Proposed FUEGO Satellite Could Locate Wild-Fires in Real-Time

The proposed Berkeley FUEGO satellite would continuously
scan the US for wildfires, so they could be potentially controlled
before they become overwhelming.  This  technology would
also potentially mitigate the currently $2.5B budget in the US set
aside annually to help control wildfires; as well as the liability for
the damage the fires invariably cause in property damage and loss
of life; affecting both civilians and firefighters.

As reported by the UC Berkeley News Center: As firefighters emerge from another record wildfire season in the Western United States, University of California, Berkeley, scientists say it’s time to give them a 21st century tool: a fire-spotting satellite.

Such a satellite could view the Western states almost continuously, snapping pictures of the ground every few seconds in search of hot spots that could be newly ignited wildfires. Firefighting resources could then be directed to these spots in hopes of preventing the fires from growing out of control and threatening lives and property.

The UC Berkeley scientists have designed such a satellite using state-of-the-art sensors, written analysis software to minimize false alarms, and even given it a name – the Fire Urgency Estimator in Geosynchronous Orbit (FUEGO). They’re hopeful it can be built for several hundred million dollars, either by government or private entities.

“If we had information on the location of fires when they were smaller, then we could take appropriate actions quicker and more easily, including preparing for evacuation,” said fire expert Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley associate professor of environmental science, policy and management. “Wildfires would be smaller in scale if you could detect them before they got too big, like less than an acre.”

Stephens, physicist Carl Pennypacker, remote sensing expert Maggi Kelly and their colleagues describe the satellite in an article published online Oct. 17 by the journal Remote Sensing.

“With a satellite like this, we will have a good chance of seeing something from orbit before it becomes an Oakland fire,” said Pennypacker, a research associate at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory and scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, referring to the devastating 1991 fire that destroyed more than 3,000 homes in Berkeley and Oakland. “It could pay for itself in one firefighting season.”

With global warming, Stephens said, wildfires are expected to become more frequent and more extensive. This year alone, California’s firefighting arm, CAL FIRE, has responded to over 6,000 wildfires, 1,600 more than average, according to tweets by the department’s information officer Daniel Berlant. Wildfire-prone areas stretching from Spain to Russia could also benefit from their own dedicated satellites.

Updating an outmoded system
Fire detection today is much like it was 200 years ago, Stephens said, relying primarily on spotters in fire towers or on the ground and on reports from members of the public. This information is augmented by aerial reconnaissance and lightning detectors that steer firefighters to ground strikes, which are one of the most common wildfire sparks.

Infrared images of the area around Yosemite National Park on
Aug. 17, 2013, before and 10 minutes after ignition of the Rim Fire.
The images, taken by the GOES weather satellite, show that fire
hotspots can be detected from space.  GOES is a powerful, all-
purpose satellite, and was not exclusively designed for fire
detections, unlike the proposed FUEGO geosynchronous satellite
which could scan areas every few minutes.

“Even today, most fires are detected, in some way or another, by people,” he said. “Even the Rim Fire near Yosemite National Park this past summer was detected by someone who saw a smoke column.”

But satellite technology, remote sensing and computing have advanced to the stage where it’s now possible to orbit a geostationary satellite that can reliably distinguish small, but spreading, wildfires with few false alarms. Pennypacker estimates that the satellite, which could be built and operated by the federal government, like the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES); as a partnership between government and the private sector, like the Landsat satellite program; or by a private company alone, would cost several hundred million dollars – a fraction of the nation’s $2.5 billion yearly firefighting budget.

The idea of a fire detection satellite has been floated before, but until recently, detectors have been prohibitively expensive, and the difficulty of discriminating a small burning area from other bright hotspots, such as sunlight glinting off a mirror or windshield, made the likelihood of false alarms high. Today, computers are faster, detectors cheaper and more sensitive, and analysis software far more advanced, making false alarms much less likely, according to researchers.

