Deb Roy (left). Image of their home lifelog (right). Space-time worm tracking movements of family members (bottom).

When Deb Roy’s son invites his girlfriend over for dinner with his family, there will be much more than photo albums to embarrass the teenager. His parents will have plenty of ammunition: 90,000 hours of video and 140,000 hours of audio. It’s the most comprehensive lifelogging event the world has ever seen, dwarfing a recent frame-by-frame photolog of an aging young girl. Moreover, the lifelog wasn’t compiled solely for family reminiscence, but for scientific reasons as well. As part of the Human Speechome Project, Deb Roy, an MIT cognitive scientist, is using this deluge of video footage to investigate early language acquisition. You can see his TED presentation on the subject, which includes some of the thousands of hours of footage, in the video below. From this pedagogical case study, his team also cleverly translated their budding ideas to human behavior in digital communities. With social networking and the growing prevalence of mobile devices with cameras, is this endeavor a precursor to even grander forms of lifelogging? If so, will scientists be equipped to make sense of world-logging – recording every moment on the planet – if it emerges? Only time will tell. For now, we all can marvel at Dr. Roy’s impressive feat of lifelog analytics.

Earlier this year, Deb Roy dazzled a TED audience with his presentation, “The Birth of a Word,” featured below. Because of the unprecedented nature of the project, the captivating visualizations, and the personal touch, the video garnered widespread attention. It even earned a tweet from Ashton Kutcher. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and allot 20 minutes of your time to watch the TED Talk in full. You won’t be disappointed.

Roy opens with a thought-provoking scenario:

Imagine you could record your life – everything you said, everything you did – available in a perfect memory store at your fingertips, so you could go back and find memorable moments and relive them . . . or sift through traces of time and discover patterns in your own life that had previously gone undiscovered.

Here, Deb Roy is talking about using lifelogging as a tool to answer challenging questions about human behavior and life in general. The question that he and his wife, a speech scientist, were trying to address has eluded child development experts for years: How does the infant’s tabula rasa acquire human language? It has been a subject of rigorous investigation since the titan of developmental psychology, Jean Piaget, offered his own theory of child language development. While Dr. Roy and his wife did not completely answer the question, their videos certainly shed valuable light on the matter.

Vertical axis: Complexity of caregiver utterances. Horizontal axis: Time. At the minimum of the curve, the child made his first correct utterance of a specific word. Attaboy, Roy Junior.

There were some fascinating phenomena that emerged from Dr. Roy’s daunting dataset. He starts with some raw data at 4:59, where his son gradually improves his pronunciation of the word “water.” It’s actually quite beautiful to hear the word crystallize from its linguistic predecessor, “gaga.” In a recent CNN article, Dr. Roy eloquently referred to this verbal evolution as the “acoustic equivalent of a time-lapse video of a flower blossoming.” But what does it all mean? Well, the MIT team sorted through the hundreds of words in Roy Junior’s early vocabulary and found that he learned a word when the complexity of caregiver utterances reached a minimum (5:58). In other words, the parents and their nanny were subconsciously simplifying their speech to meet the nascent talker halfway. It seems to be related to “motherese” in which parents heighten the pitch of their voice in the presence of a newborn. This adjustment is thought to assist language acquisition. Here, the Roy family has revealed a previously hidden parent-child feedback loop in speech development by applying home video analytics. Jean Piaget and perhaps Bob Saget, another home video enthusiast, would be very proud.

Mass Media Feedback Loop

Okay, so lifelogging can address problems of child linguistics. What about questions of a broader scope? Luckily, the MIT Media Lab had more tricks up their sleeves. By correlating “social hotspots” in the home with specific words that Roy Junior learned, the team built “wordscapes” (10:15), mountainous, data-rich structures describing utterance frequencies at particular locations. This spurred the imagination of Dr. Roy’s PhD student, Michael Fleischman, who envisaged translating this concept from the Roy household to the digitally-based community (11:19). In “virtual living rooms,” source content in mass media leads to commentary and discussion in social media. Previously, much like pinpointing how environment influences word births, it has been tricky to monitor how source content mediates responses in the digital world. However, by utilizing high-throughput media analytics, the MIT team was able to capture these media feedback loops. This is brilliantly depicted at 14:45 as a co-viewing clique, a fundamental unit of content-commentary interaction which includes the original source and the linked responses in social media. To see the President Obama’s State of the Union make a “nation explode in conversation,” check out 15:54. From ideas born from the unassuming archives of Roy Junior’s lifelog, the MIT lab has unearthed previously unknown dynamics of the mass media world.

The co-viewing clique for the State of the Union address. See it in action at 15:54.

As you could imagine, these media feedback loops might provide invaluable audience engagement information to advertisers, TV executives, and political campaigns. Using media-social media interactions as unsolicited crowdsourcing could literally transform Internet audiences into massive focus groups. To make this a reality, Dr. Roy and his former PhD student spearheaded Bluefin Labs, a company with the mission of helping organizations “link social media comments directly to their televised source—at scale, with precision and near real-time.” One of their tools, a social heatmap of television programming, is currently available on their website. At the moment, Bluefin is demonstrating their technology to Fortune 100 companies, and they expect a fully developed product by year’s end. I wonder if Roy Junior will get a cut? If the prospects of this technology tickle your fancy, check out the promotional video below to augment your excitement.

