Lifeboat Foundation

One of the biggest rumors surrounding the iPhone 7 is that Apple is adding a second camera module (at least on the Plus model), and it makes a lot more sense than you might realize.

After all, other manufacturers have already caught on. LG’s G5 comes with a ultra-wide angle lens, Huawei’s new P9 sports a dedicated black-and-white camera, and HTC beat everyone to the punch with the One M8’s depth-sensing camera a couple of years ago.

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Just A Rather Very Intelligent System, or as it is more commonly known, JARVIS, is a highly advanced personal digital assistant. And it could be your best friend of tomorrow.

Among all of the fictional artificial intelligence (AI) systems, by far, the coolest one has to be Tony Stark’s JARVIS—It can not only control everything for Iron Man, it’s also a highly intuitive and sentient entity that has become part and parcel of his Tony Stark’s way of life.

Continue reading “Microsoft Is Developing a New JARVIS-Like Artificial Intelligence System” »

Samsung is exploring the development of a contact lens that can project images directly into the users’ eye, take photographs and connect wirelessly to a smartphone, a patent application has revealed.

The South Korean copyright authority has published a 29-page application made by the consumer electronics firm two years ago, reported the technology blog Sammobile, offering a rare insight into a science fiction vision of a future technology that could be closer than we think.

The lens could overlay internet-connected services directly into the user’s line of sight, in an example of what is known as augmented reality. It could also discreetly – even covertly – take photographs. The device would be controlled by eye movements or blinking, according to the patent, and it would connect with a smartphone.

Continue reading “Samsung is developing a contact lens camera, triggered by blinking, that can also project images into the eye” »

Beautiful future lays ahead in QC.

Quantum physics not only explains how matter behaves at the subatomic level, but is also used to create many devices in our everyday lives, from lasers and transistors to GPS and mobile phones. The next wave of innovation could lead to unbreakable encryption and computers that are up to one million times faster. On 6 April, Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) unit organised a workshop to discuss with experts the potential of these new quantum technologies.

Exploiting the quirks of the quantum world

Continue reading “Quantum technologies: from mobile phones to supercomputers” »

Samsung’s dream of creating smart contact lenses capable of capturing images and shooting videos has just drawn closer. However, the patent reveals that Samsung has been working on the concepts and not necessarily the actual product which they trademarked as Gear Blink, which was filed in both South Korea and the U.S.

‘The analysis component of the contact lens can process the raw image data of the camera to determine processed image data indicating that the blind person is approaching intersection with a crosswalk and establish that there is a vehicle approaching the intersection’. It could very well be a smart contact lens. It’s a contact lens that consists of a small display, camera, RF antenna, and sensors to detect eye movement.

SamMobile states that the “lenses can provide a more natural way to provide augmented reality than smart glasses”. While the display projects images directly into the eye of the person wearing the contacts, an external device like a smartphone is needed for processing.

Continue reading “Samsung Files Patent For Augmented Reality Smart Contact Lenses” »

A few months ago; it was announced that Smartphones will be a thing of the past within the next 5 years. Luv it AR & VR with an earpiece for communications.

This is getting freaky…

Continue reading “Microsoft’s ‘holoportation’ tech could be key to supplanting phones” »

At a time when PCs have become rather boring and the market has stagnated, the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has become more interesting and not for what it has traditionally done (graphical user interface), but for what it can do going forward. GPUs are a key enabler for the PC and workstation market, both for enthusiast seeking to increase graphics performance for games and developers and designers looking to create realistic new videos and images. However, the traditional PC market has been in decline for several years as consumer shift to mobile computing solutions like smartphones. At the same time, the industry has been working to expand the use of GPUs as a computing accelerator because of the massive parallel compute capabilities, often providing the horsepower for top supercomputers. NVIDIA has been a pioneer in this GPU compute market with its CUDA platform, enabling leading researchers to perform leading edge research and continue to develop new uses for GPU acceleration.

Now, the industry is looking to leverage over 40 years of GPU history and innovation to create more advanced computer intelligence. Through the use of sensors, increased connectivity, and new learning technique, researchers can enable artificial intelligence (AI) applications for everything from autonomous vehicles to scientific research. This, however, requires unprecedented levels of computing power, something the NVIDIA is driven to provide. At the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, NVIDIA just announced a new GPU platform that takes computing to the extreme. NVIDIA introduced the Telsa P100 platform. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang described the Tesla P100 as the first GPU designed for hyperscale datacenter applications. It features NVIDIA’s new Pascal GPU architecture, the latest memory and semiconductor process, and packaging technology – all to create the densest compute platform to date.

Ask a member of Facebook’s growth team what feature played the biggest role in getting the company to a billion daily users, and they’ll likely tell you it was photos. The endless stream of pictures, which users have been able to upload since 2005, a year after Facebook’s launch, makes the social network irresistible to a global audience. It’s difficult to imagine Facebook without photos. Yet for millions of blind and visually impaired people, that’s been the reality for over a decade.

Not anymore. Today Facebook will begin automatically describing the content of photos to blind and visually impaired users. Called “automatic alternative text,” the feature was created by Facebook’s 5-year-old accessibility team. Led by Jeff Wieland, a former user researcher in Facebook’s product group, the team previously built closed captioning for videos and implemented an option to increase the default font size on Facebook for iOS, a feature 10 percent of Facebook users take advantage of.

Automatic alt text, which is coming to iOS today and later to Android and the web, recognizes objects in photos using machine learning. Machine learning helps to build artificial intelligences by using algorithms to make predictions. If you show a piece of software enough pictures of a dog, for example, in time it will be able to identify a dog in a photograph. Automatic alt text identifies things in Facebook photos, then uses the iPhone’s VoiceOver feature to read descriptions of the photos out loud to users. While still in its early stages, the technology can reliably identify concepts in categories including transportation (“car,” “boat,” “airplane”), nature (“snow,” “ocean,” “sunset”), sports (“basketball court”), and food (“sushi”). The technology can also describe people (“baby,” “smiling,” beard”), and identify a selfie.

Continue reading “Facebook begins using artificial intelligence to describe photos to blind users” »

My new article from Vice Motherboard on Direct Digital Democracy and a new branch of government:

When everyone has a mobile phone, why not use them to vote?