Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Grand Final - DLD(Digital Life Design) 11
In the closing keynote of the DLD Conference in Germany, soon to be former Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage, notably less than a week after passing on the reins of the company to Google co-founder Larry Page.
These are my live notes from the keynote:
Thank you for inviting me. I wanted to take a moment to praise mr. Burda for what you have accomplished in general, and with this event. I don’t know of a more better-done invitation-only event on the globe, so my congratulations to you.
I hope you do this for many years to come.
I have a lot of things I wanted to talk about. Important announcement for starters: we had a good year and very strong last quarter.
Our businesses are doing very well around the globe, and as a result I’m happy to announce we’ll be adding 1,000 new employees in Europe and make some significant investments.
Hundreds of these people will be located right here in our technology center in Munich.
So, I think my next decade at Google will be even more interesting than the first. Technology will finally start doing what we want, instead of us telling technology what we want it to do.
(He’s giving some examples of innovation in computing)
Three things I want to highlight. In the area of mobile, the smartphone is the device of our time. In all forms, so including tablets, there are examples abound. If you have a child, you’ll notice they’ll have two states: asleep or online.
In two years, smartphone sales will surpass PC sales, and the growth factor is increasing. Mobile is growing 8 times faster than the equivalent of the PC at its time. We see it in our data at Google, and I’m sure you can see it too.
The majority of people will soon go online from their phones more than from their computers. Landlines will disappear.
If you think you like your mobile phone, image if you’ve never had any computing device and a solid smartphone is your first. That’s transformative, a mobile revolution.
That’s where my ‘mobile first’ motto comes from.
Another trend I want to highlight: I would argue that devices that are not connected to the Internet are no longer interesting. Take every single device you know that has a CPU, and start thinking what will happen if it can connect to your WiFi network.
The networks, by the way, are seeing their own evolution – look at LTE networks that are forthcoming. It’s an order of magnitude of improvement, and it will be global, even amazingly in the United States.
Interestingly, Germany is the leader in LTE deployment in Europe. One of the interesting estimates is that there are about 35 billion devices connected to the Internet. Soon, there will be so many that we’ll stop counting. We need to give credit to the backend part of the equation.
Typical example: we have this voice translation feature, real-time translation from one language to another using nothing but voice. It’s magic, but at the same time it isn’t, so we look at ‘how did this happen’?
In the backend of that service, there are thousands of servers, which by the way you don’t have to pay for. We need to talk about that at some point.
But to me, this changes the game. How many wars have started because of miscommunication? Now we can try and solve that.
You can do other things with your phone, but we must always remember that there’s a lot of infrastructure and things going on in the background.
Now, of course, we can digitize everything. If you think about it, computers can give you digital senses you didn’t even know about. Think of it as augmented humanity, computers actually making us better humans.
Take location-aware apps. For example when you’re walking on a street and your phone can tell you that you need something from a store that you’re walking by. That’s the future.
What drives us at Google? We basically want to give you your time back, make things faster, speed up search and especially more personal. But always with your permission, I have to stress. You decide where the boundary lies.
So imagine your phone knowing you really well, your likes and dislikes – the perfect walking companion.
(Schmidt mentions the huge growth of Android and Chrome, which I’m leaving out)
The Internet is the greatest disruptor of all times. It has replaced the economics of scarcity with economics of abundance. You’re everywhere all the time. It’s going through industry after industry after industry. You can now literally reach a billion people online, every day – who would have imagined?
It’s also terrifying, because it has a lot to do with information, and information is still power. I don’t know how society will work out conflicts on a variety of levels, but I do know people care a lot about it.
I don’t think society has fundamentally figured out how to deal with this abundance of connectivity, but it’s something I think needs to be figured out soon.
We’re just at the beginning. Which I think is why you need to keep doing this conference, by the way.
I’m a computer scientist, so I think computer sciences can solve a lot of problems – I may be a little biased.
Imagine a near future where you never forget anything, because computers, with your permission, remember everything. I used to love getting lost, wandering about without knowing where the hell I was. It’s terrible, you can’t get lost anymore.
You know your position to the foot, and by the way, so do your friends. With your permission. Computers can predict whether you’re meeting your friends as you’re walking towards their house, for example. With your permission again.
I’ve been surprised how much we can know about the earth thanks to Google Earth. We have the ability to know everything that goes on, anywhere, at all times. We know climate change is real, and we need fact-based discussions about it ,and technology helps us do that.
At Google, we’ll help you sort things out.
You never travel alone anymore, your friends are always with you. You’re never bored again, you ‘waste your time’ going online instead of watching television.
You’re never out of ideas.
And what is it about this car thing? Don’t you think computers should be driving cars? We’re doing some things at Google to experiment with self-driving cars, which I think is very exciting.
So never lonely, never bored, all the world’s information at your fingertips.
And importantly, not just for the elite. Historically, information has always been reserved for the elite, for various reasons. Our vision is that information will be accessible to every single people on the planet, and we’ll help sort it.
And it will not just be in the Western world. There are about a billion smartphones in the world, and in emerging markets the growth rate is much faster.
Our next achievement is bringing people in emerging markets into ‘our’ world.
I would argue that the future of all of us should be organized around a future of trying to do good. It’s pretty clear to me this is going to happen. This is a future that gives people time back to do things that really matter.
Louis C.K. On Leno: Black People Get To Complain More (VIDEO)
The always funny and often controversial Louis C.K. appeared on "The Tonight Show" Friday night and provided Jay Leno's audience with some intriguing material on race. In this third portion of his interview with Leno, C.K. starts off talking about his daughters. Leno asks how the girls are doing and C.K. responds that of course they're great because they're "two little white girls in America," sparking a set of jokes about race that had the audience and Leno cracking up.
Leno tried to steer the conversation toward the holidays, but C.K. decided to use the remainder of the interview to clarify remarks about his daughters complaining too much about things like bubblegum-flavored medicine.
"I'm not trying to say that if you're white you can't complain," C.K. said. "I'm just saying that if you're black you get to complain more."
Leno's audience immediately broke into laughter, as well as Leno who said "don't tell the band that" before the camera panned to the nearly all-African American band.
Louis C.K. followed up with a great bit about white people insisting year after year that slavery was 100 years farther back in history than it really is. He also noted that if you see a black person with gray hair, that they probably remember what it was like to have to use a different toilet so, "give them a little time to be cranky."
Inside China with Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google in China. Interesting talk about what is going
Inside China with Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google in China. Interesting talk about what is going on in their very vibrant market.
Van Jones: The economic injustice of plastic
About this talk
Van Jones lays out a case against plastic pollution from the perspective of social justice. Because plastic trash, he shows us, hits poor people and poor countries "first and worst," with consequences we all share no matter where we live and what we earn. At TEDxGPGP, he offers a few powerful ideas to help us reclaim our throwaway planet.
I am honored to be here, and I'm honored to talk about this topic, which I think is of grave importance. We've been talking a lot about the horrific impacts of plastic on the planet and on other species, but plastic hurts people too, especially poor people. And both in the production of plastic, the use of plastic and the disposal of plastic, the people who have bull's-eye on their foreheads are poor people. People got very upset when the BP oil spill happened for very good reason. People thought about, "Oh, my God. This is terrible, this oil. It's in the water. It's going to destroy the living systems there. People are going to be hurt. This is a terrible thing, that the oil is going to hurt the people in the Gulf."
What people don't think about is what if the oil had made it safely to shore. What if the oil actually got where it was trying to go? Not only would it have been burned in engines and added to global warming, but there's a place called "cancer alley", and the reason it's called "cancer alley" is because the petrochemical industry takes that oil and turns it into plastic and, in the process, kills people. It shortens the lives of the people who live there in the Gulf. So oil and petrochemicals are not just a problem when there's a spill, they're a problem when there's not. And what we don't often appreciate is the price that poor people pay for us to have these disposable products.
The other thing that we don't often appreciate is it's not just at the point of production that poor people suffer. Poor people also suffer at the point of use. Those of us who earn a certain income level, we have something called choice. The reason why you want to work hard and have a job and not be poor and broke is so you can have choices, economic choices. We actually get a chance to choose not to use products that have dangerous, poisonous plastic in them. Other people who are poor don't have those choices. So low-income people often are the ones who are buying the products that have those dangerous chemicals in them that their children are using. Those are the people who wind up ingesting a disproportionate amount of this poisonous plastic and using it. And people say, "Well, they should just buy a different product." Well the problem with being poor is you don't have those choices. You often have to buy the cheapest products. The cheapest products are often the most dangerous.
And if that weren't bad enough, if it wasn't just the production of plastic that's giving people cancer in places like "cancer alley" and shortening lives and hurting poor kids at the point of use, at the point of disposal, once again, it's poor people who bear the burden. Often, we think we're doing a good thing. You're in your office, and you're drinking your bottled water, or whatever it is, and you think to yourself, "Hey, I'm going to throw this away. No, I'm going to be virtuous. I'm going to put it in the blue bin." You think, "I put mine in the blue bin." And then you look at your colleague and say, "Why, you cretin. You put yours in the white bin." And we use that as a moral tickle. We feel so good about ourselves. Maybe I'll forgive myself. Not you, but I feel this way. And so we kind of have this kind of moral feel-good moment.