“Simply put, we believe we have shown that this kind of rapid, sensitive fire detection of areas bigger than 10 feet on a side is probably feasible from space, and we have evidence that the false alarm rate will not be crazy,” said Pennypacker, who has designed sensitive satellite-borne detectors for 40 years. “Our work requires further testing, which we are eager to do.”

The approach is similar to what Pennypacker and colleague Saul Perlmutter used 20 years ago to search for exploding stars to study the expansion of the universe. In that case, they created an automated system to compare consecutive images of the night sky to look for new points of light that could be supernovas. Perlmutter, UC Berkeley professor of physics, shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, which proved that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

How it works
“In concept, this is a simple system: a telephoto camera, an infrared filter and a recording device. We are just looking for something bright compared to the surroundings or changing over time,” Kelly said. “Then, we do these rapid calculations to determine if one image is different from the next.”

Images taken in two different infrared wavelengths reveal different
details of a smokey fire, demonstrating that a fire-spotting satellite
could see ignition sites obscured by smoke.  These images are of a
2003 fire in the San Bernadino National Forest near Los Angeles taken
by the ASTER satellite.

Pennypacker and graduate student Marek K. Jakubowski developed a computer analysis technique, or algorithm, to detect these differences in space and time and to distinguish them from bright lights that might look like fires. This involves several billion calculations per second on images taken every few seconds, covering the entire West every few minutes. The new paper reports on tests of this algorithm using existing imagery from real fires, but the team hopes to get funding to test the system on a fire that is starting, such as a prescribed burn.

“The point is, satellites like Landsat and GOES provide great information after a fire starts; they can focus and monitor a fire by looking at smoke plumes, fire spread, hot spots at the edges, etc.,” Kelly said. “FUEGO is designed for early detection of smaller fires. Right now, we lose a lot of time because fires are already big by the time we see them.”

The FUEGO design, for which UC Berkeley has filed a patent, was developed with funds from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.

A Bluetooth Tracking Device That Fits in Your Wallet

As reported by Tuaw: It appears that 2013 is the year of the Bluetooth tracker. We've covered the nio Tag and Kensington Proximo Fob Key and Phone Finder in the past two weeks; now comes word of a remarkably thin Bluetooth tracking device from Find'em Tracking. The Find'em Tracking Cards (pre-order now, one for $24.99USD, two for $44.99USD) are the thickness of two credit cards placed back to back, have an 18-month battery life, and work hand-in-hand with an iOS app for instant tracking of valuables.

The Find'em Tracking Cards can let you know the minute your iOS device and the card are out of range (from 10 to 150 feet) of each other. There's a button on the card to make your phone ring if you've lost it.

The app provides a "tracking radar" to advise you on how far away you are from one of the Tracking Cards, and if you're out of range or didn't hear an alert, the app will show you on an integrated map exactly where the two devices -- iPhone and Tracking Card -- were last talking to each other.

There's a special feature of the Find'em Tracking Cards -- pop them in your luggage, and you'll know exactly when your luggage is delivered onto the carousel at the airport for easy pickup. The cards are definitely less expensive than the other options we've looked at, and the app will be available in English, Spanish, Russian and French.

Trucking: Ghost Logs and Hacking Could Haunt the EOBR Mandate

All American truckers will soon transmit a swarm of data on
their performance.  Proponents claim it will make the roads safer
but some wonder what else the data could be used for.

As reported by The Atlantic: Because his truck is fitted with a refrigerator unit, Dick Pingel often hauls food: usually sausage or cheese, products long associated with his home state, Wisconsin. He’s been a professional trucker for 30 years, covered over three and a half million miles, and never had a single chargeable accident.

“One of the reasons that most of us came out here, myself included,” he explains, “was because of the independence. After the Vietnam War, a lot of vets came out here. It was probably because they didn't want somebody peering over their shoulder all the time.”

But Pingel, along with more than three million of his fellow truckers in the United States, is facing a regulatory upheaval which will cost his industry an estimated $2 billion and fundamentally change the way he does his job. Over the next few years, it will become mandatory, by law, for all American truckers to carry a tracking device, an electronic on-board recorder (EOBR), in their vehicle. And Pingel isn't happy about it.

