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Scientist Develop Anti-Faking PC
Scientists have developed a computer system with sophisticated pattern recognition abilities that performed more impressively than humans in differentiating between people experiencing genuine pain and people who were just pretending.
In a study published in the journal Current Biology, human subjects did no better than chance – about 50 percent – in correctly judging if a person was feigning pain after seeing videos in which some people were and some were not.
The computer was right 85 percent of the time. Why? The researchers say its pattern-recognition abilities successfully spotted distinctive aspects of facial expressions, particularly involving mouth movements, that people generally missed.
“We all know that computers are good at logic processes and they’ve long out-performed humans on things like playing chess,” said Marian Bartlett of the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California-San Diego, one of the researchers.
“But in perceptual processes, computers lag far behind humans and have a lot of trouble with perceptual processes that humans tend to find easy, including speech recognition and visual recognition. Here’s an example of a perceptual process that the computer is able to do better than human observers,” Bartlett said in a telephone interview.
For the experiment, 25 volunteers each recorded two videos.
In the first, each of the volunteers immersed an arm in lukewarm water for a minute and were told to try to fool an expert into thinking they were in pain. In the second, the volunteers immersed an arm in a bucket of frigid ice water for a minute, a genuinely painful experience, and were given no instructions on what to do with their facial expressions.
The researchers asked 170 other volunteers to assess which people were in real discomfort and which were faking it.
After they registered a 50 percent accuracy rate, which is no better than a coin flip, the researchers gave the volunteers training in recognizing when someone was faking pain. Even after this, the volunteers managed an accuracy rate of only 55 percent.
The computer’s vision system included a video camera that took images of a person’s facial expressions and decoded them. The computer had been programmed to recognize that one kind of facial movement combinations suggested true pain and another kind suggested faked pain.
HP Unveils 3D Plan
March 31, 2014 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Hewlett-Packard Co will unveil plans to enter the commercial 3D-printing arena in June, saying it has resolved a number of technical issues that have hindered broader adoption of the high-tech manufacturing process.
Chief Executive Meg Whitman told shareholders the company will make a “big technology announcement” that month around how it will approach a market that has excited the imagination of investors and consumers.
Critics have accused the sci-fi-like technology of being over-hyped and still too immature for widespread consumer adoption.
Industry observers have long expected HP, the largest of several printer-making companies from Canon to Xerox, to eventually get into the business. Whitman said HP’s inhouse researchers have resolved limitations involved with the quality of substrates used in the process, which affects the durability of finished products.
“We actually think we’ve solved these problems,” Whitman told an annual shareholders meeting. “The bigger market is going to be in the enterprise space,” manufacturing parts and prototypes in ways that were not possible before.
“We’re on the case,” she said without elaborating.
HP executives have estimated that worldwide sales of 3D printers and related software and services will grow to almost $11 billion by 2021 from a mere $2.2 billion in 2012.
The nascent 3D-printing market is now dominated by a number of smaller players like MakerBot, a unit of Stratasys that is concentrating on selling more affordable devices to consumers.
Contract manufacturers like Flextronics however already use the technology to help craft prototype parts or devices for corporate clients.
“HP is currently exploring the many possibilities of 3D printing and the company will play an important role in its development,” CTO and HP Labs director Martin Fink said in a February blogpost on HP’s website.
“The fact is that 3D printing is really still an immature technology, but it has a magical aura. The sci-fi movie idea that you can magically create things on command makes the idea of 3D printing really compelling for people.”
Will GoDaddy Do An IPO?
March 26, 2014 by admin
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Web hosting company The GoDaddy Group Inc is gearing up for a second attempt at an initial public offering, according to two people familiar with the matter, as the 2014 tech IPO pipeline continues to grow.
GoDaddy, the Internet domain registrar and web host known for its racy ads, would join a number of high-profile tech names expected to go public this year in the wake of Twitter Inc’s successful debut. They include “Candy Crush” developer King Digital and cloud services providers Box and Dropbox.
The company is in the process of selecting underwriters for its IPO, one of the two sources said on condition of anonymity.
GoDaddy was not immediately available for comment.
