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Technology Science

Browsing Reality With Sensor Networks 104

Posted by timothy from the hey-what's-going-on-there dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Welcome to the world of 'Reality Mining'! The billions of networked sensors that exist today are generating humongous streams of data. What about 'data mining' this big flow of data and discover our environment in a way that never existed before? Suddenly, sensors would look like pixels and we would start to browse reality as easily as we browse web pages today. Fascinating concept! Some fellows at Accenture Technology Labs are thinking about this and they already have designed some demos of reality mining software. Their demos include web agents, data modeling, GIS systems and much more. They also show how you could detect fires or how you would do virtual shopping. Please read their long article or this shorter summary for a couple of examples."
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Browsing Reality With Sensor Networks More

Browsing Reality With Sensor Networks

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  • This is great, but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by DanthemaninVA1 ( 750886 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @04:39PM (#10454505)
    I started browsing reality around the age of 1, when I learned to WALK.
  • along the lines of:

    "A method of using geographically separated networked sensors to mine data about the physical environment..."

  • Snowcrash (Score:3, Interesting)

    by metlin ( 258108 ) * on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @04:41PM (#10454524) Journal
    That is a really cool idea.

    Did anyone else think of Snowcrash when they saw this? It's almost like the world of Snowcrash super-imposed on reality with all the cool stuff.

    However, this is also ripe for abuse. I can think of so many people who'd want to "hack" into what you see and do weird things (make you see a fire in places where there is not).

    Already, the latest JPEG exploit makes me think of hacking into a system by merely viewing an image - this would make it closer to that reality ;-)
    • If you want to read a world where nanites with audio/video form a supercomping net that anyone can access to invade anyone else's privacy, then you need to read this book. This is really searching reality. Frighteningly, the technology for this is probably less than a few decades away.
      • It does already exist (though not to such a refined extent). There was a slashdot article not long ago on a computer/sensor network full of nodes, who's individual sizes were about 50 cubic mm or so. The nodes were monitoring a island ecosystem IIRC.

        I'm late for work now, so maybe some other Slashdotter with a good memory can find a link to the story for you.

        Frightening and a little exciting at the same time, indeed.

    • It's actually closer to The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke. Superimposed reality (or, in the case of the book, superimposed images of the past).

      Excelent read, regardless.

    • "I can think of so many people who'd want to "hack" into what you see and do weird things (make you see a fire in places where there is not)."

      William Gibson - Neuromancer.

      In terms of neuro-linguistic programming, or the visual reprogramming mentioned in Snowcrash, the first time you'll see them will be in either politics or advertising (which are converging rapidly) and you can see the signs already. Which prompts people like myself to get _really_ cynical about the possible uses of this beyond *ahem*

  • Welcome to the World of Marketing (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @04:41PM (#10454528)
    Vague name with 'mining' - check.
    Gratuitous use of the word 'virtual' - check.
    'Shopping' is involved somehow - check.

    Time to go hustle up some VC like it was 1997!
    • What they probably fail to mention is that this would work only for those places that they have "mined" beforehand.

      So, if you are going to a new place, do not expect to have this information - if it's a well known or big place that people frequent and the like, you would have information. Else nothing.

      Good idea, but if it's a well known place you would not really need this thing, anyway.

      • Re:Welcome to the World of Marketing (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Not sure I agree. After all, traveler's guides are popular right now. There are few places in the modern world that people haven't already been too - and those places are by definition not high-traffic or densely urban. Where this is going to be useful is for mirroring the real world in a virtual world, which has lots of tasty implications. The more people live in a place, the denser your amount of information... makes perfect sense for a place that's just a mass hallucination anyway.

    • Re:Welcome to the World of Marketing (Score:5, Funny)

      by pchan- ( 118053 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @04:59PM (#10454663) Journal
      you're surprised to see this coming from andersen consulting, aka accenture*? they've been virtualising resources, shifting paradigms, and enabling synergies through proactive leveraging of resources for years. now they're mining reality. sure, why the hell not? it's as much bullshit as anything else they do. you know what they say: a consultant is someone who borrows your watch, tells you what time it is, keeps your watch, and bills you for it.

      *pronounced "ass-enter"
      • a consultant is someone who borrows your watch, tells you what time it is, keeps your watch, and bills you for it.

