Disney Develops Sensation Jacket for VR

In the ever expanding world of virtual reality it seems there is a new tool or device to further enhance the experience coming out every day. There are headsets, treadmills, handheld devices, and now you can wear a jacket to simulate affects on your torso. Disney Research has teamed up with the MIT Media Lab and Carnegie Mellon University to develop what they are calling the conceptual haptic force jacket. Disney has stated that the most likely application of the conceptual haptic force jacket will be to use it in tandem with a virtual reality headset to further enhance the immersion. The jacket can simulate the feeling of being hugged, hit, punched, and even the sensation of a snake crawling on your body. See the jacket pictured below.

The conceptual haptic force jacket works by inflating and deflating a series of 26 air compartments similar to airbags to create sensations that can mimic real world actions. Speed, force, and duration of inflation and deflation can be controlled using a computer with haptic effects software. The current goals of the jacket are to create the core technology to begin a psychosocial assessment and start creating effects. Current effects created include a racing heartbeat, light and heavy rain, being hit by a snowball, a bug crawling up your arm, slime dripping down your back, and motorcycle vibrations. I for one am very interested to see just how immersive devices like this can make future VR experiences.

Sources: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/26/17284058/disney-force-jacket-physical-experienes-vr-virtual-reality-haptic

Image: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/disneys-pneumatic-force-jacket-could-be-the-key-to-awesome-vr-theme-parks/

Quantum Radar to Revolution Stealth Detection

A new type of radar being developed by the Canadian Department of National Defense promises to completely change modern radar technology and the effectiveness of current stealth technology. The project is being undertaken by the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing and is supervised by Jonathan Baugh. The new radar system uses quantum entanglement to eliminate the background noise currently present in radar technologies. The new radar would render current stealth-craft ineffective like that of the B-2 Spirit bomber (pictured below) employed by the United States

 

 

 

 

 

The new radar works by using quantum illumination. Quantum illumination involves creating photons in pairs with unique and identifiable signatures, through the principle of quantum entanglement. The created photons have complimentary position, momentum, spin, and polarization. This allows the radar to release one photon while retaining its identifying partner. Since the radar is only looking for returning photons of the signatures it emitted all other incoming photons can be ignored eliminating all of the background noise experienced in current radar installations. Another important feature of the new quantum radar is it’s ability to operate in extreme conditions without losing accuracy, and this ability to operate in the arctic is one of the driving forces for the Canadian Department of National Defense to order the project. The hope is that the radar will eventually replace all of the current systems in the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s (NORAD)current North Warning System (NWS).

Sources: https://newatlas.com/quantum-radar-detect-steath-aircraft/54356/

Facebook Attempts to Begin Collecting Facial Recognition Data

Just weeks after the major Cambridge Analytica scandal on user data collection Facebook appears to be ramping data collection in Europe. The social media website started offering users the ability to turn on facial recognition to European users. Facebook is hoping to pressure users to voluntarily opt in to the program that was disabled in the EU back in 2012 due to regulatory pressure.The company is trying to pressure people into giving their data to the company through its prompts about the technology. The manipulation is present in the menu for opting in and out. Facebook attempts to make it seem that the purpose of the technology is theft prevention, auto tagging, and to help the visually impaired. Its a blatant lie about the purpose and is morally and ethically bankrupt showing that the company has learned nothing from the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.The new EU regulations require consent for user data manipulation, and can it even be considered consent when Facebook uses manipulative language and lies about the real purpose of the data.

Source:https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/just-say-no/

Google Develops AR Microscope for Detecting Cancer

Google has unveiled that they managed to retrofit common light microscopes used in hospitals with new a new technology that would identify possible cancerous areas on the sample and return the information to the doctor. This works by having a camera that acquires the view of the sample from the microscope which then passes it onto a computer running a deep learning framework which is a type of machine learning, and finally the view that has been annotated by the computer is projected onto an augmented reality display inside the eyepiece of the microscope.

Google researchers started the deep learning process by using a training data set of hundreds of pictures from the cancer metastases in lymph nodes challenge data set, which is a set of images used in a challenge to develop AIs for cancer detection. Google claims that they are hopeful that applications that expand upon existing methods such as the Augmented Reality Microscope (ARM) expand access to AI to users that aren’t likely to develop a digital workflow. The ARM can analyze any image presented to it and in real-time project its analysis on the display (see below image).

The ARM demonstrates how existing medical technology can be improved to make the job easier and more efficient. Google is particularly hopeful that the ARM proves to be a foot in the door for developing more AI and machine learning applications in the medical analysis field. It seems everyday we are finding more and more applications for AI and machine learning hopefully more methods are developed in the near future.

Sources:https://news.developer.nvidia.com/google-develops-an-ar-microscope-to-detect-cancer-in-real-time/

https://research.googleblog.com/2018/04/an-augmented-reality-microscope.html

 

New Google AI Experiments Attempt to Understand Words and Language

Google continues to advance their AI technology by unveiling new a collection of interactive AI language tools. Google has dubbed the new collection “Semantic Experience”. The goal of this new collection of tools is to identify word vectors, which refers to the intrinsic understanding of words meaning relative to other words. So the AI is essentially identifying words of similarity and equivalence based on their uses in actual language and speech. Google released the TensorFlow platform for other researchers the experiment with how the new AI works.

Google released another experimental platform also that is more aimed towards the public. Talk to Books as the name suggests allows a user to have a conversation with books, and not in the sense of talking to some paper. The new algorithm was trained using machine learning to answer user questions with responses from a catalog of over 100,000 books. When a user asks a question Talk to Books looks for similar questions in the cataloged books and finds the responses given by the book, and then Talk to Books responds with the answers it finds in the books that it deems correct. It is a very rough concept at the moment and broad questions will return many responses. The tools use is also limited in that its depth of knowledge is much better suited for factual answers than complex changing current opinions.

