Learning with light: New system allows optical 'deep learning'

This futuristic drawing shows programmable nanophotonic processors integrated on a printed circuit board and carrying out deep learning computing.

Credit: RedCube Inc., and courtesy of the researchers

"Deep Learning" computer systems, based on artificial neural networks that mimic the way the brain learns from an accumulation of examples, have become a hot topic in computer science. In addition to enabling technologies such as face- and voice-recognition software, these systems could scour vast amounts of medical data to find patterns that could be useful diagnostically, or scan chemical formulas for possible new pharmaceuticals.

But the computations these systems must carry out are highly complex and demanding, even for the most powerful computers.
Now, a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere has developed a new approach to such computations, using light instead of electricity, which they say could vastly improve the speed and efficiency of certain deep learning computations. Their results appear today in the journal Nature Photonics in a paper by MIT postdoc Yichen Shen, graduate student Nicholas Harris, professors Marin Soljacic and Dirk Englund, and eight others.
Soljacic says that many researchers over the years have made claims about optics-based computers, but that "people dramatically over-promised, and it backfired." While many proposed uses of such photonic computers turned out not to be practical, a light-based neural-network system developed by this team "may be applicable for deep-learning for some applications," he says.
Traditional computer architectures are not very efficient when it comes to the kinds of calculations needed for certain important neural-network tasks. Such tasks typically involve repeated multiplications of matrices, which can be very computationally intensive in conventional CPU or GPU chips.
After years of research, the MIT team has come up with a way of performing these operations optically instead. "This chip, once you tune it, can carry out matrix multiplication with, in principle, zero energy, almost instantly," Soljacic says. "We've demonstrated the crucial building blocks but not yet the full system."
By way of analogy, Soljacic points out that even an ordinary eyeglass lens carries out a complex calculation (the so-called Fourier transform) on the light waves that pass through it. The way light beams carry out computations in the new photonic chips is far more general but has a similar underlying principle. The new approach uses multiple light beams directed in such a way that their waves interact with each other, producing interference patterns that convey the result of the intended operation. The resulting device is something the researchers call a programmable nanophotonic processor.
The result, Shen says, is that the optical chips using this architecture could, in principle, carry out calculations performed in typical artificial intelligence algorithms much faster and using less than one-thousandth as much energy per operation as conventional electronic chips. "The natural advantage of using light to do matrix multiplication plays a big part in the speed up and power savings, because dense matrix multiplications are the most power hungry and time consuming part in AI algorithms" he says.
The new programmable nanophotonic processor, which was developed in the Englund lab by Harris and collaborators, uses an array of waveguides that are interconnected in a way that can be modified as needed, programming that set of beams for a specific computation. "You can program in any matrix operation," Harris says. The processor guides light through a series of coupled photonic waveguides. The team's full proposal calls for interleaved layers of devices that apply an operation called a nonlinear activation function, in analogy with the operation of neurons in the brain.
To demonstrate the concept, the team set the programmable nanophotonic processor to implement a neural network that recognizes four basic vowel sounds. Even with this rudimentary system, they were able to achieve a 77 percent accuracy level, compared to about 90 percent for conventional systems. There are "no substantial obstacles" to scaling up the system for greater accuracy, Soljacic says.
Englund adds that the programmable nanophotonic processor could have other applications as well, including signal processing for data transmission. "High-speed analog signal processing is something this could manage" faster than other approaches that first convert the signal to digital form, since light is an inherently analog medium. "This approach could do processing directly in the analog domain," he says.
The team says it will still take a lot more effort and time to make this system useful; however, once the system is scaled up and fully functioning, it can find many user cases, such as data centers or security systems. The system could also be a boon for self-driving cars or drones, says Harris, or "whenever you need to do a lot of computation but you don't have a lot of power or time."

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The 5 surprising things to know about smart glasses

 

The world's largest long-haul airline wants both employees and customers using smart glasses.
Emirates Airlines, based in Dubai, revealed this week that the company sees smart glasses as a strategic initiative that should help them fend off discount airline rivals.
Airlines succeed when they can treat passengers with a personal touch and top-notch customer service. For example, flight attendants can call passengers by name, provide personalized meals (that are, say, vegetarian or kosher), give extra attention to nervous fliers, provide added service for loyalty-card members or keep an eye on passengers with a history of disruptiveness.
This kind of service is hard to provide because of the lack of readily accessible knowledge.

