AI, Are We There Yet?

By: Alon Cohen

Wow how times fly. I remember a discussion I had about 28 years ago as if it was yesterday. At the time, I was working on few computer programs that seem to need human intelligence. One was an automated device testing program that could tell a technician which board to replace based on anomalies in the way that device behaved. The second was a learning algorithm that had to play Tic-Tac- Toe by figuring out the rules of the game by itself (yes after I saw the movie war games in 1983)) and it triggered in me the thinking about what would it take to make a computer more human.

I was talking to few of my friends discussing what would it take to make a computer creative. My idea at that time was that scientists would probably be able to take a human Neuron (or few of them) and place them in a chip, and use that as an intuition co-processor.

Well it seems like the MIT scientists just made it happen. The MIT people did not really took a brain tissue but found a way to emulate the way a Neuron behaves using analog circuits on a CMOS chip. I guess it took more than few years to figure that one out. However, as it stands I can now envision a reality just as the one depicted in Asimov’s books where business entities (like US robotics) will own an artificial brain that will surpass any human or supper (digital) computer in existence, which will help them invent and solve problems not solvable by humans like time travel or teleportation.

As it stands, the human brain has 100,000,000,000 Neurons and about 100,000,000,000,000 Synapse connecting them. The cerebral cortex is the outermost part of the brain. It plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness. The number of neurons in the cortex is estimated to be 11,000,000,000 so about 11,000,000,000,000 Synapses. Synapses are those specialized junctions through which neurons signal to each other.

Surprisingly it only took 400 transistors to create that artificial Synapse at MIT. Imagine a quad core Itanium chip with 2,000,000,000 transistors, take that level of technology and you can create a brain with 5,000,000 Synapses or an equivalent of 5,000 neurons give or take or hmm as smart as Pond Snail.

Since our brain has about 11,000,000,000,000 Synapse in our cortex, we need just about 2.2 Million more of those quad core chips to emulate the human cortex. Sounds scary large number but the truth is that it is not that far if you are an optimist.

If you apply Moore’s law to those numbers you get that in 30-40 years (2^21 = 2M) give or take we will have the capacity to replicate a human cortex that can work thousands of times faster than a human can.

It is not that far I can tell you that, specifically when we live in internet speeds and each New Year end before you even noticed it started. Now, way before those 30 years, say 15 years from now we will be able to compose an artificial brain equivalent in capacity to a dog cortex. I guess all we will need to do at that stage is hope that this technology will not bite us. If it will bite, it will help us realize the corrections we need to make, just in time, so that the first artificial human-level brains will do the right thing.

You can read more about this amazing technologyfrom MIT here

Science Fiction? Conspiracy theory? – You Decide

Science Fiction? Conspiracy theory? – You Decide

By: Alon Cohen

I will start and explain why I do not buy HP products for 10 years now. This is a story I have been telling every HP employee I have met at every trade show and every friend who asked me about HP that was willing to listen.

Maybe 10 years ago I bought an all in one HP printer. I really liked HP from my days working at an R&D lab during the eighties, where every really good measurement equipment was either Tektronics or HP. I specifically liked the HP200 serious of PC computers that were way ahead of their time and superior in all aspect (but the cost) to the flimsy PCs XT that came out from IBM and looked like crap back in 1986-1987. So naturally, when I came to staples around 2000 and saw the brand new HP printers I still carried with me that warm fuzzy feeling I had from the old HP days about those products.

Since I needed two printers, one for home and one the office, I thought to myself why not buy the same one? This way I will install the driver once on my laptop and be done with it. In theory a great idea, practically I discovered that HP is not HP anymore and that printer drivers, is not their forte to say the least. But you know what, this is not the point.

The point is that after a year, just a week or two after the warranty expired, both printers started to display a similar error message on the screen. Normally a person who buys one would not suspect a foul play, however when one printer did thousands of pages at the office and the other one did only few pages sitting idle at home, one starts to suspect. My suspicion was that HP allegedly inserted a time bomb in the printer software to make it looks like it is dead forcing consumers to buy new printers.

