Rice University graduate student Melissa Duarte with a “full-duplex” test device. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow, Rice University)
The days of waiting for smartphones to upload video may be numbered. Rice University engineering researchers have made a breakthrough that could allow wireless phone companies to double throughput on their networks without adding a single cell tower.
Rice’s new “full-duplex” technology allows wireless devices like cell phones and electronic tablets to both “talk” and “listen” to wireless cell towers on the same frequency — something that requires two frequencies today.
“Our solution requires minimal new hardware, both for mobile devices and for networks, which is why we’ve attracted the attention of just about every wireless company in the world,” said Ashutosh Sabharwal, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice. “The bigger change will be developing new wireless standards for full-duplex. I expect people may start seeing this when carriers upgrade to 4.5G or 5G networks in just a few years.”
New performance records set
In 2010, Sabharwal and Rice colleagues Melissa Duarte and Chris Dick published the first paper showing that full-duplex was possible. That set off a worldwide race to demonstrate that the technology could actually be used in a real network. This summer, Sabharwal and Rice’s Achaleshwar Sahai and Gaurav Patel set new performance records with a real-time demo of the technology that produced signal quality at least 10 times better than any previously published result.
“We showed that our approach could support higher throughput and better link reliability than anything else that’s been demonstrated, which is a plus for wireless carriers,” Sabharwal said. “On the device side, we’ve shown that we can add full duplex as an additional mode on existing hardware. Device makers love this because real estate inside mobile devices is at a premium, and it means they don’t have to add new hardware that only supports full duplex.”
Why it was thought impossible
To explain why full-duplex wireless was long thought impossible for wireless networks, Sabharwal uses the analogy of two people standing far apart inside an otherwise empty arena. If each shouts to the other at the same time, neither can hear what the other is saying. The easy solution is to have only one person speak at a time, and that’s what happens on two-way radios where only one person may speak at a given time. Cell phones achieve two-way communications by using two different frequencies to send and listen.
Rice’s team overcame the full-duplex hurdle by employing an extra antenna and some computing tricks. In the shouting analogy, the result is that the shouter cannot hear himself, and therefore hears the only other sound in the arena — the person shouting from far away.
“We send two signals such that they cancel each other at the receiving antenna — the device ears,” Sabharwal said. “The canceling effect is purely local, so the other node can still hear what we’re sending.”
He said the cancellation idea is relatively simple in theory and had been proposed some time ago. But no one had figured a way to implement the idea at low cost and without requiring complex new radio hardware.
Repurposed antenna technology
“We repurposed antenna technology called MIMO, which are common in today’s devices,” Sabharwal said. “MIMO stands for ‘multiple-input multiple-output’ and it uses several antennas to improve overall performance. We took advantage of the multiple antennas for our full-duplex scheme, which is the main reason why all wireless carriers are very comfortable with our technology.”
Sabharwal said Rice is planning to roll its full-duplex innovations into its “wireless open-access research platform,” or WARP. WARP is a collection of programmable processors, transmitters and other gadgets that make it possible for wireless researchers to test new ideas without building new hardware for each test. Sabharwal said adding full-duplex to WARP will allow other researchers to start innovating on top of Rice’s breakthrough.
“There are groups that are already using WARP and our open-source software to compete with us,” he said. “This is great because our vision for the WARP project is to enable never-before-possible research and to allow anyone to innovate freely with minimal startup effort.”
Sabharwal’s team has gone one step further and achieved asynchronous full-duplex too – that is one wireless node can start receiving a signal while it’s in the midst of transmitting. Asynchronous transmission is import for carriers wishing to maximize traffic on their networks, and Rice’s team is the first to demonstrate the technology.
“We’ve also developed a preliminary theory that explains why our system is working the way that it is,” Sabharwal said. “That’s also important for carriers and device makers, because engineers aren’t likely to implement something like this without a clear understanding of fundamental tradeoffs.”
Rice’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Roberto Rocca Education Program and Xilinx Incorporated.
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A radical new approach to thwarting Internet censorship would essentially turn the whole web into a proxy server, making it virtually impossible for a censoring government to block individual sites.
The system is called Telex, and it is the brainchild of computer science researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Waterloo in Canada. They will present it Aug. 12 at the USENIX Security Symposium in San Francisco.
“This has the potential to shift the arms race regarding censorship to be in favor of free and open communication,” said J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at U-M and one of Telex’s developers.
Internet can catalyze change
“The Internet has the ability to catalyze change by empowering people through information and communication services. Repressive governments have responded by aggressively filtering it. If we can find ways to keep those channels open, we can give more people the ability to take part in free speech and access to information.”
Today’s typical anticensorship schemes get users around site blocks by routing them through an outside server called a proxy. But the censor can monitor the content of traffic on the whole network, and eventually finds and blocks the proxy, too.
“It creates a kind of cat and mouse game,” said Halderman, who was at the blackboard explaining this to his computer and network security class when it hit him that there might be a different approach—a bigger way to think about the problem.
Here’s how Telex would work:
Users install Telex software. Halderman envisions they could download it from an intermittently available website or borrow a copy from a friend.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) outside the censoring nation deploy equipment called Telex stations.
When a user wants to visit a blacklisted site, he or she would establish a secure connection to an HTTPS website, which could be any password-protected site that isn’t blocked. This is a decoy connection. The Telex software marks the connection as a Telex request by inserting a secret-coded tag into the page headers. The tag utilizes a cryptographic technique called “public-key steganography.”
“Steganography is hiding the fact that you’re sending a message at all,” Halderman said. “We’re able to hide it in the cryptographic protocol so that you can’t even tell that the message is there.”
Large segments of the net would have to be involved
The user’s request passes through routers at various ISPs, some of which would be Telex stations. These stations would hold a private key that lets them recognize tagged connections from Telex clients. The stations would divert the connections so that the user could get to any site on the Internet.
