Art Prof Lets World Peer Through His Surgically Embedded 3rd Eye - TechNewsWorld

For the next year, Wafaa Bilal, an assistant art professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, will record his life through still images taken at one-minute intervals by a camera surgically attached to the back of his head.

The photos will be sent to an art museum in Qatar which commissioned the work.

Bilal is known for controversial art projects, and this latest one has stirred up the faculty and staff at NYU.

His project could be seen as one type of "sousveillance" -- the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant.

Bilal had three titanium plates implanted under the skin in the back of his head at a body modification shop. The plates each have a post attached that sticks out through the skin when it's sewn back over the plates.

A 10-megapixel color digital camera measuring one inch by two inches was then screwed on to the posts.

The camera will regularly snap images, and the photos will be transmitted to his server via a cell phone worn on his body. Ultimately, they'll be sent to the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, which commissioned the project, called "The Third I." The museum, which will open Dec. 30, will display a live stream of the photos.

"No doctor wanted to do this, so piercing was my next best option," Bilal told TechNewsWorld. "It was done safely."

Bilal has already seen some fallout from his efforts. NYU asked him to cover the camera with a lens cap while he was on university property, in order to protect the privacy of staff and students. He has agreed to do so.

That might put a crimp in his ambition to document his life minute by minute for the next year, but Bilal has come up with a solution -- blank images tagged with the time,, date and GPS location will be sent back to his server when the camera lens is capped.

Apparently several acquaintances have taken him off their guest lists for future gatherings because of the camera as well.

Further, as can be imagined, Bilal has trouble when trying to sleep -- he can only sit up, propped up by pillows.

Bilal has racked up a bit of a reputation for himself with his projects.

Earlier this year, he reportedly received over 100,000 tiny tattoos on his back to commemorate those killed in the war in Iraq, where he was born.

The project, titled "... and Counting," consisted of his getting the names of Iraqi cities tattooed on his back along with 5,000 red dots to represent American military personnel killed there and 100,000 dots in UV ink to represent the official death toll for Iraqi citizens. The entire procedure was streamed live on the Web.

In 2007, his dynamic installation "Domestic Tension" had him sit in front of a paintball gun, with cameras streaming this over the Web 24 x 7.

A 2008 project, titled "Virtual Jihadi," consisted of a video game into which he inserted an avatar of himself as a suicide bomber hunting then-president George W. Bush.

Is Bilal really a publicity hound?

"I am nothing if not a storyteller," Bilal said. "All of my work to date has been concerned with the communication of public and private information to an audience so it may be retold and distributed. The stories I tell are political dramas."

Bilal's latest project may be thought of as a type of sousveillance. The term was coined by Steve Mann to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant.

Mann's a professor in the University of Toronto's department of electrical and computer engineering. He worked at MIT, where he was one of the founding members of the Wearable Computers Group in the MIT Media Lab.

Dec. 24 was denoted World Sousveillance day in 2001. Sousveillance by citizens of a state has been credited with exposing problems such as electoral misdeeds or election fraud. For example, voters in Sierra Leone and Ghana used mobile phones to check electoral malpractice and voter intimidation during elections in 2007.

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Microsoft's Head Is in the Clouds - TechNewsWorld

It was pretty much all about the cloud at Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Professional Developers Conference, held last week at its Redmond, Wash., corporate campus.

CEO Steve Ballmer and other executives spoke about how the software giant's latest developments span the PC, the mobile phone and the cloud.

They also highlighted the revamp of Windows Azure as a PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering, pushing it as a next-generation operating system.

Microsoft further used the occasion to unveil major changes in its browser with the release of IE9 Platform Preview 6 for developers.

It's not clear, however, what effect its ramped-up push into the cloud will have on the software giant's competitive position in the short term.

At PDC 2010, Microsoft positioned Windows Azure as a PaaS. A PaaS lets users set up the platform they heed - -- the hardware, operating systems, IT infrastructure and tools -- automatically on the cloud, instead of having to physically source some or all of these components.

Microsoft announced Virtual Machine Role, as well as Server Application Virtualization -- two new Windows Azure capabilities that will make it a PaaS.

Virtual Machine Role lets users run an instance of Windows Server 2008 R2 on Microsoft's cloud. This lets developers move their apps to the cloud more easily.