To be honest, I have no proof of that but I was unable to shake that feeling off over the years, specifically with all the other bad smell coming out of that company.

It did not end there, to add a sin to the crime, when I called HP's customer support they made me pay for the call and forced me to buy another cartridge saying the new spare one I had expired. Well clearly, it did not, but if you can squeeze few more bucks from a sucker why not.

At some point, the HP customer support agent felt he was on a roll, one sucker customer two bad printers, so he took it to the next step saying: “What if I will get you the newest fancy printer for only $200”. Well I was an idiot for buying the first time but hey I am not that bad. And so I said, “let me get back to you on that”.

The next day, I went to the store to compare prices and, lo and behold, it is cheaper at the store! This sealed the deal from my point of view. I have not touched HP ever again.

Was I correct about this alleged selling methodology? You will be the judge of that. However moving to now, I came across this WSJ article about how HP decided to commit suicide and how this whole move is so unclear to everyone in the industry and... bang, it all became clear to me.

I wouldn't be surprised if few years from now, it will come out, that competitors were able to prove what HP did use time bombs and gave HP’s board and management an ultimatum to stay out of the PC / Home Printers / Tablets space or face class action law suits with deep personal consequences. I am not sure how deep you are into conspiracy theories, but this explanation works for me, and personally, I would like to see them out of the game because of that incident.

Who knows, maybe Agilent who span off, back in the days, and took HP’s good measurement products, can re-take the HP name and revive it to glory once again.

Thanks

Alon

How to stop your Microwave clock from Blinking

By: Alon Cohen

Whenever I hear about a new programming language I cringe. Essentially programming languages are all the same… a group of commands in an allegedly human readable language that tells your computer or device how to respond to inputs like keys keyboard, voice, numbers, mouse and so on.

So why do we have so many programming languages? Well every so often, a computer science professor decides that all that was done so far could be done in a simpler way; for those of you who believe that, I suggest trying to program in “Scheme”. Too often, a software company from the north-west decides that the best way to sell new development tools would be to create a new sharper language. Or a company in California, decides that in order to make it harder for developers to move code from other platforms it is better to come up with their own version of objective C.

Generally speaking, all those "new" languages, in my mind, just slows down development of good code (as programmers are always new to the language) and it prevents the industry from building on existing foundations. Yet it sure does help few companies to strive.

Contrary to the above, sometimes a good idea appears. This time, I would not call it a programming language but more like a programming interface. It is not an entirely new concept and it was even used for programming of Lego Devices and even homegrown interactive telephony systems.

However, this new concept from a Rutgers Professor makes me optimistic and also proud as my two boys, Gal Cohen who directly works on this project as a Junior at Rutgers, and Roy Cohen a Sophomore in High School who helps the team with ongoing advice about the Arduino and Xbee communications.

So why am I optimistic? Well for once, I can see this saving significant amount of my time trying to convince the kids to program the “smart” phones to do X & Y (for instance try activating conditional call forwarding on iPhone). It will also save me time helping less technically oriented friends, to deal with devices from answering machine (yes some people still use those) to wireless printers.

Plus, I can clearly see how the Phone.com user interface for call handling rules (which I use every day) could become a part of that Scratch world, helping customers define, in a simpler way than available today, the different actions that will take place when a call comes in.

Exercising my Bragging Rights

I wanted to thank all my friends and the people I have never met for voting my invention/idea about a simple way of "Increasing Effective Capacity of Highways" to the the first place and helping me win.

I am now officially the #1 winner of the popular vote at the “Create the Future design contest for 2010” that was conducted by “Tech Briefs Media Group”.

I even received a symbolic prize, which is a 3D Mouse.

You can see the top 10 winners list here: http://contest.techbriefs.com/top-votes-2010

Tech Briefs Media Group is the home of few respectable industry magazines such as:

• NASA Tech Briefs
• Medical Design Briefs
• Green Design & Manufacturing
• Defense Tech Briefs
• RF & Microwave Technology
• Embedded Technology
• Motion Control Technology
• Photonics Tech Briefs
• Imaging Technology
• Software Tech Briefs

Thanks

Alon

My latest ISSUED Patent – Conferencing Bridge on steroids

By: Alon Cohen

I was just informed (by a marketing company none-the-less selling plucks) that my US Patent 7742587 filed (November 25 2002) was issued (June 22, 2010), i.e. accepted as an official patent by the US Patent office (USPTO) it only took 8!!! years - wow.