But if we were to be able to follow that little bottle on its journey, we would be shocked to discover that, all too often, that bottle is going to be put on a boat. It's going to go all the way across the ocean at some expense. And it's going to wind up in a developing country -- often China. I think in our minds we imagine somebody's going to take the little bottle, say, "Oh, little bottle. We're so happy to see you little bottle." (Laughter) "You've served so well." He's given a little bottle massage, a little bottle medal. And say, "What would you like to do next?" The little bottle says, "I just don't know." But that's not actually what happens. That bottle winds up getting burned. Recycling of plastic in many developing countries means the incineration of the plastic, the burning of the plastic, which releases incredible toxic chemicals and, once again, kills people. And so poor people who are making these products in petrochemical centers like "cancer alley"; poor people who are consuming these products disproportionately; and then poor people, who even at the tail end of the recycling are having their lives shortened, are all being harmed greatly by this addiction that we have to disposability.
Now you think to yourself -- because I know how you are -- you say, "That sure is terrible for those poor people. It's just awful, those poor people. I hope someone does something to help them." But what we don't understand is -- is, here we are in Los Angeles. We worked very hard to get the smog reduction happening here in Los Angeles. But guess what? Because they're doing so much dirty production in Asia now, because the environmental laws don't protect the people in Asia now, almost all of the clean air gains and the toxic air gains that we've achieved here in California have been wiped out by dirty air coming over from Asia. So we all are being hit. We all are being impacted. It's just the poor people get hit first and worst. But the dirty production, the burning of toxins, the lack of environmental standards in Asia is actually creating so much dirty air pollution it's coming across the ocean and has erased our gains here in California. We're back where we were in the 1970's. And so we're on one planet, and we have to be able to get to the root of these problems.
Well the root of this problem, in my view, is the idea of disposability itself. You see, if you understand the link between what we're doing to poison and pollute the planet and what we're doing to poor people, you arrive at a very troubling, but also very helpful insight: In order to trash the planet, you have to trash people. But if you create a world where you don't trash people, you can't trash the planet. So now we are at a moment where the coming together of social justice as an idea and ecology as an idea, we finally can now see that they are really, at the end of the day, one idea. And it's the idea that we don't have disposable anything. We don't have disposable resources. We don't have disposable species. And we don't have disposable people either. We don't have a throw-away planet, and we don't have throw-away children -- it's all precious.
And as we all begin to come back to that basic understanding, new opportunities for action begin to emerge. Biomimicry, which is something that is an emerging science, winds up being a very important social justice idea. People who are just learning about this stuff, biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species. Democracy, by the way, means respecting the wisdom of all people -- and we'll get to that. But biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species. It turns out we're pretty clever species. This big cortex, or whatever, we're pretty proud of ourselves. But if we want to make something hard, we come up, "I know, I'm going to make a hard substance. I know, I'm going to get vacuums and furnaces and drag stuff out of the ground and get things hot and poison and pollute, but I got this hard thing. I'm so clever." And you look behind you, and there's destruction all around you. But guess what? You're so clever, but you're not as clever as a clam.
A clam shell's hard. There's no vacuums, there's no big furnaces, there's no poison, there no pollution. It turns out that our other species has figured out a long time ago how to create many of the things that we need using biological processes that nature knows how to use well. Well that insight of biomimicry, of our scientists finally realizing that we have as much to learn from other species -- I don't mean taking a mouse and sticking it with stuff. I don't mean it from that way: abusing the little species -- I mean actually respecting them, respecting what they've achieved. That's called biomimicry, and that opens the door to zero waste production, zero pollution production -- that we could actually enjoy a high quality of life, a high standard of living without trashing the planet.
Well that idea of biomimicry, respecting the wisdom of all species, combined with the idea of democracy and social justice, respecting the wisdom and the worth of all people, would give us a different society. We would have a different economy. We would have a green society that Dr. King would be proud of. That should be the goal. And the way that we get there is to first of all recognize that the idea of disposability, not only hurts the species we've talked about, but it even corrupts our own society.
We're so proud to live here in California. We just had this vote, and everybody's like, "Well, not in our state. I don't know what those other states were doing." (Laughter) Just so proud. And, yeah, I'm proud too. But California, though we lead the world in some of the green stuff, we also, unfortunately, lead the world in some of the gulag stuff. California has one of the highest incarceration rates of all the 50 states. We have a moral challenge in this moment. We are passionate about rescuing some dead materials from the landfill, but sometimes not as passionate about rescuing living beings, living people. And I would say that we live in a country -- five percent of the world's population, 25 percent of the greenhouse gases, but also 25 percent of the world's prisoners. One out of every four people locked up anywhere in the world is locked up right here in the United States. So that is consistent with this idea that disposability is something we believe in.
And yet, as a movement that has to broaden its constituency, that has to grow, that has to reach out beyond our natural comfort zone, one of the challenges to the success of this movement, of getting rid of things like plastic and helping the economy shift, is people look at our movement with some suspicion. And they ask a question, and the question is: How can these people be so passionate? A poor person, a low-income person, somebody in "cancer alley", somebody in Watts, somebody in Harlem, somebody on an Indian reservation, might say to themselves, and rightfully so, "How can these people be so passionate about making sure that a plastic bottle has a second chance in life, or an aluminum can has a second chance, and yet, when my child gets in trouble and goes to prison, he doesn't get a second chance?" How can this movement be so passionate about saying we don't have throw-away stuff, no throw-away dead materials, and yet accept throw-away lives and throw-away communities like "cancer alley"? And so we now get a chance to be truly proud of this movement. When we take on topics like this, it gives us that extra call to reach out to other movements and to become more inclusive and to grow. And we can finally get out of this crazy dilemma that we've been in.
Most of you are good, soft-hearted people. When you were younger, you cared about the whole world, and at some point somebody said you had to pick an issue, you had to boil your love down to an issue. Can't love the whole world -- you've got to work on trees, or you've got to work on immigration. You've got to shrink it down and be about one issue. And really, they fundamentally told you, "Are you going to hug a tree, or are you going to hug a child? Pick. Are you going to hug a tree, or are going to hug a child? Pick." Well, when you start working on issues like plastic, you realize that the whole thing is connected, and luckily most of us are blessed to have two arms. We can hug both.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Van Jones lays out a case against plastic pollution from the perspective of social justice. Because plastic trash, he shows us, hits poor people and poor countries "first and worst," with consequences we all share no matter where we live and what we earn. At TEDxGPGP, he offers a few powerful ideas to help us reclaim our throwaway planet.
I am honored to be here, and I'm honored to talk about this topic, which I think is of grave importance. We've been talking a lot about the horrific impacts of plastic on the planet and on other species, but plastic hurts people too, especially poor people. And both in the production of plastic, the use of plastic and the disposal of plastic, the people who have bull's-eye on their foreheads are poor people. People got very upset when the BP oil spill happened for very good reason. People thought about, "Oh, my God. This is terrible, this oil. It's in the water. It's going to destroy the living systems there. People are going to be hurt. This is a terrible thing, that the oil is going to hurt the people in the Gulf."
What people don't think about is what if the oil had made it safely to shore. What if the oil actually got where it was trying to go? Not only would it have been burned in engines and added to global warming, but there's a place called "cancer alley", and the reason it's called "cancer alley" is because the petrochemical industry takes that oil and turns it into plastic and, in the process, kills people. It shortens the lives of the people who live there in the Gulf. So oil and petrochemicals are not just a problem when there's a spill, they're a problem when there's not. And what we don't often appreciate is the price that poor people pay for us to have these disposable products.
The other thing that we don't often appreciate is it's not just at the point of production that poor people suffer. Poor people also suffer at the point of use. Those of us who earn a certain income level, we have something called choice. The reason why you want to work hard and have a job and not be poor and broke is so you can have choices, economic choices. We actually get a chance to choose not to use products that have dangerous, poisonous plastic in them. Other people who are poor don't have those choices. So low-income people often are the ones who are buying the products that have those dangerous chemicals in them that their children are using. Those are the people who wind up ingesting a disproportionate amount of this poisonous plastic and using it. And people say, "Well, they should just buy a different product." Well the problem with being poor is you don't have those choices. You often have to buy the cheapest products. The cheapest products are often the most dangerous.
And if that weren't bad enough, if it wasn't just the production of plastic that's giving people cancer in places like "cancer alley" and shortening lives and hurting poor kids at the point of use, at the point of disposal, once again, it's poor people who bear the burden. Often, we think we're doing a good thing. You're in your office, and you're drinking your bottled water, or whatever it is, and you think to yourself, "Hey, I'm going to throw this away. No, I'm going to be virtuous. I'm going to put it in the blue bin." You think, "I put mine in the blue bin." And then you look at your colleague and say, "Why, you cretin. You put yours in the white bin." And we use that as a moral tickle. We feel so good about ourselves. Maybe I'll forgive myself. Not you, but I feel this way. And so we kind of have this kind of moral feel-good moment.
