Note: these are running notes LIFT ‘08.  For more complete blog coverage, check out the official LIFT conference blog or LunchOverIP.

On the outside, Kevin Warwick looks like your typical middle-aged, mild-mannered Brit. On the inside, however, he’s jacked his body up with most of the technology you’d find in your living room.  His experiments with neural implants, RFID sensors and robotic arms have earned him the title of the world’s first cyborg. 

Kevin’s theory is simple: as human beings, we have very limited senses - just five to be exact, and none of them particularly noteworthy.  Collectively, dogs, cats and bats outweigh us from a sensory perspective.  But why should we be satisfied with the genetic equivalent of second-place?  Why not use technology to extend our senses, to give us super-sonic hearing or ‘bionic’ eyesight?

For both ethical and legal reasons (”I’d never get permission for a test group”) Warwick has conducted his “cyborg” experiments on himself and his wife.  In the first, he implanted a tiny RFID tag into his arm which, connected to his computer, allowed him to control the doors and lights in his lab as well as operate a robotic arm some 5000km away.  In effect, his arm had its own IP address.  Another experiment extended his sensory range, in essence giving him an extra sonar sense: blindfolded he could “sense” (like a bat) when an object came close to him, just from the impulses in his arm.

In a later experiment, Warwick connected (via another set of implants) both his and his wife’s nervous systems: when he moved his hand, she felt the impulses, creating a nascent form of telegraphic communication between their nervous systems. He cautions that these are early-stage experiments, that it will be decades before brain-to-brain communication becomes a reality.  But the question is out there: what happens when it does?

As usual, Kevin captivates the audience - he’s funny, articulate and completely engaging.  Perhaps it’s his guy-next-door persona that makes the message all the more potent: maybe cyborgs of the future will look less like the Terminator and more like Mr. Rodgers.

I’ve heard Kevin speak before, and was grateful for the opportunity to spend the day with him last year in his lab at University of Reading, where he is a professor of cybernetics.  The hype around him abounds, but while he likes to play the cyborg, my sense is that his real passion is improving the human condition.  The possibilities of super-sonic senses may sound narcissistic, but side-effects of the research (ie, a cure for Parkinson’s disease) are anything but.  To cure neurological disorders or repair damaged or severed limbs (of which there are record numbers of in returning war veterans) we need to come to grips - both scientifically and culturally - with a new concept of what the human body, indeed a human being, can be.  

One of my favorite possessions as a child was a world globe. I spent hours spinning it, stopping it randomly with a finger tip and then imagining what each far flung place would look like. I wondered what it smelled like. I wanted to know what and where people ate and where they played. Simply put, I wanted to know what it was like to live there. Back then it never occurred to me that the art and science of cartography would make it possible to create collaborative maps of individuals’ emotions.

All of us unconsciously tag places with the emotions we experienced while there. Not only that but we re-experience those same emotions when we revisit the place and sometimes when we simply think of it. Mapping feelings is a continuation of the making the invisible visible trend. However, mapping something as intimate as your feelings, emotional cartography, strikes me as a very different expression of this trend. When we make our feelings visible, we reveal intimate bits of ourselves for all to see. What this means for the future, I’m not sure. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on emotional cartography.

Mood Jam is a platform to explore the colors people associate with their moods. You can record your moods and describe them by selecting a color from the palette that best represents your mood and then you can use the text box to describe your mood. There is even a Google gadget for mood jams so you can display your mood on your homepage and share it with your friends.

Map My London is sponsored by the Museum of London. The map is a repository of peoples’ memories attached to specific geographic locations all around London. The memories are sorted into six categories: love/loss, fate/coincidence, beauty/horror, joy/struggle, friendship/solitude and what else. When I clicked on the love/loss tab red dots popped up all over London. When I moused over the dots memories like this popped up.

Too nervous to kiss after our second date. We stood with our hands in our pockets and at first desperately and then with increasing enthusiasm talked about Mister Men. For an hour. I missed the last train, but I got my first kiss.

Bio Mapping San Francisco is one of the most recent projects by Christian Nold. His maps explore the emotional relationship people have with their local environment. Volunteers strap on a bio-mapping device, a Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) device that is GPS enabled. The bio-mapping device records the wearer’s emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. The resulting maps reveal the participants’ unseen emotional responses to their environment. The maps make visible locations where communities feel stressed and excited.

