Weird science: The 10 oddest tech stories of 2014

Online telepaths, culinary AI, criminal drones -- the tech world was full of offbeat surprises this year

Weird science: The 10 oddest tech stories of 2014
Every now and again, strange events from the world of high tech bubble over to the general news cycle and make headlines for a day or two. No doubt these crossover hits favor reports that enforce the general populace's sentiment that technologists are fringe lunatics with their eyes on our collective future demise. This phenomenon has become more common in recent years as the intersections of technology and pop culture have become busier and more crowded. In 2014, plenty of technology weirdness cycled through the "odd news" section of mainstream media outlets. But for the real connoisseur of weird tech news, there's a very specific sweet spot.

It concerns those instances in which emerging technology seems to misbehave, wandering to places we don't anticipate, thereby generating a moment of cognitive dissonance. Here we take a look at 10 of the weirder tech stories of 2014, featuring online telepaths, moonlighting artificial intelligences, and criminal drones. And now, here's the news....

IBM creates AI foodie chef
Advances in artificial intelligence and cognitive computing continued to make headlines in 2014, with Johnny Depp getting all transcendent and ex-"Jeopardy" champ AI Watson doing on-the-fly Twitter translations and demonstrating its first machine learning API. IBM launched another cognitive computing initiative earlier this year, partnering with the Institute of Culinary Education to create what is essentially a hipster foodie AI chef.

Designed to think, experiment, and learn, the computer chef has generated recipes like Belgian Bacon Pudding, Swiss-Thai Asparagus Quiche, and the deeply disturbing Austrian Chocolate Burrito. The foods, prepared by a team of carbon-based chefs, have been touring around to industry events in the IBM Food Truck -- three words that really should never appear in sequence.

3D printer hacked into tattoo machine
"Trypanophobia" is the medical term for fear of needles, and for us dedicated tryanophobes, this may be the scariest tech story of the year. Back in April, a group of psychotic French design students hacked a commercial 3D-printing machine and added, yes, an actual tattoo gun.

Check out the accompanying video and you'll see that the machine pretty much works how you think it might. A young insane person volunteer sticks his arm into the tattoo machine, whereupon his flesh is inked automatically by the computer-controlled needle, in place of the printer's original extruder. In case you're interested in making your own tattoo machine, the team has posted full instructions on the hack at Instructables.

Fans of Franz Kafka will note that “In the Penal Colony” got a little less metaphoric

Robot hitchhikes across Canada
Then there's the curious case of the Canadian hitchhiking robot. In July, researchers from a pair of Canadian universities deployed hitchBOT onto the highways of the Great White North, where the experimental 'bot ultimately traveled from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Victoria, British Columbia -- hitchhiking the entire way.

The project was part of a larger research study concerning the utility of social robots and the psychology of human kindness. Using its LED-screen face to petition for rides, hitchBOT made the coast-to-coast trip in 21 days, plugging into cars' cigarette lighters to recharge, posting videos on social media, and relying on the kindness of strangers. Canada, generally regarded as the planet's nicest nation-state, may be the only country where this could have worked.

University builds city of robot cars
More from the robotics desk: Back in May, an odd little news story started making the rounds about a fake city sprouting up in southern Michigan. Designed by engineers and robotics researchers at the University of Michigan, the 32-acre simulated city center is intended to be a future home for hundreds of autonomous robots.

Well, sort of. The Mobility Transformation Facility is a test site for the future of automated vehicles and self-driving cars and trucks. Situated only a few dozen miles from the original Motor City of Detroit, the ersatz metropolis will eventually include a four-lane freeway, merge lanes, stoplights, a railroad crossing, and even mechanical bicyclists and pedestrians.

Drug-smuggling drone crashes outside of prison
Probably the single most prevalent tech topic in 2014, drones made for weird news throughout the year -- from controversial FAA decisions to eerie footage of Chernobyl to insanely great Halloween projects.