Flight attendants wearing augmented reality smart glasses, however, could use face recognition that identifies a passenger, with a heads-up display (HUD) that shows the airlines' notes about each individual. The end result is that these employees will perform like they have incredibly actionable knowledge -- as if they recognize each passenger and "know" exactly what they need for optimal service.
Emirate's initiative strongly hints at the the five surprising and important things you need to know about the coming world of smart glasses.

1. Google Glass was a success

The best-known smart glasses product is Google Glass. The false narrative around Glass is that Google tried to rush it into the market and that it was rejected by the public, and therefore failed.
The truth is that Google's R&D lab launched a splashy and expensive public beta program, expressly to determine what this new technology could best be used for. They learned all they could, then transitioned the project out of the lab and into a division for developing glass as a product.

The first Google Glass product is called Glass at Work. Google runs a Glass at Work developers program for the creation of enterprise applications for Glass.
One of the biggest and earliest users of Google Glass in manufacturing is Boeing, whose workers use Glass for building airplanes.
Specifically, Boeing airplane manufacturing involves a complex process of connecting all the wiring that controls a plane's many electrical systems. The process is massively knowledge intensive. Google Glass enables workers to function as if they've memorized all the complexities of connecting the wires. They behave as if they have perfect knowledge, and keep their hands free to do the work itself.
Google Glass is also being used heavily in medicine, both for research and clinically.
One inspiring project at Silicon Valley's Stanford University called the Autism Glass Project is using Google Glass to help children with autism form emotional bonds with people by helping them read facial cues and other forms of emotional communication.
With "pilot" projects like Emirates to real manufacturing applications like Boeing to a world of smart glasses research, the Google Glass program has delivered an important platform and a huge body of knowledge for figuring out how smart glasses would work.

2. Augmented reality is all about smart glasses

The public can be forgiven for believing that the smart glasses industry is just a moribund category of wearable computing that itself has disappointed expectations. Instead, the industry has moved on to focus on more promising and exciting technologies, like augmented reality.
The more sophisticated understanding, however, is that augmented reality and smart glasses are the same thing. In other words, all the investment and progress in augmented reality is building a foundation for the coming smart glasses revolution.
As Google demonstrated with Google Glass, the hardware part of smart glasses simply involves a camera, a way to control the interface (such as voice commands or touch screen) and some way to bend light into the wearer's eye.
Such hardware is already available, but it's too big and clunky to be socially acceptable. However, it's getting better, smaller, lighter, offers longer battery life and is becoming more "wearable" all the time. The hardware is an industry-wide work in progress.
More important than hardware is the creation of development platforms and the resulting interfaces and content for smart glasses -- augmented reality platforms and apps. Earlier this month, Apple unveiled something called ARKit, an augmented reality developers kit for the upcoming iOS 11 mobile operating system.
In fact, the normally stoic and circumspect CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, told an interviewer this week that he's so excited about augmented reality that he wants to "yell out and scream."
The ARKit idea is that developers can build apps for iPhones and iPads that use the camera for augmented reality. You look at the screen, and see what's on the other side of the device, plus whatever digital objects or information are to be inserted as augmented reality.
Thousands of developers are expected to use ARKit, so we can look forward to thousands of apps. But augmented reality on a phone or tablet is clearly just a stopgap for development while smart glasses evolve sufficiently for widespread use.
Apple is rumored to be working on smart glasses, a rumor that was extremely convincing even before Apple announced an all-out push into augmented reality.
Once developers have used ARKit to build mobile apps, the distance to supporting smart glasses is very short. On such a platform, the "reality" part will be normal vision, with the "augmented" bits superimposed on what the user is actually looking at.
In fact, it seems like every major technology industry is working on augmented reality platforms. Facebook, at its own developers conference recently, unveiled its platform for augmented reality. It's called the Facebook Camera Effects platform. And other major companies are not only working on augmented reality platforms, but have also announced smart glasses hardware itself.

