BLUE EYES TECHNOLOGY

Blue Eyes is a technology conducted by the research team of IBM at its Almaden Research Center (ARC) in San Jose, California since 1997. Blue eyes technology makes a computer to understand and sense human feelings and behavior and also enables the computer to react according to the sensed emotional levels. The aim of the blue eyes technology is to give human power or abilities to a computer, so that the machine can naturally interact with human beings as we interact with each other. All human beings have some perceptual capabilities, the ability to understand each other’s emotional level or feelings from their facial expressions. Blue eyes technology aims at creating a computer that have the abilities to understand the perceptual powers of human being by recognizing their facial expressions and react accordingly to them.  

Imagine, a beautiful world, where humans collaborate with computers!! .The computer can talk, listen or screech aloud!! .With the help of speech recognition and facial recognition systems, computers gathers information from the users and starts interacting with them according to their mood variations. Computer recognizes your emotional levels by a simple touch on the mouse and it can interact with us as an intimate partner. The machine feels your presence; verifies your identity and starts interacting with you and even it will dial and call to your home at any urgent situations. This all is happening with this “Blue Eyes” technology.

The main objective of Blue eyes technology is to develop a computational machine having sensory and perceptual ability like those of humans. The Blue Eyes technology system is a combination of a set of hardware and software systems.

The hardware consists of a central system unit (CSU) and data acquisition unit (DAU). Microcontroller- ATMEL 89C52 is the heart of the data acquisition unit. Bluetooth technology is provided for the coordination and communication between the two units. We can adapt this Blue Eyes technology in all working places, where the operator’s attention is continually available. Using the Blue eyes Technology it is able to record and monitor the user’s physiological condition by a technical approach. The aim of this Blue Eyes technology is to provide a machine or system having sensory and perceptual abilities like human beings thus it will support healthy stress free surroundings where the computers and humans can work together as intimate partners.

 Blue eyes technology consist of,

1. Mobile measuring device or Data Acquisition Unit (DAU)
2. Central System Unit (CSU)
3. The Hardware

Mobile measuring device or Data Acquisition Unit(DAU) of Blue Eyes technology:

The DAU used in the Blue Eyes technology is the mobile component of the system. The main function of DAU is to gather the physiological information from sensors and forward to the CSU for processing and verification purposes.

Fig: Over view of Blue Eyes systems

The blue tooth module, which is integrated with the mobile device (DAU), provides a wireless interface between the Central System Unit (CSU) and the user or operator having the sensors. PIN codes and ID cards are assigned to the entire operator’s for authentication purposes. The device uses a five-key keyboard, beeper and LCD display for the interaction with the operators and if, any unwanted situation occurs, the machine uses these devices to inform the operators. The ‘voice’ information from the user is transferred with the help of a headset, which is interfaced with the Data Acquisition Unit using a mini jack plug. DAU incorporates various hardware modules like system-core Bluetooth section, Atmel 89C52 microcontroller, EEPROM, Beeper, LCD display (HD44780), LED indicator, voltage level monitors and 6 AA batteries.

Fig: Data Acquisition Unit (DAU) Components

Central system Unit (CSU) of Blue Eyes technology:

CSU is the next squint of wireless-network connection in the Blue Eyes technology. The CSU mainly contains codec (PCM Codec commonly used for voice information transmission) and a wireless blue tooth module. This CSU section is integrated to a personal computer using USB, parallel and serial cable. The mini-jack socket is used for audio data accessing. The program containing the operators personal ID is amalgamating to the personal computer through the serial and power ports. The microcontroller (Atmel- 89C2051) inside the unit handles the I2C EEPROM- programming and UART transmission.

Fig: Central system Unit (CSU)Components

The Software used in Blue Eyes Technology:

The operator’s physiological condition is continually supervised by this Blue Eyes technology software. The software will respond in real time according to the operator’s physiological condition. This software helps to transfer the data or information from managers to the data analyzers. Then it transfers the processed information from this data analyzers unit to the GUI controls and data analyzers. At last, the data visualization module supports a user supervisor interface section. The visualization module is in the off-line mode and it will continually fetch the information from database and also records the video, audio and physiological parameters. Thus ‘Blue Eyes’ software enables the supervisor to know about the physiological condition of the operators.