Truckers are on the forefront of workplace surveillance. With the availability of cheap sensors and hyper-competitive companies seeking to maximize their profits, any human action done on the clock may become subject to increased scrutiny and what will probably be called optimization. If you want to see the future of work, take a look at IBM’s efforts around call center workers or the battle over electronic armbands at Tesco in Ireland. It’s not that data hasn't always been used in corporate decision-making, it’s that it’s possible to capture so much more now. With more data, comes more control.

There are hundreds of different types of EOBR (or ELD), and they vary greatly in terms of cost and capability. In order to comply with the incoming federal mandate, however, they all have to track when a truck’s engine is running, record its duty status and ensure that drivers aren't working for more than 14 consecutive hours, including a maximum of 11 actual driving hours within that window.

The idea is to make “Hours of Service” log-keeping, which drivers are already required to do manually, more accurate. It’s also an attempt to reduce crashes. A 2006 government survey suggested that around 13% of accidents are fatigue-related and there’s no doubt that road haulage is a dangerous industry. In fact, it’s one of the most dangerous in America.

Preliminary figures from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics show that in 2011, 656 Americans died while operating tractor-trailers or heavy trucks. Thousands more other drivers, passengers and pedestrians are killed in accidents involving large professional vehicles every year.

For Pingel, though, the EOBR won’t provide any obvious benefits. “They’re forcing me to put something in that’s not gonna help me any,” he says. “And they keep saying, ‘Well, it saves you time…’ You know, I can do a lot. I can write up a log book in the same amount of time that it takes me to program what I’m doing into the EOBR.”

He’s been testing one model in preparation for the mandate coming into force. For one thing, he says the graphical display, which gradually turns from green to red as he uses up his allowed time on the road, creates an unnecessary sense of urgency that makes the last hour of his run feel more stressful than it did before.

Pingel has specifically chosen his EOBR for its simplicity and low cost to try and minimize its impact on him. However, there are many competing devices on the market which can gather much more detailed information on speed, engine revving, hard-braking and fuel efficiency.

This data is often centrally monitored by carrier control rooms in real time. With the prospect of a mandate on the horizon, many other tech firms have seized on the opportunity to profit. 

It’s not an entirely new concept. Rather, it’s a 21st Century version of devices like the 1911 Jones Recorder. An early example of a tachograph designed for use in road vehicles, the Jones Recorder was heavily marketed across Europe and America in newspaper and magazine advertisements. These claimed that business owners who relied on a fleet of delivery vehicles would, for the first time, be able to accurately track the number of stops drivers made, check what speed they had traveled at and know how many miles they covered. It was, boasted the tagline, “A constant check on the driver.”

Among truckers, EOBRs are sometimes derided as “baby sitters” and there is some resentment towards the growing emphasis on data-informed hiring practices within the industry. Many are aware that a record which shows a trucker is slightly harder on fuel thanks to the way he revs, idles, and brakes could mean that he won’t get a job in an increasingly competitive market. The nominal rationale may be to increase safety, but as Pingel puts it, “it’s all turned into bottom line.”

Fears that trucking companies could misuse their expanded awareness of where their drivers are and what they are doing have already been expressed in court. In 2011, the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA), of which Pingel is a long-term member, launched a lawsuit against the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), the authority responsible for drafting the rule.

OOIDA complained that there was a risk of driver harassment, in which carriers, cognizant that a trucker is running out of time to complete his delivery, might goad him or her into getting back on the road when it’s not safe to do so. Fatigue, inclement weather, or traffic problems could all be ignored for the sake of the time sheet.

For Todd Spencer, Executive Vice President of OOIDA, it was a clear threat to driver safety. “These are the kinds of decisions that experienced, professional drivers have to make every day,” he comments. “These are safety decisions. Technology can’t take the place of sound judgement.”