Microsoft

Microsoft demonstrates Hololens with interactive games, but the product is pure enterprise for now.

Microsoft, of course, is working on its highly anticipated HoloLens, which is available currently only to developers and mostly for enterprise applications.
Former Android founder Andy Rubin is in the news because his unicorn startup, Essential, announced a new phone and virtual assistant appliance. Less well known is that Essential's got a patent for smart glasses. Rubin is a well-known fan of the Google Glass concept .
And, of course, augmented reality smart glasses startups like Google-backed Magic Leap are getting major funding.
So whether we're talking about the companies like Microsoft and Magic Leap that emphasize hardware, or companies like Apple and Facebook that emphasize augmented reality, they're all working toward the same goal: the mainstreaming of augmented reality smart glasses.

3. Smart glasses are really about prosthetic knowledge

Why would Emirates Airline go to the trouble of outfitting flight attendants with smart glasses? Why not give them tablets to look up the same information?
The reason is that the effect of smart glasses will be completely different from every other user interface. It won't look or feel like people are "using" a computer.
Let's say Emirates did roll out augmented reality tablets. One flight attendant wants to interact with the passenger in seat 2B. He goes and gets the tablet. He stands next to the passenger and holds up the tablet, which shows the passenger's name and some helpful personal information.
This scenario is ridiculous and would never happen.
Now let's do the smart glasses version. The passenger in seat 2B presses the call button. The flight attendant comes over, and instantly the passenger's name and other information appears overlaid on his glasses. He's able to respond in a customized fashion, recalling previous engagements on prior flights and reflecting the passenger's personal profile.
The difference is that using augmented reality on a phone or tablet is like "using" a computer. Using augmented reality with smart glasses is like "prosthetic knowledge" — the information appears to the wearer in a way that simulates the occurrence of a thought or memory.
It feels that way, too.
I used a Google app called Word Lens on Google Glass while living in Italy three years ago. Word Lens is an early augmented reality app that translates the language of words. It's amazing because it keeps the translation in the same color and typeface as the original.
As I wore Glass around Tuscany, the effect was not like "using" a translation app. It felt like I could read Italian. And it was an amazing feeling.

4. The real impact of smart glasses will be in the enterprise

Whenever people talk about smart glasses, they assume the conversation is all about consumers walking around watching YouTube clips and seeing text messages through their prescription glasses or sunglasses. (Emirates, for example, envisions passengers using smart glasses to navigate through airports. _
Consumer use is coming. But the real impact will be in the enterprise. Entire industries from manufacturing to transportation to healthcare and many others are already leading the way. In fact, it's hard to think of any industry or profession that won't benefit from this kind of prosthetic knowledge.
And it's because of the coming ubiquity of smart glasses in the enterprise that...

5. ...Smart glasses will be the second most transformative tech over the next 25 years

While autonomous cars and trucks will be the top most transformative tech, augmented reality smart glasses -- and the prosthetic knowledge they provide -- will deliver a boost to any industry where knowledge is a competitive factor.
Augmented reality smart glasses will enable companies to bolster training and knowledge programmatically, by which I mean they'll be able to upgrade the "knowledge" of tens of thousands of workers using a five-minute update in a database. The net effect of this knowledge upgrade for the entire enterprise workforce will be comparable to the PC and mobile computing transformation of the past 50 years.
So as you read about augmented reality over the next few years, understand where it's going: straight into smart glasses to power enterprise applications that will transform the world.

