Tens of thousands of people already receive $100 a month from a company called Luth Research in return for very detailed data from their smartphones tablets
The Michigan State university researchers developed software that makes it feasible to accurately match fingerprints of children under five with off-the-shelf equipment.
The Michigan State university researchers needed to process images taken from fingerprint sensors using software to compensate for the small size of the children s fingerprints as well as their sometimes wet and oily skin.
In a trial in Benin West Africa the software successfully matched about 70 percent compared to 98 percent in another test in Lansing Michigan.
#Google Launches Effort to Build Its Own Quantum computer Google is about to begin designing and building hardware for a quantum computer a type of machine that can exploit quantum physics to solve problems that would take a conventional computer millions of years.
But independent tests published earlier this year found no evidence that D-Wave s computer uses quantum physics to solve problems more efficiently than a conventional machine.
Now John Martinis a professor at University of California Santa barbara has joined Google to establish a new quantum hardware lab near the university.
and make the qubits in a different way says Martinis of his effort to improve on D-Wave s hardware.
Quantum computers could be immensely faster than any existing computer at certain problems. That s because qubits working together can use the quirks of quantum mechanics to quickly discard incorrect paths to a solution
Since showing off its first machine in 2007 D-Wave has irritated academic researchers by making claims for its computers without providing the evidence its critics say is needed to back them up.
Larger systems of such qubits could be configured to run just about any kind of algorithm depending on the problem at hand much like a conventional computer.
It concluded that in the tests run on the computer there was no evidence of quantum speedup.
Without that critics say D-Wave is nothing more than an overhyped and rather weird conventional computer.
and that Google S d-Wave computer will be upgraded with a new 1000 qubit processor when it becomes available e
As the first generation of digital natives##people who have known never the world without computers
You can use an ipad to tap between different realistic-looking fabric options that change via an overhead projector.
and uses software to segment the resulting 3-D model into pieces, similar to the way in
ük re-registers the real couch location with Vizera server; and if I were to move the carefully positioned throw pillow,
Maimone, a Phd student at the University of North carolina at Chapel hill, is developing a new kind of head-worn display that could make augmented reality hereby digital objects
While it possible to use a smartphone or tablet to, for example, conjure a virtual character
and place it onto a real world table viewed on a smartphone screen, this just sn very compellingsays Maimone. he experience doesn occur in one own vision,
Together with three other researchers from the University of North carolina and two from Nvidia Research
Maimone device, called a Pinlight Display, does not use conventional optical components. It replaces these with an array of bright dots dubbed pinlights. transparent display panel is placed between the pinlights
so the team has compensated for this by performing some image manipulation in software. ne could think of Pinlight Displays as exploiting how the eye sees an image that is out of focus,
says Maimone. he resulting hardware configuration is very simplehere are no reflective, refractive, or diffractive elementso we do not run into the trade-off between form factor
rather than something that exists only on external screens. There may be other potential benefits to the team approach. ince part of the image formation process takes place in software,
we can adjust parameters such as eye separation and focus dynamically, says Maimone. Therefore we can imagine incorporating the pinlights into the corrective lenses
or ordinary glasses, creating a display that looks like ordinary glasses with the addition of an LCD panel.
is now offering companies an unprecedented window into the private digital domains of tens of thousands of people who have agreed to let much of what they do on a smartphone, tablet,
or PC be tracked for a $100 a month. Luth Q Intelligenceservice collects and analyzes data from preselected participantsphones and computers via a virtual private network connection.
Data is routed through the company servers where it is collected and analyzed for trends. The company doesn view the contents of messages,
but what it does gather includes where smartphone users are given at any moment, what websites they are visiting,
Luth current and former clients include Subway, Microsoft, Walmart, the San diego padres, Nickelodeon, and Netflix. The information it collects can help companies decide where to spend advertising dollars.
But as many as 20,000 PC users and 6, 000 smartphone users are given, at any time,
Roseanne Luth, says participants can uninstall the software anytime they want (though theyl stop earning any money at that point.
In a survey of 1, 100 smartphone users by Punchtab, an advertising company, in April 27 percent of respondents said they would allow themselves to be tracked by retailers on mobile devices
Microsoft is involved in ongoing litigation against a search warrant issued in December 2013 by a U s. magistrate authorizing the search
and seizure of e-mail accounts hosted by Microsoft. The company objected to the warrant with regard to data stored at its data center in Ireland claiming that U s. courts are authorized not to issue warrants for extraterritorial searches.