With a strong legal case and testimonies from truckers who claimed that this had already happened to them, OOIDA won their suit and the mandate was vacated for redrafting. The latest version still hasn't been authorized and published, though it’s expected before the end of the year. Most observers believe the final rule will be enforceable on American highways by 2015. Truckers who haven’t yet implemented an EOBR are therefore living in the twilight of an era when driving without one can be described as legal.

But in many areas, the road haulage industry has already been modernizing itself through such technology. Danny Knapp of Illinois has had a commercial driver’s license since 1998. Over the years he’s hauled livestock, liquid commodities like fertilizer and produce such as corn. He says that trucking has never had an especially positive public image but that truckers, once portrayed as cowboys in the 1978 Sam Peckinpah film Convoy, have long been trying to clean up their image.

“Most drivers want to be safe,” he explains. “The outlaw types used to be cool, even heroes, but now we kind of alienate them.” He recalls hearing stories about “truckers’ tooth-picks” – tooth-picks dipped in liquid speed and chewed.

But could truckers regain their edginess by evolving into a new breed of hacker? Traditionally, log book “fudging”, where duty records were falsified in some way, was understood to be common. It was at least prevalent enough to be romanticized in popular songs like Dave Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road,” which cheerfully references several other stereotypical trucking misdemeanors.

A hacked EOBR system playing solitaire.

Some old habits die hard, according to Karen Levy, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton. Levy has been researching the impact of EOBRs in the trucking industry and says that many drivers are already experimenting with hacks and methods of tampering.

“Truckers are a particularly savvy and motivated bunch,” she says. “Some drivers have figured out how to temporarily disconnect certain EOBR models from the truck, or to otherwise block their signals so they can't record data. Another approach is to drive using multiple driver ID numbers which are sometimes called ‘ghost logs.’”

There’s even a YouTube video showing how an EOBR can be hacked to play games, and Danny Knapp, although he’s not tried it himself, says he can imagine a future where shady individuals at truck stops offer to tamper with on-board recorders for a small fee, just like they offer to remove speed limiters and increase horsepower today.

Companies, too, might have an incentive to surreptitiously add “extra” hours to a driver’s electronic log so they can complete a delivery without running out of time. Dick Pingel says he’s heard stories like this already from drivers he’s met on the job.

Nevertheless, the trucking industry is gradually falling into line with the idea of mandated electronic recorders. Many of the bigger carriers have made a vigorous effort to adapt early and absorb the cost of implementing EOBRs across their fleet as soon as possible. Thomas Scollard, Vice President of Dedicated Contract Carriage Services for Penske Logistics confirms that the devices have improved planning and saved on huge amounts of paperwork.

As many might suspect, Penske’s stature has not been irrelevant here. “We’re fortunate that, the size we are, we can look at something like this, put some resources against it and say, OK, how do we make this work for us in a positive way?” explains Scollard.

But there are plenty of independents who see new technology as an opportunity too. Cliff Downing, of Iowa, is one of them. Like Dick Pingel, he’s been on the road for three decades, but unlike Pingel, he’s embraced the EOBR with gusto, and even claims that it’s benefited him financially.

“My gross revenues have been up year over year each year since using electronic logs,” he says. “Now is it due to electronic logs? Not the machine itself, it’s the efficiency that’s been forced onto us by the machine.”

A trucker who, by his own account has, “pulled just about everything there is to pull,” Downing provides several arguments about making the most of the technology at his disposal. For example, he carefully modified his brand new truck with a tuned-up, slightly older engine, to guarantee that it would run at almost two gallons more to the mile than the industry average, saving him thousands of dollars in fuel each year.

Like his vehicle, Downing has streamlined his business over the years. He likes to operate within a specific 5-600 mile radius and relies on a list of reliable customers who ship loads such as bulk oatmeal and coiled steel for use in manufacturing.

