LG announces new AI-based camera features for upcoming V30s at MWC

LG is turning to AI as the differentiator for its upcoming phone.

LG is all set to announce an upgraded variant of the V30 at MWC dubbed the V30s, and ahead of the event the manufacturer has highlighted a few features that will be making their way to the device. The company said that it was researching AI-based solutions for over a year now, focusing on image and voice recognition:

LG spent more than a year researching how AI should be implemented in smartphones, long before announcing LG ThinQ at CES 2018. This research focused primarily on making AI-based solutions with the objective to deliver a unique and more intuitive user experience, focusing on the camera and voice recognition. The result is a suite of AI technologies that is aligned closely with the needs and usage behavior of today’s users.

To that effect, LG is announcing two new features that leverage artificial intelligence: Vision AI and Voice AI. Vision AI automatically analyzes objects to serve up recommendations on the best shooting mode, which is similar to what Huawei does in the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro. LG says that the feature takes several factors into account, like angle of view, color, reflections, backlighting, and saturation levels, offering recommendations from the eight shooting modes available: portrait, food, pet, landscape, city, sunrise, sunset, and flower.

LG says that it worked with a “partner in image recognition” to analyze over 100 million images — coming up with over a thousand unique categories — to fine-tune the phone’s image recognition algorithms. Vision AI will also be able to automatically scan QR codes, and the feature will automatically tweak settings to increase brightness “by a factor of two” when taking low-light images.

As for Voice AI, LG has worked with Google to introduce exclusive voice commands for Google Assistant. The company rolled out 23 commands last year, with an additional nine commands making their debut on the V30s.

LG announced earlier this year that it would stop releasing new phones every year, and instead of iterating on hardware, the company is now looking to AI for differentiation From LG’s senior vice president and head of mobile unit Ha Jeung-uk:

As we communicated last month at CES, the future for LG lies in AI, not just hardware specs and processing speeds. Creating smarter smartphones will be our focus going forward and we are confident that consumers will appreciate the advanced user experience with the enhanced V30 that many have been asking and waiting for.

LG also said that some of the features that will be debuting on the V30s will be making their way to older models. With MWC just under two weeks away, we don’t have to wait long to find out what’s in store with the V30s.

YouTube chief says Logan Paul won’t get the banhammer

YouTube might have cut off Logan Paul’s ad revenue, dropped him from Google Preferred and suspended his planned original projects, but that doesn’t mean he’ll get booted off the platform anytime soon. In an interview at Recode’s annual Code Media conference, YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki said Paul won’t be getting banned from the video website anytime soon. “He hasn’t done anything that would cause those three strikes,” she explained when host Kara Swisher asked why the company hasn’t banned Paul. “We can’t just be pulling people off our platform… They need to violate a policy.”

Wojcicki is talking about YouTube’s three strikes policy, which states that the platform will terminate creators’ accounts if they get three strikes within a three-month period. According to the Google-owned company’s community guidelines, creators can get strikes if they videos “contain nudity or sexual content, violent or graphic content, harmful or dangerous content, hateful content, threats, spam, misleading metadata, or scams.”

Logan Paul has been under fire ever since he posted a video showing the body of a suicide victim while joking around and laughing in Japan’s Aokigahara forest. While he apologized and published a suicide prevention video afterward, he has also followed that up with a video of him tasering dead rats and a tweet saying he’d join that dangerous/ridiculous internet Tide Pods challenge. YouTube was also hit by a wave of criticism over the role it played in hosting his videos, putting its relationship with advertisers in jeopardy. The event forced it to change its Google Preferred moderation system and to introduce new punishments to address creators’ “egregious actions.”

Wojcicki said YouTube won’t be banning Paul (yet) despite all the backlash it got, because the platform “need[s] to have consistent laws” so that it can apply its policies consistently to millions of videos and creators. She added: “What you think is tasteless is not necessarily what someone else would think is tasteless.”