But if we were to be able to follow that little bottle on its journey, we would be shocked to discover that, all too often, that bottle is going to be put on a boat. It's going to go all the way across the ocean at some expense. And it's going to wind up in a developing country -- often China. I think in our minds we imagine somebody's going to take the little bottle, say, "Oh, little bottle. We're so happy to see you little bottle." (Laughter) "You've served so well." He's given a little bottle massage, a little bottle medal. And say, "What would you like to do next?" The little bottle says, "I just don't know." But that's not actually what happens. That bottle winds up getting burned. Recycling of plastic in many developing countries means the incineration of the plastic, the burning of the plastic, which releases incredible toxic chemicals and, once again, kills people. And so poor people who are making these products in petrochemical centers like "cancer alley"; poor people who are consuming these products disproportionately; and then poor people, who even at the tail end of the recycling are having their lives shortened, are all being harmed greatly by this addiction that we have to disposability.
Now you think to yourself -- because I know how you are -- you say, "That sure is terrible for those poor people. It's just awful, those poor people. I hope someone does something to help them." But what we don't understand is -- is, here we are in Los Angeles. We worked very hard to get the smog reduction happening here in Los Angeles. But guess what? Because they're doing so much dirty production in Asia now, because the environmental laws don't protect the people in Asia now, almost all of the clean air gains and the toxic air gains that we've achieved here in California have been wiped out by dirty air coming over from Asia. So we all are being hit. We all are being impacted. It's just the poor people get hit first and worst. But the dirty production, the burning of toxins, the lack of environmental standards in Asia is actually creating so much dirty air pollution it's coming across the ocean and has erased our gains here in California. We're back where we were in the 1970's. And so we're on one planet, and we have to be able to get to the root of these problems.
Well the root of this problem, in my view, is the idea of disposability itself. You see, if you understand the link between what we're doing to poison and pollute the planet and what we're doing to poor people, you arrive at a very troubling, but also very helpful insight: In order to trash the planet, you have to trash people. But if you create a world where you don't trash people, you can't trash the planet. So now we are at a moment where the coming together of social justice as an idea and ecology as an idea, we finally can now see that they are really, at the end of the day, one idea. And it's the idea that we don't have disposable anything. We don't have disposable resources. We don't have disposable species. And we don't have disposable people either. We don't have a throw-away planet, and we don't have throw-away children -- it's all precious.
And as we all begin to come back to that basic understanding, new opportunities for action begin to emerge. Biomimicry, which is something that is an emerging science, winds up being a very important social justice idea. People who are just learning about this stuff, biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species. Democracy, by the way, means respecting the wisdom of all people -- and we'll get to that. But biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species. It turns out we're pretty clever species. This big cortex, or whatever, we're pretty proud of ourselves. But if we want to make something hard, we come up, "I know, I'm going to make a hard substance. I know, I'm going to get vacuums and furnaces and drag stuff out of the ground and get things hot and poison and pollute, but I got this hard thing. I'm so clever." And you look behind you, and there's destruction all around you. But guess what? You're so clever, but you're not as clever as a clam.
A clam shell's hard. There's no vacuums, there's no big furnaces, there's no poison, there no pollution. It turns out that our other species has figured out a long time ago how to create many of the things that we need using biological processes that nature knows how to use well. Well that insight of biomimicry, of our scientists finally realizing that we have as much to learn from other species -- I don't mean taking a mouse and sticking it with stuff. I don't mean it from that way: abusing the little species -- I mean actually respecting them, respecting what they've achieved. That's called biomimicry, and that opens the door to zero waste production, zero pollution production -- that we could actually enjoy a high quality of life, a high standard of living without trashing the planet.
Well that idea of biomimicry, respecting the wisdom of all species, combined with the idea of democracy and social justice, respecting the wisdom and the worth of all people, would give us a different society. We would have a different economy. We would have a green society that Dr. King would be proud of. That should be the goal. And the way that we get there is to first of all recognize that the idea of disposability, not only hurts the species we've talked about, but it even corrupts our own society.
We're so proud to live here in California. We just had this vote, and everybody's like, "Well, not in our state. I don't know what those other states were doing." (Laughter) Just so proud. And, yeah, I'm proud too. But California, though we lead the world in some of the green stuff, we also, unfortunately, lead the world in some of the gulag stuff. California has one of the highest incarceration rates of all the 50 states. We have a moral challenge in this moment. We are passionate about rescuing some dead materials from the landfill, but sometimes not as passionate about rescuing living beings, living people. And I would say that we live in a country -- five percent of the world's population, 25 percent of the greenhouse gases, but also 25 percent of the world's prisoners. One out of every four people locked up anywhere in the world is locked up right here in the United States. So that is consistent with this idea that disposability is something we believe in.
And yet, as a movement that has to broaden its constituency, that has to grow, that has to reach out beyond our natural comfort zone, one of the challenges to the success of this movement, of getting rid of things like plastic and helping the economy shift, is people look at our movement with some suspicion. And they ask a question, and the question is: How can these people be so passionate? A poor person, a low-income person, somebody in "cancer alley", somebody in Watts, somebody in Harlem, somebody on an Indian reservation, might say to themselves, and rightfully so, "How can these people be so passionate about making sure that a plastic bottle has a second chance in life, or an aluminum can has a second chance, and yet, when my child gets in trouble and goes to prison, he doesn't get a second chance?" How can this movement be so passionate about saying we don't have throw-away stuff, no throw-away dead materials, and yet accept throw-away lives and throw-away communities like "cancer alley"? And so we now get a chance to be truly proud of this movement. When we take on topics like this, it gives us that extra call to reach out to other movements and to become more inclusive and to grow. And we can finally get out of this crazy dilemma that we've been in.
Most of you are good, soft-hearted people. When you were younger, you cared about the whole world, and at some point somebody said you had to pick an issue, you had to boil your love down to an issue. Can't love the whole world -- you've got to work on trees, or you've got to work on immigration. You've got to shrink it down and be about one issue. And really, they fundamentally told you, "Are you going to hug a tree, or are you going to hug a child? Pick. Are you going to hug a tree, or are going to hug a child? Pick." Well, when you start working on issues like plastic, you realize that the whole thing is connected, and luckily most of us are blessed to have two arms. We can hug both.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Anders Ynnerman: Visualizing the medical data explosion
About this talk
Today medical scans produce thousands of images and terabytes of data for a single patient in mere seconds, but how do doctors parse this information and determine what's useful? At TEDxGöteborg, scientific visualization expert Anders Ynnerman shows us sophisticated new tools -- like virtual autopsies -- for analyzing this myriad data, and a glimpse at some sci-fi-sounding medical technologies in development. This talk contains some graphic medical imagery.
I will start by posing a little bit of a challenge, the challenge of dealing with data, data that we have to deal with in medical situations. It's really a huge challenge for us. And this is our beast of burden. This is a computer tomography machine -- a CT machine. It's a fantastic device. It uses X-rays, X-ray beams, that are rotating very fast around the human body. It takes about 30 seconds to go through the whole machine and is generating enormous amounts of information that comes out of the machine. So this is a fantastic machine that we can use for improving health care. But as I said, it's also a challenge for us. And the challenge is really found in this picture here. It's the medical data explosion that we're having right now. We're facing this problem. And let me step back in time.
Let's go back a few years in time and see what happened back then. These machines that came out -- they started coming in the 1970s -- they would scan human bodies, and they would generate about 100 images of the human body. And I've taken the liberty, just for clarity, to translate that to data slices. That would correspond to about 50 MB of data, which is small when you think about the data we can handle today just on normal mobile devices. If you translate that to phone books, it's about one meter of phone books in the pile. Looking at what we're doing today with these machines that we have, we can, just in a few seconds, get 24,000 images out of a body. And that would correspond to about 20 GB of data, or 800 phone books. And the pile would then be 200 meters of phone books. What's about to happen -- and we're seeing this, it's beginning -- a technology trend that's happening right now is that we're starting to look at time result situations as well. So we're getting the dynamics out of the body as well. And just assume that we will be collecting data during five seconds, and that would correspond to one terabyte of data. That's 800,000 books and 16 km of phone books. That's one patient, one data set. And this is what we have to deal with.
So this is really the enormous challenge that we have. And already today -- this is 25,000 images. Imagine the days when we had radiologists doing this. They would put up 25,000 images, they would go like this, "25,0000, okay, okay. There is the problem." They can't do that anymore; that's impossible. So we have to do something that's a little bit more intelligent than doing this. So what we do is we put all these slices together. Imagine that you slice your body in all these directions, and then you try to put the slices back together again into a pile of data, into a block of data. So this is really what we're doing. So this gigabyte or terabyte of data, we're putting it into this block. But of course, the block of data just contains the amount of X-ray that's been absorbed in each point in the human body. So what we need to do is to figure out a way of looking at the things we do want to look at and make things transparent that we don't want to look at. So transforming the data set into something that looks like this. And this is a challenge. This is a huge challenge for us to do that.
Using computers, even though they're getting faster and better all the time, it's a challenge to deal with gigabytes of data, terabytes of data and extracting the relevant information. I want to look at the heart, I want to look at the blood vessels, I want to look at the liver, maybe even find a tumor in some cases. So this is where this little dear comes into play. This is my daughter. This is as of 9:00 am this morning. She's playing a computer game. She's only two years old, and she's having a blast. So she's really the driving force behind the development of graphics processing units. As long as kids are playing computer games, graphics is getting better and better and better. So please go back home, tell your kids to play more games, because that's what I need.