These are just the first steps of converting the vast stockpiles of videos, photos, and commentary into meaningful data. As social media is chronicling the lives of millions and cell phone cameras are approaching omnipresence, humanity at-large is building a worldlog of epic proportions. Almost certainly, there are valuable hidden insights within this treasure trove of human artifacts. Throw in unstructured data on science, politics, public health, and history, and the possibilities grow exponentially. We might be able to track how language is born not just in the individual, but civilization as a whole. Digging further, we might discover how cultural conditions can lead to scientific breakthroughs. The question is:   Who is up to the Herculean task of elucidating global behavior patterns from this ocean of world knowledge? IBM has shown interest in this effort on a small scale with social media analytics, so perhaps a more computationally powerful version of Watson will be up to the challenge.

Also, what if we expand measurable life beyond the limits of sound, images, and text? All recorded human behavior is really just the end product of neural activity, so knowledge derived from advanced neuroscience might produce more fundamental insights than lifelogging through video. For a moment, imagine recording and interpreting brain activity among multiple individuals simultaneously. Now, imagine a whole community . . . then the world. The gates of social neuroscience would be wide open, transitioning worldlog analytics from  behaviorism to biological understanding.

Alright, now I’m tiptoeing into science fiction, but in light of Deb Roy’s inspirational work, I can’t help but dream. His project foreshadows new tools that could change our world for the better. Through immediate and long range feedback loops observed in lifelogs and the hypothetical worldlog, we could improve our self-awareness, understanding, and behavior on both an individual and global scale. So, the next time you post a picture of your vacation on Flickr or upload your extreme sports exploits to Youtube, don’t think of it as an exercise in vanity. You are adding an infinitesimally small piece to an ever-growing library of human events that could answer our deepest questions. This echoes the bit of Socratic wisdom at the beginning of this article, a statement that really drives at the core of Deb Roy’s work and all the other lifelogging devotees out there. Socrates, if he were cryogenically unfrozen today, might amend his famous quotation: “An unexamined life is not worth living, and an unexamined world is not worth inhabiting. So take plenty of pictures! And don’t drink the hemlock.”

<Image Credits:  TED (modified), Bluefin Labs (modified)>

<Video Credits: TED, Bluefin Labs>

<Sources: TED, Bluefin Labs, CNN>

Cynthia Breazeal's TED presentation reviewed some of her amazing social robots (inset).

Forget the automated factories, the Mars rovers, and the vacuum cleaners, Cynthia Breazeal wants you to know that robots should actually be social machines. Head of the Personal Robotics Group at the MIT Media Lab, Breazeal is a world-renowned expert in robotics. In the late 1990s, she and her team built Kismet, one of the first advanced robots ever made specifically to interact with humans on a social level. More than a decade later, Breazeal is still pushing the boundaries of where machines and people come together. In her latest talk at TED Women in Washington DC this past year, Breazeal gave a 14 minute overview of some of the incredible projects coming out of the Personal Robotics Group. Don’t miss the video of her talk below, followed by two more video examples of her work. Breazeal’s exploration of how bot and humans can bond socially heralds the arrival of the age of personal robotics.

Cynthia Breazeal’s team at MIT has its hands in many different projects, but they all seem to share a common understanding – robots are really about people. From the first days of Kismet (1:20), to the more advanced emotional awareness of Leonardo (2:10) the Personal Robotics Group has designed and constructed some of the most socially viable machines on the planet. People will talk to these robots, listen to their advice, and even miss them when they are gone. At 4:15 in the talk below, Breazeal discusses how psychologists are using robots to help them understand the nuances of human behavior. With body language, a main advantage bots have over computers, social machines can augment digital communication (5:18), or form the personal connections needed to help people change their habits (8:30). In Breazeal’s vision, robots my even come to have a valuable role in educating our youngest children (11:15). In this field of robotics, the greatest successes aren’t measured in speed, strength, or coordination, but rather in the trust and connections these machines engender among the humans that interact with them.

Huggable, a robotic teddy bear from the PRG, is able to track objects and interact with humans via a voice. In the video below, you can see it encourage a user to color a picture. Brief shots of the computer interface showcase its tracking skills, and its body awareness.

Graduate student Ryan Wistort’s project at the PRG was TOFU, a robot that used tested methods of animatronics to create a stretchable and squishable character with a lot of personality.

Here’s Tofulandia, a ‘mixed reality’ system that allows for interactions between fully digital and fully physical (robotic) versions of Tofu.

Clearly there are going to be uses for robots that don’t require them to have a high level of social skills. When you’re assembling car parts 24/7, you don’t need a lovable face or a cuddly fur exterior. Yet I think Breazeal’s work highlights the vast potential that robots could have when aimed towards social interactions. With driven research, we could have machines that closely mimic our expressions and appearance, able to act as stand-ins for humans. There are teams all over the world, like MIT’s Personal Robotics Group or Kokoro in Japan working to make these kinds of replicants. Who knows, with enough advances in artificial intelligence, maybe they wouldn’t simply look like us, maybe they would think like us as well. We’re still many years (decades?) away from having real world versions of C3PO and R2D2 in our homes, but the concept of a robot pal arriving in my lifetime seems more and more likely every day. Thanks, Prof. Breazeal.

