Clumsy Avatars: Perfection Versus Mortality in Games and Simulation

The shop is one of several projects Chang uses to explore humanity in technology. Chang, an electronic artist and recently appointed co-director of the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences program at Rensselaer, sees the dialogue between perfection and mortality as an important influence in the growing world of games and simulation.

"There's this transcendence that technology promises us. At its extreme is the notion of immortality that -- with artificial intelligence, robotics, and virtual reality -- you could download your consciousness and take yourself out of the limitations of the physical body," said Chang."But at the same time, that's what makes us human: our frailty and our mortality."

In other words, while the"sell" behind technology is often about achieving perfection (with a smart phone all the answers are at hand, with GPS we never lose our way, in Second Life we are beautiful), the risk is a loss of humanity.

That dialogue and tension leads Chang to believe that the nascent world of gaming and simulation could become"a new cultural form" as great as literature, art, music, and theater.

"This is just the beginning; we don't really know what this is going to be, and 'games and simulation' is just the best term we have to describe a much larger form," said Chang."Twenty years ago nobody knew what the Web was going to be. There was this huge form on the horizon that we were sort of fumbling toward with different technological experiments, artistic experiments; I think this is what's going on with games and simulation right now.

"There are many things that are very difficult to do hands-on -- it's very difficult to simulate a disaster, it's very difficult to manipulate atoms and molecules at the atomic level -- and this is where simulation comes in handy," said Chang."That kind of learning experience, that way of gaining knowledge that's intuitive, that comes through experience and involvement, can be expanded to many other realms."

As an electronic artist, Chang's own work is at the intersection of virtual environments, experimental gaming, and contemporary media art.

"I'm interested in what you could call evocative and poetic experiences within technological systems -- creating that powerful experience that you can get from great music, theater, books, and paintings through immersive and interactive simulations as well," Chang said."But I'm also interested in the experiences of being human within technological systems."

Other recent projects include"Becoming," a computer-driven video installation in which the attributes of two animated figures -- each inhabiting their own space -- are interchanged."Over time, this causes each figure to take on the attributes of the other, distorted by the structure of their digital information."

In"Insecurity Camera," an installation shown at art exhibits around the country, a"shy" security camera turns away at the approach of subjects.

"What I'm interested in is getting at those human qualities that are still there," Chang said."Some of this has to do with frailty, with fumbling, weakness, and failure. These are things that can get disguised, they can get swept under the rug when we think about technology."

Chang earned a bachelor of arts in computer science from Amherst College, and a master of fine arts in art and technology studies from the Art Institute of Chicago. His installations, performances, and immersive virtual reality environments have been exhibited in numerous venues and festivals worldwide, including Boston CyberArts, SIGGRAPH, the FILE International Electronic Language Festival in Sao Paulo, the Athens MediaTerra Festival, the Wired NextFest, and the Vancouver New Forms Festival, among others. He has designed interactive exhibits for museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History.

Chang teaches a two-semester game development course that joins students with backgrounds in all aspects of games -- computer programming, computer science, design, art, and writing -- in the process of creating games. The students start with a design, and proceed through all the steps of planning, creating art work, writing code, and refining their game.

"Think of it as a foundation into developing games that you can take into experimental game design and stretch beyond it," Chang said.

As the"new cultural form" evolves, Chang sees ample room for exploration.

For example, said Chang, virtual reality, in which experiences are staged in a wholly digital world, leads to different implications than augmented reality, in which digital elements overlay the physical world. One implication of virtual reality -- in which, as in Second Life, users can experiment with their identity -- lies in research which suggests that personal growth gains made within the virtual world transfer to the real world. One implication of augmented reality -- in which users may add digital elements that only they can access -- is the possibility of several people sharing the same physical world while experiencing divergent realities.

In the near term, the most immediate implications for the emerging form are, as might be expected, in entertainment and education.

"What's already happening is this enrichment of the notion of what entertainment is through games," Chang said."When you talk about games, you often have ideas of simple first-person shooter or action games. But within the realm of entertainment is an immense diversity of possibilities -- from complex emotional dramatic story-based games to casual games on your cell phone. There's this range of ways of playing from competitive, multiplayer, social to creative. This is just within the entertainment realm."

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Super-Small Transistor Created: Artificial Atom Powered by Single Electrons

The researchers report inNature Nanotechnologythat the transistor's central component -- an island only 1.5 nanometers in diameter -- operates with the addition of only one or two electrons. That capability would make the transistor important to a range of computational applications, from ultradense memories to quantum processors, powerful devices that promise to solve problems so complex that all of the world's computers working together for billions of years could not crack them.

