EmTech 2009 news round-up

EmTech 2009 brought the world's technology experts together in Boston

The Emerging Technologies conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston brings together research laboratories, companies and entrepreneurs from around the world to showcase a host of new technologies, offering demonstrations, keynotes, interactive breakout sessions, and networking opportunities. The show covers fields including energy, biotechnology, IT and the internet. In this special show report we round up the key announcements.

Killer hackers
One of the most important developments at the show was a US researcher calling for legislation to enforce tighter security on implanted cardiac devices after he hacked into one wirelessly to produce a potentially fatal electric shock.

The scenario may sound like something out of a detective novel or far-fetched thriller movie script, but the danger is real and should be taken seriously, according to Kevin Fu, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts, who specialises in the security of radio frequency identification (RFID) systems.

Judges at the EmTech conference in Boston took Fu's work seriously enough to give him an Innovator of the Year award.

Doctors can access modern pacemakers and defibrillators over the internet via a short-range wireless link similar to those used in RFID devices. The system allows them to monitor patients remotely and install software updates.

This means that a hacker could access confidential medical information as well as reprogram the devices, Fu said.

"Manufacturers point out that implanted medical devices [IMDs] have used radio communication for decades, and that they are not aware of any unreported security problems," he wrote in a recent paper.

"Spam and viruses were also not prevalent on the internet during its many-decade childhood. Firewalls, encryption and proprietary techniques did not stop the eventual onslaught."

Fu and his team used off-the-shelf components to build a device that could write to a defibrillator and read the signals being sent to it. They deciphered the signals by exploiting the fact that they knew the patient's name.

They could then reprogram the device to give an electric shock. Another possibility is that a hacker could disable the power-saving mode so that the device's battery ran down in days rather than years.

The hacking device could be built into something the size of a mobile phone, and infect IMDs with malware randomly as the killer walked down the street. Millions of people use pacemaker/defibrillator devices.

Fu pointed out that such random attacks are not unknown. Vandals have caused people to have seizures by implanting flashing lights on a web site used by epileptics, for example, and seven people died when a killer put cyanide-laced painkillers on supermarket shelves in Chicago.

Nevertheless, some doctors resisted when Fu first started making inquiries about IMD security. Has he any idea of how many of the devices in use are vulnerable? "That's the point," he said. "We just don't know."

Holographic storage
Holographic technology has been developed that can pack 1TB of data onto a DVD-sized disk that can be read by a slightly modified Blu-ray drive, and is expected to last 100 years.

The first products using the technology will be 1TB or multi-terabyte drives for archival storage, and will hit the market in two to three years, according to Peter Lorraine, manager of the applied optics laboratory at General Electric, at the EmTech conference in Boston this month. Consumer drives will appear about two or more years later.

"We think there is consumer fatigue over changing formats," he said. " Blu-ray has two to four years of life to go. After that, consumers will be clamouring for terabytes of storage."

General Electric is licensing the technology to other companies rather than manufacturing devices itself. "We will be making an announcement about licensees shortly," Lorraine said.

The holographic drives have an access time of 3ms and data transfer rates up to five times faster than a DVD. They can be factory replicated, making them suitable for ultra-high quality movie distribution.

Holographic technology has been around for 30 years and many companies have tried to bring products to market. The major problems have been the cost of the drives, the need for tight tolerances, and sensitivity to ambient conditions. Lorraine claimed that General Electric has essentially solved these problems.

Holographic drives work by splitting a laser beam into a reference beam and a signal beam, which is encoded with data. The two beams are then crossed to produce an interference pattern that is stored. Older versions stored 'pages' of a million bits, stacked 10,000 deep at hundreds of locations on a disk.

Researchers looked at what would happen if they reduced the page size to a single bit. It turned out that these 'micro holograms' could store as much data per unit area but were far easier to read. In fact, the upper data layers can be read by a standard Blu-ray player, and all layers can be accessed by slightly increasing the tracking range of the read head and making a minor adjustment for spherical aberration.