Under this system, large segments of the Internet would need to be involved through participating ISPs.
“It would likely require support from nations that are friendly to the cause of a free and open Internet,” Halderman said. “The problem with any one company doing this, for example, is they become a target. It’s a collective action problem. You want to do it on a wide scale that makes connecting to the Internet almost an all or nothing proposition for the repressive state.”
The researchers are at the proof-of-concept stage. They’ve developed software for researchers to experiment with. They’ve put up one Telex station on a mock ISP in their lab. They’ve been using it for their daily web browsing for the past four months and have tested it with a client in Beijing who was able to stream YouTube videos even though the site is blocked there.
The steady improvement in speed and power of modern electronics may soon hit the brakes unless new ways are found to pack more structures into microscopic spaces. Unfortunately, engineers are already approaching the limit of what light—the choice tool for “tweezing” tiny features—can achieve. But there may be a way of reaching beyond this so-called “diffraction limit” by precisely steering, in real time, a curve-shaped beam of weird “virtual particles” known as surface plasmons.
This technique, described in the Optical Society’s (OSA) journal Optics Letters, opens the possibility of even smaller, faster communications systems and optoelectronic devices. Examples of optoelectronic devices used today include photodiodes such as solar cells, integrated optical circuits used in communications, and charged coupled imaging devices at the heart of cell phone cameras and receivers on the world’s most advanced telescopes. This method also may yield new, important tools for research in chemistry, biology, and medicine.
The key to this innovation is the ability—for the first time—to actively manipulate a blended stream of light and plasma, known as a plasmonic Airy beam. The beam, owing to the laws of electromagnetism, travels, not in a straight line like the beams of light to which we are accustomed, but rather in an arc. “It’s an odd thing for sure, as light is supposed to travel in a straight line,” says Peng Zhang, a member of the research team with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center of the University of California, Berkeley and Department of Physics and Astronomy at San Francisco State University (SFSU).
“That’s why people are so crazy about these kinds of interesting beams.”
As the beam first strikes a metal surface (typically at an irregular feature called a grating structure), it stirs up small waves of electrons at the metal-insulator interface. These waves, which can be thought of as “virtual particles” known as surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs), then follow the curved trajectory of the Airy beams. And, just as ocean waves move objects on the surface of the water, the SPPs can be directed to manipulate ultrafine-scale features on the surface of a metal.
SPPs are already essential elements in the design and manufacture of optoelectronic devices. The reason they’re so critical is that they can affect extremely small-scale objects, smaller than the diffraction limit, or half of the wavelength of light used to create SPPs.
The current systems, however, have a significant drawback: they required fixed, permanent nanostructures to direct the SPPs. This lack of flexibility severely limits their uses in nano-system design and manufacture. But by being able to manipulate the Airy beam, and therefore the SPPs, in real time, the new design gives scientists on-the-fly control (see Fig. 1).
“We have demonstrated a new way of routing the flow of surface plasmons without any guiding structures,” says Xiang Zhang, who led this research and is the director of the NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at Berkeley and a faculty scientist with the Materials Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Lack of a guiding structure key
The lack of guiding structures, according to Xiang Zhang, is the critical innovation in their design. Currently, to manipulate surface plasmons over two-dimensional metal surfaces, different elements such as waveguides, lenses, beam splitters, and reflectors need to be created. This is done by either structuring metal surfaces (fabricating some permanent nanostructures) or placing insulators on metals. These permanent guiding structures cannot be reconfigured; once the structure is fabricated it cannot be changed in real time.
Computer controlled optics allow steering the beams
By using computer-controlled optics, however, the research team has developed a way to steer and manipulate the beams, precisely directing their trajectories to specific spots on an optical surface and adjusting them as needed. Due to their unique arc-shaped paths, the beams have the added ability to bypass surface roughness and defects, or even vault over obstacles.
“These on-the-fly adjustments are extremely desirable,” says Zhigang Chen, a principal investigator with the Department of Physics and Astronomy at SFSU. “They enable reconfigurable optical interconnections in ultra-compact integrated photonic circuits, which are at the core of many high-speed computing technologies. They also would enable on-chip nanoparticle manipulations for chemical, medical, or biological research purposes.”
The Airy beams used to direct the flow of plasmons also remain coherent, not fanning out or distorting as they travel along their curved trajectories, much in the same way that laser light remains coherent even after traveling great distances.
To create the Airy beams, the researchers used a laser beam and modulated its phase, or wave front, with a spatial light modulator (a device similar to a miniature liquid crystal display) controlled by a personal computer. By continuously changing the specially designed patterns in the computer, they were able to dynamically control the trajectories of the beam in real time.
Results show new direction
“These results point out a new direction for dynamically routing surface energies without any permanent guiding structures,” says Peng Zhang, “which could inspire researchers from different areas to develop new technologies or tools for a variety of applications.” For example, in nano-photonics, researchers may design practical reconfigurable plasmonic devices for ultra-compact integrated photonic circuits. In biology and chemistry, researchers may establish new tools for dynamically manipulating nanoparticles or molecules, and improving the performance of sensors.
“The ultrafine wavelength nature of surface plasmons makes them a promising tool for future nanolithography or nanoimaging applications,” says research team member Sheng Wang, also of the NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center. “Now, with the dynamic tunable plasmonic Airy beams, researchers may also shed new light on ultrahigh resolution bioimaging. For example, by bypassing obstacles and directly shining a beam on a target sample, background noise can be greatly reduced, which would enable more accurate imaging.”
“This method may also encourage researchers in other fields to manipulate the surface waves in other low-dimensional systems, including graphenes, topological insulators, and magnetic thin films,” says fellow team member Yongmin Liu of the NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center.
This research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Science Foundation.
If you read a number of positive reviews for a product or restaurant, one negative one might actually boost your regard, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. That is true as long as the negative information only creates a minor blemish and if you can’t think deeply about it.
