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Robo-mate exoskeleton under development in Europe

Efforts to develop an exoskeleton for the workplace are under way, backed by EU funds.

Twelve research institutions from seven European countries are involved in the Robo-mate project, which hopes to test a robotic suit that can be worn by factory employees within three years.
They say the machine could reduce the number of work-related injuries.

One expert warned employers would need to be convinced the equipment would not pose safety issues of its own.

Manufacturers including Italian carmaker Fiat and the French vehicle recycler Indra are working with the teams.

The companies will suggest situations in which the tech could prove useful and have also said they would help test it.

The EU has committed 4.5m euros (£6m; £3.8m) to the scheme.

Heavy weights

The project aims to address the fact that many manufacturing tasks are difficult to automate.

For example Indra has to deconstruct many different types of car, and at present humans, rather than robots, are the only ones capable of handling the complexity of the choices involved.

Because of the weights involved, this can put staff at risk of developing medical problems.

"People have to manipulate parts or components that weigh more than 10kg [22lb]," said Dr Carmen Constantinescu, from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute, one of the organisations involved.

"These activities are not carried out just once per day, but are repetitive.

"An exoskeleton with a human inside represents a new type of research for the manufacturing industry.

"It offers a hybrid approach in which the robotic parts support the human who can provide the decisions and cognition needed."

The partners have highlighted a study by the UK's Work Foundation think tank that suggested as many as 44 million people in the EU have suffered work-related musculoskeletal disorders.

Not all would be preventable by such an exoskeleton, and one of the other researchers involved said part of the challenge would be indentifying where the tech could prove useful.

"One area would be, is it useful to lift heavy loads?" Prof Darwin Caldwell, from King's College London, told the BBC.

"The other is situations when people are working above their head.

"If you hold a paint brush or a screwdriver above your head for more than two to three minutes your arms become very fatigued and it can be very bad for your heart."

However, he said the engineering teams were mindful of the risks involved.

"At the minute the motors or hydraulic systems required tend to be rather large and clumsy," Prof Caldwell said. "What we have to do is find ways to miniaturise those.

"What we also have to remember is that an exoskeleton is essentially a robot in physical contact with a human.

"That raises safety issues so we will be looking at making the interaction between the two softer and more organic - it won't be like having a large industrial robot which is dangerous."

The researchers have already suggested some of the technologies they plan to include

One roboticist who is not involved in the project said he expected such technology to become commonplace within the next two to three decades.

"A number of exoskeletons have been developed for military use in the US, and for helping the disabled and frail older people to walk again in Japan - industrial use is an obvious next step," said Prof Noel Sharkey, from the University of Sheffield.

"But one hard problem is how the human user interfaces with the device. It is vital that the operator can perform dextrously with natural movements without having to think about it.

"Another problem is how to work in environments with other humans without hurting them. This will require new natural collision avoidance methods."

Why you can't vote online yet

Online voting companies like Everyone Counts, whose system is shown here, face a slew of obstacles in the U.S. - even as other countries take the digital plunge.

Online voting is taking off in local elections, particularly overseas. But Americans shouldn't expect to vote for the president on their laptop or iPad anytime soon.

The battle over whether to digitize the voting process has become a full-blown war in the United States, even as countries like Canada, Norway and Australia have increasingly adopted online systems. Proponents say going digital will boost voter turnout, while naysayers cite hacking and other security threats as risks too great to overcome in the near future.

"It's such a different world than it was 20 years ago, and yet very little has changed in our voting process," says Rob Weber, a former IT professional at IBM (IBM, Fortune 500), who started the blog Cyber the Vote in 2010.

Like many supporters of online voting, Weber points out that many young Americans don't vote. Bringing the voting process to a format they're familiar with -- a website on a PC, tablet, or even a mobile phone -- would overcome the "enthusiasm gap," he believes.

But that argument hasn't been enough to bring online voting into the mainstream. For that, Weber places the blame squarely on election officials whom he says aren't interested in changing the status quo.

"They find online voting culturally distasteful," Weber says. "They bring up theoretical hacking situations in order to make people afraid of the concept of change. And unfortunately it works."

