3D-printed Stradivarius replica is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing

Why it matters to you

This 3D-printed replica can put one of the world’s most famous violins into your hands.

Usually we associate 3D printing with ultramodern technologies like cutting-edge medical implants or futuristic space fabrics. Music technology researcher Harris Matzaridis’ ViolinoDigitale project has gone in totally the opposite direction, however.

What Matzaridis has created through the digital magic of additive manufacturing is an accurate replica of an original Stradivarius violin, the Sunrise Stradivari — one of the incredibly expensive and rare master violins built by the Italian family Stradivari during the 17th and 18th centuries.

“ViolinoDigitale is essentially all about developing a specific ‘making’ process as an additional tool to better understand the sound mechanics of the best-sounding musical instruments out there,” Matzaridis told Digital Trends. “With 3D-printed violin replicas, anyone can have a small ‘taste’ of an old master instrument, without wearing out the original. 3D-printed violins can incorporate a fresh approach not only in instrument making, but also in acoustics research studies.”

The amazing project took two years to create, and required the printing of more than 40 individual parts, as well as some impressive (and more old school) handcrafting. Many of the 3D-printed parts were printed using a wood filament. “The hardest overall challenge was to make a functional violin that does not deform or break under string tension, while sounding rich, fully natural and as least plastic as possible,” Matzaridis continued.

While we’ll admit to having something of a tin ear for the finer points of musicology, it seems that Matzaridis succeeded — since not only does the finished piece look like the instrument it’s meant to, Matzaridis says that it shares acoustic and tonal similarities with its inspiration.

Next up, Matzaridis said the plan is to build more violin replicas, along with larger acoustic instruments.

“Museums or research institutions can freely ask for their violins to be replicated for their museum indoor use, it is something that can be done as we speak,” Matzaridis concluded. “Also any organization or tech exhibition can invite me to speak and showcase my work in their premises. The violin is playable so they can even invite a violinist of their choice to play it so everyone can have a chance to hear it in person. I am currently constantly analyzing audio results, making comparative tests between printed and non-printed violins and preparing for academic journals’ proposals to publish those results.”

Moderating explicit and illegal content on Facebook isn’t getting any easier

Why it matters to you

Finding a way to deal with the explicit or illegal content on Facebook remaining an ongoing and constantly evolving issue.

Facebook has come a long way since its days of connecting college students to those in other dorms. More than a decade and a billion users later, the social network has become a powerful hub of content, but with that power comes great responsibility. And those who must bear the brunt of that responsibility are tasked with the rather onerous duty of evaluating potential cases of revenge pornography and “sextortion” — more than 50,000 times a month.

Per a leaked document first obtained by The Guardian, the social media platform ultimately disabled more than 14,000 accounts as a result of sexual abuse, with 33 of the cases involving children. While these may seem like gargantuan numbers, they could represent just the tip of the iceberg. The Guardian reports that because abusive content must be reported (and is not proactively sought out), the true extent of abuse on the platform could be far larger than even Facebook realizes.

Not only is scale an issue but in some sense, scope presents a problem as well. Moderators often have trouble following Facebook’s complex and sometimes ambiguous policies, with a source telling The Guardian, “Sexual policy is the one where moderators make most mistakes It is very complex.” But Facebook says that it is actively working to improve these processes. “We constantly review and improve our policies,” said Monika Bickert, ‎ head of global policy management at Facebook. “These are complex areas but we are determined to get it right.”

Facebook has come under fire in recent months for how it handles some of these “complex areas,” particularly with regard to child pornography. In March, the company came under fire after it failed to remove “dozens of images and pages devoted to apparent child pornography” flagged by the BBC. At the time, Facebook said that it reviewed the material in question and “removed all items that were illegal or against our standards.” The company added, “We take this matter extremely seriously and we continue to improve our reporting and take-down measures.”

But it’s still a dicey issue. Facebook’s manual on how to address various sexual abuse cases is no shorter than 65 slides long and simply cannot address the full breadth of potentially problematic content that may appear online.

“Not all disagreeable or disturbing content violates our community standards,” Facebook said. “For this reason we offer people who use Facebook the ability to customize and control what they see by unfollowing, blocking or hiding posts, people, pages and applications they don’t want to see.”

All the same, the social media platform says it is committed to “building better tools to keep our community safe,” noting, “We’re going to make it simpler to report problems to us, faster for our reviewers to determine which posts violate our standards and easier for them to contact law enforcement if someone needs help.”

