Flippy gets fired: Burger bot shut down after one day on the job

Miso Robotics

After debuting to much fanfare, Flippy the burger-flipping robot, who started a new gig at CaliBurger, has been sidelined — at least temporarily. It turns out the automated fast-food worker created by Miso Robotics was a victim of his own success.

When USA Today visited the Pasadena location on Thursday, the robotic arm was still on display but someone had pulled the plug. Anthony Lomelino, the chief technology officer for Cali Group, explained that they needed more time to train the human workers to keep pace.

“Mostly it’s the timing,” he said. “When you’re in the back, working with people, you talk to each other. With Flippy, you kind of need to work around his schedule. Choreographing the movements of what you do, when and how you do it.”

That means preparing the burgers before and after Flippy does his thing — seasoning the patties, adding condiments, and serving them to customers.

The six-axis robot arm is bolted to the kitchen floor and receives orders via digital tickets. Flippy is equipped with thermal and regular vision to monitor each patty as it cooks. Cooking times displayed on a screen tell the human employees when to add cheese or prepare the buns. Flippy also rotates spatulas, using different ones for raw and cooked burgers.

The robots, which run about $60,000, were designed for the CaliBurger chain and are exclusive for the next six months. Once Flippy gets back to work, the company hopes to have 50 locations operating by the end of the year, including restaurants in Seattle and Annapolis.

Robots have been popping up in more and more food and beverage industry positions. Sally the robot can make you a salad, and the Café X robot barista will whip up a killer latte. The robot revolution is already here.

There’s no doubt that automation is taking jobs away from humans, but it’s difficult to keep trained employees at fast-food restaurants like CaliBurger, which pays $13 or more per hour. “We train them, they work on the grill, they realize it’s not fun … and so they leave and drive Ubers,” said CEO John Miller.

According to the Washington Post, up to 50 percent of fast-food restaurant staff leave within a year. The prevailing cause is low wages, but the industry spends about $3.4 billion annually in recruiting and training. Employment in the fast-food industry is climbing faster than health care, construction, or manufacturing, with a 40 percent increase in the last decade.

“The kitchen of the future will always have people in it, but we see that kitchen as having people and robots,” David Zito of Miso Robotics said in an interview. “This technology is not about replacing jobs. We see Flippy as that third hand.”

Editors’ Recommendations

• Flippy the burger-flipping robot is now working alongside humans at CaliBurger
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Stealth startup launches four unauthorized rogue satellites into orbit

The Indian-built PSLV-C40, which launched in January, had 31 satellites onboard. It carried a lot of cool stuff into orbit, including the Arkyd-6 satellite which could lead to asteroid mining, as well as the first commercial satellite for Finland.

It also carried an unauthorized payload: four tiny satellites from a stealth startup called Swarm Technologies, which didn’t have permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The nearly undetectable satellites could pose a hazard to the thousands of other orbiting spacecraft, the agency said.

IEEE Spectrum has a detailed report on the launch of the four SpaceBee satellites, which it called “the first ever unauthorized launch of commercial satellites.”

According to CNBC, Swarm Technologies is a stealthy startup founded in 2016 by Sara Spangelo and Benjamin Longmier, former engineers at Google and Apple, respectively. The SpaceBee satellites, much smaller that CubeSats at about the size of a paperback book, were deployed as a demonstration of their space-based concept for an Internet of Things (IoT) communication network.

Swarm claims that their cutting-edge technology will enable worldwide communication for such things as transportation networks and agricultural technologies for far less than current options. Using solar-powered gateways, the satellites would connect to existing IoT devices via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and transfer that data to Internet-connected ground stations.

Realizing that their tiny satellites would raise red flags at the agency, the company installed GPS responders and covered the satellites in radar-reflecting material to make them easier to track.

The FCC disagreed, however, and rejected Swarm’s application for its satellite launch in December, citing safety concerns. Thousands of tiny pieces of space debris already pose a hazard to orbiting satellites.

Aerospace professor Marcus Holzinger told Spectrum that it’s not necessarily the mass of the SpaceBees, it’s the velocity. “Even at that size, you’re talking about a substantial energy transfer should they hit something,” he said. “Anything that size impacting at orbital velocities can be catastrophic.”