So what's inside of this machine is what enables me to do the things that I'm doing with the medical data. So really what I'm doing is using these fantastic little devices. And you know, going back maybe 10 years in time when I got the funding to buy my first graphics computer. It was a huge machine. It was cabinets of processors and storage and everything. I paid about one million dollars for that machine. That machine is, today, about as fast as my iPhone. So every month there are new graphics cards coming out. And here is a few of the latest ones from the vendors -- NVIDIA, ATI, Intel is out there as well. And you know, for a few hundred bucks you can get these things and put them into your computer, and you can do fantastic things with these graphics cards. So this is really what's enabling us to deal with the explosion of data in medicine, together with some really nifty work in terms of algorithms -- compressing data, extracting the relevant information that people are doing research on.
So I'm going to show you a few examples of what we can do. This is a data set that was captured using a CT scanner. You can see that this is a full data. It's a woman. You can see the hair. You can see the individual structures of the woman. You can see that there is scattering of X-rays on the teeth, the metal in the teeth. That's where those artifacts are coming from. But fully interactively on standard graphics cards on a normal computer, I can just put in a clip plane. And of course all the data is inside, so I can start rotating, I can look at it from different angles, and I can see that this woman had a problem. She had a bleeding up in the brain, and that's been fixed with a little stent, a metal clamp that's tightening up the vessel. And just by changing the functions, then I can decide what's going to be transparent and what's going to be visible. I can look at the skull structure, and I can see that, okay, this is where they opened up the skull on this woman, and that's where they went in. So these are fantastic images. They're really high resolution, and they're really showing us what we can do with standard graphics cards today.
Now we have really made use of this, and we have tried to squeeze a lot of data into the system. And one of the applications that we've been working on -- and this is gotten a little bit of traction worldwide -- is the application of virtual autopsies. So again, looking at very, very large data sets, and you saw those full-body scans that we can do. We're just pushing the body through the whole CT scanner, and just in a few seconds we can get a full-body data set. So this is from a virtual autopsy. And you can see how I'm gradually peeling off. First you saw the body bag that the body came in, then I'm peeling off the skin -- you can see the muscles -- and eventually you can see the bone structure of this woman.
Now at this point, I would also like to emphasize that, with the greatest respect for the people that I'm now going to show -- I'm going to show you a few cases of virtual autopsies -- so it's with great respect for the people that have died under violent circumstances that I'm showing these pictures to you. In the forensic case -- and this is something that there's been approximately 400 cases so far just in the part of Sweden that I come from that has been undergoing virtual autopsies in the past four years. So this will be the typical work-flow situation. The police will decide -- in the evening, when there's a case coming in -- they will decide, okay, is this a case where we need to do an autopsy. So in the morning, in between six and seven in the morning, the body is then transported inside the body bag to our center and is being scanned through one the the CT scanners. And then the radiologist, together with the pathologist and sometimes the forensic scientist, looks at the data that's coming out, and they have a joint session. And then they decide what to do in the real physical autopsy after that.
Now looking at a few cases, here's one of the first cases that we had. You can really see the details of the data set; it's very high-resolution. And it's our algorithms that allow us to zoom in on all the details. And again, it's fully interactive, so you can rotate and you can look at things in real time on these systems here. Without saying too much about this case, this is a traffic accident, a drunk driver hit a woman. And it's very, very easy to see the damages on the bone structure. And the cause of death is the broken neck. And this women also ended up under the car, so she's quite badly beaten up by this injury.
Here's another case, a knifing. And this is also again showing us what we can do. It's very easy to look at metal artifacts that we can show inside of the body. You can also see some of the artifacts from the teeth -- that's actually the filling of the teeth -- but because I've set the functions to show me metal and make everything else transparent. Here's another violent case. This really didn't kill the person. The person was killed by stabs in the heart, but they just deposited the knife by putting it through one of the eyeballs. Here's another case. It's very interesting for us to be able to look at things like knife stabbings. Here you can see that knife went through the heart. It's very easy to see how air has been leaking from one part to another part, which is difficult to do in a normal, standard, physical autopsy. So it really, really helps the criminal investigation to establish the cause of death, and in some cases also directing the investigation in the right direction to find out who the killer really was.
Here's another case that I think is interesting. Here you can see a bullet that has lodged just next to the spine on this person. And what we've done is that we've turned the bullet into a light source, so that bullet is actually shining, and it makes it really easy to find these fragments. During a physical autopsy, if you actually have to dig through the body to find these fragments, that's actually quite hard to do.
One of the things that I'm really, really happy to be able to show you here today is our virtual autopsy table. It's a touch device that we have developed based on these algorithms, using standard graphics GPU's. It actually looks like this, just to give you a feeling for what it looks like. It really just works like a huge iPhone. So we've implemented all the gestures you can do on the table, and you can think of it as an enormous touch interface. So if you were thinking of buying an iPad, forget about it; this is what you want instead. Steve, I hope you're listening to this, all right. So it's a very nice little device. So if you have the opportunity, please try it out. It's really a hands-on experience. So it's gained some traction, and we're trying to roll this out and trying to use it for educational purposes, but also, perhaps in the future, in a more clinical situation. There's a YouTube that you can download and look at this, if you want to convey the information to other people about virtual autopsies.
Okay, now that we're talking about touch, let me move on to really touching data. And this is a bit of science fiction now, so we're moving into really the future. This is not really what the medical doctors are using right now, but I hope they will in the future. So what you're seeing on the left is a touch device. It's a little mechanical pen that has very, very fast [unclear] monitors inside of the pen. And so I can generate a force feedback. So when I virtually touch data, it will generate touch forces in the pen, so I get a feedback. So in this particular situation, it's a scan of a living person. I have this pen, and I look at the data, and I move the pen towards the head, and all of a sudden I feel resistance. So I can feel the skin. If I push a little bit harder, I'll go through the skin, and I can feel the bone structure inside. If I push even harder, I'll go through the bone structure, especially close to the ear where the bone is very soft. And then I can feel the brain inside, and this will be the slushy like this.
So this is really nice. And to take that even further, this is a heart. And this is also due to these fantastic new scanners, that just in 0.3 seconds, I can scan the whole heart, and I can do that with time resolution. So just looking at this heart, I can play back a video here. And this is Karljohan, one of my graduate students who's been working on this project. And he's sitting there in front of the Haptic device, the force feedback system, and he's moving his pen towards the heart, and the heart is now beating in front of him, so he can see how the heart is beating. He's taken the pen, and he's moving it towards the heart, and he's putting it on the heart, and then he feels the heartbeats from the real living patient. Then he can examine how the heart is moving. He can go inside, push inside of the heart, and really feel how the valves are moving. And this, I think, is really the future for heart surgeons. I mean it's probably the wet dream for a heart surgeon to be able to go inside of the patient's heart before you actually do surgery, and do that with high-quality resolution data. So this is really neat.
Now we're going even further into science fiction. And we heard a little bit about functional MRI. Now this is really an interesting project. MRI is using magnetic fields and radio frequencies to scan the brain, or any part of the body. So what we're really getting out of this is information of the structure of the brain, but we can also measure the difference in magnetic properties of blood that's oxygenated and blood that's depleted of oxygen. That means that it's possible to map out the activity of the brain. So this is something that we've been working on. And you just saw Motts the research engineer there going into the MRI system, and he was wearing goggles. So he could actually see things in the goggles. So I could present things to him while he's in the scanner. And this is a little bit freaky, because what Motts is seeing is actually this. He's seeing his own brain. So Motts is doing something here. And probably he is going like this with his right hand, because the left side is activated on the motor cortex. And then he can see that at the same time. These visualizations are brand new. And this is something that we've been researching for a little while.
This is another sequence of Motts' brain. And here we asked Motts to calculate backwards from 100. So he's going "100, 97, 94." And then he's going backwards. And you can see how the little math processor is working up here in his brain and is lighting up the whole brain. Well this is fantastic. We can do this in real time. We can investigate things. We can tell him to do things. You can also see that his visual cortex is activated in the back of the head, because that's where he's seeing, he's seeing his own brain. And he's also hearing our instructions when we tell him to do things. The signal is really deep inside of the brain as well, but it's shining through, because all of the data is inside this volume. And in just a second here you will see -- Okay, here. Motts, now move your left foot. So he's going like this. For 20 seconds he's going like that, and all of a sudden it lights up up here. So we've got motor cortex activation up there. So this is really, really nice. And I think this is a great tool. And connecting also with the previous talk here, this is something that we could use as a tool to really understand how the neurons are working, how the brain is working, and we can do this with very, very high visual quality and very fast resolution.