Security researchers don't think those concerns are merely theoretical. Michael Coates, chair of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and director of security assurance at Firefox maker Mozilla, says hackers will attack anything worth hacking.

"It's guaranteed that such a system [online voting] would be attacked, for sure," Coates says. "All important systems, from financial to government, face skilled hackers. There are security flaws in every system; it's a matter of how you detect and respond to them."

Home PCs, in particular, are susceptible to a myriad of cyberattacks that could be used to alter a user's vote.

"Until we can reliably foil malware and viruses -- and who knows when that will be -- it's hard to consider a system in which we vote from our home computers," Coates says.

Such issues have felled some past attempts at online voting in the United States.

In 2004, the military began testing the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE), which would have let service members stationed overseas vote online in the general election. But Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz scrapped the plan after government-commissioned studies warned of extensive security flaws.

Another oft-cited failure came in 2010, when Washington, D.C., conducted a pilot project to allow overseas or military voters to download and return absentee ballots over the Internet. Before opening the system to real voters, D.C. invited the public to evaluate whether the system could be hacked.

It was. Within 36 hours of going live.

A University of Michigan team "found and exploited a vulnerability that gave us almost total control of the server software, including the ability to change votes and reveal voters' secret ballots," professor J. Alex Halderman later wrote in a blog post about the hack.

Halderman termed the system "brittle" and proclaimed online voting too dangerous to implement anytime soon.

"It may someday be possible to build a secure method for submitting ballots over the Internet, but in the meantime, such systems should be presumed to be vulnerable based on the limitations of today's security technology," he wrote.

Such high-profile debacles are a difficult obstacle for online voting companies like Everyone Counts, says CEO Lori Steele.

"The problem with the D.C. hacking is that it was a less-than-mediocre system run by people who had no experience," Steele says. "When people use it as an example, it's like, c'mon -- those issues were all security 101."

Bad PR for any online voting attempt undermines the entire cause, Steele says. Still, California-based Everyone Counts has run online elections for local and municipal contests in U.S. locations including West Virginia, Honolulu, El Paso, Chicago and Washington state, in addition to the United Kingdom and Australia.

Everyone Counts uses "military-grade encryption" for its ballots, and can also provide a paper trail for clients who want it, Steele says. A "transparent code" policy allows any client to inspect the company's source code.

While Steele admits that online voting, like any system, is susceptible to attacks, she thinks the sheer number of devices in the wild would make it difficult for would-be hackers to hit their targets.

"They don't know which PCs or tablets or phones will be used for voting," Steele says. "Plus, people talk about paper being the Holy Grail of security, but that is so far from reality."

The biggest limitation of paper ballots was on display last week, when Hurricane Sandy decimated parts of the northeastern United States. The storm's destruction cut many voters off from their scheduled polling station.

On Saturday, New Jersey announced that displaced storm victims will qualify as "overseas voters," meaning they are eligible to vote via e-mail or fax.

"The storm was awful, but it could serve as a wider reminder that we need to reform the system," says Michelle Shafer, director of communications at Scytl USA.

Scytl's Spanish parent company has conducted online voting in over 30 countries worldwide. In the U.S., it's slowly gaining steam. The company has completed online "ballot delivery" -- digitally delivering a paper-ballot-like form that voters can fill out and submit -- in six U.S. states. Those digital ballots are typically used by military members and overseas residents. It has also run direct online voting for local elections in West Virginia, Florida and Alaska.

"I don't think we'll be voting online by [2016's general election], but my hope is that we'll continue to take slow and measured steps toward that eventuality," she adds.

While the United States takes it slow, countries like Canada and Norway continue to expand online voting.

Dean Smith, president and founder of Canada's leading online-voting firm, Intelivote, says the divide between his home country and the United States is vast. Popular Canadian labor unions have used online voting for years -- which means users have grown accustomed to the process -- and the country's ballots tend to be far less complex than those in the United States.

"In general, people here see the benefits of online voting and there's an acceptance," Smith says of Canada. "The U.S. would be a great coup, but there are so many academics who made their name by being naysayers. There's so much fighting about it. Right now, we don't need the additional problems."