Swarm proceeded with their launch plans anyway, using a broker called Spaceflight Industries to get their payload placed aboard the Antrix rocket. Spaceflight was unaware of the concerns raised by the FCC, and received an e-mail days before launch that assured them that regulatory approval was imminent. “Spaceflight has never knowingly launched a customer who has been denied an FCC license,” they said in a statement to Spectrum. “It is the responsibility of our customers to secure all FCC licenses.”

The FCC has come down hard on Swarm, revoking authorization for its next four satellites, which were scheduled for launch on a Rocket Labs mission in April. CEO Peter Beck, last seen sending a giant disco ball into orbit, issued a statement saying, “Rocket Lab will not launch spacecraft that do not have the relevant regulatory approvals or licenses.”

According to Spectrum and CNBC, Swarm Technologies has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

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Xbox One will automatically use your TV’s game mode

Many TVs have a game mode that disables image processing to reduce lag, but it can be a pain if you regularly do things besides gaming. Do really want to switch the mode off every time you want to watch Netflix? You might not have to before long. Microsoft has unveiled a bevy of upcoming Xbox One updates that include support for Auto Low Latency Mode. If you have a compatible TV (some Samsung models will qualify), it’ll recognize your Xbox and invoke its low-lag mode only when you’re actually playing — all your TV’s processing will come back the moment you curl up with a movie. The improvement arrives later in 2018.

Another improvement will enable variable refresh rates for Xbox One S and One X systems hooked up to PC monitors that support AMD Freesync, in case you’re the sort to play at your desk instead of the living room. You can also expect the Edge browser to support downloads and uploads (say, a picture you want to use as your Xbox’s wallpaper) and Twitter sharing that displays media in-line. And as the company hinted at earlier in March, you can soon share your game controller with viewers when you’re livestreaming on Mixer. These updates should be ready later in the spring.

Source: Xbox Wire

Study Suggests AliveCor KardiaBand for Apple Watch Can Be Used With AI Algorithm to Detect High Potassium

AliveCor, the company that makes an FDA-approved EKG band for the Apple Watch called KardiaBand, teamed up with the Mayo Clinic for a new study that suggests an AliveCor EKG device paired with artificial intelligence technology can non-invasively detect high levels of potassium in the blood.

A second study conducted by the Cleveland Clinic also confirms the KardiaBand’s ability to accurately detect atrial fibrillation.

AliveCor’s KardiaBand
For the potassium study, AliveCor used more than 2 million EKGs from the Mayo Clinic from 1994 to 2017 paired with four million serum potassium values and data from an AliveCor smartphone EKG device to create an algorithm that can successfully detect hyperkalemia, aka high potassium, with a sensitivity range between 91 and 94 percent.

High potassium in the blood is a sign of several concerning health conditions, like congestive heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and diabetes, and it can also be detected due to the medications used to treat these conditions. According to AliveCor, hyperkalemia is associated with “significant mortality and arrhythmic risk,” but because it’s typically asymptomatic, it often goes undetected.

Currently, the only way to test for high potassium levels is through a blood test, which AliveCor is aiming to change with the new non-invasive monitoring functionality.

AliveCor says that the AI technology used in the study could be commercialized through the KardiaBand for Apple Watch to allow patients to better monitor their health. Vic Gundotra, AliveCor CEO, said that the company is “on the path to change the way hyperkalemia can be detected” using products like the Apple Watch.

For the Cleveland Clinic study, cardiologists aimed to determine whether KardiaBand for Apple Watch could differentiate between atrial fibrillation and a normal heart rhythm. The researchers discovered that the KardiaBand was able to successfully detect Afib at an accuracy level comparable to physicians interpreting the same EKGs. The Kardia algorithm was able to correctly interpret atrial fibrillation with 93 percent sensitivity and 94 percent specificity. Sensitivity increased to 99 percent with a physician review of the KardiaBand recordings.

KardiaBand, which has been available since late last year, is available for purchase from AliveCor or from Amazon.com for $199. Using the KardiaBand also requires a subscription to the AliveCor premium service, priced at $99 per year.

AliveCor premium paired with the KardiaBand offers SmartRhythm notifications, unlimited EKG readings, detection of atrial fibrillation or normal sinus rhythm, and unlimited cloud history and reporting of all EKGs.

