Technology

Automated automobiles are coming, the question is how they will behave. Not how they will perform, anything is guaranteed to be safer than millions of distracted individuals and ATM machines have shown what accuracy will look like, but how they will behave, their driving style, may impact individual uptake in the short term. Do you want robotic efficiency, a car that won't stop at a cross-section when no other cars are around, or automation that emulates average human driving and not only stops but even peeks ahead to get a better "view" like a human might? The surprising result was that…

Many people who are old enough to have experienced the first moon landing will vividly remember what it was like watching Neil Armstrong utter his famous quote: That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”. Half a century later, the event is still one of the top achievements of humankind. Despite the rapid technological advances since then, astronauts haven’t actually been back to the moon since 1972. This seems surprising. After all, when we reflect on this historic event, it is often said that we now have more computing power in our pocket than the computer aboard Apollo 11…

Cities with a higher incidence of racist tweets showed more actual hate crimes related to race, ethnicity, and national origin, according to an analysis of the location and linguistic features of 532 million tweets published between 2011 and 2016. A machine learning model identified and analyze two types of tweets: those that are targeted (directly espousing discriminatory views) and those that are self-narrative (describing or commenting upon discriminatory remarks or acts) and then the team compared the prevalence of each type of discriminatory tweet to the number of actual hate crimes…

"Lag" is a common term for the latency in human-computer interactions caused by various factors related to the environment and performance of the devices, networks, and data processing. There is no question it impacts the user's performance, and that impacts long-term usability, as the success of "Anthem" versus games like "Fortnite" show. New technology helps game players maintain zero-latency performance and it was created by using a mathematical model for predicting players' behavior by understanding the effects of latency on players. This cognitive model is capable of predicting the…

If you read the Harry Potter series of novels or saw the films, you've known that fiction has people moving in and out of photographs - now that magic has been brought to real life. The University of Washington algorithm Photo Wake-Up was posted in preprint form on arXiv in December and created a buzz because it can take a person from a 2D photo or a work of art and make them run, walk or jump out of the frame. The system also allows users to view the animation in three dimensions using augmented reality tools. Next week at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Long…

To say ‘business ecosystem’ or ‘innovation ecosystem’ is to commit the teleological fallacy. That means assuming a purpose where there is no purpose. Charles Darwin said species evolve to adapt to changing environments. Natural ecosystems – species and their environments – have no ‘purpose’; they just are. Now, if you believe in a creator deity, you might hold that biological ecosystems do have a (divine) purpose. We’ll come back to this point. Artificial ‘ecosystems’ include business ecosystems, innovation ecosystems, and device ecosystems. Each of these is designed by humans, for a purpose…

As measles outbreaks spread across the U.S., our new look at how information about vaccine safety and reliability spreads online suggests that the tide may be turning against the anti-vaccination movement. Between Jan. 1 and March 28, 387 people contracted measles in 15 U.S. states. Mumps is also coming back, with 151 infections in just the first two months of 2019. Both of these dangerous and deadly diseases can be prevented by getting the MMR vaccine, which is so safe and effective, and so widely used, that measles was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000. But more recently, new…

One of the problems that led to both opioid and medical marijuana overuse has been that the notion of pain is subjective. If someone claims they are in pain, a doctor has no way to know how much of it is real and how much is psychological. A new test can identify biomarkers in the blood that can help objectively determine how severe a patient’s pain is. The blood test, the first of its kind, would allow physicians far more accuracy in treating pain—as well as a better long-term look at the patient’s medical future. In addition to providing an objective measure of pain, the blood test helps…

If you've read anything about computers for the last 25 years, you've read the hype about quantum computing and how it is going to be better and faster and with less heat and replace conduction-based chips and it will generally be awesome. And then nothing happens outside a lot of arXiv papers and some physics magic published in journals. Quantum computing has basically gotten the best marketing free pass ever, because it is always five years away and no one seems to get cynical. Now it's only two years away.  A company has gotten seed funding to bring their photonic quantum computer to…

You may be told that you have individual choice about whether or not social media privacy (or lack thereof) affects you; don't join social media, or delete your account.  Not so, according to a new study. Big Data can essentially triangulate your behavior, by using the data of your friends. A team gathered more than 30,000,000 public posts on Twitter from 13,905 users and found that information within the Twitter messages from 8 or 9 of a person's contacts make it possible to predict that person's later tweets as accurately as if they were looking directly at that person's own…