In addition, the tiny central island could be used as an artificial atom for developing new classes of artificial electronic materials, such as exotic superconductors with properties not found in natural materials, explained lead researcher Jeremy Levy, a professor of physics and astronomy in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences. Levy worked with lead author and Pitt physics and astronomy graduate student Guanglei Cheng, as well as with Pitt physics and astronomy researchers Feng Bi, Daniela Bogorin,and Cheng Cen. The Pitt researchers worked with a team from the University of Wisconsin at Madison led by materials science and engineering professor Chang-Beom Eom, including research associates Chung Wun Bark, Jae-Wan Park, and Chad Folkman. Also part of the team were Gilberto Medeiros-Ribeiro, of HP Labs, and Pablo F. Siles, a doctoral student at the State University of Campinas in Brazil.

Levy and his colleagues named their device SketchSET, or sketch-based single-electron transistor, after a technique developed in Levy's lab in 2008 that works like a microscopic Etch A Sketch^TM, the drawing toy that inspired the idea. Using the sharp conducting probe of an atomic force microscope, Levy can create such electronic devices as wires and transistors of nanometer dimensions at the interface of a crystal of strontium titanate and a 1.2 nanometer thick layer of lanthanum aluminate. The electronic devices can then be erased and the interface used anew.

The SketchSET -- which is the first single-electron transistor made entirely of oxide-based materials -- consists of an island formation that can house up to two electrons. The number of electrons on the island -- which can be only zero, one, or two -- results in distinct conductive properties. Wires extending from the transistor carry additional electrons across the island.

One virtue of a single-electron transistor is its extreme sensitivity to an electric charge, Levy explained. Another property of these oxide materials is ferroelectricity, which allows the transistor to act as a solid-state memory. The ferroelectric state can, in the absence of external power, control the number of electrons on the island, which in turn can be used to represent the 1 or 0 state of a memory element. A computer memory based on this property would be able to retain information even when the processor itself is powered down, Levy said. The ferroelectric state also is expected to be sensitive to small pressure changes at nanometer scales, making this device potentially useful as a nanoscale charge and force sensor.

The research inNature Nanotechnologyalso was supported in part by grants from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, and the Fine Foundation.

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Privacy Mode Helps Secure Android Smartphones

"There are a lot of concerns about potential leaks of personal information from smartphones," says Dr. Xuxian Jiang, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research."We have developed software that creates a privacy mode for Android systems, giving users flexible control over what personal information is available to various applications." The privacy software is called Taming Information-Stealing Smartphone Applications (TISSA).

TISSA works by creating a privacy setting manager that allows users to customize the level of information each smartphone application can access. Those settings can be adjusted any time that the relevant applications are being run -- not just when the applications are installed.

The TISSA prototype includes four possible privacy settings for each application. These settings are Trusted, Anonymized, Bogus and Empty. If an application is listed as Trusted, TISSA does not impose additional information access restrictions. If the user selects Anonymized, TISSA provides the application with generalized information that allows the application to run, without providing access to detailed personal information. The Bogus setting provides an application with fake results when it requests personal information. The Empty setting responds to information requests by saying the relevant information does not exist or is unavailable.

Jiang says TISSA could be easily modified to incorporate additional settings that would allow more fine-grained control of access to personal information."These settings may be further specialized for different types of information, such as your contact list or your location," Jiang says."The settings can also be specialized for different applications."

For example, a user may install a weather application that requires location data in order to provide the user with the local weather forecast. Rather than telling the application exactly where the user is, TISSA could be programmed to give the application generalized location data -- such as a random location within a 10-mile radius of the user. This would allow the weather application to provide the local weather forecast information, but would ensure that the application couldn't be used to track the user's movements.

The researchers are currently exploring how to make this software available to Android users."The software modification is relatively minor," Jiang says,"and could be incorporated through an over-the-air update."

The paper,"Taming Information-Stealing Smartphone Applications (on Android)," was co-authored by Jiang; Yajin Zhou, a Ph.D. student at NC State; Dr. Vincent Freeh, an associate professor of computer science at NC State; and Dr. Xinwen Zhang of Huawei America Research Center. The paper will be presented in June at the 4th International Conference on Trust and Trustworthy Computing, in Pittsburgh, Pa. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and NC State's Secure Open Systems Initiative, which receives funding from the U.S. Army Research Office.

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Hydrocarbons Deep Within Earth: New Computational Study Reveals How

The thermodynamic and kinetic properties of hydrocarbons at high pressures and temperatures are important for understanding carbon reservoirs and fluxes in Earth.

The work provides a basis for understanding experiments that demonstrated polymerization of methane to form high hydrocarbons and earlier methane forming reactions under pressure.

Hydrocarbons (molecules composed of the elements hydrogen and carbon) are the main building block of crude oil and natural gas. Hydrocarbons contribute to the global carbon cycle (one of the most important cycles of Earth that allows for carbon to be recycled and reused throughout the biosphere and all of its organisms).

