"iot" entries

Four short links: 5 April 2016

Four short links: 5 April 2016

Programming Living Cells, Internet of Bricked Discontinued Things, Bitcoin User ID, and Paper-a-Day Roundup

  1. cello — home page for the Verilogish programming language to design computational circuits in living cells.
  2. Internet of Bricked Discontinued Things (BusinessInsider) — Shutting down Revolv does not mean that Nest is ceasing to support its products, leaving them vulnerable to bugs and other unpatched issues. It means that the $300 devices and accompanying apps will stop working completely.
  3. Bitcoin Users Reveal More Than They Thinknew technologies trace BTC transactions, attempting to identify bitcoin users. A number of startups have raised money to explore these new possibilities
  4. Last Three Months of Paper-a-Day (Adrian Colyer) — a pointer to the highlights from the 68 papers he covered in the first three months of the year.
Four short links: 16 March 2016

Four short links: 16 March 2016

Analytic Monitoring, Commenter Demographics, Math and Empathy, and How We Read

  1. MacroBaseAnalytic monitoring for the Internet of Things. The code behind a research paper, written up in the morning paper where Adrian Colyer says, there is another story that also unfolds in the paper – one of careful system design based on analysis of properties of the problem space, of thinking deeply and taking the time to understand the prior art (aka “the literature”), and then building on those discoveries to advance and adapt them to the new situation. “That’s what research is all about!” you may say, but it’s also what we’d (I’d?) love to see more of in practitioner settings, too. The result of all this hard work is a system that comprises just 7,000 lines of code, and I’m sure, many, many hours of thinking!
  2. Survey of Commenters and Comment ReadersAmericans who leave news comments, who read news comments, and who do neither are demographically distinct. News commenters are more male, have lower levels of education, and have lower incomes compared to those who read news comments. (via Marginal Revolution)
  3. The Empathizing-Systemizing Theory, Social Abilities, and Mathematical Achievement in Children (Nature) — systematic thinking doesn’t predict math ability in children, but being empathetic predicts being worse at math. The effect is stronger with girls. The authors propose the mechanism is that empathetic children pick up a teacher’s own dislike of math, and any teacher biases like “girls aren’t good at math.”
  4. Moneyball for Book Publishers: A Detailed Look at How We Read (NYT) — On average, fewer than half of the books tested were finished by a majority of readers. Most readers typically give up on a book in the early chapters. Women tend to quit after 50 to 100 pages, men after 30 to 50. Only 5% of the books Jellybooks tested were completed by more than 75% of readers. Sixty percent of books fell into a range where 25% to 50% of test readers finished them. Business books have surprisingly low completion rates. Not surprisingly low to anyone who has ever read a business book. They’re always a 20-page idea stretched to 150 pages because that’s how wide a book’s spine has to be to visible on the airport bookshelf. Fat paper stock and 14-point text with wide margins and 1.5 line spacing help, too. Don’t forget to leave pages after each chapter for the reader’s notes. And summary checklists. And … sorry, I need to take a moment.
Four short links: 8 March 2016

Four short links: 8 March 2016

Neural Nets on Encrypted Data, IoT VR Prototype, Group Chat Considered Harmful, and Haptic Hardware

  1. Neutral Nets on Encrypted Data (Paper a Day) — By using a technique known as homohorphic encryption, it’s possible to perform operations on encrypted data, producing an encrypted result, and then decrypt the result to give back the desired answer. By combining homohorphic encryption with a specially designed neural network that can operate within the constraints of the operations supported, the authors of CryptoNet are able to build an end-to-end system whereby a client can encrypt their data, send it to a cloud service that makes a prediction based on that data – all the while having no idea what the data means, or what the output prediction means – and return an encrypted prediction to the client, which can then decrypt it to recover the prediction. As well as making this possible, another significant challenge the authors had to overcome was making it practical, as homohorphic encryption can be expensive.
  2. VR for IoT Prototype (YouTube) — a VR prototype created for displaying sensor data and video streaming in real time from IoT sensors/camera devices designed for rail or the transportation industry.
  3. Is Group Chat Making You Sweat? (Jason Fried) — all excellent points. Our attention and focus are the scarce and precious resources of the 21st century.
  4. How Devices Provide Haptic Feedback — good intro to what’s happening in your hardware.