He says people who complain about the EOBR mandate are simply expressing an innate but unhelpful resistance to change. After all, in Europe, simpler electronic tachographs have been mandatory since the 1970s. And for him, the digital recorder has been a boon. “If I need a log for an officer alongside the road, it’s kind of like… how do ya want it? Do you want me to fax it to you? Here, I can show you on my smartphone! Oh hey, I can open up my Macbook Air, you can look at it on my laptop,” he explains. “You take your pick Mr Cop, I’ll show you any way you want.”

Downing, who has degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Alaska, perhaps gets some of his resilience from the military, being a veteran who saw action in Korea and the evacuation of Vietnam.

Later, he quit working for the government because he longed for greater independence. “I worked better in a ‘nobody-hassling-me’ kind of environment,” he says, before describing his subsequent life as an “ice road trucker” in Alaska, where existence was “frontiersy” and where planning for harsh conditions and break-down was something your life depended on.

The same strategic planning now manifests itself in Downing’s adoption of the EOBR. “I modified my operation to make it work,” he says. “As much as the libertarian in me says no to mandates, they’re coming. You might as well just wake up, face it, and deal with it.”

Trucking is a very big industry, with a diverse range of people in it. Some of them distrust the rise of electronic logging while others have seized upon it. None of the truckers I interviewed discounted the importance of autonomy, however. When I asked Danny Knapp why he liked the job he said this: “It’s just a unique feeling to get on the interstate, riding on top of this 80,000 pound machine and driving 65 miles an hour. When I do it I feel calm and I feel free. I can’t explain it any further than that.

“Maybe it’s something about leaving. You know, we’re always leaving some place. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s a very free feeling to me.”

Technology might disrupt that, but then again it might not. Knapp, for one, is not opposed to the mandate. Trucking, as well as being big, is also a competitive industry and businesses are constantly looking for ways of understanding their operations in more detail.

Today, OOIDA says it is not currently planning any further legal challenges against the FMCSA, whose rule-making is nearly complete. Everything now falls to the truckers. As technology encroaches they seem determined, one way or another, to retain their professional independence, the spirit of the open road. 

CIA Wary of Russian GNSS/GPS Correction Stations in the USA

A technician from Russia's space agency at a monitor station
that opened in Brazil recently.

As reported by the New York Times: In recent months, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have been quietly waging a campaign to stop the State Department from allowing Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to build about half a dozen of these structures, known as monitor stations, on United States soil, several American officials said.

They fear that these structures could help Russia spy on the United States and improve the precision of Russian weaponry, the officials said. These monitor stations, the Russians contend, would significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of Moscow’s version of the Global Positioning System, the American satellite network that steers guided missiles to their targets and thirsty smartphone users to the nearest Starbucks.

“They don’t want to be reliant on the American system and believe that their systems, like GPS, will spawn other industries and applications,” said a former senior official in the State Department’s Office of Space and Advanced Technology. “They feel as though they are losing a technological edge to us in an important market. Look at everything GPS has done on things like your phone and the movement of planes and ships.”

The Russian effort is part of a larger global race by several countries — including China and European Union nations — to perfect their own global positioning systems and challenge the dominance of the American GPS.

For the State Department, permitting Russia to build the stations would help mend the Obama administration’s relationship with the government of President Vladimir V. Putin, now at a nadir because of Moscow’s granting asylum to Mr. Snowden and its backing of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

A new GLONASS station in Brazil - similar
to what Russia would like to setup in the
USA.

But the C.I.A. and other American spy agencies, as well as the Pentagon, suspect that the monitor stations would give the Russians a foothold on American territory that would sharpen the accuracy of Moscow’s satellite-steered weapons. The stations, they believe, could also give the Russians an opening to snoop on the United States within its borders.

The squabble is serious enough that administration officials have delayed a final decision until the Russians provide more information and until the American agencies sort out their differences, State Department and White House officials said.

Russia’s efforts have also stirred concerns on Capitol Hill, where members of the intelligence and armed services committees view Moscow’s global positioning network — known as Glonass, for Global Navigation Satellite System — with deep suspicion and are demanding answers from the administration.