Now we're also having a bit of fun at the center. So this is a CAT scan -- computer aided tomography. So this is a lion from the local zoo outside of Norrkoping in Kolmarden, Elsa. So she came to the center, and they sedated her and then put her straight into the scanner. And then, of course, I get the whole data set from the lion. And I can do very nice images like this. I can peel off the layer of the lion. I can look inside of it. And we've been experimenting with this. And I think this is a great application for the future of this technology. Because there's very little known about the animal anatomy. What's known out there for veterinarians is kind of basic information. We can scan all sorts of things, all sorts of animals. The only problem is to fit it into the machine. So here's a bear. It was kind of hard to get it in. And the bear is a cuddly, friendly animal. And here it is. Here is the nose of the bear. And you might want to cuddle this one, until you change the functions and look at this. So be aware of the bear.
So with that, I'd like to thank all the people that have helped me to generate these images. It's a huge effort that goes into doing this, gathering the data and developing the algorithms, writing all the software. So, some very talented people. My motto is always, I only hire people that are smarter than I am and most of these are smarter than I am.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)
Today medical scans produce thousands of images and terabytes of data for a single patient in mere seconds, but how do doctors parse this information and determine what's useful? At TEDxGöteborg, scientific visualization expert Anders Ynnerman shows us sophisticated new tools -- like virtual autopsies -- for analyzing this myriad data, and a glimpse at some sci-fi-sounding medical technologies in development. This talk contains some graphic medical imagery.
I will start by posing a little bit of a challenge, the challenge of dealing with data, data that we have to deal with in medical situations. It's really a huge challenge for us. And this is our beast of burden. This is a computer tomography machine -- a CT machine. It's a fantastic device. It uses X-rays, X-ray beams, that are rotating very fast around the human body. It takes about 30 seconds to go through the whole machine and is generating enormous amounts of information that comes out of the machine. So this is a fantastic machine that we can use for improving health care. But as I said, it's also a challenge for us. And the challenge is really found in this picture here. It's the medical data explosion that we're having right now. We're facing this problem. And let me step back in time.
Let's go back a few years in time and see what happened back then. These machines that came out -- they started coming in the 1970s -- they would scan human bodies, and they would generate about 100 images of the human body. And I've taken the liberty, just for clarity, to translate that to data slices. That would correspond to about 50 MB of data, which is small when you think about the data we can handle today just on normal mobile devices. If you translate that to phone books, it's about one meter of phone books in the pile. Looking at what we're doing today with these machines that we have, we can, just in a few seconds, get 24,000 images out of a body. And that would correspond to about 20 GB of data, or 800 phone books. And the pile would then be 200 meters of phone books. What's about to happen -- and we're seeing this, it's beginning -- a technology trend that's happening right now is that we're starting to look at time result situations as well. So we're getting the dynamics out of the body as well. And just assume that we will be collecting data during five seconds, and that would correspond to one terabyte of data. That's 800,000 books and 16 km of phone books. That's one patient, one data set. And this is what we have to deal with.
So this is really the enormous challenge that we have. And already today -- this is 25,000 images. Imagine the days when we had radiologists doing this. They would put up 25,000 images, they would go like this, "25,0000, okay, okay. There is the problem." They can't do that anymore; that's impossible. So we have to do something that's a little bit more intelligent than doing this. So what we do is we put all these slices together. Imagine that you slice your body in all these directions, and then you try to put the slices back together again into a pile of data, into a block of data. So this is really what we're doing. So this gigabyte or terabyte of data, we're putting it into this block. But of course, the block of data just contains the amount of X-ray that's been absorbed in each point in the human body. So what we need to do is to figure out a way of looking at the things we do want to look at and make things transparent that we don't want to look at. So transforming the data set into something that looks like this. And this is a challenge. This is a huge challenge for us to do that.
Using computers, even though they're getting faster and better all the time, it's a challenge to deal with gigabytes of data, terabytes of data and extracting the relevant information. I want to look at the heart, I want to look at the blood vessels, I want to look at the liver, maybe even find a tumor in some cases. So this is where this little dear comes into play. This is my daughter. This is as of 9:00 am this morning. She's playing a computer game. She's only two years old, and she's having a blast. So she's really the driving force behind the development of graphics processing units. As long as kids are playing computer games, graphics is getting better and better and better. So please go back home, tell your kids to play more games, because that's what I need.
So what's inside of this machine is what enables me to do the things that I'm doing with the medical data. So really what I'm doing is using these fantastic little devices. And you know, going back maybe 10 years in time when I got the funding to buy my first graphics computer. It was a huge machine. It was cabinets of processors and storage and everything. I paid about one million dollars for that machine. That machine is, today, about as fast as my iPhone. So every month there are new graphics cards coming out. And here is a few of the latest ones from the vendors -- NVIDIA, ATI, Intel is out there as well. And you know, for a few hundred bucks you can get these things and put them into your computer, and you can do fantastic things with these graphics cards. So this is really what's enabling us to deal with the explosion of data in medicine, together with some really nifty work in terms of algorithms -- compressing data, extracting the relevant information that people are doing research on.
So I'm going to show you a few examples of what we can do. This is a data set that was captured using a CT scanner. You can see that this is a full data. It's a woman. You can see the hair. You can see the individual structures of the woman. You can see that there is scattering of X-rays on the teeth, the metal in the teeth. That's where those artifacts are coming from. But fully interactively on standard graphics cards on a normal computer, I can just put in a clip plane. And of course all the data is inside, so I can start rotating, I can look at it from different angles, and I can see that this woman had a problem. She had a bleeding up in the brain, and that's been fixed with a little stent, a metal clamp that's tightening up the vessel. And just by changing the functions, then I can decide what's going to be transparent and what's going to be visible. I can look at the skull structure, and I can see that, okay, this is where they opened up the skull on this woman, and that's where they went in. So these are fantastic images. They're really high resolution, and they're really showing us what we can do with standard graphics cards today.
Now we have really made use of this, and we have tried to squeeze a lot of data into the system. And one of the applications that we've been working on -- and this is gotten a little bit of traction worldwide -- is the application of virtual autopsies. So again, looking at very, very large data sets, and you saw those full-body scans that we can do. We're just pushing the body through the whole CT scanner, and just in a few seconds we can get a full-body data set. So this is from a virtual autopsy. And you can see how I'm gradually peeling off. First you saw the body bag that the body came in, then I'm peeling off the skin -- you can see the muscles -- and eventually you can see the bone structure of this woman.
Now at this point, I would also like to emphasize that, with the greatest respect for the people that I'm now going to show -- I'm going to show you a few cases of virtual autopsies -- so it's with great respect for the people that have died under violent circumstances that I'm showing these pictures to you. In the forensic case -- and this is something that there's been approximately 400 cases so far just in the part of Sweden that I come from that has been undergoing virtual autopsies in the past four years. So this will be the typical work-flow situation. The police will decide -- in the evening, when there's a case coming in -- they will decide, okay, is this a case where we need to do an autopsy. So in the morning, in between six and seven in the morning, the body is then transported inside the body bag to our center and is being scanned through one the the CT scanners. And then the radiologist, together with the pathologist and sometimes the forensic scientist, looks at the data that's coming out, and they have a joint session. And then they decide what to do in the real physical autopsy after that.
Now looking at a few cases, here's one of the first cases that we had. You can really see the details of the data set; it's very high-resolution. And it's our algorithms that allow us to zoom in on all the details. And again, it's fully interactive, so you can rotate and you can look at things in real time on these systems here. Without saying too much about this case, this is a traffic accident, a drunk driver hit a woman. And it's very, very easy to see the damages on the bone structure. And the cause of death is the broken neck. And this women also ended up under the car, so she's quite badly beaten up by this injury.
Here's another case, a knifing. And this is also again showing us what we can do. It's very easy to look at metal artifacts that we can show inside of the body. You can also see some of the artifacts from the teeth -- that's actually the filling of the teeth -- but because I've set the functions to show me metal and make everything else transparent. Here's another violent case. This really didn't kill the person. The person was killed by stabs in the heart, but they just deposited the knife by putting it through one of the eyeballs. Here's another case. It's very interesting for us to be able to look at things like knife stabbings. Here you can see that knife went through the heart. It's very easy to see how air has been leaking from one part to another part, which is difficult to do in a normal, standard, physical autopsy. So it really, really helps the criminal investigation to establish the cause of death, and in some cases also directing the investigation in the right direction to find out who the killer really was.
Here's another case that I think is interesting. Here you can see a bullet that has lodged just next to the spine on this person. And what we've done is that we've turned the bullet into a light source, so that bullet is actually shining, and it makes it really easy to find these fragments. During a physical autopsy, if you actually have to dig through the body to find these fragments, that's actually quite hard to do.
One of the things that I'm really, really happy to be able to show you here today is our virtual autopsy table. It's a touch device that we have developed based on these algorithms, using standard graphics GPU's. It actually looks like this, just to give you a feeling for what it looks like. It really just works like a huge iPhone. So we've implemented all the gestures you can do on the table, and you can think of it as an enormous touch interface. So if you were thinking of buying an iPad, forget about it; this is what you want instead. Steve, I hope you're listening to this, all right. So it's a very nice little device. So if you have the opportunity, please try it out. It's really a hands-on experience. So it's gained some traction, and we're trying to roll this out and trying to use it for educational purposes, but also, perhaps in the future, in a more clinical situation. There's a YouTube that you can download and look at this, if you want to convey the information to other people about virtual autopsies.