[image credits: TED (modified), Personal Robotics Group at MIT Media Lab]
[video credtis: TED, Personal Robotics Group at MIT Media Lab]
[sources: TED, PRG at MIT]

Guess who was giving people free rides in their robot car? I'll give you a clue: rhymes with "holy crap this is awesome...oogle."

Dammit, I really need to attend TED. The annual Technology Entertainment Design conference always has tons of great presenters, but this year they also had something better: Google’s autonomous car. On a specially designed outdoor course in Long Beach, Google allowed press to not only film the robot vehicle, they were also handing out rides inside the car itself. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land grabbed two sweet videos, providing an external and internal view of how the autonomous vehicle can perform on a closed track. Check them both out below. Despite the fact that I’m eating my heart out from jealousy while watching Sullivan’s excursion, I’m still pretty skeptical that Google will be able to market their car anytime soon. These videos demonstrate the awesome engineering of the project, but I still haven’t seen anything that lets me believe that the social and legal barriers opposing robot automobiles are falling. More’s the pity.

Here’s the interior view. Man, what I would give to get a chance to be in that front seat. Hands free is the only way I want to drive!

The exterior view gives a better idea of the car’s speed. Not bad for a Prius! Those turns give a great squeal. Awesome.

Reportedly, Google’s robotic fleet has been tested using very conservative driving schemes when taken on public roads. As I mentioned when this project was first unveiled back in the fall, Google’s traveled 140,000 miles in their autonomous vehicles, but that’s been really tame driving with a lot of supervision. The test track on TED is something else. With the ability to preprogram the driving course in very controlled conditions, Google is able to let its robot car tear up the track as best as it can. Pretty impressive, and much closer to performances we’ve seen from other robotic car programs, such as the one from Volkswagen and Stanford.

This performance just shows that Google’s team of world-class experts is excelling at the engineering side of things. Sebastian Thrun, the project’s leader, was on hand at TED giving some more details about Google’s motivations and successes- we’ll definitely throw that presentation up once it goes public.

Yet I would be happier if Google also had an elite team of psychologists, publicists, and lawyers working in parallel with their autonomous car project. (Maybe they do? I’d love to hear about it if anyone has inside information on this.) As I’ve stated ad nauseum, creating robotic vehicles won’t matter much if you can’t convince people (and their governments) to accept putting human lives in the ‘hands’ of these bots. Some nation is going to lead the way with this, either by steam-rolling opposition or convincing the public through good PR. That nation is going to reap the benefits of automated driving (lower casualties, higher fuel efficiencies, great convenience) and is likely to set the standards the rest of the globe will adopt as they come on board with the idea. I have little doubt that Silicon Valley will lead the way in engineering. For my sake (yes, I’m petty like that) I hope that Google and the US leap the social/legal hurdle first as well. I’d love to ride on an automated highway as soon as possible.

In the meantime…Google, if you ever want me to ‘test drive’ one of your cars, you just tell me where and when. I promise to shut up about my social/legal hurdle theory for the entirety of the ride. I make no such claims about throwing my hands in the air and screaming “wheeeeeee” however. There are limits to my will power.

[screen capture and video credits: SearchEngineLand/Danny Sullivan]
[source: SearchEngineLand, Google Blog]

Anderson believes that online videos are fueling revolutions in creativity.

Five hundred years ago, the printing press marked a rise in the power of the written word over human speech. Now, Chris Anderson thinks that web videos could reverse that change with some amazing benefits. Anderson is the head of TED, the popular global conference on technology, entertainment, and design. During his recent talk at TED 2010, Anderson described how web videos, epitomized in YouTube, allowed groups all around the globe to share ideas in ways that spurred creativity. This ‘crowd accelerated innovation’ is increasing in power as more and more people go online and as more of the web is dominated by video content. Already the fields of dance and extreme sports have seen web videos act as a crucial means of evaluating and inspiring communities of performers. Watch Anderson’s presentation in the video below to see some amazing examples of this phenomenon. What happens when this same accelerating push is brought to bear on teachers, scientists, and everyone else in the world?

We make a habit of examining exponential growth at Singularity Hub, and Anderson’s argument is that YouTube (and web videos in general) could bring exponential growth in innovation to every group that communicates online. The idea is simple enough – bring enough people with a common interest together and they will start to share and compete and improve. The bigger the crowd, the greater the chance of innovation, and the more people who witness and benefit from that innovation. The system feeds upon itself. Web videos are creating crowds in the millions and billions, and have the potential to create powerful feedback loops. In order to do so, Anderson believes that we must preserve open sharing, and points to TED’s own open distribution of videos (~7:03). Anderson’s vision for the future is painted in broad strokes, and it’s unclear what the benefits and limits of crowd-fueled creativity will be. Still, it’s hard to ignore that there is some potential building as billions of new people move online. He ends with an amazing look at a community in the Kibera slums of Kenya who are using web video and community organization to accelerate innovation and feed their families (~16:47). Very inspiring.

Anderson mentions TED Translations and the JOVE scientific community in his talk. Here are links to both for easy reference:
http://www.ted.com/translate
http://www.jove.com/

[screen capture and video credit: TED 2010]

Tan Le let a first time user demo how the EPOC headset translates brain activity into commands.

