As I type this, I’m sitting in a seventh-floor conference area at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, listening to the keynote speaker for the second of five panels today in the “Cyber Deterrence Symposium,” a joint production of INSA (the Intelligence and National Security Alliance), and the Homeland Security Policy Institute.

If you’re reading this on the day of the symposium (Monday November 2, 2009), you can tune in to the live webcast of the speakers and panels. It is a stellar line-up, see the roster below.

There’s a follow-on conference tomorrow at which I’ll be participating in a panel; however Day 2 is a series of classified sessions at another facility, and won’t be available as a webcast…  If you’re a really talented hacker and you’re able to watch tomorrow’s sessions over the web, drop me a line and let me know how :)

Sessions at today’s Cyber Deterrence Symposium:

8:00‐8:10 AM Welcome

Frank Cilluffo, Director, HSPI and Ellen McCarthy, President, INSA

8:10‐8:30 AM Opening Remarks

The Honorable Charles Allen

HSPI Steering Committee and INSA Senior Intelligence Advisor

8:30‐9:10 AM Keynote Address

The Honorable Jaak Aaviksoo

Minister of Defence, Republic of Estonia

9:20‐10:20 AM Session One—The Cyber Threat

Keynote Jim Lewis, Director and Senior Fellow, Technology and Public Policy Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Panelists Roger Cressey, President, Good Harbor

Mike Delaney, Majority Staff Director, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. House of Representatives

Sam Visner, Vice President, Strategy and Business Development for Enforcement, Security, and Intelligence Division, CSC - 2 -

10:30‐11:30 PM Session Two—Deterrent Capability

Keynote The Honorable Michael Nacht, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs, Department of Defense

Panelists Martin Libicki, Senior Policy Analyst, RAND Corporation

Richard O’Neill, President, The Highlands Forum

Terry Pudas, Senior Research Fellow, Center for Technology and National Security Policy

Lee Zeichner, President, Zeichner Risk Analytics

11:45‐12:45 PM Lunch & Keynote Address

The Honorable Susan M. Collins, Ranking Member, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate

1:00‐2:00 PM Session Three—Solutions

Keynote Richard Barrett, Coordinator, Al‐Qaeda Taliban Monitoring Team, United Nations

Panelists David Grannis, Majority Staff Director, Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. Senate

Dan Hall, Vice President, Cyber Security/CNCI Coordinator, ManTech International Corporation

Neill Sciarrone, Former Special Assistant to the President for Homeland Security; Director, Cyber Security and Information Sharing, BAE Systems

Amit Yoran, Former Director, National Cyber Security Division, Department of Homeland Security

2:10‐3:10 PM Session Four—Implementation

Keynote The Honorable Philip Reitinger, Deputy Undersecretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate, Department of Homeland Security

Panelists Steve Chabinsky, Deputy Assistant Director, FBI Cyber Division

Jeff Cooper, Vice President for Technology, SAIC

Thom Shanker, Correspondent, The New York Times

Suzanne Spaulding, Principal, Bingham Consulting Group - 3 -

3:20‐4:20 PM Presentation of INSA Cyber Task Force Paper: “Public Private Partnership for Cyber Incidence Response”

Panelists Lou Von Thaer, Steve Cambone, Barbara Fast, Charlie Allen, Bob Gourley, Bob Farrell, and Mike Karpovich

4:30 PM Closing Keynote

Chris Painter

Acting Senior Director of Cybersecurity, National Security Council

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I’m taking up my duties as a public-spirited citizen next week on Tuesday evening, by hosting a fun little fundraiser for my local Congressman – and if you’re going to be in Washington DC the evening of 10/27 I hope you’ll join me (click here for the invitation and details). It’ll be a fun evening; we’ll be at the ultra-cool Johnny’s Half-Shell on Capitol Hill after all.

I’m looking forward to introducing friends to someone who I think stands head and shoulders above the current claptrap-echo-chamber that passes for informed political discourse in Our Nation’s Capital   I could put on the hard-sell for my friends in DoD or the national security community, since this fellow is increasingly influential on the Armed Services Committee, but that’s not why I’m supporting him.

