Communications: Picking up Signals from Television Viewers

 

Talking about TV: Bluefin Signals, above, gives a fine-grained view of how much audiences are responding to television content through social media.
Credit: Bluefin Labs 

Bluefin Labs aims to measure the connections between social media and television shows.

Bluefin Labs wants to know not how many people are watching a TV show, but what they're saying about it. This week, the company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, launched its first product: Bluefin Signals, a tool for monitoring and analyzing audience reaction to TV shows, which it collects by simultaneously monitoring television and social media feeds.

Bluefin has spent the past three years building up the infrastructure, algorithms, and computing power needed to process the enormous quantities of data generated by social media sites including Twitter and Facebook. Currently, the platform processes more than three billion public comments each month.

For years, the success of a television show has been assessed using an estimate of the number of people watching a show provided by Nielsen, a company that gathers information using set-top boxes and diaries. But advertisers and producers increasingly also want to know who's talking about a show, and what they're saying. Bluefin Signals is designed to measure this side of an audience's reaction using social media.

Bluefin faces competition from a growing field of startups, including Netbase and Viralheat, which also mine social networks for reactions to products and media. Other companies, such as GetGlue and Tunerfish, are building social networks around television content, and gathering data in the process. Bluefin executives say that the massive amount of data they collect and analyze sets their product apart. The most serious potential competition could ultimately come from Nielsen. The ratings giant has not yet announced a strategy for monitoring social media, but it is working on connecting its existing data to social media analysis.
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Bluefin tracks which shows are scheduled to be shown on TV and also uses analyzes broadcast and cable television feeds from all over the United States frame by frame using fingerprinting to confirm that a particular show or advertisement is on screen. The company simultaneously crawls through social media feeds for mentions of television shows, and links those mentions to specific shows and commercials.

Many advertisers and television networks already monitor Twitter, Facebook, and other similar sites to learn how a show's audience received it. But executives struggle to understand the implications—if a show gets 2,000 mentions on social networks, is that number was impressive or small compared to similar shows? "That's one of the core problems we're looking to solve for people doing this type of analysis," says Tom Thai, vice president of business development at Bluefin. "Not only give them the numbers, but also the universe of context."

Bluefin Signals provides two main ways of measuring an audience's reaction. The first, called Response Level, tallies up the number of people commenting on a given show. It converts this to a 10-point scale so that people can assess that number in relation to other shows aired at other times. The second, Response Share, determines how much attention a show got while it was on the air. Bluefin found that the NBA finals got about 45 percent of the response to television on social media on the night of May 24, compared with only 6.1 percent for American Idol. Bluefin Signals allows users to get a finer look at the data, by comparing shows within the same genre.

Thai says Bluefin's product is most useful for assessing whether less popular shows are a good advertising buy. Many of these have similar audience numbers, so social media response could make certain shows stand out. He adds that eventually Bluefin can even reveal which shows get the best response to particular types of advertisements on social media.

A product like Bluefin's could help fill in some key gaps for advertisers, says Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University who studies the social and information networks that underpin the Web and online media. "One thing that has made advertising work very powerfully in domains such as Internet search is that you know a lot about the person receiving the ad--what they're doing at the moment, through their query or other activities on the site, and sometimes what they've done in the past as well," Kleinberg says. "For other domains--broadcast media such as TV, for example--it's traditionally been harder to form a picture of the ad's recipients, at the moment they receive it." Bluefin has the opportunity to "fill in the missing details" by measuring and reporting how audiences react to broadcast content in real time.

Bluefin is studying other fine-grained data, such as the success of commercials when paired with particular shows, and it plans to release additional products and features that make use of this sort of data.

Communications: Would an iPhone 'Assistant' Really Help?

Apple may be building the technology into iOS. But can it succeed where others have failed?

Are we on the cusp of an era of ubiquitous "virtual personal assistants"? If Steve Jobs has his way, we just might be.