This reinforces what we heard at recent Tech Media digital conferences (the next is Digital East in Tyson’s Corner, VA, in September). Negative reviews online can actually increase the perceived validity of positive reviews.
“Imagine that you are considering a new restaurant and reading reviews of it online,” write authors Danit Ein-Gar (Tel-Aviv University) Baba Shiv, and Zakary L. Tormala (both Stanford Graduate School of Business).
“Most of the reviews are very favorable: Great food, pleasant music, relaxed atmosphere. Then you come across a review that mentions that there is no parking nearby, a piece of information that is negative but not quite central to your value proposition for restaurants. How does this small dose of negative information influence the positive impression you have begun to form?”
A negative can accentuate the postive
The authors found that when consumers receive negative information after receiving positive information, especially if that negative information is relatively minor and just “blemishes” the product, it accentuates the positive information—if it’s encountered after the positives and if the consumers are somewhat distracted.
In one study, the researchers presented consumers with information about a pair of hiking boots. The boots had many positive attributes (orthopedic soles, waterproof, warranty) but they came in a box that was slightly damaged. In another study, college undergrads were offered a chocolate bar on a hot summer day. The chocolate bar was a favorite and it was chilled, but broken in half.
Presenting negative information online has advantages
The authors varied the amount of distraction participants faced. “Under low thought conditions—when participants were distracted or had fewer resources available for thinking about their decisions—we observed more favorable reactions to the products when participants received positive plus minor negative information rather than exclusively positive information,” the authors write.
“In situations that encourage careful thinking, presenting exclusively positive information still does seem to be more compelling,” the authors write. “But in settings that might make careful thought unlikely—as is true of most online ads—presenting some negative information has advantages.”
RALEIGH, NC – Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a memory device that is soft and functions well in wet environments – opening the door to a new generation of biocompatible electronic devices.
“We’ve created a memory device with the physical properties of Jell-O,” says Dr. Michael Dickey, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research.
Researchers have created a memory device with the physical properties of Jell-O, and that functions well in wet environments.
Conventional electronics are typically made of rigid, brittle materials and don’t function well in a wet environment. “Our memory device is soft and pliable, and functions extremely well in wet environments – similar to the human brain,” Dickey says.
Prototypes of the device have not yet been optimized to hold significant amounts of memory, but work well in environments that would be hostile to traditional electronics. The devices are made using a liquid alloy of gallium and indium metals set into water-based gels, similar to gels used in biological research.
The device’s ability to function in wet environments, and the biocompatibility of the gels, mean that this technology holds promise for interfacing electronics with biological systems – such as cells, enzymes or tissue. “These properties may be used for biological sensors or for medical monitoring,” Dickey says.
Uses ions instead of electrons
The device functions much like so-called “memristors,” which are vaunted as a possible next-generation memory technology. The individual components of the “mushy” memory device have two states: one that conducts electricity and one that does not. These two states can be used to represent the 1s and 0s used in binary language. Most conventional electronics use electrons to create these 1s and 0s in computer chips. The mushy memory device uses charged molecules called ions to do the same thing.
In each of the memory device’s circuits, the metal alloy is the circuit’s electrode and sits on either side of a conductive piece of gel. When the alloy electrode is exposed to a positive charge it creates an oxidized skin that makes it resistive to electricity. We’ll call that the 0. When the electrode is exposed to a negative charge, the oxidized skin disappears, and it becomes conducive to electricity. We’ll call that the 1.
Normally, whenever a negative charge is applied to one side of the electrode, the positive charge would move to the other side and create another oxidized skin – meaning the electrode would always be resistive. To solve that problem, the researchers “doped” one side of the gel slab with a polymer that prevents the formation of a stable oxidized skin. That way one electrode is always conducive – giving the device the 1s and 0s it needs for electronic memory.
The paper, “Towards All-Soft Matter Circuits: Prototypes of Quasi-Liquid Devices with Memristor Characteristics,” was published online July 4 by Advanced Materials. The paper was co-authored by NC State Ph.D. students Hyung-Jun Koo and Ju-Hee So, and NC State INVISTA Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Orlin Velev. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Brain regions positively correlated with the average likability of the song: cuneus, orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum.
It may not be long before another new buzz word hits marketing circles: “neuroeconomics.”
In a blog entry on Emory University’s eScience Commons, Carol Clark reports that an Emory University study suggests that the brain activity of teens, recorded while they are listening to new songs, may help predict the popularity of the songs.
We’re willing to bet it won’t be long before the music, film, and marketing industries look for ways to use this research practically.
“We have scientifically demonstrated that you can, to some extent, use neuroimaging in a group of people to predict cultural popularity,” says Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist and director of Emory’s Center for Neuropolicy.
The Journal of Consumer Psychology is publishing the results of the study, conducted by Berns and Sara Moore, an economics research specialist in his lab.
In 2006, Berns’ lab selected 120 songs from MySpace pages, all of them by relatively unknown musicians without recording contracts. Twenty-seven research subjects, aged 12 to 17, listened to the songs while their neural reactions were recorded through functional magnetic resolution imaging (fMRI). The subjects were also asked to rate each song on a scale of one to five.
Clark reports that the data was originally collected to study how peer pressure affects teenagers’ opinions. The experiment used relatively unknown songs to try to ensure that the teens were hearing them for the first time.
Three years later, while watching “American Idol” with his two young daughters, Berns realized that one of those obscure songs had become a hit, when contestant Kris Allen started singing “Apologize” by One Republic.
“I said, ‘Hey, we used that song in our study,’” Berns recalls. “It occurred to me that we had this unique data set of the brain responses of kids who listened to songs before they got popular. I started to wonder if we could have predicted that hit.”
A comparative analysis revealed that the neural data had a statistically significant prediction rate for the popularity of the songs, as measured by their sales figures from 2007 to 2010.
