Are These The Drones We're Looking For? (Part II)

(Part 1, Drones for Destruction, Construction, and Distribution; Part II, Pirate Hunting in the Clouds; Part III, Photos, Bullets, and Smuggling; Part IV, The Coming War Overhead)

Pirate Hunting in the Clouds

Piracy is a perennial weed. For example, coordinated efforts to shut down electronic file sharing have had little effect; you can still find anything you want online.  The reason, of course, is that pirate hunters are always playing catchup to technological innovation that facilitates the anonymous movement of bits.  That should be no surprise to anyone involved, because the same sort of technological struggle has been present in print piracy since the days of Johannes Gutenberg.  Music, game, and movie piracy is just the same game on a new field.

The latest innovation in file sharing looks to be drones.  Two groups, The Pirate Bay (TPB) and Electronic Countermeasures, are building swarms of file-sharing drones meant to decentralize information storage and communications. TPB, in particular, propounds an ideology of sharing everything they can get their hands on by any means available. Says one contributor, "Everyone knows WHAT TPB is. Now they're going to have to think about WHERE TPB is."  File sharing may soon be located both metaphorically and physically in the clouds.

How will pirate-hunters respond to airborne, file-sharing drones?  Attempts will certainly be made to regulate airborne networks.  But that approach will probably fail, because regulation rarely makes headway against ideology.  Along with regulation will come electronic efforts to disrupt drone networks by jamming broadcasts and disrupting intraswarm communications.  That is likely to fail as well, because the drone networks will employ frequency bands used for many other devices, which will make drone-specific jamming technologically implausible, especially in signal-rich, urban environments.  Finally, both government and industry will embark on physically attacking the drones (to which I return to in a moment).  But that isn't going to work either, because drones will soon be cheap enough to fire and forget.

At the moment, the hardware for each of the file-sharing drones is a bit pricy, north of $1000.  Inevitably, the cost will come down.  Quite capable toy quadcopters are available for only a few hundred dollars, whereas just a few years ago the same bird cost thousands.  You can be sure that other form factors will be used, too.  Fixed-wing and lighter-than-air drones are experiencing the same pressure for innovation as four-, six-, and eight-bladed 'copters.  Regardless of what sort of drones are employed in the network, any concerted effort to physically disrupt drones will simply result in more innovation and cost reduction by those who want to keep them in the air.  The economic motivation to fly drones in the face of regulations is compelling, whether for smuggling atoms or bits, and as a result there is every reason to think there will be clouds of drones in the air relatively soon.

As we start down this road, what's missing from the conversation is a concerted effort to ask, "What's next?"  Authorities might imagine they can constrain access to the physical hardware, but the manufacturing of drones is already well beyond anyone's control.  Any attempt at restricting access or use will merely create perverse incentives for greater innovation.

Hackers regularly modify commercially available drones to their own ends.  Beyond what comes in a kit, structural components for drones can be 3D-printed, with open source CAD files and parts lists available at Thingverse and other repositories.  Whatever mechanical parts (such as propellers) that are not now easily printable will undoubtedly soon be, and in any case can be easily molded in a variety of plastics.  MIT just announced a project to develop printable robots.  While the MIT paper 'bots are described as being terrestrial, you have to imagine that boffins are already cooking up aerial versions.  Contributing to the air of innovation, DARPA even runs a crowd-sourced UAV design competition, UAVForge.

So much for the hardware; what about control software? The University of Pennsylvania's Vijay Kumar and his collaborators at the GRASP Lab literally have drones jumping through hoops on command, and cooperating both to fly in formation and to build large structures. This academic project will certainly result in the publication of papers describing the relevant control algorithms, and quite probably the publication of the control code itself.  Imagining GRASP Lab projects out in the wild gives you something to think about.  When you put all this together, the combination of distributed designs and distributed manufacturing employing readily available motors and drive electronics mean that, in the words of open source advocate Bruce Perens, "innovation has gone public".  (For more on that meme, see Perens' The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source.)  As a result, there is no physical means available to law enforcement, or to anyone else, to either control access to drones or to control their use.  Combining wide access to hardware with inevitably open-source control code will produce a profusion of drone swarms. And yet some authorities will inevitably try to restrict access and use of drones, both in the name of public safety and to maintain a technological edge over putative scofflaws.  Up next: what if attempts at regulation just make things worse?