My congressional district is Virginia’s historic First District, which is pretty darn big and important for the nation – it stretches all the way from DC’s Northern Virginia suburbs down along the Chesapeake Bay to the shipyards at Hampton Roads.  I love it because of the natural protected beauty and because of the history; it’s home to Jamestown and the birthplace of George Washington, and really has been the cradle of American democracy.

People here still take popular representation seriously – and we’ve got a new young member of Congress, my onetime-neighbor from Montross, Rob Wittman. He was the mayor of Montross (pop. 315) for a while, and is exactly the kind of elected official I’ve always liked: he avoids rhetoric or labels, focusing instead on good solid public policy. As his Wikipedia entry points out, Rob “worked for 20 years with the Virginia Department of Health,” and quoting from his bio:

Rob worked for many years as an environmental health specialist for local health departments in Virginia’s Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula regions. He holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration from Virginia Commonwealth University, a Master of Public Health degree in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Virginia Tech.

Rob’s service in Congress is important, I think, so I’ve decided to help him win re-election. In Congress, he serves on the House Armed Services Committee, already as ranking member on the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee – he’s a tough Pentagon watchdog but a strong supporter of a robust Navy fleet. He also sits on the House Committee on Natural Resources, where he is a champion of the Chesapeake Bay for its environmental and economic attributes, using his professional expertise in water quality and fisheries for the environmental clean-up of the Bay. That’s what he ran on, that’s what he’s doing already in his first full term.

I also like that he’s tech-savvy and a Gov 2.0 kind of guy (check him out on Twitter and Facebook).

If you like the sound of that and would like to support Rob, click here to send an email RSVP’ing for the reception/dinner, or even if you live elsewhere or can’t make it in person I would appreciate your donation. I vouch for this guy.

Does it matter where you place yourself on the political spectrum? There is no single slot that would hold me – or many of my friends, frankly, who range from fuzzy centrists to Maoists to Goldwater Girls (remember them?). My political leanings have always puzzled folks; I’ve worked for Democratic elected officials in the nation’s most liberal city, San Francisco (like my friend Mayor Frank Jordan), and yet I’m also supporting Wittman, who’s a moderate Republican. I tend to vote for someone I believe is the best possible choice.

Some people (and news channels) like to portray the nation as bifurcated along a politico-philosophical axis of Left and Right – as in this new visually creative effort from the great “Information is Beautiful” site to capture the spectrum in a single info-graphic (click the thumbnail on the left to see it in full detail).

But I’ve been politically aware – and active – since I was a kid. I told the story once (in an online interview about my “path to Gov 2.0″) of how I got started:

As a kid in the ‘60s I was a political junkie, and I made candy money at the age of 6 by swarming parking lots for my local congressman in North Carolina and putting his bumperstickers on cars. A nickel a car for me, and no permission sought; people would at some point discover they had been driving around advertising their Member of Congress. Imagine if politicians today were remotely adding a banner ad to constituents’ personal websites and blogs!”

Things are different now; I’m actually asking people upfront to support the candidate I like   If you can make it Tuesday night, let me know ($100 gets you in the door!). Even if you can’t make it but you like the idea of having a sane, responsible person like Rob Wittman among the lunatics in Congress, you can still contribute and I’ll thank you profusely!

By the way, I like the fact that the First District produced three of the first five presidents (Washington, Monroe, Madison). Just my little thought, but maybe we’re overdue….

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• Improve knowledge of DCGS and JIOC capabilities for security, engagement and relief and reconstruction activities
• Increase the utility and value DCGS provides to Irregular Warfare and General Purpose Forces operating independently, and through increasingly lower echelons
• Markedly improve the ability to integrate with U.S. agencies, coalition forces, and other partners across the ISR enterprise
• Inspire new thinking in areas of acquisition of ISR services, DCGS capability metrics, and the rapid delivery of intelligence solutions to the warfighter.”

Moderator: Mr. John A. Marshall
Chief Technology Officer

Panel Members:

Ms. Michelle Munson
President and Co-Founder, Aspera, Inc.

Mr. Lewis Shepherd
Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Institute 

Panel Members:

Mr. Robert Gourley
CTO, Crucial Point

Mr. Rudi Ernst
CEO/CTO, Pixia Corporation


Ms. Casey Henson
DIA/DS-CTO

Dr. Kari Kelton, Ph.D.
Chief System Sciences Officer, NSI, Inc.