The team includes colleagues at UC Davis, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Shell Projects& Technology. One of the researchers, UC Davis Professor Giulia Galli, is the co-chair of the Deep Carbon Observatory's Physics and Chemistry of Deep Carbon Directorate and former LLNL researcher.

Geologists and geochemists believe that nearly all (more than 99 percent) of the hydrocarbons in commercially produced crude oil and natural gas are formed by the decomposition of the remains of living organisms, which were buried under layers of sediments in Earth's crust, a region approximately 5-10 miles below Earth's surface.

But hydrocarbons of purely chemical deep crustal or mantle origin (abiogenic) could occur in some geologic settings, such as rifts or subduction zones said Galli, a senior author on the study.

"Our simulation study shows that methane molecules fuse to form larger hydrocarbon molecules when exposed to the very high temperatures and pressures of the Earth's upper mantle," Galli said."We don't say that higher hydrocarbons actually occur under the realistic 'dirty' Earth mantle conditions, but we say that the pressures and temperatures alone are right for it to happen.

Galli and colleagues used the Mako computer cluster in Berkeley and computers at Lawrence Livermore to simulate the behavior of carbon and hydrogen atoms at the enormous pressures and temperatures found 40 to 95 miles deep inside Earth. They used sophisticated techniques based on first principles and the computer software system Qbox, developed at UC Davis.

They found that hydrocarbons with multiple carbon atoms can form from methane, (a molecule with only one carbon and four hydrogen atoms) at temperatures greater than 1,500 K (2,240 degrees Fahrenheit) and pressures 50,000 times those at Earth's surface (conditions found about 70 miles below the surface).

"In the simulation, interactions with metal or carbon surfaces allowed the process to occur faster -- they act as 'catalysts,'" said UC Davis' Leonardo Spanu, the first author of the paper.

The research does not address whether hydrocarbons formed deep in Earth could migrate closer to the surface and contribute to oil or gas deposits. However, the study points to possible microscopic mechanisms of hydrocarbon formation under very high temperatures and pressures.

Galli's co-authors on the paper are Spanu; Davide Donadio at the Max Planck Institute in Meinz, Germany; Detlef Hohl at Shell Global Solutions, Houston; and Eric Schwegler of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

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New Spin on Graphene Makes It Magnetic

The results, reported inScience, could be a potentially huge breakthrough in the field of spintronics.

Spintronics is a group of emerging technologies that exploit the intrinsic spin of the electron, in addition to its fundamental electric charge that is exploited in microelectronics.

Billions of spintronics devices such as sensors and memories are already being produced. Every hard disk drive has a magnetic sensor that uses a flow of spins, and magnetic random access memory (MRAM) chips are becoming increasingly popular.

The findings are part of a large international effort involving research groups from the US, Russia, Japan and the Netherlands.

The key feature for spintronics is to connect the electron spin to electric current as current can be manipulated by means routinely used in microelectronics.

It is believed that, in future spintronics devices and transistors, coupling between the current and spin will be direct, without using magnetic materials to inject spins as it is done at the moment.

So far, this route has only been demonstrated by using materials with so-called spin-orbit interaction, in which tiny magnetic fields created by nuclei affect the motion of electrons through a crystal. The effect is generally small which makes it difficult to use.

The researchers found a new way to interconnect spin and charge by applying a relatively weak magnetic field to graphene and found that this causes a flow of spins in the direction perpendicular to electric current, making a graphene sheet magnetised.

The effect resembles the one caused by spin-orbit interaction but is larger and can be tuned by varying the external magnetic field.

The Manchester researchers also show that graphene placed on boron nitride is an ideal material for spintronics because the induced magnetism extends over macroscopic distances from the current path without decay.

The team believes their discovery offers numerous opportunities for redesigning current spintronics devices and making new ones such as spin-based transistors.

Professor Geim said:"The holy grail of spintronics is the conversion of electricity into magnetism or vice versa.

"We offer a new mechanism, thanks to unique properties of graphene. I imagine that many venues of spintronics can benefit from this finding."

Antonio Castro Neto, a physics professor from Boston who wrote a news article for theSciencemagazine which accompanies the research paper commented:"Graphene is opening doors for many new technologies.

"Not surprisingly, the 2010 Nobel Physics prize was awarded to Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov for their groundbreaking experiments in this material.

"Apparently not satisfied with what they have accomplished so far, Geim and his collaborators have now demonstrated another completely unexpected effect that involves quantum mechanics at ambient conditions. This discovery opens a new chapter to the short but rich history of graphene."

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Magnetic New Graphene Discovery

The finding by a team of Maryland researchers, led by Physics Professor Michael S. Fuhrer of the UMD Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials is the latest of many amazing properties discovered for graphene.