        I object!

        Not all consultants are created equal! I'm at least nice enough to let you use your watch anytime you like afterwards!
      • on how to pick the pockets of their clients. I have just rolled off a(nother) major project that they screwed up. The offshored it to their own delivery centre in Manila and I guess the project plan was a result of mining the imagination and the offshore delivery centre was full of virtual resources.
    • VC mining was my immediate reaction too. With all those "reality TV" shows out there, "reality" is an instant catch-phrase too.

      People have been connecting sensors to the internet etc for a long time. Most small microcontroller companies (eg. Microchip) have been promoting this kind of thing for many years.

      In short there's nothing new here technically - just a marketeer with a new tie and jacket.

  • Suddenly, sensors would look like pixels and we would start to browse reality as easily as we browse web pages today.

    Aacccch! Nooo more advertising! Aaaaarg! Tin foil or no tin foil... don't say i didn't warn you!

    • MOD PARENT UP! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mrchaotica ( 681592 )
      Although this is a cool idea, it's dangerous too. You know how you get all upset with cookies and spyware? Well, this can (and probably will, sooner or later) lead to the same thing in real life. Imagine running out of milk and being bombarded with Mayfield ads everywhere you go.

  • Roland Piquepaille writes nothing (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    he just takes it, then reposts it for 400$ per advert per month, nice little cashflow for copyright infringment
    do you think sensormag mind him reposting their articles on his website without permission for profit ?
    maybe a C&D would persuade weblogs.com to tighten up ?

    • If he wasn't running all of the ads on his site then he would be okay, for the most part, under "fair use." Running the ads makes his site commercial so he does need permission from copyright holders to reprint/reproduce their work. I have no idea if he does this or not.

    • Potential Astroturf Solutions (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sbszine ( 633428 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @08:49PM (#10456208) Journal
      Quite a few Slashdot readers think Roland Piquepaille (rpiquepa [slashdot.org] is exploiting this site as a way of upping his ad impressions. There's a strong argument that he wants to turn the Slashdot effect into ad money, and this is supported by the habit he has of linking not to the article, but to a verbatim copy posted on his ad-supported blog. Engadget (ptorrone [slashdot.org]) are pretty dubious too, but at least they bother to write their own content.

      Having said that, I don't think Roland etc are bribing the /. editors, and I don't necessarily think that their submissions should be rejected. Whether they are astroturf or not is up to the individual reader to decide, and some people seem to enjoy them. What I would like to see is the ability to let the individual block submissions from particular users somehow, either as a subscription feature (block by UID / foes list), or a Firefox extension (based on NukeAnything [mozilla.org] perhaps).

      And I no, I don't have the time / skillset / influence to code the above myself. I'm just putting some ideas out for discussion.

  • Open Sensors and Privacy (Score:5, Informative)

    by eutychus_awakes ( 607787 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @04:42PM (#10454540)
    People have been talking about integrating sensor networks like this for a long time. One issue that comes up often is what to do about privacy - especially with regard to image data. You can put a camera on every building in town - and you can be guaranteed that at least one person per day will object to having their picture taken and used for some open-source data fusion project.

  • Total Information Awareness (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @04:44PM (#10454554) Journal
    The US gov't wants to do this kind of thing, not with sensors but with data from credit cards, libraries, schools, airlines, etc. I haven't been too worried about this so far, considering that we don't have the technology to pull useful data out of all that noise, but if we can do it with sensor networks, who knows. How long until all of those cameras at intersections are hooked up into one all-seeing electronic mind that will always know where you're going and what you do when you get there?
    • so we should stifle the technological development of society becuase an evil government might one day use that tech for "evil"?

      the whole topic reminds me of this book i read by virge? (i googled but i cant remember the name, read it a few years ago). anyways so this guy who manages a galactic empire buys these sensors from an alien government and gets the deployed everywhere. only he doesnt let people know that they are as powerfull as they are. i believe that they are used as stabalizers?? localizers?

      bas
  • That app is *really* cyberspace. Now we need HMD with projected overlays, marking up optically viewed scenes ("reality"(TM)) with rendered sensor reports. Who's got my goggles?
  • Man, as technology improves it keeps bringing us closer and closer to the technology displayed in movies over the last 20 years.