“It’s not quite a hit predictor,” Berns cautions, “but we did find a significant correlation between the brain responses in this group of adolescents and the number of songs that were ultimately sold.”
Previous studies have shown that a response in the brain’s reward centers, especially the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum, can predict people’s individual choices – but only in those people actually receiving brain scans.
The Emory study enters new territory. The results suggest it may be possible to use brain responses from a group of people to predict cultural phenomenon across a population – even in people who are not actually scanned.
The “accidental discovery,” as Berns describes it, has limitations. The study included only 27 subjects, and they were all teenagers, who make up only about 20 percent of music buyers.
The majority of the songs used in the study were flops, with negligible sales. And only three of the songs went on to meet the industry criteria for a certified hit: More than 500,000 unit sales, including albums that had the song as a track and digital downloads.
“When we plotted the data on a graph, we found a ‘sweet spot’ for sales of 20,000 units,” Berns said. The brain responses could predict about one-third of the songs that would eventually go on to sell more than 20,000 units.
The data was even clearer for the flops: About 90 percent of the songs that drew a mostly weak response from the neural reward center of the teens went on to sell fewer than 20,000 units.
Another interesting twist: When the research subjects were asked to rate the songs on a scale of one to five, their answers did not correlate with future sales of the songs.
That result may be due to the complicated cognitive process involved in rating something, Berns theorizes. “You have to stop and think, and your thoughts may be colored by whatever biases you have, and how you feel about revealing your preferences to a researcher.”
On the other hand, “you really can’t fake the brain responses while you’re listening to the song,” he says. “That taps into a raw reaction.”
The pop music experiment is merely “a baby step,” Berns says. As a leader in the nascent field of neuroeconomics, he is interested in larger questions of how our understanding of the brain can explain human decision-making.
“My long-term goal is to understand cultural phenomena and trends,” Berns says. “I want to know where ideas come from, and why some of them become popular and others don’t. It’s ideas and the way that we think that determines the course of human history. Ultimately, I’m trying to predict history.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA – The University of Virginia is creating a nanoelectronics center it says will focus on developing the next generation of electronics.
UVA, together with Old Dominion University and the College of William & Mary will run the center, which is initially funded by the Nanoelectronics Research Iniative, the Virginia Microelectronics Consortium and the three schools.
The center will do research on making faster, smaller and cheaper computer devices for many purposes, including vehicles and energy efficient homes.
The Center will be affiliated with affiliated with the university’s Institute for Nanoscale and Quantum Scientific and Technological Advanced Research.
ATLANTA – Georgia Tech’s Research Institute will lead a $10 million Homeland Security project to look at open source cybersecurity options for potential use by the U.S. government – and eventually there may be money in it for open source developers.
While lead investigator at Georgia Tech, Joshua L. Davis notes that some people think open source software is more vulnerable to cyber attack because the code is public, he says it is actually more adaptable in dealing with security threats.
The five-year project will proceed in three stages. Researchers will first inventory available open source software that might meet government needs; next, it will facilitate connections between agencies and developers; finally, it will direct money to support promising open source projects.
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ATLANTA – Are you getting the Internet speed and bandwidth you’re paying for? That’s a question likely to become even more important as broadband providers ponder charging by how much bandwidth you use. Georgia Tech researchers have developed an app called Kermit that let’s you know just what speed you’re actually getting and track your bandwidth use over time.
Developed by Beki Grinter, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, and her team, Kermit is an easy-to-use application that allows users to monitor and control network usage within their home environment, including measuring the actual network speed made available by their Internet service providers (ISPs) and tracking bandwidth usage over time.
“I think it’s widely recognized now, and the FCC is [aware], that people are not getting the speeds that are sometimes advertised,” Grinter said. “What Kermit does is it makes that very visible to people in their homes.”
Kermit works by showing the user a simple view of all the home’s devices connected to the Internet: computers, mobile devices, digital video recorders, game systems or anything else that’s networked. Users can rename their devices, or label them with photos to show what they are. At any moment, Kermit can not only show who’s using the Internet, whether through a desktop or mobile device, but it can also limit a device’s speed. The user can even limit or prioritize a specific machine’s traffic.
The researchers tested the system using a group of users who were not particularly computer savvy. The researcher’s say that after using Kermit, they were able to see their speeds over time and by the end of the study were either beginning to question whether or not they were actually getting the speeds they paid for, or realized that indeed they were.
Kermit works by showing the user a simple view of all the home’s devices connected to the Internet: computers, mobile devices, digital video recorders, game systems or anything else that’s networked. Users can rename their devices, or label them with photos to show what they are. At any moment, Kermit can not only show who’s using the Internet, whether through a desktop or mobile device, but it can also limit a device’s speed. The user can even limit or prioritize a specific machine’s traffic.
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Are online daily deal promotions such as those offered by Groupon and LivingSocial, among many others, good for the businesses using them? Do they boost revenue or provide valuable exposure? A new study by a Rice University School of Management professor did an in depth analysis of the experience of Gourmet Prep Meals (GPM), a Houston-based startup, with running a Groupon promotion.
The results? Gourmet Prep Meals saw its revenue and profits increase modestly the first two and half months it was in business. When its Groupon promotion started, however, revenue more than doubled, although later analysis showed that profit per transaction dipped 60 percent from previous levels.
Study author, Rice Associate Professor of management, Utpal Dholakia, said, “Daily deal promotions can be effective marketing tools for retail startup businesses in local markets to achieve exposure and stimulate sales. But you can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach and assume a daily deal promotion will work for any business.”
Dholakia said, “Groupon users bring in less than half the revenues of GPM’s full-price-paying customers, and the company loses a small amount of money on its average Groupon transaction. But about 20 percent of those transactions yielded relatively high profits and helped keep GPM’s profit margin above zero throughout.”
