as if the German industrial designer Dieter Rams had created a more social version of Tumblr is probably not causing many people to ditch Facebook
Apps for iphone and Android are in the offing but for now the only way to use it on a smartphone
or tablet is via a mobile browser. Despite the long to-do list Ello is off to an intriguing start.
The catalysts built on previous work showing that nickel hydroxide is a promising catalyst, and that adding iron could improve it.
Izhikevich s startup Brain Corporation based in San diego has developed an operating system for robots called Brainos to make that possible.
To teach a robot running the software to pick up trash for example you would use a remote control to repeatedly guide its gripper to perform that task.
Brain Corporation hopes to make money by providing its software to entrepreneurs and companies that want to bring intelligent low-cost robots to market.
Later this year Brain Corporation will start offering a ready-made circuit board with a smartphone processor
The chip on that board is made by mobile processor company Qualcomm which is an investor in Brain Corporation.
and could then copy its software to new robots with the same design before they headed to store shelves.
Brain Corporation s software is based on a combination of several different artificial intelligence techniques. Much of the power comes from using artificial neural networks
But they might eventually offer a more powerful and efficient way to run software like Brainos.
Researchers from Carnegie mellon and Intel developed the prototype headlight which scans the road ahead using an infrared camera
The Carnegie mellon-Intel prototype includes a camera a computer and a digital projector. Information from the infrared camera is processed by a computer that tries to identify relevant objects on the road such as cars, pedestrians or road signs.
The projector uses a light source that is 4700 lumens (much brighter than a halogen headlight) with an array of almost 800000 micromirrors that can be controlled individually by the computer.
The ability to control the light with so many micromirrors provides a high-resolution, highly tunable system that can also turn on
This is a great example of taking ideas from computer vision and applying them to a challenging real-world problem,
which recently presented its findings at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Zurich Switzerland is still modifying the prototype
and gets its power from a USB port on a computer. Unlike other commercial sequencing machines
if the sequencer was vaporware. By this spring Oxford had worked the bugs out enough at any rate to start mailing out beta versions of the nanopore sequencer to 500 hand-picked labs it is collaborating with.
Even with a supercomputer the puzzle often can't be solved there can be repeated too many sequences
#Intel Says Laptops and Tablets with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon Laptops with 3-D sensors in place of conventional webcams will go on sale before the end of this year according to chip maker Intel
which is providing the sensing technology to manufacturers. And tablets with 3-D sensors will hit the market in 2015 the company said at its annual developers conference in San francisco on Wednesday.
Intel first announced its 3-D sensing technology at the Consumer electronics Show in January (see Intel s 3-D Camera Heads to Laptops and Tablets.
It has developed two different types of depth sensor. One is designed for use in place of a front-facing webcam to sense human movement such as gestures.
The other is designed for use on the back of a device to scan objects as far as four meters away.
Both sensors allow a device to capture the color and 3-D shape of a scene making it possible for a computer to recognize gestures
Intel is working with software companies to develop applications that use the technology. In the next few weeks the chip maker will release free software that any software developer can use to build apps for the sensors.
Partners already working with Intel include Microsoft s Skype unit the movie and gaming studio Dreamworks and the 3-D design company Autodesk according to Achin Bhowmik general manager for Intel s
perceptual computing business unit. None of those partners showed off what they re working on at the event this week.
But Intel showed several demonstrations of its own. One developed with a startup called Volumental lets you snap a 3-D photo of your foot to get an accurate shoe size measurement something that could help with online shopping.
Bhowmik also showed how data from a tablet s 3-D sensor can be used to build very accurate augmented reality games where a virtual character viewed on a device s screen integrates into the real environment.
As the tablet showing the character was moved it stayed perched on the tabletop and even disappeared behind occluding objects.
Intel also showed how the front-facing 3-D sensors can be used to recognize gestures to play games on a laptop
Those demonstrations were reminiscent of Microsoft s Kinect sensor for its Xbox gaming console which introduced gamers to depth sensing
Microsoft launched a version of Kinect aimed at Windows PCS in 2012 and significantly upgraded its depth-sensing technology in 2013
but Kinect devices are too large to fit inside a laptop or tablet. Some of Intel s demos were rough around the edges suggesting that their compact sensors are less accurate than the larger ones of Microsoft.
However Bhowmik said that any such glitches would be unnoticeable in the fully polished apps that will appear on commercial devices.
Intel s two sensors work in slightly different ways. The front sensor calculates the position of objects by observing how they distort an invisible pattern of infrared light by a tiny projector in the sensor.
Intel s new sensors are roughly the same size as the camera components used in existing devices says Bhowmik.
On Monday Dell announced that the sensors will appear later this year in its Venue 8 7000 tablet which is only six millimeters thick thinner than any other tablet on the market t
however, this doesn mean you can actually bend the screen. As with other devices featuring flexible displays,
such as those from LG and Samsung, the display has been laminated onto a stiff pane, fixing it in place to prevent the damage that would come from repeated flexing.
Even so, the appearance of the first few flexible screens in commercial devices may be a sign of things to Come in fact
fully flexible electronic gadgetsith full-color displays that wrap around a wrist or fold upay be just a few years away,
chief marketing officer for Applied materials, a company whose equipment is used to make displays, is also extremely difficult to make a flexible backlighthe component needed to illuminate LCD pixels.
So the screen in the Apple Watch is almost certainly an OLED display. Rather than the pixels being illuminated by a backlight,
Manufacturers can already make OLED displays flexible. They first laminate a sheet of plastic to glass and then deposit the materials for the pixels and the electronics on top of both.
and afterwards the plastic, together with display and electronic components, is lifted off the glass. Manufacturers have known how to do this for years.
so you have to seal the display within robust, high-quality, flexible materials. This is costly, and there are challenges with ensuring that the seal survives being bent hundreds or thousands of times over the lifetime of a device.
Novel materials for touch screens that use flexible nanomaterials could also help. One patent application suggests Apple is already looking at this issue.
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.
The remarkable result is described in this paper due to be presented at a conference in South korea next month,
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
and others, says Radu Sion, a computer security expert at Stony Brook University. Tromer says he doesn know of anybody performing a ground-potential attack to steal real data
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.
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