June 2015 - Page 20 of 20 - Mobile and Web Technologies

Several popular smart phones fail to reach normal Internet speeds

Posted by Madhu Reddy on June 2, 2015 Leave a Comment

A lot of users are using outdated mobile devices that fail to reach adequate speeds on mobile networks. This is shown by measurements shared by the users of Netradar, a free mobile application that measures mobile connections and devices. The impartial Netradar application is developed and run globally by Aalto University in Finland. The full list of the 150 most popular smart phones and tablets and their average and median top 10 maximum download speeds is here.

Android phones like Sony Ericsson Xperia Acro S and Xperia S, Samsung Galaxy Xcover and S Plus, LG Optimus L7, Nokia X, ZTE Blade III, Huawei Ideos X5 or HTC Desire S or Android tablets like Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 are among the slowest mobile devices. The iPhone 4 and iPad 2 are clearly slower than newer Apple devices and often contribute to the speed bottleneck. Out of the most popular smart phones based on the Windows Phone, the Nokia 610 and ZTE Tania have very limited download speeds. Old Symbian phones are also limited in performance.
At the moment, the mobile device market is very polarized. Out of the 150 most commonly used mobile phones, half are 4G/LTE devices that can reach at least 95 Mbit download speeds over mobile networks. Yet, about one fourth of the popular devices cannot reach 10 Mbit. A 10 Mbit download speed enables reasonably fast Internet services and smooth HD video streams. The remaining one fourth can give up to 20 Mbit download speeds, the upper limit of 3G networks.
“Quite often ordinary smart phone users fail to reach proper speeds. A device that was bought and considered fast few years ago, but also brand new devices, can contribute to the speed bottleneck. People often expect that it is the operator’s fault if the Internet connection is bad, but the device can also be the problem”, says professor Jukka Manner, who leads the Netradar development team at Aalto University in Finland.
“If a consumer wants to use fast mobile Internet, almost any LTE device is up to the job, provided that LTE is available in the area and there is no speed limitation in the data plan. The fastest mobile Internet speeds are all achieved using LTE”, continues professor Manner.
The results are based on speed measurements shared by mobile phone users using Netradar, a free mobile application to measure mobile connections and devices, available for all smart phones and tablets. When using the application, users are presented with data about the quality of their connectivity. Simultaneously, this data is uploaded anonymously to the Netradar database.
The free Netradar app measures devices and mobile network quality in terms of download and upload speed, latency and signal strength, network problems and the performance of individual brands of smartphones and tablets. Mobile device users can download the Netradar app for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Nokia X, Meego, Symbian and Jolla/Sailfish. Maps of mobile Internet speeds measured all around the world are displayed at www.netradar.org . Netradar mobile network maps can also be viewed at http://www.internetsociety.org/netradar .
So far, the Netradar app has been installed over 220,000 times. The database currently holds almost 6 million measurements from all around the globe.

References:http://phys.org/

Virtualization technology brings security and operability to web applications

Posted by Madhu Reddy on June 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced that it has developed technology for web applications that run on smart devices or wearables, and that delivers the same level of security as thin clients while offering an exceptional degree of operability. In recent years, there have been increasing expectations that the use of smart devices and wearables in a variety of front-line scenarios will lead to greater efficiency in business operations. When a high degree of confidentiality is required for the data used by these devices, such as patient data or confidential company data, thin client environments, which leave no trace of the data on the devices, are ideal from a security perspective. Generally, thin clients are environments in which screen data is frequently sent and received. As a result, depending on the status of the mobile network or the processing performance on the device side, lags of up to about a second can occur, and operations that are unique to smart devices, such as swiping are effected.

Fujitsu Laboratories has now developed new virtualization technology for web applications, developed for smart devices, that automatically separates the user interface processing (UI processing) from the data processing. With this technology, data processing is executed in the cloud, and the UI processing is executed on the smart device side. As a result, new web applications running on smart devices or wearables can have a work application execution environment that is as secure as a thin client environment while achieving outstanding operability.
In recent years, the trend of using smart devices for work in a variety of settings is becoming more common. Moreover, as smart glasses and other wearables come into practical use, there are high expectations that linking wearables with smart devices will lead to greater efficiencies in business operations for people in the field (figure 1).

Technological Issues

Web applications developed for smart devices, such as cameras and sounds, for example, may use data that have been stored on the devices themselves. In addition, once data received from the cloud are stored on the devices, they may execute business logic. When a high degree of confidentiality is desired for the data used by these devices, such as in the case of patient data or confidential company data, thin client environments, which leave no trace of the data on the devices, are ideal from a security perspective. The problem with thin client environments, however, is that, depending on the status of the mobile network or the processing performance on the device side, lags of up to about a second can occur, and affect smart device operations, such as swiping (figure 2).