Okay, now that we're talking about touch, let me move on to really touching data. And this is a bit of science fiction now, so we're moving into really the future. This is not really what the medical doctors are using right now, but I hope they will in the future. So what you're seeing on the left is a touch device. It's a little mechanical pen that has very, very fast [unclear] monitors inside of the pen. And so I can generate a force feedback. So when I virtually touch data, it will generate touch forces in the pen, so I get a feedback. So in this particular situation, it's a scan of a living person. I have this pen, and I look at the data, and I move the pen towards the head, and all of a sudden I feel resistance. So I can feel the skin. If I push a little bit harder, I'll go through the skin, and I can feel the bone structure inside. If I push even harder, I'll go through the bone structure, especially close to the ear where the bone is very soft. And then I can feel the brain inside, and this will be the slushy like this.
So this is really nice. And to take that even further, this is a heart. And this is also due to these fantastic new scanners, that just in 0.3 seconds, I can scan the whole heart, and I can do that with time resolution. So just looking at this heart, I can play back a video here. And this is Karljohan, one of my graduate students who's been working on this project. And he's sitting there in front of the Haptic device, the force feedback system, and he's moving his pen towards the heart, and the heart is now beating in front of him, so he can see how the heart is beating. He's taken the pen, and he's moving it towards the heart, and he's putting it on the heart, and then he feels the heartbeats from the real living patient. Then he can examine how the heart is moving. He can go inside, push inside of the heart, and really feel how the valves are moving. And this, I think, is really the future for heart surgeons. I mean it's probably the wet dream for a heart surgeon to be able to go inside of the patient's heart before you actually do surgery, and do that with high-quality resolution data. So this is really neat.
Now we're going even further into science fiction. And we heard a little bit about functional MRI. Now this is really an interesting project. MRI is using magnetic fields and radio frequencies to scan the brain, or any part of the body. So what we're really getting out of this is information of the structure of the brain, but we can also measure the difference in magnetic properties of blood that's oxygenated and blood that's depleted of oxygen. That means that it's possible to map out the activity of the brain. So this is something that we've been working on. And you just saw Motts the research engineer there going into the MRI system, and he was wearing goggles. So he could actually see things in the goggles. So I could present things to him while he's in the scanner. And this is a little bit freaky, because what Motts is seeing is actually this. He's seeing his own brain. So Motts is doing something here. And probably he is going like this with his right hand, because the left side is activated on the motor cortex. And then he can see that at the same time. These visualizations are brand new. And this is something that we've been researching for a little while.
This is another sequence of Motts' brain. And here we asked Motts to calculate backwards from 100. So he's going "100, 97, 94." And then he's going backwards. And you can see how the little math processor is working up here in his brain and is lighting up the whole brain. Well this is fantastic. We can do this in real time. We can investigate things. We can tell him to do things. You can also see that his visual cortex is activated in the back of the head, because that's where he's seeing, he's seeing his own brain. And he's also hearing our instructions when we tell him to do things. The signal is really deep inside of the brain as well, but it's shining through, because all of the data is inside this volume. And in just a second here you will see -- Okay, here. Motts, now move your left foot. So he's going like this. For 20 seconds he's going like that, and all of a sudden it lights up up here. So we've got motor cortex activation up there. So this is really, really nice. And I think this is a great tool. And connecting also with the previous talk here, this is something that we could use as a tool to really understand how the neurons are working, how the brain is working, and we can do this with very, very high visual quality and very fast resolution.
Now we're also having a bit of fun at the center. So this is a CAT scan -- computer aided tomography. So this is a lion from the local zoo outside of Norrkoping in Kolmarden, Elsa. So she came to the center, and they sedated her and then put her straight into the scanner. And then, of course, I get the whole data set from the lion. And I can do very nice images like this. I can peel off the layer of the lion. I can look inside of it. And we've been experimenting with this. And I think this is a great application for the future of this technology. Because there's very little known about the animal anatomy. What's known out there for veterinarians is kind of basic information. We can scan all sorts of things, all sorts of animals. The only problem is to fit it into the machine. So here's a bear. It was kind of hard to get it in. And the bear is a cuddly, friendly animal. And here it is. Here is the nose of the bear. And you might want to cuddle this one, until you change the functions and look at this. So be aware of the bear.
So with that, I'd like to thank all the people that have helped me to generate these images. It's a huge effort that goes into doing this, gathering the data and developing the algorithms, writing all the software. So, some very talented people. My motto is always, I only hire people that are smarter than I am and most of these are smarter than I am.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)
Heather Knight: Silicon-based comedy
About this talk
In this first-of-its-kind demo, Heather Knight introduces Data, a robotic stand-up comedian that does much more than rattle off one-liners -- it gathers audience feedback (using software co-developed with Scott Satkin and Varun Ramakrishna at CMU) and tunes its act as the crowd responds. Is this thing on?
Some of the greatest innovations and developments in the world often happen at the intersection of two fields. So tonight I'd like to tell you about the intersection that I'm most excited about at this very moment, which is entertainment and robotics. So if we're trying to make robots that can be more expressive and that can connect better with us in society, maybe we should look to some of the human professionals of artificial emotion and personality that occur in the dramatic arts. I'm also interested in creating new technologies for the arts and to attract people to science and technology. Some people in the last decade or two have started creating artwork with technology. With my new venture, Marilyn Monrobot, I would like to use art to create tech.
(Laughter)
So we're based in New York City. And if you're a performer who wants to collaborate with an adorable robot, or if you have a robot that needs entertainment representation, please contact me, the bot agent. The bot, our rising celebrity, also has his own Twitter account: @robotinthewild. So I'd like to introduce you to one of our first robots, Data. He's named after the Star Trek character. I think he's going to be super popular. We've got the robot -- in his head is a database of a lot of jokes. Now each of these jokes is labeled with certain attributes. So it knows something about the subject, it knows about the length. It knows how much it's moving. And so it's going to try to watch your response. I actually have no idea what my robot is going to do today.
(Laughter)
So it can also learn from you about the quality of its jokes and cater things -- sort of like Netflix-style -- over longer-term to different communities or audiences -- children versus adults, different cultures. You can learn something from the robot about the community that you're in. And also I can use each one of you as the acting coach to our future robot companions. So some of you in this middle section. You have red/green paddles. If you like what's going on, show the green. If you don't like the subject or the performance, you can hold the red. Now don't be shy. It's just a robot; it doesn't have feelings ... yet. (Laughter) And the rest of you, you still count, you still matter. There's also a microphone that's listening to the aggregate laughter and applause and booing -- I hope not -- to help make some of its next decisions. Right, so, let the robot stand-up comedy begin.
Data: Hello TEDWomen. It's an honor to be here.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
You guys are looking good out there. Ready for some jokes?
(Audience: Yeah.)
Here's the first one. Right, so, a doctor says to his patient, "I have bad news and worse news. The bad news is that you only have 24 hours to live." "That's terrible," said the patient. "How can the news possibly be worse?" "I've been trying to contact you since yesterday."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
The Swiss have an interesting army. Five hundred years without a war. Heather Knight: He's talking about the Swiss. Data: Pretty lucky for them. Ever see that little Swiss Army knife they have to fight with? "Come on buddy, I have the toe clippers right here. You get past me, The guy behind me has a spoon."
(Laughter)
HK: He's a French robot.
Data: A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods. One of them falls to the ground. He does not seem to be breathing. The other guy whips out his cellphone and calls 911. He gasps to the operator, "My friend is dead. What can I do?" The operator says, "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There's a silence, and the operator hears a shot. The guy's voice comes back on the line, "Okay, now what?"
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Question: Why is television called a medium? Anyone? Because it's neither rare nor well done. But to be completely honest with you, I kind of love television. Any of you like television? (Audience: Yes.) I find it incredibly educational. Actually, as soon as someone turns it on, I go into the other room and read. (Laughter) That's all for now. Was that okay for my first time?
(Applause)
You've been a great audience. Thank you.
HK: Yay.
(Applause)
So this is actually the first time we've ever done live audience feedback to a performance. So thank you all for being a part of it. There's a lot more to come. And we hope to learn a lot about robot expression.
Thank you very much.
(Audience)
In this first-of-its-kind demo, Heather Knight introduces Data, a robotic stand-up comedian that does much more than rattle off one-liners -- it gathers audience feedback (using software co-developed with Scott Satkin and Varun Ramakrishna at CMU) and tunes its act as the crowd responds. Is this thing on?
Some of the greatest innovations and developments in the world often happen at the intersection of two fields. So tonight I'd like to tell you about the intersection that I'm most excited about at this very moment, which is entertainment and robotics. So if we're trying to make robots that can be more expressive and that can connect better with us in society, maybe we should look to some of the human professionals of artificial emotion and personality that occur in the dramatic arts. I'm also interested in creating new technologies for the arts and to attract people to science and technology. Some people in the last decade or two have started creating artwork with technology. With my new venture, Marilyn Monrobot, I would like to use art to create tech.
