Intel talks sensors

IDF San Francisco: Intel's extrasensory perception

LAYING OUT WHAT he claimed to be the “largest change currently happening at Intel”, Vice President of Chipzilla's corporate technology group and director of Intel research, Andrew Chien, talked some serious sense about sensors today, in a briefing to the foreign press.

Sensing big opportunities, Chien discussed his firms efforts to some day be able to transform huge amounts of everyday sensory information into processable digital information which could then be manipulated to, in his words, have a “positive impact on human life”.

Chien reckoned that Intel's exploratory research into the field represented a major shift for the company towards what he described as “more essential computing and essential applications”, from microscopic to macroscopic sensors.

Asking “wouldn't it be nice if my computer knew what I was doing?” - something to which many a privacy-conscious individual would answer an emphatic “NO” - Chien went on to outline Intel research's goal in the sensory field as “achieving 90 per cent accuracy for 90 per cent of a person's day”, something, he reckons, is a lot more impressive than it actually sounds.

As one example, Chien highlighted a suite of software called DermFind, developed by the firm, which purportedly helps doctors identify melonomas and skin cancer quickly, by feeding a photo of a particular skin lesion into a massive online medical image database to check for similar images and their matching diagnostic and treatment information. Another biological use for micro sensors and the information they yield, according to Chien, was stem cell research, something the company claims it has already looked into.

The problems with this kind of technology, Chien noted however, was how to move from what he called “low level sensors to high levels of understanding”, acknowledging that hoarding vast amounts of information without actually being able to make head nor tail of it did little good to anyone.

Explaining that studies had revealed that real time video event detection actually required the equivalent of a whopping four Teraflops at 10 kw today, Chien said Intel wanted to be able to cut that number down to less than one watt on a handheld device, and that that information would also then be able to access the web which could help interpret and make more sense of it.

Outlining the potential for sensor technology, not only as a source of entertainment, but also as an educational tool, Chien demonstrated research of children wearing sensory bracelets and mini shoulder cams (Egocentric video), which could, he posited, some day be able to help teachers know exactly how their students responded to and used certain objects. For example, the information garnered from a child's sensors could tell the teacher if they were actually really learning anything at all productive from an object, just messing around with it, or worse, being destructive little cretins.

Accelerometers, GPS tracking systems and embedded microphones also all featured heavily in Chien's presentation on Intel's all knowing, all seeing, all powerful plan to have devices take over your life.

In a later interview, Chien admitted that the whole issue for safeguarding personal privacy with such devices was “an interesting challenge” for the firm, but said Chipzilla would continue to work with the various global rights and privacy organisations to ensure that, at least from a cryptological point of view, personal privacy was protected.

He added that in his opinion, the longer a company held on to a person's private information (*cough*, Google), the more risk they ran of getting themselves into trouble for privacy abuse, and advocated destroying as much primary data as possible, as quickly as possible, to avoid such problems arising in the future.