The study says that the Groupon promotion increased the firm’s revenue over what it would have made doing “business as normal” by 140 percent, which it termed the “exposure value” of the deal.
An unexpected finding: The Groupon promo accelerated the purchase rate of full price customers. The purchase rate of full price-paying customers, some but not all of whom came to the company due to the promotion, was three times higher during the promotion, enough to push the profit per transaction into positive territory.
By the end of the study’s time period, about 4 percent of Groupon users returned to GPM for at least a second purchase and when they did, spent well over hte average level of other full price customers.
At the end of the Groupon promo, the company’s founders concluded that it has achieved most of the objectives they started with.
The study authors concluded that “These results all lead to the same conclusion: all in all, GPM enjoyed significant positiveexposure value from running the Groupon promotion and saw few, if any, downsides.”
ATLANTA – As the old philosophical question begs, “If a tree falls in the middle of a forest with no one around to hear it, does it really make a sound?” Or as an Emory Healthcare marketing and social media expert recently asked and received an answer to, “If a critically ill woman in rural south Georgia needed immediate specialized medical care, would anyone more than 150 miles away hear her family member’s desperate “tweets” in time to send a life-saving helicopter?”
The answer to that question was an incredible “yes we did, and sure we can.”
Another first for social media?
Social media technology has been credited in recent years with everything from reuniting lost friends and loved ones to starting a couple on the path to wedded bliss (or divorce), to even starting an organized nationwide revolution in Egypt. But a recent connection in cyberspace starting in rural Southern Georgia may be yet another first in social media’s rise.
At 11:06 a.m. on April 25, Emory Healthcare Web and social media specialist Morgan Griffith received a “tweet” from Connecticut resident Matthew Browning, who was playing a critical role in helping his wife and family in getting through a crisis situation.
The grandmother of Browning’s wife was suffering from a host of dangerous medical issues, including, most urgently, a ruptured aorta. Being in a highly rural area, no local hospitals were equipped to accept or care for a patient with such complex needs.
Browning immediately took to Twitter and thus began a new journey between patient, concerned family member, a social media manager, and a hospital admissions unit.
A conflict between health care and social media
“There has existed an inherent conflict between health care and social media for quite some time. Health care is innately private, secure, and confidential, and that makes people worry when coupled with such a fast, open, and uncensored dialogue as the one taking place in the social media space,” says Griffith.
“On that incredible Monday, we got a glimpse of the potential these two realms have in becoming an extremely useful, successful and potentially life-saving duo. It was a truly moving and powerful experience to be a part of.”
Browning’s first “tweet” read as follows, “@emoryhealthcare (Emory’s Twitter account address) NEED HELP NOW!! Grandma w/ RUPTURED AORTA needs Card Surgeon/OR ASAP, STAT! Can you accept Life Flight NOW!!?”
Everything changes
“While much of our social media is proactive and conversational, when we receive a tweet like Matthew’s, everything changes. We must immediately throw out the process flowcharts, remove all barriers, and act. Instantaneously, things shift into high gear and a number of contacts in a variety of departments are contacted to get the right information as quickly as possible,” says Griffith.
“Within minutes, we tweeted back to Matthew, “@MatthewBrowning Matthew: please either call 911 or have your grandma’s doctor call our transfer service to get immediate help at 404-XXX-XXXX.”
At this point, the most important thing was giving Browning information he could act on. When using Twitter, messages can only be 140 characters, so it was critical to include the most necessary information for him to get immediate assistance, explains Griffith.
Four minutes later, at 11:21 a.m., Browning responded, “@emoryhealthcare: We are doing that! She is in small South Georgia hosp right now- but needs MAJOR help- We are calling, thanks!”
Griffith responded “@MatthewBrowning keep us posted & please let us know if there is anything else we can do to help. We’re keeping you both in our thoughts.” One minute later, Browning responded back “@hospitalpolicygrp, @emoryhealthcare: Thank you for your help!” Followed by: “@emoryhealthcare: Look for STAT Transfer from South Georgia, accept her if able and we’ll see you soon. Thanks!”
Sixteen minutes later, at 11:41 a.m., the patient was on a helicopter to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.
“@emoryhealthcare: Thank you for accepting her. She is on the Life Flight to you now- Bless you all and Thank you!!”
Now a textbook lesson
Unfortunately, the patient would not survive her traumatic illness, but, according to both Griffith and Browning, the experience is now a textbook lesson – proving that social media technology and the vast network it has created can allow more than one person to hear the tree falling in an even larger forest; hence, offering new life-saving opportunities not existent just a few short years ago.
“Our dialogue with Matthew on Monday continued on through the day, and not all of the tweets we received or sent are included above, but if that doesn’t show you the power of social media, I don’t know what will,” said Griffith. “It’s true that the same outcome may have taken place if it had not been for social media. But when a life is hanging in the balance and minutes – not hours – make the difference, the risk of ignoring technology such as social media to intervene and save a life is one we’re not willing to take.”
And, of course, the last message from Browning arrived same as the first. “@emoryhealthcare: Thank You for your valiant efforts on behalf of our Grandmother – your team is awesome and their compassion unrivaled- thx“.
The full story of the interaction between Matthew and Emory Healthcare can be found on Emory Healthcare’s blog, where they have published a two part case study on the story:
RALEIGH, NC – Companies spend millions to develop their brand’s personality, in hopes that it can help sell products. But they’ve had no way of measuring whether that personality actually appeals to consumers. Now, research from North Carolina State University lays out a system for measuring the appeal of a brand’s personality.
“We developed this means of measuring brand personality appeal (BPA) so companies can figure out how favorably their brand personality is viewed by consumers – and what they can do to enhance that personality’s appeal to their market,” says Dr. David Henard, an associate professor of business management at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the study.
I’m a Mac
The concept of brand personality helps consumers form attachments to specific brands. For example, Apple has its “I’m a Mac…And I’m a PC” campaign, which brands its products as young and hip. But does that brand personality actually get people to buy anything?