Via: The Verge

Source: Recode’s Code Media

Netflix preps late-night series with ‘Daily Show’ vet Michelle Wolf

Netflix is determined to cement its place in the talk show landscape. The streaming service has unveiled plans for a weekly late-night show hosted by Michelle Wolf, a contributor to the Daily Show and a veteran comedienne. While the half-hour program doesn’t even have a title yet, it won’t be limited to politics and will include the risqué humor “we couldn’t do on TV,” according to Wolf. The series will debut sometime later in 2018.

This definitely isn’t Netflix’s first fling with talk shows — it launched Chelsea Handler’s series in May 2016, and it’s hard to escape the marketing blitz for David Letterman’s show. However, it illustrates Netflix’s desire to compete directly with the conventional talk show circuit by recruiting its stars. It also highlights a potential weak point for TV networks like Comedy Central. While it’s nothing new for comedy contributors to jump at chances to host their own shows (see John Oliver and Samantha Bee, among others), internet services like Netflix make that easier — they don’t have to compete for time slots or clean up their language.

Via: Variety

Source: Hollywood Reporter

Cryptocurrency mining site hijacked millions of Android phones

Smartphone users are just as vulnerable to cryptocurrency mining hijacks as their PC counterparts, and sometimes on a dramatic scale. Malwarebytes has detailed a “drive-by” mining campaign that redirected millions of Android users to a website that hijacked their phone processors for mining Monero. While the exact trigger wasn’t clear, researchers believed that infected apps with malicious ads would steer people toward the pages. And it wasn’t subtle — the site would claim that you were showing “suspicious” web activity and tell you that it was mining until you entered a captcha code to make it stop.

The exact number of victims isn’t apparent, but it’s large. Malwarebytes identified five internet domains using the same captcha code and Coinhive site keys used for the campaign. At least two of the sites had over 30 million visits per month, and the combined domains had about 800,000 visits per day. Even though most people only ever spent a short amount of time on the pages (an average of 4 minutes), that amounted to a lot of mining time.

Not surprisingly, Malwarebytes is recommending that Android phone users use web filters and security software to fend off these hijacks. We’d add that you can reduce the odds of encountering these campaigns by sticking to Google Play for app downloads, since you’re less likely to run into rogue apps. However, it’s doubtful that mining ploys like this will go away any time soon. So long as cryptocurrency values remain through the roof, you’re bound to see someone hoping to make a few coins at your expense.

Source: Malwarebytes Labs

Keep your records looking and sounding sweet: Here’s how to clean vinyl

lambros / 123RF

As the twin krakens of Spotify and Apple Music have wrapped their tentacles around the music industry, a curious thing has happened: Vinyl records, those big black discs that were once all too common in garages and dorm rooms, have made a resurgence.

In fact, the vinyl industry has seen a straight decade of year-after-year growth. That’s impressive for a product that seems so antithetical to our modern philosophy of convenience. After all, new vinyl collections aren’t easily portable, require a record player for listening, and are prone to damage that can destroy their sound. In an age dominated by streaming services and the ability to flit between songs like gnats, the vinyl record seems as archaic as straight-razors or horse-drawn carriages.

Why is vinyl back with such a fervor? Perhaps in an age where music has been broken down to bytes of data, vinyl offers a long-lost, tangible experience. To hold a record with your fingertips and place it on the spindle of a record player, to hear the tonearm drop and the needle settle into the groove, is a ritual. Forget the debate about whether vinyl sounds better than digital for a moment: for many people, the simple pleasures of flipping through a record collection and placing the needle gently into position cannot be replaced for the sake of convenience.

With more people getting into vinyl as a hobby, there is one thing that may shock new enthusiasts: Unlike files in an iTunes collection, records can get dirty. Dust and grime can easily accumulate in the grooves of a vinyl record, and even a little dust or static electricity can impact the sound quality. Many a record owner has pulled a dusty Stones LP from their parent’s collection only to discover a cacophony of pops and static as soon as the needle begins to glide through the gak. To enjoy vinyl to the fullest, record owners must keep it clean. Thankfully, it’s not difficult. There are a few ways to clean a vinyl record, even on a tight budget, and doing so will keep a record sounding pristine for decades.