(Laughter)
So we're based in New York City. And if you're a performer who wants to collaborate with an adorable robot, or if you have a robot that needs entertainment representation, please contact me, the bot agent. The bot, our rising celebrity, also has his own Twitter account: @robotinthewild. So I'd like to introduce you to one of our first robots, Data. He's named after the Star Trek character. I think he's going to be super popular. We've got the robot -- in his head is a database of a lot of jokes. Now each of these jokes is labeled with certain attributes. So it knows something about the subject, it knows about the length. It knows how much it's moving. And so it's going to try to watch your response. I actually have no idea what my robot is going to do today.
(Laughter)
So it can also learn from you about the quality of its jokes and cater things -- sort of like Netflix-style -- over longer-term to different communities or audiences -- children versus adults, different cultures. You can learn something from the robot about the community that you're in. And also I can use each one of you as the acting coach to our future robot companions. So some of you in this middle section. You have red/green paddles. If you like what's going on, show the green. If you don't like the subject or the performance, you can hold the red. Now don't be shy. It's just a robot; it doesn't have feelings ... yet. (Laughter) And the rest of you, you still count, you still matter. There's also a microphone that's listening to the aggregate laughter and applause and booing -- I hope not -- to help make some of its next decisions. Right, so, let the robot stand-up comedy begin.
Data: Hello TEDWomen. It's an honor to be here.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
You guys are looking good out there. Ready for some jokes?
(Audience: Yeah.)
Here's the first one. Right, so, a doctor says to his patient, "I have bad news and worse news. The bad news is that you only have 24 hours to live." "That's terrible," said the patient. "How can the news possibly be worse?" "I've been trying to contact you since yesterday."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
The Swiss have an interesting army. Five hundred years without a war. Heather Knight: He's talking about the Swiss. Data: Pretty lucky for them. Ever see that little Swiss Army knife they have to fight with? "Come on buddy, I have the toe clippers right here. You get past me, The guy behind me has a spoon."
(Laughter)
HK: He's a French robot.
Data: A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods. One of them falls to the ground. He does not seem to be breathing. The other guy whips out his cellphone and calls 911. He gasps to the operator, "My friend is dead. What can I do?" The operator says, "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There's a silence, and the operator hears a shot. The guy's voice comes back on the line, "Okay, now what?"
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Question: Why is television called a medium? Anyone? Because it's neither rare nor well done. But to be completely honest with you, I kind of love television. Any of you like television? (Audience: Yes.) I find it incredibly educational. Actually, as soon as someone turns it on, I go into the other room and read. (Laughter) That's all for now. Was that okay for my first time?
(Applause)
You've been a great audience. Thank you.
HK: Yay.
(Applause)
So this is actually the first time we've ever done live audience feedback to a performance. So thank you all for being a part of it. There's a lot more to come. And we hope to learn a lot about robot expression.
Thank you very much.
(Audience)
Martin Jacques: Understanding the rise of China
About this talk
Speaking at a TED Salon in London, economist Martin Jacques asks: How do we in the West make sense of China and its phenomenal rise? The author of "When China Rules the World," he examines why the West often puzzles over the growing power of the Chinese economy, and offers three building blocks for understanding what China is and will become.
Speaking at a TED Salon in London, economist Martin Jacques asks: How do we in the West make sense of China and its phenomenal rise? The author of "When China Rules the World," he examines why the West often puzzles over the growing power of the Chinese economy, and offers three building blocks for understanding what China is and will become.
Thomas Goetz: It's time to redesign medical data
About this talk
Your medical chart: it's hard to access, impossible to read -- and full of information that could make you healthier if you just knew how to use it. At TEDMED, Thomas Goetz looks at medical data, making a bold call to redesign it and get more insight from it.
Your medical chart: it's hard to access, impossible to read -- and full of information that could make you healthier if you just knew how to use it. At TEDMED, Thomas Goetz looks at medical data, making a bold call to redesign it and get more insight from it.
Computex: Asustek shows a 12-inch tablet and e-reader
TAIPEI -- Asustek on Monday unveiled a PC that combines the tablet form-factor with the versatility and power of a Windows 7 laptop. The Eee Pad 121 has a 12-inch touch screen display, which is a couple of inches larger than Apple's iPad, and is based around an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a chip more typically found in a laptop.
Daniel Ellsberg: We Need Whistleblowers to Stop Murder
Bio
Daniel Ellsberg is a former US military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of US government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers.
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay, and we're in Santa Clara, California. Now joining us to talk about the WikiLeaks and his latest thinking on this issue is someone who knows a lot about leaking, Daniel Ellsberg. Daniel was a former State and Defense Department official who was prosecuted for releasing the Pentagon Papers. So, Daniel, what's your latest thinking on the WikiLeaks controversy?
DANIEL ELLSBERG, FMR. DEFENSE DEPT. OFFICIAL, LEAKER OF PENTAGON PAPERS: Every administration hates leaks that they haven't made themselves, that haven't actually been authorized by their own high officials, which is the greater part of leaks. Nearly all leaks to the newspapers, so-called, are actually authorized by a boss, or even by the highest officials. So unauthorized disclosures that are truly unauthorized, real leaks, are very much a minority of what we see in the newspapers of classified information or scoops or leaks, backgrounders, and whatever. Every administration, really, would like to close all of those off, and when they talk about there being too many leaks, they mean too many of the kind we didn't want, that we didn't make. And that's what WikiLeaks represents. So they would like to close down WikiLeaks as a channel for information about what they're doing.
JAY: What WikiLeaks is doing and will do more of has set quite a precedent, and it really shakes, at the very core, a whole fabric or structure based on the ability of governments, and particularly the US government, to keep its secrets. So it can't let this go. It--does it not, from its view of maintaining control of information, have to really punish or undo this precedent?
ELLSBERG: Well, most countries in the world could very straightforwardly prosecute Julian Assange, just as they are prosecuting Bradley Manning--who's military and who is subject to military law, by the way. The US is disadvantaged, from the point of view of most dictators in the world, because we don't have an official secrets act like Britain's that criminalizes any and all disclosure of classified information. We have some very narrowly defined official secrets act that proscribe giving out, for example, nuclear weapons data or communications intelligence or the identities of intelligence agents, covert agents, like Valerie Plame--that was wrongly and unlawfully leaked, really, by the White House. But we don't have a law that makes it simply criminal to put out classified information as most people assume we do. Nearly everyone assumes that. And most nations do have it. The reason we don't is we have a First Amendment. And the idea of the First Amendment, the freedom of speech and the press--which other countries don't have in their constitution, by and large--the reason for it was precisely to assure a flow of information to the public through the newspapers and otherwise, and for citizens to be able to discuss that among themselves freely, and expose it, resist it, and whatnot, about the shortcomings of government, about incompetence, about corruption, about wrongdoing, about aggressive war, as matter of fact, like the war we waged in Iraq against Iraq, which was a clear-cut crime against the peace, or about reckless policies or hopeless policies, like our war in Afghanistan right now, or like the war in Vietnam, which I was one of those who helped expose. That was the purpose of the First Amendment.
JAY: Does this protect Bradley Manning?
ELLSBERG: It should protect Bradley Manning from the charge that he's facing, which is the one he shared with me, 18 USC 793 paragraphs (d) and (e). I was the first person prosecuted ever under those sections of what's called the Espionage Act. And really those sections should be ruled unconstitutional. They really--read as they are in these cases, to apply to disclosures to the American public rather than spy cases (to secret disclosures to an enemy, or even an ally, to a foreign country), used against something other than espionage, they really should have been held unconstitutional. And the reason that they have been used so sparingly before Obama--only three cases involving those charges--with all the leaks that occur daily, weekly, three people have been brought--three cases have been brought up under those charges. And the reason for that was that they knew that they risked losing those cases as unconstitutional in the Supreme Court.
JAY: But they lost your case.
ELLSBERG: They--it just banned too much information from the American public without excuse. It stunted our democracy too much. So they were afraid to use the case, really, use those acts, lest they be found unconstitutional. Now, Obama has brought, actually, already, five such indictments in his two years--in other words, almost twice what all other presidents have done put together. He's using that act as if it were an official secrets act, apparently not worrying that this Supreme Court is as likely as earlier ones to find it unconstitutional. Or maybe he just doesn't worry about that. The intimidating aspect of bringing people to trial and forcing them [inaudible] extreme expense and stress of long trial might be enough to keep people away from leaking. But other presidents, interestingly, didn't do that. He's the one who has this campaign on against freedom of the press, I would say.
JAY: So what tools do they have, they being--if the government wants to undo this precedent of WikiLeaks and take some action to stop people doing this in the future, what tools do they have? And then, how do they go after WikiLeaks without going after The New York Times?
ELLSBERG: They have all the tools that have kept most guilty secrets secret for far too long, enough secrets, enough guilty secrets, long enough to get us into Vietnam, which was a crazy adventure, or into Iraq, which was a crazy adventure, or into escalation in Afghanistan, equally crazy. Had the dissenting opinion within the administration itself been leaked, or just testified to honestly and openly by officials who knew that the policy was hopeless, we wouldn't have gotten into those wars. So it's not--the fact is that their ability to keep secrets is very great, and the way they do it is without actually prosecuting people, up till now. But in previous administrations the way they did it simply was threatening to take away clearance, take away job, take away access, promotion, all the things that actually threaten even a marriage.