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Windows 10: IT wants to manage PCs like phones

 

When three large government departments merged to create the Australian Department of Human Services, it took the new department almost three years to migrate to Windows 7. Having gone through those “three hard years,” the IT team was determined not to fall behind again, says Mike Brett, the department’s general manager for information communication technology infrastructure. Not only did the department start its Windows 10 migration as soon as the operating system came out, but it’s also committed to adopting new releases of Windows 10 as they come along.
“It’s our intention not to get out of date and fall behind again, so we don’t have to have a big-bang Windows upgrade again,” says Brett. “We’re keen to stay current — especially where there’s an advantage to moving forward — and we’re keen not to have to do that kind of remediation again. We want to stay ahead of the game rather than playing catch-up.
“It’s a culture change for the team, but we’re trying to make it part of business as usual. Really, it’s just good IT practice.”
Which is exactly how Microsoft is hoping businesses will think about Windows as a Service, according to Michael Niehaus, director of product marketing for commercial Windows. “We’re suggesting changing Windows deployment from a project that customers do every three to five years to thinking about deployment as a process. You move to Windows 10 and then continually stay up to date with the new features as released, and the benefits are that you get security capabilities faster, you get less disruption, you get a simpler deployment process.”

Microsoft

Getting used to change

Updating Windows regularly might be less disruptive, but moving to this model is itself a big change. “On the one hand, organizations see this as potentially disruptive. At the same time, they say disruption can be good if it gets them out of the problems of the past,” Niehaus says.

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With long deployment cycles, there’s a temptation to defer problems. “They’d build up technical debt,” says Niehaus. “They’d say, ‘We’re not going to deal with this now; we’ll take care of it with the next Windows upgrade in three years’ time.’ But when you do that with your apps and infrastructure, that takes the Windows upgrade project — which most organizations already thought was a big enough job — and makes it that much bigger, because now it’s not just upgrading to the next version of Windows but upgrading your infrastructure and your apps and dealing with all that technical debt.”
The solution isn’t just keeping up with Windows, says Niehaus, but modernizing IT habits generally. “Organizations need to make sure that the application owners and the business groups take responsibility for keeping line-of-business apps up to date as well. That way they can avoid this ‘kick the can down the road’ syndrome they’ve typically encountered.”
Many organizations are coming round to this point of view, says Gartner analyst Steve Kleynhans. “Everybody realizes there is a necessity to keep up, and so the majority of the customers I talk to are working at developing a process so they can keep up with feature updates as they come out.”

This acceptance comes after some initial denial, Kleynhans notes, but more frequent change is the new normal. “Lots of companies suggested to us that Microsoft is not really going to do this. Of course they are; this is just the nature of how things have changed.”
He suggests that feature updates might even arrive more quickly. “This is a very fluid market. There are new competitive pressures. This is not the last time we will have a change in what the cadence of updates is going to be and how it is going to work. We are entering a market where change is going to be continuous in every aspect of what we do.”
That can be a positive thing for IT teams, Brett suggests. “Internally, the project was a great opportunity for the staff to feel that they were playing in IT again. We had been risk-averse, and to be at the leading edge has been invigorating for them.”