The Blue Eyes Technology and Its Basic Structure:

The objective of Blue Eyes technology is to design a computational machine having sensory and perceptual abilities like human beings. Blue Eyes technology uses most modern cameras, microphones and advanced non-obtrusive sensing techniques to interact with humans and understand the emotions of human beings. The machine has the ability to grasp the eye movement of the user, the needs of the user and also can understand the emotional and physical states of a user in front of the machine. The process of making a computer having sensing and emotional capabilities is known as “Affective Computing”.

The steps involved for designing such type of computers are given below.

1. Process of giving sensing capacity.
2. Human Emotion detection or Affect Detection.
3. Respond appropriately and properly.

1.  Process of giving sensing capacity:

Blue Eyes utilizes many sensor mechanisms, which is equivalent for the ears, eyes and other sensory organs that human beings used to express emotions and recognize each other. Blue Eyes uses voice recognition software, cameras and biometric sensors to understand and respond to the emotional levels of humans. The voice recognition software can perceive not only what is being spoken but also the tone how it is said. High resolution cameras are used for tracking the minute facial expressions, hand gestures and eye movements. Biometric sensors are used for measuring and analyzing the muscle tension, body temperature, blood pressure and other physiological gesture correlated with emotions.

2. Detecting human emotions/ Affect Detection:

In Blue Eyes technology, the machines have the ability to identify the minor variations in the moods of human beings. Say a person may strike the keyboard hastily or softly depends on his mood like happy or in angry. The Blue Eyes enables the machines to identify these minor emotional variations of human beings even by a single touch on the mouse or key board and the machines started to react with the users according to this emotional levels. This is done with the guidance of intelligent devices like “Emotion Mouse”. Along with this Emotion Mouse, Simple User Interest Tracker (SUITOR) and Artificial Intelligent Speech Recognition are equipped with the Blue Eyes technology to understand the speech and identify the interest of the peoples at that instance of time.

For implementing the Affective Computing we need Emotion Sensors.

Types of Emotion Sensors used in Blue Eyes Technology:

• For Hand - Emotion Mouse:

The major aim of Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is to develop a smart and adaptive computer system. These types of project must include speech recognition, eye tracking, facial recognition, gesture recognition etc. software and hardware. Similarly in Blue Eyes technologies, we need to build a system have the ability to identify all these perceptual abilities of human beings. In Blue Eyes, the machines have the ability to identify the minor variations in the moods of human beings. Say a person may strike the keyboard hastily or softly depends on his mood like happy or in angry. The Blue Eyes technology enables the machines to identify these minor emotional variations of human beings even by a single touch on the mouse or key board and the machines started to react with the users according to this emotional levels. This is done with the guidance of intelligent devices like “Emotion Mouse”. Actually this Emotion Mouse is an input device to track the emotions of a user by a simple touch on it. The Emotion Mouse is designed to evaluate and identify the user’s emotions such as fear, surprise, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust etc. when he/she is interacting with computer. The main objective of the Emotion Mouse is to gather the user’s physical and physiological information by a simple touch. 

• For Eye - Expression Glass:

Expression Glass is an alternative for the usually available machine vision face or eye recognition methods. By analyzing pattern recognition methods and facial muscle variations, the glass senses and identifies the expressions such as interest or confusion of the user. The prototype used for this glass uses piezoelectric sensors.