“Until now, researchers have only been able to determine whether a company has a brand personality,” Henard says. “The only existing scale was Aaker’s Brand Personality Scale, which could determine whether a brand personality is rugged, sophisticated, competent, exciting or sincere.
Deeper into concrete outcomes
“What we’ve done here is develop a system that digs deeper to help companies link brand personality to concrete outcomes. For example, does the brand personality actually make people want to buy their product?”
The researchers first broke BPA down into three components: favorability, originality and clarity. Favorability is how positively a brand personality is viewed by consumers.
Originality is how distinct the brand personality is from other brands. Clarity is how clearly the brand personality is perceived by consumers.
For example, Ford trucks are clearly recognized as having a “rugged” brand personality. A brand personality’s appeal is determined according to the interaction of these three variables.
The researchers then used these three variables to establish a measurement system for BPA. The system consists of 16 questions that provide information on each of the three BPA variables. The questions can be applied to any brand personality, from Mercedes Benz to Mary Kay. By assessing consumer responses to these 16 questions, a brand personality is graded on its overall favorability, originality and clarity.
Better understanding of how brands work
For example, a company may find that its brand personality has a moderate rating on favorability, but is viewed as highly original and clearly defined.
High marks for originality and clarity make the brand personality more appealing than the moderate favorability rating might indicate. It also tells a company that it needs to focus its efforts on improving its favorability rating, rather than distinguishing itself from competitors, in order to boost the brand personality’s overall appeal.
“This work gives us a much more thorough understanding of how the mechanics of brand personality work on consumers,” Henard says.
The paper, “Brand personality appeal: conceptualization and empirical validation,” was co-authored by Henard; Dr. Traci Freling, of the University of Texas-Arlington; and Dr. Jody Crosno, of West Virginia University. The paper is forthcoming from the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
RALEIGH, NC – Did you know that pencil lead may just end up changing the world? Graphene is the material from which graphite, the core of your No. 2 pencil, is made. It is also the latest “wonder material,” and may be the electronics industry’s next great hope for the creation of extremely fast electronic devices.
Researchers at North Carolina State University have found one of the first roadblocks to utilizing graphene by proving that its conductivity decreases significantly when more than one layer is present.
Graphene’s structure is what makes it promising for electronics. Because of the way its carbon atoms are arranged, its electrons are very mobile. Mobile electrons mean that a material should have high conductivity.
But NC State physicist Dr. Marco Buongiorno-Nardelli and NC State electrical and computer engineer Dr. Ki Wook Kim wanted to find a way to study the behavior of “real” graphene and see if this was actually the case.
“You cannot make a semiconductor with just one graphite layer,”Buongiorno-Nardelli explains. “To make a device, the conductive material must have a means by which it can be turned off and on. And bilayer provides such ability.”
They discovered both good and bad news.
The good news: With a single layer of graphene, the mobility – and therefore conductivity – shown by the researchers’ simulations turned out to be much higher than they had originally thought.
The bad news: bilayer graphene was an order of magnitude lower in the mobility of its electrons. “The reduction is substantial, but even this reduced number is higher than in many conventional semiconductors,” Borysenko said.
Buongiorno-Nardelli says that the NC State researchers are turning their attention to remedying this problem.
“If we put the graphene on a substrate that can ‘siphon off’ some of the heat generated by the electric current, the crystal vibrations will decrease and the mobility will increase. Those are our next steps – running the simulations with graphene and substrates that have this property.”
RALEIGH, NC – Computer programs are incorporating more and more safety features to protect users, but those features can also slow the programs down by 1,000 percent or more. Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a software tool that helps these programs run much more efficiently without sacrificing their safety features.
“These safety features – or meta-functions – can slow a program down so much that software developers will often leave them out entirely,” says Dr. James Tuck, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and leader of the research team that designed the new tool. “Leaving out those features can mean that you don’t identify a problem as soon as you could or should, which can be important – particularly if it’s a problem that puts your system at risk from attack.”
Historically, these safety features have been incorporated directly into a software program’s code, and are run through the same core – the central processing unit that serves as the brain of a computer chip – that the program itself uses. That is what slows the program down.
Researchers at NC State have developed a tool that takes advantage of multi-core computer chips by running the safety features on a separate core in the same chip – most chips currently contain between four and eight cores – allowing the main program to run at close-to-normal operating speed.
“To give you some idea of the problem, we saw the application we were testing being slowed down by approximately 580 percent,” Tuck says.
“Utilizing our software tool, we were able to incorporate safety metafunctions, while only slowing the program down by approximately 25 percent. That’s a huge difference.”
This multi-core approach has been tried before, but previous efforts were unwieldy and involved replicating huge chunks of code – a process that was time-consuming and used a great deal of power. The new tool, Tuck says, “significantly streamlines the safety feature work being done by other cores.”
Tuck stresses that the tool functions automatically, and does not involve manual reprogramming. In fact, Tuck’s team found that the tool is more effective than manual reprogramming for at least some applications, and is far less labor intensive.
The software tool is implemented as a plug-in for the Gnu Compiler Collection of software tools, and Tuck’s team is working to fine-tune and extend the tool to support a wider range of applications and meta-functions. “We plan to release the first version of this tool as open-source software later this spring,” Tuck says.
University of Florida computer researcher Herman Lam (left) and Alan George, founder and director of the NSF CHREC Center, display UF’s supercomputer, the Novo-G, on Feb. 8, 2011. The Novo-G, built and developed at UF, is believed to be the world’s most powerful reconfigurable computer.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — University of Florida researchers say their supercomputer, named Novo-G, is the world’s fastest reconfigurable supercomputer and is able to perform some important science applications faster than the Chinese supercomputer touted as the world’s most powerful.
In November, the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, for the first time ever, named the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Computer Center in Tainjin, China as No. 1.