Tan Le isn’t just interested in reading your mind, she wants to have fun while doing it. Le is one of the founders of Emotiv, maker of the EPOC headset – a streamlined EEG device that translates your thoughts and facial expressions into computer inputs. It’s been hyped as bringing a new dimension to video games. At this year’s TED conference, Le gave a wonderful presentation on EPOC, letting a first time user demonstrate how it could control a simulated object. Available as low as $300, EPOC is one of the least expensive brain computer interfaces you can find on the market. Watch the Emotiv headset in action during Le’s TED Talk in the video below. She reveals parts of the UI and capabilities of the device that you haven’t seen anywhere else.

Calling the EPOC a brain computer interface is a little bit generous. With only 14 channels, it’s a fairly simple version of EEG. Certainly we’ve seen more complex BCIs that are currently on the market. Yet EPOC is an order of magnitude cheaper than these more advanced devices, and seems to be able to translate a wide variety of brain activity into computer commands. In the TED demonstration we are able to see a first time user pull a virtual object (~4:55) and even make that object disappear (~6:45) using monitored brain activity. In both these cases EPOC only had a single point of reference from which to base the commands. Clearly the learning algorithm of the system is fairly capable. Eventually, commercial BCIs like EPOC may enjoy a wide range of applications. Le highlights a few in the video below, including video games (8:20), automated machines (8:50), and wheelchairs (9:30).

As we discussed in our original review of Emotiv, the EPOC headset may not make it as a video game controller. Sure, being able to lift an object with the power of your mind sounds cool, but the reality looks difficult and unwieldy. I’m not sure I would spend $300 on it. Sharing my facial expressions through online avatars is only somewhat appealing, and having a virtual landscape that adjusts to my emotions seems like a recipe for disaster. Also, at the $300 level you can only use the headset with approved software applications, which are very limited at this point. Bottom line, I’m much more impressed that the EPOC system can perform all these video game tasks than I am with the game applications themselves.

Maybe Emotiv agrees? They’ve made their SDK for the EPOC very affordable – starting at just $500. Research packages are a little more expensive ($750) and advanced enterprise and education adopters will likely pay $2500-$7500 for development. These are all relatively cheap prices, and may encourage third party developers to find that killer app that the EPOC needs.

I have really no idea what that app will be. Other commercial EEG devices are either typing tools for helping patients with locked-in syndrome communicate (high-end), or novelty products for hobbyists (low-end). EPOC is clearly not the latter, but I don’t know if it has the spatial/temporal resolution for the former. I doubt it, otherwise I think Le would have shown us that at some point. Still, with a reasonable purchase price, and a robust system of capabilities, chances are that EPOC could find a good use fairly soon. It’s a great example of how BCIs are getting cheaper and more powerful as companies explore the technology. One day brain-computer interactions will become so sophisticated that traditional human-computer interfaces, like the keyboard, will become obsolete. We’re not there yet, but Le’s presentation gives me hope that we’re on the right path. In preparation for the coming BCI revolution I’m doing a bunch of mental exercises. Picturing my computer disappear is strangely relaxing.

[screen capture and video credit: TED Talks]
[source: Emotiv]

Hans Rosling uses impressive displays of statistics to explain why infant mortality is at the root of population growth.

Think the global human population is growing too quickly? Then work to decrease infant mortality among the world’s poor. That’s the message that world-class health analyst and statistician Hans Rosling presented at the recent TED Talks at Cannes. Rosling is known for making dense statistical analysis easily accessible through graphic displays, and is the director of Gapminder, an organization that looks to transform important data into clear and expressive visual aides. In his TED Talk, Rosling highlights how the gap between the developing and industrial worlds is closing, but that the largest population growth is still among the poorest peoples. Helping these individuals out of poverty isn’t just a humane act, it may be an ecological necessity. Check out Rosling’s presentation in the video below. It’s a clear call to tackle two of humanity’s grand challenges: poverty and health.

Part of the general appeal of accelerating technologies is that they have the potential to address the big problems we face: poverty, hunger, energy, environment, war, and health. This potential is so great that we’ve seen entire institutions (like Singularity University) geared towards leveraging technology to solve humanity’s grand challenges. Yet the growing population of the world only serves to exacerbate most of these global problems as we need more resources and space to fit our growing communities. Finding a sustainable size for humanity is going to be critical to stabilizing and improving our world. Rosling’s presentation on global population gives us a clear hope: as we work to end global poverty we will be working towards ending unchecked population growth. Why? Healthier and wealthier babies make for smaller families.

As Rosling explains in the video, there are clear links between increased economic success and reduced family size, and between low infant mortality and reduced family size. Ending global poverty (and increasing child survival rates) is the clear path to reaching a sustainable human population. Rosling’s goal of a stable size of 9 billion people by 2050 seems rooted in a firm understanding of world health and fighting poverty. Which is fitting considering Rosling is an expert in both fields.

If you need more evidence for Rosling’s assertions about the state and history of global poverty, you are in luck. He’s given several wonderful talks at TED over the years. The following video explains how our understanding of the world is largely stuck in the outlook of the 1960s. It also highlights some of Rosling’s genius in presenting statistics in a way we can all clearly understand.