MAGIC Pointing:                                        

The Eye gaze tracking methods explores a new way for handling ‘eye gaze’ for man machine interfacing. The gaze tracking has been deliberated as an excellent pointing method for giving input to computers. But many drawbacks exist with this traditional eye gaze tracking methods. To overcome these difficulties an alternative approach – termed as MAGIC - Manual and Gaze Input Cascaded – is projected. In this approach, eye gaze pointing appears to the user as a manual job, utilized for fine selection and manipulation processes. Even so, a large amount of the cursor movement is removed by bending the cursor to the eye gaze portion, which surrounds the target. The selection and pointing of the curser is primarily controlled by manual means but also guided by a gaze tracking mechanism and is commonly known as MAGIC Pointing. The main aim of MAGIC pointing is to use ‘gaze’ to warp the previous position (home) of the curser to the locality of the target, reasonably where the user was looking at, so as to reduce the cursor motion amplitude required for target selection. When the cursor position is identified, only a small movement is needed by the user to click on the target by a manual input device that is to accomplish Manual Acquisition with Gaze Initiated Cursor or Manual and Gaze Input Cascaded (MAGIC) pointing. Two MAGIC Pointing methods – conservative and liberal –in terms of cursor placement and target identification, were outlined, analyzed and executed with an eye tracker unit.

    

           Fig: Liberal MAGIC pointing Technique            Fig:The conservativeM AGIC pointing Technique

 Advantages of MAGIC Pointing Technique:

•  Reduced physical effort compared with the traditional manual pointing techniques.
•  Greater spontaneity than traditional manual pointing.
•  Greater accuracy.
•  Faster speed of operation than manual pointing.

Drawbacks of MAGIC Pointing Technique:

The unconscious jittery movement that an eye continually makes and also the one degree size of the fovea, eye gaze method is not accurately enough to perform UI widgets such as slider handles, scrollbars and hyperlinks on the Graphic User Interfaces. Sometimes the movement of the eye is spontaneously controlled while sometimes it is uncontrollable. In MAGIC pointing many methods such as eye blinking and continuous looking etc. are used for target selection procedures. But sometime it is not working properly because if a user does not look at a particular target continuously for a predetermined threshold value, the target will not be selected. Thus there are more chances for false selections.

The Simple User Interest Tracker (SUITOR):

The Simple User Interest Tracker is revolutionary approaches towards the design of machine having the ability to maintain an intimate relationship between the humans and the computers. The SUTOR continuously analyzes the user that where his eye focus on the personal computer screen. The SUITOR has the ability to determining the topic of interest of the user and also according to this it can able to deliver the appropriate data to a handheld device.

Artificial Intelligent Speech Recognition used in Blue Eyes Technology:

For implementing the Artificial Intelligent Speech Recognition system in Blue Eyes technology, the working environment should be very important. The manner of the user’s speech, grammar, noise type, noise level and the position of the microphone are some important factors that may influence the features of speech recognition system. In Artificial Intelligent Speech Recognition system, an automatic call handling method is implemented without any telephone operator.

Two basic ideas are included in the Artificial intelligence (AI),

• Study the thought of human beings.
• Represents the thought process of human beings through robots, computers etc.

Actually Artificial intelligence (AI) denotes the behavior of a computer or any machines but it is carried out by the humans is called as ‘intelligent’. This AI makes machines more power full, useful, and smarter and also it is less expensive compared to natural intelligence. Natural language processing (NLP) makes artificial intelligence systems to communicate English. The main goal of the Natural language processing (NLP) is to understand the users input and react according to these inputs. The input data or words are continuously scanned and finds matches against inside stored known data or words. And after identifying the key words, the corresponding actions are carried out by the machine. In this way the Blue Eyes technology enables the users to communicate with the machines with their own languages.

Conclusion:

BLUE EYES technological approach assure a convenient technique, that simplifies the life by supporting more elegant and user friendly provision in computing devices. The day is very near, that this Blue Eyes technology will advance its way towards your house hold devices and makes you lazier. In future, even this Blue Eyes will reach as your hand held mobile device.

PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY (PART-3)

PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY (PART-3) Fascinating facts about the invention of the Ballpoint Pen by Ladislas Biro in 1935. BALLPOINT PEN

The first great success for the ballpoint pen came on an October morning in 1945 when a crowd of over 5,000 people jammed the entrance of New York’s Gimbels Department Store. The day before, Gimbels had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times promoting the first sale of ballpoints in the United States. The ad described the new pen as a "fantastic... miraculous fountain pen ... guaranteed to write for two years without refilling!" On that first day of sales, Gimbels sold out its entire stock of 10,000 pens-at $12.50 each!