Back in the spring of 2010, Apple acquired Siri, a company that produced an app that described itself in just those terms. Now, clues dug up recently by 9to5Mac, a site dedicated to scrutinizing all things Apple, suggest that Apple may be ready to introduce Siri-like features in the next version of iOS, its operating system for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

If Apple is indeed about to launch a personal assistant, it could help set the iPhone apart from other smart phones in the market. Android's voice-command system is considered one of its chief advantages over the iPhone, but a Siri-derived personal assistant would add more voice functionality, eliminating Android's advantage. But it will be a gamble, as other efforts to foist a personal assistant upon computer users have backfired badly. Remember Clippy, the animated paper clip that would pop up every time you tried to write a letter in Microsoft Word?

In a screenshot that 9to5Mac turned up, apparently from the menu on an iPhone "test unit," one button reads "Assistant"; another reads "Speaker," suggesting that the assistant can talk back, if you want it to; and a tab reading "MyInfo" suggests that the assistant will be able to use data on your phone such as address book contacts and location to help find the information you want. 9to5Mac further claims to have plumbed the depths of an iOS software development kit and found lines of code that correspond to the features in the screenshot.
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Siri's original app, which licensed voice recognition technology from Nuance, a company based in Burlington, Massachusetts, enabled users to perform searches and make appointments or reservations using voice commands. It worked remarkably well for these simple tasks. (You can see a video of it in action here.)

Work on Siri began about eight years ago, when DARPA funded a massive AI initiative called CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes). The idea, says Norman Winarsky, vice president of ventures at SRI, based in Menlo Park, California, the prime contractor for CALO, was to develop a virtual personal assistant as good as the character of Radar O'Reilly on the TV show M*A*S*H. "Radar always knew what the captain wanted before the captain knew what the captain wanted," says Winarsky.

As the CALO program wound down, SRI recognized a massive market opportunity in the research it had been doing. Over a period of a few years, SRI built the company Siri and launched an app.

Apple scooped up the company less than three months after the Siri app launched. Since then, we've all been held in suspense. Once Apple acquires a company, says Winarsky, "they go into radio silence, and believe me, they don't share with SRI or anybody" as to just what their plans are.

But, even if Apple is ready to offer a virtual personal assistant to every iPhone 5 buyer, does that mean every iPhone 5 buyer is ready for a virtual personal assistant? Not if it doesn't at least outperform Clippy.

Jason Hong, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of its Human-Computer Interaction Institute, says Microsoft Word's Clippy failed for two reasons: he was intrusive, interrupting you when you had already begun a task, and he simply wasn't very smart, often failing to understand your intentions, when you bothered to indulge him, that is. Hong found an explanation at a talk given by Eric Horvitz, the Microsoft researcher who worked on some of the AI behind Clippy. "They had to lobotomize all the machine learning they used, to make it primitive enough to run fast and in real time" on your desktop, says Hong.

Now, though, smart phones are blisteringly fast, and complex processing can be outsourced to the cloud, which means we can fully leverage the fruits of AI research even from relatively simple hardware. What's more, adds Hong, Siri is crucially "driven by what the user is explicitly asking"—it doesn't pop up officiously, like that insufferable paper clip.

Winarsky is betting that virtual personal assistants will be ubiquitous, and widely accepted, sooner than many expect. Looking beyond the restaurant reservations that Siri handled so well, Winarsky foresees an era when virtual personal assistants offer advice and recommendations on a range of topics. Eventually, he says, the technology will be folded into the desktop and the Web, and it will make people rich. "Within 10 years," he says, "we will see the value associated with virtual personal assistants throughout our marketplace to be in the many tens of billions—and [it] optimally might reach the 100-billion-dollar level."

The biggest stumbling block ahead might just be how willing people are to be heard constantly issuing commands in carefully enunciated English into their iPhones. "I used to play a game of guessing whether people I saw talking to themselves were drunk, crazy, or on the phone," says Hong. "And sometimes it was pretty hard to tell."

In that sense, the most important feature visible on the leaked 9to5Mac screenshot may well be the button labeled "OFF."