The major issue in making it work turned out to be choosing the right storage medium, which is where Lorraine says General Electric has made its breakthrough.

Ultracapacitors
Supercharged versions of the capacitors commonly used in electronics are approaching the storage density of conventional batteries, and could replace them for many uses.

The big advantage of the devices, called ultracapacitors, is that they can be charged and discharged rapidly, although they can give a steady, longer term, more battery-like flow depending on the load.

One possible long-term application is a laptop battery that can charge in as little a minute. The speed would be dictated less by the ultracapacitor than by the size of the mains adapter required to deliver the charging current.

Capacitors store charge and smooth out current flow in circuits in much the same way as a lake in the course of a river steadies its flow and acts as a reservoir, except that most capacitors are more like tiny ponds, with a capacitance of billionths or millionths of a farad. A conventional capacitor with a rating of one farad would be huge.

The charge density of ultracapacitors is orders of magnitude higher. One already on the market, about the size of a D-cell battery, has a capacity of 350 farads. Like other ultracapacitors currently available, it is based on activated carbon which has a structure like a sponge with nanoscale pores providing an enormous surface area to which charge adheres.

Researchers led by Joel Schindall, associate director of the Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems at MIT, are developing ultracapacitors with an even greater surface area using carbon nanotubes rooted on an aluminium substrate, like threads on a thick-pile carpet.

"We have already achieved [two times] the energy density of activated carbon, and within weeks or months we expect to get [five times]," Schindall said at the EmTech conference.

That would give ultracapacitors 25 per cent of the energy density of a standard lithium-ion battery. Schindall said that, for some heavy-duty applications, this is better than it sounds because the batteries used for them operate in the range of only 50 per cent to 60 per cent of their capacity, and actually have far less available energy than their theoretical storage capacity.

The rapid charge and discharge rates of ultracapacitors make them suitable for driving electric vehicles and regenerative braking, whereby kinetic energy is stored during deceleration so that a vehicle wastes less energy.

This task also exploits another advantage of the new ultracapacitors, in that they can be recharged more than a million times without deteriorating. Effectively that gives them an indefinite working life, according to Schindall.

In the shorter term they could be used in rapid-charge auxiliary batteries for laptops and other electronic equipment. But Schindall said that these are early days and energy densities could rise still further, which could make them a viable replacement for lithium-ion batteries.

"When digital cameras came in I wondered if they would ever match the resolution of film. How many people use a film camera now?" he said.

The hope is that the cost can also be brought down to that of conventional batteries. But Schindall pointed out that, even if they are much more expensive, they could work out cheaper in the long run because they would not need replacing.

Gaming in the cloud
The launch of a new online games service could spell the end for expensive games consoles, and hit sales of high-end consumer PCs, if it succeeds.

OnLive, currently on beta test in the US, allows users to play even the most demanding games on low-spec PCs or netbooks, which act simply as front-ends for code running on specially optimised remote servers.

Transmission delays are negligible provided that the server is not more than 1,000 miles from the user, OnLive founder Steve Perlman claimed at the EmTech conference in Boston.

There have long been predictions that gaming will move online to take advantage of the almost limitless computing power of cloud servers offering processing as a service. This would affect the hardware industry because games have been a major driver in pushing up the power of consumer PCs.

A move online could also encourage people to make more use of the cloud for other purposes such as workaday office tasks. However, OnLive is not a typical cloud application because it uses specialised servers, packing a board that compresses the video data and 'fools' games into behaving as if they are running on a normal PC.

Perlman reckons he can run a standard definition game on a 1.5Mbit/s link and a high-definition game on a 5Mbit/s connection, speeds which are now commonly available to broadband subscribers. He claims to have the backing of leading games developers, and said that the system has advantages for both developers and end users.

"It cuts out piracy and the selling-on of [second-hand] games, and means that users do not need a high-spec PC," he said. "They also don't have to bother about upgrading their hardware."

Perlman plans to take OnLive to the UK and the rest of Europe after getting it established in the US over the coming year.