Qualcomm Releases Car Platform

Qualcomm has released its Connected Car Reference Platform so that the car industry to build prototypes for the next-generation connected car.

U.S. Wants To Help Supercomputer Makers

Five of the top 12 high performance computing systems in the world are owned by U.S. national labs. But they are beyond reach, financially and technically, for many within the computing industry, even larger ones.

Is Mastercard Going With Selfies?

Mastercard has announced plans to roll out a verification technology that requires a selfie to process payments. The industry’s latest move in the shameless act of narcissism is a biometric face scanning technology that will let customers replace their PINs with their face, according to MasterCard chief product security officer, Ajay Bhalla. Bhalla told CNN Money that the multinational financial services corporation has teamed up with all the major phone manufacturers to deliver the technology. “The new generation, which is into selfies, I think they’ll find it cool. They’ll embrace it. This [app] seamlessly integrates biometrics into the overall payment experience,” he said. “You can choose to use your fingerprint or your face. You tap it, the transaction is OK’ed and you’re done.” The selfie payment feature will roll out on a trial basis first in the US, with a full scale deployment to follow at an unspecified date. The system requires users to blink when prompted once they have held their device at eye-level for the checkout process to complete. This ensures that potential cyber crooks cannot use a still image of the user to hack into their personal account. MasterCard announced last month that all retail outlets across Europe will accept contactless payments by 2020, paving the way for wider adoption of mobile payment solutions. Mike Cowan, head of emerging payments products at MasterCard, revealed at the company’s Future of Payments event in London that Europeans will soon be able to tap to pay anywhere. “From the beginning of 2016 any new payment terminal that gets deployed must accept contactless, and every single terminal must accept it by 2020,” he said. This means that new point of sale terminals must adhere to the new standard on deployment from 1 January 2016, while existing terminals that don’t yet support contactless payments must be replaced by 1 January 2020 at the latest. Source

MasterCard Testing New Fingerprint Reader

MasterCard is trying out a contactless payment card with a built-in fingerprint reader that can authorize high-value payments without requiring the user to enter a PIN.

The credit-card company showed a prototype of the card in London on Friday along with Zwipe, the Norwegian company that developed the fingerprint recognition technology.

The contactless payment card has an integrated fingerprint sensor and a secure data store for the cardholder’s biometric data, which is held only on the card and not in an external database, the companies said.

The card also has an EMV chip, used in European payment cards instead of a magnetic stripe to increase payment security, and a MasterCard application to allow contactless payments.

The prototype shown Friday is thicker than regular payment cards to accommodate a battery. Zwipe said it plans to eliminate the battery by harvesting energy from contactless payment terminals and is working on a new model for release in 2015 that will be as thin as standard cards.

Thanks to its fingerprint authentication, the Zwipe card has no limit on contactless payments, said a company spokesman. Other contactless cards can only be used for payments of around €20 or €25, and some must be placed in a reader and a PIN entered once the transaction reaches a certain threshold.

Norwegian bank Sparebanken DIN has already tested the Zwipe card, and plans to offer biometric authentication and contactless communication for all its cards, the bank has said.

MasterCard wants cardholders to be able to identify themselves without having to use passwords or PINs. Biometric authentication can help with that, but achieving simplicity of use in a secure way is a challenge, it said.

Source

HP Unveils 3D Plan

Hewlett-Packard Co will unveil plans to enter the commercial 3D-printing arena in June, saying it has resolved a number of technical issues that have hindered broader adoption of the high-tech manufacturing process.

Chief Executive Meg Whitman told shareholders the company will make a “big technology announcement” that month around how it will approach a market that has excited the imagination of investors and consumers.

Critics have accused the sci-fi-like technology of being over-hyped and still too immature for widespread consumer adoption.

Industry observers have long expected HP, the largest of several printer-making companies from Canon to Xerox, to eventually get into the business. Whitman said HP’s inhouse researchers have resolved limitations involved with the quality of substrates used in the process, which affects the durability of finished products.

“We actually think we’ve solved these problems,” Whitman told an annual shareholders meeting. “The bigger market is going to be in the enterprise space,” manufacturing parts and prototypes in ways that were not possible before.

“We’re on the case,” she said without elaborating.

HP executives have estimated that worldwide sales of 3D printers and related software and services will grow to almost $11 billion by 2021 from a mere $2.2 billion in 2012.

