Nokia has developed a prototype of its N900 smartphone that lets you feel the texture of icons on the screen

A technology that would add a whole new dimension to touchscreen apps. This week, Nokia researcher Piers Andrew showed how the technology could give each icon its own feel or add surface texture to photographs. "The idea is to have everything on a touchscreen give tactile feedback," Andrew says. The technology is based on an effect called electrovibration, in which touch receptors in the skin can be fooled into perceiving texture when you swipe a fingertip across an insulating layer above a metal surface carrying an alternating voltage. The higher the frequency of that alternating voltage, the smoother the texture feels. "It's an effect that's been known about since the 1950s," says Andrew. Often when electrical equipment was poorly earthed, people could feel a mysterious rough surface as they swept a fingertip across a visibly smooth, insulator-coated metal surface carrying a varying voltage (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.118.3062.277).



Rough to the touch

The effect is thought to be due to the varying electrostatic attraction between the metal and the deeper, liquid-rich conducting layers of the skin – an effect which changes the perceived friction level. To mimic this is in a touchscreen phone, Nokia placed two thin layers above the LCD display: the first a transparent conductor, indium tin oxide, and the second a transparent insulator, hafnium oxide. When the user cradles the phone in one hand and touches the screen with the fingers of their other hand, they effectively create a closed circuit. If the indium tin oxide is excited at frequencies between 50 and 200 hertz, the finger above the touchscreen is attracted towards the screen with varying strength, generating the textured effect. You will only feel texture if you move the finger across the surface, and since the prototype can generate just one frequency at a time, only one on-screen texture can be felt at any moment. To enable multitouch – with different fingers simultaneously experiencing different textures on the display – Nokia will have to modify the system to apply different frequencies to different areas of the screen. Nokia has filed a patent on its ideas, but Andrew admits the concept still needs some work. "This is not necessarily the most attractive sensation for some people," he says.

Singular sensation

Ian Summers at the University of Exeter, UK, agrees. "Electrotactile stimulation has a long history. The problem has always been to control the sensation as skin conductivity changes from minute to minute and from person to person." The cellphone manufacturer is not alone in its pursuit of texture for touchscreens. Academic groups around the world are exploring similar ideas, and Toshiba is also developing electrostatic displays in collaboration with Finnish start-up Senseg of Helsinki. When will Nokia launch this phone? "This interface is still very much in the research phase. The ultimate goal is to integrate the research into future Nokia devices – but it's too early to say when," says Frederique Slezak, a Nokia spokeswoman. Yon Visell, a specialist in tactile interfaces at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, looks forward to such capability: "Tactile feedback is the most glaringly omitted dimension in touchscreen devices like the Apple iPhone or iPad. The device can feel what we're touching, but we can't," he says.

An online 'depression detector' developed in Israel can identify depression 78 percent of the time, according to a team of clinical psychologists

A new algorithm developed by Israeli researchers can identify Internet users who are feeling depressed or suicidal.

You know that the Internet is a goldmine of information, but did you know that the Web is able to diagnose your emotional states and determine whether you are depressed, in love, feeling vengeful or aggressive? A new algorithm developed by Israeli researchers can pinpoint human emotions and intentions by studying vast amounts of publicly available data on blogs and other social media outlets.

Lead researcher Dr. Yair Neuman from Israel's Bar-Ilan University has especially promising results for identifying depression. The data provided by his application could help human experts to home in on who might be at risk for suicide. And the application, which skims the Internet automatically, can be adapted to any sort of data he says, presenting intriguing possibilities for crime fighters, pollsters or Homeland Security.

Currently enjoying a short summer sabbatical at the University of Toronto, Canada, Neuman will present his research in late August at the 2010 International Conference on Web Intelligence. He tells ISRAEL21c that he doesn't imagine that his invention will replace the human element, but rather that he views it as an aid to help sift through and make sense of the billions of bits of data about the human experience that are available online.

Neuman has used his application, which is funded by Israel's Defense Ministry, to scan more than 300,000 English language blogs linked to mental health websites. The software was programmed to identify the 100 most depressed, and the 100 least depressed individuals, by analyzing their responses to metaphors and questions.

The resulting data was handed over to a team of clinical psychologists, who confirmed a high correlation to what they would diagnose in the clinic, reporting that the software was able to identify depression 78 percent of the time.

New software could pinpoint would-be terrorists

"The software program was designed to find depressive content hidden in language that did not mention the obvious terms like 'depression or ‘suicide'," Neuman relates. "A psychologist knows how to spot various emotional states through intuition. Here, we have a program that does this methodically through the innovative use of 'Web intelligence'."