Microsoft also argued that if it turned over data stored abroad to the U s. government it would be more difficult for the company to resist requests by foreign governments for data stored in the U s
Microsoft argues that it does since it directs the company to produce information stored outside the United states. The government's argument is that
because Microsoft is subject to U s. jurisdiction it must turn over data it controls regardless of where the data is stored.
and Verizon) have supported publicly Microsoft's position. The revelations of Edward Snowden have put them all under increasing pressure to resist U s. requests for data access.
The issues raised in the Microsoft case are relevant to all companies subject to U s. jurisdiction not just those in the Internet sector including companies based abroad but active in the U s. market.
Microsoft has stated that it will appeal Judge Preska's decision and sources in the U s. legal community tell me that the case could eventually go all the way to the U s. Supreme court
. But while Microsoft s argument that the case has major policy implications is compelling the U s. government's position may be difficult to overcome under the current state of the law.
#How to Break Cryptography With Your Bare Hands With enough technical savvy, simply touching a laptop can suffice to extract the cryptographic keys used to secure data stored on it.
The trick is based on the fact that the roundelectrical potential in many computers fluctuates according to the computation that is being performed by its processorncluding the computations that take place
when cryptographic software operates to decrypt data using a secret key. Measuring the electrical potential leaked to your skin
when you touch the metal chassis of such laptops, and analyzing that signal using sophisticated software,
can be enough to determine the keys stored within, says Eran Tromer, a computer security expert at Tel aviv University.
Or that wire can make contact anywhere on the body of an attacker touching the computer with a bare hand (sweaty hands work best.
or USB cable attached to the computer, or even wirelessly with sensitive voltage-detection equipment.
The work contributes to a growing body of evidence that regardless of the software protections people place on computers
that analyzing the power consumption of a computer can reveal cryptographic keys. The good news is that analyzing subtle trends in power usage can also reveal
whether a computer is being attacked (see iny Changes in Energy use Could Mean Your Computer Is Under attack. verall,
there are likely tens of undiscovered hardware-related side channelsnd we are likely going to hear more from these authors
but he has notified cryptography software makers. It is possible to avoid such attacks by adding random data to computations.
The developers of one popular free cryptographic software package, Gnupg, incorporated such a patch into the latest version of their software a
#A New Chip Could Add Motion Sensing to Clothing A company called mcube has made a new kind of accelerometer, the device that senses motion from inside a smartphone or fitness monitor.
Applied materials one of the world s biggest equipment suppliers for the semiconductor and display industries says it can make these batteries much cheaper.
and the solid electrolyte that separates them in much the way that the many layers of a display are deposited.
#Turning a Regular Smartphone Camera into a 3-D One Microsoft researchers say simple hardware changes
new research from Microsoft shows that with some simple modifications and machine-learning techniques an ordinary smartphone camera or webcam can be used as a 3-D depth camera.
The idea is to make access to developing 3-D applications easier by lowering the costs and technical barriers to entry for such devices,
Microsoft modified camera A group led by Sean Ryan Fanello Cem Keskin, and Shahram Izadi of Microsoft Research is due to present a paper on the work Tuesday at Siggraph, a computer graphics and interaction conference in Vancouver, British columbia.
To modify the cameras, the group removed the near infrared filter, often used in everyday cameras to block normally unwanted light signals in pictures.
By doing so, they essentially made each camera act as an infrared camera. computer with Microsoft image of person's face e kind of turned the camera on its head
The Microsoft team says it wanted to use the reflective intensity of infrared light as something like a cross between a sonar signal and a torch in a dark room.
But the group needed to train the machines (in this case a Samsung galaxy Nexus smartphone and a Microsoft Lifecam Web camera) on that relationship,
Microsoft chose skin since it has so many implications for navigating Xbox and Windows environments, but Kohli points out that the machine learning techniques could transfer anywhere. he only limitation is
#Super-Fast Pixels Could Make Smartphones Brighter and Longer-Lasting Displays account for between 45 and 70 percent of the total energy consumption in portable electronics.
A new kind of liquid crystal display (LCD) with pixels that switch much more quickly could give smartphones brighter screens
and one green, that illuminate all of the pixels in the display in very rapid successionoo quickly for the eye to perceive.
