Cyborg Lives

Like most other “all points” signs in the world, this one will lead you in the right direction towards your destination. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

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For the last three years  Breakfast has been working on creating a street sign. Like most other “all points” signs in the world, this one will lead you in the right direction towards your destination. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

The Brooklyn-based interactive agency’s sign, called Points, is an high-tech version of a low tech tool. While it can, in fact, tell directions, Points is also able to tell you who’s winning the U.S. Open, where the nearest coffee shop is or how soon the next bus will be arriving. This is all while its shiny aluminum arms rotate 360 degrees around the pole, pointing you in the direction of the information being served.

New array measures vibrations across the skin, may help engineers design optimal, wearable tactile displays.

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In the near future, a buzz in your belt or a pulse from your jacket may give you instructions on how to navigate your surroundings.

Think of it as tactile Morse code: vibrations from a wearable, GPS-linked device that tell you to turn right or left, or stop, depending on the pattern of pulses you feel. Such a device could free drivers from having to look at maps, and could also serve as a tactile guide for the visually and hearing impaired.

Lynette Jones, a senior research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, designs wearable tactile displays. Through her work, she’s observed that the skin is a sensitive — though largely untapped — medium for communication.

“If you compare the skin to the retina, you have about the same number of sensory receptors, you just have them over almost two square meters of space, unlike the eye where it’s all concentrated in an extremely small area,” Jones says. “The skin is generally as useful as a very acute area. It’s just that you need to disperse the information that you’re presenting.”

Many don’t understand why they should be concerned about surveillance if they have nothing to hide.

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For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.

If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

In robotics, as in life, it often takes small steps to reach a big goa

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Okay, it’s not like you’re going to get a PR2 to fetch you coffee any time soon, and in that sense, this research isn’t what you’d call practical. What you have to keep in mind when you see fun demos like this is that the demo itself is just a way to demonstrate the functionality and practicality of the underlying research. In this case, there are four challenges that have been solved:

lNavigating between multiple 2D maps

Robust operation of an elevator.

Opening heavy, transparent, spring-loaded doors.

Passing objects between robots and humans.

Augmented reality has come along way in the last few years, and while it still has a long way to go, we are starting to see it enter the mainstream discourse.

In two weeks, tens of thousands of people will fill the streets of Toronto for the seventh annual Luminato Festival to see beautiful works of art, hear great music, and enjoy the sights of a world-class city. They'll also make history by participating in a first-of-its-kind augmented reality exhibition.

After downloading an app for the event, attendees can point their phones at different places around David Pecaut Square to see a "virtual gallery" not visible to the human eye. Augmented reality works by displaying layers of computer-generated information on top of a view of the physical world. In this case, as they point their phones at different places around the square, they can see works of art on their screens that they can interact with, share, and discuss with others. As people explore the virtual art pieces, a heat-map will be created displaying where they are and what they are looking at.

When the event is over and people are done using the app, what they will leave behind is an entirely new type of digital art: a giant, crowdsourced version of the iconic Lancôme rose spanning the length of an entire city square. It will be an enormous, virtual mural of sorts that each person has individually contributed to, just by participating. In other words, it will be the world's first "human heat-map logo."

This will all be made possible by the groundbreaking work of a San Francisco-based, 3-year-old startup by the name of CrowdOptic.

Led by serial-entrepreneur Jon Fisher, the company has created a technology that is able to take the GPS, accelerometer, and compass data from multiple phones to see what people are focusing on. Instead of just recording a phone's location, CrowdOptic is able to compare the information from different phones with one another. The company can tell where different people in a situation are pointing their devices and so measure what they are paying attention to.

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS Intel Capital creates a $100-million Intel Capital Experiences and Perceptual Computing Fund to bring more compelling, natural and immersive experiences across the spectrum of Intel® architecture platforms.

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COMPUTEX, Taipei, Taiwan, June 4, 2013 – At Computex today, Intel Corporation executives detailed progress toward the company's vision to integrate human-like sensing technology into devices, ultimately delivering more natural, intuitive and immersive computing experiences. To help realize this vision, Intel Capital, Intel's Global Investment and M&A Organization, announced a $100-million investment fund to accelerate the development of software and applications that bring these experiences to life across the spectrum of Intel® architecture platforms.

 

The Intel Capital Experiences and Perceptual Computing Fund will invest over the next 2-3 years. Areas of software and application investment will include broader touch applications, imaging, gesture, voice and emotion sensing and biometrics, among others.

 

"Devices with human-like senses – the ability to see, hear and feel much like people do – has long been a subject of science fiction but is now within reach given recent innovations in compute power and camera technology," said Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital and Intel executive vice president. "This new fund will invest in start-ups and companies enabling these experiences, helping them with the business development support, global business network and technology expertise needed to scale for worldwide use."