Communications: Ultrafine Location Fixes

Precise positioning: A network of these transmitters, each the size of a hardback book, can enable nearby devices to locate themselves to within a few centimeters.
Credit: Locata

Small ground-based transmitters that mimic GPS satellites help receivers find their position with high accuracy.

The GPS technology that allows cell phones and other devices to pinpoint their location to within a few meters has made possible new services ranging from location-aware social networks to self-driving cars. A new location technology accurate to a few centimeters will refine those services and unlock another wave of novel ideas, claims Australian company Locata. The company's technology can work alongside GPS to provide superaccurate positioning or fill in the gaps in places where GPS signals are blocked.

Locata's technology involves installing a network of "LocataLites"--devices about the size of a hardback book--in several known locations across an area. These devices function like grounded versions of GPS satellites, sending out signals that receivers use to get a location fix. LocataLites transmit signals using the same frequency as Wi-Fi, and they can each cover several kilometers. "We introduce a local constellation that works like the one in space," says Nunzio Gambale, one of Locata's two cofounders. "It's just much cheaper and more accurate."

The technology will be used to track aircraft on the U.S. Air Force's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, where an upgraded system will soon cover an area of 6,474 square kilometers. The Boddington gold mine in Western Australia is using Locata's technology to position digging and drilling equipment with high accuracy. It is a convenient alternative to manually surveying the insides of the deep opencast mine, the walls of which block GPS signals. The same effect often weakens or blocks GPS signals in urban environments. Locata's technology is also attractive for any city wanting to offer its own "location hotspot" to fix that, says Gambale.

Next month, Locata will release information that will allow other companies to manufacture receivers, a move intended to see the technology added to devices that already use GPS signals. "It's like the early days of GPS," says Gambale. "The real explosion will happen when there are chip-scale receivers that can fit into your pocket."

Ultimately, this could mean smart phones that know their location with remarkable accuracy, enabling apps such as augmented reality to be much more powerful. Before that, however, construction sites, warehouses, and factories will likely benefit. Tracking goods and machines with high accuracy can enable greater use of robotics and automation, says Gambale.

Locata's technology was enabled by a cheaper alternative to the atomic clock found inside every GPS satellite. Each satellite uses its clock to timestamp the signal it sends back to Earth. A receiver can use that timestamp to calculate its distance from a satellite, based on the time it took for the signal to travel. Repeating this trick with several satellites reveals a gadget's position through triangulation.

Locata's satellite mimics are built with timing chips much less accurate than an atomic clock. That's possible because they only keep in sync with one another, not to an external standard, says Gambale. LocataLites do this by listening to each other's signals. Each LocataLite adjusts the timing of its outgoing signal based on the timing of the signals it picks up from other LocataLites, creating a feedback loop that ensures all the signals are in sync. "All the clocks drift together," says Gambale, and all the signals are synchronized to within two nanoseconds.

"Synchronizing this kind of device is a big research task," says Per Enge, professor and leader of the GPS research lab at Stanford University. His group is working on similar devices known as pseudolites that will be deployed across the U.S. by the Federal Aviation Authority to boost the reliability of GPS and to protect signals against jamming or natural interference. The goal is to make it possible for civilian aircraft to rely on GPS more heavily so they can use more sophisticated autopilots that help cut fuel use.

Enge says it is likely that these pseudolites will rely on time signals sent over the Internet, using a new protocol that enables high accuracy. Some may tune in to time signals broadcast by Iridium communications satellites, which are in lower orbits than GPS satellites and so yield stronger signals back on Earth.

Locata's approach of using feedback among its devices sounds "valid," Enge says, although those at the edge of a network might be more likely to lose their timing if they cannot correlate with as many of their fellows as those nearer the center.

Gambale hopes Locata's technology could also aid aviation, and he says he has conducted test flights in Australia using the technology. However, civil aviation adopts new technology very cautiously due to the need for absolute safety. "Locata will make their money from construction and agriculture," says Enge.

Communications: New Tool Keeps Censors in the Dark

 

Anti-censorship software would make it harder for censors to track—and block—undesirable communications.

