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Face recognition software is making a leap forward from 2-D to 3-D scanning. Courtesy of Product Reviews.

Yesterday we reflected on 9/11 and honored the thousands killed in New York, Washington, D.C. and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It was an intensely personal day, one that crescendoed into a chorus of shared emotion and remembrance.

The commitment to ensure that such a catastrophic act of terror never happens again involves not just preventing a repeat of the past, but also imagining what else is possible and making sure that doesn’t happen either.

This has spurred innovation in many directions, from processing and analyzing data at speeds we couldn’t have imagined a decade ago to devising nearly foolproof recognition software to designing skyscrapers that can survive the level of devastation that brought down two of America’s tallest buildings.

Here are some of the ways we’ve moved forward in coping with an increasingly turbulent world:

• Risk assessment: It’s one thing to accumulate massive amounts of data from all over the world; it’s another to make sense of it. But supercomputers using risk-assessment software have become much more sophisticated in recognizing travel and language patterns and in analyzing links between people, places and events. That becomes the basis of risk profiles and watchlists used at airports and borders. But the computers can still struggle with interpreting local jargon and metaphors. And, unfortunately, people who aren’t suspicious at all can still turn up on watchlists.
• Reading faces: Face recognition software is making a leap forward from 2-D to 3-D scanning. For a computer to analyze facial “landmarks” using 2-D software, the person in the photo pretty much had to be looking straight into the camera. But 3D facial recognition software can adapt flat images, using distinctive features—such as curves of the eye socket or the nose–to identify someone. Other recognition methods coming into play are “surface texture analysis,” which uses a “skinprint” of pores, skin texture and scars to identify someone, and identification through the iris of a person’s eye. The latter is now used at only a handful of airports around the world, but will be tested at two yet-unnamed U.S. airports later this year.
• Body scanning: People worried about the new airport body scanners revealing a little too much of their naked selves will be happy to know that a machine being tested at London’s Heathrow Airport makes you look a lot like Gumby.
• Speaking the language: There’s long been a language barrier for American troops in Afghanistan, but Lockheed Martin has developed a Dial-a-Translator system called LinGO Link. Soldiers in the field use a customized smart phone to connect, over secure lines, to a bank of translators who can interpret, in real time, what’s being said.
• Crisis control: One of the more disturbing lessons learned on 9/11 was that first responders had a very hard time communicating with each other. Commanders inside the World Trade Center didn’t have a clear idea of what was happening outside. But now the city has a high-tech Fire Department Operations Center, which will help prevent the situation 10 years ago when too many ambulances were dispatched to the Twin Towers. Now commanders in the operation center can use GPS tracking which displays on maps all of the vehicles dispatched to a disaster scene.
• Safer skyscrapers: None of us will ever forget watching the Twin Towers collapse into a mountain of debris. The failure occurred partly because the planes severed the buildings’ sprinkler systems, allowing the fires to burn and fatally weaken the structure. Skyscrapers of the future are being designed to ensure that never happens again. Now sprinkler supply lines are being located within an impact-resistant core. Also, new buildings are being constructed with steel floor structures designed to resist collapse. And new skyscrapers are being built with fast “lifeboat” elevators that can rush people from high floors directly to the lobby.
• Rise of the robots: Little robots called Packbots got their baptism under fire digging through the rubble of the World Trade Center and proved their value for search and rescue missions in unsafe environments. Earlier this year they were used to inspect damage at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. Now smaller versions—so small they can fit into a backpack—are in demand in Afghanistan. If a soldier wants to see what’s in a building, he just tosses the robot inside, then controls its movements while watching what its camera sees.  The Defense Department is impressed enough that it’s likely to order as many as 5,000 of the little machines.

Bonus: See a “pocketbot” in action. (Even if the music is way over the top).

The smart helmets of the future? Image courtesy of Riddell

With the National Football League season getting underway tonight, we’ll soon be treated to video replays in super-slow motion of ridiculously violent collisions that would make the rest of us want to wear bubble wrap for a few years.

What we won’t see is what’s going on inside those helmets, or actually the skulls inside those helmets, when those man-crashes occur. Inevitably, someone’s brain will shake liked grooved Jell-o, and if last season’s pace holds up, one player in the game will likely end up with a concussion.

Long football’s dirty little secret, concussions have been getting almost as much attention as point spreads lately—especially now that a group of former players is suing the NFL. They’re seeking damages for brain injuries as well as insisting that the league do a better job of protecting players and monitoring their medical conditions. And they cite chilling stats. A typical NFL lineman gets hit in the head as many as 1,500 times in a season. Retired players older than 50 are 5 times more likely to have a dementia-related disorder than the average person.

No surprise, then, that the NFL is moving quickly toward the day when its players will wear “smart helmets”—headgear with sensors that measure the location and direction of a head hit. That data would be wirelessly transmitted to a computer on the sidelines which would then calculate the magnitude of the blow. If it’s above a set threshold, the player would have to come out of the game, no matter how much he insists it was no big ding.

It’s not just the NFL that’s going wireless to track head whacks. This season, 22 Notre Dame players are taking the field fitted with “intelligent mouthguards.” No, the devices can’t carry on witty repartee. But they can measure the G-force of collisions and send the data to a sideline computer. And a company called Battle Sports Science has developed a chin strap that can gauge the level of impact to a player’s head. If a light on the strap turns from green to red, it’s time for the player to have a little face time with the team doctor.