In his state of the union speech, President Barack Obama noted, “Just recently, China became home of the world’s largest solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer.”
“Novo-G is believed to be the most powerful reconfigurable machine on the planet and, for some applications, it is the most powerful computer of any kind on the planet,” George said.
“It is very difficult to accurately rank supercomputers because it depends upon what you want them to do,” George said, adding that the TOP500 list ranks supercomputers by their performance on a few basic routines in linear algebra using 64-bit, floating-point arithmetic.
However, a significant number of the most important applications in the world do not adhere to that standard, including a growing list of vital applications in health and life sciences, signal and image processing, financial science, and more under study with Novo-G at Florida.
New, innovative form of computing
Most of the world’s computers, from smart-phones to laptops to Tianhe-1A, feature microprocessors with fixed-logic hardware structures. All software applications for these systems must conform to these fixed structures, which can lead to a significant loss in speed and increase in energy consumption.
By contrast, with reconfigurable machines, a relatively new and highly innovative form of computing, the architecture can adapt to match the unique needs of each application, which can lead to much faster speed and less wasted energy due to adaptive hardware customization.
Novo-G uses 192 reconfigurable processors and “can rival the speed of the world’s largest supercomputers at a tiny fraction of their cost, size, power, and cooling,” the researchers noted in a new article on Novo-G published in the January-February edition of the IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering magazine.
Conventional supercomputers, some the size of a large building, can consume up to millions of watts of electrical power, generating massive amounts of heat, whereas Novo-G is about the size of two home refrigerators and consumes less than 8,000 watts.
Later this year, researchers will double the reconfigurable capacity of Novo-G, an upgrade only requiring a modest increase in size, power, and cooling, unlike upgrades with conventional supercomputers.
RALEIGH NC – Opposites don’t always attract. A study from North Carolina State University shows that participants are happier – and perform better – when the electronic helpers used in online training programs resemble the participants themselves.
“It is important that the people who design online training programs understand that one size does not fit all,” says Dr. Lori Foster Thompson, an associate professor of psychology at NC State and co-author of the study. “Efforts to program helper agents that may be tailored to individuals can yield very positive results for the people taking the training.”
Online training programs are becoming increasingly common, and are used for everything from developing work skills in employees to teaching children basic math skills. Many of these programs utilize electronic training agents, or “helpers,” to give feedback to users and help them through the coursework. But the usefulness of these helpers can vary, or even be annoying. Remember Clippy, the animated paper clip, from Microsoft?
In the Southeast, we have seen a fair number of online training and Internet education-related companies nabbing financing in recent months. Like many things in the digital world, the increasing number of mobile devices that access the Internet and the wider availability of broadband connections are factors.
Which characteristics make online training helpers more effective?
NC State researchers set out to determine what characteristics make a training helper more effective. “We know from existing research on human interaction that we like people who are like us,” Foster Thompson says. “We wanted to see whether that held true for these training agents.”
The researchers evaluated the superficial similarities between 257 study participants and helper agents in an online training course, and assessed each participant’s communication style and their similarity to the helper’s communication style. Superficial similarities included the gender and race of the participant.
Assessment of each participant’s communication style was determined by asking participants how they would give feedback to others in various situations – such as helping someone with classwork. Researchers also asked participants how similar they felt the helper’s communication style was to their own style.
Matching race and gender increases focus
The researchers found that people reported being more engaged and focused on their training when the helper was portrayed by an image that matched both their race and gender. Furthermore, the researchers found that participants liked the helper more – and learned more from the program – when the helper’s communication style matched their own in regard to a very specific aspect of giving feedback.
Essentially, when giving feedback, some people give individual performance evaluations by comparing the individual to the group (e.g., you are in the top 10 percent), while others compare an individual’s performance only against that individual’s previous record (e.g., you did much better this time). Study participants performed much betterwhen the helper’s feedback style matched their own in this regard.
The study also showed that perception could be more important than reality in participant performance. “We found that people liked the helper more, were more engaged and viewed the program more favorably when they perceived the helper agent as having a feedback style similar to their own – regardless of whether that was actually true,” Foster Thompson says.
The paper isforthcoming from the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
RALEIGH, NC – Computer engineers at North Carolina State University have developed hardware that allows programs to operate more efficiently by significantly boosting the speed at which the “cores” on a computer chip communicate with each other.
The core, or central processing unit, is the brain of a computer chip; most chips currently contain between four and eight cores. In order to perform a task more quickly using multiple cores on a single chip, those cores need to communicate with each other.
But there are no direct ways for cores to communicate. Instead, one core sends data to memory and another core retrieves it using software algorithms.
“Our technology is more efficient because it provides a single instruction to send data to another core, which is six times faster than the best state-of-the-art software we could find,” says Dr. James Tuck, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. Tuck explains that the technology, called HAQu, is “not hardware designed to communicate data on its own, but is hardware that expedites data-sharing using existing data paths on a computer chip.”
Because HAQu uses these existing data paths, the research team compared it to software communication tools – even though it is a piece of hardware.
HAQu is also more energy efficient. “It actually consumes more power when operating but, because it runs so much more quickly, the overall energy consumption of the chip actually decreases,” Tuck says.
The next step for the research team is to incorporate the hardware into a prototype system to demonstrate its utility in a complex software environment.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.
RALEIGH, NC – A computer security researcher at NC State University, Xuxian Jiang, has identified a security vulnerability in the latest version of Google Android, version 2.3, also known as Gingerbread. The vulnerability gives attackers access to user data – similar to a vulnerability identified in previous iterations of Android, which Google thought it had fixed with the latest version.
Basically, simply by clicking on a link, Android users may give attackers access to personal information. If exploited, the vulnerability would allow a malicious Web site to read and upload the contents of any file stored on the phone’s microSD (memory) card. Information on the SD card could include saved voicemails, photos or online banking data.