The sciences of genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and telecommunication have the capability of drastically affecting Rosling’s predictions for 2050. We’ve seen many projects aimed at improving food supplies and access to healthcare. If successful, these technologies could help us reduce infant mortality among the world’s poor much quicker than Rosling expects. Yet it is likely that public policy will still be the defining factor that determines if and how these technologies are applied. As with all of humanity’s grand challenges, the responsibility for implementing a solution falls squarely on our own shoulders. I have high hopes for stabilizing the global population, but the speed at which we approach these problems is unpredictable at best. Maybe Rosling has a graph that explains why.

[image credit: Gapminder.org]
[video credits: TED]
[source: TED, Gapminder]

Is your head ready to teleconference?

USC’s amazing floating head 3D teleconferencing technology is back and as captivating as ever. Developed by the university’s Institute for Creative Technologies the display uses a spinning mirror to project a 3D image in real time. That spinning mirror lets multiple people see different sides of the same object, which for teleconferencing is usually a disembodied head. I loved this thing the first time I saw it and I’m happy to report that the technology is still going strong, grabbing attention at the TEDxUSC conference last week. While the setup looks pretty similar to what we saw at SIGGRAPH, the presenter in the following video really articulates the advantages in perspective and eye contact that the USC ICT project has over competing concepts. She also discusses where the team might be headed next. Cool stuff, check it out below:

[video credit: Mashable]
[source:USC ICT, TEDxUSC]

The AngelMed Guardian System lets you know you're having a heart attack before you even feel it.

The heart monitor of the future is already here and saving lives. AngelMed‘s Guardian System is an implant that continually measures the heart much like a pacemaker. In the very early stages of a myocardial infarction (MI) patients are often unaware of the experience. Every second that they go untreated a MI victim’s chances of survival decrease. The Guardian System provides an audible warning to its host through a pager-like device and encourages them to get to a hospital quickly. Robert Fischell first discussed the Guardian back in his TED Talk in 2005. Now, the system is approved for use in Brazil, is likely to be approved in Europe this year, and is currently in clinical trials in the US. We’ve got great video of Fischell’s original talk, and a local news segment describing how the device has already saved the lives of one of the trial participants. Check them out below!

Pacemakers already help patients to stabilize their heart rates, but there are many causes of MI that can’t be regulated by electric pulses. Torn vessels, fatigued muscles, faulty valves – these serious conditions can be treated if a patient arrives at a hospital soon enough. Many patients will have clear symptoms of a heart attack and get themselves treated without need of an implant. Those patients however, won’t notice signs as quickly as the Guardian. That means the implant could get patients to hospitals quicker and that translates into less damage to the heart and better long term health. With more than a million heart attacks each year in the US alone this device has the potential to make a huge impact in medicine.

Fischell discusses the predecessor to the AngelMed Guardian System in the first 11 minutes of the clip below:

AngelMed is currently in two clinical trials for the Guardian System. The bigger of these two is the ALERTS study which has been underway for more than a year and will continue for at least another two. For those worried that early clinical trials don’t have large enough sample sets, ALERTS is looking to include up to 3000 patients! Recruitment is still ongoing. Hundreds of devices have already been implanted and lives have already been saved, including that of Bob Focht of Virginia:

As useful as the AngelMed Guardian System is proving to be, it is just one instrument that may appear in the future of body monitoring. Implants can get detailed data that other sources cannot, and these are likely to be integrated into surface monitoring systems to give a complete understanding of total body health. We’ve already seen at least two disposable patches that likely have the power to process (though not the instrumentation to record) all the data that the Guardian collects. It may not be long until such patches are sophisticated enough to directly interface with the implant? It will take at least two years for the ALERTS trial to be completed, and probably at least another year for FDA approval (perhaps much more). Digital patches are likely to incorporate ECG in that time, and perhaps even chemical and other heart monitoring applications, though that’s a bit of a stretch. With these more complex surface systems and the implant heart monitors we could have an internal and external picture of our body that could provide an extremely useful understanding of our health.

Whether the heart monitor of the future is implanted or rests on the surface of your chest, there’s little doubt that it will be there. Fischell has it right: if we want to help heart attack patients we need them to get treatment as soon as possible. The monitors of the future may be cheap enough that everyone has one. And they won’t just track our hearts, but our blood sugar, our hydration, and our temperatures as well. It will help us improve our medical care through a mountain of data and extremely personalized therapy. Further down the line, implants may prove to be a way to pair cutting edge monitoring with on the spot treatments. We’ve seen new implants being tested for epilepsy and diabetes. As complicated as the causes for acute myocardial infarction can be, we may one day have an implant that can treat a heart attack as it happens. Saving lives may the strongest reason to put us all on the path to becoming cyborgs. Cool.

[image credit: AngelMed]
[video credits: TED, WAVY-TV 10]
[sources: AngelMed, ClinicalTrials .gov]

David Blaine's record for holding his breath is almost as long as the talk he gave at TEDMED. Coincidence...or magic?