Google Introduces New Desktop Apps

A screen shot of the new Chrome app launcher for Windows desktops.

Even if Google is ready to live entirely online, everyone else might not be.

To celebrate the Google Chrome browser’s fifth birthday on Thursday, the company expanded its ambitions in computing by introducing a new kind of Chrome app that runs offline and on other operating systems besides Google’s.

If trying to figure out what that means makes your head spin, you’re not alone.

Until now, Google’s Chrome Web apps worked only online. The new apps combine the best of online and offline apps, the company says, similar to the apps on a smartphone. For instance, they allow people to work without an Internet connection and plug in hardware like digital cameras. But since they are written in Web programming languages, they can sync across devices, back up to the cloud and receive automatic security updates.

So far, there are only a few such apps, like Pixlr Touch Up for photo editing and Wunderlist for to-do lists. But the development has important implications for the way we use computers and the way Google competes with rivals like Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft made a similar move with Windows 8.

The surprising part is that Google’s Web apps now work not just on the company’s own Chromebooks, but also on Microsoft Windows machines and, soon, on Macs, as long as they have the Chrome browser.

For Google, it is a way to promote its own services even for people who use computers made by other companies or who have been turned off by the need for an Internet connection to use Google Web apps.

“It’s really increasing the competitiveness or the appeal of Google Apps for people who don’t want to pay for Microsoft Office,” said Frank E. Gillett, an analyst studying computing platforms at Forrester.

It is also an acknowledgment that Google’s dream of a world in which everyone lives on the Web — always with an Internet connection and without desktop software, which Chromebooks do not have — is not a reality, at least not yet.

“It’s an admission that their original vision was over-simplistic,” Mr. Gillett said. “I agree with the notion that online cloud services are becoming an important part of the experience of using software. But where the Google guys got mixed up was the notion that it’ll all be inside this thing called the Web browser.”

Though Erik Kay, a Chrome engineering director at Google, said in a blog post that the company still believes in the Web, he said it also acknowledged that people need some of the functionality provided by software installed on devices.

Though low-end Chromebooks, which Google has shifted to marketing as a second computer just for Web access, have sold well, the Chromebook Pixel, Google’s $1,300 laptop and MacBook competitor, is a hard sell because it has no hard drive or desktop software. The new Chrome apps could change that.

“Even though the P.C. market is in decline, the form factor isn’t going to disappear,” said Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner who studies consumer technology. “Google has a lot of goals in trying to get businesses and education and markets like that, and having the laptop form factor could be important for them.”

Google’s move seems mostly aimed at courting software developers, Mr. Blau said. Instead of being forced to choose among operating systems, they can just write apps for the Web that run on a variety of systems.

Google’s message to developers is, “This is one more reason that app developers should come and use Google products over their competitors,” he said. “That’s the bottom line.”

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo completes 2nd powered flight

Ride aboard Virgin Galactic spacecraft

Billionaire Richard Branson's planned commercial spacecraft had a successful test flight Thursday, rocketing into the skies over California after being dropped from its carrier plane, his company announced.

Branson's Virgin Galactic said SpaceShipTwo broke the sound barrier, climbed from 42,000 feet to 69,000 feet over the Mojave Desert under rocket power and descended using its tilt-wing "feathering" maneuver. It's the second powered flight for SpaceShipTwo, which is designed to carry up to six passengers on what will be suborbital flights at first.

"In addition to achieving the highest altitude and greatest speed to date, the test flight demonstrated the vehicle's full technical mission profile in a single flight for the first time ... All of the test objectives were successfully completed," the company said.

In a video showing highlights of Thursday's test flight, Branson said Virgin Galactic plans to start taking passengers aloft in 2014 -- a slight delay from the December 2013 marker he set down at Britain's Farnborough International Airshow in June.

"Virgin Galactic is now gearing up for the commercial service, finalizing cabin interiors, flight suits, training programs and the multiple other details required to offer hundreds of aspiring astronauts a safe and awe-inspiring journey," he said.

More than 500 would-be astronauts, including actor Ashton Kutcher, have so far signed up for the two-hour, $200,000-a-seat flights. Virgin executives have said they expect to have 600 bookings in the first two years of service.