Get a machine to do it for you

For those who don’t want to risk damaging their records when cleaning them by hand, or those who simply don’t have the time, buying a machine to clean them is the best option. In fact, some would argue a proper record cleaner can better clean a record than any manual process. There are many brands of cleaner out there, ranging in price from the approachable to the absurd. Here are two of the most notable:

VPI HW-16.5 ($700)

On the higher end of record cleaners is the VPI HW-16.5. Vinyl collectors respect VPI for its top-of-the-line record players, and its record cleaners are similarly praiseworthy. Like the players, however, the cleaning machines are also quite expensive, often running nearly $700. For those who can afford the cost, this cleaner is as good as they come, as well as straightforward to use. After clamping a record down on the turntable, simply use a brush to spread cleaning fluid around the record, then use the cleaner’s vacuum to suck it all up. The process is quick and easy, and the device has a solid build. Aside from being noisy, the only downside is the aforementioned price, which will keep it out of the hands of the average collector.

Buy it now from:

Amazon Music Direct

Spin-Clean ($80)

A far cheaper option than the HW-16.5, the Spin-Clean lacks a vacuum or an impressive case, but will get dust off a record quickly and quietly. The device uses rollers to scrub both sides of a record at the same time, and drain the dirty water down into a basin. Unfortunately, letting the fluid run off instead of vacuuming it up means that sometimes fluid will be left on the record. Moreover, this device might not get rid of deeply entrenched grime. At $80, however, the machine does a respectable job, and is affordable for most collectors.

Buy it now from:

Amazon Spin Clean

MIT drones navigate more effectively in crowded spaces by embracing uncertainty

Amazon and other companies have big plans for delivery drones. In order to get to the point where delivery drones are truly safe and ready to become mainstream technologies, though, one of the things that needs work is making them more agile and better able to deal with complex obstacles while flying. That’s something that researchers from MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have been working to improve.

Their new NanoMap technology promises to give drones the ability to consistently navigate at 20 miles per hour speeds through obstacle-packed locations such as forests or warehouses — in which even the slightest of miscalculations can result in a crash.

“NanoMap is a mapping system that enables drones to fly at high speeds through dense environments like forests and warehouses,” MIT CSAIL graduate student Pete Florence told Digital Trends. “The system’s key insight is that it actively models and accounts for the uncertainty of not being 100 percent confident about where the drone is located in space. This makes it a more flexible approach for flying in real-world environments that you can’t predict in advance, and creates a deeper integration between perception and control.”

Jonathan How, MIT

NanoMap consists of a depth-sensing system, which seamlessly stitches together a series of measurements concerning a drone’s surroundings. This allows it to anticipate what motion plans to make concerning both what it is currently looking at and also what it might see in the future. That’s different from existing drone piloting technologies that are routinely reliant on intricate maps that tell the drone exactly what is around it at any point.

The idea of a high-speed drone that doesn’t sweat the small details about its exact location sounds, at best, counterintuitive and, at worst, a bit scary, but MIT’s smart tech means it’s surprisingly effective. Without the NanoMap system being employed, MIT’s test drone crashed 28 percent of the time if it went off-course by more than 5 percent. With NanoMap, these crashes were reduced to only 2 percent of flights that veered 5 percent off course.

According to Pete Florence, the technology could theoretically also be used in any piece of hardware involved in navigation, including self-driving cars. There’s still a lot more work to be carried out, though.

“There’s much more that can be done in terms of improving our systems for planning, control, perception and local obstacle avoidance,” he said. “As an example, we intend to work on the system so that it can one day incorporate other pieces of information related to uncertainty, like being able to account for the uncertainty of the drone’s depth-sensing measurements.”