In July, authorities at the maximum security Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina reported on a new and potentially problematic drone development. It seems someone attempted to fly a small drone loaded with contraband -- marijuana, tobacco, and mobile phones -- over the walls and into the prison yard. The scheme didn't work, though. The drone crashed short of the prison walls.

Smartphones are the new plumage
Sometimes the worlds of hard science and social science converge to make news in a weirdo, Venn diagram kind of way. Such was the case in October when researchers at the University of Würzburg in Germany released a report that was both intriguing and entirely predictable. According to the study, men who are single or in uncommitted relationships are more likely to purchase high-end smartphones than other men.

The phones are a mating signal of sorts, the researchers conjecture, intended to communicate that the bearer of the phone has sufficient resources to provide for potential partners. "Studies have suggested that, as part of short-term mating strategies, men are particularly willing to engage in conspicuous consumption to attract mates," according to the research abstract. The full report will be published early next year in the prestigious quarterly journal Incredibly Obvious Things We Get Paid to Quantify.

Scientists test Internet telepathy
Another odd trend in 2014 involved news stories about an emerging kind of online telepathy -- really. In November, researchers at the University of Washington sent direct brain-to-brain transmissions over the Internet in which one test subject was able to move the hand of another, simply by thinking about it.

In a similar study back in August, scientists from several different countries employed Internet-linked neural devices to essentially broadcast one person's thoughts to other people around the world. The single-word thoughts (like "hola" and "ciao") were detected by electroencephalogram units, translated into binary code, then reassembled in the receivers' brains by way of transcranial magnetic stimulation technology.

Google Glass app promises brainwave control
In yet another variation on the theme, an intriguing open source app surfaced over the summer that -- in terms of strict dictionary definition -- appears to give users telekinetic powers. The MindRDR system uses Google Glass plus a commercially available EEG headset to let users take pictures and post social media -- using brainwaves.

The dermal patch on the headset can be positioned to detect when you're concentrating hard on a particular image in your field of view. When the displayed indicator reaches a threshold, MindRDR snaps a pic via the Glass camera and uploads it automatically to whatever online destination you've previously chosen. When news broke about MindRDR in July, nerdier observers noted that the effect is arguably telekinetic -- you're effecting change in the material world by the power of thought. Jean Grey would be proud.

Smartphone chip beams real hologram
Speaking of nerdy, the new "Star Wars" trailer has fans geeking out yet again, nearly 40 (!) years after the first film's debut. That movie featured one of the most iconic images in all of science fiction: R2-D2 projecting a free-floating hologram of Princess Leia imploring Obi Wan Kenobi, "You're my only hope."

Hope for actual free-floating holograms has waned in the years since -- the technology is further away than the Death Star, it seems. Or maybe not. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported on a low-profile but impressively funded project to create a hologram projector chip small enough to fit into a smartphone. The report even featured video evidence -- a short clip of the technology generating a 3D hologram of floating dice.

Letterman hosts hologram musical guest
In the absence of actual free-floating holograms, you can always rely on show business to bring you the next best thing. In October, the indefatigable David Letterman welcomed his first hologram musical guest: the Japanese pop star sensation known as Hatsune Miku.

The technology behind this particular brand of hologram is similar to that used for famous previous appearances by, for example, hologram Tupac. The image appears to be free-floating, but it's actually projected onto a transparent 2D surface. Hatsune Miku's "voice," meanwhile, is synthesized from vocal samples. Nevertheless, the virtual pop star is regularly booked in theaters and arenas. Hatsune Miku's name, by the way, translates roughly to "First Sound From the Future." There you go.

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The Internet of Things gets real

Practical applications are emerging for connected devices in key industries

A year ago, people were mostly talking about the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) — what companies and government entities might do in the future to take advantage of this widespread network of connected objects.

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While we’re still in the early stages of IoT, today it’s looking like more of a reality, with a number of implementations in the works. And while many issues still need to be sorted out — data security and privacy for one — a growing number of companies are exploring how they can leverage IoT-related technologies.