The nascent 3D-printing market is now dominated by a number of smaller players like MakerBot, a unit of Stratasys that is concentrating on selling more affordable devices to consumers.

Contract manufacturers like Flextronics however already use the technology to help craft prototype parts or devices for corporate clients.

“HP is currently exploring the many possibilities of 3D printing and the company will play an important role in its development,” CTO and HP Labs director Martin Fink said in a February blogpost on HP’s website.

“The fact is that 3D printing is really still an immature technology, but it has a magical aura. The sci-fi movie idea that you can magically create things on command makes the idea of 3D printing really compelling for people.”

Source

App Stores For Supercomputers Enroute

A major problem facing supercomputing is that the firms that could benefit most from the technology, aren’t using it. It is a dilemma.

Supercomputer-based visualization and simulation tools could allow a company to create, test and prototype products in virtual environments. Couple this virtualization capability with a 3-D printer, and a company would revolutionize its manufacturing.

But licensing fees for the software needed to simulate wind tunnels, ovens, welds and other processes are expensive, and the tools require large multicore systems and skilled engineers to use them.

One possible solution: taking an HPC process and converting it into an app.

This is how it might work: A manufacturer designing a part to reduce drag on an 18-wheel truck could upload a CAD file, plug in some parameters, hit start and let it use 128 cores of the Ohio Supercomputer Center’s (OSC) 8,500 core system. The cost would likely be anywhere from $200 to $500 for a 6,000 CPU hour run, or about 48 hours, to simulate the process and package the results up in a report.

Testing that 18-wheeler in a physical wind tunnel could cost as much $100,000.

Alan Chalker, the director of the OSC’s AweSim program, uses that example to explain what his organization is trying to do. The new group has some $6.5 million from government and private groups, including consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, to find ways to bring HPC to manufacturers via an app store.

The app store is slated to open at the end of the first quarter of next year, with one app and several tools that have been ported for the Web. The plan is to eventually spin-off AweSim into a private firm, and populate the app store with thousands of apps.

Tom Lange, director of modeling and simulation in P&G’s corporate R&D group, said he hopes that AweSim’s tools will be used for the company’s supply chain.

The software industry model is based on selling licenses, which for an HPC application can cost $50,000 a year, said Lange. That price is well out of the reach of small manufacturers interested in fixing just one problem. “What they really want is an app,” he said.

Lange said P&G has worked with supply chain partners on HPC issues, but it can be difficult because of the complexities of the relationship.

“The small supplier doesn’t want to be beholden to P&G,” said Lange. “They have an independent business and they want to be independent and they should be.”

That’s one of the reasons he likes AweSim.

AweSim will use some open source HPC tools in its apps, and are also working on agreements with major HPC software vendors to make parts of their tools available through an app.

Chalker said software vendors are interested in working with AweSim because it’s a way to get to a market that’s inaccessible today. The vendors could get some licensing fees for an app and a potential customer for larger, more expensive apps in the future.

AweSim is an outgrowth of the Blue Collar Computing initiative that started at OSC in the mid-2000s with goals similar to AweSim’s. But that program required that users purchase a lot of costly consulting work. The app store’s approach is to minimize cost, and the need for consulting help, as much as possible.

Chalker has a half dozen apps already built, including one used in the truck example. The OSC is building a software development kit to make it possible for others to build them as well. One goal is to eventually enable other supercomputing centers to provide compute capacity for the apps.

AweSim will charge users a fixed rate for CPUs, covering just the costs, and will provide consulting expertise where it is needed. Consulting fees may raise the bill for users, but Chalker said it usually wouldn’t be more than a few thousand dollars, a lot less than hiring a full-time computer scientist.

The AweSim team expects that many app users, a mechanical engineer for instance, will know enough to work with an app without the help of a computational fluid dynamics expert.

Lange says that manufacturers understand that producing domestically rather than overseas requires making products better, being innovative and not wasting resources. “You have to be committed to innovate what you make, and you have to commit to innovating how you make it,” said Lange, who sees HPC as a path to get there.

Source

Researchers Build Flying Robot

Researchers say they have assembled a flying robot. It’s not designed to fly like a bird or an insect, but was built to simulate the movements of a swimming jellyfish.

Scientists at New York University say they built the small, flying vehicle to move like the boneless, pulsating, water-dwelling jellyfish.

Leif Ristroph, a post-doctoral student at NYU and a lead researcher on the project, explained that previous flying robots were based on the flight of birds or insects, such as flies.