"I emphasize that the tool cannot substitute for an expert. It can provide a powerful way to screen for depression through blogs and Facebook. It analyzes text - the written language - and it can help us to identify people who are presenting signs of depression," he tells ISRAEL21c.

"Most who suffer from depression won't commit suicide. But this is a powerful way of screening for depression. It has psychosocial applications as well for Homeland Security - let's say monitoring depression levels of the population in a political circumstance to understand the population's sentiment."

The software can also "excavate" the meaning of context Neuman continues, testing for love, revenge and happiness among people, or even the way a society feels about its minorities. To date, the standard way to gain insight into these issues is through costly and time-consuming public opinion polls. The identification of people prone to vengeful behavior might also help to pinpoint would-be terrorists or criminals, he adds.

Another Israeli researcher, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recently developed an online sarcasm detector, but Neuman says his approach is different: "I am analyzing the metaphor by sending queries to the web as questions, and understanding the way people metaphorically describe the answer.

"We could ask: What is love like? What is depression like? And look for how people describe the personal experience. We are harvesting a web of metaphors," he explains.

Combining the wisdom of people with IT

For now his tool won't be open source [meaning that for now the public does not have access to the end product's source material] and with no immediate plans for commercialization, Neuman isn't commenting on which, if any, agencies may be interested in the application. Still, his "no comment" suggests that it may be of interest to the US defense department. "It's not artificial intelligence, but intelligence augmentation, combining the wisdom of people with IT to mine a goldmine of data," he says.

The Mayo Clinic for example, offers a list of clues that someone may be suicidal and includes in its watch list "statements about hopelessness, helplessness or worthlessness, sudden changes in mood, direct or indirect statements that reference death or dying and isolating oneself from friends or family." These are signs loved ones can look out for, but what if the signs aren't obvious? This is where the Israeli application could help.

In the US alone, about 35,000 people commit suicide each year and the problem of diagnostics remains a challenge, since people identified as suicidal are those who are already seeking help, or those who have been 'diagnosed' through an online questionnaire. With increasing software advances, in the future diagnosticians will be able to scan the online world for more proactive signs of depression and suicide, for better intervention, monitoring and prevention.

While developed for academic purposes, the new Israeli findings could be used to screen for suicidal teens and bloggers, mining the Internet for the clues they may leave about their intentions, perhaps enabling friends and relatives to intervene in time, if someone they care about is at risk.

[caption id="attachment_137" align="alignleft" width="712" caption="Woff in IE9 "][/caption]

While Web publishing continues to challenge the printed page as the primary means of sharing text, in one aspect it still lags behind Johannes Gutenberg's 500 year old technology: Web developers have a relatively measly choice of fonts. Now the standards body for the Web is hoping to bring online the rich variety of type styles long availab The World Wide Web Consortium's Web Fonts Working Group has launched version 1.0 of the The Web Open File Format (WOFF).

This format will provide a platform for open source and commercial providers of fonts to make their creations easily available across the Web, according to W3C fonts activity lead Chris Lilley. "In print, publishers use lots and lots of fonts all the time. And there is a mechanism for that: They can get a font from a particular client, and use it on their computers," Lilley said. "And when designers come to the Web, they're in shock when they find they can't do that."

Today, the vast majority of text rendered on the Web is rendered by browsers in a small number of typefaces, most provided to the Web by Microsoft, such as Arial, Verdana and Times New Roman. (Typographically speaking, the term typeface refers to a stylistic rendition of each letter in an alphabet, whereas the font refers to the a specific rendering of these letters). This collection is but a small subset of the wide range of typefaces available for print media, though. Various initiatives, most confined to specific browsers, have tried to expand the palette of fonts, but have failed to take off, due the amount of work they required on the part of Web developers.

WOFF is an attempt to provide a platform for fonts that can be easily used by all browsers. WOFF is actually a compression technology. A font owner can package a font in a WOFF container and post it on the Web. A browser, when it must render a page requiring the font, can download the font package, uncompress the font and use it to render the text. The page specifies the font needed with a Cascading Style Sheets(CSS)-based declaration. The Mozilla Foundation provides an example page that allows the viewer to compare fonts already packaged in most browsers with a newly available WOFF-based downloadable font, the Charis SIL Compact (which is about a megabyte in size, or 80 kilobytes for the subset needed for the text). The Mozilla page allows the viewer to see how quickly the fonts load, as well as view the stylistic improvements. In the original incarnation, the page used a series of small images to render those letters that the browser could not render itself--the text itself is in the African Ewe and Adja languages. This technique of using images for letters slows the page loading time, gives the page an inconsistent lettering and makes the contents less scrutable to search engines....

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