Tech Talk

Automatically tinting windows that spare occupants from glare and save energy appear to finally be taking root in commercial buildings.

Startup View, which makes so-called smart windows, today said that glass and ceramics giant Corning has invested in the company as part of a $60 million series E round of funding. The two companies intend to do joint research to improve the performance and lower the cost of View’s electrochromatic glass products. “There will likely be material science and (manufacturing) process development work. Assuming that’s successful, we’ll also work on engineering and scale-up,” says View CEO Rao Mulpuri.

It’s a sign of confidence in smart window technology, where an electric charge triggers a color change to block sunlight and unwanted heat. Last year, French construction company Saint Gobain acquired Minnesota-based Sage Glass, which makes similar auto-tinting window technology.

The promise of electrochromatic glass is that it cuts buildings’ energy use by using more natural light and reducing the heating and cooling load. View estimates that its “dynamic glass” can cut lighting by about 20 percent and the cooling load by 25 percent at peak times.

Still, despite decades of development, auto-tinting glass is rarely used, even in commercial buildings with big energy bills that might justify a higher-cost product. View’s Mulpuri says that company has managed to reduce the cost of dynamic glass in part by modifying production techniques from the flat-panel display and semiconductor industries. In its factory in Mississippi, View applies two layers of a ceramic metal oxide coating onto glass panes with a sputtering vapor deposition process. Applying a voltage causes the electrochromatic material to absorb or reflect light and darken.

During manufacturing, panes of glass, which can be as large as five feet by ten feet, are wired so they can be controlled electronically. Then they are fitted with a second pane of clear glass. The window can be operated from a wall switch, set on a schedule from a tablet or computer, or changed based on light and temperature sensors connected to a commercial building management system. Competitor Sage has similar capabilities with its windows.

The push to improve commercial building efficiency is helping create demand for more intelligent components, such as lighting controls or computer-optimized HVAC systems. But better energy efficiency is not the only selling point of this technology. Instead, it's because building owners want a better experience for people inside from reduced glare and heat, says Mulpuri. The company has its dynamic windows installed in hotels, hospitals, and office buildings.

View and Corning hope architects and designers will incorporate automatically tinting glass into new types of building facades. “We believe the precise surface attainable through our fusion glass process combined with View’s leading expertise in dynamic glass technology will help us develop an innovative glass that can make dynamic windows a bigger part of exterior architectural applications,” Corning’s executive vice president and innovation officer Martin Curran said in a statement.

Smart windows face plenty of commercial obstacles. Will building owners forego traditional shades and blinds and pay more for automatically tinting glass? The devices can be connected to a building network, but that makes installation more complex. Whether these windows become more than a curiosity ultimately depends on whether smart glass makers can appeal to architects and deliver tangible benefits for building occupants and building owners’ energy bills. 

Photo: View's tinting windows in an office environment. Credit: Flickr user jandrograu for View.

Every year, in June and in November, the Top500 list shows which supercomputers can crank out the most calculations per second. This go-around, the number one system showed that all the rumors leading up to the reveal were true. The Tianhe-2, a massive system that clocked 33.86 petaflops, or 33.86 thousand trillion floating point operations per second, represents China's return to the No. 1 spot—a distinction it has not held since November 2010, when its Tianhe-1A was considered the world's finest computing system. 

The Top500 list is typically topped by a U.S. Department of Energy machine. But Tianhe-2 trounces that department's entrants, including the old top dog on the list, a supercomputer called Titan which is housed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Titan executed 17.59 petaflops—a little over half of the Tianhe-2's supercomputing muscle.

Built at China's National University of Defense Technology, Tianhe-2 (also known as the Milky Way-2) consists of 16 000 nodes. Inside each node, two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors run the show, adding up to a total of 3.12 million computing cores. The machine is scheduled to be fully operational by the end of this year.

Tianhe-2's surprise arrival symbolizes China's unflinching commitment to the supercomputing arms race; the machine was not expected to be deployed until 2015. Moreover, it uses technologies that have almost all been invented in China, according to Top500 editor Jack Dongarra.

About 113 smartphones are lost or stolen every minute in the United States and prosecutors here have lost patience. On Thursday during a Smartphone Summit, top law enforcement officials from New York City and San Francisco called upon leading smartphone makers to create a "kill switch" solution for stolen phones.

The prosecutors met with representatives of Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft to discuss ways for stopping smartphone thieves in their tracks, according to Bloomberg News. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman described the "epidemic of crime" as "unacceptable" given the possibilities for technological fixes.

Many law enforcement officials have accused phone carriers and makers of intentionally dragging their feet on developing anti-theft features. That's because consumers whose phones get stolen typically have little choice but to pay up for a new phone.

"The carriers are not innocent in this whole game," said Cathy L. Lanier, chief of the police department of the District of Columbia, in an earlier New York Times interview. "They are making profit off this."

Diversity is a good thing in the never-ending effort to produce electronic noses that can compete with human and canine noses (and honey bee antennae) to smell out all kinds of important stuff:  finding contraband like explosives and narcotics, watching over the maturation of a vintage wine, gauging blood glucose levels without a pin-prick…even detecting the telltale biochemical signature of a malignant tumor.