Server Application Virtualization lets devs transfer app images to Windows Azure.

Microsoft also announced Windows Azure services, which let developers create rich cloud apps. One is the Windows Azure AppFabric Composition Model. The model provides critical application deployment and management capabilities that help devs assemble services more quickly.

Another service is the Windows Azure Marketplace. This includes DataMarket, previously codenamed "Project Dallas." The Windows Azure Marketplace offers premium (for-pay) and public content, including demographic, financial, mapping and entertainment data. It was launched Friday and has more than 35 content providers offering data subscriptions.

Microsoft also introduced the Extra Small Widows Azure Instance for developers. This is priced at 5 US cents per compute hour.

"This emphasis on the cloud is likely Ray Ozzie's signature contribution to Microsoft, and it looks like he actually did an impressive job of getting a lot of folks who don't normally work together to cooperate," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld.

"I think the impact is going to be positive for Azure," John Barnes, chief technology officer at Model Metrics, told TechNewsWorld. "We're going to evaluate it because we're hearing more and more positive things about it."

However, Microsoft may find the going tougher than expected. "Depending on the enterprise, there's still some skepticism about the cloud," Barnes said.

It will be five to 10 years before people fully accept moving everything to the cloud, he added.

Microsoft did not respond to TechNewsWorld's requests for comment by press time.

As for IE9, the next version of Microsoft's browser, the focus is strongly on HTML5. The company is working on interoperability, committing to the W3C and the standards process. The IE9 beta has been downloaded 10 million times since it was launched about six weeks ago, Microsoft said.

Microsoft on Friday made IE9 Platform Preview 6 available for developers at IETestDrive.com. This preview offers better performance and quality, as wel as increased standards support.

For example, IE9 now supports CSS3 2D transforms. It also supports full hardware acceleration.

"IE9 is the only browser in the market that is 100 percent hardware accelerated," Enderle said. "The others haven't been able to pull this off yet, and it's a huge improvement over IE8 as a result."

Although Microsoft's pushing of hardware performance will slow down adoption of IE9 at first, it will appeal to those who buy new hardware and are most likely to buy other devices, Enderle pointed out. "It's called going where the money is, and this practice is more consistent with Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) practice than it is with Microsoft's," he added.

"Microsoft's seen what happened with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Chrome and has tried to make its browser much faster and tighter," Model Metrics' Barnes remarked.

Still, this may not be enough to stem the growing popularity of Google's Chrome browser, which been making inroads into the browser market at Microsoft's expense, of late.

"Whether people will go back to IE after having used Chrome or Firefox remains to be seen," Barnes said.

Why the heavy play on HTML5? Is Microsoft tired of Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) Flash?

"Flash has issues, and, while Microsoft will continue to support it, Flash is somewhat of an embarrassment because it should have been Microsoft's technology," Enderle said.

"Flash has its roots in 'Chrome Effects,' a project that was killed because of internal politics. Microsoft probably would just as soon see Flash go away," he added.

"Flash, HTML5 and Silverlight all have their places," Model Metrics' Barnes suggested. "I think HTML5 is great for cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility."

Flash and Silverlight have a place in the short term, and they'll probably coexist with HTML5 for the next three to five years, Barnes said. "I know Adobe's doing a lot with Flash, and it talks a lot about how HTML5 and Flash can coexist -- and the same can be said for Silverlight."

Apple, too, is pushing for HTML5 instead of Flash, which it describes as old technology and prone to malware attacks.

Talk of a move toward mobile computing has been gaining traction for some time. Apple seems to have taken this to heart, revamping its MacBook Air family's user interface with features formerly only seen in mobile devices.

Is Microsoft missing the boat here? There's almost nothing heard about a mobile version of IE9.

Perhaps not. At PDC 2010, Microsoft demonstrated using Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone to develop apps. VSE is the free version of Visual Studio.

Devs can use a variety of ways to get data with WinPho7. These include REST, JSON and Web services, and Microsoft on Friday announced it's shipping a new OData library devs can use. This provides standards-based OData to consume and query data on the Web.

"The Windows Phone 7 offering has the best browser Microsoft has ever put in a phone," said Enderle. "It's just that Microsoft had issues with Flash initially."

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