Technology presented by Light Polymers at the 2014 Emerging Display Technologies conference in San jose this week could allow switching in less than 60 microseconds.
The new designnown as a sequential displayould help LCDS close the energy efficiency gap with another type of display, the OLED.
Marc Mcconnaughey, CEO of Light Polymers, says the company materials are being evaluated by flat-panel display manufacturers.
#IBM Chip Processes Data Similar to the Way Your Brain Does A new kind of computer chip,
unveiled by IBM today, takes design cues from the wrinkled outer layer of the human brain.
IBM Synapse chip processes information using a network of just over one million eurons, which communicate with one another using electrical spikess actual neurons do.
The Synapse chip breaks with a design known as the Von neumann architecture that has underpinned computer chips for decades.
In a demonstration at IBM Almaden research center, MIT Technology Review saw one recognize cars, people,
A nearby laptop that had been programed to do the same task processed the footage 100 times slower than real time
and it consumed 100,000 times as much power as the IBM chip. IBM researchers are now experimenting with connecting multiple Synapse chips together,
and they hope to build a supercomputer using thousands. When data is fed into a Synapse chip it causes a stream of spikes,
and its neurons react with a storm of further spikes. The just over one million neurons on the chip are organized into 4, 096 identical blocks of 250,
says Dharmendra Modha, chief scientist for brain-inspired computing at IBM. Programming the chip involves choosing
a programmer would work out the necessary settings on a simulated version of the chip, which would then be transferred over to the real thing.
But those networks require giant clusters of conventional computers. As an example Google famous neural network capable of recognizing cat
000 computers with 16 processors apiece (see elf-Taught Software. Although the new Synapse chip has more transistors than most desktop processors,
or any chip IBM has made ever, with over five billion, it consumes strikingly little power.
When running the traffic video recognition demo, it consumed just 63 milliwatts of power. Server chips with similar numbers of transistors consume tens of watts of powerround 10,000 times more.
The efficiency of conventional computers is limited because they store data and program instructions in a block of memory that separate from the processor that carries out instructions.
As the processor works through its instructions in a linear sequence it has to constantly shuttle information back and forth from the memory store bottleneck that slows things down and wastes energy.
IBM new chip doesn have separate memory and processing blocks, because its neurons and synapses intertwine the two functions.
And it doesn work on data in a linear sequence of operations; individual neurons simply fire
when the spikes they receive from other neurons cause them to. Horst Simon, the deputy director of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and an expert in supercomputing, says that until now the industry has focused on tinkering with the Von neumann approach rather than replacing it,
for example by using multiple processors in parallel, or using graphics processors to speed up certain types of calculations.
The new chip ay be a historic development, he says. he very low power consumption and scalability of this architecture are really unique.
One downside is that IBM chip requires an entirely new approach to programming. Although the company announced a suite of tools geared toward writing code for its forthcoming chip last year (see BM Scientists Show Blueprints for Brainlike Computing,
even the best programmers find learning to work with the chip bruising, says Modha: t almost always a frustrating experience.
But IBM may find a receptive audience because it is becoming clear that current computers won be able to deliver much more in the way of performance gains. his chip is coming at the right time,
says Simon
#Stacking Cells Could Make Solar as Cheap as Natural gas When experts talk about future solar cells they usually bring up exotic materials and physical phenomena.
and computers into corners of the world they don currently reach. Battery-free devices that can communicate could make it much cheaper and easier to widely deploy sensors inside homes to take control of heating and other services.
Software installed on the phone allows it to read that signal by observing the changing strength of the signal it detects from that same router as the battery-free device soaks some of it up.
Ranveer Chandra, a senior researcher in mobile computing at Microsoft Research, says the technology could help accelerate dreams of being able to deploy cheap,
uses it in forearm-worn heart-rate monitors). But it also being used for a growing number of ear-worn devices,
including LG Heart rate Monitor Earphone and iriver iriveron Heart rate Monitoring Bluetooth Headset (available to consumers for $180 and $200, respectively) and a pair of earbuds from Intel,
and firefighters and changing the way we play video games. oul see games where your emotional state changes the character youe playing,
But a pair of Performtek-using earbuds that Intel showed off this year at the International Consumer electronics Show in Las Vegaseant to be a reference design for manufacturersvoids this kind of bulk by harvesting power from the microphone jack.
