Column: The Pretexting Way

Letter From Silicon Valley
09.22.06, 6:00 AM ET

Burlingame, Calif. -Hewlett-Packard has my number. Not only my work and cell phone number, but probably also the numbers of my father, the nanny of my son’s best friend and a host of others. My husband, George Anders, works for The Wall Street Journal. He was one of the nine journalists targeted by private investigators hired by HP to figure out who was leaking corporate information to the press. For us, the story has gone from weirdly funny to downright creepy as more details have emerged. Ultimately, there are going to be quite a few casualties from this hit-and-run demolition of HP’s ethical standards.

We entered the story when a beleaguered sounding HP spokesman called us at home one evening to tell us about the probe and apologize for the fact that investigators hired by HP decided to snoop through our phone records. We were, quite honestly, surprised: My husband published a book about HP and Carly Fiorina in 2003. Since then, he’s written stories about everything from options guzzling executives to quaint ghost towns--but only an occasional piece on HP. A few days later, news dribbled out that the investigators had rifled through the phone records of the PR guy, too. (HP’s bosses say they’re sorry about that one as well.)

As it turns out, the techniques the investigators considered seem unbounded by decency, common sense or even by a budget. Along with scrutinizing phone records, they watched people's homes and even thought about planting spies disguised as janitors in the offices of The Wall Street Journal and CNET to look for clues.

HP executives, too, seemed to be devoting an astonishing amount of time to faking out one journalist in particular, reporter Dawn Kawamoto of CNET. The Washington Post has served up some astonishing details of the HP plot. Senior Council Kevin Hunsaker apparently oversaw the investigation, which was largely handled by private firms in states that follow the old East German approach toward privacy. Hunsaker helped create a fictitious persona, “Jacob,” who would leak inaccurate information to Kawamoto. By including a “tracer” program in Jacob’s e-mail, investigators hoped to track down anyone Kawamoto later e-mailed with the fake news. (Like all too many programs, the software turned out to be a dud.)

The Post reports that on Feb. 22, Hunsaker sent a copy of the faked product information to HP Chair Patricia Dunn and general counsel Ann Baskins in an e-mail. "I made up everything in the slide, trying to make it at least somewhat feasible," Hunsaker wrote to Dunn and Baskins. "I won't quit my day job, but hopefully neither the name nor the information on the slide are terribly off-base."

Suggestion to Hunsaker: Go ahead. Quit your day job.

One private investigator, a long-time family friend, scoffed at the methods reportedly employed by the firms working on behalf of HP. Any investigator worth his retainer could have used much subtler methods, our friend suggested.

All of which begs the question: Is every company spying on people?

Just about every publicly held company worries about leaks. The most obvious leaks occur during the so-called “quiet” period--the typically 20 or so days after a company closes its financial quarter and before it reports the results. Trading on these results is a big no-no (otherwise known as insider trading). But frequently analysts’ estimates of quarterly results get awfully close to the mark during those magical “quiet” days.

To try to stem leaks, company managers will zero in on the employees who get a glimpse of e-mails. Companies can--and do--monitor e-mail. Routinely.

Some companies let employees know that the penalties for talking to the press are stiff. At Apple Computer, CEO Steve Jobs has lashed out at those suspected of dealing in leaked Apple information. In January 2005, Apple sued a Web site, Think Secret, run by a then 19-year old, for allegedly soliciting insider information from employees and publishing it on the site. You can bet Jobs lost little sleep in going after anyone inside Apple who might have gossiped with Think Secret.

Scott McNealy, formerly CEO of Sun Microsystems, put it succinctly in 1999 when he said, “You have zero privacy. Get over it.”

Ironically, McNealy was less hung up on leaks than many other Valley CEOs. In the mid 1990s, when Sun made a bid to acquire Apple, insiders on both sides of the proposed deal were throwing buckets of details to the press in hopes of nudging the sale price up or down. One insider told me that McNealy never bothered trying to figure out who was leaking what. (Ultimately, the deal tanked for other reasons.)

Clearly those days are over. The level of suspicion has risen dramatically. Journalists must weigh whether information is fabricated and interviews covertly monitored. Sources, too, will feel that no conversation is ever private.

Zero privacy--and zero trust. These are poignant legacies for HP to give to the Valley.