 

Intel announced its perceptual computing initiative at its annual Intel Developer Forum in 2012. Since then, the company's Perceptual Computing Software Developer Kit (SDK) has been downloaded more than 10,000 times. It had already launched the Perceptual Computing Challenge, an early kick-off contest for developers to create innovative applications using the SDK with up to $1 million in awards.

 

Intel and its industry partners have also made significant progress in bringing the first perceptual computing technologies to the market for today's Ultrabook™ systems and PCs, including:

 

An interactive gesture camera from Creative, the Senz3D which is already in the hands of developers and will be available to consumers in the third quarter of this year.Leading the development and enabling the integration of 3-D depth camera technology by working with multiple OEM partners to build the technology into various Intel-based devices with targeted availability for second half of 2014.The largest U.S. PC retailer, Best Buy, is assorting the Nuance Dragon Assistant on 10+ Intel® Core™ based notebooks, Ultrabooks™, and all-in-one PCs from Acer, Asus, Lenovo, and Toshiba. With Dell announced earlier this year, there are now five OEMs shipping designs to consumers during the back-to-school selling cycle.Facial log-in software from Sensible Vision will ship preloaded from multiple OEMs.

Harbisson sees the world in greyscale. Born in Belfast and raised in Catalonia in northeastern Spain, as a child Harbisson was diagnosed with achromatopsia, a rare congenital condition in which his eyes’ cone cells do not pick up color. He has worn a version of his eyeborg since 2004. It transposes color into a continuous electronic beep, exploiting the fact that both light and sound are made up of waves of various frequencies. Red, at the bottom of the visual spectrum and with the lowest frequency, sounds the lowest, and violet, at the top, sounds highest. A chip at the back of Harbisson’s head performs the necessary computations, and a pressure-pad allows color-related sound to be conducted to Harbisson’s inner ear through the vibration of his skull, leaving his outer ears free for normal noise. Harbisson, who has perfect pitch, has learned to link these notes back to the colors that produced them. Where once he had to rely on other people’s descriptions of how colors looked and what they meant, now he can create his own web of meanings and associations. He even hears sound-color in his dreams.Harbisson never takes his eyeborg off, even to sleep or shower. The device, he said, “is part of my body.” This year, he plans to have it “osteointegrated,” inserted into the bone in his skull. It is his feeling of oneness with a qualitatively new sense, rather than the expansion of the sensorium itself, that makes him feel like a cyborg—a word, he noted, that was coined in 1960 as a contraction of “cybernetic organism,” in order to describe how astronauts could use drugs and devices to adapt their bodies for space travel. “If we can adapt ourselves to better live in space,” he told me, “why can’t we adapt ourselves to better live in nature?”

When we talk about design nowadays, the focus has been on the lures (or dangers) of flat design and skeumorphism; whether there should be (or really are any) intuitive interfaces; and wearable, maybe “disappearing” interfaces.

One of the biggest fears about Google Glass's pending world takeover is creeps using Google's face computer to recognize them, look up their awful prom pictures, or any number of things, all without permission and on the spot.Those people can now rest easy. Google glass won't have facial recognition features for the foreseeable future. 

The Google developers announced that the Glass won't be able to recognize people on the streets in an update late Friday night. "As Google has said for several years, we won’t add facial recognition features to our products without having strong privacy protections in place. With that in mind, we won’t be approving any facial recognition Glassware at this time," the company announced. Sorry, creeps. This is all likely a response to an API update from Lambda Labs to come out next week that would have enabled facial recognition. And, yes, private Pauls can celebrate now that they don't have to worry about Glass facial recognition. But they didn't say it's not coming, ever. Google said facial recognition is just not coming... yet.

So, rejoice! Google is still making up its mind about facial recognition, but it might not ever make it to Google Glass's feature list. If they can't reasonably guarantee people their privacy is protected, they'll probably stay away forever. Until that day, though, they have to worry about if Glass users will get beat up, and legislators trying to make Glass illegal.

Tauhid Zaman. Photo: Tauhid Zaman It doesn't matter if you're Justin Bieber or James Baker. On Twitter, the first few minutes tell the whole story

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It doesn’t matter if you’re Justin Bieber or James Baker. On Twitter, the first few minutes tell the whole story.

In fact, MIT Sloan Professor Tauhid Zaman has figured out a way to predict how many retweets a Twitter message will receive, just based on what happens in the first few minutes of its life.

“If a Tweet goes up, I can actually forecast ahead of time how many people are going to retweet it,” he says.