Xbox One to launch in major markets on 22 November

Microsoft positions the arrival of its next-gen console between the US and European launch dates for Sony's PS4

Xbox One: Microsoft's next-gen console will launch in major markets on 22 November. Photograph: Nick Adams/Reuters

This is it: the battle for the next generation console market is on. Microsoft has finally revealed the launch date for its Xbox One machine – it will hit retail in 13 major territories including North America and the UK on 22 November.

It is an interesting and provocative timing. With Sony's rival PlayStation 4 console arriving in North America on 15 November and Europe on 29 November, Microsoft has chosen a more ambitious rollout right in the middle of its competitor's launch period. Neither manufacturer has provided a firm date for a Japanese release, reversing the traditions of previous console cycles where new devices tended to premiere in Japan.

In a statement on the Xbox Wire website, Yusuf Mehdi, the vice-president of marketing, strategy and business for Xbox wrote: "The culmination of many years of listening to you, our fans, developing innovative technology, and partnering with the best game and entertainment partners in the industry has brought us to this point. There is still a lot more work to do, but the teams are making excellent progress and are focused on launch."

Officially announced in May, the Xbox One console has had a rough journey toward its launch. Microsoft's intitial focus on the video-on-demand and live television capabilities of its machine alienated gamers, as did early indications that the console would restrict the sale of pre-owned games and that the Kinect camera device would need to be permanently switched on for games to work. Microsoft later controversially reversed these policies and since then has worked to improve the image of its device. The company enjoyed a comparatively successful showing at the recent Gamescom festival in Cologne, revealing a Call of Duty console bundle deal, as well as free copies of Fifa 14 for pre-orders of the special Day one edition of the machine.

With both "next-generation" consoles arriving on shop shelves within weeks of each other, this is one of the closest console wars the industry has seen. There was almost a year between the debut of the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3, for example.

It is expected that the arrival of new hardware will provide a major boost to the $60bn a year games industry, which has seen software and hardware sales falling over the last two years. Interest in the new consoles has been huge, despite competition from devices such as smartphones and tablets. Sony has announced that 1m pre-orders have been received for the PlayStation 4, and while Microsoft hasn't provided figures, many stores have closed pre-orders for the machine, or have stopped guaranteeing that reserved machines will be available on day one. According to gaming news site Videogamer, UK chain GAME is now informing customers that the only way to now secure an Xbox One on day one is to pre-order the Call of Duty: Prestige Edition bundle – at £615. With shipments of the Xbox One allegedly reduced due to poor yield rates of camera and disc drive components – the launch date may well prove to be rather meaningless to ill-prepared shoppers who turn up on the day.

The big question now is, how will gamers, and mainstream consumers, decide between such closely placed competitors. Both machines feature eight-core CPUs and powerful AMD graphics processors, and both have built-in Blu-ray drives as well as advanced online functionality. While on paper, the PlayStation 4's specs seem more powerful, it's likely that developers will quickly work out ways to exploit the hardware so that technical differences become negligible.

If it's down to price, the PlayStation 4 comes in at $399 (£349) while the Xbox One will cost $499 (£429), although the latter comes with the Kinect motion controller, while the PS4's motion control and camera peripheral is sold separately.

It's just as likely, however, that games will be the deciding factor. While both will boast major third-party titles such as Fifa 14, Call of Duty Ghosts and Watchdogs, Sony has the platform exclusive racing game DriveClub, sci-fi shooter Killzone and cute adventure platformer Knack, while Microsoft can call on the hugely popular Forza Motorsport 5, zombie romp Dead Rising 3 and classic reboot Killer Instinct.

However the competition is decided, we at least now know when it starts.

US Open Tennis App Is a Smash

The US Open app is heavily influenced by Twitter, and throughout the app you'll find current tweets on the players and the matches. The Dashboard gives you an overview of tweets, letting you get perspectives from other fans as well as connect and engage. The Trendcast feature monitors Twitter activity, alerting you to matches that look like they're becoming awesome slugfests.