(Part 1, Drones for Destruction, Construction, and Distribution; Part II, Pirate Hunting in the Clouds; Part III, Photos, Bullets, and Smuggling; Part IV, The Coming War Overhead)

Are These The Drones We're Looking For? (Part I)

Drones for Destruction, Construction, and Distribution

Drones, it seems, are everywhere. The news is full of the rapidly expanding use of drones in combat.   The U.S. government uses drones daily to gather intelligence and to kill people.   Other organizations, ranging from organized militaries in China, Israel, and Iran to militias like Hezbollah, aspire to possess similar capabilities.  Amateurs are in the thick of it, too; if a recent online video is to be believed, a few months of effort is all that is necessary to develop a DIY drone capable of deploying DIY antipersonnel ordinance.

Lest we think drones are only used to create mayhem, they are used to create beauty.  Last year's lovely art project Flight Assembled Architecture employed a centrally-controlled swarm of small drones to build a complex, curving tower 6 meters tall.  Operating in a highly controlled environment, fully outfitted with navigational aides, each drone had to position itself precisely in six degrees of freedom (three in space, and three in rotation) in order to place each building block.  As our urban areas become sensor-rich environments, drones will soon have these remarkable navigational capabilities just about anywhere people live at high densities, namely urban environments.

To understand the future capabilities of drones, you need merely think of them as flying smartphones running apps.  That's not a great leap, because smartphones are already used as the brains for some drones.  The availability of standard iPhones and Android phones has enabled a thriving market of third-party apps that provide ever new capabilities to the user.  Drone platforms will benefit from analogous app development.  Moreover, as hardware improves, so will the capabilities of apps.  For example, Broadcom recently announced a new chip that enables the integration of multiple kinds of signals -- GPS, magnetometer, altimeter, wi-fi, cell phone tower, gyroscopes, etc. -- and that "promises to indicate location ultra-precisely, possibly within a few centimeters, vertically and horizontally, indoors and out."  The advertised application of that chip is for cell phones, but you can be sure the chips will find their way into drones, if only via cell phones, and will then quickly be utilized by guidance apps.  Whatever the drone mission may be, there will be an app for that.

When those individual, sensor-laden drones can cooperate, things get even more interesting.   Vijay Kumar's recent TED talk has must-see video of coordinated swarms of quad-rotor drones.  The drones, built at the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, fly in formation, map outdoor and indoor environments, and as an ensemble play music on oversized instruments (see Double-O-Drone).  As you watch the videos, pay close attention to how well the drones understand their own position and speed, and how that information improves their flight capabilities.  When equipped with GPS and other sorts of sensors, drones are clearly capable of not just finding their way around complex environments but also of manipulating those environments.  At the moment, the drones' brains are actually in a stationary computer, with both sensory data and flight instructions wirelessly broadcast to and fro.  Moore's Law guarantees that those brains - including derivatives of the aforementioned Broadcom chip - will soon reside on the drones, thereby enabling real-time, local control, which will be necessary for autonomous operations at any real distance from home base.  The drones will become birds.  But these birds will have vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capabilities, substantial load-carrying capacity, and will be able to work together towards ends set by humans.

A company called Matternet is already planning to exploit these capabilities.  The company's initial business model involves transporting goods in developing countries that lack adequate infrastructure.  If this strategy is successful, and if it can be scaled up, it will negate the need to build much of the fixed infrastructure that exists in the developed world.  It is a 21st century version of the Pony Express: think packet-switching, which makes the internet work efficiently, but for atoms rather than for bits.

Matternet plans that the first goods moved this way will be small, high value, perishables like pharmaceuticals.  But cargo size needn't be limited.  As Vijay Kumar pointed out in his TED talk, drones can cooperate to lift and transport larger objects.  While undoubtedly power or fuel will constrain some of these plans until technology catches up to aspirations, drones will inevitably be used to move larger and larger objects over longer and longer distances.  The technology will also be used very soon in the U.S.  The FAA has been directed to come up with rules for commercial drone use by 2015, and must sort out how to enable emergency agencies to use drones in 2012.  There are already 61 organizations in the U.S. with permission to fly drones in civilian airspace.  Yet rather less thought has been given to drone use outside the rules.  We are planning for drones, after a fashion, but what about after they arrive?

(Part 1, Drones for Destruction, Construction, and Distribution; Part II, Pirate Hunting in the Clouds; Part III, Photos, Bullets, and Smuggling; Part IV, The Coming War Overhead)

Biodefense Net Assessment: Causes and Consequences of Bioeconomic Proliferation

Revenues from biotechnology continue to grow rapidly around the world.  For several years I have been trying to assess these revenues, in part as a proxy metric for technological capabilities.  A couple of years ago, I received a commission from the U.S. government to explore this topic for the 2012 Biodefense Net Assessment (BNA).  I recently received approval to release the resulting report, which carries the title "Causes and Consequences of Bioeconomic Proliferation: Implications for U.S. Physical and Economic Security" (PDF).  As far as I am aware, this is the first publicly-released document from the BNA. 