He can do this because pretty much all Twitter messages have the same lifecycle, and that can be mapped on a graph. Zaman wants to build a website that will analyze Tweets in real-time and make predictions about their popularity, but in the meantime, he’s set up a website that graphs the number of retweets that followed messages from people like Will.i.am, Newt Gingrich, and Kim Kardashian. He calls it the Twouija, a nod to the old Ouija board game that purports to predict your future.

The predictions are far from perfect. For example, Zaman took a look at Kim Kardashian’s April 15, 2012 message: “Happy Sunday tweeps! Have a blessed day!” After watching the retweets for five minutes, he predicted it would get 555 retweets within a few hours. In fact, it got 709. That’s off by 30 percent, though it’s not bad.

But you can see each of the graphs following the same pattern: there are a lot of retweets during the first few minutes, and then this gradually tapers off in a somewhat predictable way.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a bigshot or a nobody,” Zaman says. “If you’re going to get anything you’re going to get it in the first couple of hours, and this is the way you get it. It’s going to evolve like the kind of curve you see in Twouija.”

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The ethics surrounding so-called killer robots will come under scrutiny as a report is presented to the UN's Human Rights Council in Geneva.

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So-called killer robots are due to be discussed at the UN Human Rights Council, meeting in Geneva.

A report presented to the meeting will call for a moratorium on their use while the ethical questions they raise are debated.

The robots are machines programmed in advance to take out people or targets, which - unlike drones - operate autonomously on the battlefield.

They are being developed by the US, UK and Israel, but have not yet been used.

Supporters say the "lethal autonomous robots", as they are technically known, could save lives, by reducing the number of soldiers on the battlefield.

But human rights groups argue they raise serious moral questions about how we wage war, reports the BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva.

They include: Who takes the final decision to kill? Can a robot really distinguish between a military target and civilians?

A provocative new poll shows that Americans have little trouble imagining a future full of personal service robots -- at least when it comes to robots tasked with cleaning our homes, driving our cars, and even helping fight our wars.

But the HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that we're a bit squeamish about bots in especially personal roles, such as caring for elderly people or replacing a human sex partner. These findings are consistent with research conducted by Stanford University's Dr. Leila Takayama, an expert in robot-human relationships.

"We've been finding that people prefer the idea of working with robots instead of having robots work in place of people," Takayama told The Huffington Post in an email.

In the poll, 58 percent of Americans said that robots will be cleaning our homes by 2030. But only 33 percent said that they'd like a robot servant. Forty-two percent indicated that they wouldn't want one. Those between 40 and 44 years of age were the most likely to say they would like a robot servant, while adults age 65 or older were the least likely.

Google reaches into every aspect of our lives, both online and in the real world.

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Google's big keynote at its I/O developers conference this week wore me out.

Not because it lasted a grueling three hours and fifty minutes, but because of what was announced. With every new product update, every new feature, every new virtual service, it became more and more clear that Google isn't just a search company that makes loads of cash by showing you ads. It's creeping into every aspect of our digital, physical, and private lives at an exponential rate. 

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it.

Google isn't just the backbone of the Internet anymore. It's rapidly becoming the backbone of your entire life, all thanks to data you're voluntarily giving up to a private company based on your Web searches, photos, Gmail messages, and more.

 

This image shows the changes that took place in the brain for all patients participating in the study using a brain-computer interface. Changes in activity

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Small brain-computer interface (BCI) electrodes placed on or inside the brain allow patients to interact with computers or control robotic limbs simply by thinking about how to execute those actions.

This technology could improve communication and daily life for a person who is paralyzed or has lost the ability to speak from a stroke or neurodegenerative disease.

Now, University of Washington researchers have demonstrated that when humans use BCI technology, the brain behaves much like it does when completing simple motor skills such as kicking a ball, typing or waving a hand. So learning to control a robotic arm or a prosthetic limb could become second nature for people who are paralyzed.

“What we’re seeing is that practice makes perfect with these tasks,” said Rajesh Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering and a senior researcher involved in the study. “There’s a lot of engagement of the brain’s cognitive resources at the very beginning, but as you get better at the task, those resources aren’t needed anymore and the brain is freed up.”

You’ve probably never heard of Anki. Before this article, I’d never heard of Anki either.

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A few minutes into his 10 minute speech opening Apple’s 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple CEO Tim Cook did something remarkable—he gave up the stage to a previously unknown startup called Anki to demonstrate a car racing game. Of course, it wasn’t just any car racing game. Anki Drive is an impressive combination of robotics and artificial intelligence run on Apple’s mobile operating system iOS. And more, it’s a demonstration of how these technologies are poised to finally make it out of the lab and into the real world—into consumer products we all can use and enjoy.

If Cook’s actions were remarkable, Anki’s story is their equal.

