iOS 11 Indoor Maps Feature Now Available at More Than 40 Airports and Malls

Starting in iOS 11, Apple introduced support for indoor maps for select malls and airports around the world. Indoor maps have been slow to roll out, but Apple has been steadily adding additional mall and airport maps since September.

Apple today began listing indoor maps for malls and airports on its iOS 11 feature availability page, giving us a clear picture of exactly where the indoor mapping feature is available for the first time.

Apple offers indoor maps at 34 airports around the world, in countries that include the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Hong Kong, the UK, and Canada.

Indoor maps for malls are more limited, but are available in several locations around the United States including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington, DC.

Apple’s indoor mapping feature provides full layouts of each mall or airport location with icons for restaurants, elevators, bathrooms, shops, and other notable landmarks. Different floors are clearly marked, making it easy to navigate through unknown areas.

For airports, Maps users can see the location of gates, terminals security checkpoints, check-in desks, and baggage claim areas, which can be helpful when in a new location. As for malls, stores can be filtered by categories like clothes, beauty, food, and shoes, so it’s quicker to find just what you’re looking for.

All of the malls and airports where the Apple Maps indoor mapping feature can be used are listed on the iOS 11 feature availability page.

Tag: Apple Maps
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Force Block extension now blasts evil ‘The Last Jedi’ spoilers in Chrome

The eighth installment in the Skywalker saga, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, is just a few days away from flooding movie theaters. Early reviews are starting to arrive, some of which herald it as the best Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back. That’s a tall order to fill, but if you want to judge for yourself without any pre-show spoilers, there is a Chrome extension just for you.

Called Force Block, the extension first arrived on the Chrome Web Store at the end of 2015. Creator Matt Tyndall realized that he couldn’t escape spoilers related to the seventh episode, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, without shutting off his internet connection. To get around that possible mind-numbing disconnect, he proceeded to create a Chrome extension.

“Luckily, J.J. Abrams and Disney have kept the story buttoned up for us so far, giving us a unique chance of experiencing the movie like many did when A New Hope first premiered,” he said. “But once the film starts making its way into the hands of those outside the innermost circles, well …”

According to Tyndall, Force Block will analyze web pages using “smart pattern detection.” During the scan, the extension relies on a database of Star Wars terms and will flag the page if too many tagged terms reach a specific threshold. The page will go dark, save for one message stating that “the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of spoilers.”

Once the warning appears, you have the option of continuing, and to prevent the extension from blocking the page in the future. Force Block experienced more than 100,000 downloads by the time Priceless Misc added support for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in December 2016. Now it protects Star Wars fans against evil spoilers stemming from The Last Jedi, as well.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi hits theaters on Friday, December 15. The Resistance is still battling the New Order while Rey (Daisy Ridley) serves as Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) latest Padawan on the planet Ahch-To. The film supposedly tackles a lot of questions raised by The Force Awakens, but early reviews say the tone, action, and dramatic storytelling echoes the greatness of The Empire Strikes Back. Given the lackluster reception of the prequels and the A New Hope-style storyline in Episode VII, The Last Jedi appears to be the best post-Empire film to date.

But as Tyndall pointed out prior to The Force Awakens, many fans want a spoiler-free experience just like many of us observed when Star Wars originally hit theaters in 1977. That is where the Force Block extension comes in although no Star Wars movie will ever make the same impact as the original Episode IV film did 40 years ago.

Once The Last Jedi arrives and thoroughly dazzles your eyeballs, the Chrome extension can always be removed. Instructions for doing so can be found here.

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Deep-learning algorithms help study brain waves to predict seizures

Researchers at the University of Melbourne and IBM Research Australia have taken a big step in developing the ability to predict seizures triggered by epilepsy. Using deep learning, a brain-inspired machine learning technique, the system automatically analyzes the electrical activity of a patient’s brain, improving seizure prediction by 69 percent, and giving patients time to recognize the onset of an episode.

Artificial intelligence algorithms are increasingly being used in healthcare, from crunching chemical combinations to discovering new drugs to offering advice on dieting. But in most of these cases, the algorithms are best used in combination with medical professionals, giving human decision-makers insight to make better decisions.