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If that title seems a bit LSD-fueled, the subject matter warrants it. Here comes some Chemistry gone wild!

First, have a look at this bizarre video. It stars a soft robot, or chemical robot – “ChemBot.” Even the experienced geeks at IEEE Spectrum are calling it “by far one of the coolest and weirdest robot prototypes we have ever seen.”

This particular prototype by iRobot and University of Chicago researchers was just unveiled, at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems this past week. (More on the conference here.) It was built in response to DARPA’s interest in chemical robots, a program run by Dr. Mitchell Zakin.

The DARPA “ChemBots” page describes the program as creating “a convergence between materials chemistry and robotics through the application of any one of a number of approaches, including gel-solid phase transitions, electro- and magneto-rheological materials, geometric transitions, and reversible chemical and/or particle association and dissociation.”

What’s the anticipated DoD mission use? In DARPA’s words, “With ChemBots, our warfighters can gain access to denied spaces and perform tasks safely, covertly, and efficiently.”  Or, as CNet’s “Crave” gadget blog puts it, “the weird little blob inflates and deflates parts of its body, changing size and shape–and scaring the living daylights out of us. We don’t know exactly when ChemBot will join the Armed Forces, but we can only beg: please, oh please, keep it away from us.”

 Does Mitch Zakin Dream of Electric Sheep?

With that kind of geeky appeal, this video has been gathering some Internet buzz over the weekend, appearing on several tech blogs. But the better story is the scientist behind the science. Several of us have been following Mitch Zakin’s work for a while, primarily because he is also the PM for the Programmable Matter Program — the “novel physics” of “a new functional form of matter, based on mesoscale particles, which can reversibly assemble into complex 3D objects upon external command.”

There is revolutionary promise for such composability in multiple fields, not just defense. Zakin described it several years ago in a speech as “a concept so simple, yet so revolutionary that it pushes even the DARPA envelope. A vision that has profound implications for how we think about chemistry and materials. A vision that could provide our warfighters with meaningful technological surprise.”

Zakin is a demonstrably brilliant scientist, of the sort you expect to find at DARPA. Indeed, in that same speech (“The Next Revolution in Materials“) which he gave at DARPA’s 25th Systems and Technology Symposium a couple of years ago, Dr. Zakin said: “I joined DARPA because it is unfettered by conventional wisdom.” 

One area where he has been exploring beyond traditional boundaries is in developing “the infochemistry project,” which combines the powers of chemistry and information technology. In an exotic illustration, Dr. Zakin is directing a research program on “Chemical Communications,” which I’m not sure I fully understand but which sounds like some sort of holographic persistent Twitter:

The Chemical Communications Program is exploring innovative methods to develop self-powered chemical systems that can encode an input string of alphanumeric characters (i.e., a message), convert the message to a modulated optical signal, and transmit it repetitively to a receiver. 

The ultimate goal of this program is to develop a small replicator device, with the form factor of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or cell phone that―

• Permits the user to input an arbitrary 60-character alphanumeric message.
• Translates the message into an appropriate set of modulated chemistries.
• Embeds these chemistries into a disposable substrate (the transmitter).
• Ejects the substrate for deployment.

The replicator device will enable warfighters to generate disposable optical transmitters in real time, each with a user-specified message.  It will be compact, lightweight, and powered by batteries or solar cells.                        – DARPA website, Chemical Communications Program

With projects like these under his belt, Zakin is credited with reviving the chemistry discipline at DARPA, which had fallen away over the years. But now he’s scheduled to leave the agency in 2010. He is uncertain where he’s heading, but perhaps he can be persuaded to spend some time with like-minded souls in Microsoft Research; I suspect many there would find his infochemistry approach very appealing.  

An interesting profile of Dr. Zakin in the journal Analytical Chemistry notes that “Academia is one option. Venture capitalism is another. Zakin has launched so many basic science research projects that have the potential of becoming commercial products that he says, ‘it’s almost a sin not to look at all that from the other side.’ ”

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I’ve had the good fortune to work with talented folks in my (short) time in Washington, since moving back East in 2002, particularly in the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense.  And one such fellow at DoD has been Bob Lentz, the outgoing deputy assistant secretary of Defense for information and identity assurance – the Chief Information Assurance Officer and equivalent to a private-sector CISO.