    A pretty neat application of this would be the ability to create almost that robocop type view of the world with specialy designed contacts or something like that. You walk around and have infomation fed to you about the various objects you see in your reality,
  • Still no word on where all the money went at Worldcom. Film at 11.

  • Accenture? (Score:1, Troll)

    by IronChef ( 164482 )
    Isn't Accenture the company you hire when you want a really big project screwed up? Cool.
    • The UK government have been using them to royally sqrew up projects for decades. The US government seem to prefer CSC for that, so I'm not sure who's the market leader in fucking up big IT projects at the moment.

  • If we could read the information from molecules or even atoms about the molecules or atoms that are directly next to them and from that, read the same information for the molecules next to those, thus creating a chain, I've always wondered if it would be possible to create a 3d model of the universe, reading it molecule by molecule.
    • Actually there is such a thing, it goes by the code name T.P.V, thats Total Perspective Vortex [wikipedia.org].

      For it's starting molecules it uses a piece of fairy cake.
    • Good luck attaching tiny sensors to all those atoms. That'd be one heckuva small tweezers and dab of heat glue.

      Oh, and good luck getting the atoms and their neighbors to sit still while you ask them about themselves and their neighbors.

      There are just a few laws of physics to surmount before getting excited about this.

    • Re:I've always had this idea: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Problem is there's no way to store that much information. You can't store information about every atom in the universe because doing so would require every atom in the universe to store it!

      You'd either have to compress the data massively, or, more likely, simulate things on a much larger scale. The most recent universe-scale gravity simulations (too lazy to post a link, check slashdot history) simulate reality by using spheres the size of galaxies.

      As storage density and computational power increase, or
  • minesweeper is still going to be included in windows right? I mean, they aren't going to replace minesweeper right... *heart beat* *heart beat*, no, they they they wouldn't.. do that. /me pops 2 painkillers and passeszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.......
  • I have been working on a version of this idea for a long time. It truly is fascinating. Imagine being able to reverse engineer the future based on the largest data cube in the world- the physics and chemistry of the molecules in the world around us. Think of a massive 3D version of the Periodic Table of Elements but applied to molecules and particles. Self-organizing on an immense scale. Imagine if we could see relationships amongst things where today relationships do not exist. I, for one, welcome our Univ
  • Vinge wrote about something like this in "A Deepness in the Sky', only he called them localizers. The bad part is they made the police state more powerful than Orson Wells ever imagined.
  • A virus will start spreading across all computers and then someone will put StarNet online. The next thing you know, naked people will start appearing in big balls of light.
  • I see nodal points [amazon.com] everywhere...
  • I wonder if this will finally allow geeks the ability to 'browse' girlfriends o_0

  • Wake me (Score:2, Interesting)

    by LordMyren ( 15499 )
    Wake me when we have effective position location sensors, indoors and out, and the required beacon deployment to be useful most places.

    Until then its all BS.

    Data is useless without context. Position is the best context we have any hope of auto-generating.

  • Roland's at it again (Score:2, Informative)

    by Swamii ( 594522 )
    You guys do know this is a hoax, right?
  • We need a camera that digitizes real life into an online 3d map.

    With GPS on a cellphone with a mapping program like mapsonus, and a bus schedule, you could find where you want to go fast. Or how about a cellphone with a cab pager button.

    I like finding resturants within a certain radius, like some devices do gas stations. Eventually events could be plotted on the devices too, so you could attend or not. Lots of stuff can be done, but only a little is done here and there.

    God spoke with me:
    www.geoc

  • "Becoming" connected (Score:2, Insightful)

    by eseiat ( 650560 )
    From the article:
    As cameras become a standard cell phone feature, we're becoming the most connected and instrumented people in history.
    How are we merely becoming the most connected people? I don't remember seeing Caesar cruising through Rome, telling all his "boys" to "holla back at a brotha on my 2-Way, cause I'm a roll out to Cairo for a weekend dip in the Nile". Perhaps that is information that my public school budgets couldn't afford to dig up.
  • It cant be that hard...minus all this ronald and slashvertisement bullshit.
  • *waits for the obligatory comment about the matrix being too information-dense to viualize, except as symbols*
    • I was going to mention that, but you beat me to it. I'll just switch off my extra screens now so you don't get distracted by them.

  • I just don't see this taking off without incorporating porn somehow.