Steve Holmes, who leads Intel New Devices Group, says this could also make it possible to add features like noise reduction.
#Cheap and Nearly Unbreakable Sapphire Screens Come into View This fall, rumor has it, Apple will start selling iphones with a sapphire screen that is just about impossible to scratch.
or tablet screen relatively cheaply (see our Next Smartphone Screen May be made of Sapphire. The manufacturing technology
and the screens on some high-end phones that cost as much as $10, 000. But sapphire has been too expensive for widespread use.
A screen made entirely out of sapphire as the forthcoming iphone may be, remains five times as expensive as a regular one,
Smartphone makers have taken long advantage of advances in glass production to make devices with stronger and more durable screens.
The most well-known of these screens is made from Corning Gorilla Glass, which is used in iphones.
#Super-Dense Computer Memory A novel type of computer memory could, in theory, let you store tens or even hundreds of times as much data on your smartphone.
The type of memory in question, resistive random access memory (RRAM), is being developed by several companies, but fabrication usually requires high-temperatures or voltages, making production difficult and expensive.
#Prototype Display Lets You Say Goodbye to Reading Glasses Those of us who need glasses to see a TV
or laptop screen clearly could ditch the eyewear thanks to a display technology that corrects vision problems.
The technology uses algorithms to alter an image based on a person glasses prescription together with a light filter set in front of the display.
The technology is being developed in collaboration with researchers at MIT and Microsoft. In addition to making it easier for people with simple vision problems to use all kinds of displays without glasses,
the technique may help those with more serious vision problems caused by physical defects that can be corrected with glasses or contacts,
to whose display they had affixed an acrylic slab topped with a plastic screen pierced with thousands of tiny, evenly spaced holes.
Gordon Wetzstein, who coauthored the paper while a research scientist at MIT Media Lab, says the screen allows a regular two-dimensional display to work as what known as a ight field display.
This means the screen controls the way individual light rays emanate from the display, leading to a sharper image without degrading contrast.
Wetzstein says the next step is to build prototype displays that people can use in the real worldomething he expects could take a few years.
or requires software that tracks head movement and adjusts the image accordingly. Barsky expects this won be much of a problem,
when we look at a display that doesn look right, we tend to naturally move around to improve the focus.
if researchers used a display with a high enough resolutionbout double the 326 pixels per inch of the ipod Touch used in the paperhe technology could be made to be used by more than one person at once t
and advances in analytic software now make it possible to capture vast amounts of information about our individual makeup and the environment around us.
and IBM to invest in technologies from data-capturing smartphone apps to billion-dollar analytical systems.
One way is by using mobile technology to monitor sleep patterns, heart rate, activity levels, and so on.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Hofstede surveyed more than 100,000 IBM employees to measure how these dimensions varied in different countries around the world.
rechargeable batteries that can be printed cheaply on commonly used industrial screen printers. Imprint Energy, of Alameda, California, has been testing its ultrathin zinc-polymer batteries in wrist-worn devices
where she collaborated with a researcher in Japan to produce microscopic zinc batteries using a 3-D printer.
The batteries that power most laptops and smartphones contain lithium which is highly reactive and has to be protected in ways that add size and bulk.
and one is displays, says Steven Holmes, vice president of the New Devices Group and general manager of the Smart Device Innovation team at Intel.
Despite demand for flexible batteries, Ho says no standard has been developed for measuring their flexibility, frustrating customers who want to compare chemistries.
#Amazon s Zocalo Cloud Service Casts a Shadow over Startups In the 1990s Microsoft became identified with the Death Star partly by enticing developers to build applications (such as Wordperfect
and Lotus 1-2-3) on its platform and then releasing copycat versions that ran more smoothly thanks to proprietary access to the underlying code.
and Schneider Electric but it faces blistering competition from EMC Syncplicity and Citrix Sharefile as well as Microsoft Onedrive Google Drive and a host of others.
The stock market chose the same moment to pound cloud-software companies giving rise to reports that Box would postpone its public offering.
The price of hard disk capacity per megabyte plummeted from $700 in 1981 to two-tenths of a cent in 2010.
That pressure has spurred Microsoft Google and now Amazon to evolve from providing generic file storage to specialized services aimed at large organizations that have real problems
and Microsoft boost per-customer storage allotments. Box for its part can t afford to be drawn into a race to the bottom.