“I would like to understand why the United States would be interested in enabling a GPS competitor, like Russian Glonass, when the world’s reliance on GPS is a clear advantage to the United States on multiple levels,” said Representative Mike D. Rogers, Republican of Alabama, the chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee.

Mr. Rogers last week asked the Pentagon to provide an assessment of the proposal’s impact on national security. The request was made in a letter sent to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Secretary of State John Kerry and the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.

The monitor stations have been a high priority of Mr. Putin for several years as a means to improve Glonass not only to benefit the Russian military and civilian sectors but also to compete globally with GPS.

Earlier this year, Russia positioned a station in Brazil, and agreements with Spain, Indonesia and Australia are expected soon, according to Russian news reports. The United States has stations around the world, but none in Russia.

Several chip manufacturers are already beginning to offer chipsets that combine the ability to receive satellite based position information from multiple signals, such as the USA GPS system, Europe's Galileo system, the Russian Glonass system and Japan's QZSS.

New Algorithms Can Tell if You Ride the Bus or Train, or How Bad You Drive

As reported by GigaOm: Researchers from the University of Helsinki in Finland have developed algorithms they say are the best yet for determining how mobile phone users are getting around town - walking, driving, taking the subway or otherwise - by analyzing the frequency and velocity of their starts and stops.

Paired with location data, this could be great news for civic planners trying to optimize roads or public transportation.  As the researcher's suggest, it could also be helpful in reconstructing accidents or identifying road hazards, or powering an app that gives feedback about a user's driving style in the name of improving safety or fuel efficiency.

It's arguable the latter capability is better suited for the car's internal sensor network and display system, though. for starters, cars can gather much more fine-grained data about a vehicle's operation than just braking and acceleration patterns.  And should such a system turn into a glorified, digital backseat driver, a car-based system is much less likely to be thrown out the window.

NASA: PhoneSat 2.4 is Ready for Launch

As reported by NASA: For the second time this year, NASA is preparing to send a smartphone-controlled small spacecraft into orbit. The PhoneSat 2.4 mission is demonstrating innovative new approaches for small spacecraft technologies of the future.

The NASA PhoneSat 2.4 is hitch-hiking a ride onboard an Orbital Minotaur I rocket slated for a November 19 liftoff from the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The primary payload on the booster is the U.S. Air Force Office of Responsive Space ORS-3 mission, which will validate launch and range improvements for NASA and the military.

PhoneSat 2.4 builds upon the successful flights of a trio of NASA smartphone satellites that were orbited together last April. That pioneering mission gauged use of consumer-grade smartphone technology as the main control electronics of a capable, yet very low-cost, satellite, reports Andrew Petro, program executive for small spacecraft technology at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Each smartphone is housed in a standard cubesat structure, measuring roughly four inches square.

The soon-to-be lofted PhoneSat 2.4 has two-way radio communications capability, along with reaction wheels to provide attitude control, Petro says, and will be placed into a much higher orbit than its PhoneSat predecessors. Those were short-lived, operating for about a week in orbit.

Tabletop technology

“We’re taking PhoneSat to another step in terms of capability, along with seeing if the satellite continues to function for an extended period of time,” Petro explains.

The PhoneSat mission is a technology demonstration project developed through the agency’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program, part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

NASA PhoneSats take advantage of “off-the-shelf” consumer devices that already have many of the systems needed for a spacecraft, but are ultra-small, such as fast processors, multipurpose operating systems, sensors, GPS receivers, and high-resolution cameras.

“It’s tabletop technology,” Petro says. “The size of a PhoneSat makes a big difference. You don’t need a building, just a room. Everything you need to do becomes easier and more portable. The scale of things just makes everything, in many ways, easier. It really unleashes a lot of opportunity for innovation,” he says.

Consumer electronics market

There’s another interesting aspect to using the smartphone as a basic electronic package for PhoneSats.

“The technology of the consumer electronics market is going to continue to advance,” Petro notes. “NASA can pick up on those advances that are driven by the needs of the consumer.”