Anki’s robotics and artificial intelligence platform—which can be applied to more than just cars—is five years in the making, and until yesterday, had been a complete secret. Even so, behind the scenes the firm managed to raise $50 million in two funding rounds and includes investments from  Andreessen Horowitz (Mark Andreessen sits on the board), Index Ventures, and Two Sigma*. That’s a significant investment for a company with no publicity and no finished product.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Huddled in the bowels of a nondescript convention center are a few hundred men and women whose vision of the sci-fi future makes Google Glass look like Mr. Peanut's monocle.

Welcome to the Augmented World Expo, a 4-year-old annual affair whose buzz has gotten a boost from Google's mainstream glasses, even though for these 1,100 registrants -- up 40% over last year -- that creation is a mere baby step toward our inevitable 4-D existence, meaning the overlay of a projected but fully interactive fourth dimension over our natural 3-D world.

"Google Glass is a third eye off to the side, but what's coming is a generation of glasses whose information becomes immersed in your reality," says Steve Mann, who walked around AWE, which wraps today, wearing homemade spectacles that screamed metal-shop meets cyborg. "A camera, a microprocessor and a display, those are the elements that will come together in the new generation of glasses."

Does he ever take his off?

"No," he says. "Except in the shower."

Soon after the first porn app appeared for Google Glass, Google has changed its Developer Policies, prohibiting apps that contain sexually explicit content.

Researchers show off an experiment to non-invasively measure brain waves and turn them into controls for a model helicopter - moved by thought alone.

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Researchers have harnessed the power of thought to guide a remote-control helicopter through an obstacle course.

The demonstration joins a growing number of attempts to translate the electrical patterns of thoughts into motions in the virtual and real world.

Applications range from assisting those with neurodegenerative disorders to novel modes of video game play.

The research in the Journal of Neural Engineering uses a non-invasive "cap" to capture brain electrical activity.

It is not the "mind-reading" of fiction. The approach, and others like it, require that an electronic system be "trained" to recognise patterns in an electroencephalograph - a map of electrical activity.

Those thoughts, such as that of making a fist with the left hand, are then correlated with motions of the helicopter - in this case to the left.

The electroencephalograph remains a chaotic and largely indecipherable mess of electrical signals, but those related to motion - or the mere thought of it - have proven to be comparatively strong and repeatable.

Such thoughts have already been used to steer a motorised wheelchair and a range of reliable brain signals have even been put to use in the world's first "brain orchestra".

Even technology firms see potential in the idea; Samsung is reportedly working on a "mind-control" tablet device.

When researchers can access the brain directly - with probes or implants - they can focus on more precise areas of brain activity, at the source.

Then, even finer control is possible - implants have helped people move a computer cursor using the subtler thoughts of vowel sounds, and have allowed both monkeys and paralysed humans to delicately control robotic arms.

(Phys.org) —Researchers from Carnegie Mellon have developed a solution for finding people through computer analysis making use of facial recognition, color matching and location tracking With homage to the fictional map used by Harry Potter, they came up with a solution that can effectively track people in the real world just like The Marauder's Map locates and tracks people in Harry Potter's magical world. Security camera footage across a network of cameras can be analyzed via an algorithm that combines facial recognition, color matching of clothing, and a person's expected position based on last known location.

In designing the map, Shoou-I Yu, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, who has been working on multi-object tracking in multi-camera environments for surveillance scenarios, sought to take on the challenge of finding and following individuals in complex indoor environments where walls and furniture may obstruct views. He and his team found a solution by combining several tracking techniques.

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Every year (sometimes twice), longtime tech analyst turned venture capitalist Mary Meeker drops her state of the internet presentation. It's that time of year again, and here it is.

Learning from ants

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Future teams of subterranean search and rescue robots may owe their success to the lowly fire ant, a much-despised insect whose painful bites and extensive networks of underground tunnels are all-too-familiar to people living in the southern United States.

By studying fire ants in the laboratory using video tracking equipment and X-ray computed tomography, researchers have uncovered fundamental principles of locomotion that robot teams could one day use to travel quickly and easily through underground tunnels. Among the principles is building tunnel environments that assist in moving around by limiting slips and falls, and by reducing the need for complex neural processing.

Among the study's surprises was the first observation that ants in confined spaces use their antennae for locomotion as well as for sensing the environment.

"Our hypothesis is that the ants are creating their environment in just the right way to allow them to move up and down rapidly with a minimal amount of neural control," said Dan Goldman, an associate professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and one of the paper's co-authors. "The environment allows the ants to make missteps and not suffer for them. These ants can teach us some remarkably effective tricks for maneuvering in subterranean environments."

The research was scheduled to be reported May 20 in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The work was sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Physics of Living Systems program.

Onstage at the D11 conference in California, Tim Cook responded to a question about Google Glass, noting that wearables are a profound type of technology and that Apple may be working on its own...