Lose It app promises to log your meal just by taking its photo
Keeping track of what you eat has proven to be a pretty effective method in aiding weight loss. Studies show that food diaries not only help people manage their daily caloric intake, but it also just helps them be more aware of what they’re putting in their bodies. Unfortunately, noting down your every meal can be tedious and time-consuming. But what if you could do so just by taking a photo of your food? That’s exactly what Lose It, a food-tracking app, is trying to do with a brand new feature called Snap It. Using a combination of machine learning and Lose It’s own vast database, the app aspires to figure out what you’re eating based on your photo alone.
Now, the feature is still in beta, so it’s not perfect. For one thing, it’s not fully automated — you can’t just take a photo and it’ll know exactly what’s in the food. But for what it is, Snap It comes pretty close. What you do is take a photo of what you’re eating, and then the app will analyze the image and spit out a list of suggestions of what it thinks it is. Pick the option that fits it the most, and then you’ll be brought to a screen where you can add more details, like whether that piece of fried chicken was a thigh or a breast and how much of it you ate. If there are multiple foods on the plate or if the app just didn’t guess the food correctly, you can also just enter it manually via the Add Food button at the bottom of the photo.
I tried out the app for a week and while it didn’t always recognize the foods I ate, it did well enough where I was still impressed. I found that the list of suggestions based on the photos almost always brought up at least one correct answer. When I took a photo of a bucket of fried chicken, for example, the very first suggestion was “Fried Chicken”, followed by “Chicken Thigh” and “Pork Chop.” Sure, that last one wasn’t right, but it was still a pretty good guess. The same happened when I took a photo of strawberries — it got it right the first time.
Where it got a little tricky was when it was a photo of multiple foods. I snapped an image of a plate of chicken, collard greens and mashed potatoes. The app could only spot the chicken and the mashed potatoes, but not the greens. But in a photo of fried rice, spinach and chicken, the app was able to recognize all three instantly. In yet another picture of a culotte steak drenched in a cheese-based sauce, the app was pretty stumped as to what the sauce was, but did recognize that there was a steak. And it missed the arugula and tomatoes that were underneath the steak altogether, because, of course, they weren’t visible on camera.
It’s issues like this that make food tracking via photography such an inexact science. A photo of a bowl of curry won’t be enough for you to figure out exactly what kind of vegetables and spices are in it and just looking at a salad dressing won’t be able to tell you if it has any sugar. “That’s why we’re doing this semi-automated to start,” says CEO Charles Teague. “The idea that you could look at a picture and instantly know what it is, it just wasn’t going to work all the time.”
With the assumption that it was never going to be 100 percent accurate, the goal of the Snap It feature, at least for now, is simply to make it easier to log your diet. And I have to say I found to be true in my case. Prior to using the app, I wasn’t a fan of keeping a food diary exactly because it seemed like such a hassle. But using the camera to snap my food and having at least a little bit of automation made it easy enough that I found myself logging my diet all the time.
That, Teague says, is the point of Lose It in the first place. The company started around 2008 with only around 50,000 foods in its database. Now, it has millions of entries. Recently, Lose It added the ability to add foods by scanning a bar code. It even has location services to see if you’re within walking distance of a restaurant it recognizes — usually a chain — and when you go to make an entry in the app, it’ll instantly suggest the kinds of foods you can get at that restaurant. The next step is machine learning, and though the Snap It feature is still a little rough around the edges, it certainly has promise.
“I think our strategy is great because when we start getting all these photos of food, it becomes a dataset we can use,” Teague says. “We’ll have photo data, food data and eventually, location data. There’ll be a lot more context around the user that can make the app a lot smarter.” So even if a photo might not indicate that a dish is a curry, for example, the fact that it was taken in the vicinity of an Indian restaurant might teach the app to at least suggest it as a possibility. “It could be the combination of the photo and the location that could reveal very specifically what it is.”
