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Dubbed TagSense, the new app was developed by students from Duke University and the University of South Carolina who combined smartphones’ many sensors into one all-encompassing tag suite. The technique goes way beyond GPS technology to recreate a photo’s location and context.

A phone’s built-in accelerometer could tell whether a person is standing still, dancing or engaged in some other activity, according to a Duke news release. Light sensors in the phone, normally used to dim or brighten a display screen, can be used to tell whether the picture is inside our outside; weather conditions can be checked against the phone’s location; and it can even use a microphone to tell whether the subject of the photo is laughing or quiet.

All these attributes are assigned to each picture, and a user can search according to various categories, the news release says.

“So, for example, if you've taken a bunch of photographs at a party, it would be easy at a later date to search for just photographs of happy people dancing,” said Chuan Qin, a visiting graduate student from the University of South Carolina.

The students tested the system using eight Google Nexus One mobile phones, snapping more than 200 photos at various spots on the Duke campus, and found it was more sophisticated than Google’s Picasa or Apple’s iPhoto tagging systems, according to Romit Roy Choudhury, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke.

The team unveiled the app at the ninth Association for Computing Machinery's International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), being held in Washington, D.C.

The product would also be the first to use printed nanotube transistors

A version of the RFID tags slated to hit the market later this year would be the first product to use printed transistors based on carbon nanotubes. Printing means the application of different layers of antenna coils, nanotube inks, and capacitors and diodes.

The researchers at Sunchon National University in South Korea successfully printed out the plastic RFID tags using common industrial methods such as roll-to-roll printing, ink-jet printing, and silicone rubber-stamping.

These processes churn out tags for just three cents per piece, but the group ultimately hopes to pass the one-cent milestone by figuring out how to lay down all the nanotube ink layers in one go during the roll-to-roll printing. Many RFID tags today cost anywhere from 7 cents to 15 cents, if not more.

But some hurdles remain before you'll see these newer tags at checkout lines. The current prototypes are three times the size of a typical barcode, and can only store one bit of information -- just enough to either give a yes or no response to an RFID reader. Such tags also only work with readers up to 10 centimeters away, because of their weak power signals.

That should change with the 64-bit tag set to come out next year, and then ultimately a 96-bit tag, a real barcode-killer.

Even the pricier RFID tags today have already found use in EZPass highway tolls and as anti-counterfeiting devices.

[via Technology Review]

Can't touch this

Miniscule flaws because of a slightly thicker or thinner wire can mean tiny variations in how fast a circuit works on a chip. Srini Devadas, an electrical engineer at MIT and Verayo founder, saw that as as the key to creating physically unclonable devices.

Devadas realized that running a series of signals through the imperfect circuits can create a string of numbers unique to each circuit. The string of numbers became the basis for a whole series of mathematical equations that create many challenge and response pairs unique to the security of each chip.

That means a forger can't hope to copy an RFID chip even if he or she intercepts the RFID signals being transmitted, because it's literally impossible to perfectly replicate each and every flaw.

Someone could still beat the system by getting their hands on the challenge-response pairs for RFID tags. But these imperfect circuits should form just one part of a much larger defense against counterfeiting, experts say.

Verayo already has contracts for even more sophisticated systems with the U.S. Department of Defense, and other companies have begun developing physically unclonable security systems.

If you're not as worried about counterfeiters, and just want to keep track of all your personal gear, there are already DIY RFID kits that have you covered.

[via Technology Review]