“Epileptic seizure monitoring and prediction is a perfect use case for demonstrating the potential of this,” Stefan Harrer, an IBM Research Australia staff member who worked on the recent study, told Digital Trends. “[It has] huge amounts of noisy, unstructured data that clinicians were previously required to analyze manually (with many details on EEG data incredibly difficult for them to interpret or even see and real-time analysis virtually impossible). A.I. has shown that EEG data can now be analyzed and could be applied in a fully automatic, patient-specific mobile system.”

The system developed by Harrer and his team was trained on EEG data previously collected from multiple patients over several years during which seizures occurred. By comparing seizure data to a dataset of patients with normal brain activity, when a seizure hadn’t yet occurred, the system was able to identify recurring patterns that signaled the onset of an episode. They system can’t yet be generalized since the patterns are patient-specific, but the study demonstrates how the right data can aid a patient.

“Our hope is that this could inform the development of a wearable seizure warning system that is specific to an individual patient, and could alert them via text message or even a fitbit-style feedback loop,” Harrer said. “It could also one day be integrated with other systems to prevent or treat seizures at the point of alert.”

Moving forward the researchers want to be able to collect this data from outside the skull, making the process less invasive, while leveraging other factors about a patient’s environment and physiology to better refine the prediction models.

The results were presented at the 2017 NIPS Conference in Long Beach, California. A paper detailing the research is scheduled to be published in the journal EbioMedicine.

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Google extends Assistant support to older Android smartphones and tablets

Back in February, Google’s biggest announcement at Mobile World Congress was that its artificially intelligent Assistant was officially available on smartphones running Android Marshmallow and Nougat. Google is now bringing built-in support for the Assistant to smartphones running older operating systems — specifically Android Lollipop, along with tablets running Marshmallow and Nougat.

Assistant lets users perform certain actions with their voice by saying “OK Google,” or by pressing and holding the home button. You can ask it about your upcoming day — and Assistant will recite your calendar events, the weather, and even put on a podcast of your choice — or you can use it to control your smart home devices. It can make quick translations, find the nearest restaurant, pull up your flight information, and a whole lot more. It’s conversational and it understands contextual search so you don’t need to repeat queries or commands more than once.

Assistant originally debuted in Google’s messaging app, Allo. It then went on to be a prominent feature of the Google Pixel, the company’s first phone “made by Google,” and it’s also what powers Google Home, an Amazon Echo competitor. It’s also available now on Android Wear, and it’s heading to Android Auto as well as Android TV.

Smartphones running Marshmallow or Nougat — basically version 6.0 or higher — have been able to use Assistant since March. The best part was that you didn’t have to wait for a version update from Google or your device manufacturer, which would have taken months to roll out. Instead, version 6.13 or higher of the Google app brought the Assistant functionality.

There are rules governing which devices are eligible to utilize Assistant, though. Specifically, you’ll need to have Google Play Services installed, so phones in China are not able to utilize Assistant. Secondly, your device will need to have at least 1.5GB of RAM, and a 720p or higher screen resolution.

For those with a phone running Lollipop — which was released in 2014 — the update should appear on your device soon. But it will only be available if you have set the language to English in the U.S., India, U.K., Canada, Australia, and Singapore. It will also be available to those who have set their main language to Spanish in the U.S., Spain, and Mexico — along with users in Italy, Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Brazil.

As for Android tablets that are running 7.0 Nougat and 6.0 Marshmallow, the update will be rolling out over the next few weeks. But it will only be available to those in the U.S. who have their default language set to English.

Update: Google Assistant will be available on phones running Android Lollipop and tablets running Nougat and Marshmallow.

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A.I. reads the Harry Potter series, then writes some absurd fan fiction

Have you ever tried using the predictive keyboard on your smartphone to generate completely nonsensical messages, based on the words it considers to have the highest probability of following each other? A mischievous member of Botnik Studios, an online artist collaboration, just used a similar technique to write part of a new Harry Potter novel — with hilarious effect.