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/09/21/hp-spy-corcoran-tech-cz_ec_0922valleyletter.html

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Travel: Nothing but sand and sky

Sun, Sep. 17, 2006
TRIP PUTS UTAH'S GRANDEUR IN FOCUS Special to the Mercury News Whoosh. A burst of flames erupts above my head. My two children crouch near my feet. We're hanging a thou- sand feet above rocky desert terrain, next to a guy clutching an enormous blowtorch. Every few seconds he squirts blazing propane skyward, moving as serenely as if he were casting for trout. Whoosh. If life, as I know it, ends soon, at least my final moments will be scenic. The view up here is magnificent. When our family of four decided to make a road trip this summer from California to Colorado, we figured the shortest route to sanity was to pause the driving for a few diversions along the way. Ghost towns and scenic hikes topped our list. So did a jaunt on Highway 375 through Nevada, the ``Extraterrestrial Highway,'' a straight shot past the outskirts of the Air Force's mysterious Area 51. We even planned a lunch at the aptly named ``Little Ale-Inn Cafe,'' a friendly roadside diner loaded to the gills with alien kitsch. Those stops were just the warm-up act for the Grand Adventure: a balloon trip in southern Utah over the spirals and chasms of Bryce Canyon. The idea sounded marvelously romantic when my husband broached it: We would take off at dawn, waft amid the caramel-colored rock formations near Bryce for an hour or two, then alight and spend the day scampering through the canyons. Dorothy and Toto had big plans for their balloon trip from Oz, too. Before we signed a deposit for an hour balloon tour, prudence suggested we take a look at the safety record of hot-air balloons in the United States. When you think about it, ballooning seems like a crazy stunt: You fill an enormous silk canvas with air, heat it to about 240 degrees Fahrenheit with a blowtorch, leap into a wicker basket and head off. There are no life vests, no escape hatches and no parachutes. The National Transportation Safety Board obligingly lists all the accidents and incidents for airborne vehicles, back to the 1960s. (See www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/query.asp.) The numbers are reassuring -- sort of. During the past 10 years, the NTSB has reported 164 ``incidents'' caused by hot-air balloons, including 13 fatalities. (The most recent of these took place in Louisiana in May 2005.) By contrast, gliders have caused twice as many problems and five times as many deaths. Of course, flying a balloon into power lines causes huge problems. So, too, does flying in thunderstorms, or turning the controls over to passengers. Commercial ballooning pilots have to be at least 18 years old and log at least 10 flights and 35 hours in the air. We wanted someone who had spent plenty of time amid the clouds. And since we wanted to soar over some remote locations, we called Will Drummer, who runs Skywalker Balloon Co. Drummer, a native of Austria, first visited southern Utah as a tourist more than 10 years ago and was dazzled by the landscape. ``After I got back to Vienna, I spent a year thinking about how to make a living showing people the Utah countryside,'' he says. Ballooning called to him. He headed back to Utah, spent 18 months working as a crew member for a ballooning company, then set up his own outfit in 1996. Since then, Drummer has logged more than 500 hours of balloon flight time -- enough to soothe our nerves. We agreed to meet Drummer at Bryce the evening before our flight, where we would camp. The day before our launch dawned clear and bright where we were -- Tonopah, Nev. But when we checked with Drummer by phone, he sounded gloomy. Thunderstorms were skulking around Bryce, he reported. With little slack in our travel schedule, bad weather would not only thwart our adventure but also cost a 25 percent cancellation charge against our $1,000 flight fee. Should we take our chances and hope for the best? Tell Drummer we were willing to run the risk that there might be a thunderstorm within a hundred miles of our launch? No. We had picked a cautious pilot with loads of experience; we'd follow his recommendations to the letter. Drummer's advice was to head another 180 miles northeast to a lesser-known canyon, Goblin State Park, where the weather reports looked sweet. Goblin was his personal favorite, he confided, a surreal landscape with fewer tourists. Getting to Goblin Valley would require a mad dash. But off we went. After a dinner stop, we drove until nightfall. The road turned from paved highway into one-lane roads and finally to dirt. Jackrabbits bounded out of the shadowed scrub, startled by our headlights. A lone sign pointed the way to Goblin. It was fortunate we had planned on camping; the nearest motel was about 15 miles away. When we rolled into the camping ground close to 10 p.m., the dark canyon walls rose around us like the sides of a swallow's nest. Lights glowed from the windows of a half-dozen RVs. We finally found Drummer and Matthew Hawk, his crew, who had arrived at the site several hours earlier. They were upbeat: We had evaded the thunderstorms. Stars glimmered. The night air was soft. Our two boys were nodding off. We skipped setting