Volvo’s new self-driving truck follows trash collectors like a dog

Why it matters to you

Volvo’s self-driving garbage truck may make trash collection safer and more sustainable.

Garbage collection is an important profession but it’s not the most glamorous. As artificial intelligence seems to be integrated into every job, it’s about time AI help us clean up waste.

Volvo announced last week that it has started testing a self-driving garbage truck in partnership with Swedish waste and recycling company Renova. Rather than entirely automating the task, the truck is designed to work alongside a trash collector, reversing from house to house to make garbage collection more efficient.

“There is amazing potential to transform the swift pace of technical developments in automation into practical benefits for customers and, more broadly, society in general,” Lars Stenqvist, Chief Technology Officer at Volvo Group, said in a statement.

“Our self-driving refuse truck is leading the way in this field globally, and one of several exciting autonomous innovations we are working with right now,” he added.

The truck uses sensors and GPS to map each new neighborhood it enters. It reverses to follow the trash collector as he/she walks between trash cans, meaning the trash collector doesn’t waste timing walking around the vehicle, allowing him/her to spend more time out of the cab. Volvo thinks this could make collection safer for the collector and those around him.

“One important benefit of the new technology is a reduction in the risk of occupational injuries, such as wear in knee joints – otherwise a common ailment among staff working with refuse collection,” said Stenqvist.

Volvo’s garbage truck borrows much of its technology from the company’s autonomous mining vehicle, which it unveiled last year. It is equipped with sensors that help it detect objects in its surroundings and navigate around them safely.

Beyond improving efficiency, Volvo claims its autonomous truck will be more sustainable than traditional methods since it is designed for optimum performance, steering, and speed. These combined features would help decrease emissions and fuel consumption.

The trials will run until the end of 2017.

Volvo’s new self-driving truck follows trash collectors like a dog

Why it matters to you

Volvo’s self-driving garbage truck may make trash collection safer and more sustainable.

Garbage collection is an important profession but it’s not the most glamorous. As artificial intelligence seems to be integrated into every job, it’s about time AI help us clean up waste.

Volvo announced last week that it has started testing a self-driving garbage truck in partnership with Swedish waste and recycling company Renova. Rather than entirely automating the task, the truck is designed to work alongside a trash collector, reversing from house to house to make garbage collection more efficient.

“There is amazing potential to transform the swift pace of technical developments in automation into practical benefits for customers and, more broadly, society in general,” Lars Stenqvist, Chief Technology Officer at Volvo Group, said in a statement.

“Our self-driving refuse truck is leading the way in this field globally, and one of several exciting autonomous innovations we are working with right now,” he added.

The truck uses sensors and GPS to map each new neighborhood it enters. It reverses to follow the trash collector as he/she walks between trash cans, meaning the trash collector doesn’t waste timing walking around the vehicle, allowing him/her to spend more time out of the cab. Volvo thinks this could make collection safer for the collector and those around him.

“One important benefit of the new technology is a reduction in the risk of occupational injuries, such as wear in knee joints – otherwise a common ailment among staff working with refuse collection,” said Stenqvist.

Volvo’s garbage truck borrows much of its technology from the company’s autonomous mining vehicle, which it unveiled last year. It is equipped with sensors that help it detect objects in its surroundings and navigate around them safely.

Beyond improving efficiency, Volvo claims its autonomous truck will be more sustainable than traditional methods since it is designed for optimum performance, steering, and speed. These combined features would help decrease emissions and fuel consumption.

The trials will run until the end of 2017.

Robot-made Voxel chair is 3D printed from a single, unbroken strand of plastic

Why it matters to you

This innovative 3D printing process not only creates cool designs, it’s faster and uses less material, too.

Fancy ditching your regular office chair for a futuristic throne built by a robot? Of course you do. That’s why you should check out this amazing plastic creation, conjured up using the magic of 3D-printing software by designers from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.

Unlike regular printing, which involves a layer-by-layer printing process, this chair was created by printing a continuous line of melted plastic, a bit like squirting molten glue out of a glue gun and using it to make a unique-looking object.

“The process we developed allows us to not print in layers like with normal 3D printing, but in three dimensions,” Gilles Retsin, co-director of the Design Computation Lab behind the chair, told Digital Trends. “This is very difficult to control, because you have to prevent the nozzle hitting structures that are already printed. Our software allows exactly that. It’s the first software that allows users to design objects directly with the toolpaths themselves, and send this data directly to a robot. This makes large-scale robotic fabrication and 3D printing available for a large public. It goes from academic exercise to direct application.”