The predictive text generator used to write the story was trained on the seven previous Potter books. From this, it analyzed frequent recurrent word pairings and sentences to come up with text that is a weird mix of algorithmic randomness and something that, frankly, still reads a bit like J.K. Rowling may have penned it.

Titled Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash, the story is every bit as weird as you might imagine. A Death Eater wears a shirt reading, “Hermione Has Forgotten How To Dance,” Harry falls down a spiral staircase for an entire summer, and Ron does a tap dance and then tries to eat Hermione’s family. None of it makes a lick of sense, but it’s a whole lot of fun — and genuinely creative in a way that mixes human smarts with artificial intelligence.

This isn’t the first time computer scientists have used artificial intelligence to try and generate new Harry Potter stories. Last year, we reported on one attempt to generate new Hogwarts-related stories using a long short-term memory recurrent neural network trained on the series’ first four books.

Even more significantly, when Rowling was outed as the author of the detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling a few years ago — writing under the pen name Robert Galbraith — computer scientists cracked the mystery in a very similar way to Botnik’s story generator: by analyzing the text based on frequent word pairings and the like. In the aftermath, Rowling admitted that she was the author.

If you are interested in finding out a bit more about Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash and the predictive text program used to generate it, check out this page on GitHub, where it is freely available to inspect.

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Coffee, Wine, and Beer Accessories Gift Guide

Everyone loves a good drink. Whether it’s coffee, wine, beer or something a little bit stronger, these gifts are perfect to quell that thirst. From The Periodic Table of Wine to GrowlerWerks’ Pressurized Growler, there’s something here for every price range.

Yeti Roadie 20 CoolerMade for the rough and tumble, and designed to keep your water in its frozen state, this cooler is also the perfect size for one-day events like tailgating or hiking.Amazon$199.99WishlistInstant 1-Button Electric Wine AeratorIf you’re drinking your wine straight from the bottle without letting it breathe, you’re doing it wrong. This electric aerator will change the way you drink.Amazon$59.99WishlistGrowlerWerks uKeg 128 Pressurized Growler for Craft BeerYou can’t just get your beer to go in a plastic cup. You need to go with a growler that can preserve the flavor and the temperature.Amazon$199.00WishlistAll-In-One 7-piece Espresso/Cappuccino Machine Bundle SetStop wasting all your money at Starbucks. Waste it on this instead. Get espresso or cappuccino on your kitchen counter every day. Great if your family has a lot of coffee drinkers.Amazon$219.99WishlistKitchenAid Cold Brew Coffee MakerReally, the only true way to drink iced coffee is with cold brew. So, if you’re going to spend $80 on a coffee maker, it should be a cold brew coffee maker.Amazon$79.96WishlistMoscow Mule set of 4 16oz copper mugsThese mugs look great and work well with any ice-cold drink you want: water, beer, soda. You name it.Amazon$41.95WishlistKovot 9-piece Wine Travel Bag and Picnic SetThis perfect picnic accessory works really well when you want to bring wine but you’re already over-encumbered by a giant picnic basket. It’s easy to carry and has everything you need.Amazon$26.99WishlistYeti Rambler 10oz Vacuum-Insulated Stainless Steel LowballThese Yeti Lowball tumlers are short and fat instead of tall and skiny like most designs. That makes them great for sipping hot tea, cider, or a small cocktail.Amazon$39.99WishlistGlogex 11-piece home bar tool setWhether you want to impress your friends or make a complicated drink for yourself, this set has all the tools you need to setup the perfect home bar.Amazon$42.99WishlistMr. Coffee 2-in-1 Iced Tea Brewing SystemThis is not a system designed to be complicated. Find your favorite tea bag or tea leaves, select the strength of the brew you want, and let Mr. Coffee handle the hard part.Amazon$28.79WishlistDuoMuo Coaster Set of 6 Colorful Vinyl Record Disk CoastersThis unique set of coasters are designed to look exactly like tiny vinyl records. Perfect for the music-obsessed coffee drinks that really don’t want any rings on the coffee table.Amazon$10.00WishlistThe Periodic Table of WineEnhance your wine-ication with this book that breaks down all the different variables in wine and actually presents a unique way to introduce you to vintages you’ve never tried before.Think Geek$15.99WishlistOster cordless electric wine bottle openerPlease stop living in the 20th century and start using an electric wine bottle opener. All you have to do is press a button and there’s nothing standing between you and your favorite red.Amazon$17.99WishlistSimple Modern Spirit 12oz vacuum-insulated Wine TumblerThis collection from Simple Modern features solid colors and design, vacuum-insulation to keep beverages hot or cold for longer and different styles for wine or coffee.Amazon$22.99WishlistGoodnight Brew: A Parody for Beer PeopleWhether you want to get your kids working at your bewery real young, or the brew master in your life isn’t quite all there, this parody take on the famous Goodnight Moon! will teach everyone about the joys of making beer.Amazon$12.40WishlistReusable K-Cup (4-pack)If you prefer specialty coffee but like the simplicity of using a Keurig, this is the way to go.Amazon$10.95WishlistK-Cup CarouselStop storing your K-Cups in a random drawer, and instead display them in a way that makes them easier to find.Amazon$12.42Wishlist64oz Chalkboard GrowlerMost people only care about the beer inside the growler, but having a cool growler is a conversation starter. This chalkboard painted growler lets you customize it as you wish, making it perfect for every situation.Etsy$32.00WishlistCorksickle Chillsner Beer CoolerThere’s no beer worse than a warm beer. Trust me. Don’t be that friend that serves a beer that isn’t cold enough, and instead have a few of these in your freezer.Amazon$19.95WishlistBeer Chilling Coaster SetThe refridgerator isn’t the only place that can keep your beer cold. These coasters will help keep them chilled while you are sipping on them (and it helps prevent rings on your table!).Uncommon Goods$68.00WishlistBormioli Rocco Selecta 7-Piece Whiskey Gift SetThis seven piece whiskey set features glasses and a carafe, but if you give this as a gift it should really be an 8-piece set with some whiskey to really round it out.Amazon$18.95Wishlist