The company has built server farms in Europe Asia and South america to deal with local regulations and provide a responsive experience to international customers and deal with local regulations.
Given that Amazon web services has become the go-to source of computing power for new-breed online businesses the company may well threaten Google Microsoft
you need powerful computers but those computers don necessarily have to be yours. Some of the largest botnets run by online criminals today are monetized by mining.
So an infected home computer of a grandmother in Barcelona for example, may be mining Bitcoins worth tens of thousands of dollars a day for a Russian cybercrime gang.
Cyber-spies Companies and governments spend money on espionage. Cyber-spies use rojansand ack doorsto access data on their targetscomputer networks,
such as keylogging to collect passwords or eavesdropping through the infected computer microphone. The most effective method to protect data against cyber-spying is to process confidential information on dedicated computers that are connected not to the Internet.
Critical infrastructure should be isolated from public networks. Exploits Cyber attacks rely on exploitation of ulnerabilitiesbugs in the source code of commonly used software to infect target computers.
When professional criminals and governments got into the cyber attack game demand for new xploitsgreatly increased,
Some U s.-based defense contractors are openly advertising positions for people with Top Secret/SCI clearance to create offensive exploits targeting iphones, ipads, and Android devices.
monitors people known to be innocent and builds dossiers on everyone based on their Internet activity.
Because the U s. is home to the most ubiquitous Internet services, search engines, webmail sites, browsers,
and mobile operating systems, it can basically spy on the whole world at a level no other country can.
#How An Intelligent Thimble Could Replace the Mouse In 3d Virtual reality Worlds The way in
which humans interact with computers has been dominated by the mouse since it was invented in the 1960s by Doug Engelbert.
A mouse uses a flat two-dimensional surface as a proxy for a computer screen. Any movements of the mouse over the surface are translated then into movements on the screen.
These days a mouse also has a number of buttons and often scroll wheel that allow interaction with on-screen objects.
The mouse is a hugely useful device but it is also a two-dimensional one. But what of the three-dimensional world and the longstanding but growing promise of virtual reality.
What kind of device will take the place of the mouse when we begin to interact in three-dimensions?
Today we get to see one idea developed at the University of Wyoming in Laramie by Anh Nguyen and Amy Banic.
These guys have created an intelligent thimble that can sense its position accurately in three-dimensions
It s been possible to buy a computer mouse for some time that senses its position in three dimensions.
Anybody who has a modern computer game console such as an Xbox Kinect or a Nintendo Wii will be aware of the way these devices capture three-dimensional movements
and translate them onto 2-D screen. The problem here is that these devices are locked to a particular technology
and cannot be transferred to a PC or Mac for example. Then there is the Leapmotion which measures the movement of an entire hand in three-dimensional space.
In addition the 3dtouch has an optical flow sensor that measures the movement of the device against a two-dimensional surface exactly like that inside an ordinary mouse.
The fused data is streamed then to a conventional laptop. However Nguyen and Banic recognised the bulkiness of this set up.
Nguyen and Banic say it will work with existing devices such as a desktop PC or a Cave Autonomous Virtual Environment.
A Wearable 3d Input device With An Optical Sensor And A 9-DOF Inertial Measurement Uni U
says Lorrie Cranor a computer scientist at Carnegie mellon University, where she directs the Cylab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory.
#Google Makes Its Search engine a Remote control for Some Mobile Apps Getting stuff done using a smartphone often involves swiping through a jumble of icons looking for just the right app then navigating within it to find what you want.
If successful the move could change the way people interact with smartphones and tablets. So far aimed only at devices running Google s mobile operating system Android the new system also expands the company s vision for mobile voice-operated functionality that competes with Apple s Siri and Microsoft
s Cortana. It could help extend Google s lucrative search ads business in an increasingly mobile app-defined world.
On Thursday at the Google I/O conference for software developers in San francisco the company announced that its search engine will now index any
Lawrence Chang a product manager at Google said the change would make mobile devices easier to use
Chang said the company was interested in eventually rolling out the new features to devices based on Apple s ios operating system
We re focused naturally right now on Android he said but Google users are on all different platforms and that s really important to us.
The key to searching inside apps is modified a version of the Googlebot software that constantly trawls the Web.
Facebook for example has launched a program called App Links designed to help spread the practice on both Android
and ios devices and a well-funded startup recently announced its own plans for a search engine focused on searching inside apps (see A Search engine for the App Era
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