There is a relatively small amount of information available about the BNA available on the web. The BNA is a quadrennial review required under Homeland Security Presidential Directive 10 (HSPD-10): "These assessments are meant to provide senior level decision makers with fresh, non-consensus, perspectives on key issues underlying the Nation's biodefense."  The first few pages of the report provide more information about the origin and use of the BNA.

My own motivation for doing this work is to better understand what is going on in the world.  When it comes to developing policy to improve security and safety, I unapologetically insist that data drive policy.  There are far too many people who develop policy in spite of data rather than in light of data.  That leads to messy thinking and demonstrably makes us less safe and less secure.  All that said, one conclusion from my work on this report is that nobody is doing a very good job of gathering and publishing the data necessary to understand the rapid technical and economic development of biotechnology around the world.

One final thought about the report: this particular document was funded by the U.S. government, and I was given a particular set of charges in the task (see pg iii-iv); the report is therefore tilted toward U.S. security concerns.  However, the basic analyses and conclusions are relevant to developing policy in any country, and for that matter to developing strategy for many private companies and other organizations.  I will continue work on this story, and look forward to engaging people around the globe in better understanding how our world is changing.

Here is the "Background" section of the report.  Please note that the report is now a few years old, and the bioeconomy has continued to grow rapidly around the world.

Biotechnology is becoming increasingly de-skilled and less expensive, leading to a proliferation of localized innovation around the world. In addition to major investments by growing economic powerhouses India and China, other developing countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, and Brazil are equally intent on developing domestic biotech research and development capabilities. All of these countries are interested initially in producing drugs for diseases that predominantly affect their citizens, a project that requires a particular infrastructure and set of skills. Yet those same skills can be used to develop other applications, from fuels and materials to weapons, all of which can serve as a lever to increase power and presence on the world stage, thereby enabling developing countries to become rivals to the US both regionally and globally.

Economic demand will serve as a driver for ever greater proliferation of biotechnology. Today, in the US, revenues from genetically modified systems contribute the equivalent of almost 2% of GDP, and are growing in the range of 15 to 20% per year. China, among other countries, is not far behind and is following explicit government policy to substantially increase its independent, domestic development of new biological technologies to address such diverse concerns as healthcare, biomass production, and biomanufacturing. As is already the case in many other industries, trade between developing nations in biotech may soon exceed trade with the US. Therefore, among the challenges the US is likely to face in this environment is that the flow of technology, ideas, and skills may bypass US soil. Moreover, because skills and instrumentation are widely available, biotechnological development is possible in unconventional settings outside of universities and corporate laboratories. The resulting profusion of localized and distributed innovation is likely to provide a wide variety of challenges to US security, from economic competition, to intelligence gathering, to the production of new bio-threats.

Upcoming Talks in New York Area

I'm headed to the New York area this week and will be giving three talks (two of which are open to the public).

May 4th, Noon, Princeton University: "Biology is Technology: Garage Biology, Microbrewing and the Economic Drivers of Distributed Biological Production"

May 5th, 1 pm, Genspace (33 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn): "Biology Is Technology: The Implications of Global Biotechnology"

May 7th-8th, The Hastings Institute, "Progress and Prospects for Microbial Biofuels" for the next round of conversations on ethics, synthetic biology, and public policy.  The previous round of conversations is captured in this set of essays, which includes my contribution, "Staying Sober About Science" (free after registration).

Synthetic biology and "green" explosives

Here is my article with Dan Grushkin for Slate and Future Tense on "The Military's Push to Green Our Explosives", about using synthetic biology to make things go boom.  We had way more material than space, and we should probably write something else on the topic.

Here are the first three 'graphs:

Last year, when the United States military debuted footage of an iridescent drone the size and shape of a hummingbird buzzing around a parking lot, the media throated a collective hooah! Time magazine even devoted a cover to it. Meanwhile, with no fanfare at all--despite the enormous potential to reshape modern warfare--the military issued a request for scientists to find ways to design microbes that could produce explosives for weapons. Imagine a vat of genetically engineered yeast that produces chemicals for bombs and missiles instead of beer.