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If Apple designed a scooter, it would probably look a lot like The Eagle

Apple’s Jony Ive doesn’t design scooters, but if he did we’re imagining they may well be along the lines of The Eagle, a forthcoming ultra-thin carbon fiber electric scooter created by Swiss and Lithuanian startup Citybirds. Recently shown off at the ISPO trade expo in Munich, Germany, The Eagle promises to join the ranks of best escooters when it finally hits the streets.

The scooter is described by its creators as the thinnest and lightest electric scooter concept on Earth, with a folded thickness of just 30mm. This makes it perfect for both storing in your home and office, and any commute that requires you to fold it up for space saving. It features a 36-volt motor that will grant you a top speed of around 25 kilometers per hour (approximately 16 mph) and a battery that will give you a range of 15 kilometers (nine miles) or double that with an extra battery.

In addition to this, it will boast both plug-in and inductive charging, and a pop-up display in the handlebars, which will offer turn-by-turn directions, as well as the possibility of acting as another external display for information like media notifications.

“We started designing Citybirds scooters in 2014, when the first iconic non-electric Pigeon scooter design appeared on Kickstarter,” CEO and designer Ignas Survila told Digital Trends. This was followed by the newer Raven scooter before the team turned its attention to creating the sleekly impressive Eagle e-scooter.

Don’t expect it to be here in time for this summer, though. “We present it not as a finished product, but as a concept that will only appear on the market in 2020,” Survila said. There are no more details at present about the exact availability of the scooter, nor its planned market price. However, Survila said it won’t be prohibitively expensive. “For sure it won’t be more than 1,500 euros,” he said.

While the equivalent of $1,840 isn’t exactly cheap, it’s also not in the upper echelons of escooter prices. Given the chic design and promise of some nifty smart features, it seems a pretty fair price. Now we guess we should better get saving some extra cash.

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The key to next-gen 3D vision for autonomous cars is … praying mantis goggles?

Researchers at the U.K.’s Newcastle University may have discovered a new way to more efficiently model computer vision systems — and it’s all thanks to a multi-year project that involves putting tiny 3D goggles on praying mantises.

“The 3D glasses we use are similar to the old-school 3D glasses we used to use in the cinema,” Dr. Vivek Nityananda, part of Newcastle’s Institute of Neuroscience, told Digital Trends. “The idea behind these is that having different color filters on each eye allows each eye to see a different set of images that the other eye can’t see. By manipulating the geometry of the images the eyes see we could create the 3D illusions, exactly like you see in the cinema. For our glasses, we cut out teardrop shapes from the color filters and fitted them onto the mantis using beeswax. They were then allowed to recover overnight, and we could try them in experiments the next day. Since we used beeswax, we could melt the wax and remove the glasses once the experiment was over.”

The glasses allowed the researchers to demonstrate that mantises have a way of computing stereoscopic distance to objects that differs from that of any other animal, including humans. Instead of comparing the stationary luminance patterns across the two eyes, as other vision systems do, mantises rely on matching motion or other kinds of change in each eyes’ view of the world.

Newcastle University

This could be exciting because detecting change simultaneously in both eyes is a simpler computational problem than figuring out which details of each eye’s view matches those of the other. It suggests that mantis stereo vision could be easier to model in computer vision applications and robotics, especially in situations where less computational power is available.

“So far we’ve been designing these systems to see and react to the world in the same way we do, but our brains are immensely complex and power hungry machines that may not be the ideal biological model to inspire efficient design,” Dr. Ghaith Tarawneh, another researcher on the project, told Digital Trends. “Mantis 3D vision uses the exact sort of computational trickery that challenges our way of seeing things: A view of the world radically different from ours, but evidently more fit for purpose. Adapting autonomous cars and drones after insect vision can give them the same capabilities: A superior ability to see the details that matter with shorter reaction times and longer battery life.”

A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Current Biology.

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Amazon is reportedly designing its own A.I. chips to make Alexa respond faster

Do you love Alexa but think the voice assistant from Amazon responds too slowly sometimes? Amazon is working on a fix for that, according to an exclusive report from The Information. The online marketplace giant is designing its own artificial intelligence (A.I.) chips that would add speech recognition directly to Alexa-powered devices and allow the voice assistant to respond more quickly. The goal is for the hardware to be built into any device that features Alexa, including the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Plus.

