NEWS BRIEFS Project Converts Arms and Hands into … · Skinput and additional systems Harrison is working on use arms, hands, ... patent for the technology, which won’t be ready

15AUGUST 2010

NEWS BRIEFS

Published by the IEEE Computer Society0018-9162/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE

Figure 1. A Carnegie Mellon University project turns users’ arms and hands into input devices for activities such as answering a smartphone or selecting an interface menu item. Users could, for example, utilize an arm or hand as a keyboard or display screen via acoustic vibrations produced by tapping the skin. Source: Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University

A Carnegie Mellon Univer-sity doctoral student has developed a prototype system that could let users turn their arms or hands

into keyboards or display screens via acoustic vibrations produced by tap-ping their skin.

Chris Harrison, who is working with Microsoft on the project, said his Skinput system would be preferable to the small keyboards and screens

found on mobile devices. Their size comes at the expense of usability, he explained.

Skinput and additional systems Harrison is working on use arms, hands, and other larger areas near mobile devices for input and output, thereby increasing usability and interactivity.

With Skinput, a person interacts with devices by using a finger to touch other fingers, their hand, or their arm,

as Figure 1 shows. The system detects the small vibrations the touches make; recognizes the gesture; and issues the associated command, such as answering a phone or selecting an interface menu item.

Users wear an armband—the prototype is made with an elbow brace—lined with 10 specialized sensors that detect the vibrations and determine the action to be carried out. The sensors are canti-

Project Converts Arms and Hands into Input Devices

NEWS BRIEFS

COMPUTER 16

Device Could Eliminate Wires in Home and Office Communications

Purdue University research-ers are working on a small device that converts laser pulses into radio signals, which could enable high-

speed wireless communications in place of many of the wired transmis-sions currently used in home and office systems.

With this chip-based, photonically assisted, radio-frequency, arbitrary waveform-generation device—devel-oped by a team led by Purdue assistant professor Minghao Qi—a single base station could handle wireless communications for dif-ferent types of applications such as high-definition TV, detached laptop displays, or wireless printing servers.

Qi’s device uses shaping techniques on the light signals—a technique that doesn’t work with radio signals—to create more complex waveforms that carry more data and offer more band-width, capabilities that remain when

the system converts the optical signal to a radio signal.

The system works with a mode-locked laser that emits an optical pulse that lasts only 50 femtoseconds (50 quadrillionths of a second) but that offers high bandwidth.

A spectral shaping chip selects a few parts of the optical pulse and adjusts the strength of each. The microring resonators, the chip’s major components, pass information about the shaped signals to a spool of optical fiber.

The fiber allows the different wavelengths of light within a trans-mission to travel at different speeds, thereby forming the peaks and valleys of the signal formed after photodiodes convert the light into a radio-frequency format.

The Purdue system is smaller and thus more portable than other approaches for converting laser pulses into radio signals. In addition, unlike

other approaches, the Purdue system yields transmissions in the 60-GHz frequency band without signal-com-bining techniques that create jitter. The 57-to-64-GHz frequency band is desir-able because governments permit it for unlicensed utilization globally, mean-ing the systems would be usable and interoperable worldwide.

According to Qi, his team is work-ing on incorporating the device’s components—the laser, spectral-shaping chip, and fiber spool—onto a single chip to make the system smaller and less expensive.

The US National Science Foun-dation, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship program are funding the Purdue research.

Purdue has filed a provisional patent for the technology, which won’t be ready for commercializa-tion for at least five years, Qi said.

levered piezo films. These are thin films—fixed to the brace at one end and unattached at the other—acti-vated by electricity generated when they’re subject to the mechanical stress that the vibrations cause.

Weights added to the film’s loose end change the sensors’ resonant fre-quency so that they can detect small audio vibrations in the frequency range—from 25 to 78 Hz—that propa-gate naturally up human bones and soft tissues.

According to Harrison, the sen-sors used are like guitar strings: each is sensitive to a particular audio frequency. Thus, when a user taps a finger on a wrist, only one sensor will react to the resulting

vibration. In addition to enabling the system to recognize specific gestures, this lets it disregard extra-neous noise.

The sensors connect to a PC—run-ning custom software—that performs the system’s necessary computations. In the future, the researchers hope their system could also connect to a smartphone or other mobile device to conduct the computations.

Users need only a few minutes to train Skinput to learn the audio vibrations peculiar to their gestures and to customize the commands that each gesture represents, explained Harrison.

To help users send text messages or otherwise navigate complex input

tasks on mobile devices, Skinput uses a tiny projector to display a virtual keyboard with large keys on the user’s hand or arm. The system recognizes the keys pressed based on the resulting audio vibrations. So far, researchers have only tested the system with a five-key board.

Microsoft researcher Dan Morris said Harrison began developing Skin-put while an intern at the company. He noted that Microsoft is working on other, similar systems.

Skinput—still in early devel-opment—won’t be commercially available for up to seven years, Morris noted. It will need various improvements, including more accu-rate sensors, he explained.

17AUGUST 2010

A researcher has developed visualization techniques and a tool-kit that let users comb through disease-related statistics in

otherwise unexamined sources—such as patient records and news-paper articles—to discover geographic trends that could help control the spread of illnesses.