A honeycomb sheet of carbon atoms just one atom thick, graphene is the basic constituent of graphite. Some 200 times stronger than steel, it conducts electricity at room temperature better than any other known material (a 2008 discovery by Fuhrer, et. al). Graphene is widely seen as having great, perhaps even revolutionary, potential for nanotechnology applications. The 2010 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to scientists Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim for their 2004 discovery of how to make graphene.

In their new graphene discovery, Fuhrer and his University of Maryland colleagues have found that missing atoms in graphene, called vacancies, act as tiny magnets -- they have a"magnetic moment." Moreover, these magnetic moments interact strongly with the electrons in graphene which carry electrical currents, giving rise to a significant extra electrical resistance at low temperature, known as the Kondo effect. The results appear in the paper"Tunable Kondo effect in graphene with defects" published this month inNature Physics.

The Kondo effect is typically associated with adding tiny amounts of magnetic metal atoms, such as iron or nickel, to a non-magnetic metal, such as gold or copper. Finding the Kondo effect in graphene with vacancies was surprising for two reasons, according to Fuhrer.

"First, we were studying a system of nothing but carbon, without adding any traditionally magnetic impurities. Second, graphene has a very small electron density, which would be expected to make the Kondo effect appear only at extremely low temperatures," he said.

The team measured the characteristic temperature for the Kondo effect in graphene with vacancies to be as high as 90 Kelvin, which is comparable to that seen in metals with very high electron densities. Moreover the Kondo temperature can be tuned by the voltage on an electrical gate, an effect not seen in metals. They theorize that the same unusual properties of that result in graphene's electrons acting as if they have no mass also make them interact very strongly with certain kinds of impurities, such as vacancies, leading to a strong Kondo effect at a relatively high temperature.

Fuhrer thinks that if vacancies in graphene could be arranged in just the right way, ferromagnetism could result."Individual magnetic moments can be coupled together through the Kondo effect, forcing them all to line up in the same direction," he said.

"The result would be a ferromagnet, like iron, but instead made only of carbon. Magnetism in graphene could lead to new types of nanoscale sensors of magnetic fields. And, when coupled with graphene's tremendous electrical properties, magnetism in graphene could also have interesting applications in the area of spintronics, which uses the magnetic moment of the electron, instead of its electric charge, to represent the information in a computer.

"This opens the possibility of 'defect engineering' in graphene -- plucking out atoms in the right places to design the magnetic properties you want," said Fuhrer.

This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.

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Accelerate Data Storage by Several Orders of Magnitude? Ultra-Fast Magnetic Reversal Observed

With a constantly growing flood of information, we are being inundated with increasing quantities of data, which we in turn want to process faster than ever. Oddly, the physical limit to the recording speed of magnetic storage media has remained largely unresearched. In experiments performed on the particle accelerator BESSY II of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, Dutch researchers have now achieved ultrafast magnetic reversal and discovered a surprising phenomenon.

In magnetic memory, data is encoded by reversing the magnetization of tiny points. Such memory works using the so-called magnetic moments of atoms, which can be in either"parallel" or"antiparallel" alignment in the storage medium to represent to"0" and"1."

The alignment is determined by a quantum mechanical effect called"exchange interaction." This is the strongest and therefore the fastest"force" in magnetism. It takes less than a hundred femtoseconds to restore magnetic order if it has been disturbed. One femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second. Ilie Radu and his colleagues have now studied the hitherto unknown behaviour of magnetic alignment before the exchange interaction kicks in. Together with researchers from Berlin and York, they have published their results inNature.

For their experiment, the researchers needed an ultra-short laser pulse to heat the material and thus induce magnetic reversal. They also needed an equally short X-ray pulse to observe how the magnetization changed. This unique combination of a femtosecond laser and circular polarized, femtosecond X-ray light is available in one place in the world: at the synchrotron radiation source BESSY II in Berlin, Germany.

In their experiment, the scientists studied an alloy of gadolinium, iron and cobalt (GdFeCo), in which the magnetic moments naturally align antiparallel. They fired a laser pulse lasting 60 femtoseconds at the GdFeCo and observed the reversal using the circular-polarized X-ray light, which also allowed them to distinguish the individual elements. What they observed came as a complete surprise: The Fe atoms already reversed their magnetization after 300 femtoseconds while the Gd atoms required five times as long to do so. That means the atoms were all briefly in parallel alignment, making the material strongly magnetized."This is as strange as finding the north pole of a magnet reversing slower than the south pole," says Ilie Radu.

With their observation, the researchers have not only proven that magnetic reversal can take place in femtosecond timeframes, they have also derived a concrete technical application from it:"Translated to magnetic data storage, this would signify a read/write rate in the terahertz range. That would be around 1000 times faster than present-day commercial computers," says Radu.

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