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Category: internet – Page 301

Long-Term, Intensive Robot-Assisted Therapy Helps Paraplegic Patients Walk Again

NORWELL, Mass.—()— Last week, Nature Publishing Group sent the scientific areas of the Internet into a frenzy by publishing a groundbreaking study that proves the positive effects of long-term training with Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) on patients who have suffered a spinal cord injury (SCI).

The study titled “Long-Term Training with a Brain-Machine Interface-Based Gait Protocol Induces Partial Neurological Recovery in Paraplegic Patients” was conducted by an international group of scientists, led by the Duke University neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis and demonstrates that it’s never too late to start intensive therapy.

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The Internet of Things and the city of tomorrow

First, there is sharing. Self-driving vehicles promise to have a dramatic impact on urban life, because they will blur the distinction between private and public modes of transportation. “Your” car could give you a lift to work in the morning and then, rather than sitting idle in a parking lot, give a lift to someone else in your family – or, for that matter, to anyone else in your neighborhood, social-media community, or city. Some recent papers by MIT show that today’s mobility demand of a city like Singapore could be satisfied by just one-fifth of the number of cars currently in use. Such reductions in car numbers would dramatically lower the cost of our mobility infrastructure and the embodied energy associated with building and maintaining it. Fewer cars may also mean shorter travel times, less congestion, and a smaller environmental impact.

–A second change is parking. Parking infrastructure is so pervasive that in the United States it covers around 5,000 square miles, an area larger than Puerto Rico. Increased sharing of vehicles, as outlined above, would dramatically lower the need for parking spaces. Over time, vast areas of valuable urban land currently occupied by parking spaces could be reinvented for a whole new spectrum of social functions. Creative uses are already promoted across the world during Parking Day, a worldwide event held on the third Friday of September, where artists, designers and citizens transform metered parking spots into temporary public places. The same dynamic re-purposing could happen tomorrow on a much larger scale and with permanent solutions, leading to the reclamation of a large percentage of the urban fabric.

–Finally, urban infrastructure is subject to change. Traffic lights are a 150-years-old technology originally conceived for horse carriages. With the advent of widespread autonomy, slot-based intersections could replace traditional traffic lights, significantly reducing queues and delays. This idea is based on a scenario where sensor-laden vehicles pass through intersections by communicating and remaining at a safe distance from each other, rather than grinding to a halt at traffic lights. Vehicle speed could be controlled so that each vehicle reaches the intersection in synch with the assigned slot – so that stop and go is avoided. The latter, in turn, would reduce emission of pollutants and greenhouse gases caused by the acceleration and deceleration cycles.

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World’s most efficient AES crypto processing technology for IoT devices developed

Energy efficient IoT — proven to reduce energy usage by 50% via new technique for compressing the computations of encryption and decryption operations known as Galois field arithmetic operations.

Our research group has discovered a new technique for compressing the computations of encryption and decryption operations known as Galois field arithmetic operations, and has succeeded in developing the world’s most efficient Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cryptographic processing circuit, whose energy consumption is reduced by more than 50% of the current level. With this achievement, it has become possible to include encryption technology in information and communication technology (ICT) devices that have tight energy constraints, greatly enhancing the safety of the next-generation Internet of Things (IoT). This result was announced on August 19, 2016 during the Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems 2016 (CHES 2016) hosted by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) in Santa Barbara, USA.

It is currently very common to exchange important personal or financial information over the Internet through ICT devices. Cryptographic techniques are used inside these devices to protect important information. In next-generation networks such as the IoT, which has attracted attention in recent years, it is expected that myriad devices will be connected to the network. Hence, it will be necessary to have built-in encryption technology in these connected devices to prevent malicious attacks. However, many battery or cell-driven devices with tight energy constraints are also included in the IoT and running energy-consuming encryption processes on these is a big challenge. One of the most widely used international standard encryption methods is AES. Since this is used in areas such as wireless LANs, it is very important for practical reasons to design energy-saving AES cryptographic processing.

Tohoku University and the NEC Corporation have been collaborating on research and development since 2013 with the purpose of improving the safety of ICT devices. In particular, they aim to build a system that will allow the new IoT services to be enjoyed with confidence. This will be done by developing technology that embeds encryption in small devices and sensors for the first time. This research and development is being carried out as part of the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) program No. 25240006 “Development of formal design technology for VLSI data path based on the Galois field computations.” (Research representative: Naofumi HOMMA, Tohoku University).

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For the First Time Ever a New Way of Communication Enables “Talking” Between Body Implants and Smartphones

Luv this.

Smart devices implanted in the body have thus far not been able to communicate via Wi-Fi due to the power requirements of such communications. Surgery is required when the battery in a brain stimulator or a pacemaker needs to be replaced. Not only is this expensive, but any surgery has inherent risks and could lead to complications. It is therefore critically important that the battery life in implanted medical devices be preserved for as long as possible.

Other constraints limiting how much power a device can use include their location in the body and their size. New emerging devices that could one day reanimate limbs, stimulate organs, or brain implants that treat Parkinson’s disease are limited by the same factors.

Smartwatches, smartphones and other similar Bluetooth enable devices continuously transmit communication signals. A team from the University of Washington (UW) consisting of computer scientists and electrical engineers, have developed a method that utilizes these signals and converts it to Wi-Fi signals. The new method uses ten thousand times less energy than traditional methods do. Another huge advantage of this method is that it does not need any specialized equipment.

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QUESS and Quantum Communications

Excellent write up on QUESS; and yesterday we saw that the first set of code was transmitted successfully which means so far success. However, many are asking when will the US respond about our own efforts around our own efforts of a Quantum satellite and our own progress around improving the net infrastructure to ensure we’re not a sitting duck for government backed hackers. Granted we have been operating for many years a version of a Quantum Internet at Los Alamos; however, we need to expand and accelerate the efforts around the Quantum Internet restructuring.

In mid August China launched “QUESS” (Quantum Experiments at Space Scale), a new type of satellite that it hopes will be capable of “quantum communications” which is supposed to be hack-proof, through the use of “quantum entanglement”. This allows the operator to ensure that no one else is listening to your communications by reliably distributing keys that are then used for encryption in order to be absolutely sure that there is no one in the middle intercepting that information.

According the Chinese scientists involved in the project, quantum encryption is secure against any kind of computing power because information encoded in a quantum particle is destroyed as soon as it is measured. (According to Tibor Molnar a scientist at the University of Sydney), the only way to ‘observe’ a photon is to have it interact with (a) an electron, or (b) an electromagnetic field. Either of these interactions will cause the photon to “decohere” – i.e., interfere with it in a way that will be apparent to the intended recipient.

Gregoir Ribordy, co-founder of Geneva-based quantum cryptography firm ID Quantique, likened it to sending a message written on a soap bubble. “If someone tries to intercept it when it’s being transmitted, by touching it, they make it burst.”

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Interscatter enables first implanted devices, contact lenses, credit cards to ‘talk’ WiFi

Engenheiros da Universidade de Washington introduziram uma nova forma de comunicação que permite que dispositivos como implantes cerebrais, lentes de contato, cartões de crédito e pequenos eletrônicos vestíveis falar com aparelhos de uso diário, como smartphones e relógios.

Este novo” Comunicação interscatter” funciona convertendo sinais Bluetooth em transmissões Wi-Fi através do ar. Usando apenas reflexões, um dispositivo interscatter como uma inteligente de lentes de contato converte sinais Bluetooth a partir de um SmartWatch, por exemplo, em transmissões Wi-Fi que podem ser apanhados por um smartphone.

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