By using visual information representations such as interactive maps and graphs in combination with text searches, users could more easily see relationships between data that provide insights into complex events like the spread of an illness, explained Frank Hardisty, a research associate at Pennsylvania State University’s GeoVISTA Center. GeoVISTA is an interdisciplinary geographic-information-science center.

Hardisty said geographic visualization could help analysts find previously unknown relationships among data.

The GeoViz Tookit, for which Hardisty was lead developer, could work in any field—such as public health or law enforcement—with large amounts of publicly available data. The toolkit uses well-known data-mining and other algorithms, as well as open source software libraries such as the Apache Lucene search-engine library.

GeoViz can be used by even those with no programming experi-ence, which makes it more useful than many other analytical tools for researchers, Hardisty noted.

Numerous potential sources for disease, crime, and other statis-tics, such as newspaper articles, are in a semistructured format, with data that contains both numbers and text. For example, police

reports contain defined fields such as time of day or age of perpe-trator. But they also contain narrative with information not as clearly defined as and not structured like a table or graph.

To create structure and derive meaningful conclusions from these unstructured documents, GeoViz lets researchers use text analytics, which lets them extract relevant information, Hardisty said.

Mapping technologies let researchers organize, analyze, and present the information geographically. And GeoViz enables them to change the factors they look at and the perspective from which they analyze them

As Figure A shows, Hardisty’s toolkit provides users with an array of display options, including maps, parallel coordinate plots, and multiform matrices. This could show patterns in how and how quickly a disease is spreading.

The analysis could also show locations that are susceptible or not susceptible to certain diseases, as well as possible links to causes or triggers. In addition, it could help officials identify at-risk populations and implement preventative plans such as regular dis-ease exams.

Moreover, GeoViz could help public health officials develop effective control measures—like immunization regimens—for both infectious and chronic diseases.

Hardisty says his group is working with analysts at the US Cen-ters for Disease Control and other health organizations that could implement his tool.

APPLICATION USES VISUALIZATION TECHNOLOGY TO FIGHT DISEASE

Figure A. A Pennsylvania State University researcher has developed the GeoViz Toolkit. GeoViz would enable users to analyze health-related statistics in otherwise unexamined sources—such as patient records and newspaper articles—to discover and display geographic trends that could help control diseases’ spread. Source: Frank Hardisty, Pennsylvania State University.

NEWS BRIEFS

COMPUTER 18

Learn about computing history and the people who shaped it.

COMPUTING THEN

http://computingnow.computer.org/ct

phone number, mailing address, employer name, and passwords used to access games.

It also automatically collected data from victims’ computers, including information about personal accounts, browser histories, and Internet Explorer favorites.

The Trojan uploaded all the infor-mation to the hackers. They allegedly posted the information—along with screenshots of Internet Explorer Favorites and records of computer activity such as access of the por-nographic games—with the victim’s name to a website that the host ISP has since taken offline.

A party identifying itself as Romancing Inc. then sent e-mails to victims claiming that they down-loaded the game in violation of someone else’s copyright and that their name and the potentially embar-rassing information would remain on the Web until they resolved the issue.

The hackers allegedly offered to remove the information and resolve the alleged copyright infringement for a fee reported in some cases to be about 1,500 yen (currently about $17), paid by credit card.

According to reports in the Japa-nese media, at least 5,500 people downloaded the malicious file. Law enforcement didn’t release details about how many people actually paid the criminals. The only victims identi-fied were in Japan.

Although cybercriminals have used copyright infringement scams before, the pornographic angle is new, according to Ullrich.

News Briefs written by Linda Dailey Paulson, a freelance technology writer based in Portland, Oregon. Contact her at [email protected].

hackers’ desire to continue using social-engineering-based attacks rather than solely relying on technical exploits, noted Johannes B. Ullrich, chief technology officer for the SANS Institute, a security training and information organization.

In the recent attacks, hackers reportedly seeded a Trojan called Kenzero—disguised as an installer—into some adult games available via the popular Japanese Winny P2P network, explained Rik Ferguson, a senior security researcher with secu-rity vendor Trend Micro.

Downloading the anime-style games, known as Hentai, isn’t illegal. But the hackers may have exploited the potential shame some people would have if others found they did so, Ferguson noted.

When victims tried to download a game affected by the scheme, the installer/Trojan requested personal data, including name, birth date,

Police have arrested a Jap-anese gang that allegedly ran an extortion scheme with a new pornographic twist.

The hackers reportedly first fooled users trying to download adult games via peer-to-peer (P2P) technology into installing malware. They then allegedly collected money from the victims in exchange for removing online posts that included their names, personal data har-vested from their computers, and information about their attempted pornographic downloads.

This attack is significant because it demonstrates that cybercriminals have become aware of and are taking advantage of users’ P2P activities, said Rossano Ferraris, functional lead for Internet security intelligence with CA Technologies’ Internet Secu-rity Business Unit.

The attack also demonstrates

Online Threat Extorted Porn Downloaders

Editor: Lee Garber, Computer; [email protected]