The food identification might be semi-automated right now, but Teague ensures me that he’s pretty ambitious in what he thinks the technology will eventually be able to do. “Our expectations are that this will generate huge amounts of data that we can use to continue training and improving the machine learning,” he says. “That’s going to drive more accuracy in what we recognize, and the ability to recognize even more things.”
“Each photo that you log will become a piece of data that we use to train the next generation of the app,” he says. “We might even be able to estimate serving sizes.”
Mercedes will put an ‘EQ’ badge on its best electric cars
After confirming that it has quietly been working on a new sub-brand that will host a contemporary line of EVs, Mercedes today unveiled at the Paris Motor Show what it believes is the future of electric mobility. It’s called Generation EQ and the first we’re seeing of it is the new 402bhp SUV coupe concept pictured above, complete with twin electric motors, zero-emission drivetrain technology and a range of up to 311 miles. Like VW, Mercedes is putting it cars firmly in Tesla territory.
Mercedes says all of its new electric vehicles will share one overall architecture, allowing it to build SUVs, saloons, coupes and other models using its “modular building-block system.” It’s a scalable approach that allows the company to support “a wide variety of wheelbase and track measurements as well as electric motors and battery combinations.” Put simply, batteries and power outputs can be switched quickly, allowing customers to tailor an EQ car to their own specifications.
According to Mercedes, the EQ name stands for “Electric Intelligence” and is aimed at making its electric sports cars more mainstream. “The mobility of the future at Mercedes-Benz will stand on four pillars: Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric. ‘Generation EQ’ is the logical fusion of all four pillars,” remarks Dr Dieter Zetsche, CEO of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes‑Benz Cars. “The emission-free automobile is the future. And our new EQ brand goes far beyond electric vehicles. EQ stands for a comprehensive electric ecosystem of services, technologies and innovations.”
To boost the efficiency of the new SUV, Mercedes ensured the Generation EQ has tightly-joined body panels, hid the windscreen wipers underneath the top edge of the bonnet and concealed the door handles in favor of remote opening. Models will be constructed from a mixture of high-strength steel, aluminium and carbon-fiber, and the lithium-ion batteries — manufactured by Deutsche Accumotive, a battery company owned by Mercedes parent Daimler — are mounted low in floor of the of the frame to increase performance (the Generation EQ can do 0-60mph in under five seconds) but also make its cars safer.
As you would expect, Mercedes’ EQ range will also feature the latest technology inside the cars. They will utilize HERE’s mapping technology in its driver assistance systems, which will underpin its autonomous driving technology. The software will interact with intelligent sensors located all around the car that feed back data its own systems but also other vehicles on the road that have Car-to-X features installed. This system intelligently exchanges information with other cars on the road to further prevent accidents.
Mercedes says that the “electro-look” SUV is expected to go into production from 2019, putting it in direct competition with the Audi e-tron quattro and Tesla Model X. Like Tesla, Mercedes will offer branded “wallboxes” that can be used for fast charging but also plans to introduce wireless induction charging. The German automaker already builds its own home batteries, which it says can be used to store excess energy from a customer’s existing solar setup and provide a “green” source of power for their vehicle.
Source: Mercedes
‘The Revenant’ director is making a VR short with Lucasfilm
While the jury is still out on whether virtual reality is the future of film, some of Hollywood’s biggest filmmakers are dedicating a lot of time to the medium. Deadline reports that two-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is teaming up with three-time Oscar winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki to work on a new VR short.
It will focus on “the intense and excruciating experience of a group of immigrants and refugees crossing the border between Mexico and the United States” and sees Inarritu and Lubezki reunite after have previously worked together on the critically-acclaimed The Revenant and Birdman.
The virtual reality piece has been four years in the making and will utilize the smarts of Lucasfilm’s ILMxLAB team, who will build the world and characters. ILMxLAB is the new immersive entertainment division inside Industrial Light & Magic that previously created the Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine VR experience for HTC Vive.