GoDaddy had filed to go public in 2006 but was told at the time that it would be required to take a 50 percent haircut — a percentage that is subtracted from the par value of assets that are being used as collateral — on its initial public offering.
The company instead decided to pull its filing, citing unfavorable market conditions.
The company, founded in 1997, was eventually acquired by a private equity consortium led by KKR & Co and Silver Lake in 2011 for $2.25 billion. Silver Lake declined to comment while KKR did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other private equity buyers included Technology Crossover Ventures.
GoDaddy, which provides website domain names, is famous for airing bawdy commercials with scantily clad women for the past decade during the Super Bowl.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on the plans.
Will Chrome’s API Work?
March 25, 2014 by admin
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Google has targeted web browser settings hijacking in its latest update to Chrome for Windows.
On the Chromium blog, Google engineering director Erik Kay announced an extension settings API designed to ensure that users have notice and control over any settings changes made to their web browsers.
As a result, the only way extensions will be able to make changes to browser settings such as the default search engine and start page will be through this API.
Bargain hungry consumers are often unaware that freeware programs often bundle add-on programs for which developers receive payment but can create irritating, rather than malicious, changes to user settings.
Although there is usually consent sought at installation, quite often it is ignored or not understood, and the people who miss the warnings are generally the same ones who find it hard to change the settings back.
Kay said that the API is available in the Chromium developer channel, with a rollout to the stable channel set for May.
The Chromium stable channel has been updated to version 33.0.1750.149. The main change is an update to the embedded Flash Player for Windows, which is now version 12.0.0.77.
There are seven new security fixes, most of which were user submitted via the open source Fast Memory Detector Address Sanitizer.
Although the user community and Chrome team continue to proactively protect the Chromium project, third party extensions can still cause problems, with several already having been removed from the Chrome Store this year.
Web Pioneer Calls For Bill of Rights
The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, voiced his support for bill of rights to protect freedom of speech on the Internet and users’ rights after leaks about government surveillance of online activity.
25 years since the London-born computer scientist invented the web, Berners-Lee said there was a need for a charter like England’s historic Magna Carta to help guarantee fundamental principles online.
Web privacy and freedom have come under scrutiny since former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year leaked a raft of secret documents revealing a vast U.S. government system for monitoring phone and Internet data.
Accusations that NSA was mining personal data of users of Google, Facebook, Skype and other U.S. companies prompted President Barack Obama to announce reforms in January to scale back the NSA program and ban eavesdropping on the leaders of close friends and allies of the United States.
Berners-Lee said it was time for a communal decision as he warned that growing surveillance and censorship, in countries such as China, threatened the future of democracy.
“Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control – more and more surveillance?” he told BBC Radio on Wednesday.
“Or are we going to set up something like a Magna Carta for the world wide web and say, actually, now it’s so important, so much part of our lives, that it becomes on a level with human rights?” he said, referring to the 1215 English charter.
While acknowledging the state needed the power to tackle criminals using the Internet, he has called for greater oversight over spy agencies such Britain’s GCHQ and the NSA, and over any organizations collecting data on private individuals.
He has previously spoken in support of Snowden, saying his actions were “in the public interest”.
Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium, a global community with a mission to lead the web to its full potential, have launched a year of action for a campaign called the Web We Want, urging people to push for an Internet “bill of rights” for every country.
IBM Breaks Big Data Record
IBM Labs claims to have broken a speed record for Big Data, which the company says could help boost internet speeds to 200 to 400Gbps using “extremely low power”.
The scientists achieved the speed record using a prototype device presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco.
Apparently the device, which employs analogue-to-digital conversion (ADC) technology, could be used to improve the transfer speed of Big Data between clouds and data centres to four times faster than existing technology.
IBM said its device is fast enough that 160GB – the equivalent of a two-hour 4K ultra-high definition (UHD) movie or 40,000 music tracks – could be downloaded in a few seconds.
The IBM researchers have been developing the technology in collaboration with Swiss research institution Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to tackle the growing demands of global data traffic.
“As Big Data and internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, future networking standards have to support higher data rates,” the IBM researchers explained, comparing data transfer per day in 1992 of 100GB to today’s two Exabytes per day, a 20 million-fold increase.
