#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
A computer algorithm then creates a stack of thin layers that a radiologist can read, much like the pages of a book.
a researcher at Intel Labs who developed the technology while a Phd student at Dartmouth. f
or I could log into my PC or provide a means of access control, he said.
Given the boom in fitness monitors and other wearable gadgets tethered wirelessly to smartphones, the technology could also allow confirmation that data streaming from the device is coming from the right person,
says Carl Gunter, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois, who was not involved with the project.
however, it may also be creating a powerful new mobile search engine that could evolve into a simpler way to find all sorts of information on the fly.
During yesterday event in Seattle, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the Fire Phone black handset that runs a modified version of Google android system and looks pretty similar
70 million of the more than 100 million things Firefly can currently recognize are products like books and video games,
says Ramneek Bhasin, general manager of mobile and vice president of product for shopping search engine Thefind. Bhasin is interested in using Firefly to expand the Thefind search capabilities.
which often exceed the cost of the panels themselves, because fewer panels are needed to generate a given amount of power.
Silevo isn the only company to produce high-efficiency solar cells. A version made by Panasonic is just as efficient,
But Silevo claims it could make its panels as cheaply as conventional ones if it can scale up from its current production capacity of 32 megawatts to the factory Musk has planned,
Microsoft s Quantum Search for The next Transistor Microsoft is making a significant investment in creating a practical version of the basic component needed to build a quantum computer,
In an interview, he told MIT Technology Review that Microsoft had kept previously its quantum effort relatively quiet
Microsoft has dedicated a quantum computing research lab, known as Station Q, on the campus of University of California,
Microsoft is not currently attempting to build a quantum computer. Rather, its research effort is aimed at developing a reliable version of the qubit, the key building block of a quantum computer.
Just like a transistor in a conventional computer, a qubit can switch between states that represent either a 1 or 0 of digital data.
That would allow a quantum computer to process data many times faster than any conventional computer.
making them impractical for anyone hoping to build a computer of any size. e believe that current approaches will said never scale
Microsoft research focuses on a type of qubit known as a topological qubit that theory suggests would encode data in a much more robust way.
around four years ago, Microsoft researchers led work to pose a series of key tests that could show
Microsoft funded several labs around the world to work on those questions, says Lee. wo years ago the results started to come in positive.
Microsoft has developed specialized tools for quantum experiments and given them to the academic community. Those tools range from cloud simulation platforms for theoretical work to new types of electronics for use in the super-cooled temperatures of quantum hardware experiments.
Meanwhile Microsoft is already looking ahead to explore what could be done with a system of topological qubits once they are built. upposing that one day we have a quantum machine:
would it be good for anything? says Lee. oday we have clear ideas in classical computing about problems we can solve
Software engineers are currently working to make Facebook apps leaner in order to make them more practical for people who have scarce bandwidth
That effort has seen already the data use of Facebook main Android app drop by 50 percent.
Sitting alone at a computer seemingly connected to an entire world but lacking any physical contact with others in a real physical space,
or Skype them. The problem is real, and as our devices grow more and more capable, we had better do something about reversing this trend.
First Emotion-Reading Apps for Kids with Autism The first mobile apps that use emotion-reading software to help kids with autism are nearing release,
Affectiva grew out of emotion-detecting research at MIT Media Lab. The company software, called Affdex, analyzes images of faces to detect features such as smiles, frowns, raised eyebrows, furrowed brows, and smirks.
whether ads are effective (see tartup Gets Computers to Read Faces, Seeks Purpose Beyond Ads.
last year, the company released the software to app writers for ios, the operating system used in iphones and ipads.
And now the first apps are said coming el Kaliouby. utistic kids have trouble reading and understanding social and emotional cues,
The advertising work helped make the software more accurate by rainingit she added. After three years analyzing faces seen on webcams,
Affectiva database now holds more than a billion facial expressions
#A Simple Plan to Impede the NSA Is Taking hold A year after revelations first emerged from former National security agency contractor Edward Snowden about mass Internet surveillance,
if it gains access to an e-mail provider servers. Even here, though, the tide may be turning:
Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist at Trinity college in Dublin and a member of the Internet Engineering Task force, the group of engineers who maintain
says the Google data shows progress. ore e-mail is being encrypted between mail servers, he says. ne would hope that a general,
#Microsoft s 3-D Audio Gives Virtual Objects a Voice Just as a new generation of virtual reality goggles for video games are about to hit the market,
researchers at Microsoft have come up with what could be the perfect accompaniment way for ordinary headphones to create a realistic illusion of sound coming from specific locations in space.