In spite the fact that I have no idea who this patent is assigned to those days, as it was sold repeatedly between different companies, I still keep to myself the bragging rights for the idea.

The concept is about providing a more sophisticated set of capabilities to a conferencing bridge. What we all know is a bridge is a place where all participants hear each other unless the moderator decides to mute everyone.

In my invention every participants has full control over what he/she can hear and control over about who might hear each participant. Sounds a bit hard to manage? True! It is even harder to grasp when implementing. However, this is just the underlying technology at the base of it. Where in fact it enables nifty features, that when combined with a nice user interface (even on a mobile device) become very powerful.

Here are some examples:

Imagine you are a sales person about to call a prospect to close a big deal, you know you have good potential to sell but this customer is highly technical. You do not want to have an engineer talk to your prospect, as you master the art of selling in ways your engineer will never understand. So what do you do? How do you make that work?

You call your bridge and have the bridge call your prospect (yes you can do that), then you call the in the engineer in the group and enter team consultation mode. The Eng. can hear the prospect you hear both and the prospect only hears you the closing master. When the prospect comes up with a hard technical question about “MPLS convergence time”, your engineer gives you the answer and you look like the best sales person in the world. If you need a finance person to back you up on discount you can add that he/she to your group of consultants in the same way, where the group can talk among them without the prospect hearing a thing besides you. Deal closed you nailed another prospect.

Or say when you are in a board meeting conference call and you need your lawyer as personal consultant, so that the lawyer hears everyone but when he talks it is only to you. (Would you rather pay that lawyer to come sit with you or would you rather call him when you need him?)

Now imagine that any of the participants can invoke all those different modes any time, all at the same time, all using any phone or cell phone. The complexities of the technology dealing with managing privacy, managing echoes, suppressing DTMF tones, all implemented in software only, is just few steps above what is implemented today in the most complex bridges out there.

One of the uses I had envisioned at the time was an always-on scenario. A distributed team that collaborates on a time-critical project has the phone open day on and while they can still use the phone to receive and make new calls. The bridge keeps the private calls in private and can keep the conference at low volume in the back so that participants can jump in to the session when needed ask a quick question and progress fast in what they need to do to finish the task.

It is like bringing all the people into a war-room but enabling them to consult with one another on the side. Enabling participants to bring in new people to consult with. Get status calls from the field and decide if to share the callers with the team or not, step out and call home and perform any audio related communication task you can think of that they could have done had they been at the same room while in this case, they are in fact, located far from one another.

Think of it as windows operation system for audio. You can have windows at the back at low volume and main conversation at the front. The technology extends further to situations where the participants are using different audio Codecs, and still each enjoy the best quality and not the lowest common denominator due to the fact that each has in a sense its own mixing element in the bridge controlled by the participant to mix what that specific participant wants (even set individual volumes).

At the same time, each participant can control where his own audio will feed into, to enable privacy. All that controlled by high level features that manage and hide the complexity with a small set of commands delivered via DTMF, a web interface or even a mobile device.

Moreover, it can also do a normal conference call, and you will not know the difference.

It is tough concept to sell, but much fun to use. What made it all possible was a group of dedicated engineers product managers and other team players that actually made it work. What killed it were mostly the economy downturn of the first internet bubble and a one short sighted VC, who did not think a proposal from Nortel to include the technology in every office PBX, was worth the time to write a non-binding letter affirming their intentions to back the company up going on. In addition, the deal did not fit the VC hidden agenda to control bigger portions of the company (how can you take bigger portions if the company can hold its own?). Oh well. The nice thing is that the technology survived, moving on from one company to another, merged into the video conferencing space, and moved on with one dedicated very talented programmer Mr. Igor who was hired along with the patent and IP to make it work in new environments.