First day of the Singularity Summit 2010 and first round-up of the last innovations and cutting-edge projects in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The conferences focused more on demos and concrete applications, less on Theory. L’Atelier US was there.

Human health and body improvement was a highly discussed subject today. Ben Goertzel, CEO of bioinformatics firm Biomind, talked about AI for increasing Human Health. He explained how the human body can be thought of as a very complex machine and remains very difficult to understand for our human mind. Longevity research has shown that everything in the body is interrelated. There isn’t a magic cocktail for longevity. In a near future, AI and AGI could help biology and pharma. What we need is an AI Biologist.

Steve Mann, an eccentric inventor and professor at the University of Toronto, gave the most entertaining show. He arrived wearing cam glasses and a blue machine that plays music with water. He also filmed the audience while he was talking. His concept of “sousveillance” or “undersight”, presented as the opposite of “surveillance” could be a deep understanding of how cam technologies can change society for the good or not. He thinks that a society based on the concept of “sousveillance” is the best way to decrease criminality because in this case surveillance comes from a human level, from “under”. It’s the contrary of a Big Brother society based surveillance from the above.

Another inspiring idea shared by Steve Mann and his music team was his idea about addiction. Human Computer Interfaces seem to work better if there is a real human desire to have an interaction with them. Better is the pleasure to play with machines, better humans and machines are interrelated. The best way to create this addiction is to create machines that are also provide sensitive experiences (playing music with water for example). Science engineering and art have to fuse to create Human Computer Machines of the future.

Mandayam A. Srinivasan, Director of MIT’s TouchLab, explained the latest innovations in haptic (touch) technologies: TADOMA, a system that aids deaf people, remote human interactions, brain machine control. He gave his vision of the future human brain: superhuman capacities (high speed and accurate vision, for example), directly integrated software (music), data management, new capacities to evolve in an abstract space.

A mobile application that uses a brainwave scanner to make phone calls has reached a usable level of development. With the ThinkContacts system, individuals with motor disabilities can select contacts from their mobile phone’s address book and make calls.

TheNextWeb reported on ThinkContacts, which uses hardware from NeuroSky that registers two types of qualities in brain activity: "meditation" and "attention." The NeuroSky MindSet headpiece, as shown on the project’s YouTube sample video, looks like over-ear-style headphones but for a small boom that touches the skin at the center of the forehead. This three point contact system presumably gives access to enough neural activity to determine both concentration and relaxation, the means of navigation for the app.

After assisting in Bluetooth connection to the mobile device, team developer Mirko Perkusich demonstrates how the user manipulates the Nokia handset with a status bar for both Meditation and Attention. The project wiki explains the navigation in detail: "The user controls the selection of the desired contact by controlling his/her level of meditation and attention. If the user’s level of attention is higher than 70% the software switches to the next contact in the list, if it is lower than 30% the software switches to the previous, otherwise the current contact will not be switched. If the user’s meditation level is higher than 80%, the software makes a phone call to the contact located at the center of the screen."

The app is designed for the Nokia N900’s Maemo platform, the Linux-based software that runs on the device. Maemo prioritizes multitasking, cross-platform social networking, multiple desktops and geotagging for its core functionality.

No progress roadmap is given on the ThinkContacts wiki, suggesting this project is still in a relatively early stage. ReadWriteWeb remarked on the limited number of accessibility apps for mobile are currently in the market. Several apps mentioned are available on the Android operating system, many of which are tools for the visually impaired.

One of the first examples of virtual reality affecting smell and taste was showcased at last month’s SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics conference in Los Angeles. Using visual and olfactory stimuli, the system attempted to alter the subject’s perception of taste using virtual and real life cookies. After donning combination eye/nose goggle headgear, the user saw a visual representation of a flavored cookie, as well as inhaled scented air through nose tubes, and subsequently took a bite of a neutrally flavored cookie.

The contributing team for this project, made up of Takuji Narumi, Takashi Kajinami, Tomohiro Tanikawa and Michitaka Hirose, come from the University of Tokyo. They describe the project itself, "Meta Cookie," as "the world’s first pseudo-gustation system that induces cross-modal effects so humans can perceive various tastes by changing only visual and olfactory information." The system recognizes the sugar cookies that have augmented reality markers printed on them so that the software can properly track movement and time sensory output.

As the team’s article abstract explains, due to flavor being chemical-related, little innovation has been related to computers for this sense, despite how much has been done using the other major senses (vision, touch, hearing, etc). Since much of chemical interaction with taste is not understood, this project has taken advantage of visual and olfactory cues to affect taste. Using these tools, as well as memory, an effective experience can be cobbled together to fool the brain into changing the perception of flavor for the user. "We taste with our yes and nose before any food enters our mouth," says Stuart Fox at MSNBC. If indeed "good chefs know this," then so now will virtual and augmented reality engineers.