The new project is due to be released next spring, after the presidential elections. It’s not yet known how it will be viewed — whether it’ll get a theatrical release or shown at smaller VR-specific events — but having so many big names attached to the short can only build interest in the emergent virtual reality movie scene.
Via: VR Focus
Source: Deadline
Apple CEO Tim Cook to Field Questions at Utah Tech Tour With Senator Orrin Hatch
Apple CEO Tim Cook will participate in a Q&A session with U.S. senator Orrin Hatch this Friday, as part of the senator’s Utah Tech Tour (via AppleInsider).
The event is being held to highlight the state’s technology community, and the Apple chief is scheduled to give a short address before taking questions from Hatch and members of the public. An online form has also been set up for submitting questions for possible inclusion in the Q&A.
It’s not clear what topics will be up for discussion during the event, although Apple’s run-in with the government over encryption and privacy issues following the San Bernardino shooting case is likely to be on the agenda.
Senator Hatch serves as the Chairman of the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force, and in April he invited members of the Senate to a special Q&A session with one of the lawyers Apple hired to head its legal team during its dispute with the FBI.
The Utah Tech Tour takes place at the Grand America in Salt Lake City, from 5.30pm to 7pm MDT on Friday, September 30. The event is open to the public. Tickets of limited availability can be ordered online via the Utah Tech Tour website.
Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
Tag: Tim Cook
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Apple Opening R&D Center in Zhongguancun, China’s ‘Silicon Valley’
Apple has set up its first research and development center in China in Zhongguancun Science Park, according to a statement released by the Zhongguancun Park Management Committee (via DigiTimes).
Zhongguancun is a technology hub situated in the Haidian District in northwestern Beijing and is very well known in China. Often referred to as “China’s Silicon Valley”, the area has gathered nearly 20,000 technology enterprises since its emergence in the 1950s. The hub has many local prestigious academy affiliations, and is home to research centers for several global tech companies, including Google, Intel, AMD, Sony, and Microsoft.
Zhongguancun main street and plaza in northwestern Beijing, China..
Apple’s new R&D center in Zhongguancun has reportedly registered a capital of $15 million, with total investment likely to reach $45 million in the future, according to the park’s press release. The center will employ a total of 500 staff and focus on the development of “computer software and hardware products, communication, audio and video devices, as well as advanced technologies for consumer electronics products and the information industry”.
The R&D facility is expected to complete in 2016 and to be used to integrate Apple’s engineering and business teams to increase regional sales and services, according to media reports in China.
The news comes on the heels of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s announcement last month during a visit to China that an R&D center would be coming to the country “by the end of the year”.
The move has been seen as a response to the iPhone’s dwindling returns in the country as consumers opt for low-cost alternatives available on the Chinese market. Apple has also experienced a series of setbacks in the region this year, including the closure of the iTunes and iBooks store and a number of lawsuits that have prevented it from being able to focus on gaining traction in the country’s lucrative mobile segment. Although once Apple’s second largest market in the world, the company announced during July’s earnings report that its revenue in China had dropped 33 percent year-over-year.
Apple has set up similar R&D centers in Japan, Israel, and the UK, and is said to be planning similar facilities in Canada, India, Indonesia and Vietnam to take advantage of local resources.
Tag: China
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Raise some Hell on your commute with the ‘Doom’ soundtrack
In case you wanted to listen to the crushing beats and guitar riffs of Doom’s soundtrack during your daily trip to work or school, now’s your chance. Composer Mick Gordon’s industrial-metal score is available to purchase and stream from Google Play, iTunes and Spotify. A tweet from Gordon outlines what’s available in the digital version: 31 tracks with new mixes spanning a 128 minute runtime. And at least a few pentagrams and numbers of the beast if you run it through a spectrogram.
It isn’t the Trent Reznor score we were promised for Doom 3, but it’s probably as close as we’ll ever get. And I mean that in the absolute best way possible. There isn’t a physical release (yet) but given the popularity of those it probably isn’t too far off. Don’t have $10 to spare for the download? Well, there’s always YouTube.