The Newly Developed Technology

Fujitsu Laboratories has now developed a technology that places the source code of the developed web applications on a server. When web applications are executed on a smart device, they are automatically interpreted. This technology enables processing to be distributed with data processing handled by the server, and UI processing handled by the smart device (figures 3 and 4). The features of this technology are described below.

1. Distributed web applications

A newly developed virtualization engine, run on both the device and the server, performs tasks including the transfer of UI processing and execution of processing content. In addition, a conventional web application library is replaced with a proprietarily developed web application library that supports virtualization. When the engine executes a web application, the source code is analyzed, and, by estimating the source code’s UI processing, it separates that part of the source code written in an API related to the UI defined in the library (web application library), and that is required in web application execution. Having been notified by the device executing the web application, the server sends the UI processing part of the source code and the specific web application library that supports virtualization to the smart device. By executing data processing of everything in the source code except the separated UI processing on the server side, and by executing in a distributed way on the smart device the transferred UI processing, this technology is able to maintain security while achieving a high level of operability. Because these are dynamically processed when a web application is executed, there is no need for redesign or redevelopment work for the distributed processing.

2. Distributed processing in accordance with operations

Fujitsu Laboratories also developed a feature that analyzes on the smart device the user’s operations, processing times, and frequency of operations, and dynamically transfers to the server the processes within the UI processing that have little impact on operability. The result is a secure system that also maintains a high level of operability.

The use of this newly developed virtualization technology enables smart devices to be utilized in business operations when using web applications in a mobile environment. This can be achieved with both security and the high level of operability characteristic of smart devices. In addition, by applying the technology to web applications that communicate with smart glasses and other wearables that are increasingly coming into practical use, thin client environments can be newly expanded to web applications that run on smart devices and wearables, such as for use in work that deals with large amounts of data for which a high level of confidentiality is needed.

Fujitsu Laboratories will work to improve the virtualization technology’s multiplex execution performance on servers and make its operations analysis highly accurate with the goal of practical implementation in fiscal 2016. In addition, rather than just applications for servers or storage equipment, Fujitsu Laboratories will proceed with developing technologies for distributed execution tailored to devices, network equipment, and servers in accordance with execution conditions or the network environment in order to create hyperconnected clouds, in which a variety of clouds are linked together, such as for an Internet of Things environment.

References:http://phys.org/

Brillo as an underlying operating system for Internet of Things

Posted by Madhu Reddy on June 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

The Project Brillo announcement was one of the event’s highlights making news at Google’s I/O conference last week. Brillo fundamentally is Google’s answer to the Internet of Things operating system. Brillo is designed to run on and connect various IoT low-power devices. If Android was Google’s answer for a mobile operating system, Brillo is a mini, or lightweight, Android OS–and part of The Register’s headline on the announcement story was “Google puts Android on a diet”.

Brillo was developed to connect IoT objects from “washing machine to a rubbish bin and linking in with existing Google technologies,” according to The Guardian.
As The Guardian also pointed out, they are not just talking about your kitchen where the fridge is telling the phone that it’s low on milk; the Brillo vision goes beyond home systems to farms or to city systems where a trashbin could tell the council when it is full and needs collecting. “Bins, toasters, roads and lights will be able to talk to each other for automatic, more efficient control and monitoring.”
Brillo is derived from Android. Commented Peter Bright, technology editor, Ars Technica: “Brillo is smaller and slimmer than Android, providing a kernel, hardware abstraction, connectivity, and security infrastructure.” The Next Web similarly explained Brillo as “a stripped down version of Android that can run on minimal system requirements.” The Brillo debut is accompanied by another key component, Weave. This is the communications layer, and it allows the cloud, mobile, and Brillo to speak to one another. AnandTech described Weave as “an API framework meant to standardize communications between all these devices.”
Weave is a cross-platform common language. Andrei Frumusanu in AnandTech said from code-snippets given in the presentation it looked like a straightforward simple and descriptive syntax standard in JSON format. Google developers described Weave as “the IoT protocol for everything” and Brillo as “based on the lower levels of Android.”
Is Google’s Brillo and Weave component, then, the answer to developer, manufacturer and consumer needs for interoperability among smart objects? Some observers interpreted the announcement as good news, in that Google was now, in addition to Nest, to be an active player in the IoT space. Google was making its presence known in the march toward a connected device ecosystem.

