Tech - Blog Posts
IBM to integrate MedyMatch technology to help spot brain bleeding
TEL AVIV Israel’s MedyMatch Technology said on Thursday IBM Watson Health would integrate MedyMatch’s technology into its offerings to imaging experts in hospitals to help doctors identify intracranial bleeding from head trauma and stroke. Initially, IBM… Source: IBM to integrate MedyMatch technology to help spot brain bleeding
From pocket copters to $50,000 monsters, these are our favorite drones http://ift.tt/1TszSWJ
Making AI systems that see the world as humans do
A Northwestern University team developed a new computational model that performs at human levels on a standard intelligence test. This work is an important step toward making artificial intelligence systems that see and understand the world as humans do.
“The model performs in the 75th percentile for American adults, making it better than average,” said Northwestern Engineering’s Ken Forbus. “The problems that are hard for people are also hard for the model, providing additional evidence that its operation is capturing some important properties of human cognition.”
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#Google #AI
Pilot, the real-time universal translator, is straight out of a sci-fi novel
The ability to understand someone speaking a foreign language could soon be as easy as wearing a new earpiece.
Waverly Labs is behind an earpiece called the Pilot that is eerily similar in scope to Star Trek’s Universal Translator that allows individuals to translate languages in real-time.
The smart earpiece works by canceling out ambient noise to concentrate on what is being said by a speaker
And then funnels that data to a complementary app that screens it for translation and speech synthesis, according to its website.
Pilot isn’t the first — and likely won’t be the last — piece of tech made for the translation marketplace.
However, where this device really shines is with its instantaneous translation possibilities that remove the sometimes awkward waiting game. Read more
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Five NASA Technologies at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show
This week, we’re attending the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where we’re joining industrial pioneers and business leaders from across the globe to showcase our space technology. Since 1967, CES has been the place to be for next-generation innovations to get their marketplace debut.
Our technologies are driving exploration and enabling the agency’s bold new missions to extend the human presence beyond the moon, to an asteroid, to Mars and beyond. Here’s a look at five technologies we’re showing off at #CES2017:
1. IDEAS
Our Integrated Display and Environmental Awareness System (IDEAS) is an interactive optical computer that works for smart glasses. The idea behind IDEAS is to enhance real-time operations by providing augmented reality data to field engineers here on Earth and in space.
This device would allow users to see and modify critical information on a transparent, interactive display without taking their eyes or hands off the work in front of them.
This wearable technology could dramatically improve the user’s situational awareness, thus improving safety and efficiency.
For example, an astronaut could see health data, oxygen levels or even environmental emergencies like “invisible” ethanol fires right on their helmet view pane.
And while the IDEAS prototype is an innovative solution to the challenges of in-space missions, it won’t just benefit astronauts—this technology can be applied to countless fields here on Earth.
2. VERVE
Engineers at our Ames Research Center are developing robots to work as teammates with humans.
They created a user interface called the Visual Environment for Remote Virtual Exploration (VERVE) that allows researchers to see from a robot’s perspective.
Using VERVE, astronauts on the International Space Station remotely operated the K10 rover—designed to act as a scout during NASA missions to survey terrain and collect science data to help human explorers.
This week, Nissan announced that a version of our VERVE was modified for its Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM), a platform for the integration of autonomous vehicles into our society. For more on this partnership: https://www.nasa.gov/ames/nisv-podcast-Terry-Fong
3. OnSight
Did you know that we are leveraging technology from virtual and augmented reality apps to help scientists study Mars and to help astronauts in space?
The Ops Lab at our Jet Propulsion Laboratory is at the forefront of deploying these groundbreaking applications to multiple missions.
One project we’re demonstrating at CES, is how our OnSight tool—a mixed reality application developed for the Microsoft HoloLens—enables scientists to “work on Mars” together from their offices.
Supported by the Mars 2020 and Curiosity missions, it is currently in use by a pilot group of scientists for rover operations. Another HoloLens project is being used aboard the International Space Station to empower the crew with assistance when and where they need it.
At CES, we’re also using the Oculus Rift virtual reality platform to provide a tour from the launchpad at our Kennedy Space Center of our Space Launch System (SLS). SLS will be the world’s most powerful rocket and will launch astronauts in the Orion Spacecraft on missions to an asteroid and eventually to Mars. Engineers continue to make progress aimed toward delivering the first SLS rocket to Kennedy in 2018.
4. PUFFER
The Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot, PUFFER, is an origami-inspired robotic technology prototype that folds into the size of a smartphone.
It is a low-volume, low-cost enhancement whose compact design means that many little robots could be packed in to a larger “parent” spacecraft to be deployed on a planet’s surface to increase surface mobility. It’s like a Mars rover Mini-Me!
5. ROV-E
Our Remote Operated Vehicle for Education, or ROV-E, is a six-wheeled rover modeled after our Curiosity and the future Mars 2020 Rover.
It uses off-the-shelf, easily programmable computers and 3D-printed parts. ROV-E has four modes, including user-controlled driving to sensor-based hazard-avoidance and “follow me” modes. ROV-E can answer questions about Mars and follow voice commands.