Current means semiannual

Craig Dewar, senior director for commercial Windows at Microsoft, estimates that most customers that are adopting Windows as a Service have some 90% of their PCs running the Current Branch for Business (CBB, which Microsoft is renaming the Semi-Annual Channel, because it will now come out twice a year, on a fixed schedule to match Office and System Center). “They typically have something like 9% of their machines on the latest release, and then 1% on Insider builds” (referring to the Insider for Business program).
“Enterprises want to start piloting a new release as soon it comes out, starting with the IT organization, to see how productivity and line-of-business apps and devices work with it,” Niehaus notes. Typically, customers decide the new releases are ready for broad deployment after four months, he says.
The support life cycle for Windows 10 pushes businesses in this direction. With Windows releases now coming in March and September every year, the rather complicated formula of servicing for the two most recent CBB releases plus a 60 days’ grace period becomes a much clearer 18 months of support.
Kleynhans cautions against trying to use the Long Term Servicing Branch (LTSB, soon to be known as the Long Term Servicing Channel) as a way to avoid updating Windows 10. LTSB releases come out every two to three years and are supported for ten years (much longer than other branches), but this branch is intended only for specialized systems that perform a single important task and need stability more than the latest features. LTSB devices only get quality updates, they can’t run Edge or Windows Store apps (including the inbox apps such as Mail and Cortana), and you can only use an LTSB release on PCs with the CPUs that were shipping when that branch was released.
“For a lot of companies, rolling out LTSB beyond the relatively few targets in their environment where it’s required will actually create more problems with keeping up to date,” he says. “The problem is that LTSB is only certified for things that were shipping the day LTSB shipped. Any new processors, potentially any new versions of applications — for anything that comes out after LTSB ships — there's the potential that it won’t work with that LTSB and you’ll have to move to a new LTSB. You might end up having to update to a new LTSB every year. How is that better? Outside of a very narrow target, LTSB could be much harder to manage in your environment long term than just sticking with CBB.
“It's not the good old days. It’s not the Windows 7 model; what a lot of people were thinking was that LTSB would take them back to the Windows 7 model, and it’s not. It’s something different, and it’s not going to get them what they want.”
The message seems to have gotten through: The most recent survey that Microsoft did of commercial Windows customers showed only a single-digit percentage looking at LTSB for broad deployment, according to Niehaus.
Making this regular process work means striking a balance between getting experience with new features from Insider builds and not wasting time on bugs that won’t be in the final release, cautions Kleynhans. “Everybody wants access to code as early as possible, so they can start their testing processes and their familiarization processes as easy as possible. But they don’t want to get started with stuff that's breaking and causing problems that are not going to be there in production code. Organizations want to be testing their issues, not Microsoft’s issues.”
New controls in the Insider program that let IT teams see feedback and usage of Insider builds within their organization will give more control. They may also give them more influence with Microsoft. “From our side, this allows us to weight feedback more accurately,” Dewar explains. “We understand that not all feedback is equal, and one piece of feedback can represent a very large installed base. If you leave three pieces of feedback but you represent a large organization with 80,000 PCs, we would probably listen to your feedback on a security or business feature more than a home user with a single PC. Before, we didn’t have the ability to do that.”
The smaller, simpler monthly updates for security and quality make this more palatable as well. If you want more time to test non-security fixes you can now get those a couple of weeks before the monthly Cumulative Update, and System Center Configuration Manager now supports Express Updates, which download only the updates that are new to a Windows client, rather than the full Cumulative Update package. And if you want to switch to deploying updates without administrators approving them manually, you can use Windows Update for Business for that while still updating third-party and line-of-business apps through Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) using Dual Scan. (Introduced with Windows 10 version 1607, Dual Scan is being updated for version 1703 to give businesses more control over which updates are applied and when.)

Manage like mobile

As they shift the way they handle deploying Windows, many organizations are also taking the opportunity to manage those Windows PCs rather differently — more like the BYOD phones and tablets employees have been adopting than the desktop PCs of old, especially as more two-in-one devices such as the Surface Pro show up in the enterprise.
“The methods that organizations use to manage Windows devices have been more or less unchanged for the last decade or more,” Niehaus points out. “We’ve been telling the modern IT management story for a couple of years, which is that you probably have groups of employees who are mobile, who are never connected to the corporate network, who could be treated differently than the traditional corporate network-connected, workstation tower under the desk.”
Some customers experimented with this approach but there hadn’t been a significant shift in PC management until Windows 10 built in an MDM client that adds new policy options with each release.
“The big change with Windows 10 is that customers are coming back to us and saying, ‘We’ve been taking that approach for our mobile devices — and if we’re able to take a step back from our heavy-handed policies, maybe we can make that work for our entire population and take a much lighter-weight approach that’s really focused on keeping the organization safe and productive, where we don't have to be in control of everything.’”
Some organizations are already shifting to this approach, using Azure Active Directory and an MDM service such as Intune rather than Active Directory and group policy and System Center Configuration Manager, says Niehaus, but “others are plotting that course over potentially a period of years.”
According to a recent survey by analysts CCS Insight, this switch will bring desktop and mobile management teams into a single group inside IT organizations. Among respondents to the survey, 83% said that operational convergence would happen within three years, and 44% said that would happen within 12 months. That also means moving from MDM tools designed for phones to services such as Microsoft Intune and EMS that can manage both phones and PCs, noted Nicholas McQuire, vice president of enterprise research at CCS Insight.
Even though the MDM client in Windows 10 supports many of the same options as group policy, you need to think carefully about how many of those policies you apply. Mike Brett suggests IT teams approach this by asking, “How do we make the experience better? Previously we would lock everything down, which is a very easy approach for IT. Now it’s, What do we lock down that protects us, and what do we do that enhances the user experience?”