Peter Hoddie on JavaScript for embedded systems

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: Hardware abstraction, scripting languages, and user experience.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing. Find us on TuneIn, Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS.

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This will be a breakout year for JavaScript on embedded systems. Our guest on the Hardware Podcast this week is Peter Hoddie, who founded Kinoma, which makes software and hardware for building JavaScript-powered prototypes. Previously he was one of the original developers of QuickTime at Apple.

Computing power has become so inexpensive, and the JS developer community so large, that the accessibility and fast development times of JavaScript will outweigh the efficiency advantages of C and assembly for all but fairly specialized projects.

Discussion points:

  • Scratch, which begat Blockly, which begat KinomaJS Blocks, which can be used to program the Create embedded platform.
  • Transitioning from software development to hardware development.
  • The importance of developing hardware that is flexible, modular and abstracted. “Why should you throw out your hardware because the software is obsolete?” Hoddie asks.
  • Tools: Hoddie swears by profilers, including Apple’s Instruments and the Kinoma Studio profiler
  • Writing your own JavaScript engine—in this case, Kinoma’s XS6

Read more…

Four short links: 24 February 2016

Four short links: 24 February 2016

UX Metrics, Page Scraping, IoT Pain, and NLP + Deep Learning

  1. Critical Metric: Critical Responses (Steve Souders) — new UX-focused metrics […] Start Render and Speed Index.
  2. Automatically Scrape and Import a Table in Google Spreadsheets (Zach Klein) — =ImportHtml("URL", "table", num) where “table” is the element name (“table” or a list tag), and num is the number of the element in case there are multiple on the page. Bam!
  3. Getting Visibility on the iBeacon Problem (Brooklyn Museum) — the Internet of Things is great, but I wouldn’t want to have to update its firmware. As we started to troubleshoot beacon issues, we wanted a clean slate. This meant updating the firmware on all the beacons, checking the battery life, and turning off the advanced power settings that Estimote provides. This was a painstakingly manual process where I’d have to go and update each unit one-by-one. In some cases, I’d use Estimote’s cloud tool to pre-select certain actions, but I’d still have to walk to each unit to execute the changes and use of the tool hardly made things faster. Perhaps when every inch of the world is filled with sensors, Google Street View cars will also beam out firmware updates.
  4. NLP Meets Deep Learning — easy to follow slide deck talking about how deep learning is tackling NLP problems.
Four short links: 19 February 2016

Four short links: 19 February 2016

Exoskeletons Insured, Companies Rethought, IoT OS Launched, and BotNets Open Sourced

  1. Exoskeletons Must be Covered by Health Insurance (VICE) — A medical review board ruled that a health insurance provider in the United States is obligated to provide coverage and reimbursement for a $69,500 ReWalk robotic exoskeleton, in what could be a major turning point for people with spinal cord injuries. (via Robohub)
  2. New Models for the Company of the 21st Century (Simone Brunozzi) — large companies often get displaced by new entrants, failing to innovate and/or adapt to new technologies. Y-Combinator can be seen as a new type of company, where innovation is brought in as an entrepreneurial experiment, largely for seed-stage ideas; Google’s Alphabet, on the other hand, tries to stimulate innovation and risk by dividing a large company into smaller pieces and reassigning ownership and responsibilities to different CEOs.
  3. Zephyr — Linux Foundation’s IoT open source OS project. tbh, I don’t see people complaining about operating systems. Integrating all these devices (and having the sensors actually usefully capturing what you want) seems the bigger problem. We already have fragmentation (is it a Samsung home or a Nest home?), and as more Big Swinging Click companies enter the world of smarter things, this will only get worse before it gets better.
  4. A Hands-On Approach on Botnets for a Learning Purpose — these researchers are working on open source botnet software for researchers to bang on. (So you don’t need to attract the interest of actual botnet operators while you learn what you’re doing.)