Second-screen or only screen, the official USTA US Open Tennis Championships for iPad app brings some of the greatest hardcourt tennis in the world into your hands, wherever you happen to be. Right there, the app starts off on a great footing for tennis fans. Fortunately, through nimble footwork and a lot of great serving, the app does a decent job of keeping you updated on all the action at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, N.Y.

Oh, and you often get to watch matches live, too.

The app is actually produced by IBM in partnership with the US Open, and because the core foundation behind the digital experience and analytics is provided by IBM -- which also provides similar services for all four of the hot Grand Slam tennis tournaments each year -- the app is similar to those for Wimbledon, the French Open, and the Australian Open.

You can expect to find not only the current scores, draws, photos and news, but also a wealth of smart analytics that crunches more than 41 million data points to deliver insight into how well a player is performing against historical match data.

Analytics Aplenty

Keys to the Match lets regular fans drill down to look at IBM's analysis while a match is a being played and learn, for example, that a player has three key performance metrics that, if fulfilled, will likely lead to a win -- according to the numbers, of course.

Interestingly, keys for each player are usually not the same. One player may need to win 78 percent of points on first serves, so winning just 75 percent wouldn't bode well overall. Another metric might be a need to win more than 53 percent of 4 to 9 shot rallies. In one match I was following, the underdog needed to serve astoundingly well in order to pull off a likely win, blasting more than 18 percent of first serve points with an ace.

This sounds wild, but serious tennis fans can see where this sort of measuring actual performance during game play matters. Although it's information fans might know intuitively -- the underdog better deliver some blistering serves -- seeing it turned into graphs through the app is undeniably cool.

Yet true fans know something else, too: Tennis is a sport, and at any moment the advantage can turn. If players are still playing, it's always possible for either to win.

What's in the App

The US Open app is heavily influenced by social media, primarily Twitter activity, and throughout the app you'll find current tweets on the players and the matches. The Dashboard gives you an overview of tweets, letting you hear perspectives from other fans as well as connect and engage.

The Trendcast feature monitors Twitter activity, alerting you to which matches might be turning into awesome slugfests. You can also slide through each current match in the Dashboard and see the score, who's serving, and what the latest tweets are. If the match is available to watch live, there's a red Watch Live button that will take you to the match.

From the Scores section, you can tap on a match and launch into an analytics dashboard that shows first serve percentages, double faults, winners, unforced errors and the like, connected to the aforementioned Keys to the Match.

Unfortunately, the app doesn't provide you a quick link from this area to the live match -- and vice versa. On my iPad, for example, if I tap on the SlamTracker button while watching a live match, it doesn't seem to do anything; however, if I click on the SlamTracker button on the usopen.org website, it launches a Web browser pop-up window that loads the SlamTracker data points. Similarly, if I click on a Watch Live button on the website, it will launch a popup window that delivers the live action.

In this situation, my Mac-based experience is better than my iPad experience.

One of my favorite features of the app is actually old-school: the photos. The US Open team has total access to everything, of course, and the photographers deliver fantastic action shots. They give you a sense of being on the court and you can see your favorite players in stunning detail -- and occasionally sporting some contorted faces as they attempt to crush the ball.

All-in-all, for tennis fans, there's no downside to getting this free app. You can quickly check up on the draw and scores, and even catch a bit of the action live, if not feel a little more connected to the world of tennis via Twitter.

HomeMonitor security camera review

The HomeMonitor from Y-Cam makes a web-based CCTV system easy for anybody. But it comes at a price, says Matt Warman

Where once a domestic CCTV system was the preserve of the paroanoid or the oligarch, today the web makes it easy and fairly affordable.

The trouble is that what can be done by a geek for about £50 is also quite tricky to pull off for the mainstream consumer, and hence the rise of a host of various solutions to make the process rather easier. Some of these attempt to utilise existing, redundant mobile phones, whose cameras may be able to become webcams that act as anything from a baby monitor to a security solution, while others use fuller service solutions. Some record to hard discs, while other, more sophisticated, use the cloud.

HomeMonitor is one of the latter. Made by Y-Cam it offers indoor cameras from £166, outdoor versions from £291 and free online storage for the last seven days, with more available if you want it for a one-off charge. An app or a web viewer lets you see what’s going on and notifications tell you if movement has been detected, in zones you can specify. Night vision makes these useful when it’s dark, which is more than your recycled smartphone could likely offer.