The request takes advantage of new research in synthetic biology, a science that applies engineering principles to genetics. To its humanitarian credit, in the field's short existence, scientists have genetically programmed bacteria and yeast to cheaply produce green jet fuels (now being tested by major airplane makers) and malaria medicines (scheduled for market in 2013). It's an auspicious beginning for a science that portends to revolutionize how we make things. In the future, we may harness cells to self-assemble into far more complex objects like cell phone batteries or behave like tiny programmable computers. The promise, however, comes yoked with risks.

The techniques that make synthetic biology such a powerful tool for positive innovation may be also used for destruction. The military's new search for biologically brewed explosives threatens to reopen an avenue of research that has been closed for 37 years: biotechnology developed for use in war.

The Arrival of Nanopore Sequencing

(Update 1 March: Thanks to the anonymous commenter who pointed out the throughput estimates for existing instruments were too low.)

You may have heard a little bit of noise about nanopore sequencing in recent weeks.  After many years of development, Oxford Nanopore promises that by the end of the year we will be able to read DNA sequences by threading them through the eye of a very small needle.

How It Works: Directly Reading DNA

The basic idea is not new: as a long string of DNA pass through a small hole, its components -- the bases A, T, G, and C -- plug that hole to varying degrees.  As they pass through the hole, in this case an engineered pore protein derived from one found in nature, each base has slightly different interactions with the walls of the pore.  As a result, while passing through the pore each base lets different numbers of salt ions through, which allows one to distinguish between the bases by measuring changes in electrical current.  Because this method is a direct physical interrogation of the chemical structure of each base, it is in principal much, much faster than any of the indirect sequencing technologies that have come before.

There have been a variety of hurdles to clear to get nanopore sequencing working.  First you have to use a pore that is small enough to produce measurable changes in current.  Next the speed of the DNA must be carefully controlled so that the signal to noise ratio is high enough.  The pore must also sit in an insulating membrane of some sort, surrounded by the necessary electrical circuitry, and to become a useful product the whole thing must be easily assembled in an industrial manner and be mechanically stable through shipping and use.

Oxford Nanopore claims to have solved all those problems.  They recently showed off a disposable version of their technology -- called the MinIon -- containing 512 pores built into a disposable USB stick.  This puts to shame the Lava Amp, my own experiment with building a USB peripheral for molecular biology.  Here is one part I find extremely impressive -- so impressive it is almost hard to believe: Oxford claims they have reduced the sample handling to single (?) pipetting step.  Clive Brown, Oxford CTO, says "Your fluidics is a Gilson."  (A "Gilson" would be a brand of pipetter.)  That would be quite something.

I've spent a good deal of my career trying to develop simple ways of putting biological samples into microfluidic doo-dads of one kind or another.  It's never trivial, it's usually a pain in the ass, and sometimes it's a showstopper.  Blood, in particular, is very hard to work with.  If Oxford has made this part of the operation simple, then they have a winning technology just based on everyday ease of use -- what sometimes goes by the labels of "user experience" or "human factors".  Compared to the complexity of many other laboratory protocols, it would be like suddenly switching from MS DOS to OS X in one step.

How Well Does it Work?

The challenge for fast sequencing is to combine throughput (bases per hour) with read length (the number of contiguous bases read in one go).  Existing instruments have throughputs in the range of 10-55,000 megabases/day and read lengths from tens of bases to about 800 bases.  (See chart below.)  Nick Loman reports that using the MinIon Oxford has already run DNA of 5000 to 100,000 bases (5 kB to 100 kB) at speeds of 120-1000 bases per minute per pore, though accuracy suffers above 500 bases per minute.  So a single USB stick can run easily run at 150 megabases (MB) per hour, which basically means you can sequence full-length eukaryotic chromosomes in about an hour.  Over the next year or so, Oxford will release the GridIon instrument that will have 4 and then 16 times as many pores.  Presumably that means it will be 16 times as fast.  The long read lengths mean that processing the resulting sequence data, which usually takes longer than the actual sequencing itself, will be much, much faster.

This is so far beyond existing commercial instruments that it sounds like magic.  Writing in Forbes, Matthew Herper quotes Jonathan Rothberg, of sequencing competitor Ion Torrent, as saying "With no data release how do you know this is not cold fusion? ... I don't believe it."  Oxford CTO Clive Brown responded to Rothberg in the comments to Herper's post in a very reasonable fashion -- have a look.

Of course I want to see data as much as the next fellow, and I will have to hold one of those USB sequencers in my own hands before I truly believe it.  Rothberg would probably complain that I have already put Oxford on the "performance tradeoffs" chart before they've shipped any instruments.  But given what I know about building instruments, I think immediately putting Oxford in the same bin as cold fusion is unnecessary.