Related Roundups: Apple Watch, watchOS 4Tag: AliveCorBuyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Neutral)
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Amazon makes it easier to give Alexa follow-up commands

It’s easy enough to summon Alexa on one of Amazon’s speakers, but when you’ve got a million things to ask the voice assistant, it can be a pain having to say “Hey, Alexa” over and over again. Now, Amazon has rolled out a new feature, which gives its Echo speakers the ability to listen to back-to-back commands for the assistant. When you switch on Alexa’s Follow-up Mode, your Echo speaker will continue listening for a second command for a few seconds after you issue the first one — no need to wake it up again by saying “Hey, Alexa.” You’ll know for sure if the device is listening if its blue indicator is on.

Take note, though, that your speaker won’t wait for a follow-up if it’s in the middle of playing music or audiobooks. Also, Alexa won’t respond until it’s “confident you’re speaking to” it. You’d have to talk clearly and audibly, otherwise it won’t be able to separate what you’re saying from background noise. You can also ensure that Alexa won’t think that you’re issuing follow-up commands when you’re talking to someone else by ending the conversation: simply say “stop,” “thank you,” “cancel” or “go to sleep.”

If this sounds useful, because you pepper Alexa with questions and tasks, just fire up the voice assistant’s app and head to Settings. Select the device you want, scroll down, toggle on the mode and you’re good to go.

Via: CNET, TechCrunch

Source: Amazon

FBI arrests CEO of company selling custom BlackBerrys to gangs

Custom, extra-secure BlackBerry phones remain a staple of the criminal underworld, and a recent bust just illustrated this point. Motherboard has learned that the FBI arrested Vincent Ramos, the founder of the well-established phone mod seller Phantom Secure, for allegedly aiding criminal organizations that include the Sinaloa drug cartel. The company altered BlackBerry and Android devices to disable common features (including the camera and web browsing) while adding Pretty Good Privacy for encrypted conversations. And it wasn’t just turning a blind eye to the shady backgrounds of its customers, according to investigators — it was fully aware of who was involved.

Reportedly, undercover agents running a sting operation not only heard Ramos say that buying one of his phones was “totally fine,” but that the phones were modified “specifically” with drug trafficking in mind. It even singled out Hong Kong and Panama as areas it thought would be “uncooperative” with police. A convicted Sinaloa cartel member also stated that the gang had bought Phantom’s phones to conduct its drug trafficking business. The FBI estimated that there were as many as 20,000 of these handsets around the world, half of them in Australia with others selling in countries like Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela.

Neither the FBI nor Ramos’ attorney has commented on the case.

The arrest highlights the perpetual dilemma with encrypted communication. While encryption is vital to preserving privacy, there are people who will exploit tough-to-crack communications to conduct shady business. And there’s no easy answer. Despite what officials say, there’s no such thing as an encryption backdoor — a vulnerability that’s open to police is also open to hackers. Operations like Phantom Secure may be difficult to completely avoid so long as there’s a serious interest in secure data.

Source: Motherboard

SpaceX and ‘Westworld’ creators made a Falcon Heavy short film

Elon Musk promised a short film about the inaugural Falcon Heavy launch from the team behind Westworld, and he delivered. The entrepreneur has posted the video (he calls it Falcon Heavy and Starman) in two parts on Instagram. It’s not exactly a magnum opus, but it does a good job of encapsulating SpaceX’s milestone in a short amount of time, including Starman’s departure. Surprisingly, the video includes the loss of the center booster — SpaceX isn’t pretending the launch was all sunshine and roses. And naturally, there’s no shortage of David Bowie for the soundtrack.

The clips arrived soon after Musk made a guest appearance at the SXSW 2018 Westworld panel. While he didn’t offer any stunning insights, he did explain why he’s tackling pie-in-the-sky projects like SpaceX or Tesla. Life can’t be about “solving one miserable thing after another,” he said. They have to be things that “make you glad to wake up in the morning,” and concepts like electric cars and space travel certainly qualify.

Falcon Heavy and Starman, Part 1

A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Mar 10, 2018 at 4:00pm PST

Falcon Heavy and Starman, Part 2

A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Mar 10, 2018 at 3:51pm PST

Catch up on the latest news from SXSW 2018 right here.