A team from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain and the University of Gävle in Sweden has rigged an array of 32 commercially available sensors that can sniff a bit of crushed fruit and tell if the source was an apple or a pear.

The long vaunted promise of quantum cryptography is the ability to beam a message across the planet with supposedly unhackable encryption, and the competition to develop the best system for doing just that is heating up. Just last month, Canadian researchers detailed their plans in IEEE Spectrum to launch a host of microsatellites created from commercially available, off-the-shelf technologies, and estimated that they could have a working prototype later this year. Now, the Chinese have also revealed their intentions to launch a quantum satellite experiment into orbit by 2016.

Today’s mobile devices are constantly in use—so constantly that battery life is a huge problem. I recently hosted an afternoon barbecue at a community pool; over in one corner, folks jockeyed for a turn to charge their mobile devices at the one available outlet. Meanwhile, the sun shone down brightly on mobile phones scattered across the picnic tables, as the batteries on those idle devices quietly drained.

The SunPartner Group, a 30-employee startup in Aix-en-Provence, France, thinks that’s a real waste. Folks sitting in restaurants, in outdoor cafes, or at their desks typically pull out their phones and put them face up in front of them; put solar cells on the phones and there’d be a lot less scrambling to find a wall outlet. And they’ve built a low-cost transparent panel that does just that. They’re now testing it with a number of manufacturers and expect to see it built into mobile devices early next year.

Sunpartner isn’t the first to think mobile phones should use solar power to charge themselves. A few years ago, several cell phone manufacturers tried putting solar cells on the back of phones—like the Samsung Crest and the Sharp Solar Hybrid. Turns out, though, that people weren’t inclined to put phones face down on the table—they missed alerts, and were worried about scratching the screen. And solar cells on the back of cell phones never caught on widely.

What good is it for the ordinary machines in your house—thermostats, garage door openers, refrigerators, and more—to become "smart," if the added features go unused? Ayla Networks wants to unlock those features for users by helping manufacturers make them controllable from smartphones.

The Silicon Valley-based start-up last week unveiled a Wi-Fi module with software to connect household devices to home networks and cloud services. The goal is to make it easier for manufacturers to add wireless connectivity and write apps for their products, be they appliances or light bulbs.

Ayla, which has raised $5.4 million from Voyager Capital and Crosslink Capital and had been quiet since its founding three years ago, is one of many companies betting that the “Internet of things” in consumer products, after false starts in the past, is finally beginning to materialize. They may be right: Nest Lab’s Learning Thermostat and Philips’ Hue “connected” LED bulbs have attracted consumer interest and more home automation products are being developed all the time.

The biggest barrier to the consumer Internet of things isn’t necessarily the hardware—Wi-Fi chips are already in millions of devices, notes Ayla founder and CEO David Friedman. More important is simplifying the networking and application software for manufacturers. “There’s massive pent-up demand to do this at low costs and frankly, it is the software to tie it all together that is the piece to make it all go,” he says.

Embedding Ayla's networking software into devices should speed up product development, because manufacturers can let the software manage connectivity and security. Ayla also offers a cloud service that makes it easier to write applications for connected devices. For example, the software lets people register devices on their home Wi-Fi networks in one step or control many devices from a single smart phone application. Prewriting these basic software features for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will enable more smart objects, says Friedman.

Anyone scolded for pulling faces as a child could soon feel free to blow as many raspberries as they like. Not at dear old mom and dad, of course, but at their phones—to unlock them.

The Google idea for replacing standard passwords with specific facial gestures appears in a patent filed in June 2012. BBC News detailed the patent's plan to boost the security of Google's existing Face Unlock feature for Android smartphones, but could not get Google to comment on when such a feature might appear in consumer devices.

The facial recognition feature can only become a trusted replacement for passwords if it can authenticate a smartphone owner's face every time without fail. Facial recognition software works best with an ideal image of a person's face looking straight ahead—similar to driver's license or passport photos—but can still mix up similar-looking faces.

Google's Face Unlock first ran into problems when people showed they could trick the facial recognition security with a photo of the smartphone owner. When Google added a "liveness check" by requiring users to blink, researchers at the University of British Columbia showed that could still trick the smartphone security by editing a person's photo to make them appear as if their eyes were closed.

The newly-revealed Google patent filing aims to boost facial recognition security by adding a "facial landmark" requirement—asking users to make a face such as frowning, sticking out their tongue or raising an eyebrow. Random combinations of facial expressions could make it even harder to fool the facial recognition security.

Google goes even farther down the road into future paranoia. Its patent imagines the security threat of a futuristic device that simulates video of a person's face to make expressions upon demand. A counter for such a device might include light beams reflected off the person's eyes or a "3D-rangefinder" that uses lasers to map the 3D profile of a person's face.

One cybersecurity expert interviewed by BBC News said it might be years before people can feel completely secure relying on facial recognition passwords. Still, a combination of facial recognition and other biometric security scans involving fingerprints, voice, or even ears might do the trick.