Actually, this "new" pen wasn't new at all and didn't work much better than ballpoint pens that had been produced ten years earlier. The story begins in 1888 when John Loud, an American leather tanner, patented a roller-ball-tip marking pen. Loud’s invention featured a reservoir of ink and a roller ball that applied the thick ink to leather hides. John Loud’s pen was never produced, nor were any of the other 350 patents for ball-type pens issued over the next thirty years. The major problem was the ink - if the ink was thin the pens leaked, and if it was too thick, they clogged. Depending on the temperature, the pen would sometimes do both.The next stage of development came almost fifty years after Loud’s patent, with an improved version invented in Hungary in 1935 by Ladislas Biro and his brother, Georg.   Ladislas Biro was very talented and confident of his abilities, but he had never had a pursuit that kept his interest and earned him a good living.  He had studied medicine, art, and hypnotism, and in 1935 he was editing a small newspaper-where he was frustrated by the amount of time he wasted filling fountain pens and cleaning up ink smudges.  Besides that, the sharp tip of his fountain pen often scratched or tore through the newsprint (paper). Determined to develop a better pen, Ladislas and Georg (who was a chemist) set about making models of new designs and formulating better inks to use in them. One summer day while vacationing at the seashore, the Biro brothers met an interesting elderly gentleman, Augustine Justo, who happened to be the president of Argentina.   After the brothers showed him their model of a ballpoint pen, President Justo urged them to set up a factory in Argentina.  When World War II broke out in Europe, a few years later, the Biros fled to Argentina, stopping in Paris along the way to patent their pen. Once in Argentina, the Biros found several investors willing to finance their invention, and in 1943 they had set up a manufacturing plant.  Unfortunately, the pens were a spectacular failure. The Biro pen, like the designs that had preceded it, depended on gravity for the ink to flow to the roller ball. This meant that the pens worked only when they were held more or less straight up, and even then the ink flow was sometimes too heavy, leaving smudgy globs on the paper.  The Biro brothers returned to their laboratory and devised a new design, which relied on "capillsry action" rather than gravity to feed the ink.  The rough "ball" at the end of the pen acted like a metal sponge, and with this improvement ink could flow more smoothly to the ball, and the pen could be held at a slant rather than straight up.  One year later, the Biros were selling their new, improved ballpoint pen throughout Argentina. But it still was not a smashing success, and the men ran out of money. The greatest interest in the ballpoint pen came from American flyers who had been to Argentina during World War II. Apparently it was ideal for pilots because it would work well at high altitudes and, unlike fountain pens, did not have to be refilled frequently. The U.S. Department of State sent specifications to several American pen manufacturers asking them to develop a similar pen.  In an attempt to corner the market, the Eberhard Faber Company paid the Biro brothers $500,000 for the rights to manufacture their ballpoint pen in the United States. Eberhard Faber later sold its rights to the Eversharp Company, but neither was quick about putting a ballpoint pen on the market. There were still too many bugs in the Biro design. Meanwhile, in a surprise move, a fifty-four-year-old Chicago salesman named Milton Reynolds became the first American manufacturer to market a ballpoint pen successfully. While vacationing in Argentina, Reynolds had seen Biro’s pen in the stores and thought that the novel product would sell well in America.  Because many of the patents had expired, Reynolds thought he could avoid any legal problems, and so he went about copying much of the Biros’ design.  It was Reynolds who made the deal with Gimbels to be the first retail store in America to sell ballpoint pens.  He set up a makeshift factory with 300 workers who began stamping out pens from whatever aluminum was not being used for the war.  In the months that followed, Reynolds made millions of pens and became fairly wealthy, as did many other manufacturers who decided to cash in on the new interest. The competition among pen manufacturers during the mid-1940s became quite hectic, with each one claiming new and better features. Reynolds even claimed that his ballpoint could write under water, and he hired Esther Williams, the swimmer and movie star, to help prove it. Another manufacturer claimed that its pen would write through ten carbon copies, while still another demonstrated that its pen would write up-side down.  However, the effect of the slogans and advertising wore off as soon as the owners discovered the many problems that still existed with the ballpoint pens. As the sale of the pens began to drop, so did the price, and the once expensive luxury now would not even sell for as little as 19 cents.  Once again, it looked as if the ballpoint pen would be a complete failure.  For the pen to regain the public’s favor and trust, somebody would have to invent one that was smooth writing, quick drying, nonskipping, nonfading, and most important didn’t leak. Two men, each with his own pen company, delivered these results.  The first was Patrick J. Frawley Jr.  Frawley met Fran Seech, an unemployed Los Angeles chemist who had lost his job when the ballpoint pen company he was working for had gone out of business. Seech had been working on improvements in ballpoint ink, and on his own he continued his experiments in a tiny cubbyhole home laboratory.  Frawley was so impressed with his work that he bought Seech’s new ink formula in 1949 and started the Frawley Pen Company.  Within one year, Frawley was in the ballpoint pen business with yet another improved model-the first pen with a retractable ballpoint tip and the first with no-smear ink.  To overcome many of the old prejudices against the leaky and smeary ballpoint pen of the past, Frawley initiated an imaginative and risky advertising campaign, a promotion he called Project Normandy.  Frawley instructed his salesmen to barge into the offices of retail store buyers and scribble all over the executives’ shirts with one of the new pens.  Then the salesman would offer to replace the shirt with an even more expensive one if the ink did not wash out entirely.   The shirts did come clean and the promotion worked.  As more and more retailers accepted the pen, which Frawley named the "Papermate," sales began to skyrocket. Within a few years, the Papermate pen was selling in the hundreds of millions.The other man to bring the ballpoint pen successfully back to life was Marcel Bich, a French manufacturer of penholders and pen cases.  Bich was appalled at the poor quality of the ballpoint pens he had seen and he was also shocked at their high cost. But he recognized that the ballpoint was a firmly established innovation and he resolved to design a high-quality pen at a low price that would scoop the market.  He went to the Biro brothers and arranged to pay them a royalty on their patent.  Then for two years Marcel Bich studied the detailed construction of every ballpoint pen on the market, often working with a microscope.  By 1952 Bich was ready to introduce his new wonder: a clear-barreled, smooth-writing, non-leaky, inexpensive ballpoint pen he called the "Ballpoint Bic."  The ballpoint pen had finally become a practical writing instrument.  The public accepted it without complaint, and today it is as standard a writing implement as the pencil. In England, they are still called Biros, and many Bic models also say "Biro" on the side of the pen, as a testament to their primary inventors.

