ISR - January 2000 - Cover Story

January 2000, Vol. 17, No. 1

1999: The Year in Review
The more things change... the more things change

Welcome to the year 2000! The Y2K "crisis" has come and gone (more or less) and left us all relatively unscathed (more or less) if not slightly richer or poorer — depending on which side of the consultancy and progamming fence you sat on.

Regardless of what kind of significance you place on the 2000 date, it still makes one pause and reflect on the march of time and all that it brings. Certainly this millennium has seen tremendous change for the human race and this century alone has brought some of the most significant and rapid advancements. The list of scientific and technological achievements and discoveries seems virtually endless, to say nothing of the ways these milestones have effected our society from socio-political, economic and philosophical stances to simple day-to-day existence.

Not only do the triple zeroes make us look back, they make us look forward. "Where are we going?" we ponder even more than usual. And predictions, whether divined from tea leaves or charts and graphs, always provoke the wiser of us to take that major grain of salt: "will we get it right?" Just look to 2001: A Space Odyssey to see some innocently off-based visions of today.

So, not to be outdone by Jeane Dixon OR Alvin Toffler, ISR presents a look at the future... but first, how about last year...

"What a swell party it was..."

As we reported a year ago, the turbulent biometrics industry was beginning to show some signs of maturity, particularly in the area of standards. In late '98 the BAPI Working Group merged with the BioAPI Consortium standards. Shortly thereafter, BioAPI and the Human Authentication Application Interface (HA-API) Working Group united. The result: all biometrics API proposals were now consolidated.

The ultimate fallout of this significant move remains to be seen; but, if 1999's activity and innovations in the biometric integration marketplace is any indication, biometric security systems will be common place within the next few years.

The speech recognition industry continued to be no stranger to the excitement of volatile business activity. Well-known player Periphonics was acquired by Nortel. Philips' speech recognition division began its push into the U.S. market by purchasing VCS. Lernout & Hauspie acquired European and U.S. firms quicker than the editor of ISR can throw back a Belgian lambic.

Speaking of acquisitions and mergers and such, checkout the run-down of some of 1999's major changes in the intelligent computing arena, located at the end of this article.

Artoo in the OR

ISR has always paid close attention to intelligent systems improving healthcare and medicine. There were a number of interesting applied solutions, primarily made by the robotics industry, in the medical field this year.

The ZEUS Robotic Surgical System, from Computer Motion Inc., was used in the first successful completion of a closed-chest beating heart cardiac hybrid revascularization procedure at London (Ontario) Health Sciences Centre. In this procedure, Douglas Boyd, MD, used the ZEUS system to perform an endoscopic, single-vessel heart bypass surgery. The bypass was performed through four tiny ports, through which 3 mm to 5 mm surgical instruments were inserted, while the heart continued to beat.

Integrated Surgical Systems Inc. reached an agreement for the first U.S. placement of its Frameless NeuroMate Stereotactic Robotic Assistant at The Harper Hospital, a division of the Detroit Medical Center (DMC). NeuroMate is the first robotic technology for use in stereotactic brain surgery. It consists of a robotic arm assembly and a PC-based positioning system.

This technology, cleared by the U.S. FDA in July 1999, allows for greater flexibility for both patients and surgeons by decoupling the image acquisition and surgical planning from the actual procedure. This decoupling saves most hospitals over 90 minutes of valuable operating room time.

And now, the future: it will be small, very small

Richard Feynman put it best by titling his famous 1959 paper "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." If only the visionaries had paid attention — we might not have predicted the monolithic supercomputers of mid-century speculation. Over the last 20 years, amazing notions of micromachinery, nanotechnology and quantum computing have moved from the realms of science fiction to respectable theory and lab work.

1999 saw remarkable steps in quantum computing that may bring this subatomic, theoretical technology to a practical level before nanotechnologists come remotely close to building a molecular-sized computational device.

In a paper in the June 28th issue of Physical Review Letters, researchers from MIT and Los Alamos National Laboratory illustrated a general scheme for quantum simulation that would work on any quantum computer. This was demonstrated on a liquid state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) quantum computer developed at MIT.

Later in the year, researchers at MIT and Delft University of Technology came up with a way to use standard integrated circuit technology to make a very basic component of a quantum computer. The proposed method would use superconducting circuits — metal that, when cooled to very low temperatures, shows no resistance to the flow of electrical current — to store and manipulate information. The researchers have proposed that by making a superconducting coil or loop very small, only the diameter of a human hair, the circulating currents will obey the laws of quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanic theory is based on the observed features of subatomic particles. One of these features is spin, or angular momentum. Spins align in a magnetic field to be either up or down. This is the equivalent of the conventional computer's "on" and "off" states, represented by ones and zeroes. Currents flowing in one direction and the opposite direction have often been proposed as the zero and one states, called bits, that are needed for computation and communications in a quantum computer.

This research team is the first to suggest the use of these persistent currents as qubit states — a single bit of information in the quantum realm which can represent one, zero or the two states at once. This superposition of states (both at the same time) is what allows quantum computers the power to perform many computations simultaneously. And, according to the researchers, superconducting wire will make this possible.

Perhaps most importantly, the superconducting method could be scaled up to a level of practical application (80 to 100 qubits) while maintaining coherency — the ability for an atom to "concentrate on the task at hand" rather than reacting to other atoms and materials in their environment. Previous quantum computing methods based on natural phenomena, such as ion traps or controlling the spin of large numbers of identical molecules, are good at staying coherent, but seem difficult or impossible to scale up to a useful size.

Although the team says that a quantum computer based on this technology is still years away, the advantages of this approach are that the devices can be fabricated into desired configurations rather than relying on materials available in nature, and fabrication can be done by existing superconducting technology.

So, what's all the fuss about? Well, quantum computers represent a potential major leap in computing power. For instance, they may be able to quickly solve problems involving weather prediction and fluid flow — problems so big they couldn't be stored in a conventional computer's memory. Also, quantum computers could potentially do these calculations in seconds instead of years.

Not to be outdone by the subatomic level, nanotechnology took some big steps this year. Researchers at New York University joined two double-stranded DNA spirals with a bridge of DNA. When exposed to a particular chemical solution, part of the structure bends. The research team hopes to eventually build other moving parts using DNA, including "arms" and "fingers" that someday could be mounted on a micro-robot.

Also, Harvard University researchers, as reported in a recent issue of Science, were able to make tweezers out of two carbon nanotubes, each measuring 4 µm long and 50 nm in diameter. The researchers were able to pick up and manipulate silicon carbide nanoclusters (a bead about 500 nm in diameter) and gallium arsenide nanowires by applying voltage to the tubes causing them to bend or open.

Where is this leading? In hopes of not getting it wrong, ISR won't make any extreme predictions. But, the potential of practical quantum computing and molecular machinery over the next 50 years could make this century look like a drive in the country. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to catch a PanAm shuttle to the space station.

The Changing Face of the Intelligent Systems Marketplace, 1999
Here is a brief listing of some of the major acquisitions that occurred this year, relative to the intelligent systems (IS) marketplace:
IS Company (or business unit) Acquired	New Parent Company
Acacia Biosciences	Rosetta Inpharmatics
AdKnowledge	Engage
Aptex	HNC Software
Brussels Translation Group	Lernout & Hauspie
Flanders Dialogue Company	Lernout & Hauspie
Fonix Healthcare Group	Lernout & Hauspie
Integral Solutions Ltd.	SPSS
Linguistic Technologies Inc.	Lernout & Hauspie
Periphonics	Nortel
Voice Control Systems (VCS)	Philips Electronics

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