I gave an interview this afternoon to Federal News Radio (AM 1500 in the DC area, worldwide at www.FederalNewsRadio.com), on Bob’s tenure, and what will come next for DoD in the wake of his departure. You can read the news story about the interview here, or listen to the entire 15-minute interview as an mp3:

Shepherd interview on Federal News Radio, 10/13/2009

Not everything has gone perfectly, or even well, for Pentagon infosec during his tenure; we have been fighting several wars, declared and undeclared, real and cyber, during the past few years. It’s an unbelievably daunting mission, to secure the nation’s ability to defend herself and our most critical systems amid unrelenting attack.

But Bob has worked closely with the private sector on information security technological advances – he and I joined several leading Silicon Valley startup CEOs, leading-firm CISOs, and venture-capital entrepreneurs in the Information Technology Security Entrepreneurs Forum, or ITSEF.  He’s worked closely with DHS and NSA, including in the establishment of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command. He has also taken a number of counter-intuitive approaches, ranging from getting involved with Black Hat and DEFCON, to establishing jointly with the IC the Unified Cross Domain Management Office, or UCDMO. If you have the right credentials, visit the UCDMO SharePoint Collaboration Site (requires Intelink-U Access), or see their open web site at http://www.ucdmo.gov/.

This week Bob himself published a great “farewell column” in Government Computer News, “5 Key Challenges to DoD’s Cybersecurity.” The article includes policy advice for his successor and the Defense Department as a whole – but it is thoughtful advice that should be read by any CISO.  I’ll include his bullet-point list from the article: he writes, “If I had to list five of the biggest challenges that remain, my list would include”:

• The need to continuously harden the network, in this era of Web 2.0, cloud services, and increased mobile workforce and growing global requirements.
• The whole area of Supply Chain Risk Management. As the threat changes, we need to adjust as well, which includes rolling out technologies that inspect and secure the supply chain.
• Raising awareness across DOD and greater national security community on cyber resilience, so that commanders are prepared to operate in a contested cyber domain when communications are degraded or, worse, untrusted. The increased complexity of our technologies, coupled with our even greater dependence on them for mission success, make this an imperative.
• The necessity of education, training and workforce manning for critical IT/IA skill sets.
• And, again, the need to move to multi-factor and attribute-based identity assurance access for people, devices, data and applications.

That third bullet could be read as a provocative statement (which in Washington terms means admitting the truth): Imperfection, in DoD!  Military commanders are going to have to put up with “untrusted” communications systems in “a contested cyber domain.”  That’s the harsh reality, and military commanders are on the front lines in facing it. Bob Lentz’s successor will find his boots challenging to fill.

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How do intelligence analysts handle the long-discussed problem of information overload? (The same question goes for information workers and government data of any kind.)

I should put the word “problem” in quotation marks because there is now the persuasive counter-argument that there’s no such thing; Clay Shirky says that people may in fact suffer from what he calls filter failure, but that more information in an info-centric environment is still by definition a good thing.

Information overload started in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria, right? That was the first example where we have concrete archaeological evidence that there was more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime, which is almost the definition of information overload. And the first deep attempt to categorize knowledge so that you could subset; the first take on the information filtering problem appears in the library of Alexandria.

By the time that the publishing industries spun up in Venice in the early- to mid-1500s, the ability to have access to more reading material than you could finish in a lifetime is now starting to become a general problem of the educated classes. And by the 1800s, it’s a general problem of the middle class. So there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, right? Which is to say the normal case of modern life is information overload for all educated members of society…

So, the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information?”   – “Overload! Interview with Clay Shirky,” Columbia Journalism Review December 19 2008

So let’s assume that filters are working for an analyst, yet she or he still sits atop an ever-replenished mountain of new and now presumably relevant data: images, field reports, news accounts, cryptic tweets, classic message traffic, and the like.  Even if filters whittle down the data to usable information – “good dots” – it still takes the human brain to investigate, explore, analyze, and connect those dots into accurate patterns, or to discern the true absence of connection, or to uncover a misleading connection.

I’ve heard often that intelligence work would be easier if we could be like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, manipulating large amounts of data by hand with 3D touch gestures. Can’t do that yet, but we’re approaching the capability in a variety of ways. One new way is inherent in the Windows 7 operating system I’ve been using in our internal Microsoft deployment for several months, because Win 7 has built-in support for multi-touch and gesture-based interaction techniques.