up the tent, laid out our sleeping bags in a sandy clearing and went to sleep as a shooting star or two winked at us. At 5:30 a.m., we shook the boys gently awake. Drummer and Hawk needed to find a site for our launch. Balloonists typically take off either at sunrise or a few hours before sunset, when the air currents are gentlest. We climbed into Drummer's pickup truck, which was pulling a trailer neatly packed with the balloon's wicker basket and folded silk canopy, and drove to a lookout spot above the Valley of the Goblins. Sunlight began to paint the horizon red and orange. The weird stones, called ``hoodoos,'' sculpted by millions of years of wind and water, cast eerie shadows. Drummer and Hawk inflated a small black test balloon with helium and set it aloft, watched its trail through the sky. Drummer frowned. The tiny black speck drifted east, toward an area with no accessible roads for retrieving the balloon once we landed. `It looks like a strawberry seed,'' said our 9-year-old, Matthew. Several test balloons later, Drummer still looked stern. We climbed into the pickup truck and headed to another spot two miles north. Gray morning light filled the desert. Seven-year-old Peter lay stomach-down in the red desert, eyeing half-inch-long beetles burrow in the sand. The rest of us watched in silence as more of Drummer's test balloons sailed off. At last, Drummer was satisfied. ``All right. Let's go!'' He pulled on a pair of white kid gloves and began unpacking the trailer. In less than 10 minutes, Drummer and Hawk attached the yellow and green silk canvas to the basket, secured the liquid propane burners, and were using a huge fan to push air into the belly of the balloon. They enlisted my husband's help to hold onto the basket as they fired the burners to begin to warm the air, which would lift the balloon. At first it was easy. Before long, my husband was straining with all his muscles to keep the basket in place. Finally, the moment came. Drummer gave us a short but stern safety talk: Never climb in or out of the basket until he gave the OK. Don't touch the balloon's controls. We scrambled into the basket. Hawk set us free. Drummer fired the burners. Whoosh. The balloon quivered, then floated gracefully off the ground. We drifted lazily into the sky. There is no steering wheel on a balloon; you go where the wind pushes you. The quiet of the desert surrounded us . . . until Drummer squeezed the handles of his burners and Whoosh! Another blast of heat would warm the air in the balloon and push us a little higher. ``The balloon doesn't leave a trail -- we don't even leave footprints,'' Drummer said. We drifted over the desert terrain, gazing at the buttes that rose like mushrooms, at grand cracks and crevices in the land, at a lonely narrow road that looped through the desert. Time seemed to slow down. Drummer, even as he vigilantly watched the land roll by beneath us, relaxed a bit and began to tell us about the history of ballooning. Ballooning started in France in 1783. Lore claims that the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph and Étienne, who owned a paper mill, marveled at how paper or laundry would rise in the updraft of a fire. Early experiments spooked farmers, who suspected the balloons were the devil's work and promptly shredded them. The Montgolfiers built a large balloon from paper, attached a platform to it, and set a sheep, a rooster and a duck aloft. There were no propane burners, of course, so they burned straw to heat the air. The balloon floated about two miles, landing in Versailles, before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The brothers learned two lessons: that hot air would lift the balloon and that nervous farmers might kill them the moment they landed. They constructed another balloon of paper and silk, recruited two noblemen as passengers, and equipped them with two bottles of Champagne. One bottle was intended to be used as a fire extinguisher; the second would be rappelled down to the crowds just before landing. ``They figured that if the farmers were presented with Champagne, they would know the pilots were Frenchmen,'' Drummer recounted. After an hour of gazing at the Utah desert, Drummer began to look for a safe landing spot. He radioed Hawk, who had been following our progress, driving the pickup truck on the park roads below us. We descended gently, finally almost hovering about 10 feet off the ground. A light breeze nudged us along. For almost a half-mile, we floated along, as light as meringue. Finally, not far from the road and the pickup, Drummer set the balloon down with one quick bump. After our ride, Drummer and Hawk carefully packed up the balloon and basket, then cracked open the balloonists' now-traditional bottle of Champagne (along with some fizzy apple juice for the boys). Drummer recited the prayer of the balloonists: The winds have welcomed us with softness The sun has blessed us in its warm hands We have flown so high and so well That God has joined us in our laughter And gently set us back down Into the loving arms of Mother Earth. They gave us a lift back to camp, shared a couple of gallons of water and headed off, leaving us to explore Goblin Valley, find something to eat -- and imagine where else we might one day tour in a balloon.

