"Mommy has brought the car to the big gasoline boobie!"

- mike lee -

...Wednesdays at Mamie's Cafe on the Avenue in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore.

- mike lee -

:-)

...appeared in front of our house today.

I did a double-take when I saw a jet engine outside of one of the entrances to Union Station this morning. Was this some new homeland defense scheme? No, the display is part of this week's General Electric technology expo.

The Guiness Book of World Records says the GE90 is the world's most powerful jet engine. It stands 13 feet high by 25 feet long and weighs 20,000 pounds. It has the power to blow two-ton boulders about as if they were pebbles.

It is indeed a beautiful piece of machinery.

- mike lee - washington, dc

MIT research scientist Henry Holtzman, working with the boys in the Physical Language Workshop, gave a hands-on workshop on RFID or Radio Frequency IDentification technology this morning (pic 1). RFID uses stickers/tags (pic 2) with unique ID numbers stored in a chip with an antenna through which external readers can retrieve the ID. These tags cost about a dollar each, and less in large quantities. Walmart is gearing up to use 8 billion of these tags a year to track shipping palettes and individual boxes of product. The FDA wants to tag every drug bottle to control theft and counterfitting.

Henry and the boys custom built a low-cost reader device (pic 3) to use in experiments in the lab. The reader consists of about $125 worth of mostly off-the-shelf parts that can read an ID from a tag at close range, beep to confirm, and transmit the data via an ethernet connection to a web server port.

In the hands-on session, we picked a toy from a box--mine was a foam rubber brain--to affix a tag (pic 4).

At the first workstation, we photographed our object with a web cam which posted the resulting image to the Treehouse collaboration system which has a photo image manager (pic 5). We typed in a name for our image. In another interface, we opened our image and waved the tagged object over the reader to assign the unique ID to the named image.

At the last station (pic 6), you could wave the tagged objects over one to three readers to have the photos retrieved. The names of the photos were then sent as queries to ConceptNet, a database of over 680,000 common sense facts about everyday life, which returned a statement. The words "kleenex," "brain," and "toy car" returned: "Man tire seat metal key leather heading." OK, well the idea was cool anyway.

Best of all, I got to walk out of the lab with a complete kit (pic 7) of our own reader and tags to play with.

We bugged out right after the closing remarks at 1pm to catch an earlier flight to beat the approaching snow storm. I'm resting my brain at home now.

- mike lee - baltimore

Ed Burton, inventor of the Sodaplay Construction Set was having AV problems before his talk this morning due not having a special adapter for his tablet PC. I had to smile when he was surrounded by three MIT professors, a grad student, the director of the Media Lab, and two conference staffers all trying different solutions. The audience took a 10 minute break during which time the problem was solved. Ed went on to give an excellent talk. - mike lee - cambridge

Today is the first day tenants are moving into the 430,000 sqaure foot multipurpose Stata Center, which was designed by Frank Gehry. The building is two blocks from the Media Lab.

- mike lee - cambridge

After a morning of talks by Media Lab faculty and students on such topics as "meaning machines," "ambient intelligence," "creative learning," and "deep interfaces, the symposia attendees broke for lunch.

After lunch, a three-hour open house offered a chance for us all to visit some of the 350 research projects throughout the building. The experience--my second time--was like attending a science fair funded by millions of dollars. Of the dozens of projects we visited, including encounters with such way-edgy technologies like robotic human limbs, eye trackers, and RFID systems, the relative calm and simplicity of the Evocative and Extended Portraits project (above) left an impression on me. These were matted and framed LCD panels that displayed black & white portraits of people that animated in response to viewers' physical presence and reactions in proximity to electronic sensors.

After 2 1/2 hours of walking the lab, my brain was saturated. After drinks with my boss, and dinner with Sandy at the Harvest Restaurant at Harvard Square, I'm back in my hotel room enjoying the fading echoes of today's intensive technology bazaar. After more talks and a hands-on workshop tomorrow morning, I fly home.

- mike lee - cambridge