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Quote of the Week

There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.

- Lord Voldemort, Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone

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Data Mining

The implications of our time browsing the Internet

Source: Flickr Creative Commons

Computer programs can extract an extraordinary and frightening amount of data from our web activity. Following the digital revolution and the proliferation of digital record keeping, the information generated by our online activity has potentially great benefit, but leaves serious questions unanswered regarding our confidence in digital record keeping.

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected and technological adoption rises in emerging markets, data from online activity poses great promise and peril. According to studies from the Pew Research Center, there has been a significant increase in the number of internet and smartphone users in developing nations. In 2013, across 21 emerging and developing countries, a median of 45 percent of respondents used the internet or owned a smartphone. In 2015, the median rose to 54 percent, with much of the increase driven by emerging economies like Malaysia, Brazil, and China. Through machine learning algorithms, we can now make well calculated and informed policies with previously unimaginable amount of data from observing the activity of the newly connected. With the massive increase in smartphone ownership among residents of developing nations, passively collected digital data could come to replace household surveys in assessing social and economic well-being. Information from online data collection could thus be translated into more effective policies and better service delivery.

Organizations such as Google, Amazon and Apple already collect data and invest heavily in technologies like big data, supercomputers and artificial intelligence and can tailor information directly to users. Facebook, for example, measures users’ links clicked, and by studying billions of data points it can determine the type of news a user might “like” and push that to their Facebook feed. Though this is an effective way to personalize the web, society must consider the ethics and implications of tailoring information, as the loss of reliable and authoritative information sources can inflame emotions and undermine reason.

In China, the nation is experimenting with “citizen scores”, which will rank citizens and could determine the conditions that citizens get loans, jobs, or travel visas. People’s internet activity and the behavior of their social contacts could potentially be monitored. Based on different data points, a user could be categorized over petabytes of information and millions of other users. Conceivably, without needing any consent or active inputs by the user, computer programs could guess preferences, estimate income, profession, educational level, and numerous other details. Algorithms can learn to recognize life events like pregnancies or even whether you’re thinking of getting married. GPS location can determine exact locations, home addresses, and commute time. Programs even have the capacity to predict your age based on mouse movement; younger people have more precise movements than older people.

We begin to better understand complex relationships in the world by applying algorithms and statistical methods to interpret the figures, names, and other quantities of online activity data. However, all this necessitates democratic technologies for greater transparency, trust and systems that are compatible with democratic principles. This requires decentralized information systems, commitments to open data strategies, reduced distortion of information and even granting citizens the right to get a copy of personal data collected on them.

Utilizing information aggregated through online activity and translating it into big data, we can quickly and intelligibly shift through millions of data points to extract meaningful relationships in complex economies, national systems, and human behaviors. Data gathering through online activity and employing big data techniques can be an extremely effective method for understanding and describing the world, yet as citizens, we must determine the extent and limit to the data we allow to be collected on us, how it’s collected, and who could have access to it. Policies and regulations for which governments and private industry must abide should be ahead of this technological change, as these algorithms are already creeping into every aspect of our lives.

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Tiny Device Allows You To Track Your Car Using Your Smartphone

Have you ever lost your car on a parking lot? It happens. You park and go shopping. When you get back, you don't have a clue where your car is. Then you start roaming around clicking on the panic button on your car keys so the alarm goes off. It can be frustrating, especially on a hot, sunny day.
No, you don't need to install an expensive GPS system to keep track of your car. That's way too expensive. You would need to pay a monthly subscription fee just to use it. Don't we have enough bills to pay already?

The device "TrackR" has the size of a coin and can be placed everywhere

But is there a way to track your vehicle without spending a fortune? Yes, now there is!
A California-based startup company was able to make this a reality. They created a tiny device that works with your smartphone, and it could be exactly what you're looking for!

What is it?

It's called TrackR. It is a state-of-the-art tracking device the size of a quarter. It's changing the way we keep track of the important things in our lives.