Last spring, for example, Harvard University researchers announced that they had built an insect-like robot that flies by flapping its wings. The flying robot is so small it has about 1/30th the weight of a U.S. penny.

Before the Harvard work was announced, researchers at the University of Sheffield and the University of Sussex in England worked together to study thebrains of honey bees in an attempt to build an autonomous flying robot.

By creating models of the systems in a bee’s brain that control vision and sense of smell, scientists hope to build a robot that would be able to sense and act as autonomously as a bee.

The problem with those designs, though, is that the flapping wing of a fly is inherently unstable, Ristroph noted.

“To stay in flight and to maneuver, a fly must constantly monitor its environment to sense every gust of wind or approaching predator, adjusting its flying motion to respond within fractions of a second,” Ristroph said. “To recreate that sort of complex control in a mechanical device — and to squeeze it into a small robotic frame — is extremely difficult.”

To get beyond those challenges, Ristroph built a prototype robot that is 8 centimeters wide and weighs two grams. The robot flies by flapping four wings arranged like petals on a flower that pulsate up and down, resembling the flying motion of a moth.

The machine, according to NYU, can hover and fly in a particular direction.

There is more work still to be done. Ristroph reported that his prototype doesn’t have a battery but is attached to an external power source. It also can’t steer, either autonomously or via remote control.

Source

MIT Develops Inflatable Antenna

Satellites the size of shoe boxes, which are expected to one day allow researchers to explore space more efficiently, will soon have greater range.

MIT researchers have built and tested an inflatable antenna that can fold into such a satellite, then inflate in orbit to enable long range communications — from seven times the distance possible today.

The technology will let the small satellites, called CubeSats, move further into space and send valuable information to scientists back on earth.

“With this antenna, you could transmit from the moon, and even farther than that,” said Alessandra Babuscia, a researcher on the inflatable antenna team at MIT, in a statement. “This antenna is one of the cheapest and most economical solutions to the problem of communication. But all this research builds a set of options to allow the spacecraft … to fly in deep space.”

The MIT effort comes as engineers at the University of Michigan work on ways to propel such small spacecraft into interplanetary space. The team is building a plasma thruster that could fit in a 10-centimeter space and push a small satellite-bearing spacecraft into deep space.

The university researchers using superheated plasma that would push through a magnetic field to propel a CubeSat.

The MIT researchers are seeking to solve the communications problems and enable far-afield CubeSats to send data to and receive instructions from Earth.

The CubeSat devices cannot support radio dishes that are used today to let spacecraft communicate when far from Earth’s orbit.

The inflatable antennas significantly amplifies radio signals, allowing a CubeSat to transmit data back to Earth at a higher rate, according to the university.

MIT engineers have built two prototype antennae, each a meter wide, out of Mylar, which is a polyester film known for its strength and use as an electric insulator. One antenna was a cone shape, while the other looks more like a cylinder when inflated. Each fits into a 10-cubic-centimeter space within a CubeSat.

Each prototype contains a few grams of benzoic acid, which can be converted to a gas to inflate the antenna, MIT noted.

In testing, the cylindrical antenna performed “slightly better” than the cone shaped device, transmitting data 10 times faster, and seven times farther than existing CubeSat antennae.

Source

Microsoft Looks Into Smart Watches

Microsoft is developing designs for a touch-enabled smart watch, joining a number of other large competitors like Samsung Electronics and Apple who are said to be working on similar devices, according to a recent report.

Executives at suppliers to Microsoft told The Wall Street Journal that the company was sourcing components for the prototype of what could potentially be a “watch-style device.”

Microsoft has, for example, requested 1.5-inch displays from component makers for the prototype, an executive at a component supplier told the newspaper. It is unclear whether the company will decide to go ahead with the watch, the newspaper added.

Microsoft could not be immediately reached for comment.

A large number of vendors are looking at new product categories beyond smartphones and tablets.

This isn’t the first time, however, that Microsoft may be looking at watches as a product. It launched a smart wrist watch around a concept called Smart Personal Object Technology it unveiled in 2002, but withdrew it after a lackluster performance.

The Redmond, Wash., company is seeing its key PC market under threat from smartphones and tablets, and the failure of its new Windows 8 operating system to boost sales significantly. IDC said last week that first quarter PC shipments totaled 76.3 million units, down 13.9% compared to the same quarter last year. (The decline was worse than the 7.7% previously forecast by the analyst firm, and the market could be headed into further contraction, the research firm added.

Source