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Column: Back To Silicon Valley's Future

Letter From Silicon Valley

09.11.06, 6:00 AM ET

BURLINGAME, CALIF. -Tim O’Reilly has invented a time machine. Not the H.G. Wells version, but an intellectual time shifter that briefly brings back some of the inventive magic of Silicon Valley’s past. Last month he offered me a ride. It was a vivid reminder of what made Silicon Valley great--and a tempting promise of things to come.

For the past 28 years, O’Reilly has run a privately held publishing and conference company located in Sebastopol, Calif., a 45-minute drive north of San Francisco. Many of the books published by O’Reilly are intensely geeky: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is among its top sellers. O’Reilly doesn’t care about becoming a media mogul. Instead, he continues to feed the old home-brew spirit of innovation, while providing savvy commentary on the state of techdom.

In 2003, O’Reilly kicked off a series of conferences, mischievously called “Foo Camps" (the name is a tribute both to programmers, for whom “foo” is a placeholder word like “whatchamacallit," and to himself, as in “Friends of O’Reilly"). The camps--which sometimes actually take place in an old apple orchard outside O'Reilly's Sebastopol woods--are purposely not about business plans and marketing proposals. That's where the time travel comes in: The gatherings are a throwback to Silicon Valley's early days, when it was populated by dreamers who reveled in building stuff and did only what they had to do to
pay the bills.

The Internet changed all that, raining so much money on the Valley that business plans washed away chip diagrams. But O’Reilly is still inspired by ideas, not cash. And so he’s made his Foo Camps a place for starting conversations, not generating business leads.

In August, O’Reilly, in conjunction with Nature magazine and with support from Google, convened the first SciFoo: A gathering of about 200 carefully picked scientists, pundits and writers. The broad mandate was to discuss emerging science and science policy ideas, particularly ones that have been supercharged by the Internet or other vast database technology. That was it. No agenda, no keynote speakers, no public relations crews and no trade floor booths. People came to stir up ideas. And as far as I could tell, everyone went home thinking about something different from when they arrived.

SciFoo was held at the memorably indulgent Googleplex, in Mountain View, Calif., where the cafeteria is lavish, the bathrooms feature high-tech toilets with warm seats and nozzles for squirting water at delicate spots, and a glassed-in laundry room offers employees a chance to take a personal hygiene break.

Many of the SciFoo “campers” were the people that other conferences are built around: Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and inventor of Berkeley UNIX; Danny Hillis, co-founder of Thinking Machines, one of the first massively parallel supercomputers; Esther Dyson, long-time technology pundit and now venture capitalist; the Google duo, Larry and Sergey, along with their new compatriot, Larry Brilliant, who helped squash smallpox and is now running the billion-dollar Google Foundation; and Donald Hopkins, who directs health programs at the Carter Center and is leading the fight to eradicate guinea worm disease.

O’Reilly’s team plopped a big whiteboard in a common area just outside the Google cafeteria and suggested that people sign up to give presentations on their work or host a session on a topic they find interesting. The board filled quickly with topics such as managing enormously complex datasets, fighting pandemic diseases, teaching science to children, building robots and studying the history of technology. Some sessions attracted dozens of people, others just a handful. In every case, however, I saw some of high-tech’s big names listening and brainstorming with people they had never met before the conference.

One researcher described the change in the way the World Health Organization tracks emerging potential epidemics, due in part to a tiny Canadian organization called Global Public Health Intelligence Network. Since the most effective way to derail an epidemic is to catch it early, the WHO relies on countries to report the health trends they’ve detected within in their own borders. But GPHIN has sped up detection enormously by also sifting stories and Web sites from global media sources, using carefully chosen keywords. Stories that use the term “dead birds” and “dead nurses," for instance, may indicate an outbreak of avian flu.

Now imagine expanding that kind of Internet trolling to include many more sources, starting with personal blogs. What would researchers see? Who should get the findings? How reliable would they be? What if people tried to send out misleading information?