I’m a big TEDMED fan, so it seems like magic that the videos of the latest conference are starting to go live on their website for free. The first video available was also a little magical, it’s the presentation by David Blaine about his attempt to beat the record for holding one’s breath underwater. Now, considering the serious and groundbreaking nature of most of the TEDMED presentations, I was a little disappointed that the first video available wasn’t from a major scientific mind. Still, after watching all twenty minutes of Blaine’s talk I was really impressed with the scale of his attempt. Officially, I’m still skeptical whether or not he really did what he said or if it was an illusion. Judge for yourself by watching the full presentation after the break.

If you don’t have 20 minutes, here are some highlights followed by the video:
4:54 – Blaine discusses several possible ways to perform an illusion instead of really holding his breath. Includes a very graphic image of a re-breathing apparatus.
9:10 – Blaine claims that he dropped his heart rate to 38 bpm.
10:30 – His attempt and failure at Lincoln Center.
12:10 – Using a low-oxygen tent to raise blood cell count.
13:40 – Using magic tricks to get the attention of the New York Times and reputable Science Times coverage.
15:30 – Blaine claims that he can get his heart rate to 12 bpm while holding his breath.
16:45 – Descriptions of the effects of holding one’s breath for more than ten minutes.
19:30 – Facing skepticism at the Apple Store.

Again, I’m not sure Blaine actually held his breath for that long (I’ve watched too much of Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed) but I am sure that TEDMED is a great forum for all sorts of advancements in medical technology. Sure this video is about entertainment (and maybe personal triumph) but that’s probably just to get people to come to the YouTube channel. Once TEDMED hooks you with the fun talks, you’ll stick around for the enlightening ones. I can’t wait to see what other videos will be coming out next.

[screen capture and video credit: TEDMED]

Not sure who Emilymcmc is, not sure how she did this, but she has a great list of all the TED videos available online as a Google Document. Just follow the link above to the document then browse for your favorite talk. There are summaries and duration lengths to help you choose which presentation to watch. Click on the link in the first column and you get taken right to the video you want. You can sort the list by publishing date (roughly equal to presentation order), by conference, or by speaker first name. The presentations at Technology Entertainment and Design are usually great, and often mind blowing. I’m not sure who has time to watch all 537, but it would definitely be worth it.

These videos are just from TED and TED Global but they are current up through 2009. Hopefully we’ll see a master list for TEDMED and other related presentations sometime soon. In the meantime, enjoy the easy access to the talks. Thanks Emily!

Will scientific advancements in treating aging let our children eventually live forever?

If living forever isn’t enough motivation to get scientists to study longevity, maybe $3.8 million will work instead. That’s the current size of the Mprize, a special fund put forth by the Methuselah Foundation that seeks to encourage research into extending healthy human life. The prize is awarded to those scientists who can increase the lifespan of lab mice in the hopes that work performed on that species can be readily applied to humans. Can we live longer? Do we even want to? When will the average human life expectancy start to increase by more than a year each year? The Methuselah Foundation’s answers are yes, yes, and much sooner than you might think. Check out Aubrey De Grey’s discussion of longevity at TED 2005 in the video after the break. He’s very enthusiastic to say the least.

The history of offering a cash prize to help motivate research has a long and successful history. Mariners were finally able to determine their longitude at sea thanks to the aptly named Longitude Prize offered by the British government. Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight was in direct response to the Orteig prize. The modern day Xprize is inspiring new achievements in genomics, space flight, lunar exploration, and transportation efficiency. With the Mprize, the Methuselah Foundation may very well bring about a surge in the interest in increasing human lifespans within the next generation. As Aubrey De Grey points out, once human lifespans start increasing by an appreciable amount, further medical developments will occur during that lifespan increasing it even farther. We could eventually reach a sort of lifespan escape velocity and reach immortality. De Grey has since coined the concept as the Methuselarity. Catchy, huh?


The Prize That Keeps On Giving

The Mprize is divided into two awards for those researchers who can increase the lifespan of mice. A Longevity prize is offered to the producer of a mouse that beats the current lifespan record. The mouse has to be healthy, and the size of the prize is in proportion to the amount by which you beat the old record. The Rejuvenation prize seeks to improve the life of mice already in middle age. This encourages research into life extension that could be applied to humans already living. The current winners are (Longevity) Andrzej Bartke who used a genetic treatment to get a mouse to live for 1819 days, and (Rejuvenation) Steve Spindler who used caloric restriction started at 19 months to get 6 mice to live an average of 1356 days. Most of the mice used in these tests would normally live for about 3 years (~1100 days) in a lab environment.

Caloric Restriction should sound familiar. Resveratrol, the substance found in red wine that we discussed previously is hoped to function as a substitute for CR. In fact, one of the early researchers into resveratrol, David Sinclair, is a current competitor for the Mprize.

Which brings up an important and wonderful aspect of the structure of the Mprize: it keeps giving. Each award is proportional to the level of success and the size of the fund. Every time a prize is awarded, only part of the fund is consumed. Donations bring the fund back up over time. This encourages further research into the field. While a single researcher could discover a miraculous cure for aging, no single researcher will ever ‘break the bank’ of the fund. It’s a cool idea, shared by other such prizes, and if you’d like to donate to the fund, you can do so on the Methuselah Foundation website.