As users of Alexa-powered devices may have noticed, there is a small delay between making an inquiry or request and getting a response from Alexa. That’s because the voice assistant must contact the cloud and interpret the command before it is able to formulate a response. By processing more data on the devices rather than in the cloud, the devices should theoretically be able to formulate a reply more speedily and operate more efficiently overall. While the device will still have to contact the cloud for more complex requests, the addition of speech recognition would eliminate the delay in simple tasks, such as reporting the time.

In 2015, Amazon acquired chip designer Annapurna Labs. The company is now producing A.I. chips that specifically suit Amazon’s own hardware needs. Amazon is also currently in the process of hiring chip engineers for Amazon Web Services, which suggests that the company may be introducing its own proprietary chips for that department as well.

The news of yet another tech giant embarking on its own A.I. chip creation poses a threat to companies like Nvidia and Intel. Both companies specialize in manufacturing chips and have shifted much of their expertise to the creation of A.I. chips. Now, many of their former customers are becoming their competition.

Amazon is not the first major company to produce its own A.I. chips in hopes of elevating its products above those of the competition. The Mountain View, California-based Google currently uses its own chips to support features like Street View, Translate, and Search. Silicon Valley tech giant Apple has also designed and deployed custom A.I. chips in its own products.

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Government websites fall prey to a plugin injected with a digital coin miner

Thousands of websites relying on the Browsealoud plugin developed by U.K.-based Texthelp recently fell prey to a hack that secretly ran a cryptocurrency mining script in the background of visiting PCs. Websites use this specific plugin for visually impaired visitors so they can hear content, but on Sunday, February 11, someone managed to alter the plugin’s code to run Coinhive’s controversial JavaScript-based Monero digital currency miner. 

Because it’s based on JavaScript, administrators can easily insert Coinhive’s miner into a webpage. It runs in the background while visitors browse the website, silently mining digital coins using their PC’s processor. The CPU use can be extremely apparent if you know what’s going on, otherwise, the average web surfer may simply shrug off the slow performance as typical Windows or web-based processes slowing down the machine. The mining stops once web surfers leave the offending page. 

The altered Browsealoud plugin began mining Monero Sunday morning on more than 4,200 websites spanning the globe, including governments, organizations, and schools. Among them was the State of Indiana, the U.S. court information portal, the City University of New York, the U.K.’s National Health Service, the U.K.’s Student Loans Company, and many more. 

Most websites typically rely on plugins to pull content and tools from third-party developers. These can include translators, shopping baskets and ecommerce, menus, and so on. But the discovery of Coinhive’s miner in Browsealoud points to the possibility that if a hacker could gain access to one plugin for malicious purposes, thousands of websites could suffer. 

Plugin content typically resides on a remote server and sent to the target web page using a secure connection. The problem is that there is no real system to authenticate the actual content. Thus, someone with access to the content could easily inject malicious code, and the resulting websites using the plugin would serve up the malicious content despite registering the server as secure. 

One method to fix this problem is called Subresource Integrity. It comprises of two HTML elements with an “integrity” attribute that relies on a cryptographic hash. If the number provided to the website doesn’t match the number associated by the content, then the website can catch and block the malicious code. Unfortunately, this isn’t a widely used technique, but the recent issue with Browsealoud may convince more websites to utilize the Subresource Integrity method. 

Coinhive’s miner was reportedly only active in the Browsealoud plugin for a few hours before Texthelp pulled the plug. And although the outcome was apparently only to generate digital coin, the company still considers the hack as a criminal act. 

“Texthelp has in place continuous automated security tests for Browsealoud — these tests detected the modified file and as a result, the product was taken offline,” Texthelp Chief Technical Officer Martin McKay said in a statement. “This removed Browsealoud from all our customer sites immediately, addressing the security risk without our customers having to take any action.” 

Texthelp is currently working with the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Agency to hunt down the hacker(s). 

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