PAST PRESENT FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY (PART-2)

MOBILE PHONE

PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY (PART -1)

PURPOSE

To broaden students’ awareness of technology by examining inventions of the past and present and by learning how inventions inspire and lead to the development of other inventions.

Technology is an intrinsic part of a cultural system and it both shapes and reflects the system's values. (Science for All Americans, p. 25.)

In the broadest sense, technology extends our abilities to change the world: to cut, shape, or put together materials; to move things from one place to another; to reach farther with our hands, voices, and senses. We use technology to try to change the world to suit us better. The changes may relate to survival needs such as food, shelter, or defense, or they may relate to human aspirations such as knowledge, art, or control. But the results of changing the world are often complicated and unpredictable. (Science for All Americans, p. 25.)

Students at this level can become interested in comparing present technology with that of earlier times, as well as the technology in their everyday lives with that of other places in the world. They can imagine what life would be like without certain technology, as well as what new technology the future might hold. Reading about other civilizations or earlier times than their own will illustrate the central role that different technologies play. (Benchmarks for Science Literacy, p. 54.)

3G

THE FULL FORM OF 3G IS-"3RD GENERATION" !
when mobiles ist came into existence they were referred to as 1G,then after some more elaborate and distinctive features the technology came to be known as 2g,and now with more wonderful features on the list,with a certain full movie download facility it is well said to be 3G.

GPRS

GPRS-General Packet Radio Service

GSM-The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM)

CDMA-Code Division Multiple Access

IVRS-Interactive Voice Response System

chat

It is Conversational Hypertext Across Technology.