The chair itself is modeled after the famous S-shaped Panton chair, created by Danish designer Verner Panton. It’s called the Voxel chair, named after so-called “voxels” which act as pixels in three-dimensional space. It is made from transparent, biodegradable PLA plastic.

“This process is very cheap and fast, allowing for larger objects to be manufactured,” Retsin continued. “The ability to print in the air saves a lot of time in the printing process. you can go much faster and you have to use less material.”

While there are no plans to bring the chair to market any time soon, Retsin says that the software will be released some point this year.

“We think it’s very interesting not only for architects and designers, but specifically for engineers in automobile and aerospace,” Retsin said. “This basically allows them to really optimize and tailor large 3D-printed structures and therefore save lots of material. The software essentially offers something that no other software on the market does now. Some structure optimization softwares allow to chose a pattern for internal structures, but as a designer or engineer you can’t play around with it that much. This is a game changer and the first software that allows you to directly design and organize millions of toolpaths for 3D printing.”

With names like Burf Pink and Bank Butt, a paint algorithm fails spectacularly

Why it matters to you

AI have proven to be incredibly helpful when they succeed but they are also pretty funny when they falter.

Algorithms have outperformed humans at everything from board games to driving, but we are still the masters of creativity. Case in point: Naming paint colors.

Computer scientist and artist Janelle Shane developed a neural network that creates and names new paint colors. It sounds like an easy enough task. You and I might even match the pros at Sherwin-Williams. Shane’s AI, on the other hand, struggled.

Shane fed her neural net around 7,700 of Sherwin-Williams’ paint colors, including their red/green/blue color values, and told the algorithm to create new colors while assigning them appealing names. Maybe it would come up with Sensuous Cyan, Melancholy Mauve, or Smokey Drapes. (Those are our attempts, at least.)

Instead, some of the standout names included Dorkwood, Stanky Bean, Gray Pubic, and Bank Butt. Here’s another small sample in the image below.

Janelle Shane

In the neural net’s defense, it did invent some more clever — and potentially useful — names, like Power Gray, Ghasty Pink, and Rover White. But the majority came out in the vein of Burf Pink and Rose Hork.

And to be fair, the task was pretty tough for an algorithm that did not have that much context to work with.

“The names in the original dataset are highly varied and very dependent on associations with words and concepts outside the dataset,” Shane told Digital Trends. “A neural network is good at learning recurring patterns, but since a word was rarely used twice in the dataset, the neural network didn’t have a good chance of being able to determine that a geranium, for example, is a flower that’s often red or pink.”

Without context or an outline of what it is doing, the neural network is grasping for words. But that doesn’t mean the AI was totally incompetent and sometimes its names sounded pretty sophisticated even if they didn’t make much aesthetic sense. Shane explains: “The other thing that neural networks are good at is figuring out how to generate pronounceable English words. The neural net was able to come up with new words that weren’t in the original dataset — but had no context that might tell it that words like ‘butt’ and ‘hork’ were to be avoided.”

See more of Shane’s creations over on her Tumblr page.

With names like Burf Pink and Bank Butt, a paint algorithm fails spectacularly

Why it matters to you

AI have proven to be incredibly helpful when they succeed but they are also pretty funny when they falter.

Algorithms have outperformed humans at everything from board games to driving, but we are still the masters of creativity. Case in point: Naming paint colors.

Computer scientist and artist Janelle Shane developed a neural network that creates and names new paint colors. It sounds like an easy enough task. You and I might even match the pros at Sherwin-Williams. Shane’s AI, on the other hand, struggled.

Shane fed her neural net around 7,700 of Sherwin-Williams’ paint colors, including their red/green/blue color values, and told the algorithm to create new colors while assigning them appealing names. Maybe it would come up with Sensuous Cyan, Melancholy Mauve, or Smokey Drapes. (Those are our attempts, at least.)

Instead, some of the standout names included Dorkwood, Stanky Bean, Gray Pubic, and Bank Butt. Here’s another small sample in the image below.

Janelle Shane

In the neural net’s defense, it did invent some more clever — and potentially useful — names, like Power Gray, Ghasty Pink, and Rover White. But the majority came out in the vein of Burf Pink and Rose Hork.