ROV-E was developed by a team of interns and young, up-and-coming professionals at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who wanted to build a Mars rover from scratch to help introduce students and the public to Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) careers, planetary science and our Journey to Mars.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
This indoor smart garden helps you grow basil and lettuce with zero effort
Plus it looks like part of the decor!
Photography by Amelia Holowaty Krales for The Verge
Prosthetic electrodes will return amputees’ sense of touch
For all the functionality and freedom that modern prosthetics provide, they still cannot give their users a sense of what they’re touching. That may soon change thanks to an innovative electrode capable of connecting a prosthetic arm’s robotic sense of touch to the human nervous system that it’s attached to. It reportedly allows its users to feel heat, cold and pressure by stimulating the ulnar and median nerves of the upper arm.
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Color can convey a mood or elicit a particular emotion and, in terms of web design, color can influence attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. However, many websites demonstrate inaccessible color choices. Numerous online color palette design tools only focus on assisting designers with either the aesthetics or accessibility of colors.
This paper in ACM TACCESS presents the Accessible Color Evaluator (ACE, daprlab.com/ace) which enhances web developers’ and designers’ ability to balance aesthetic and accessibility constraints.
Courtesy: ACM
If you’re looking for a college major that gives you an incredible job outlook, we have two words for you: computer science.
If you could create a digital version of yourself to stick around long after you've died, would you want to?
Samantha Payne’s startup Open Bionics allows anyone in the world to download and 3D print their own bionic limbs.
Tilly was just 15 months old when she had to have her hand amputated after contracting meningitis septicaemia. Now, with a bionic arm from Open Bionics, Tilly can move all of her fingers and perform more complex movements. EMG sensors on her arm detect muscle movement, telling her bionic arm how quickly or firmly to squeeze its fingers.
Roboticists are putting a tremendous amount of time and effort into finding the right combination of sensors and algorithms that will keep their drones from smashing into things. It’s a very difficult problem: With a few exceptions, you’ve got small platforms that move fast and don’t have the payload capability for the kind of sensors or computers that you really need to do real-time avoidance of things like trees or powerlines. And without obstacle avoidance, how will we ever have drones that can deliver new athletic socks to our doorstep in 30 minutes or less?
At the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab, where they’ve been working very very hard at getting quadrotors to fly through windows without running into them, Yash Mulgaonkar, Luis Guerrero-Bonilla, Anurag Makineni, and Professor Vijay Kumar have come up with what seems to be a much simpler solution for navigation and obstacle avoidance with swarms of small aerial robots: Give them a roll cage, and just let them run into whatever is in their way. Seriously, it’ll be fine!
This kind of “it’ll be fine” philosophy is what you find in most small flying insects, like bees: They don’t worry all that much about bumbling into stuff, or each other, they just kind of shrug it off and keep on going. Or, if you’re a roboticist, you might say something like, “The penalty due to collisions is small at these scales and sensors and controllers are not precise enough to guarantee collision free trajectories,” so stop trying to solve the collision problem, and just focus on not completely trashing yourself when you hit something. (Swiss startup Flyability was among the first to demonstrate the benefits of collision robustness by equipping a regular-size drone with a gimballed protective cage and flying through forests and ice caves.)
Biomimicry in action to aid robots in walking
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZBD2tcKOU4)
I can see the good this could do, but all too easily this could be just another tool for Big Brother
At just 1.2 pounds and eight inches long, the camera-equipped rolling robot can be quite literally tossed like a football onto rooftops or through building windows. Its design ensures it lands upright in pretty much any situation where it hits a flat surface, and once deployed it can stealthily move under furniture, cars, or other cover and beam back live video to a command station 1,000 feet away. It is designed to be controlled by an operator working alongside it via a simple joystick control that also sports a small display that provides a ‘bots’-eye view.
We promise we did not use Mad-Libs to write this headline.
This awesome plane-train hybrid could revolutionize transportation, but not for another 50 years
Imagine a future where a plane lands at an airfield that doubles as a rail yard. The cabin — one of three that cling to the underbelly of the aircraft like a baby possum to its mother — detaches, is seamlessly transferred to a nearby train, and then continues its journey toward the city center. Your multi-seat trip (taxi-to-subway-to-airtrain) from home to hotel suddenly becomes a one-seat, hassle-free ride. That’s the aim of a consortium of Swiss researchers with the conceptual Clip-Air, a bold-looking plane-train hybrid that despite its high-minded possibilities, will probably never get made.
OMG, so pretty
Stunning Bionic Insects Built From Computer Circuit Boards
UK-based artist Julie Alice Chappell (previously featured here) constructs stunning sculptures of insects with parts of vintage computers and video game systems for her taxonomic collection, called “Computer Component Bugs”. Using parts of Nintendo’s and DVD players, Chappell hopes to raise awareness of environmental waste.
Chappell’s goal is to create an aesthetically beautiful creation, which also offers a socio-political discourse on the reclaimed waste and the destruction of the natural world with art. Chappell’s bionic insects can be found on Etsy shop!
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Here’s a new piece for the December issue of aiCIO about partnership and the sharing of technology and knowledge. Thanks to AD SooJin Buzelli for letting me wax cyberpunk on this one. Check out the article online here.
While you’re doing that, I’ll just be over here re-reading Neuromancer…