What’s the big deal about small satellites?

NASA is eyeing use of small, low-cost, powerful satellites for atmospheric or Earth science, communications, or other space-born applications.

For example, work is already underway on the Edison Demonstration of Smallsat Networks (EDSN) mission, says Petro. The EDSN effort consists of a loose formation of eight identical cubesats in orbit, each able to cross-link communicate with each other to perform space weather monitoring duties.

Magic dust

The three PhoneSats that were orbited earlier this year signaled “the first baby step,” says Bruce Yost, the program manager for NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

“The PhoneSat 2.4 will be at a higher altitude and stay in space for a couple of years before reentering,” Yost adds. “So we’ll be able to start collecting data on the radiation effects on the satellite and see if we run into anything that causes problems.”

Yost says where the real “magic dust” of PhoneSats comes into play is how you program them. “That is, what applications can you run on them to make them useful. We’re adding more and more complexity into the PhoneSats.”

To that end, PhoneSats and the applications they are imbued with can lead to new ways to interact with and explore space, Yost observes. “You can approach problems in a more distributed fashion. So it’s an architectural shift, the concept of inexpensive but lots of small probes.”

NASA’s Petro sees another value in pushing forward on small satellites.

“It used to be that kids growing up wanted to be an astronaut. I think we might be seeing kids saying, what they want to do is build a spacecraft. The idea here is that they really can do that,” Petro says. “They can get together with a few other people to build and fly a spacecraft. Some students coming out of college as new hires have already built and flown a satellite…that’s a whole new notion, one that was not possible even 10 years ago,” he concludes.

Smartphones in 2017 will be Smart Enough to Automate and Manage Your Daily Life

Starting from certain basic tasks, smartphones are expected to
control greater aspects of our lives.

As reported by IBM Times: Over the next four years, smartphones will become so intelligent that they will be able to predict their owners' next move, their next purchase or even interpret their actions, according to a new Gartner report, which says that smartphones will be able to perform such tasks using what has been described as “the next step in personal cloud computing.”

“Smartphones are becoming smarter, and will be smarter than you by 2017,” Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Tuesday at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2013, which is taking place in Barcelona, Spain, from Nov. 10-14. “If there is heavy traffic, it will wake you up early for a meeting with your boss, or simply send an apology if it is a meeting with your colleague. The smartphone will gather contextual information from its calendar, its sensors, the user’s location and personal data.”

According to Milanesi, the transition from mobile phones to smartphones is attributed to two main factors -- technology and apps. While the former is responsible for features such as cameras, location-based intelligence and sensors, the latter has connected such features to an array of sophisticated functions that have improved users’ daily lives.

Initially, smartphones are expected to perform basic tasks, such as booking a car for its yearly service, creating a weekly to-do list, sending birthday greetings or responding to everyday emails. However, as consumers become more confident about their smartphone's ability to perform certain menial tasks, they are expected to begin allowing more apps and services to take control of other, more crucial, aspects of their lives, which according to analysts, “will be the era of cognizant computing.”

However, it maybe a while before smartphones will be ready to take over the planet from humans.

Milanesi said that smartphones will be smarter than what they are now not because of inherent intelligence, but because the data stored in the cloud will provide them with the computational ability to make sense of the information they have. Smartphones will have the potential to become consumers’ “secret digital agent,” but only if users are willing to provide them with the data.

According to Gartner, regulatory and privacy issues, and the level of comfort users will have in sharing their personal information, will differ considerably based on age groups and geographies. Here’s a figure, showing the four stages of cognizant computing:

The four stages of cognizant computing.

According to Gartner, cognizant computing will have significant impact on hardware vendors, and other services and business models, and over the next two to five years, it will become one of the strongest market forces affecting the entire technological ecosystem.

“Over the next five years, the data that is available about us, our likes and dislikes, our environment and relationships will be used by our devices to grow their relevance and ultimately improve our life,” Milanesi said.