Microsoft’s Cortana can now suggest follow-up tasks

Microsoft may not be the biggest player in the AI assistant space, but it has some tricks that could give it an edge. The software giant has used an AI-themed event to demo Cortana’s widening abilities, most notably to ‘chain’ skills together based on what you’re doing. If you book tickets for a concert, for instance, Cortana could suggest adding the concert to your calendar so that you won’t forget to head out that night. You could get everything done in a single, elegant voice command session.

Cortana should also make better sense of your overflowing inbox. The demo showed the AI helper not only sorting emails, but summarizing the most important ones. If your boss asked about the status of a project, you would know without having to look at your email app or check your notifications. The feature works across different email account types and subjects, so this could include both your Outlook account at work and your personal Gmail address.

It’s not certain how readily these features will be available as we write this. However, Microsoft did score a coup: it landed its first deal to integrate Cortana into a third-party Android launcher, in this case Cheetah Mobile’s CM Launcher. The addition gives CM Launcher voice control it didn’t have before, whether it’s making calls, reading the news or searching the web. The Cortana version is available in an open beta right now in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, with a polished release due in January.

Source: Microsoft, Google Play

Microsoft adds more AI smarts to Office 365

Microsoft has been adding cloud-based artificial intelligence to its popular Office suite for years now. In addition to new AI-focused upgrades to Cortana and Bing, the company also announced several new tools for Word, Excel and Outlook to help you make the most of your data, organizational content and more.

At Microsoft’s AI event on Wednesday in San Francisco, the company announced Office Insights, machine learning that will analyze data from Excel spreadsheets to create pivot tables and trend charts. “Data is incredibly valuable, but it’s only valuable when you’re actually able to extract insights from it,” Microsoft’s Rob Howard said in a statement.

It also revealed Acronyms in Word, which looks through your organization’s documents and emails to help find acronyms specific to your business. Tap in Word will bring up documents, spreadsheets and presentations from your company without leaving the document you’re working on, making it trivial to include, say a chart from Excel into your PowerPoint deck without having to search a corporate intranet to find it. The company also plans to release a tool to help highlight action items in emails via Outlook so you can respond on the go.