All of this makes for a superb system that is easily set up – plug in the camera, enter its unique code, and away you go. Wireless or wired options are supplied, and screwing the robust yet lightweight cameras to the wall is straightforward.

Critics will suggest that this is much more money than anyone needs to spend – Y-Cam is not the cheapest way of setting yourself up with an external camera. But the app is straightforward, the website decent enough and the various controls make it easy to define specific areas that are the ones where movement between certain times might make you suspicious.

All of this adds up to a powerful if pricey system, adding the web to an existing idea, and removing the need for tapes.

Rival systems do exist – electronics giant Maplin sells huge amounts of the UK’s CCTV cameras – but where HomeMonitor excels is in a single, simple set-up that is expensive but neat. If you’re not a geek, it offers the power of the cloud and the security of CCTV for a similar price to other, less sophisticated systems that require hard discs.

World’s first anti-trolling software' launched in UK

A British software company has launched a new app to help footballers, reality TV stars, pop stars, politicians and anyone in the public eye block abusive messages on their Twitter feeds.

Lee Westwood recently lashed out at Twitter trolls who criticised his performance in the USPGA Championship

The app, called SMC4 Lite, claims to be the “world’s first anti-trolling software”. It reads all inbound and outgoing social media messages from the user’s Twitter account and automatically blocks any profanity, sexism, racism and other inappropriate language.

Michael Veenswyk, chief executive of SMC4, which developed the app, said that implementing automated social media controls stops abuse and eliminates reaction, enabling celebrities and fans to enjoy social messaging protected from unwanted abuse.

“The proliferation of social media has enabled people to get closer than ever to public figures, but the flipside is that it has also opened up an unwanted avenue of antisocial abusive communication towards celebrities," said Veenswyk.

"It's unfortunately an epidemic that has found its way into day-to-day social communication and needs to be stamped out as no person should be subject to vile and abusive social media attacks."

SMC4 was originally a corporate tool designed to stop rogue or mistaken tweets by employees, but it has since been adapted to work for celebrities.

The SMC4 free version enables up to 10 ‘transactions’ per day. This means it will monitor the social media account it is attached to every six minutes and delete any incoming abuse for free up to ten times a day. Users also have the option to upgrade to a paid, premium version, if they are worried about needing more than ten transactions.

SMC4 claims that the app could help bring an end to online celebrity metdowns, such as Lee Westwood’s recent outburst following the PGA Championship, and Alec Baldwin’s infamous response to Daily Mail journalist George Stark earlier this year, allowing people in the public eye to have civilised conversations with those that want to interact with them.
Veenswyk claims it could also be used to protect children from being bullied online by blocking abusive tweets from other children.
As well as Twitter, the SMC4 app can block abuse on corporate Facebook accounts. However, Facebook does not enable third parties to control private accounts, so the SMC4 app does not work on private accounts.
Veenswyk said: “Mark Zucerkburg and Facebook have a duty of care to protect young people and could easily stop social media abuse by unlocking the Private Facebook user API, enabling authorised 3rd parties like SMC4 to end profanity attacks and trolling."

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Robo-mate exoskeleton under development in Europe

Efforts to develop an exoskeleton for the workplace are under way, backed by EU funds.

Why you can't vote online yet

Online voting is taking off in local elections, particularly overseas. But Americans shouldn't expect to vote for the president on their laptop or iPad anytime soon.

Google Introduces New Desktop Apps

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo completes 2nd powered flight

Xbox One to launch in major markets on 22 November

Microsoft positions the arrival of its next-gen console between the US and European launch dates for Sony's PS4

US Open Tennis App Is a Smash

Analytics Aplenty

What's in the App

HomeMonitor security camera review

The HomeMonitor from Y-Cam makes a web-based CCTV system easy for anybody. But it comes at a price, says Matt Warman

World’s first anti-trolling software' launched in UK

A British software company has launched a new app to help footballers, reality TV stars, pop stars, politicians and anyone in the public eye block abusive messages on their Twitter feeds.

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