  • - Outcry From Tinfoil Hat Brigade
    - I Welcome Our New Lamp Post Overlords
    - Maybe We Can Beowulf These Sensors
    - This Will Finally Finish SCO Off
    - Something About Soviet Russia
    - A Groklaw Link Saying "We Filed Suit Against It Three Weeks Ago"
    - I Voted For Kodos

    Repeat Above In Random Order Until...
    Profit!

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @05:14PM (#10454738)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • This part of your reply really amused me:

      Also, standards-compliance will be impossible to implement: show me ten different temperature sensors and I'll show you 12 different ways of handling the data.

      Very well put, and funny to boot! I lik ethe idea too but it's a lot harder than it might seem on the surface when you start working with real, physical, sensors.

    • Re:Another one for the trash (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      the submitter couldnt give a shit about the content, its all about getting you (& 50,000 /.ers) to visit the article and create impressions for advertising, thats the whole purpose of the site, the guy just copy and pastes whole articles vertabim and then doesnt have to pay the writer like other sites
      weblogs.com are turning a blind eye as they just havent had a lawyer pissed off at them yet to shut them down
      of course time will tell, in the meantime its payday! thank you for playing, keep clicking dumbas
    • While I agree that roland is a useless douchebag there is some merit to making assorted sensors free for open use. If you make yours open, and the next guy does too, you can use each other's sensors and you both benefit.
  • This is Chaos Theory 101 if I'm not correct (INAM::I'm not a mathematician)? The class CT example is having weather scensors 100 feet covering the earth and still storm prediction would be impossible due to small variations of unpredicatability.

    So if someones says something about dinosours on an island, just remember I told you so ...

  • It's Never Going to Happen Because of You People (Score:3, Insightful)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @05:22PM (#10454778)
    I've been thinking about this for a while. What if you could, for lack of a better term, Google the earth? That's a bit broad, and excuse the ca. 1994 AT&T "You Will" commercial-speak [russellbeattie.com]...
    • You listen to a song on the radio, and then search for a match from what your brain just heard (and was stored on a portable audio device) with a world database of songs.
    • You see a person you recognize and are able to get their name, last time you talked to them, etc.
    • You can take a look at all this data and have software come up with weird trends or coincidences ("Heinz! Your ketchup sells better a week after a victory by the local football team!").


    The problem is of course that people are against this. I, for one, do not have a problem as long as it's easily accessible public information. Think back to 20 years ago. What would you say if your next-door neighbor had our present time internet, with access to public records, opinions, sports cores, etc. etc. etc. We take it for granted now because everyone can do it.

    I think this is probably what will cause the singularity.
  • Google Labs comes up with lots of neat stuff, but it's not research, it's all practical product stuff.

    Microsoft Research is well respected and does lots of original research, but has a focus on stuff that can be applied. As Clippy has shown, their ideas aren't always good, though.

    IBM Research does lots of cool research that ranges from applied stuff for new products to basic scientific research in many different fields.

    Accenture Technology Labs researches new buzzwords and how they can be applied to t

  • Scatter these sensors around Hollywood, and use the software to search for nodal influences in the Celeb world, and you have Slitscan. Though, I can't wait to see the "average" consumer.

    "Which is to say, [Laney], anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anoited. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled pot

  • Is it just me, or does this read like a press release?

    Is it just me, or has Slashdot been posting quite a few articles lately that involve nothing more than a large company and vague intimations of something related to technology going on there?

  • Obfuscation.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bigattichouse ( 527527 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @07:53PM (#10455882) Homepage
    and hiding will become an artform.. because no one will believe that something could actually *hide* from the sensor web... So hidden things will be very well hidden indeed once you assume that they cannot exist.
  • No catch phrase bullsh!t here:

    http://www.ewcd.org/ [ewcd.org] - about 80 remote monitoring stations updated hourly.

    http://www.sevierriver.org/ [sevierriver.org] - something similar
  • It's just as I imagine navigation help for vehicles in 5 to 10 years. With this huge sensor network and the *exact* position of your car and your head you will be able to see in the windscreen signals and messages over the real image.

    Every passenger will see a custom view upon his vision angle to the windscreen and his profile (you looking for bars and traffic directions while your wife look for shops)

    It's a question of data mining and calibration.

    <w/>

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