that is incompatible with the liquid-crystal shutters in an LCD pixel, accounting for 75 percent of the total light wasted by LCD screens, and conventional color filters toss out two-thirds of the light that hits them. The two research groups have created plastic photovoltaic versions of these two display components, which convert light into electricity.

"We want to take an energy-wasting component that everybody uses and turn it into an energy-saving one," says Yang Yang, professor of materials science and engineering at UCLA. Yang's group created plastic solar cells that can act as polarizers. The researchers simply rub one layer in the solar-cell film with a cloth to align all the molecules in one direction. This alignment turns the cell into a polarizer that converts into electricity some of the light that doesn't pass through.

Yang's work is part of a three-year project being funded by Intel; in the coming year, his team plans to integrate the photovoltaic polarizer into a working display. In a paper published online in the journal Advanced Materials, the team reports that its polarizer can convert into electricity 3 or 4 percent of the light that's normally wasted by a filter. Yang expects to get this up to about 10 percent by tinkering with the materials used. 

The photovoltaic polarizers can harvest ambient light too, so they could potentially help charge a phone when it's not in use. "When the phone sits, it could work in the background, collecting energy and recycling it back to the battery," says Youssry Botros, program director at the Intel Labs Academic Research Office.

The second group, led by Jay Guo of the University of Michigan, is developing energy-harvesting color filters. Color filters are used in many types of displays, but the ones made by Guo's team are appropriate for use in reflective "electronic paper" screens. These contain arrays of sub-pixels that absorb ambient light and then reflect red, green, or blue light. 

Guo and colleagues combined a common polymer solar-cell material with a kind of color filter that his group invented last year. The photovoltaic color filter converts into electricity about two percent of the light that would otherwise be wasted. 

Guo estimates that full displays incorporating this photovoltaic filter could generate tens of milliwatts of power, enough to make a difference to the life of a cell phone battery. The photovoltaic color filter is described in a paper published online in the journal ACS Nano.

"It's an intriguing idea," says Gary Gibson, a scientist developing reflective color displays at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California. Low brightness is a recurring problem for color electronic paper. If the color filter proves practical, says Gibson, energy harvested from ambient light could be used to power a backlight and make the display brighter.

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Why Google Wants Motorola

Google announced today that it has agreed to acquire the smart-phone manufacturer Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

In a statement, Google said the deal was largely driven by the need to acquire Motorola's patent portfolio, which it said would help it defend Android against legal threats from competitors armed with their own patents. This issue has come to the fore since a consortium of technology companies led by Apple and Microsoft purchased more than 6,000 mobile-device-related patents from Nortel Networks for about $4.5 billion, in early July. Battle lines are being drawn around patents, as companies seek to protect their interests in the competitive mobile industry through litigation as well as innovation.

However, as people increasingly access the Web via mobile devices, the acquisition could also help Google remain central to their Web experience in the years to come. As Apple has demonstrated with its wildly popular iPhone, this is far easier to achieve if a company can control the hardware, as well as the software, people carry in their pockets. Comments made by Google executives hint that Motorola could also play a role in shaping the future of the Web in other areas—for instance, in set-top boxes.

Motorola is by far Google's largest acquisition, and it takes the company into uncertain new territory. The deal is also likely to draw antitrust scrutiny because of the reach Google already has with Android, which runs on around half of all smart phones in the United States.

Motorola, which makes the Droid smart phone, went all-in with Google's Android platform in 2008, declaring that all of its devices would use the open-source mobile operating system.

Before his departure as Google CEO, Eric Schmidt had begun pressing Google employees to shift their attention to mobile. Cofounder and new CEO Larry Page seems determined to maintain this change of focus. In a conference call this morning, he told investors, "It's no secret that Web usage is increasingly shifting to mobile devices, a trend I expect to continue. With mobility continuing to take center stage in the computing revolution, the combination with Motorola is an extremely important event in Google's continuing evolution that will drive a lot of improvements in our ability to deliver great user experiences."

Motorola engineers have extensively modified Google's basic Android platform for its devices. For example, the company designed Motoblur, a user interface that pulls together Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites, into a single stream of data, and this has been a major selling point for  the company's phones.
With input from Google, these sorts of modifications could get more juice—and might feature Google products more prominently. Motoblur, for example, might get an extra shot of Google+ integration.

"Google already had a big role to play in 50 percent of the smart phones being sold," says technology and strategy consultant Chetan Sharma, president of Chetan Sharma Consulting. If Google uses the Motorola acquisition to grow the Android platform further, he says, "it is quite likely that their share will get to the 70 to 75 percent range. Essentially, this means they will have a huge say in how the mobile Internet is developed and implemented by the [manufacturers]."

Page also pointed to Motorola's expertise with other Web-connected devices found around the home, saying, "I think there's an opportunity to accelerate innovation in the home business by working together with the cable and telco industry as we go through a transition to Internet protocol."