#DOOM Soundtrack out now!🤘
💀31 Tracks
💀128 Minutes
💀All-new Mixes
Available here:@iTunes | @GooglePlay | @Spotifyhttps://t.co/0nSgpAF2ZJ— Mick Gordon (@Mick_Gordon) September 28, 2016
Via: Game Informer
Source: Google Play, iTunes, Spotify, Mick Gordon (Twitter)
Soft Gold OnePlus 3 finally going on sale in India from Oct. 1
The OnePlus 3 is one of the best mid-range phones you can buy today, and those looking to pick up the handset in India will be able to select the Soft Gold color option starting October 1. The phone is sold exclusively on Amazon India for ₹27,999 ($420).
Mark your calendars, fans! The #OnePlus3SoftGold will go on sale on October 1st, only on @amazonIN. pic.twitter.com/yhKkpNswlE
— OnePlus India (@OnePlus_IN) September 28, 2016
The gold color variant is already available in the U.S., European Union, Hong Kong, and Canada.
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New Galaxy Note 7 sales resume in Korea Oct. 1 as recall expected to hit 80% completion
Samsung restarts TV commercials for the phone, throws in cheaper screen replacements for its home market.
Samsung moving towards the conclusion of its Galaxy Note 7 recall — at least in its home market of South Korea. According to Reuters, the company will restart sales of the phone on October 1, by which time it expects 80 percent of old, potentially hazardous Note 7s to have been returned.
In the run up to the new start date, Samsung has reportedly resumed Note 7 TV commercials in Korea, and to sweeten the deal it’s throwing in 50% off any repairs to the phone — including screen replacements — for customers buying a Note 7 in the month of October.
LG could take advantage of Samsung’s predicament with the timing of its V20 launch.
Elsewhere, the Galaxy Note 7 is set to go on sale again from October 28 in Europe, assuming the local Note 7 exchange program has successfully wrapped up by that point. In the U.S., the official recall program continues, with an October 21 date for new sales being rumored.
The timing of the Note 7’s Korean relaunch puts it up against LG’s V20, which hits the country’s three major carriers this week. Samsung’s local rival will be looking to take advantage of the Note 7’s ongoing publicity problem with its own high-specced, big-screened handset. Although no U.S. launch date has been confirmed for the V20 yet, it’s widely rumored to go on sale the same day new American Note 7 sales begin.
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Volkswagen’s I.D. arrives in 2020 with up to 370 mile range
VW has kicked off the Paris Motor Show with some (much needed) flair, unveiling the fully electric I.D.. The I.D. looks like something straight out of Back To The Future II, and has a suitably futuristic release date too: 2020. Volkswagen claims the 125 kW motor in the I.D. will have a huge range, landing somewhere between 250 and a pretty impressive (if true) 370 miles. You might have to wait a few years to get one, and be prepared to pay “Golf” money for it, but VW says the I.D. is actually the “ambassador” for a whole new electric line-up. For now, we took a look at the concept model right here in 2016 in Paris.
One thing’s for sure about the I.D., VW’s unlikely to get into another pickle regarding omissions (it has none). When it finally launches, the I.D. will be the first electric vehicle from VW with the company’s new “Modular Electric Drive Kit” E.V. platform — which is distinct from its current combustion, and hybrid models. We’d heard rumours that VW was planning an all electric with a pretty decent range back in August, and it looks like Volkswagen is willing to up its own ante, boosting the projected top end range to an estimated 370 miles (600Km).
There are also plans to include automated driving (called I.D. Pilot), but that’s not going to be ready until 2025, so you’ll have a few years behind the wheel yet. We’re a little early to put a price on it, but VW says it’ll cost about the same as a Golf, despite it being smaller (yet with “the generous space of a Passat”). For us, it’s all about those sweet wheels though.
Steve Dent contributed to this report.
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