Will this be the easiest platform for developers to build on? Will Brillo have the most reach over the long term? Or is the IoT to get tangled up in a “format war”? These were some questions posed in response to Google’s intro of Project Brillo.
Derek du Preez offered his point of view about standards and the IoT in diginomica, saying “we have learnt from history that there is typically room for at least a couple of mainstream OS’. But if Google wants to be the leader in this market, it needs to be the platform of choice for some of the early IoT ‘killer apps’. Its investment in Nest goes a long way to making this happen.” He added that given Google’s existing ecosystem and the amount of people across the globe that already own Android handsets, it had a good chance of taking on others and winning out.
The project page on the Google Developers site speaks about wide developer choice: “Since Brillo is based on the lower levels of Android, you can choose from a wide range of hardware platforms and silicon vendors.”
The site also said, “The Weave program will drive interoperability and quality through a certification program that device makers must adhere to. As part of this program, Weave provides a core set of schemas that will enable apps and devices to seamlessly interact with each other.”

References:http://phys.org/

MIT physicists build world’s first fermion microscope

Posted by Madhu Reddy on June 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a microscope that they claim is able to image the fundamental particles that make up all matter in the universe (Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT)

Researchers working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claim to have created a method to better observe fermions – the sub-atomic building blocks of matter – by constructing a microscope capable of viewing them in groups of a thousand at a time. A laser technique is used to herd the fermions into a viewing area and then freeze them in place so all of the captured particles can be imaged simultaneously.

In the entire known universe, there are only two types of particles: fermions and bosons. In simple terms, fermions are all the particles that make up matter (for example, electrons), and bosons are all the particles that carry force (for example, photons).

Fermions include electrons, neutrons, quarks, protons, and atoms consisting of an odd number of any or all of these elementary particles. However, due to the strange (and not completely understood) nature of these particles in regard to their quantum spin states, scientists often opt to employ gases of ultra-cold fermionic atoms as proxies for other fermions

Over the last two decades, physicists studying ultracold atomic gases of boson particles – such as photons – have been able to do so relatively easily because bosons can occupy the same quantum state in boundless numbers. Fermions, however, are much harder to manipulate for imaging, as they are unable to be held in the same quantum state in large numbers and are very much more difficult to reduce to the temperatures required to slow them down enough to view them.

Physicists at Harvard University successfully created a boson microscope that could resolve individual bosons in an optical lattice as far back as 2009. Similarly, in 2010, the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics also developed a second boson microscope. And, though these microscopes exposed the behavior of bosons, their counterparts – fermions – remained elusive without an equivalent fermion microscope. .

“We wanted to do what these groups had done for bosons, but for fermions,” said Zwierlein says. “And it turned out it was much harder for fermions, because the atoms we use are not so easily cooled. So we had to find a new way to cool them while looking at them.”

What is required to study fermions is a way to reduce their temperature, and therefore their movement, to a point low enough to image them. However, even techniques that resulted in the first ever laboratory realization of Bose-Einstein condensation in 1995 (which resulted in a Nobel Prize in 2001), or later work that saw lasers cool atoms to a few ten-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero are insufficient to achieve the cooling required to image fermion atoms.

To overcome this problem, the MIT researchers initially created an optical lattice using laser beams to form an arrangement of light “wells” which could magnetically trap and hold a single fermion in place (a technique similar to that used by the University of California to capture cesium atoms and image rotons). Applying a number of stages of laser temperature reduction, and more evaporative cooling of the gas (in this case, potassium gas), the atoms were cooled to just above absolute zero which was cold enough to hold individual fermions in place on the optical lattice.

As the fermions move to this lower energy state, they also release photons of light which can then be captured by the microscope and used to locate a fermion’s exact position within the lattice at an accuracy level greater than the wavelength of light.

“That means I know where they are, and I can maybe move them around with a little tweezer to any location, and arrange them in any pattern I’d like,” said Martin Zwierlein, a professor of physics at MIT and a member of the team working on the project.

Unfortunately, this stability was tenuous because – when light was shone upon the atoms to view them – individual photons were able to knock them out of place.

The team resolved this by cleverly employing a two laser beam approach where beams of differing frequencies were used to alter the fermion atom’s energy state. By simultaneously firing the two beams at the atom so that one beam frequency was absorbed by the particle, it would emit a corresponding photon in response. This, in turn, forced the particle into a lower energy state, thus cooling it further by reducing its excitation levels.

The upshot of this research, according to the team, is that the high-resolution image capture of more than 1,000 fermionic atoms all together at the one time will help improve our fundamental understanding of these elusive particles. As electrons are also fermions, it is hoped that this information may eventually aid research into high-temperature superconductors, with their inherent advantages of lossless energy transport and the development of quantum computer systems.

“The Fermi gas microscope, together with the ability to position atoms at will, might be an important step toward the realization of a quantum computer based on fermions,” said Zwierlein. “One would thus harness the power of the very same intricate quantum rules that so far hamper our understanding of electronic systems.”

References:http://www.gizmag.com/