Narumi has several projects in the computer science field, including other projects that use non-visual feedback. One project, "Thermotaxis," uses thermal feedback in a social edutainment situation.

We tend to turn to universities when we want to cover emerging tech, but what’s going on in the DIY Scene? They’re meeting our century’s retro quota, playing NES.

With their eyes.

Engineering collective Waterloo Labs, based in Austin, TX, has developed a way to play Super Mario Brothers with their eyes, using electrodes and an a single-board RIO platform.

eyeMario allows users to control Mario’s movements by looking left and right, make him jump while looking up.

How does it work? Electrodes are placed around the eyes, measuring the positive and negative electrons emitted by different eye movements. These bursts are translated by the RIO board into what amounts to cursor controls.

Unfortunately, while eyeMario makes it possible to play NES with your eyes, you still have to clean the cartridges the old fashioned way, by blowing in them.

The future has its limitations, after all.

Waterloo Labs’ past projects include driving a car with an iPhone and playing Half-Life with shovels.

Chris Anderson’s “Atoms are the New Bits” has given increased attention to the wonders coming out of the DIY scene, which dates back in its current iteration to San Francisco’s Survival Research Labs in the late 1970s.

Moore’s Law and attendant metaphors are continually driving down the overhead needed to invent new things. As such, it releases innovation from the restrictions of the corporation and university (and the entities funding the research).

It will take time for things like Waterloo Labs to become totally autonomous entities, but what they are doing leads us to agree with Anderson’s sub-thesis that the resources needed for innovation on the hardware side – the expensive part – will be increasingly leaked into the hands of private individuals, which will add tremendously to the acceleration of innovation cycles.

Researchers at the University of San Diego have developed cheap, 3D and tactile virtual reality, using consumer 3D HDTV panels.

The Heads-Up Virtual Reality device (HUVR) uses the 3D HDTV and a half-silvered mirror to project tactile images onto a user’s hands or the space around them.  A haptic device allows for physical manipulation of the image, and a head tracker can be included to generate the correct perspective.

The researchers see the device being used in disciplines where images of objects would have to be manipulated, like medicine, engineering instruction and archeology. They imagine how it would work with an MRI:

“By using HUVR’s touch-feedback device - which is similar to a commercial game control — a physician could actually feel a defect in the brain, rather than merely see it,” said research scientist Tom DeFanti. “This can be done over the networks, sharing the look and feel of the object with other researchers and students,” DeFanti said.

Without the head-tracker, the each HURV would cost around $7,000 per device, with $2,300 of that going towards the TV. The availability of consumer 3D HDTVs has driven the cost of production down from the $100,000 comparable technology used to cost.

The major expense that remains is the head-tracker, which costs up to $20,000. The UCSD researchers are working towards a cheaper replacement.

“If only my clothes could talk.” How many times have you thought that after a long day?

Okay, never. But someday talking clothes might be a possibility, if tech coming out of MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics is any indication. Yoel Fink, assistant professor of Materials Science, has developed fabric that can produce and emit sound.

“You can actually hear them, these fibers,” says lab member Noémie Chocat. “If you connected them to a power supply and applied a sinusoidal current” — an alternating current whose period is very regular — “then it would vibrate. And if you make it vibrate at audible frequencies and put it close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it.”

This could mean that one day clothes become microphones, for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions. Other uses imagined by the researchers are monitoring the flow of the ocean and large-scale sonar imaging systems. Materials made from the fabric would be the equivalent of millions of tiny acoustic sensors.

The MIT team also believes that fibers can one day produce energy. These new uses signal a fundamental change in fabric’s role.

“Fibre materials span a broad range of applications ranging from simple textile yarns to complex modern fibre-optic communication systems,” the researchers write. “Throughout their history, a key premise has remained essentially unchanged: fibres are static devices, incapable of controllably changing their properties over a wide range of frequencies”

The project will be written up in the August in Nature Materials.

There’s just something fundamentally cool about images projected on water. If it’s drops of water instead of the surface, that’s even better. If the images are in 3D – you might be onto something mind-blowing.

So Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute has developed something that might be mind-blowing. AquaLux 3D creates 3D images by using multiple layers of precisely controlled water droplets.

The technology grew out of efforts to build safer car headlights, headlights that would make driving in the rain easier by ensuring that as much light as possible was able to shine through raindrops.

