Intel innovation lights up research day

Intel's 'show and tell' event allowed the company to highlight how it hopes to harmonise its research and business objectives Traffic lights will communicate directly with cars, if an Intel research project comes to fruition. Also, "my taillight will communicate with your headlight," says Intel's Vu Nguyen, "using Visible Light Communication (VLC): imagine morse code, but very fast. You can't see it, but the light is flickering." The idea behind VLC is to provide safety features such as "brake assist", so if the car in front brakes, your car will hit the brakes before you do. It sounds a bit of a long shot because of the infrastructure required. However, there's already a Visible Light Communications Consortium (vlcc.net) and Intel wants to be in at the beginning, helping to establish standards and developing the building blocks that companies will use to make products. That's an approach Intel has already taken with USB, Wi-Fi, WiMax and other standards, and VLC has a particular appeal: you don't need a licence to use light for signalling. A day at the museum Nguyen, a senior technology evangelist in Intel's research department, was demonstrating a system mockup with a car dashboard, new LED traffic lights and a big screen at Intel's eighth annual Research Day, held last week in the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. A working model of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine on the museum's ground floor reminded us how much IT progress depends on manufacturing capabilities. Research Day was "show and tell" on a grand scale, and Intel flew in technology journalists not just from Europe but from Australia, Japan and other countries to enjoy the experience. We got a speech from Intel's chief technology officer, Justin Rattner, an in-depth look at silicon photonics, and a conducted tour of Intel's own museum. Rattner told us that Intel's old Corporate Technology Group no longer existed, it has been reorganised and renamed: "We're now Intel Labs and proud of it," he said. "But there's not really a change in what we do. Ultimately, our success is the company's success. Research that doesn't find its way into a product isn't of much value." This is a marked contrast from Microsoft, the other half of the Wintel duopoly, which has similar "show and tell" events to inform its staff what its researchers are doing. Microsoft Research is run like a university computer science department by a man who used to run a university computer science department Rick Rashid. Rattner says Intel's researchers start by finding out what the company's problems are, because "ultimately they translate into research objectives. I like to think Intel is somewhat unique in its ability to align its research with its business objectives." At the moment, Rattner's hot topic is the embedded chip market, where Intel is pushing its Atom processor for mobile devices. Much of this research is being done under the Carry Small, Live Large banner. Nguyen's effort to turn cars into communicating computing platforms (with broadband delivered via WiMax networks) is part of that.

So is the Classmate PC effort for schools, where the Intel research scientist Trevor Pering was showing off a new trick: people-proximity audio sensing. Imagine a classroom full of children, each with their own Classmate netbook. The software listens to what the kids are saying and creates ad hoc networks for the small groups who are working together. Intel is expanding its commercial Wi-Fi networking system with My WiFi technology (MWT) for PCs, which maintains two network stacks at once. The product manager Gary Martz says you still have your original LAN (local area network) connection to the internet, but get an extra virtual network for your PAN (personal area network). This provides a fast connection to cameras, printers, digital photo frames, TVs and mobile phones. MWT will be part of Intel's next-generation Calpella platform for laptops with Nehalem processors, which will be available later this year, I'd guess with Windows 7. However, if you run Mac OS X, Linux or Windows XP, hard luck. "My customers are PC OEMs (original equipment manufacturers)," says Martz. "They're interested in selling new equipment: they don't want to introduce new technologies for old platforms. We will make the drivers available online, but we're not investing in XP." But, as with most Intel software, MWT will be free. As Rattner notes, somewhat wryly: "We do an enormous amount of software development today, but it often disappears into someone else's product." Another of Rattner's enthusiasms is the 3D web, and he says Intel is supporting ScienceSim, which is based on OpenSim. It's like an enhanced version of Second Life. "Now, scientists anywhere in the world can put up a 3D virtual world," he says. "Unlike Second Life, this is much more like putting up a web page, but you get avatars and all the things you'd expect from a 3D world." ScienceSim does have practical and educational uses as a meeting place and a research world where you can customise the physics. The not-so-hidden agenda is that Intel is promoting something that can consume vast quantities of processing power, the majority of which will be provided by Intel chips Dual duelling But the two biggest hits from Research Day 2009 may not do much for Intel's profitability. The first was virtual fencing, demonstrated with light sabres, which attracted TV crews and just about every reporter with a video camera. This used stereo video cameras to capture the movements of two combatants at different locations and show the results on a single screen. The Teeve (Tele-immersive Environment for EVErybody) system was developed on a joint Intel-Microsoft project on parallel computing at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, and inspired comparison to Microsoft's Project Natal for the Xbox 360. However, Raoul Rivas said: "Natal uses avatars: we use real video. We think that's superior because people want to see themselves interacting."Rivas suggested the system could be used for things like doctor and patient consultations. I suggested he try the San Fernando Valley, home to America's porn industry. The other hit was Rob Ennals from Intel Research Berkeley, with Confrontational Computing, which highlights "disputed points of view" on websites. It's based on

crowdsourcing, with people voting texts up and down. It works as a Firefox browser extension, and was released last week as Dispute Finder. Ennals says the system alerts people to disputed or misleading statements on blogs or websites when otherwise they might take them at face value. A later version will include speech recognition to pick up disputed statements on TV or radio. There's never likely to be a shortage of those.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/24/intel-research-day