‘FriWalk’ is a mobility walker and a personal trainer in one

If there is one area of personal transport that is ripe for innovation, it’s probably the mobility walker. Typically reserved for older generations — complete with the stereotypical tennis ball feet (like the one used by Carl Fredricksen in Pixar’s Up) — the walker has remained largely unchanged for decades. As part of the EU’s ACANTO project, researchers from six European countries have developed the Friendly Robot Walker or FriWalk, a new four wheeled walker that is fitted with depth sensors and cameras that can detect health risks from a user’s gait but also serve as a personal trainer.

Siemens, one of the project’s major contributors, says that FriWalk requires the user to wear special pressure-sensitive insoles that allow the walker to measure the position of their feet, detect their orientation and the amount of pressure exerted on the ground. This information can be collated over a longer period of time, giving doctors a more accurate picture of a person’s overall health.

On top of that, FriWalk could also operate as a personal trainer. Users, as well as their friends and loved ones, can feed the walker with ideas for various physical activities. Its contactless heart monitor and facial recognition system can detect the user’s emotional state while they grab some groceries or visit an art gallery, providing valuable feedback on whether the activity was enjoyable or overly stressful.

The end goal is to deploy a fleet of FriWalk aids that connect users via a “cyberphysical” social network, which shares interests between groups and notifies them when an interesting activity is taking place. The system will be tested by 100 seniors in Spain, Italy and England between now and the project’s closing date in 2018, helped by €4.3 million ($4.8 million) in funding from the European Commission.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Siemens Blog

FBI chiefs want databases exempt from privacy protections

The FBI has hatched a plan to prevent its colossal database of fingerprints and mugshots from falling under the auspices of the Privacy Act. The bureau wants a series of exemptions from the law, including the requirement to tell people, when asked, that they’re listed on the system. The feds also want to remove the requirement for people listed on the database to be able to correct any errors in their file. Naturally, the EFF and 44 other privacy groups have protested the move, sending a letter to the Department of Justice asking for an extension on the 21-day consultation period to debate the issue properly.

The Washington Post has spoken to people within the bureau, who claim that the exemptions are necessary for it to work. Representatives say that the rules need to be tweaked, or else investigations would be compromised by people finding out they were on the database. It also pledges that its facial-recognition technology wouldn’t be used for political purposes — for instance to identify attendees at a presidential rally.

One of the issues that the EFF wants to highlight is that the database, named NGI (Next Generation Identification), “disproportionately impacts people of color.” It’s been established that facial recognition technology struggles with non-white faces. For instance, HP laptops released in 2009 were unable to track African American faces, and last year, Google Photos had similar struggles.

If the FBI is going to use this technology as its first weapon in the war on crime, it’s probably wise that it, you know, actually works. But that’s not going to happen without public oversight, a proper debate and some concession that absolute power isn’t great for due process. After all, while the NSA was trawling all of our mobile phone data without people realizing, it passed around people’s nude selfies for a laugh. So we wouldn’t be surprised if the public has a very real concern for being in this database.

Source: Federal Register, WaPo, EFF

AI that picked Oscar winners could predict the next President

There’s artificial intelligence in numbers. Unanimous A.I., a silicon valley startup, has built a platform that taps into the collective knowledge of a group of people to form its own opinions, preferences and surprisingly accurate predictions. The software called UNU successfully guessed last year’s Oscar winners (11 out of 15 categories) and most recently predicted the winning horses in the Kentucky Derby. Now the artificial swarm intelligence is hosting its first AMA on Reddit, where it will respond to questions pertaining to the US presidential elections.

Unlike robotic AIs that are being built to emulate the human brain, UNU works with existing human intelligence instead of replicating it. The platform, which is open to public, allows a group of people to come together and converge on an answer in real time. While a swarm of seven predicted the Oscars, the Derby decision came from 20 people. For the AMA at 1 P.M. ET today, the group that will make political predictions is expected to range from 100 to 200 people.

The participants will come from UNU’s current user base that has already answered fantasy football and cooking queries. The decision-making process, which will be live on Youtube through the AMA, is straightforward. When the users sign in, they are presented with a question and its potential answers. The group has 60 seconds to drag a puck towards a chosen answer with a graphical magnet. While each participant can only see their own puck, the group arrives at a collective decision that best represents the intelligence of the swarm.

UNU’s human-based group intelligence follows the natural workings of certain insects like bees that tend to find solutions in swarms. There’s a lot to learn from the hard working honey producers that thrive in togetherness, live in well-organized colonies and work in groups to find solutions for their striped community. As supporting evidence from nature, Louis Rosenberg, CEO of Unanimous A.I., points to a study that looked into the decision making tactics of honey bees.

Around early summer every year, a couple of hundred bee scouts split from a hive of thousands in search of a new home. When they spot a branch in a tree or a hole in the wall with the potential to make a good nest, they bring that information back to the colony, where instead of casting buzz votes, the bees break into a “waggle dance” to communicate their preferences.

Based on the bodily movements, the swarm reaches a decision. “They negotiate in real time through body vibrations and converge on a solution for the whole group,” Rosenberg tells Engadget. “Biologists have found that bees will pick the optimal site almost 80% of the time. No individual bee can understand the question or find and evaluate the site. But when a group of bees form swarm intelligence, it functions as a brain of brains. It [operates] like a neural network.”

Like the bees that swarm or birds that flock together, the artificial intelligence of UNU is based on the idea that people can be smarter together. “Nature has shown that by allowing groups of similar organisms to function in a closed loop system they can become smarter than any single individual in that system,” says Rosenberg. “In fact it becomes a super-organism.” The collective wisdom gives the swarm the ability to make decisions, have opinions and even take on a unique personality.