Plug away

But there are other ways the NFL is getting its tech on.  Here are a few:

• Playbook purge: One of the mainstays of NFL training camps is the playbook the size of an unabridged dictionary. This year the Tampa Bay Buccaneers became the first team to instead give each player an iPad loaded with diagrams and videos.
• Double vision: Some NFL teams, including the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Eagles, have started attaching tiny one-pound HD cameras to the helmets of their quarterbacks during practices. That allows coaches to follow the quarterback’s eyes and see if he’s looking where he’s supposed to be looking.
• Speed readings: During the NFL Scouting Combine before the NFL draft last spring, some of the players being scouted wore Under Armour shirts that measured G-forces, heart rate and other factors as they worked out.
• Ball smarts: The NFL is looking at a technology where a sensor in the ball would determine if it actually crossed the goal line.
• What took so long?: The Philadelphia Eagles became the first team to replace its cheerleader calendar with a cheerleader mobile app. 

Bonus: Get inside the head of a quarterback at the University of Washington.

Car sharing in Rome, image courtesy of Flickr user GwenFlickr

To hear Lisa Gansky tell it, sharing is making a big comeback. In her book, The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, and on her website, Gansky contends it has become much bigger than swapping snippets on Facebook. It is, she insists, a savvy business strategy.

Think about it. Social media and wireless networks allow us to track down almost anything in a matter of minutes. That’s the basis of Gansky’s truism: “Access trumps ownership.” Why buy something you don’t use that often when you can find it when you need it? And if you do own something and aren’t constantly using it, why not make some money during the down time?

Take my car. Please

Take car-sharing. In a TED talk in Detroit earlier this year, Gansky, the Internet-business entrepreneur who started the photo-sharing service that became Kodak Gallery, cited research concluding that, on average, people spend only eight percent of their day using their cars. Even for those pitiable souls who sit in their cars four hours a day, their vehicles are deadbeats the other 20.

Now startups such as RelayRides and Getaround are moving beyond the Zipcar model—it owns the cars that members use—to a different, cooperative approach: the firms connect people who need a car for a few hours to people who are willing to rent their cars out. They operate only in San Francisco and the Boston area for now, but these aren’t just motorized versions of Craigslist. RelayRides, which checks renters’ driving records and has a $1 million insurance policy to cover damages, says its average car owner makes $200 to $300 a month leasing his or her vehicle to others. A few weeks ago, the company announced it has raised $10 million in venture capital, with investors including Google Ventures, August Capital and, yes, Lisa Gansky. (Her investment, made very recently, came after the book, which I view as an account of this business trend rather than a way to promote her investment.)

European car companies are taking sharing seriously. Peugeot now offers free membership in its “Mu” program, which gives people temporary access—at below typical cost—to not only sports cars, vans and cars fitted with bike racks, but also to bikes and electric scooters. Daimler is going a step further. Its Car2Go service, which just added San Diego, keeps growing. Its customers use a mobile app to find the closest available Smart car, gain access through a windshield card reader and a PIN number, then drive away.

Living for the city

If you’re thinking this sharefest is mainly an urban thing, you’d be right. You have to be a bit of a masochist—make that a masochist with money—to own a car in a big city. And what urbanite has room to store a wet vac, a couple of bikes and camping gear you last used when Al Franken was Stuart Smalley? As sustainability guru Alex Steffen pointed out in a TED talk this summer, city folk have a lot more motivation to ask themselves the tough questions, such as, “Do I really need to own a drill?”

But in Lisa Gansky’s vision of the future, the sharing universe spreads to big box stores and suburban malls. Even Walmart will be drawn in, she says. This is hard to imagine when you consider that when a greeter says “Welcome to Walmart,” what he really means is “Buy more stuff.” Yet Gansky envisions a day when the retail behemoth repairs and upgrades products bought there, and when “Walmart Share Club” members have access to daily online auctions of used stuff turned in by other customers trading up.

All meshed up

That may seem a long way off, but the share economy already has footholds in many businesses:

• thredUP: A San Francisco-based firm that’s been described as a “national hand-me-down network.” When kids grow out of clothes, parents can swap for larger sizes.
• Prosper and The Lending Club: Even finance is finding its share niche through “peer-to-peer” lenders. You can be an investor and earn interest on small loans made to other members. Or if your credit score is high enough—at least 640—you can get a loan without the headache of dealing with banks.
• Crushpad: In July, this Sonoma, California, winery launched Crushpad Syndicate, a form of “crowdfunding” that makes it easier for fledgling winemakers to find investors for their own small brands.
• Airbnb: Known for connecting travelers in need of short-term lodging with people with available space, this Silicon Valley outfit just announced it’s expanding into sublets of a month or longer. Recently, after a story about a tenant trashing an apartment went viral, it began providing up to $50,000 in insurance coverage for renters.
• TrustCloud: Apartment-trashers are just the type of people TrustCloud hopes to weed out. If you opt in, it collects your “data exhaust”—the trail you leave through your electronic engagements with others and your comments on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TripAdvisor, etc.—and gives you a trust rating. Based on your web behavior, it lets the world know you’re a solid online citizen. Or not.

Bonus: Sharing used to be so much simpler.

Be honest. Would you rent your car to a stranger? What about your lawn mower?