And to be fair, the task was pretty tough for an algorithm that did not have that much context to work with.

“The names in the original dataset are highly varied and very dependent on associations with words and concepts outside the dataset,” Shane told Digital Trends. “A neural network is good at learning recurring patterns, but since a word was rarely used twice in the dataset, the neural network didn’t have a good chance of being able to determine that a geranium, for example, is a flower that’s often red or pink.”

Without context or an outline of what it is doing, the neural network is grasping for words. But that doesn’t mean the AI was totally incompetent and sometimes its names sounded pretty sophisticated even if they didn’t make much aesthetic sense. Shane explains: “The other thing that neural networks are good at is figuring out how to generate pronounceable English words. The neural net was able to come up with new words that weren’t in the original dataset — but had no context that might tell it that words like ‘butt’ and ‘hork’ were to be avoided.”

See more of Shane’s creations over on her Tumblr page.

Nest preparing new security camera with 4K video, fresh design

Nest isn’t resting, releasing a fresh indoor camera with new features.

Nest, perhaps known best for its popular smart thermostat, is reportedly ready to refresh its Nest Cam camera with new features and a higher resolution. The Google-owned company most recently refreshed its camera lineup with an outdoor-ready version near the end of 2016.

It’s a 4K camera … but you’ll only get 1080p out of it in the end.

The new Nest Cam will have a sensor capable of recording in 4K resolution, but will use this new resolution to simply enable dynamic zooming while preserving a 1080p resolution stream to the user. When it detects motion, it will be able to digitally zoom in to a specific point for a better view.

The refreshed hardware will round out with a new USB-C power source, and the lens will get an LED ring around it to indicate it’s recording. Android Police claims the design is similar to that of the current Nest Outdoor camera … but the new camera is designed for indoor use. Pricing is reportedly set at a steep $300.

The new Nest Cam is expected to launch by the end of the month, so we’ll find out all of the details soon enough.

LG launches the X Venture, an affordable active smartphone

Bear Gryll-types and the accident prone: if the Galaxy Active is too much for you, LG’s offering a cheaper alternative.

Looking for a rugged device that won’t break the bank? LG wants you to consider its second-generation X Venture smartphone. It’s made for people who are active and it’s cheap enough that, if you’re on AT&T, you could probably grab one as a backup simply for adventurous weekends.

The LG X Venture features a 5.2-inch Full HD In-Cell touch display. It runs Android 7.0 Nougat and features IP68 water and dust resistance, a front-facing fingerprint sensor embedded into a physical Home button along with two other physical navigation keys, and a whopping 4100mAh battery. It also comes with a 16-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 5-megapixel wide-angle front-facing camera.

Its other specifications may leave a bit to be desired, however, especially if you’re eager for flagship-worthy specs. The X Venture is powered by a low-end Snapdragon 435 processor and 2GB of RAM, though it should be enough for traversing the trails and slogging through mud pits—if that’s your thing. The LG X Venture is an AT&T exclusive for now.

The trickling news of LG’s rugged smartphone appears to be perfectly timed with the alleged leaks of Samsung’s Galaxy S8 Active hitting the scene. It’s hard to ignore the similarities, too; Not only is the X Venture also an AT&T exclusive, but the X Venture is also equipped with a QuickButton on the side, which is similar to the Galaxy Active’s own quick launch hardware button. LG’s can be customized to launch your favorite app, too.

This particular smartphone is much cheaper, however. Rather than charge full price for a decidedly full featured phone, the LG Venture X is well-suited as a secondary device with its $260 price tag. It’ll be available exclusively at AT&T beginning May 26.

See at AT&T

MrMobile at Google I/O: Only boring if you’re not paying attention

Google! A giant among giants who other giants think are giant (yeah, how’s that for writing?) Google’s I/O conference this year has been plagued by the specter of yawns from journalists who wonder where all the fun of the previous year has disappeared to. But what were they expecting? It’s a developers conference!

I’m Michael Fisher, AKA MrMobile, and while it’s not splashy or gadget-heavy, there’s a lot to be interested in coming from I/O this year. From simple things like easy ways to save battery life on your smartwatch, to the ease of the Kotlin programming language, to the 50 billion apps a DAY that Google scans for malware, there’s a lot of cool things to do. Check out this video and Android Central’s coverage of the event for all the reasons you should be excited about what we saw at Google I/O.

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