But most people won’t have a touch-screen laptop or monitor for their Win 7 use, at least not for a while. So there are possibilities we’re exploring internally and with partners for cheap and easy ways to take advantage of the multitouch capability in the OS. For example, why not just plug in a USB mouse-like device that actually enables full gesture-based computing?

Here’s a video showing several prototypes of exactly that, from our Applied Sciences Group and several Microsoft Research labs; check out especially the cool “Side Mouse” which appears at about 6:30 into the video:

Just thinking of national-security work, I think several of these approaches would be useful for imagery analysts, say, or defense planners, or intelligence professionals collaborating on large amounts of information. But there’s broader applicability too. I’ve been perplexed at my new Google Wave beta, in large part because the array of incoming information seems chaotic and non-intuitive; perhaps multitouch would add something there as well just among textual items.

This past week was a big exposition party for several new UI approaches from Microsoft Research, as researchers from our Cambridge and Redmond labs presented 13 separate papers and demo’s at the annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2009),  in Victoria, British Columbia. UIST is a premier forum for innovation in the software and technology of human-computer interfaces, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s special interest groups on computer-human interaction and computer graphics.

Among the papers MSR presented were the following:

Ripples: Utilizing Per-Contact Visualizations to Improve User Interaction with Touch Displays 

Contact Area Interaction with Sliding Widgets

Collabio: A Game for Annotating People within Social Networks 

Augmenting Interactive Tables with Mice & Keyboards

Enabling Always-Available Input with Muscle-Computer Interfaces

Optically Sensing Tongue Gestures for Computer Input

Integrated Videos and Maps for Driving Directions

You can find a full list here of the papers we presented at UIST 2009, with links to some additional cool videos as well. 

Let me know if you think there’s an interesting application of any of these approaches for government use in your arena.

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The future of social computing is in the integration of various services and technologies – but the fun is already available now. Here’s a nifty demo of the integration of cloud computing’s services with increasingly powerful mobile computers (smartphones or netbooks). Developers can take advantage of far more computational power both locally on the device – faster, cheaper processors thanks to Moore’s Law – and computational power residing on networked data centers.  Think of a business or social activity, and thanks to platforms like the iPhone, Android, and the new Windows Phones, “There’s an app for that.” Or there soon will be.

This quick little demo feels like nothing fancy today – but ten, even five years ago it would have seemed like sci-fi. In fact it’s available now, and uses a new Windows Phone, in this case a Samsung Intrepid, making use of Tellme software from Microsoft integrated with Bing Search web services. The demo intregrates some longtime technologies in their state-of-the-art condition today using cloud-services delivery:

• Speech-to-text
• GPS-enabled location-based services
• Web search
• Voice-enabled dialing
• Social media (crowdsourced ratings integrated in search results)
• Hardware UI (a dedicated TellMe button on the Samsung Intrepid phone)

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My intention with this blog is always to write medium-length “think-pieces,” about technology, government, or preferably both. I’m working on several (the Jefferson Gov 2.0 piece, the Evil Twin 2.0 piece, and one on “whither the multilingual web”), but they do truly require thought and some free time, so they percolate a bit.

In the meantime, readers like the latest cool demo videos, so for Friday fun here’s another one (watch below or on youTube), which was featured on TechCrunch last night (“Bing comes to the iPhone via Robotvision”), with an augmented reality app for the iPhone which uses Bing Maps and Bing’s real-time data (website here). The company describes itself this way:

Robotvision augmented reality is an exciting new way to explore the world around you. Using the accelerometer and compass technology of the iPhone 3GS, along with new camera capabilities of the 3.1 OS update, you can discover content and locations around you like never before. Search for nearby locations, restaurants, points of interest — you name it! All using the power of Bing local search. Discover photographs taken and geotagged by Flickr users in the area. Find and engage with people on Twitter in your area – all just by looking around like you normally would!” -robotvision website, emphasis added

As TechCrunch points out, “Last month, Microsoft announced its Bing iPhone SDK, which this app is using.” There will be more along these lines for the Windows Phones being released imminently this fall (using WinMo 6.5).