In combination with a virtual reality device like the Oculus Rift, the new system could be used to make objects
Microsoft researchers refer to the technology as 3-D audio. In a demonstration of the technology at Microsoft Silicon valley lab,
I put on a pair of wireless headphones that made nearby objects suddenly burst into life. A voice appeared to emanate from a cardboard model of a portable radio.
Software built a 3-D model of my head and shoulders and then used that model to calculate a personalized filter that made it possible to fool my auditory senses.
or software, says Ivan Tashev, the researcher at Microsoft Redmond labs working on the project with colleague David Johnston. ou can use this for virtual reality and augmented reality,
he says. To work properly, Tashev system also needs data on the position of the headphones as a person moves his head
but that isn practical outside a lab. Video game developers create spatial audio effects using average HRTFS,
his software generates an approximation of that subject HRTF that seems good enough to produce unusually accurate spatial audio. ssentially we can predict how you will hear from the way you look,
The software that does that was created by capturing accurate HRTFS for 250 people and then comparing them with 3-D scans of their heads.
Mark Billinghurst, a professor and leader of the Human Interface Lab at the University of Canterbury, New zealand, says that the approach developed by Microsoft could have a broad impact
#Military Funds Brain-Computer Interfaces to Control Feelings Researcher Jose Carmena has worked for years training macaque monkeys to move computer cursors and robotic limbs with their minds.
He does so by implanting electrodes into their brains to monitor neural activity. Now, as part of a sweeping $70 million program funded by the U s. military,
including small, implantable computers. Under its program, Mass General will work with Draper Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
The new line of research has been dubbed ffective brain-computer interfacesby some, meaning electronic devices that alter feelings,
#10-4, Good Computer: Automated System Lets Trucks Convoy as One A recent demonstration involving two trucks tethered by computer control shows how automation
and vehicle-to-vehicle communication are creeping onto the roads. A pair of trucks convoying 10 meters apart on Interstate 80 just outside Reno,
the computer controlled the gas and brakes to pull to within 10 meters (roughly three car lengths) of the truck ahead.
The computer then kept the two trucks paired at this precise distance, as if linked by some invisible cable,
and computers connected to each truck central computer. Video screens in both cabs show the drivers views of blind spots around the two vehicles.
Joshua Switkes, CEO of Peloton Tech, says the fuel savings are 4. 5 percent for the front truck and 10 percent for the rear truck.
The prospect of two trucks driving so close together under computer control may raise concerns among other drivers,
a company that is developing technology called Wattup that will allow you to charge smartphones, tablets,
so you can easily power your ipad while sitting on the couch browsing Instagram, or top off your phone while buying a coffee or playing Candy Crush in an airport.
Holmes picks up an ipad running a Wattup app that shows the two devices that are enabled for chargingine,
if we didn have so many wires and gadgets to plug in. Yet many of the wireless charging products that have come to market have relied on special charging mats that juice up devices at a short distance,
Its patents are at the heart of a new standard called Rezence that is supported by companies including Intel, Qualcomm, and Samsung.
The technology is called a haptic stylus gadget connected to mechanical apparatus that gives force-feedback sensations to let artists eelwhat theye doing as they sculpt a 3-D image on the screen
Haptic styluses and similar hardware have been used for years for niche applications and for high-end 3-D design and medical trainingor example,
technologies that add physical sensations a common feature in products like computer mouses that vibrate and game joysticks that shake,
and even touch screens that vibrate, making you feel like there a sharp edge on a flat surface.
and printing for a variety of applications (see hat Yoda Taught Me About 3-D Printingand he Difference Between Makers and Manufacturers. 3d Systems,
for example, makes many 3-D printers and recently launched a sub-$1, 000 home model called Cube and a $400 handheld scanner that can, in a couple of minutes, generate a realistic 3-D drawing of a human head that as good as the ones produced by existing stationary systems
or a facial feature that you really can get just using a regular mouse. As a practical matter, it will also offer museum restoration artists
#Microsoft Readies a Virtual Assistant for the Corporate World Microsoft reputation for innovation has suffered in recent years despite the company undeniable prowess in research and engineering.
and ipad apps for Microsoft office was word of a new app that could put the company at the forefront of productivity software again.