With TrackR you'll gain peace of mind, knowing you can find your car quickly.

How Does it Work?

It's easy! Install the free TrackR app on your smartphone, connect the app to your device and you're ready to go! Simply attach TrackR to whatever you want to keep tabs on. The entire process of setting it up only takes 5 minutes or less.
You can attach it to your keys, briefcase, wallet, your latest tech gadgets and anything else you don't want to lose. Then use the TrackR app to locate your missing item in seconds.
Forget expensive GPS systems or tracking services. Nobody wants to pay expensive monthly subscription fees. We understand how stressful these things can be, and this is the reason why TrackR was created. This device is your VIP when you need to take care of more important things in life.
Remember the car scenario above? If you have the TrackR, you can just hide it under your car's floor mat, in the trunk or in the glove compartment. Somewhere it won't be found if your car gets stolen.
If you forget where you parked your car, whip out your smartphone and open the TrackR app. Tap on the "lost item" icon on the screen and the app will tell you the exact coordinates of the last known location of the TrackR.

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How your iPhone could know when you’re in a moving car

A new iOS 11 feature aims to curb distracted driving

 The new feature block notifications from coming through while you're behind the wheel.

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Top 5 Medical Technology Innovations

1.Cutting Back on Melanoma Biopsies

With the most deadly form of skin cancer, melanoma, a huge number of dangerous-looking moles are actually harmless, but has always been impossible to know for sure without an invasive surgical biopsy. Today dermatologists have new help in making the right call — a handheld tool approved by the FDA for multispectral analysis of tissue morphology. The MelaFind optical scanner is not for definitive diagnosis but rather to provide additional information a doctor can use in determining whether or not to order a biopsy. The goal is to reduce the number of patients left with unnecessary biopsy scars, with the added benefit of eliminating the cost of unnecessary procedures. The MelaFind technology (MELA Sciences, Irvington, NY) uses missile navigation technologies originally paid for the Department of Defense to optically scan the surface of a suspicious lesion at 10 electromagnetic wavelengths. The collected signals are processed using heavy-duty algorithms and matched against a registry of 10,000 digital images of melanoma and skin disease.

2. Electronic Aspirin

For people who suffer from migraines, cluster headaches, and other causes of chronic, excruciating head or facial pain, the "take two aspirins and call me in the morning" method is useless. Doctors have long associated the most severe, chronic forms of headache with the sphenopalatine ganglion (SPG), a facial nerve bundle, but haven't yet found a treatment that works on the SPG long-term. A technology under clinical investigation at Autonomic Technologies, Inc., (Redwood City, CA) is a patient-powered tool for blocking SPG signals at the first sign of a headache. The system involves the permanent implant of a small nerve stimulating device in the upper gum on the side of the head normally affected by headache. The lead tip of the implant connects with the SPG bundle, and when a patient senses the onset of a headache, he or she places a handheld remote controller on the cheek nearest the implant. The resulting signals stimulate the SPG nerves and block the pain-causing neurotransmitters.

3. Needle-Free Diabetes Care

Diabetes self-care is a pain—literally. It brings the constant need to draw blood for glucose testing, the need for daily insulin shots and the heightened risk of infection from all that poking. Continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps are today's best options for automating most of the complicated daily process of blood sugar management – but they don't completely remove the need for skin pricks and shots. But there's new skin in this game. Echo Therapeutics (Philadelphia, PA) is developing technologies that would replace the poke with a patch. The company is working on a transdermal biosensor that reads blood analytes through the skin without drawing blood. The technology involves a handheld electric-toothbrush-like device that removes just enough top-layer skin cells to put the patient's blood chemistry within signal range of a patch-borne biosensor. The sensor collects one reading per minute and sends the data wirelessly to a remote monitor, triggering audible alarms when levels go out of the patient's optimal range and tracking glucose levels over time.