A new approach to overcoming state-level Internet censorship relies, ironically enough, on a technique that security experts have frequently associated with government surveillance.

Current anti-censorship technologies, including the services Tor and Dynaweb, direct connections to restricted websites through a network of encrypted proxy servers, with the aim of hiding who's visiting such sites from censors. But the censors are constantly searching for and blocking these proxies. A new scheme, called Telex, makes it harder for censors to block communications by disguising traffic destined for restricted sites as traffic meant for popular, uncensored websites. It does this by employing the same method of analyzing packets of data that censors often use.

"To route around state-level Internet censorship, people have relied on proxy servers outside of the country doing the censorship," says J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan. "The difficulty there is, you have to communicate to those people where the proxies are, and it's very hard to do that without also letting the government censors figure out where the proxies are."

The Telex system has two major components: "stations" at dozens of Internet service providers (ISPs)—the stations connect traffic from inside nations that censor to the rest of the Internet—and the Telex client software program that runs on the computers of people who want to avoid censorship.

To disguise the destination of the traffic the user wants to send, Telex employs a form of cryptography called "steganography," which is the practice of hiding secret messages within readable messages.

The Telex client software starts by making an outgoing connection to a nonblocked website, encrypting the traffic in the same way that an e-commerce or online banking site does (the address in the browser bar begins with https:// instead of http://). The identity of the censored site is then encoded in a special string, or "tag," that's embedded in the encrypted request. A Telex station at an ISP can examine incoming traffic and detect the presence of these tags, providing it has the right encryption key. The tag would be indistinguishable from random gibberish without the key.

When the Telex station detects an incoming request that includes a tag, it redirects that connection to the site specified in the encrypted message. This behavior resembles a controversial technology called "deep packet inspection" (DPI), which governments and ISPs have used for censorship and for blocking or throttling certain types of Internet traffic, such as peer-to-peer file-sharing.

"DPI has been used notoriously as a means of censorship, but Telex uses DPI in a completely different way," Halderman says. "We're basically turning the concept on its head to create something that's a really powerful anti-censorship tool."

Halderman says the design is such that it doesn't matter if the location of ISPs employing Telex stations are known to the censors. "The key thing is that we want to put the stations at enough points in the Internet so that blocking all the routes that go through those would be tantamount to making the Internet unavailable," he says. "The vision is that if we deploy Telex widely enough, it can make connecting to the Internet for a government that might want to do censorship an all-or-nothing proposition. Either you live with the fact that people can get to sites you want to censor, or you effectively pull the plug entirely."

In a paper on Telex submitted to the Usenix Security Symposium this month, Halderman and others describe in detail how their system would resist attacks by censors.

"We've gotten a lot of comment from people who don't understand the system, who are pointing out ways they believe the system could be defeated, but in almost every case, it's something we've thought about and addressed in the paper," he says, adding that the system was designed to adapt to increasingly sophisticated censorship methods.

"Censored users today have moderate success using normal proxy servers, but what we're seeing is that major countries involved in censorship are adapting quite quickly to that," Halderman says. "For example, China has gotten very effective in blocking Tor, and Iran has also made some quite sophisticated countermeasures against Tor."

Bruce Schneier, a cryptography expert and chief security technology officer at BT, calls Telex "well thought-out and designed," but says the system would not work without widespread adoption by ISPs around the world.

"There are two ways to deploy this system: ask nicely, or make it a law [for ISPs to implement it]," Schneier says. "It would be great if the governments of the world backed this idea, because in general this sort of thing is why you don't see these technologies widely adopted. No one is willing to pay for them, and no one is going to support them otherwise."

The researchers are working to expand a test Telex network that they've been using for months to surf the Web, and even to watch YouTube videos. They note that the test system works with "acceptable stability and little noticeable performance degradation," and that it performed well in the face of some unexpected stress testing. A researcher accidentally misconfigured one of the Telex stations to act as an open Internet proxy; it wasn't long before the system was being used by outsiders hoping to hide their identities.