Sanjay Jha, chairman and CEO of Motorola Mobility, agreed, saying, "Our home business is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the convergence of mobile and home environments in partnership with our key customer."

Google executives have stressed that the acquisition will not put other manufacturers of Android devices at a disadvantage. Google worked with HTC to build its Nexus One smart phone, and with Samsung to build the Nexus S. The company says Motorola Mobility will operate as a separate company and will have to bid for contracts to make future Nexus phones, just like everyone else.

 Other smart-phone manufacturers support the deal as a way to protect Android against patent lawsuits, and Google has posted quotes from them online. HTC issued a statement that said, "This is a positive development to the Android ecosystem, which we believe is beneficial to HTC's promotion of Android phones. The partnership between HTC and Google remains strong and will not be affected by this acquisition."

Even so, Google may struggle to counter the perception that Motorola Mobility will get special privileges with Android. Sharma believes Google will eventually have to do more to placate other manufacturers if Android is to remain popular. "Long-term, I feel Google will divest the hardware business, and thus it will be less of a threat to the likes of Samsung and HTC," he says.

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Personal Security

Many medical implants, such as insulin pumps and pacemakers, are equipped with wireless radios that let doctors download data about the patient's condition and adjust the behavior of the implant. But these devices are vulnerable to hackers who can eavesdrop on stored data or even reprogram the implant, causing, for example, a pacemaker to shock a heart unnecessarily. While it may be possible to engineer new, more secure implants, millions of people are walking around with vulnerable devices that can't be replaced without surgery. An anti-hacking device presented this week at the annual SIGCOMM communications conference in Toronto may offer them a solution. 

Created by researchers from MIT and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the laptop-sized device, called "the shield," emits a jamming signal whenever it detects an unauthorized wireless link being established between an implant and a remote terminal (which can be out of sight and tens of meters away).  Although no attack of this kind is known to have occurred , "it's important to solve these kinds of problems before the risk becomes a tenable threat," says Kevin Fu, an associate professor of computer science at UMass and one of the developers of the shield. Fu was Technology Review's Young Innovator of the Year in 2009 for his work in uncovering the previously unsuspected danger that hackers pose to implant wearers.

The key innovation is the new radio design that the shield uses for jamming. "If you just do simple jamming [broadcasting radio noise on a given frequency], then the attacker doesn't get the information, but the doctor doesn't either," says Dina Katabi, another developer of the shield and an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Instead, the shield allows a jamming signal to be broadcast while it simultaneously receives data signals from the implant and relays them over a secure link. So doctors can still download data and confirm adjustments even while the shield is jamming an attacker.

Normally, trying to get a radio to detect data while it's broadcasting on the same frequency is like attaching a hearing aid to a megaphone on full blast and expecting the hearing aid to pick up a nearby conversation. Earlier attempts to make radios capable of simultaneously transmitting and receiving on the same frequency relied on a carefully spaced trio of antennas. But at the frequencies used in medical devices (about 400 megahertz), this spacing would result in a jamming device far too big for a person to carry. Instead, the researchers worked out how to use two closely spaced antennas: one for receiving and the other for broadcasting the jamming signal. The trick is to feed an "antidote" signal to the jamming signal into the receiving antenna, canceling out the jamming noise. 

In tests with cardiac implants in an environment meant to simulate the human body (a one-centimeter-thick layer of bacon placed on top of the implant, and four centimeters of lean ground beef below), the shield was able to completely block unauthorized communications with standard medical terminals, such as a hacker might buy secondhand from an online auction site. Even if the hacker builds his own terminal capable of transmitting a signal 100 times as powerful as the shield's jamming broadcast, the shield can still block communications until the terminal gets within five meters of the implant. Then the shield can't ward off attacks—but it can at least alert a patient that an attack is happening. 

Although the prototype shield, built out of two off-the-shelf software radios, is cumbersome, it could be miniaturized into something that could be worn around the neck or as a bracelet. The researchers are discussing possible commercialization of the technology with one medical-device manufacturer. A problem yet to be overcome is that telecommunications regulations in the United States and elsewhere generally discourage jamming equipment. Katabi hopes the U.S. Federal Communications Commission would be flexible: "They are a relatively agile agency, and they've generated waivers before for medical devices to encourage innovation and solve problems," she says. 

The researchers believe that the shield may be a better alternative to building encryption directly into implants. "Imagine you have an implant with a secret decryption key," says Katabi. "Your doctor knows the secret key, but you're traveling and there's an emergency and you're taken into a foreign hospital. The doctor there doesn't have access to the secret key." However, with a wearable jammer, the hospital could remove the shield, allowing unencrypted access during the emergency.

Not all security researchers agree with that analysis. "There are security methods that don't require a doctor to have the key," says Jay Radcliffe, a security researcher who has also studied wireless attacks on implanted devices. Rather than trying to "bolt on security as an afterthought," Radcliffe argues, the burden should fall on device manufacturers to design in security from the beginning. Still, for existing devices, Radcliffe thinks the shield could offer an interim solution.

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