“To support the increase in traffic, ultra-fast and energy efficient analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) technology [will] enable complex digital equalisation across long-distance fibre channels.”
An ADC device converts analogue signals to digital, estimating the right combination of zeros and ones to digitally represent the data so it can be stored on computers and analysed for patterns and predictive outcomes.
“For example, scientists will use hundreds of thousands of ADCs to convert the analogue radio signals that originate from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago to digital,” IBM said.
The ADC technology has been developed as part of an international project called Dome, a collaboration between the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), DOME-South Africa and IBM to build the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope when it’s completed.
“The radio data that the SKA collects from deep space is expected to produce 10 times the global internet traffic and the prototype ADC would be an ideal candidate to transport the signals fast and at very low power – a critical requirement considering the thousands of antennas which will be spread over 1,900 miles,” IBM expalined.
IBM Research Systems department manager Dr Martin Schmatz said, “Our ADC supports Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards for data communication and brings together speed and energy efficiency at 32 nanometers, enabling us to start tackling the largest Big Data applications.”
He said that IBM is developing the technology for its own family of products, ranging from optical and wireline communications to advanced radar systems.
“We are bringing our previous generation of the ADC to market less than 12 months since it was first developed and tested,” Schmatz added, noting that the firm will develop the technology in communications systems such as 400Gbps opticals and advanced radars.
Samsung Joins OpenPower
Samsung has joined Google, Mellanox, Nvidia and other tech companies as part of IBM’s OpenPower Consortium. The OpenPower Consortium is working toward giving developers access to an expanded and open set of server technologies to improve data centre hardware using chip designs based on the IBM Power architecture.
Last summer, IBM announced the formation of the consortium, following its decision to license the Power architecture. The OpenPower Foundation, the actual entity behind the consortium, opened up the Power architecture technology, including specs, firmware and software under a license. Firmware is offered as open source. Originally, OpenPower was the brand of a range of System p servers from IBM that utilized the Power5 CPU. Samsung’s products currently utilize both x86 and ARM-based processors.
The intention of the consortium is to develop advanced servers, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology for new products. The four priority technical areas for development are system software, application software, open server development platform and hardware architecture. Along with its announcement of Samsung’s membership, the organization said that Gordon MacKean, Google’s engineering director of the platforms group, will now become chairman of the group. Nvidia has said it will use its graphics processors on Power-based hardware, and Tyan will be releasing a Power-based server, the first one outside IBM.
IBM’s Watson Goes To Africa
IBM has detailed plans to apply its Watson supercomputer the critical development issues facing Africa.
The machine is capable of holding more intelligent conversations than most Big Brother contestants, and in 2011 it beat human contestants on the US TV game show Jeopardy.
However, in Africa it will be used to help solve the pressing problems facing the continent such as agricultural patterns and famine relief.
The initiative, named Project Lucy after the earliest human remains discovered on the continent, will take 10 years and is expected to cost $100m.
“I believe it will spur a whole era of innovation for entrepreneurs here,” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty told delegates at a conference on Wednesday.
“Data… needs to be refined. It will determine undisputed winners and losers across every industry.”
The technology will be used to find ways to enable the developing world to leapfrog over stages of development that have hitherto been too expensive.
One example cited was Nigeria, where two companies have already committed to use Project Lucy to analyse the poorly maintained road system and determine project priorities for repair.
IBM recently announced that it will invest $1bn to spin off Watson into a separate business unit, however this could be quite a gamble as Reuters reported that although Watson has proved to be a quantum leap, it has yet to make any significant money for the company, netting less than $100m in the past three years.
Is China Mobile Good For Apple?
January 29, 2014 by admin
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The tame Apple Press has enthusiastically been running storied about how well Apple is doing in China. Reuters for example has been saying that the one million pre-orders that Jobs’ Mob has just collected is a triumph for Tim Cook’s negotiating ability. Getting a deal out of China Mobile was something the sainted Steve Jobs could not manage.
