

MIT can now see through concrete walls - lmathews
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/100395-mit-can-now-see-through-concrete-walls

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jpdoctor
FYI: MIT Lincoln Lab is not quite the same as MIT. Think JPL and Caltech.

Edit: I should have added that MIT LL has a long history of work in
microwaves, going back to the invention of radar in WW2.

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timsally
The above is correct. The lab is an FFRDC managed by MIT. It's a really great
place to work! I'm in the computer security group and we're hiring for full
time and summer internships. There's a description of my typical day in my
profile. I'd love to chat with anyone that is interested at tsally@mit.edu.

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jasondavies
Commercial through-wall radar back in 2005, but using UWB instead of S-band:
<http://www.cambridgeconsultants.com/news_pr150.html>

It's not clear what the advantage of using S-band is. Higher resolution,
perhaps?

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jpdoctor
Narrow band electronics are a whole lot easier, and with a lot longer history.
Source power is also easier.

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0x12
Where I live we simply use windows rather than radar for looking through
walls.

I understand that there are law enforcement and military applications for this
kind of tech, but I really wonder if we need to add the ability to see through
walls to the long list of privacy invading technology that is already
available.

There are very few good applications for this technology and lots of bad ones.

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josefresco
Stopping scientific discovery because you (or anyone) believes the result will
be abused is a bad idea IMHO. Also while you're imagining snooping police, I'm
imagining rescue workers locating survivors of a building collapse.

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cousin_it
The tech will probably have some peaceful uses, but I don't think they will
outweigh the uses for military, law enforcement, espionage etc.

More generally, I think it's a mistake to believe that tech advances are
always good overall. An extreme hypothetical example: advances in torture
technology. A real-life example: television.

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NinetyNine
Pragmatically though, you'll never be able to stop new advancements from
seeing the light of day. Blocking MIT from researching this won't stop the NSA
or defense contractors, and even with a fair government, it wouldn't stop
criminals. So far, the best path for dealing with potentially dangerous tech
has been to keep it open and studied.

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yters
I'm skeptical. If it were very simple in terms of materials to create, say,
biological weapons of mass destruction, I'd be in favor of keeping the
knowledge under wraps.

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orjan
"the researchers are now working on the output imagery: instead of blobs, they
want each moving target to be represented by a cross" -- That can't really be
that hard to implement. I'm sure they have bigger issues than this to deal
with.

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mrsebastian
Yeah, that's what I thought, but the press release suggests that it's harder
than it sounds: [http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/ll-seeing-through-
walls-1...](http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/ll-seeing-through-
walls-1018.html)

“To understand the blobs requires a lot of extra training."

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bermanoid
I suspect the real problem is just that those images are _so_ noisy - in the
demo with two people moving around, for instance, it's almost impossible to
tell at times whether there's one, two, or more blobs. Certainly it wouldn't
be very reliable from a single frame, you'd have to use the movement
information.

Personally, I wouldn't waste my time on that, that's a rather straightforward
image processing problem that could be made much easier by improving the
output quality of the machine, which I imagine would be necessary anyways for
this to see any real use in the field.

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wlievens
The military application is obvious: wallhack!

Support for it in FPS games will be instant.

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whimsy
FPS games have had wallhack support since Counterstrike was released.

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morganpyne
It seems that the real breakthough here is the cost of production? Seeing
through walls is certainly nothing new and I thought that the latest and most
promising technology for doing this was using Terahertz radiation:
[http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/terahertz-
detectio...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/terahertz-detection/)
[http://www.hightech-edge.com/terahertz-remote-sensors-
detect...](http://www.hightech-edge.com/terahertz-remote-sensors-detect-
objects-behind-inside-packages-pockets/8958/)

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swah
Self-criticizing voice says "And you can get Django to work."

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shin_lao
That's exciting, however they seem to still have a lot of work to do and one
big challenge : miniaturization.

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jpdoctor
I don't know the details, but it looks like an array of S-band horns. Those
won't get smaller without changing the frequency.

[http://www.q-par.com/products/horn-antennas/2-18-GHz-wide-
ba...](http://www.q-par.com/products/horn-antennas/2-18-GHz-wide-band-horn-
antennas)

btw: I would also guess S-band was chosen for a reason. Three are all sorts of
atomic vibrational resonances as you scale up in frequency, which might make
it harder to get the desired view.

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dhughes
I wonder what could be seen through a normal wall of wood and gyproc or brick.

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maaku
In most parts of the world, especially war-torn developing regions, a concrete
wall is a "normal wall".

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Oblivious
An invention solely for military purposes? Sorry but I have to say no.

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Egregore
A lot of inventions were initially for military purposes. I for example can
see this used by firefighters and in disaster area after earthquake.

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Oblivious
Why cannot it be invented in this positive context in the first place then. I
can imagine the reason is money and in that sense it just shows how screwed up
our world is.

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zacharycohn
Developing new tech is expensive. The military has a lot of money.
Firefighting departments don't traditionally have trillions of dollars to
spend on R&D.