Rachel Kalmar on data ecosystems

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: Collecting, sharing, and accessing data from sensors.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing: TuneIn, Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS.

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In this new episode of the Hardware Podcast, David Cranor and I talk with data scientist Rachel Kalmar, formerly with Misfit Wearables and the founder and organizer of the Sensored Meetup in San Francisco. She shares insights from her work at the intersection of data, hardware, and health care.

Discussion points:

  • The need for a “data ecosystem” approach: it’s important to understand the entire stack from acquisition through storage and analysis, and where security and privacy become concerns.
  • Analysis and insight as the real value in data: consumers get very little from raw data.
  • Authentication for smart devices—and an experiment (let us know if your lights went out during this podcast by e-mailing hardware@oreilly.com).

Read more…

Four short links: 15 February 2016

Four short links: 15 February 2016

Deep Learning Analogies, IoT Privacy, Robot Numbers, and App Economy

  1. Deep Visual Analogy-Making (PDF) — In this paper, we develop a novel deep network trained end-to-end to perform visual analogy making, which is the task of transforming a query image according to an example pair of related images. Open source code from the paper also available.
  2. Samsung’s TV and Privacy Gets More AwkwardSamsung has now issued a new statement clarifying how the voice activation feature works. “If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search,” Samsung said in a statement. “At that time, the voice data is sent to a server, which searches for the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV.” It only seems creepy until you give in and nothing bad happens, then you normalise the creepy.
  3. 2015 Robot Numbers (RoboHub) — The Robotic Industries Association (RIA), representing North American robotics, reported […] 2015 set new records and showed a 14% increase in units and 11% in dollars over 2014. The automotive industry was the primary growth sector, with robot orders increasing 19% year over year. Non-automotive robot orders grew at 5%.
  4. Mozilla, Caribou Digital Release Report Exploring the Global App Economy (Mark Surman) — The emerging markets are the 1% — meaning, they earn 1% of total app economy revenue. 95% of the estimated value in the app economy is captured by just 10 countries, and 69% of the value is captured by just the top three countries. Excluding China, the 19 countries considered low- or lower-income accounted for only 1% of total worldwide value. Developers in low-income countries struggle to export to the global stage. About one-third of developers in the sample appeared only in their domestic market.

Sanjit Biswas on industrial sensors

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: The business of building, marketing, and deploying sensors in tough environments.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing: TuneIn, Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS.

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In this episode of the Hardware Podcast, David Cranor and I talk with Sanjit Biswas, founder and CEO of the industrial sensor company Samsara.

Discussion points:

  • The challenges of making modern systems work with ancient industrial control systems already in the field
  • The process of designing temperature sensors for heavy-duty deployments, including environmental constraints, firmware, testing, and necessary certifications
  • Price sensitivity in the industrial sensor market; Samsara is one of several interesting startups that make it practical for mid-size businesses that haven’t been previously automated to add sensors

Read more…

Four short links: 12 February 2016

Four short links: 12 February 2016

Slack's Voice, Accessible Experiences, IoT Design, and What I Learned

  1. Webstock: Bug Fixes & Minor Improvements — notes from Anna Pickard’s talk about being the voice of Slack, recorded by Luke Wroblewski.
  2. Webstock: The Map & The Territory — notes from Ethan Marcotte’s talk about making accessible experiences, recorded by Luke Wroblewski.
  3. Webstock: The Shape of Things — notes from Tom Coates’s talk about designing for the Internet of Things, recorded by Luke Wroblewski.
  4. Today I LearnedA collection of concise write-ups on small things I learn day to day across a variety of languages and technologies. These are things that don’t really warrant a full blog post.