Google's radar-based gesture control system for mobile devices, Project Soli, isn't dead yet. The project, which was announced all the way back in 2015, has popped up at the FCC, where it has been approved for use in the 57- to 64-GHz frequency band.
When Apple introduced the fourth iteration of its smartwatch, the big new selling point wasn't a feature we typically associate with a watch or any sort of smart device. Instead, the company added a feature that had only recently arrived in the form of specialized consumer devices: an electrocardiograph (ECG), a device made for monitoring the heart's electrical activity.
Facial recognition is becoming more widely used in both general computing and in the wider world. Smartphones and computers can be unlocked with your face, but the technology is also used for security and policing purposes.
While most uses are legitimate and helpful, there is scope for abuse. Microsoft thinks it is time for regulation to help avoid this. The company is calling on government around the world to introduce new laws, but also on the technology industry to introduce safeguards to protect against abuse and bias.
The operating system no longer really matters. And for developers and the cloud, that means that Linux no longer really matters.
You can see proof of that in what has not happened. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has not gotten a $34 billion buyout offer from IBM, even though company founder Mark Shutteworth would have taken that deal, despite protestations that the company isn’t looking for a buyer.
A lone engineer has succeeded in doing what Uber's top lawyers and expert witnesses could not—overturning most of a foundational patent covering arch-rival Waymo's lidar laser ranging devices.
Following a surprise left-field complaint by Eric Swildens, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has rejected all but three of 56 claims in Waymo's 936 patent, named for the last three digits of its serial number. The USPTO found that some claims replicated technology described in an earlier patent from lidar vendor Velodyne, while another claim was simply "impossible" and "magic."
Lidars and cameras are two of the three standard sensors (along with radar) on almost all self-driving cars being tested today. Lidars and cameras both operate by detecting reflected light, but cameras are passive, whereas lidars actively send out laser pulses and measure the light that gets reflected back. Cameras produce a flat two-dimensional image, while conventional lidars produce a three-dimensional "point cloud."
The research conducted at the country's National Laboratories is usually highly classified and specifically aimed at solving national security problems. But sometimes you get a swords-into-ploughshares moment. That's the case here, as a startup called WaveSense looks to apply technology originally developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory to detect buried mines and improvised explosive devices for use in self-driving cars.
The supposed health risk from mobile phones is the story that will never die. The latest claim, branded an “inconvenient truth” by the Observer newspaper, is that new research shows they cause cancer in rats. But like all previous incarnations of this tale, the real truth is that the evidence has been overblown and there is nothing to worry about.
An AI system has wiped the floor with some of China’s top doctors when it comes to diagnosing brain tumors and predicting hematoma expansion.
As reported by Xinhua, the system defeated a team comprised of 15 of China’s top doctors by a margin of two to one. The AI, BioMind, was developed by the Artificial Intelligence Research Centre for Neurological Disorders at Beijing Tiantan Hospital, and is another example of the long line of the technology analyzing images.
This August, some of the world’s best professional gamers will travel to Vancouver to fight for millions of dollars in the world’s most valuable esports competition. They’ll be joined by a team of five artificial intelligence bots backed by Elon Musk, trying to set a new marker for the power of machine learning.
The bots were developed by OpenAI, an independent research institute the Tesla CEO cofounded in 2015 to advance AI and prevent the technology from turning dangerous.