Another researcher proposed creating an even earlier flu warning system by using low-cost sensor chips to test for a thousand strains of different viruses. The chips could be put in health clinics around the world and the data could be fed into a central organization. Could that kind of mesh help researchers catch--and quash--epidemics? Again, who would get to see the data? What if it missed a virus?

In another conversation, researchers described projects that collect information from webs of tiny sensors, measuring everything from ocean currents to lightning strikes, and then plot the data on global maps, such as Google Earth. (For example, see Biltzortung.org for data on lightning strikes in Europe or Ogle Earth for a blog about using Google Earth maps.) What else could be mapped? Where else are people gathering data? What happens when databases are fused together--say, mapping demographic or income tax data onto local maps?

Getting nonscientists excited about science was another favorite topic. One intriguing approach is a new series of comic books, slated to come out early next year. Saul Griffith, an alum of the Media Lab at M.I.T., has been developing what he calls “HowToons,” an adventure series in which kids design cool gadgets. (See Instructables or check Amazon.com.) Griffith gives kids, with a bit of help from adults, step-by-step instructions on how to make cool gadgets, including marshmallow shooters and rocket ships. Will Griffith’s work inspire kids to detach themselves from computer monitors and head to the garage?

The conversations continued long into the evening. Future collaborations were forged; proposals began to germinate. Guessing what real change might come from such a meeting is harder than pinning down a cloud. But surely, without such conversations, innovation would happen more slowly.

http://www.forbes.com/columnists/2006/09/08/conference-science-google_cz_ec_0911valleyletter.html


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Egang: Data Driver

On The Cover/Top Stories
Data Driver
09.04.06

Sebastian Thrun is very clear on the future. "Forty-two thousand people in the U.S. die in traffic accidents every year," he says. "Down the road, I know cars will drive themselves. It's just right!" Robots don't get drunk, fall asleep or talk on the phone. If we turn highways into "invisible rail systems," he says, we can combine the convenience of a car with the safety of a train.

This vision has been a futurist phantasm since the 1950s, but Thrun and a car named Stanley are bringing the age of the autoroad a bit closer. Stanley is a Volkswagen Touareg built by Thrun, 39, who teaches computer science at Stanford, and his graduate students. In October 2005 Stanley drove itself to a rookie victory in the Grand Challenge, a 131-mile race across the Mojave Desert. First prize: $2 million. Race sponsor, tellingly: the U.S. Department of Defense.

In the same race a year earlier none of the 15 robotic entrants even finished. Thrun entered the race last fall largely out of frustration at these results; he had just arrived at Stanford from Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. Researchers there had spent years coming up with some of the fundamental principles for building robotic vehicles. Analyzing tons of data was key: They packed cars with ever more sensors to navigate the world around them.

But Thrun knew that sometimes the data points are simply wrong. He had built a robotic tour guide for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 1998, and the contraption got confused when people waved at it. Thrun taught his bots to stop trusting all data equally and instead assign some probability to its utility and accuracy.

"The robot has to figure out: Is this data a wall? Could it be a kid? Could it be a shadow or a trick?" Thrun says.

Stanley sports five global-positioning antennas, six Pentium M computers, five laser range finders and a video camera. To train Stanley's brains, Thrun and his crew drove it 1,000 miles over desert terrain to reveal what conditions drivers deem critical and what they ignore. A bad bump jostling Stanley's sensors might accidentally produce data indicating a wall ahead even if the road is clear. Stanley learned to downplay such data and stay attuned to more significant obstacles.

To win the race in October Stanley took six hours and 54 minutes; Carnegie Mellon's car needed another 11 minutes to finish. Best of all, Thrun says, 5 contestants finished (of 23 total). "We all won. The robotics community won." The next Grand Challenge is in November 2007, with a 60-mile romp through a city yet to be named. Contestants will have to avoid static obstacles and, most important, one another. Thrun will be ready with a new Volkswagen Passat. "To make robots really useful," he says, "they will have to deal with traffic."

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0904/102.html?boxes=custom

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Egang: Emobots

On The Cover/Top Stories
Emobots
09.04.06

Caleb Chung wants pleo to perform. "Come on," he coaxes the rubbery toy dinosaur, stroking its nose. Pleo blinks its large eyes, stretches, wags its tail and totters a few steps--then yawns and curls up for a nap.