The Telemedicine System from InTouch Technologies. Image: InTouchHealth.com

4. Robotic Check-Ups

A pillar of health reform is improving access to the best health care for more people. Technology is a cost-effective and increasingly potent means to connect clinics in the vast and medically underserved rural regions of the United States with big city medical centers and their specialists. Telemedicine is well established as a tool for triage and assessment in emergencies, but new medical robots go one step further—they can now patrol hospital hallways on more routine rounds, checking on patients in different rooms and managing their individual charts and vital signs without direct human intervention. The RP-VITA Remote Presence Robot produced jointly by iRobot Corp. and InTouch Health is the first such autonomous navigation remote-presence robot to receive FDA clearance for hospital use. The device is a mobile cart with a two-way video screen and medical monitoring equipment, programmed to maneuver through the busy halls of a hospital.

The Sapien transcatheter aortic valve from Edwards Lifesciences. Image: Edwards.com

5. A Valve Job with Heart

The Sapien transcatheter aortic valve is a life-saving alternative to open-heart surgery for patients who need new a new valve but can't endure the rigors of the operation. Manufactured by Edwards Life Sciences (Irvine, CA), the Sapien has been available in Europe for some time but is only now finding its first use in U.S. heart centers—where it is limited only to the frailest patients thus far. The Sapien valve is guided through the femoral artery by catheter from a small incision near the grown or rib cage. The valve material is made of bovine tissue attached to a stainless-steel stent, which is expanded by inflating a small balloon when correctly placed in the valve space. A simpler procedure that promises dramatically shorter hospitalizations is bound to have a positive effect on the cost of care.

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Dear visitors this site is now under development unintentionally it was down sorry for unavaibility.

Since last month it was down now we are going to make it up with more features mostly for UOG Rawalpndi campus's student just wait for few more days Regards : Muqadas Ch

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Fake online profiles easier to fish out with new software tool

Researchers have trained computer models to spot social media users who make up information about themselves -- known as catfishes.
The system is designed to identify users who are dishonest about their age or gender. Scientists believe it could have potential benefits for helping to ensure the safety of social networks.
Computer scientists from the University of Edinburgh built computer models designed to detect fake profiles on an adult content website. Sites of this type are believed to be heavily targeted by catfishes to befriend other users and gain more profile views.
Researchers built their models based on information gleaned from about 5,000 verified public profiles on the site. These profiles were used to train the model to estimate the gender and age of a user with high accuracy, using their style of writing in comments and network activity.
This enabled the models to accurately estimate the age and gender of users with unverified accounts, and spot misinformation. All details were anonymised to protect users' privacy.
The study found that almost 40 per cent of the site's users lie about their age and one-quarter lie about their gender, with women more likely to deceive than men. The outcome, which underscores the extent of catfishing in adult networks, demonstrates the effectiveness of the technology in weeding out dishonest users.
The study, to be presented at the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining in Australia, was carried out in collaboration with Lancaster University, Queen Mary University of London, and King's College London.
Dr Walid Magdy, of the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, said: "Adult websites are populated by users who claim to be other than who they are, so these are a perfect testing ground for techniques that identify catfishes. We hope that our development will lead to useful tools to flag dishonest users and keep social networks of all kinds safe."

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Smarter use of mobile data

The data constantly collected and reported by smartphones can find numerous applications. An new project devoted to crowdsensing has found ways to improve privacy and localization accuracy as well as reduce the impact on hardware.

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Operating smart devices from the space on and above the back of your hand

Smartwatches such as the Apple Watch have been called a 'revolution on the wrist', but the operation of these devices is complicated, because the screen is small. Researchers have therefore developed a novel input method that expands the input space to the back of the hand and the 3-D space above the back of the hand wearing the watch.

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Shrinking data for surgical training

Technique that reduces video files to one-tenth their initial size enables speedy analysis of laparoscopic procedures.

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Software developer is a voice for Muslim women

An entrepreneur who co-founded Wise Systems, Layla Shaikley SM ’13 may be better known for her viral video created to combat media stereotypes of Muslim women.

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Computer Virus

DO YOU KNOW??
computer virus that was released in its first form in January 1986 is considered to be the first computer virus for MS-DOS.

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Coding

Coding is so much fun :)

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Facebook Real-Life “Like” Button

A Facebook engineer has revealed that the social networking company is working on a real life “like” button that people can use to rate other

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