However saner heads are urging caution, While it is true that launching its iPhone on China Mobile vast network on Friday, opening the door to the world’s largest carrier’s 763 million subscribers and giving its China sales a short-term jolt, it is not likely to last. For a start the deal could start a war which China Mobile would not want. Some analysts predicting a costly subsidy war as rival carriers compete to lure customers. If China Mobile does not make its targets on sales for these phones, they are going to increase the subsidies.
China Mobile’s iPhone sales are expected to reach 12 million in its 2014 fiscal year, but its subsidies will leap 57 percent to $7 billion. In addition, the prices are still really high for the Chinese market. For the basic 16GB iPhone 5S, with no subscriber contract, China Mobile is charging $870.
China Unicom and China Telecom slashed their iPhone prices by as much as $210 following the announcement that a deal had been struck between Apple and China Mobile. The pair have also offered a range of cut-price deals on contracts. But there are also some problems with the pre-orders. Reuters checks showed that there were multiple registrations using fake ID numbers which means that people are buying up hoping to make a swift buck on resales.
All this is the least of Apple’s Chinese worries. The outfit has fallen out of favour with consumers who are increasingly opting for domestic products. Those who want an iPhone do not need to pay excessively to get one through China mobile either. In China, you can buy handsets typically smuggled from Hong Kong and then sign up for a China Mobile contract. This is a swings and roundabouts for Apple. If people buy from China Mobile, they will not buy from Hong Kong so it will lose sales there. If they don’t then the China Mobile contract is rubbish.
Mozilla Delays Touch Browser
January 14, 2014 by admin
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Mozilla has again delayed the release date for a touch-enabled version of Firefox that will run in Windows 8′s “Modern” user interface (UI), with the new target in mid-March.
Ship estimates for the browser have been fluid, to put it mildly. In August, the open-source developer pegged December 2013 as the target for the “Metro-ized” version of Firefox. In September, Mozilla said it was hoping to bundle Firefox Metro with the Windows edition of Firefox 27, slated for release on Feb. 4.
Metro was the name Microsoft once applied to the radical UI of Windows 8, but the company ditched the moniker in 2012 over a trademark dispute with a German retailer.
The newest information from Mozilla, however, has tapped March 18, when Firefox 28 is to ship, as the projected release of the browser.
Although a preview of Firefox Metro was bundled with the Aurora build of Firefox more than three months ago — and is currently in Aurora for Firefox 28 — it has not yet been promoted to the next channel, Beta, which is the precursor to Release. Mozilla has set a Jan. 31 deadline for deciding whether the touch browser is ready to add to Firefox 28 Beta.
Mozilla started work on a Metro edition of Firefox in March 2012. It shipped a rough preview in October 2012, several weeks before Microsoft launched Windows 8. At that time, Mozilla’s schedule said the Firefox app might appear as early as January 2013. In May 2013, however, the company said its developers would complete Firefox for Modern between Oct. 2, 2013, and March 20, 2014, with mid-November the likeliest date.
If Mozilla makes the targeted March 18 release, it will have spent two years crafting the browser, which will have shipped 17 months after the retail debut of Windows 8.
Although Mozilla has said it’s important that it have a Metro-ready browser to remain competitive — and Windows 8′s and Windows 8.1′s user share has climbed above the 10% mark– it’s unclear what percentage of those PC and tablet owners spend serious time in the UI, as opposed to the traditional Windows desktop.
Mozilla is also discussing a name for the browser, which was code named “Firefox Metro” during development and later was saddled with the label “Windows 8-style Firefox.”
One suggestion, forwarded by a Mozilla user experience designer, has been “Firefox Touch,” which got nods of approval from others in a Mozilla planning message forum.
“‘Windows 8-style Firefox’ is too long and already doesn’t make perfect sense with Windows 8.1 released, but will make less sense when Windows 9 comes out,” noted Brian Bondy, a Firefox platform engineer who has led the work on the Metro version. “I like Firefox Touch and I think we should go with that. It’s a product designed above all else for touch.”
Some, however, objected to labeling the browser as “Firefox Touch,” pointing out that that would downplay the Android browser Mozilla maintains, which is also touch-enabled.
“I agree with Jim that it should be simply Firefox, and that differentiation happens at the point of download,” countered Peter Scanlon, Mozilla’s acting chief marketing officer, in another message to the same discussion forum.