Life is exhausting when you're a prototype robotic toy, just months away from your debut. It's even more exhausting for principal inventor Chung, 49, and his three dozen colleagues at Ugobe Inc., who are trying to create a "designer life form," a creature that can elicit the same cooing and warm fuzzy feelings as a new puppy.

So far, so good. When Chung showed off Pleo earlier this year at a tech conference, 200 people sang "Happy Birthday" to the robot. Since then thousands have e-mailed Ugobe pleading to be among the first to pay $250 for a Pleo. They need patience: Pleo, first planned for the holidays, won't emerge until March.

Pleo is a technical marvel, but all the wizardry is invisible, designed to create a personality. Chung knows how to prompt feelings without using words. He was a street mime; he played an orangutan on TV; he taught himself to make mechanized puppets and toys. In the 1980s he made a playful dinosaur for Mattel, but the company nixed the idea as too expensive. Chung later cocreated Furby, the big-eared fuzz ball that sold 50 million units. He retired comfortably but hankered to build a robotic dino pet.

Working with a friend, Chung came up with software that animates a four-legged robot with balanced, smooth motions. Soon entrepreneur Robert Christopher signed up to be chief executive of a new company, which he named "Ugobe" (as in, "You go be what you want to be"). They have raised $2.7 million from investors so far and bank on getting another $8 million in September.

In Boise, Idaho Chung and a dozen collaborators have modeled Pleo after a plant-eating baby camarasaurus from the Jurassic period. Pleo has an operating system, a microcontroller, 14 motors (one for each joint) and 31 sensors to detect changes in light, sound and motion. Skin has slowed Pleo's arrival; Chung wants the rubbery material to fit snugly yet move naturally.

Pleo's coolest feature is software that lets it react to stimuli and its environment in a thousand different ways. Touching its head can startle a young Pleo, make an older Pleo wag its tail playfully--and annoy a hungry one. Owners will be able to download new behaviors from the Web or write their own code. Young Pleos might even pick up habits or catch a cold by hanging out with other Pleos, sharing data via infrared links. "Our job is to create a relationship between Pleo and a person," Chung says. "You'll interact with it, share an emotional language with it. Then you can play."

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0904/098.html?boxes=custom

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Egang: Stickybot

On The Cover/Top Stories
The Stickybot
09.04.06

Cockroaches inspire Robert J. Full. So do crabs, geckos and a closetful of other creepy creatures. Not that he likes them. "I think they're disgusting!" says Full, a professor at UC, Berkeley. "But how do they move like they do?"

This biologist believes he can best nature. He has spent his life scrutinizing the ways many-legged animals scamper over bumpy terrain and scoot up a wall or even glass. Working with Mark Cutkosky of Stanford University and other mechanical engineers, Full designs robots that use these principles. "We don't want to copy nature," Full says. "That's a totally mistaken idea. Nature inspires us."

In April Full, 48, and Cutkosky, 49, unveiled their most recent bio-inspired robot, the two-foot long "Stickybot," which strides up a window much like a gecko but at 1.5 inches a second. "Everybody wants to know if Stickybot can do windows," Cutkosky says. "I just want robots that can look for cracks in the Bay Bridge."

Stickybot is the result of a decadelong collaboration between Full and Cutkosky. When they met, Full already was a leader in unraveling the principles of animal locomotion. He has measured the force of cockroaches' footsteps and the stiffness of their legs. (The legs of most creatures, insect or human, work like a pogo stick; the stiffness of the "spring"--the muscle--strongly influences their speed.)

"Cockroaches can run even faster by standing on their rear legs and running like bipeds." Full says.

Working with Irobot (see p. 94), Full developed a crablike machine that walks on land and underwater. With researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, he built a six-legged robot the size of a shoebox; it traverses rocky trails without tipping over. Pixar tapped Full for help in giving characters in A Bug's Life more personality through motion.

Cutkosky, meanwhile, had been making a name for himself by developing dexterous robotic hands. He became an expert in bonelike structures built by layering materials with different properties, a technique called shape-deposition manufacturing. Instead of making a robot's limbs with solid plastic, Cutkosky can make them, for instance, with an elastic core and a tough outer shell.

The duo has made various families of robots, each with their own talents. Some, inspired by cockroaches, sport six legs and can clamber over rocks. The speediest of these moves at 2.7 yards per second.

Getting robots to climb walls is a tougher challenge. "Even five years ago I would have had no clue how to build Stickybot," Cutkosky says. A dozen motors and embedded tendons made of fabric and cables let Stickybot maneuver each of its four legs and 16 toes independently.