We Feel Fine is another masterpiece by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. When you launch the site after a few moments you see a message that says, “Looking for feeling from people in the last few hours”. After a few more moments your screen is filled with what seems to be millions of multi-colored particles careening through space, each represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. Any particle can be clicked revealing the feeling or photograph it contains. The particles self-organize along a number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metric and Mounds. I’ve spent more time than I will admit playing with this site.

The FeelMap is a Google Maps Mash Up of We Feel Fine data. You can explore the worlds’ feelings two ways. Storyteller mode that lets you watch as emotions are bubbled across the screen or Marker Overload, which is a display of map pins with data.

The five websites I’ve mentioned represent five ways to map our emotions. If you know of more please share. I’m very interested in tracking the emerging practice of emotional cartography.

As I scroll through the 700 emails in my inbox, I mumble the prayer to St. Anthony, patron saint of missing things.

I’m giving a speech next month and the organizers need my picture to include in the conference program. I’m positive that the photo, a mid-life version of my high school yearbook picture - is in here, buried under an avalanche of emails. I’ve realized that Gmail has become my personal bunker - the endless vault where I greedily stockpile thousands of emails and files, rationalizing my electronic hoarding with the Just In Case theory. That is, “just in case I spill diet coke on my laptop again”… or “just in case my dog chews up my memory key”… or “just in case planetary sunspots cause freak electrical storms and my hard drive is fried like an egg”. Given any of these scenarios, thanks to Gmail’s unlimited storage space, I’ll be able to recover all of the emails, files and digital photos which make up the electronic anthology of my life. Such as picture I’m looking for.

Which I still can’t find. I’ve searched dozens of keywords - “picture” “michele” “speeches”. Nothing. Thirty-two agonizing minutes later I find it. Of course, it’s not labeled something simple, something obvious - Michele’s Picture, for example. Instead, in a fit of fuzzy logic, I apparently chose to name this particular file “MB Headshot.”

So goes the paradox of the ?information’ age. To effectively navigate the web, I have to name what I’m looking for, which is a little like saying “I could find the sweater I lost if I just remembered where I put it.” Despite Google’s ability to searchthree gazillion websites before I can finish typing the query; in spite of the plethora of social media tagging sites such as digg.comand del.icio.us, search is still somewhat of a crap shoot. This is because the underlying search function works on the assumption that my mental filing system makes sense, which often it does not.

When it comes to searching effectively, we’re still stuck in the Middle Ages, that is, the purgatory between Web 1.0 and 2.0. Search today is conceptual and one-dimensional, it relies on abstract concepts and clumsy language constructs; do a search for “toast” and you’ll likely get as many hits for clever wedding speeches as you do for breakfast food.

And the problem will only get worse. The most prominent language in the world today isn’t English or Spanish or even Mandarin - it’s binary code. The language of 1s and 0s is dematerializing our world. Physical objects are increasingly transmogrified from atoms to bits. Who needs Blockbuster when you can get the streaming bits - minus the plastic packaging, the late fees and the obsolete DVD player - from YouTube??

As we overpopulate the planet with bits and bytes, the ability to understand and explore our world will depend on new approaches to search and rescue (or search and destroy, as the case may be). Current strategies to improving search have centered on inventing increasingly complex algorithms, but a simpler answer might (literally) be right under our nose.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow have created a computer program which allows users to attach distinctive smells to digital photos. Called Olfoto, the program uses an array of cube-shaped capsules, similar to an ink jet printer cartridge, each of which contain a unique smell - the scent of an open wood fire, for example, or the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. The capsules release a different fragrance when activated electronically so that when a particular image appears on-screen a user can “tag” it with a scent. They can then sort through their image collections simply by sniffing.

The idea - pardon the pun - a potent one. Humans can smell approximately 10,000 odors. Scents are powerful memory tags. While I remember next to nothing from 3 years of Japanese classes, one whiff of Jagermeister triggers a gag reflex that instantly reminds me of the most important lesson I learned in college (which is of course, that one should never, ever drink Jagermeister).

In the future, we’ll need a multi-sensory approach to navigate the dematerialized world. In this way, Olfoto may ultimately become an important social and business tool, adding another dimension to our ability to communicate. Emails from your ex may smell like skunk. The quarterly finance reports might exude the aroma of champagne or sour milk, depending on the market results. And just so you know, if you want me to read your email, make it smell like freshly baked cookies.