Of course, another way that the Mprize keeps giving is based on a large, but likely true, assumption: increases in lifespan will continue at a somewhat regular pace due to continuing research in the field. For the past 20 decades or so, the average human life expectancy has increased by an average rate of about 1-2 years per decade. There’s some significant cultural and regional variation, but as a rule, 1 year per decade seems to work out. That means, and this is a gross simplification, that if you manage to extend someone’s life by 10 years, you are actually extending it for 11 or 12 because of the increased opportunities they will have for better healthcare. The Methuselah Foundation, Mprize, and other longevity research in general is aimed at slowly bringing up that rate of increase in life expectancy. The hope is that eventually, lifespan increases will start to work something like compound interest. Growth leads to further growth.

While Aubrey De Grey highlights what he believes are the seven major causes of aging, the solutions may be much more numerous. There are more than a dozen major competitors for the Mprize, and you can review their approaches to the problem of aging on the Methuselah Foundation website.

MPrize competitors can also teach us about the benefits of simply living a healthy lifestyle. Rules for the competition were altered slightly after Sandy Keith won the award by helping the mouse Charlie live for 1551 simply through good animal husbandry. Just taking good care of a mouse isn’t a ‘treatment’ and so it no longer qualifies for the Mprize but it does have parallels in humans. Look at those people who live long healthy lives in the Blue Zones, or extraordinary individuals like Gertrude Baines who lived to 115 without any longevity treatments. Some level of life extension can be achieved by healthy living and heaping doses of luck.

Whether or not the Methuselah Foundation is helping humans reach immortality, it has already furthered research into some level of life extension. Whether or not you agree with Aubrey de Grey’s predictions, he does raise some interesting questions. He also dresses like some sort of longevity seeking wizard…which you have to admit is kind of cool. The quest to live healthier for longer is bound to continue and while I’m not sure if the first immortal will be born in my lifetime, I do think our grandchildren will live longer than our grandparents would have believed possible. 100..150…200 years? It might be possible if scientists keep their eyes on the prize.
[photo credit: Reuters]
[video credit: TED 2005]

The gecko-inspired StickyBot curls its toes to release the dry adhesive that allows it to cling to walls.

When naming robots, I want to encourage all of you researchers to go for the obvious choice, that way we know what we’re getting. Case in point: Standford’s StickyBot. Giant robotic booger? No, it’s a robot that sticks to surfaces and climbs walls like a gecko. In fact, the robot looks almost exactly like a gecko and the adhesive on its padded feet are derived from the tiny hairs the lizards use to cling. Was ‘GeckoBot’ already taken? My faux outrage hardly matters though, because this wall climbing robot is one of the coolest biology-inspired robots out there. Check out StickyBot in action in the video after the break.

StickyBot’s feet are so good at clinging to smooth surfaces that they are used in other Standford robotic projects (as part of RiSE). The dry adhesive technique uses micro-hairs and intramolecular (van der waals) forces to stick bot to wall. Animal inspired robots are nothing new, and we’ve also seen robots help explain evolutionary biology. Still, when sciences work together, great things happen. Building better robots through biology and better understanding biology through studying robots will quicken advances in both fields. But don’t take my word for it. Robert Full, professor at UC Berkeley, gave a great talk at TED 2009 about interconnectivity between biology and robotics. Check out StickyBot around 3:30 in the video below.

Back in 2006, the first StickyBot was named as one of Time Magazine’s top inventions of the year, ostensibly as a ‘toy’. Now, the Stanford team is building the third iteration of the device, StickyBot III (a better name is TBD). The new robot will have two more degrees of freedom (up to 4) in each leg to allow for better climbing and improved control of adhesion. Hopefully it will be able to navigate on progressively rougher surfaces. No news yet on whether we’ll see an active tail like Robert Full discussed.

Full’s advocacy for biomutualism is one of the more promising aspects of robots like StickyBot. Climbing walls is cool, don’t get me wrong, but mimicking biology is where the real future lies. Nature is a strange, but very inventive designer, and it’s had billions of years to perfect biological structures in animals. Using robotics to understand those structures will allow biologists to better understand why organisms developed into their current shapes. Robotics, in turn, can take those shapes and adapt them using materials and intelligence not found in nature. Creations like the hummingbird spybot are a great example. I anxiously await the next generation of biologically inspired robotic organisms. We could have rescue ant-bots, submarines that move like dolphins, or robots that spin silk. Who knows, maybe some of them will even be named correctly.
[photo credit: Standford]
[video credits: Stanford, TED2009]

Each TEDMED speaker is at the top of their field. We have spiritual gurus like Deepak Chopra, public health figures like CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, and Singularity Hub regulars like 23andMe‘s Anne Wojiciki. Of course, sprinkled into the conference are more familiar names like Martha Stewart, Goldie Hawn, and David Blaine. Each presenter, celebrity or otherwise, has a tale to tell about the past, present, and future of medicine. There is literally no other conference on Earth that has such a diverse and star studded set of speakers.

The great thing about TEDMED presentations is that they focus in on developments that the speaker finds as amazing as the audience. Every TED video I’ve ever seen has shown me individuals who are excited and moved by the topics they discuss. These people love to present what they excel at, and that sort of enthusiasm combined with competence really makes TEDMED stand out.