Those toes are the real marvel. Geckos can cling to glass by a single toe because each has millions of fibers so tiny they stick to surfaces through weak molecular forces. Stickybot does the same, using hundreds of tiny tapered stalks measuring 10 microns (that's four ten-thousandths of an inch) at the tip. Because the tips are sharply angled, Stickybot's toes stick going in one direction and peel off easily when pulled the other way. Stickybot, funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, could get stickier still. More sensors and motors would let it sense when it is about to fall off a wall or when it needs to rotate its feet, as geckos do, to climb down.

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0904/104.html?boxes=custom

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Egang: The Robots Are Coming!

COVER: EGANG 2006
Magazine issue date: Sept. 4, 2006

The robots are on the move--leaping, scrambling, rolling, flying, climbing. They are figuring out how to get here on their own. They come to help us, protect us, amuse us--and some even do floors.

Since Czech playwright Karel Capek popularized the term ("robota" means "forced labor" in Czech) in 1921, we have imagined what robots could do. But reality fell short of our plans: Honda Motor trotted out its Asimo in 2000, but for now it's been relegated to temping as a receptionist at Honda and doing eight shows a week at Disneyland. The majority of the world's robots are bolted to a spot on a factory floor, sentenced to a repetitive choreography of welding, stamping and cutting.

No more. In our eighth annual E-Gang (our group of tech innovators to watch), we present the masters of robotic innovation--entrepreneurs and researchers who are fusing advances in biomechanics, software, sensor technology, materials science and computing to create new generations of robotic assistants.

Learning has been key, both for robots and for their designers. Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute has been an incubator for much of the current work on robots. Rodney Brooks of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nudged the whole field forward in early 1990s when he showed how robots could make faster decisions by responding to sensory data from their immediate environment rather than relying on complex sets of rules.

The pioneers we've highlighted in this report work in diverse corners of the robotics arena. Some people have devoted their lives to developing robots, such as Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, who founded iRobot with their academic adviser, Rodney Brooks. In the medical world, Russell Taylor has contributed to innovations in surgical robots for decades.

Others are relative newcomers. Sebastian Thrun, from Stanford University, burst into the headlines last year by winning a U.S. Defense Department race of autonomous vehicles through the desert. But he brings with him the legacy of Carnegie Mellon. So, too, does Mark Cutkoski (also of Stanford), who collaborated with an insightful biologist, Robert Full of the University of California, Berkeley. Although Full did not set out to become a robotics expert, his basic research discoveries about how creatures--from cockroaches to people--move has become a cornerstone of much work.

Soren Lund at Lego is helping bring what was once considered esoteric engineering into the hands of enthusiasts everywhere in the world. Yoshiyuki Sankai, at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, proudly continues Japan's long tradition of innovative--and surprising--humanoid robots. And Caleb Chung and his colleagues at the startup UGobe remind us to celebrate the playfulness and creativity that has also been a hallmark of robotics over the years.

The market is still small: $6 billion a year for industrial robots, according to the International Federation of Robots.(That doesn't include the software, peripherals and systems needed to support robots. Add those elements in, and the value of the market jumps to $18 billion.) Data on the size of the nascent business of service robots--robots that clean or protect or entertain--are sketchier, but the growth predictions are dizzying: the IFR, in cooperation with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, expects to see 7 million service robots sold by 2008.

In the U.S., the Defense Department has been the big spender for robots, seeking machines that can protect soldiers' lives. But interest is simmering in the venture community--a signal that profits lie ahead. Big players are muscling in, too. In May, Microsoft announced that it had a new research program under way, aimed at developing an operating system and software development tools for robots.

Tandy Trower, general manager of Microsoft's robotics group, says robotics today reminds him of the early days of the PC--chock-full of ideas, opportunities and too many different operating systems.

Unlike PCs, however, robots are calling on the ingenuity of people from wildly diverse backgrounds: biologists are teaching robots to move, entertainers are teaching them how to amuse us, statisticians are teaching them when to ignore data, computer scientists are teaching them how to think, and materials scientists are inventing new composites that make them light on their feet.

Robots are about to be unshackled from forced labor. Expect them everywhere.

http://www.forbes.com/egang/2006/08/17/robot-egang-history_06egang_cz_ec_0817robotintro.html

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