Since the system relies entirely on human knowledge and even instinct, it’s easy to think of it as a kind of crowdsourcing platform for opinions and intelligence. But according to Rosenberg, UNU doesn’t work like a poll or a survey that finds the average of the opinions in a group. Instead, it creates a platform that amplifies a group’s intelligence to create its own. For instance, when predicting the Derby winners, the swarm picked the first four horses accurately to win $11,000 in a grand bet called Superfecta. But individually, when asked to make the same predictions, none of the participants had more than one winning horse.

“Collectively, they make an expert,” says Rosenberg. “The individuals who participate in the swarm don’t have the answers that the swarm does. They got one horse right on an average. But even though no single individual in that swarm came close, the swarm was right.”

Experiments in predictions, like picking Derby winners or Trump’s potential VP, validate the premise of UNU: The intelligence of the swarm is greater than the sum of its participants. It builds the evidence for the effectiveness of collective thinking. But it also highlights the fact that an intelligent system can be built with human knowledge at its core. “We see swarm intelligence as a way to build systems that keep humans in the loop,” says Rosenberg. “Unlike AI, [where] we’re creating an intelligence from scratch that we have no reason to believe will share human values or interests or even act in ways that we as humans understand. When we’re building artificial neural networks we’re building an alien intelligence. But with swarm intelligence, we’re amplifying what’s most human about us rather than replacing it. UNU inherently has human values and interests in the system.”

While the human swarm system sounds safer than its robotic peers, its accuracy and superiority is yet to make an impact beyond the predictive format where it’s currently being tested. But eventually, if the idea sticks and takes on a large number of global users, UNU could turn into a “super expert”. Rosenberg presents the idea of a medical swarm of doctors that can accurately diagnose a disease. “Instead of relying on a single expert you’d have a group of experts who can collectively come up with answers that are significantly more insightful than individuals working on their own,” he says.​ “What we’ll see is the ability to democratize expertise.”

Wrap yourself in a cone of sound with this directional speaker

If you work in a crowded office, you’re probably considerate enough to wear a pair of headphones so you don’t disturb your co-workers with your raucous tunes. But headphones can be uncomfortable, plus they’re cumbersome to put on and off if all you want to do is catch a few seconds of a YouTube clip. The Soundlazer VR, however, offers a different solution. Debuting today on Kickstarter, it’s a unique speaker tech which aims to resolve that issue by surrounding you in a private cloud of sound.

Inside the Soundlazer VR is a slew of tiny little speakers that combine to create what founder Richard Haberkern says is a new directional audio system. It uses something called planar wave technology, which essentially broadcasts sound through parallel wave patterns that bounce off a curved reflector. “It’s like taking a bunch of flashlights side-by-side and pointing them at your ears,” he says. Haberkern is a serial inventor who’s done several successful projects on Kickstarter before, like the GPS Cookie and the Lumapad.

Sound reflectors aren’t anything new of course, but Haberkern’s take on it is a little different. He says he developed specific planar wave drivers that would work with a linear reflector instead of the more common parabolic models. This, he says, results in an “ultra high bandwidth” directional audio beam. Plus, unlike most parabolic reflectors, the Soundlazer’s slim design looks a little more appealing when hanging over your desk.

Haberkern gave us a brief demonstration of the Soundlazer VR in our San Francisco office. He hung it over a desk with a wire hanging system which is adjustable thanks to a spring loaded cable locking mechanism. He says the recommended height is around three to four feet above the desk, but you can of course change it to your preference. You’ll still need to connect it to a power outlet (via a standard 120/240VAC universal power adapter), but Haberkern says the power is delivered via the hanging steel cables so you won’t see any messy wires. It transmits your computer’s audio through Bluetooth. There’s also a two channel stereo amplifier built in.

I sat underneath the Soundlazer VR and watched a few YouTube music videos on the connected laptop. I heard the sound pretty loud and clear, as if they were transmitted through regular speakers. The audio level is consistent from the top of the unit all the way down, so you could theoretically use it with an adjustable-height sit-stand desk without issue. Then I got up from the desk and walked a few feet away. The audio gradually became softer and more muffled, and at around eight feet apart, I couldn’t make out much of the song’s lyrics at all. That crisp audio I heard just a few minutes ago was suddenly just background noise.

At this point, you might be wondering why Haberkern added “VR” to the product name. He says it’s because the Soundlazer surrounds you in a “virtual reality of sound,” not because it has anything to do with VR. You could theoretically use it while wearing a VR headset underneath, which would presumably be more comfortable than having to wear headphones along with the headset, but that’s sort of a stretch. It’s unfortunate, because the use of “VR” here is pretty misleading.

That said, Haberkern also added VR to the name to differentiate it from a previous product he invented a few years ago which bore the same Soundlazer moniker. The original Soundlazer, however, used tiny ultrasonic transducers to project audio, which resulted in a much lower fidelity than he wanted. Still, he took lessons learned from that project and applied it to the “VR” edition he’s pitching right now.

Ideally, Haberkern wants Soundlazer VR to be used in an office environment much like ours, with desks next to each other. Still, I wonder if that’s entirely practical. Even at eight feet away from the computer, I could still hear audio coming from it. Haberkern says that we’d eventually adjust to the audio levels so that we’d hear only what was coming out of our own SoundLazer VR units, but I’d have to use it on a regular basis to be sure. Additionally, the fact that you’d have to actually hang it from the ceiling sounds like way too much work for normal people. That said, Haberkern is selling a smaller desktop version of the Soundlazer VR that just sits on the table, no wire installation required.

The Junior version of the Soundlazer VR starts at around $169 on Kickstarter while the “full” size model starts at $209. If the campaign is successful, Haberkern hopes to ship the product by October this year.

Source: Kickstarter