If you like what you see in that video, you should follow Tim Sears, the engineer who has created robotvision, who writes on Twitter as @u2elan.  I also follow several other good augmented-reality Twitter feeds, here’s a short starter list if you’re interested:

• @augmented
• @ARmapping
• @TalkingDogAR
• @ARtweets
• @ARwiki
• @AugmentedPlanet
• @RobertRice
• @ubistudio
• @jack_benoff
• @KobraKai
• @LayarMobile
• @augReality
• @augmentedAR
• @totalimmersion
• @joeludwig
• @eventhorizons
• @comogard

It’s obvious that the AR field and the real-time web are heading toward immersive convergence, with what will almost certainly be astounding consequences and capabilities. For example, I’ve written about Microsoft Tag before – and now Joe Wilcox is making a provocative argument in an article with a benign title, “Could Microsoft Tag Augment Windows Mobile Reality?” At the end of the long piece which looks at competing strategies from Nokia, Google’s Android and others, Wilcox proposes the following (I’ve added bold emphasis to a couple points):

There is yet no mobile barcode economy. Google doesn’t control tagwords. Microsoft Tag has potential to become the barcode development and services platform. The Bing and Windows Live teams should be all over Tag. Microsoft isn’t exactly early barcode adopter, but there is yet time as there is no widely adopted standard. There are competitors, like Nokia Mobile Codes. Google isn’t sitting idly by, either. For example, the aforementioned Sky Map Web page has a ZXing barcode. Just point your Android phone camera to download the application.

Microsoft is building the services infrastructure to do much more, if company executives have the wherewithal. Tags could be the commercial backbone for mobile information, with no manual search necessary. They could build economy into mobile augmented reality.

I say to Microsoft: Don’t wait for third parties. Tag it! Tag everything. Microsoft Tag already is available for most mobile platforms, not just Windows Mobile. I would start with Windows Live Maps, augmenting reality in the browser as well as the device. Even do some augmented augmented reality, by overlaying mapped rooftops with Microsoft Tags. The user clicks or touches the Tag to get more information. Sure, you could overlay name of the store, but a mobile barcode could access so much more information tied to a database service.

Building out infrastructure will take years, and Google is sure to push its own technology if Microsoft does. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates built the company by selling stuff cheaper than competitors and by controlling key file formats and technology standards. The mobile barcode is a technology standard Microsoft shouldn’t want any other company to control, particularly Google.

Agree or disagree with Wilcox, there’s sure to be movement along those lines. Let me know your thoughts.

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What is the “user interface of tomorrow”? In the past I have chronicled some cool Microsoft Research prototypes of flexible touchscreen interfaces - and even touchless interfaces!  And now this month one of my friends in MSR, Mary Czerwinski, has written in Venture Beat that “those types of interfaces could be the tip of the iceberg”:

A whole new set of interfaces are in the works at various stages of research and development… I have colleagues working on tongue-based interaction, bionic contacts lenses, a muscle-computer interface, and brain-computer interaction.” – Mary Czerwinski

Not bad! But working devices along those lines are several years away, so for now we’re stuck with the tablet form-factor as the primary basis for natural input. I’ve used a tablet PC on and off for the past five years, happily. My wife now uses an HP tablet.

So I’ve been eagerly following the blogosphere’s hyperventilation about the much-rumored, still-unseen Apple tablet computer, which has been variously described as being close to launch, far from launch, and non-existent.

In a similar vein, now comes Courier, which tech-blog Gizmodo describes as “Microsoft’s astonishing take on the tablet.”  Although rival site Engadget quickly followed with a riposte that Courier “isn’t near production,” Gizmodo’s post last night titled “Microsoft’s Secret Tablet” reports that “we’ve heard that it’s in the ‘late prototype’ stage of development. It’s not a tablet, it’s a booklet.”

The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers… On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre. Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft’s brightest.” – Gizmodo

I’m not vouching for that. Even if all that were true, I couldn’t comment. But now that the concept/demo video has made its way to certain corners of the web – it even hit youTube within the past hour - I can certainly repost it here legitimately as merely an interesting take on how multitouch and gesture-interfaces can make the use of advanced computing as natural as opening a book. Take a look…

Note: For more information on Mary Czerwinski’s work visit the Visualization and Interaction (VIBE) Research Group site, which includes her own research focus on novel information visualization, interaction techniques, and user interface design.

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