JAY: But with the Internet and this kind of a possibility of a WikiLeaks where you can have something get a mass audience--. I mean, before the Internet, if something like this happened and the government put pressure on newspapers not to publish, it would go away. But you have now the ability to have a world stage that Julian Assange was able to make use of. Don't they need to make a lesson out of Julian? How do they let him get away with this?
ELLSBERG: Well, they want to. There's no question.
JAY: What will they do?
ELLSBERG: That's what they felt about me, obviously. As I said, I was the first person prosecuted. It had never been done before for a leak, for a disclosure. Now, why me? Well, it was obvious: 7,000 pages of top-secret material. In other words, far more sensitive than anything that's come out out of WikiLeaks. And they could not easily afford not to prosecute me without admitting that they didn't have a law to go with, which is the case. But most people didn't know it. And if officials were really informed of the fact that you could put out 7,000 pages and not even get prosecuted, there might have been more leaks. So my prosecution was meant to intimidate people. And it did have that effect. I was facing 115 years in prison. And even though the charges were dismissed, no one rushed to do that again for 40 years, and that--with very few prosecutions in between. Only one person actually has been convicted by a jury for a leak, Samuel Loring Morison in 1985, one person in all that time. So they run this system without successful prosecutions. They run it with the threat of ruining your career (your career, not just the job), your ability to function at all in government, or even, in most cases, outside government.
JAY: People differentiate what you did from what Bradley Manning did. They say you--in a very specific case of what you thought and I think everyone that saw the papers afterwards thought was an egregious deception that helped justify war, and you exposed that, whereas Bradley Manning has just dumped 250,000 pieces on the Internet, much of which is either benign or you could say is the normal course of things that people should be able to keep to themselves.
ELLSBERG: By the way, you know, I'm sure you're aware, but what you just said is a cliche now, that he dumped 250,000 cables on the Internet, which is what he--
JAY: No, to WikiLeaks.
ELLSBERG: --what he did not do.
ELLSBERG: What you said was the Internet, and what is usually said is the Internet, which means the world, that he's given it to the world. Actually, he did not do that. He gave it to WikiLeaks, which is functioning more and more as an investigative tool, but it's functioning like a newspaper in the sense--. They have put out less than 1 percent of the cables that he actually gave them. There's nothing indiscriminate at all about what WikiLeaks has done or that Bradley Manning did. He gave it to WikiLeaks. He could have put it on the Net. He had the capability to put that on the Internet. Even I, with help from my son, probably could learn how to put that on the Internet. That's no big trick. He didn't do that. What he's done, actually, was give it to WikiLeaks, who in turn has allowed The Times, The New York Times, Der Speigel, El Pais, Le Monde, and The Guardian to make the editorial choice with their staffs and their experience and their times. And WikiLeaks has put out almost nothing that those newspapers didn't choose to put out. So the word indiscriminate is simply false about what he's done, and it's a part of demonizing what he's done. Of course that sounds bad, and it's not what he did. In my case--by the way, I'm not quite sure what the meaning of all this is, Daniel Ellsberg did it right, he was experienced, he had a particular war, and he was exposing all this, and so forth. So what? I was prosecuted just like Bradley Manning. Are they really thinking that people extolled me at the time, that the government did? The president and the vice president called me a traitor, which was wrong, foolish. It was false. And now they'd call me a terrorist--that wasn't in vogue at that time. But I was called names as widely and by as high-level people as Bradley Manning or Assange. Governments--and not just American governments--governments don't appreciate losing control of information about what they're really doing and what they're really planning and thinking and what the cost and the risks may be.
JAY: Explain to me how you won your case, and what it means [inaudible]
ELLSBERG: I didn't--well, I didn't win the case. What happened was that the charges were dismissed. This was all 40 years ago, so it's fresh in my mind but not anyone else's. The charges were dismissed when it came out on successive days, over a matter of weeks, actually, that the Nixon administration had carried out [inaudible] sequence of criminal acts against me while I was on trial, with the purpose of silencing me from revealing secrets about their administration.
~~~
ELLSBERG (VOICEOVER): The hundreds of thousands we were killing was unjustified homicide, and I couldn't see the difference between that and murder. Murder had to be stopped.
NEWS PRESENTER: This weekend, portions of a highly classified Pentagon document came to life for all the world to see and brought cries of outrage from Washington.
RICHARD NIXON: We got to get this son of a bitch.
NEWS PRESENTER: A name has now come out as the possible source of the Times' Pentagon documents. It is that of Daniel Ellsberg, the top policy analyst for the Defense and the State departments.
ELLSBERG (ON CAMERA): I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of these decisions.
ELLSBERG (VOICEOVER): Henry Kissinger said that Daniel Ellsberg was the most dangerous man in America and he had to be stopped.
~~~
ELLSBERG: The Pentagon papers mainly dealt with the Democrats before him. It also actually dealt with the Nixon and Eisenhower administration earlier. But Nixon didn't worry about that. That was old history. So he was glad to have the information come out about the Democrats. What he worried was that I had information beyond the Pentagon papers, which I did, but not as much as he feared. And he feared that I would put out information about his nuclear threats against North Vietnam, about his plans to mine Hai Phong, to expand the war in general, renew the bombing of North Vietnam, which in fact I did know about, but I didn't have documents to prove it. To keep me from putting those out he sent people into my former doctor's office to get information to blackmail me with. I was overheard on warrantless wiretaps. A CIA profile was done against me in a period when it was still against the law for the CIA to operate domestically against an American citizen. Now all those things are legal, by the way, under the Patriot Act and other acts. And he did one other thing that isn't fully recognized as legal yet: he sent a team of CIA assets up to incapacitate me totally on the steps of the Capitol. I say yet because Obama has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens abroad, as it's come out, like Anwar al-Awlaki. And, actually, since the war on terror is global, it's not clear at all that there's a restriction against doing it in the United States if necessary. He's claimed, in other words, the right to do what Nixon did covertly. And Nixon faced impeachment because of that. So when my trial was ended, the next step was that Nixon was facing criminal charges on these things investigated by the impeachment committee, and he resigned rather than be impeached. And that actually did help shorten the war. So those were the efforts. But as a result, there never has been a Supreme Court ruling on whether the charges that were raised against me, and now Bradley Manning, the civilian charges, are constitutional. The one case that led to a jury conviction was appealed up to the Supreme Court, but they denied [inaudible], they denied taking it. And a couple of other cases have led to guilty pleas. Other cases have been dropped, like AIPAC. So no case has actually reached the Supreme Court for them to say that it's constitutional to put this much information outside the realm of public discourse and outside the press. By this much I'm talking about the vast amount of classified material. And by earlier appreciation of our constitution, it was always predicted the Supreme Court would find that unconstitutional. You can't be as confident about the current Court.
JAY: What's happening with Bradley Manning now?
ELLSBERG: Manning is still being held absolutely unconscionably in what they call prevention of injury [inaudible] not necessary as far as the prison psychologist has said, which means being interrupted every five minutes to respond during the day, having no exercise in his cell for 23 hours a day. The rationale for that is pretty thin. His physical condition is deteriorating under that. He gets one hour a day to do figure eights in a closed office, essentially. And no sheet or pillow--after all, he might commit suicide with those. So in other words, they're using every method, I would say, short of waterboarding to break him down and get him to say, I would guess falsely, but false or true, accusations against Assange which will help them in their prosecution of Assange if they can get him. So it's torture, in a word. The isolation that he's been subjected to for the last seven months now has been--it's not obvious to a layman. We're so familiar with that being--people being subjected to that. We're not really aware, I think, of how many psychological studies have definitely identified that as torture.
JAY: Now, how do we know this is happening to him?
ELLSBERG: How do we know? They admit it, basically. They just say, oh, it's ordinary treatment for national security prisoners. How many national security prisoners they have at Quantico I'm just not sure. I've waited 40 years for a national security prisoner like this one to turn up who said, I'm willing to go to prison for life or even be executed because, he said, this was information the public needed to know, it should not be sequestered in some safe in DC. He said the public needed this to be a democracy and to change conditions that he understood to be atrocious, atrocities in Iraq, including turning over hundreds and hundreds, thousands, perhaps, of people to what we knew would be torture, and tortured considerably more than he's been subjected to. It was clearly illegal. WikiLeaks has revealed this, under Obama in 2009, that Obama's administration was clearly violating the law in neither stopping the torture of prisoners that we were turning over or investigating it. The WikiLeaks shows that the orders went out again and again and again: do not investigate further. That's an illegal order, plainly. It's our international obligation to investigate any credible allegation of torture. So, strictly speaking, Obama's own officials, or even he himself, is subject to questioning here about clear-cut violations of the law. That wasn't true with the Pentagon Papers, by the way. They were three years old at the time that they were released, the most recent of them. They didn't deal with the Nixon administration. There weren't any clear-cut criminal violations they revealed then in the way this is. So I can see why Obama is particularly sensitive about these releases.
JAY: Thanks very much for joining us.
ELLSBERG: Thank you.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
End of Transcript
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