All of these new features rely on the cloud to process informations, of course. This helps Microsoft add functionality on the fly, too, like the Design tool in PowerPoint that can create a full presentation from a bulleted list. “The cloud has actually really accelerated our progress,” said Howard. “We’re able to take a lot of that functionality and bring it to end users more quickly.”

Source: Microsoft

Microsoft unveils improved AI-powered search features for Bing

Microsoft unveiled a handful of new intelligent search features for Bing at an event held in San Francisco today. Powered by AI, the search updates are meant to provide more thorough answers and allow for more conversational or general search queries.

First, when answering a question, Bing will now validate its answers by sourcing a number of websites, not just one. And in cases where there are two valid perspectives, like, for example, in response to the question, “Is cholesterol bad,” they’ll be aggregated and Bing will show both at the top of the search page. Additionally, when there’s more than one way to answer a query, Bing will provide a carousel of answers.

The Bing team is also adding relevant analogies or comparisons to search answers that make the provided information easier to understand. For example, rather than just saying Syria is 71,498 square miles in response to a question of how big the country is, it would also say it’s approximately the size of Florida. “We want to reduce the number of times that people read a number and can’t make sense of it. And we want to do that by providing some context, or an analogy, or perspective, that puts it in more familiar terms usually related to their everyday experience,” Jake Hofman, a Microsoft senior researcher, said in a statement. Further, Microsoft is expanding Bing’s comparison answers, which were previously limited to product comparisons.

Bing will also help users find answers to broad or conversational queries by asking clarifying questions that will help refine the search. And Microsoft also introduced Bing’s advanced image search capabilities, which will now let users search images or objects within images to, for example, help them track down a particular fashion item they’d like to purchase.

Additionally, Bing and Reddit have teamed up to bring the information contained in Reddit threads to Bing’s search page. Now you’ll be able to search Bing for certain Reddit topics or subreddits, such as “Reddit Aww,” and Bing will surface a snippet of the topic. If a general search, like “Why wouldn’t my water boil,” could be answered well through Reddit conversations, Bing will also surface parts of those conversations at the top of the search page. And if you want to see certain AMAs or read through popular ones, Bing will be able to surface those as well. AMAs will show up in a carousel at the top of the Bing results page, and you can even view upcoming AMAs.

Microsoft also unveiled new AI-powered features for Cortana and Office 365 at the event. The Reddit partnership launches today, while Bing’s intelligent answers and conversational search features will start rolling out next month.

Images: Microsoft

Source: Microsoft

Redbox returns to internet video with On Demand service

The last time Redbox tried online video in earnest it… didn’t go so well. The company’s Redbox Instant was effectively trying to challenge Netflix head-on, which seemed foolhardy even in 2013. After lots of teasing, though, it’s ready for a comeback. It’s launching a Redbox On Demand service that offers movies and TV shows (notably, including new releases) for purchase or rent — it’s steering clear of subscriptions this time. You can stream videos or download them for offline viewing, and it’s available across a wide range of devices from the word “go.” You can watch wherever you are with Android or iOS, while living room viewers can use Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku boxes or smart TVs from LG and Samsung.

Rentals start at $4 for a 48-hour period, while you’re looking at spending $10 or more for a purchase.

Redbox is wagering that this model plays into its existing strengths. If you’re already used to renting movies from its kiosks, it’s not a big stretch to rent online when you’d rather stay home. And since it already has deals to get new releases, it’s guaranteed to have titles that may take months to arrive on services like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, if they ever do.

It’s not going to be a cakewalk, mind you. There’s still plenty of competition in this space, such as Apple’s iTunes, Google Play Movies and Walmart’s Vudu. And unlike Redbox’s kiosks, there aren’t really price advantages. Redbox is mainly banking on its name and physical presence to earn your business. Not that it necessarily need a runaway hit, mind you. On Demand can serve as more of a complement to Redbox’s discs, and could help it transition to digital if its kiosks become untenable.

Source: Redbox