The vulnerability would also allow attackers to find out all of the applications installed on a phone, and upload many of the applications onto a remote server – including all built-in applications.
Jiang, who discovered the vulnerability when working on an Android-related research project, has confirmed the vulnerability using Gingerbread being run on a Nexus S phone.
A similar vulnerability was reported on earlier versions of Android phones, leading Google to make changes in Gingerbread designed to address the flaw. However, Jiang has found that the Gingerbread fix can be bypassed.
So, what can be done to mitigate the vulnerability? The simplest way to protect your information is to remove or disable the SD card in your phone. However, that will leave you unable to save voice mail or photos. You could also disable the JavaScript function in your browser. But that would affect your ability to access online content. Another option is to switch to a third-party browser, such as Firefox.
Now that this information is out there, programmers can begin to develop means of addressing the vulnerability.
RALEIGH, NC – NC State University researchers will receive $750,000 of a $5.15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).
The grant, most of which goes to Cree, which is leading the project, will support North Carolina State University efforts to develop new technologies essential to the development of a “smart grid” that can easily store and distribute energy from renewable sources, such as solar and wind.
NC State’s role is to develop a transformerless intelligent power substation.
Dr. Subhashish Bhattacharya, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and primary investigator for the university on the grant project. “TIPS will enable the vision of the smart grid,” Bhattacharya says. “It will be a more cost-effective and efficient means of connecting renewable energy resources to the existing power infrastructure.”
The NC State TIPS development project will be made possible by the work that Cree will be doing under the grant – developing a power semiconductor device based on silicon carbide.
NC State is recognized as a leader in developing smart grid technologies, and is home to the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center for Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management.
RALEIGH, NC -A revolutionary new computer memory device developed at North Carolina State University could end the slow computer start ups that annoy many users and at the same time help energy gobbling server farms operate more efficiently.
Traditionally, there are two types of computer memory devices. Slow memory devices are used in persistent data storage technologies such as flash drives. They allow us to save information for extended periods of time, and are therefore called nonvolatile devices.
Fast memory devices allow our computers to operate quickly, but aren’t able to save data when the computers are turned off. The necessity for a constant source of power makes them volatile devices.
But now a research team from NC State has developed a single “unified” device that can perform both volatile and nonvolatile memory operation and may be used in the main memory.
Could revolutionize computer memory
“We’ve invented a new device that may revolutionize computer memory,” says Dr. Paul Franzon, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research.
“Our device is called a double floating-gate field effect transistor (FET). Existing nonvolatile memory used in data storage devices utilizes a single floating gate, which stores charge in the floating gate to signify a 1 or 0 in the device – or one ‘bit’ of information. By using two floating gates, the device can store a bit in a nonvolatile mode, and/or it can store a bit in a fast, volatile mode – like the normal main memory on your computer.”
The double floating-gate FET could have a significant impact on a number of computer problems. For example, it would allow computers to start immediately, because the computer wouldn’t have to retrieve start-up data from its hard drive – the data could be stored in its main memory.
Energy-saving for server farms
The new device would also allow “power proportional computing.” For example, Web server farms, such as those used by Google, consume an enormous amount of power – even when there are low levels of user activity – in part because the server farms can’t turn off the power without affecting their main memory.
“The double floating-gate FET would help solve this problem,” Franzon says, “because data could be stored quickly in nonvolatile memory – and retrieved just as quickly. This would allow portions of the server memory to be turned off during periods of low use without affecting performance.”
Franzon also notes that the research team has investigated questions about this technology’s reliability, and that they think the device “can have a very long lifetime, when it comes to storing data in the volatile mode.”
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
The steady improvement in speed and power of modern electronics may soon hit the brakes unless new ways are found to pack more structures into microscopic spaces. Unfortunately, engineers are already approaching the limit of what light—the choice tool for “tweezing” tiny features—can achieve. But there may be a way of reaching beyond this so-called “diffraction limit” by precisely steering, in real time, a curve-shaped beam of weird “virtual particles” known as surface plasmons.
If you read a number of positive reviews for a product or restaurant, one negative one might actually boost your regard, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. That is true as long as the negative information only creates a minor blemish and if you can’t think deeply about it.
RALEIGH, NC – Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a memory device that is soft and functions well in wet environments – opening the door to a new generation of biocompatible electronic devices.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA – The University of Virginia is creating a nanoelectronics center it says will focus on developing the next generation of electronics.
ATLANTA – Georgia Tech’s Research Institute will lead a $10 million Homeland Security project to look at open source cybersecurity options for potential use by the U.S. government – and eventually there may be money in it for open source developers.
Are online daily deal promotions such as those offered by Groupon and LivingSocial, among many others, good for the businesses using them? Do they boost revenue or provide valuable exposure? 
ATLANTA – As the old philosophical question begs, “If a tree falls in the middle of a forest with no one around to hear it, does it really make a sound?” Or as an Emory Healthcare marketing and social media expert recently asked and received an answer to, “If a critically ill woman in rural south Georgia needed immediate specialized medical care, would anyone more than 150 miles away hear her family member’s desperate “tweets” in time to send a life-saving helicopter?”
RALEIGH, NC – Companies spend millions to develop their brand’s personality, in hopes that it can help sell products. But they’ve had no way of measuring whether that personality actually appeals to consumers. Now, research from North Carolina State University lays out a system for measuring the appeal of a brand’s personality.
RALEIGH, NC – Did you know that pencil lead may just end up changing the world? Graphene is the material from which graphite, the core of your No. 2 pencil, is made. It is also the latest “wonder material,” and may be the electronics industry’s next great hope for the creation of extremely fast electronic devices.
RALEIGH, NC – Computer programs are incorporating more and more safety features to protect users, but those features can also slow the programs down by 1,000 percent or more. Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a software tool that helps these programs run much more efficiently without sacrificing their safety features.
