Announcement

Awareness Is The Key To Spimes

The word we use to describe the components of smart sensor networks, spime, has been invented by Bruce Sterling, and it is the contraction of ’space’ and ‘time’, to signify that the object knows where it is, and when it is. Most frequently this is achieved through a GPS (Global Positioning System) module, which is very precise, but can also be done via triangulation of the signals of cell towers, or, simply the object can be stationary, and told its location once and for all. In order to call it a spime, a Category 1 spime as we say, the object also has to have memory, communication capabilities, and a sensor, which it will use to learn something about the world that surrounds it. The values of the particular data stream that the sensor captures will be communicated for aggregation, or visualization, and temporarily stored in the memory module of the spime if the communication with the Internet cloud is not available. We often use the example of a simple GPS car navigator as a Category 0 spime, since lacking a sensor, it is depicting the route calculated in a world of its own, happily guiding you in an eventual ditch that has been dug across the road during the night, as it is known to have happened to drivers excessively trusting its orders.

An other way to describe the role of the sensor in a spime is that it makes the object aware of the world around it. This awareness is the key. And there are more and more objects, and systems formed by them, whose value greatly derives from this awareness, and the object’s capability of building on it, acting on it.

An additional standard example of a Category 1 spime is your mobile phone. Even the most rudimentary phone has a sensor for telling you, or at least to itself, the strength of the electromagnetic signals that it uses to communicate, as it dynamically adjusts the power of emission to keep the conversation or the data flow going. (Those who believe that mobile phone’s emissions can be dangerous at close range are especially frightened by the increased power the phone will use when the coverage is bad and it will still strive to connect.)

New objects are acquiring the full complement of spime characteristics and behavior at an increased pace, and with it the awareness of their surroundings and the behavior modes which are a consequence of this awareness. Take the latest digital photo camera models, which after incorporating face recognition modules, which optimized the focusing of the shots, now have started to include the recognition of facial expressions. The Samsung NV100HD has smile detection, and blink detection among others. What does this mean? It means that when you press the button on the shutter, there will be something like an internal dialog in the machine going like this: “Hey, the guy wants to take a picture! Let’s see, we are in full automatic mode again. Ok… so let’s set the exposure, the timing, adjust the focus, oh looka there’s a face… alright, so let’s focus on the face! Oh, no! The fool pressed the button when she was blinking! Didn’t he see that? Well, no problem: why don’t we actually take a series of photos distanced a few 1/100th of a second, so the blink will be over. He’ll not even realize, and will be much happier.” The photo camera, being aware of the world of people, and facial expressions, smiles, and blinks, makes the final decision of when to shoot the photo, around the approximate moment when we actually press the button.

New active safety systems in cars go even further. As described in a recent article in the Economist, “Stopping in a hurry”, the latest automatic braking systems, like those in Volvo’s XC60, will alert you if you have to break to avoid a collision, having monitored the rapidly decreasing distance between your car and the one in front of you, and attend that you press the braking pedal. They will check if you press strongly enough, adding some further braking as needed if you appear to be too timid, or even deciding to brake on their own, if you totally ignore the initial alert. The machine checks not only the outside world, but, if we consider the driver to be part of the system, it is actually introspective, in the sense that it optimizes the performance of its various subsystems, in order to achieve its intended goal.

(photo by Mazintosh)