IoT is clearly on a growth curve. A March 2014 Gartner report estimates that the Internet of Things will include some 26 billion Internet-connected physical devices by 2020. By that time, IoT product and service suppliers will generate incremental revenue of more than $300 billion, according to Gartner.

“IoT is rapidly moving from the fringe of the Internet to the mainstream,” says Tim Murdoch, head of digital services at Cambridge Consultants, a U.K.-based technology consulting firm.

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The number of anecdotes about the “connected fridge” are abating, Murdoch says, and the number of actually connected and commercially available cars, electricity meters, street lights, wearable technologies and so on is growing rapidly.

Gartner is getting a lot more inquiries from enterprise clients on the IoT, says Hung LeHong, vice president and Gartner fellow, Executive Leadership & Innovation at Gartner. “Most of them are about getting started,” he says. “Either getting started from nothing or IT getting started in working with operational technology counterparts to deliver a true IoT strategy.”

Developing and deploying IoT projects isn’t without challenges. These include choosing the best architectures for each use case, a lack of connectivity standards, a lack of systems integrators with a track record, and delivering ease of use for consumers and enterprise users, LeHong says.

“A big issue is standards and interoperability,” adds Daniel Castro, director of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s Center for Data Innovation in Washington. “Building the IoT will require massive amounts of cooperation and coordination between firms.”

Fortunately, companies are getting better at recognizing the benefits of working together to develop common platforms that they can each use. Castro says, “We do not want the IoT to be a closed system — it should be an open system for innovation,” he says.

Another issue is figuring out what business problems or domains you're trying to address. “Otherwise, you throw so much data out there it's hard to scope through,” says Chris Curran, chief technologist at the U.S. advisory practices of consulting firm PwC in New York.

“If you don't have a business problem or domain to begin with, it will be hard to scope out a manageable set of projects,” Curran says. Companies will need to learn how to deal with all the data collection, storage and management involved, he says.

And of course ensuring IoT data security is a big challenge for the industry. Despite these issues, there are IoT initiatives under way today. Here are a few examples from different industries.
Water Management

HydroPoint Data Systems, a water management company in Petaluma, Calif., is leveraging real-time, two-way wireless communications via AT&T’s machine-to-machine network; big data analytics and the cloud to offer customers an automated system that eliminates water waste while monitoring and protecting against damages caused by leaks and runoff.

The system, called WeatherTRAK, has more than 25,000 subscribers who in 2013 saved more than 20 billion gallons of water, 77 million kilowatt hours of electricity and about $143 million in expenses, according to Chris Spain, CEO and president of HydroPoint.

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WeatherTRAK is a smart irrigation controller that replaces existing timers with an Internet-enabled controller that can comprehend data inputs delivered from the Internet -- such as weather data -- and provide proactive management to water supply maintainers via a Website and mobile application.

HydroPoint’s platform connects a site’s irrigation system and sprinklers, master valves, flow sensors, historical water bills, water budgets and site-specific weather data into an integrated management framework, Spain says.

“In the field, we utilize machine-to-machine communications, data over power lines and wireless communications back to the cloud,” Spain says. The company, “really couldn’t deliver our service without IoT in any cost effective fashion,” Spain says. “Water management systems, by their very nature, can change from one moment to the next so having real-time monitoring is essential.”

Pirelli, one of the world’s largest tire manufacturers, is gaining insights about the performance of its products in near-real time directly from sensors embedded in the tires.

Using SAP’s HANA data analytics platform, the Milan, Italy, company can manage the enormous amounts of data from its Cyber Tyre products. The tires contain sensors that collect data about tire conditions and performance that influence safety, control and vehicle dynamics.

The tire-mounted sensors enable fleet managers to remotely view tire pressure and temperature, as well as the mileage for each tire. With the HANA platform, the company can run reports on product performance and deliver timely and accurate sales and distribution information, which can lead to more efficient manufacturing and business processes.