It called Microsoft Oslo, and it acts like a kind of virtual assistant. It draws on online content and a company internal data to offer important information, context,
will be included in Office 365, Microsoft subscription-based productivity software for PCS and mobile devices, in the second half of 2014.
general manager of the Microsoft office suite. y work is no longer about who sent me e-mail most recently;
which Microsoft acquired in 2009. The Office Graph gathers information from the spectrum of Microsoft enterprise products (purportedly taking care to distinguish between public and private information)
and uses machine-learning algorithms to identify useful patterns. Oslo looks like a corporate manager answer to Google Now,
which runs in the background on Android devices, waiting for the moment to pop up with timely information about traffic patterns
It also has similarities to Microsoft recently unveiled mobile assistant Cortana (see icrosoft Wants You to Educate Its Virtual Assistant.
Microsoft is struggling to compete not only with Google search, Google docs, Google Drive, and Android but with Google ability to leverage big data.
With Oslo, the company is trying to take advantage of the information that its customers have poured into various products,
in areas including search (Bing), e-mail (Outlook), social media (Yammer), document creation (Office), and content distribution (Sharepoint).
Between these products, Microsoft arguably has access to more proprietary information than any other service provider On earth.
Moreover, applying similar technology to Microsoft products aimed at, say, customer relationship management could give the company an advantage over competitors like Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP.
Satya Nadella, who spent the last three years running Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group. Where his predecessor Steve Ballmer clutched the fading Windows operating system like a frayed security blankethe ios version of Office appeared four years after the iphone debutadella has acknowledged the company need to move on,
emphasizing a strategy he calls obile first, cloud first. And although Oslo was in the works before he took the helm,
and centerhe kind of thing Microsoft will need to do if it going to move back into the forefront of digital life g
and a cartoonish face shown on a touch-screen display, is very easy and safe to work with.
New sensors and software allow these machines to predict collisions and avoid them as humans go about their work.
visit Dweet. io with your computer or mobile phone, click ry it now, and youl see raw data from your device itself:
its GPS coordinates and even the position of your computer mouse. The data is now on a public Web page and available for analysis and aggregation;
and Openremote (see ree Software Ties the Internet of things Together, with different business models and levels of complexity.
Big companies like General electric are developing factory-monitoring software platforms. Yet Freeboard stands out among the various platforms because t the easiest to use, says Venkatesh Prasad, group and technical leader for vehicle design and infotronics at Ford motor.
#Shape-Shifting Touch screen Buttons Head to Market As they peck out text on the featureless glass surface of their phone or tablet,
some people still mourn the passing of the physical keyboard. Now technology is heading to mass production that can offer the best of both worlds:
and elastic blisters to make buttons rise up from a device screen and then disappear without trace when theye no longer needed.
Electronics manufacturing giant Wistron has modified now equipment at one of its factories in China to produce touch-screen panels with the shape-shifting technology inside.
it made devices for brands including Blackberry, Apple, and Acer. The company also recently became an investor in Tactus.
The first fruit of the tie-up will go on sale later this year in the form of a protective case with Tactus technology inside for Apple ipad Mini.
The design includes a transparent screen protector that covers the front of the device. However, sliding a mechanical control on the side of the case raises up a transparent set of buttons
or guides on the screen protector, over the touch keyboard, to make typing easier. Sliding the control back will cause those buttons to melt away
leaving a clear, smooth pane of glass. sers will still type on the screens as they do today,
But it did let MIT Technology Review try out an internal prototype case for the ipad Mini with the same basic design.
Sliding the control on the left pushed fluid into a set of guides that rose up between keys on the virtual keyboard.
That they were ever there is discernable only by a close examination of the screen protector in the right light
But the panel feels noticeably less smooth to a finger swiping the surface. The guides provide physical feedback
when the fingers don directly hit a key, something that lacking on a typical touch screen.
The relationship with Wistron could lead morphing buttons to appear in tablets and other devices.
Tactus has demonstrated both a prototype seven-inch tablet with its technology fully integrated into its display
and an off-the-shelf tablet modified to include the technology. When the buttons are built into a device in that way their movements are driven by a small electric pump.
when the keyboard appears. e are only at the beginning of what we expect to be a multiyear partnership,
One project is a notebook-style device that has a second, morphing screen where the keyboard would usually be
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