The final experimental platform released today is game called Semantris. Semantris has users test their word association against the software that powers Talk to Books. The game will give you a word and you will input an associated word that you think of, and then Semantris will score the association based on how strong it thinks the semantic relationship is. The point of Semantris is get more training data for machine learning and through providing a game to public google is collecting a vast data set that is representative of a wide variety of language. All of these tools are contributing to creating better AI for a smarter future.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/13/17235306/google-ai-experiments-natural-language-understanding-semantics-word-games

Machine Learning Being Used to Identify Viruses

 

Through the use of AI and specifically the branch known as machine learning researchers have developed a new method for identifying and classifying new viruses. Previously it has been very difficult for researchers to study viruses because most can not be grown in a laboratory environment and because their genomes are extremely small and evolve very quickly. The established method being used had researchers sequencing the DNA from samples in environments, and identifying the present microbes by finding their genetic signatures. However this method does not allow researchers to identify new viruses because their DNA signature is not known yet. Machine learning allows new viruses to be identified in the data by recognizing patterns it sees repeated in the genomic data. Machine learning goes through the data, learns from the data, and then classifies the data in a process that detects new virus genetic signatures.

In one example demonstrated by Simon Roux a computational biologist at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute machine learning was used to identify the various genetic sequences of all viruses from one family. Through the use of 805 instances of training data for the family and 2000 instances of training data for others viruses the researchers were able to develop an algorithm to identify other members of the family. When samples were run through, the system was able to identify more than 10,000 related viruses revealing that the original family could be classified even further.

This goes to show how powerful machine learning can be for searching through data that humans might not be able to find a patterns in. The researchers are even hopeful that as AI advances they will be able to connect data on viruses to bacteria, and protein changes in people with symptoms to develop a new method of diagnosis. We can all hope that further medical advances can be made through the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03358-3

Image Credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki/SPL/Getty obtained from nature.com

 

Satellite Image Analytics a New Business Oppurtunity

The boom of commercial satellites and new methods of analysis that have been developed with artificial intelligence haven given rise to a new business: Satellite Imagery Analysis. Using images taken by satellites these new businesses have been able to analyze useful data for a variety of businesses. Some simple analytics that have been used are parking data at various businesses which predict sales success. The images from satellites are analyzed with artificial intelligence assistance to determine the amount of cars present across a period of time. Another way satellite analytics have been used to locate crop fields, determine what crops were growing in them, and determine the healthiness of the crops, and put together that data was used to determine estimated level of production from the fields. Lastly since the data is global some researchers have used it to identify pools of stagnant water that could spawn mosquitoes and enabled them to put disease prevention methods into place ahead of time.

Source:

http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/06/technology/business/geospatial-analytics-satellite/index.html

SpaceX Gets Approval for Satellite Broadband Network

SpaceX got good news when they learned that the FCC approved their plan to create a satellite network that has been named “Starlink”. SpaceX had spoken in the past about their plan to provide a global satellite broadband service. The purpose of Starlink is two fold, the primary purpose of Starlink is to provide high-speed internet to regions that currently have limited or no internet access especially the developing world and rural regions of america. The second purpose of Starlink is to provide SpaceX with an additional revenue stream to help fund their research and development of a way to colonize Mars.

The initial plan calls for SpaceX to launch 4425 small satellites with transmitters and receivers for broadband communication. The FCC had expressed interest in the plan before with the desire being for a US company to be the first with a global network, and with the added benefit of providing better internet to rural Americans. One point of contention that was brought up however was that since there will be so many satellites in the network they will need to be assessed for a high degree of reliability and an appropriate method of de-orbiting should they become disabled.

Overall the Starlink network should make great strides at reducing the digital divide experienced by many individuals in America, and also greatly help destroy the global digital divide by eliminating the need for ground based infrastructure in developing nations.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/29/fcc-approves-spacex-plan-for-4425-satellite-broadband-network/

What is HDCP and How Does it Affect You?

The other night I sat down at home and saw that the new Star Wars was available for digital purchase. I hadn’t seen the movie in theaters so I decided to buy it and watch it. All good right? Wrong. As the movie was buffering an error popped up saying I could not watch it in High Definition (HD) because my system did not meet HDCP requirements. HDCP which stands for High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection is a protocol on computers, cable boxes, blu-ray players, video cables, monitors, and TVs. HDCP has been around for a while its purpose is to prevent pirates from intercepting the video data when it travels from a source such as a computer or Blu-ray player to a destination TV or monitor by using a digital handshake through the approved cables. If there was a device between the source and destination attempting to copy the content the handshake will fail and the video will not be sent.

Trying to protect digital content from pirating is fine, however in the case of HDCP it does more harm than good normally. Three years before HDCP was first FCC approved for use it was already proven to be breakable Scott Crosby and associates at Carnegie Mellon University. Six years after its release anyone could go online and get the master key and break HDCP v1. The point here is that anyone trying to record or pirate the content was able to with ease, but an honest person trying to rent a movie might not be able to watch their content without expensive upgrades especially since each device needs to be HDCP approved. In conclusion HDCP punishes the honest users for trying to view digital content, whereas pirates can simply break the protocols or view the content from a previously recorded source.

Sources:

https://www.techhive.com/article/2881620/4k-content-protection-will-frustrate-consumers-more-than-pirates-meet-hdcp-22.html

Image:

https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-High-Speed-HDMI-Cable-1-Pack/dp/B014I8SSD0