According to SAP, Pirelli is building systems to enable the integration of vehicle position and operating data for purposes such as vehicle protection and control; information about traffic, road conditions and parking; remote vehicle behavior and diagnostics; management of logistics and of industrial vehicle fleets; and automated emergency calls.
Smart Lighting

Shorenstein Properties, a San Francisco-based real estate business, recently retrofitted parking lot light fixtures at its Santa Clara Towers office complex to LEDs, and at the same time integrated networking capabilities, creating a “Light Sensory Network” (LSN).

The sensor network, provided by Sensity Systems, links the LED fixtures to deliver both energy-efficient lighting and a real-time, global database of information that enables organizations to better manage physical environment to improve efficiency and security.

With the installation of the network, the facility benefits from an additional energy savings of 30% to 50% over the new LED baseline usage levels, according to Stan Roualdes, executive vice president, Property Management and Construction Services at Shorenstein.

“Continued success with networked LED lights doesn’t depend just on Sensity or upon the current selection of sensors, it will be on the developers who will leverage Sensity’s open API to develop new sensors and new applications that we can leverage,” Roualdes says.

An LSN “can gather real-time parking availability data and provide this information to smart parking application developers through an open API,” Roualdes adds. This can lead to improved services that benefit customers, and new opportunities for Shorenstein. “We see our LSN as a potential revenue-generating opportunity in the future,” he says. “Our lighting fixtures can become strategic assets.”
Healthcare Workflows

Florida Hospital Celebration Health, a hospital in Kissimmee, Fla., opened a new patient tower in 2011 designed to serve as a model for the healthcare industry relative to the latest developments in patient experience and safety, as well as staff efficiency.

The hospital deployed a real-time location system (RTLS) from Stanley Healthcare to track the location of critical medical equipment, automate the monitoring of refrigerator temperatures throughout the facility, and collect more accurate data on hand hygiene compliance.

One particularly interesting application has been a nurse tracking initiative, in which the hospital collects data on nurse activity throughout their shifts.

The goal of the initiative is to better understand how nurses spend their time during their shift and uncover patterns that could lead to increased efficiency and patient satisfaction, says Ashley Simmons, director of performance improvement.

Nurses wear badges with embedded Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags throughout their shift. The system tracks and collects location data continuously. The facility collects all the data and analyzes it using analytics functions in Stanley Healthcare’s MobileView software integrated with Tableau visual analytics software, and also uses its own internal business intelligence tools.

“We now have a better understanding of each patients’ care time requirements and are able to better align staff assignments on the unit based on this information,” Simmons says. The data is even revealing ways the company can design units more efficiently.
Driver Safety

Last year, Ford Motor Co. launched Connected Car Dashboards, a collaborative project with Splunk Enterprise and Cisco that collected and analyzed data from vehicles to gain insight into driving patterns and vehicle performance.

The company used its Ford OpenXC research platform to gather data from connected vehicles. Data was then indexed, analyzed and visualized in Splunk’s machine-generated big data platform and made available in a Connected Car Dashboards, which include visualizations specific to both electric and gas-powered vehicles.

Ford OpenXC is a combination of open source hardware and software that enables developers to read data from a vehicle's internal communications network. By installing a small hardware module to read and translate metrics from vehicles, the data becomes accessible to smartphone or tablet devices that can be used to develop custom applications.

Many of the metrics gathered have never before been available for vehicles, and show insights about driving behavior that could extend to consumer and commercial applications, according to Splunk. Insights gained from the open data project include analysis of the accelerator pedal position, vehicle speed, steering, wheel position, etc.

Expect to see a lot more examples of IoT emerge in the coming months as the technology that supports it evolve and companies grasp the potential benefits.
Security and the IoT

Information security — and privacy — are among the worries many companies have when it comes to the Internet of Things. How do you prevent physical objects such as cars and smart meters from getting hacked?

“Public safety and privacy are the real concerns,” says LeHong.

“Organizationally, the operations folks and the IT folks have to work together to take operational security and IT security to an overall cyber security perspective,” LeHong says. “The two areas will be so intertwined that these groups will have to work together — and maybe even become one group — to be effective.”