Below is a performance comparison of sequencing instruments originally published by Bio-era in Genome Synthesis and Design Futures in 2007.  (Click on it for a bigger version.)  I've hacked it up to include the approximate performance range of 2nd generation sequencers from Life, Illumina, etc, as well for a single MinIon.  That's one USB stick, with what we're told is a few minutes worth of sample prep.  How many can you run at once?  Notice the scale on the x-axis, and the units on the y-axis.  If it works as promised, the MinIon is so vastly better than existing machines that the comparison is hard to make.  If I replotted that data with log axis along the bottom then all the other technologies would be cramped up together way off to the left. (The data comes from my 2003 paper, The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies (PDF), and from Service, 2006, The Race for the $1000 Genome).
 
Carlson_sequencer_performanc_2012.png The Broader Impact

Later this week I will try to add the new technologies to the productivity curve published in the 2003 paper.  Here's what it will show: biological technologies are improving at exceptional paces, leaving Moore's Law behind.  This is no surprise, because while biology is getting cheaper and faster, the density of transistors on chips is set by very long term trends in finance and by SEMATECH; designing and fabricating new semiconductors is crazy expensive and requires coordination across an entire industry. (See The Origin of Moore's Law and What it May (Not) Teach Us About Biological Technologies.)  In fact, we should expect biology to move much faster than semiconductors. 

Here are a few graphs from the 2003 paper:

...The long term distribution and development of biological technology is likely to be largely unconstrained by economic considerations. While Moore's Law is a forecast based on understandable large capital costs and projected improvements in existing technologies, which to a great extent determined its remarkably constant behavior, current progress in biology is exemplified by successive shifts to new technologies. These technologies share the common scientific inheritance of molecular biology, but in general their implementations as tools emerge independently and have independent scientific and economic impacts. For example, the advent of gene expression chips spawned a new industrial segment with significant market value. Recombinant DNA, gel and capillary sequencing, and monoclonal antibodies have produced similar results. And while the cost of chip fabs has reached upwards of one billion dollars per facility and is expected to increase [2012 update: it's now north of $6 billion], there is good reason to expect that the cost of biological manufacturing and sequencing will only decrease. [Update 2012: See "New Cost Curves" for DNA synthesis and sequencing.]

These trends--successive shifts to new technologies and increased capability at decreased cost--are likely to continue. In the fifteen years that commercial sequencers have been available, the technology has progressed ... from labor intensive gel slab based instruments, through highly automated capillary electrophoresis based machines, to the partially enzymatic Pyrosequencing process. These techniques are based on chemical analysis of many copies of a given sequence. New technologies under development are aimed at directly reading one copy at a time by directly measuring physical properties of molecules, with a goal of rapidly reading genomes of individual cells.  While physically-based sequencing techniques have historically faced technical difficulties inherent in working with individual molecules, an expanding variety of measurement techniques applied to biological systems will likely yield methods capable of rapid direct sequencing.

Cue nanopore sequencing. 

A few months ago I tweeted that I had seen single strand DNA sequence data generated using a nanopore -- it wasn't from Oxford. (Drat, can't find the tweet now.)  I am certain there are other labs out there making similar progress.  On the commercial front, Illumina is an investor in Oxford, and Life has invested in Genia.  As best I can tell, once you get past the original pore sequencing IP, which it appears is being licensed broadly, there appear to be many measurement approaches, many pores, and many membranes that could be integrated into a device.  In other words, money and time will be the primary barriers to entry.

(For the instrumentation geeks out there, because the pore is larger than a single base, the instrument actually measures the current as three bases pass through the pore.  Thus you need to be able to distinguish 4^3=64 levels of current, which Oxford claims they can do.  The pore set-up I saw in person worked the same way, so I certainly believe this is feasible.  Better pores and better electronics might reduce the physical sampling to 1 or 2 bases eventually, which should result in faster instruments.)

It may be that Oxford will have a first mover advantage for nanopore instruments, and it may be that they have amassed sufficient additional IP to make it rough for competitors.  But, given the power of the technology, the size of the market, and the number of academic competitors, I can't see that over the long term this remains a one-company game.

Not every sequencing task has the same technical requirements, so instruments like the Ion Torrent won't be put to the curbside.  And other technologies will undoubtedly come along that perform better in some crucial way than Oxford's nanopores.  We really are just at the beginning of the revolution in biological technologies.  Recombinant DNA isn't even 40 years old, and the electronics necessary for nanopore measurements only became inexpensive and commonplace in the last few years.  However impressive nanopore sequencing seems today, the greatest change is yet to come.