The patent filing is the latest evidence of Google's strong interest in facial recognition—whether for improving personal security on mobile devices or making it easier to identify people in Picasa Web photo albums. But the Internet giant seems keen to sidestep privacy concerns surrounding the possible use of facial recognition for surveillance or stalking, given its recent decision to ban the technology in its "Google Glass" smart glasses.

Photo: Martin Palombini/Corbis

The atmosphere after a hackathon is usually one of relief and mutual congratulation—“We finally made it,” the participants say, referring both to finishing their programs and reaching the end of the grueling event—but the real work takes place in the weeks and months that follow. That’s when the programmers, designers, and subject matter experts refine their work, hopefully planting the seed for a new business or public service.

Below are four standout projects that emerged from the National Day of Civic Hacking (NDoCH), which took place over the first two days of June in 95 locations around the United States. Besides celebrating their ingenuity, there are some lessons to be learned from each of them.

Some years ago, I heard a heartbreaking segment on U.S. National Public Radio about a man who came down with a rare but serious illness caused by extreme deficiency of a single mineral. It was revealed, after he died, that his diet consisted more or less exclusively of steamed hamburgers from a single restaurant near his residence. It also turned out that the man was an engineer by profession.

That memory flashed into my mind as I read accounts of a new, crowd-funded effort to produce a single foodstuff that could be consumed, to the exclusion of anything else, by people who are, presumably, extraordinarily busy or very prone to sensory overload. Its mastermind, I learned without much surprise, is also reportedly an engineer.

Rob Rhinehart, a software engineer (and IEEE member) from Atlanta, wrote on his blog of his resentment of the “time, money, and effort the purchase, preparation, consumption, and clean-up of food was consuming.” So, like an engineer with an intriguing problem, he went about designing a rational solution: a comestible that had all the nutrients that his body needed, but could be made in bulk and thereby free him from the existential drudgery of selecting and making meals and cleaning up. He called his new ingestible “soylent.” It is a powder that is stirred in water to make a translucent, pale-yellow drink that is said to be slightly sweet but basically tasteless. The name is a cheeky reference to the sci-fi novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, and the movie Soylent Green, which was based on Harrison’s novel. (In the book, the word “soylent” comes from a combination of “soy beans” and “lentil.” But in the movie…oh, never mind.)

Like a good engineer, Rhinehart went about his task systematically: he tried different formulas, kept copious notes, had his blood and vital signs repeatedly checked, and kept a diary of his fitness and physical condition. He also meticulously described the entire enterprise on his blog.

“Nutritional drinks” such as Ensure have been around for years, but they are not meant to be consumed to the exclusion of actual food. So the 24-year-old Rhinehart is actually to some extent venturing into the unknown.

What he seems to have found there, at least after a few months of living on the diet, thrilled and delighted him. He says his weight went down, and his energy and mental acuity went up. And the blood tests revealed nothing amiss. Bloggers and reporters by the score have jumped on Rhinehart’s experience in recent weeks, turning him into a minor celebrity. (There’s some irony: an EE finally becomes quasi-famous, and it’s for, um, a bizarre eating regimen.) Thus he seems destined to be the progenitor of perhaps the absolute weirdest fad diet ever.

As an experiment in physiology, Rhinehart’s regimen strikes me as a splendid endeavor. His experiences and carefully kept notes and data, along with those of his followers, might advance our knowledge of diet and nutrition and health. I have a degree and a background in engineering, so I can well understand the drive that propelled Rhinehart on this quest. But as the son of first-generation immigrants from Italy, who regarded food as a supreme pleasure and integral to family life, I find the entire enterprise deeply weird.

If I were on a voyage to the outer planets of the solar system, the unavailability of fresh produce would be one of the hardships I’d expect to endure. Indeed, I’ve been to the South Pole, and I was shocked to discover how good and varied the food was in the cafeteria at the U.S. base there; the first polar explorers basically ate pemmican and dead dogs for months. Happily enough, I live in a temperate region of earth. To my mind, slicing squash and washing dishes (I don’t even own a dishwasher) is a really small price to pay for a succulent and gooey eggplant Parmesan.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And to some engineers, lots of things look like problems in need of an engineered solution. But it’s odd to think of eating as a problem, and even stranger to come up with the solution that Rhinehart has: just consume this one thing! Nathan Myhrvold, for contrast, applied his prodigious engineering and science knowledge to the challenge of food and succeeded in expanding the frontiers of food preparation, rather than shrinking them to a single, bland, milky shake.

Rhinehart’s weight loss and newfound energy and acuity is a splendid result. But surely, he is smart enough to understand that he can, with a bit more fuss, achieve those things with a healthy and varied diet. And technology is making that easier to swallow than ever: as Spectrum reports in its June issue, new meat analogues are offering delectable alternatives to meat but without the saturated fat and other negatives of animal flesh.

Life offers few opportunities for pleasure with no or few strings attached. Whether to eliminate one of them is a choice we now apparently have. My guess is that very few people are going to avail themselves of it. But a disproportionate number of them might very well be engineers.

Photos: Julio Miles/Soylent