A lot of natural reticence to share data “has evaporated around the apps and social media that we use and the cookies we accept,” says Murdoch. “But expect there to be a greater level of concern about devices because of the greater intrusion to our daily lives.”

Security is really about trust and scale, Murdoch says. “Expect to see different approaches to peoples’ data and defaults to not using their data for anything but the actual service being offered,” he says. “Quality of service from a brand will become a key tool in addressing this.”

Organizations can “expect to see a number of incidents where IoTs are hacked, data stolen and services denied,” Murdoch adds. This is especially likely for startups that have not funded adequate security architectures, he says.

In terms of scale, a device that can be used by many different people and different stages of its life will cause problems, Murdoch says, especially when there are billions of them. There will be a need to test and provide quality of services on many different platforms, he says.

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Business users bypass IT and go rogue to the cloud

Business users bypass IT and go rogue to the cloud
Corporate departments act on their own, contending IT is too slow in creating a path to cloud services

IT departments need to watch out for business units or even individual workers going rogue and bypassing IT to go straight to the cloud.

Theres a tug-of-war tension in the enterprise right now, said Gartner analyst Lydia Leong. IT administrators very rarely voluntarily want to go with the public cloud. I call this the turkeys dont vote for thanksgiving theory. The people who are pushing for these services are not IT operations people but business people.

When marketing, events or other corporate business units conclude that IT is dragging its feet on the way to the cloud, the contract for the services themselves. IT often doesn't discover the move until oit shows up in the tech expenses papers.

Right now business strength lies in going around IT, said Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group.

Enterprise IT often sees the cloud as a risk. If you go to a large IT meeting, theyll generally place the public cloud as one of their top three or four threats because their line organizations, like marketing or manufacturing, go around IT to set up their own cloud service deals. They can get something cheaper and faster than they could by going through IT but its probably not compliant, he added.

Several analysts said theyve talked with enterprise IT executives who are facing such issues. None of the execs, though, want anyone to know its happening to them.

Jeff Kagan, an independent analyst, said the problem lies in the fact that these are still the early days of corporate cloud services use. Companies lack rules for the technology and users are more eager than IT try it out.

This is the wild, wild West where there are no rules, he added. People are used to storing their own information on their own laptop. Storing it on the cloud doesnt seem to them all that different from what theyve been doing. Were stepping into this cloud world bit by bit and every company has different challenges. This affects many of them.

The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend has contributed to the user push to the cloud, analysts say.

People have gotten pretty comfortable using their own smartphones and tablets at work. IT has had to adapt and learn to manage a network that theyre not totally able to control.

People, who dont want to wait for IT to catch up will contact companies like Google or Amazon directly and simply start storing data in the cloud.

It's also about departments using clouds to get around budget constraints and a lack of capacity in IT, said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group.

In a lot of ways, this reminds me of the 90's when departments went wild with building their own data centers and IT capabilities. In a lot of cases, that resulted in higher costs, security vulnerabilities, and poor integration, Olds said.

When IT is left out, its personnel has no idea how secure the clouds are or exactly where the information is being stored. It also means IT can't negotiate the best deal -- one that could encompass many different departments or data stores.

Best case, organizations might end up spending more on cloud services than they would if they mounted the service on systems the data center already owns, said Olds. Worst case, the organization could find that critical data is now outside their firewall and perhaps could be accessed by folks who shouldn't be able to see it.

Since analysts doubt IT can stop businesses from bypassing them on a whole-scale level, they say the tech execs need to set up strong cloud governance policies.

Its not really acceptable for IT to say no when someone wants to use the cloud, said Leong. They need to set up service agreements with approved providers and set up controls for how secure information needs to be. How do they provide risk management? How do they make this work instead of just saying, You cant do this.

Every time we take a step further into the information age, its unprotected, said Kagan. IT says theyre swamped just keeping everyone connected. They dont really have the time to proactively protect against future threats. They have to make the time.

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