AquaLux 3D projects images on layers of timed drops of water. The layers are timed in such a way that drops in the front do not block drops behind them. Right now the system generates four layers of drops falling at 60 per second.

“By carefully generating several layers of drops so that no two drops occupy the same line-of-sight from the projector, we can use each drop as a voxel that can be illuminated to create a 3-D image,” said Srinivasa Narasimhan, associate professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon

The system will be used for displaying video images and text, and envisaged for use in interactive games, exhibitions and theme parks.

“One unique aspect of AquaLux 3D is the potential for physical interaction,” Narasimhan said. “People can touch the water drops and alter the appearance of images, which could lead to interactive experiences we can’t begin to predict. We look forward to the day when creative people can fully explore the potential of this display.”

The researchers will discuss AquaLux 3D July 27 at SIGGRAPH, the 37th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, in Los Angeles.

With facial recognition being adopted by the police and the Xbox 360 sensor, expect more attention paid to start-ups developing the underlying technologies. Affective Interfaces, a business application developer that presented at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2009, builds technology that senses emotions through a webcam. The San Rafael, CA-based company "researches behavioral truthfulness indicators, emotion, and meta states of cognitive process, for a reflective empowered social web."

While the small group that makes up Affective Interfaces focuses on their innovative service but does not neglect their own monetization. The team combines clinical trauma expert Jai Haissman and software developer and philosopher Dr. Philip Kuryloski with business and finance advisors. As Tim O’Reilly commented on the TC50 panel, "[Affective Interfaces] is the first one I’ve seen that actually seems like a business."

Appropriately-acronymed AI, the tech analyzes facial expressions to help businesses uncover "the nonrational influences affecting decisions from purchase to engagement." Using input from the customer’s webcam run through AI’s metrics, the data returned is useful for gauging emotions in response to ads, media, and user experience. In an example report on a Mercedes commercial, positive responses, engagement and emotions indicated a successful commercial, except for demographic discrepancies. Time-based metrics pinpointed the two main branding moments, which generally were met with high engagement states. By comparison, the females did not show positive response or even showed negative response at the peak branding moment.

The mission statement of this company waxes enigmatic: "Affective Interfaces helps you understand and fulfill the preconscious heart and mind of your customers." Implemented effectively, the service ostensibly aims to give businesses the ability to predict what their customers will want on an informed, analysis-dependent level. The process is likely effective, as GigaOm summarizes the software’s capabilities as showcased at the TechCrunch conference - Kevin Rose of Digg was deemed happy in prerecorded video of him smiling and frowning backstage.

Have you seen Iron Man2? In the recent film, Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t typing on a keyboard but on his living room table. Just more sci-fi? Maybe not…

Light Blue Optics has developed a new product named Light Touch, an interactive projector which transforms any surface into a multitouch screen. The device uses Holographic Laser Projection technology, which creates video images in WVGA resolution, as well as an infrared sensor that detects motion. That’s why the projected image looks like a touch screen. With it, users can interact with applications simply by touching the projected screen.

Light Touch is operated on Windows CE and runs with Adobe Flash Lite. It can project a 10.1 inch image (25.7 cm). Connected to the Internet via Wifi, the device displays content like gaming applications, photos and a video player which allows movie viewing. There device has 2GB of internal storage as well as external storage thanks to a Micro SD card slot.

Currently, Light Touch isn’t available for the mainstream. But it’s available to industrial partners for commercial applications. Indeed, we could easily imagine a lot of usage in retail stores in order to develop an interactive way to have more information about a product. There are also obvious possibilities for tourist industries especially for directions and maps.

It’s utterly possible that in a generation or so people won’t need to carry gadgets like smartphones or mp3 players around them, because these things will be integrated into their clothes.

Intelligent textiles are still in the experiment and development phase, and thus are far down the line. But recent innovations show the possibilities that are opening up in this fascinating area, from hoodies that connect to your Facebook page to devices that turn a user’s skin into a UI.

Wearable Absence falls into the former category. The project, by researchers at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of London, turns clothing into an information device that displays text and images as well as play sounds

There’s a good bit of theory behind Wearable Absence, centered on creating the narrative of an absent person.

“The invocation of visual and aural memory files are triggered by a passive process in which the user will not consciously participate but through the use of unobtrusive sensing devices that detect the physical state of the wearer,” according to the project’s website.

While this positions the clothing squarely in the tech/art category, it is one of growing number of examples of the ways we will interface with technology in the future.

In 1982, when the personal computer was Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, not many readers would have imagined that in less than thirty years people would be carrying powerful computers in their pockets. It’s not inconceivable to think that thirty years from now we’ll laugh at the fact that we ever carried devices at all.