If you want to know what each guest will focus on, just go to the TEDMED speakers page and start browsing through head shots of the attendees. While the topic of the presentation isn’t stated outright, you can get a good idea of what each will discuss just by reading their bio. I’m really interested to see if Anne Wojiciki gives us updates on how the ‘research revolution’ at 23andMe is coming along.

Want to attend? You’ll need $4000 and a time machine. Tickets for this year are sold out and they come at a hefty premium. If you think you’ll be willing to shell out four grand next year, you need to get on the mailing list so that you can sign up for next year’s conference. I don’t want to come off as a fanboy, but attending TED or TEDMED would be a dream come true. If you’ve got an extra (and amazingly discounted) ticket let me know. I’ll trade you a blog post for it.

Catherine Mohr is on the cutting edge of robotic surgery. Photo by Liz Hafalia

The wonderful thing about robotic surgery is that it is already here. Thousands of robotically assisted surgeries are performed every year in the U.S. The da Vinci robot, which has been around since 1999, and which Singularity Hub has discussed before, has become the most popular method for conducting prostatectomies. Surgeons are able to use 3D imaging, and intuitive controls to manipulate da Vinci’s pincers and clamps in a way that is more precise than typical manual surgeries. More importantly, they can do these procedures through just a few incisions rather than opening up the entire chest cavity. The combination of precision and minimal invasion allows these robots to sew a blood vessel onto a beating heart.

Catherine Mohr, of course, isn’t satisfied with a “few” incisions. She’s aiming to bring that down to one. Instead of having a high-definition camera on one stalk of a robot, and a manipulation tool on another stalk, Mohr is advocating combining each of these instruments into a single unit. In this fashion, all the necessary devices would spring out from the one tube, branching out and turning back to face the point of interest. It’s like putting a complete and tiny surgical team inside the body through just one cut.

Mohr’s TED talk took the scenic approach to discussing modern robotic surgery. Feel free to skip ahead 9 minutes to get to the cool stuff. Fair warning to the squeamish, her examples are graphic! While I am suitably in awe of her new single-incision robotic surgery system (I can’t believe the TED audience didn’t applaud for it), her discussion of indicating markers really got me excited. These non-radioactive chemicals bond to tissue and are made to fluoresce. You can pinpoint cancer cells, or blood flow in vessels, or delicate nerve tissue by looking for what glows. In Mohr’s words: “…we can reach it all, and we can see it all.”

The dome from outside, looking like a scene from one of the Myst games. Photo courtesy of UCSB

In the early days of science, checking out your data was easy: there wasn’t very much of it. Collecting data was the hard part; analyzing and cataloging it was a relatively straightforward affair.  But the times, they are a-changin’. Nowadays, complex research can spit out mountains of data, making analysis a confounding and time-consuming process. Plus, it can be pretty boring. That is, unless you have an AlloSphere handy.

The AlloSphere is a data presentation instrument – environment, really – that allows researchers to explore complex datasets in a fully immersive audiovisual environment. It is composed of two 5-meter radius hemispheres with a catwalk along the middle for researchers to stand on. From this perspective, they can watch visual representations of their data surround them, whether they are interested in neural activity or quantum fields. At the same time, other data can be represented in audio form, making the data exploration a multimedia affair. And to top it off, it’s real-time responsive, letting users manipulate the data they look at.

To get an idea for its broad applications (and to see it in action) check out this amazing video from this year’s TED conference:

Developed over the process of twenty four years, the AlloSphere is housed at UC Santa Barbara’s California NanoSystems Institute building. Its unique construction provides a 360 degree visual field for data to be presented, projected onto the hemispheres by video projectors. About 500 speakers are placed around the sphere, providing 3D sound to accompany the visual display. It takes up a 3-story cube, surrounded with sound absorption material so that audio doesn’t echo. The catwalk can fit from 20-30 people inside at a time, so your whole chemistry class can take a field trip.

So what kinds of data does the AlloSphere accommodate? Physicists seemed to have jumped right on board, using the system to visualize hydrogen bonding and quantum mechanical wavefunctions. Another project is working to provide a 3D visualization of nanoscale structures (yes, with the silly glasses) that a user can interact with and manipulate. My favorite is the AlloBrain, which lets the user navigate macroscopic fMRI datasets and hear blood flow in the brain as audio. Heck, they’re even trying to get Google Earth running on this thing.

The AlloSphere in action. Photo courtesy of UCSB

Got some ideas for the AlloSphere? They’re open to suggestions. The hardware is all up and running, and they’re looking for new software ideas to explore the possibilities of how their new toy can be applied. Their doors are open to art projects, green technology, nanotech, national defense applications, medical breakthroughs, psychologists, physicists, educators, you name it. If you’ve got a cool idea that could use a little audiovisual immersion, the Allosphere is listening. I personally promote a Pink Floyd laser light show, but that’s just me.

The AlloSphere gives scientists an innovative way to look at their data, hopefully inspiring a few “eureka” moments along the way. It also makes science really cool, engaging young students by bringing lofty concepts back down to earth and into an IMAX style presentation. We’re getting a glimpse into the future of how technology can help us to experience and explore scientific data, making it beautiful and engaging (not to mention educational).

And now, back to writing my own proposal.  Prepping next year’s tax return is gonna be a blast. Hopefully.