Wireless recharging one step closer to reality

CNN.com published before yesterday, in its technology web page, an interesting news about wireless power transmission.

The news starts with the following phrase: "Imagine juicing up your laptop computer or cell phone without plugging it into an electrical socket."

According the news:
"That's a luxury that could be provided by wireless power transmission, a concept that has been bandied about for decades but is creeping closer to becoming viable.

Building off work unveiled last year by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, Intel Corp. demonstrated Thursday how to make a 60-watt light bulb glow from an energy source 3 feet away.

But this technology has a long way to evolve before it becomes a commercial product. In both the MIT and the Intel work, researchers used charging coils far too large for wide-scale use.

Even so, Rattner said Intel is in the early stages of trying to modify a laptop to accept wireless power. One challenge is figuring out how to prevent the electromagnetic field from interfering with the computer's other parts, he said."

After the wireless computer, the wireless recharging is a good news, because is boring when you are on move, and you need to look for an electrical socket to recharge the gadgets, and also always to remember to carry the wires.

Recession-Proof IT

The Wall Street and Technology published recently, in its magazine cover story and in its online edition, a news about Recession-Proof IT, written by Penny Crosman.

According the news, top Wall Street IT executives share their strategies for keeping their IT organizations, their staffs and their careers moving forward even in economically challenging times.

They talk about interesting subjects like Platform Consolidation, the necessity to reexamine IT Supply, Demand and capacity, the application of the idea of virtualization and grid computing in large-scale mode, and also the return to Outsourcing and Offshoring.

It is an interesting news about the IT strategies adopted by Wall Street companies.

Reality Mining: Predicting Where You’ll Go and What You’ll Like

The New York Times published an interesting news today, in its section of technology, about a predictive analytics tool, called Macrosense, released earlier this month by Sense Networks, a software analytics company based in New York City.

According Sense Networks: "Macrosense is the world's first platform capable of collecting and analyzing massive amounts of anonymous, aggregate location data in real-time" and "Macrosense applies complex statistical algorithms to sift through the growing heaps of data about location and to make predictions or recommendations on various questions — where a company should put its next store, for example".

The Key Features of Macrosense are: Real-Time Activity Analysis, Powerful Analytics, Historical Data Normalization, Contextual Data Inputs,and Flexible Interfaces and Visualizations.

Sandy Pentland,co-founder of Sense Networks, said that Macrosense tool lets companies engage in “reality mining”, term coined by her.

Reality mining raises questions about privacy, but according the company, it is interested only in aggregate data and that it’s looking for broad patterns, not the specific behavior of individuals.

Sense Networks also announced another tool, called Citysense, defined by them as: an innovative mobile application for local nightlife discovery and social navigation, answering the question, "Where is everybody?" Citysense shows the overall activity level of the city, top activity hotspots, and places with unexpectedly high activity, all in real-time. Then it links to Yelp and Google to show what venues are operating at those locations.

They are testing Citysense in the city of San Francisco, California; and it is currently available on BlackBerry devices and will be released for the Apple iPhone soon.

I think the use of predictive analytics will allow several kind of applications like that, and that is just beginning.

Pursuing the Next Level of Artificial Intelligence

Today, The New York Times published in its section of technology, a nice article about Artificial Intelligence, entitled Pursuing the Next Level of Artificial Intelligence.

It is about the work of Daphne Koller, a researcher at Stanford University, in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

I think Artificial Intelligence is one of the most fields of research nowadays, and its advance is amazing in the last years.

In Business Intelligence and Performance Management, the AI together its relationed fields of study, mainly Machine Learning and Data Mining, will leverage the predictive analysis.


In this article, you can notice the power of Google, when Daphne said that many of her graduate students have gone to work at Google, although she tries to persuade undergraduates to stay in academia; and also when she said: “My husband still berates me for not having jumped on the Google bandwagon at the beginning”.

After all, Peter Norvig, a famous research of AI, is Director of Research of Google.

For those interested in AI, Peter Norvig and Stuart Russell wrote a very good book: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd Edition)