Source: Elon Musk (Instagram 1), (2)

Bose sunglasses hands-on: audio AR makes more sense than you think

This week, Bose made a surprise announcement that it was getting into the augmented reality game. But Bose makes headphones, right? And AR is all about glasses with visual overlays? Well, nobody told them, and that’s a good thing. The company believes that the classic approach works fine for many things, but it still presents barriers (cost of specific hardware, battery life and so on).

Visual distractions also aren’t always appropriate, and sometimes all you need is relevant info — restaurant opening times, points of interest, for example — whispered in your ear. That’s what Bose is offering, and we (me and my colleague Cherlynn Low in the pictures and video above) tried it out for ourselves in downtown Austin at SXSW.

When Bose announced its AR intentions, it did so with a pair of sunglasses, not headphones. This might lead you to think there’s still a visual component, but there isn’t. The reason Bose chose a pair of specs is because a set of “smart headphones” would be predictable, and Bose wanted to shake things up a bit. So, it put its technology in sunglasses to show that it can be used in any kind of head-worn wearable, opening it up to all sorts of possibilities.

When a Bose representative handed me a pair of the glasses, I asked if they used bone-conduction for the audio, but he said no. I slipped them on, and instantly heard music. It had been playing before I put them on, but I hadn’t realized, as it was barely audible until the glasses were sitting on my ears. Bose says it worked on a super-thin mini speaker that “projects” audio into your ears, and was designed with this specific project in mind.

I’ll be honest, Cherlynn and I were both pretty impressed with just the idea of music-playing sunglasses as they were, we hadn’t even moved on to the AR demo yet. The sound quality was very impressive and there was a built-in microphone for answering calls. The glasses were 3D-printed prototypes, but were still light and comfortable to wear.

The AR element works thanks to a nine-axis IMU sensor that, in combination with your phone’s GPS, knows where you are and exactly what direction you’re looking in.

Before we headed out into the world, Bose played us some example audio with local information, or opening times, and demonstrated direction-specific information being played only in the one ear (“to your left is the train station” for example). Those ideas are somewhat possible with a phone and headphones already, the point here is that you will be able to look at something, and call up information about it on request.

To test this for real, Bose took us out onto Austin’s bustling Rainey Street, a lively spot filled with quirky bars and eateries. At the top of the street, I looked at a block of apartments, and double-tapped the side of the glasses (the gesture programmed to call up info for our demo). Initially I was told there was no information available. But I then turned around and looked at a restaurant called “El Naranjo,” double tapped again, and was told the name, the chef, where they trained, opening hours, how long people typically stayed there for and the type of cuisine (Mexican). I repeated this all the way down the street, looking at different businesses, and the glasses responded with impressive accuracy.

Of course, this information was just a demo created by Bose; it’s the technology that’s important. All I can say is that it worked pretty well. Only once did I get info on a bar next to the one I was actually looking at, and that was rectified by a slight adjustment of my head to get my target central to my gaze. Oh, and all the while, I had music playing in my ears, which would dip in volume as information was served up. Bose said that, when using this technology in actual headphones with noise cancellation, developers would be able to focus your attention to alerts etc, by “turning off” ambient noise around you to make sure you hear important details.

And that’s a key point to mention here. Bose isn’t trying to invent everything here (though it does of course plan to use this in its own headphones). It wants product-makers, app developers and creators to use its technology however they want. Training apps could use it to tell you where popular cycle routes are, or even where other runners are relative to you during a race. Other natural fits for the technology include travel info and reviews, of course, but this could just as easily be applied to games and language learning and beyond.

To encourage companies to adopt Bose AR, the audio firm has a pool of $50 million up for grabs to entice developers. So, whether you’re working on a dating app, a food delivery service or anything that could profit from location-specific information, then know that Bose appears to be serious about making it mainstream.

Audio and AR aren’t entirely strangers. We’ve seen rumblings from companies like Harman, Here and games like good ole’ Pokémon Go have all dabbled in augmenting sound in our environment. What Bose seems to be doing differently is making it useful and ubiquitous. By knowing what you’re looking at, and being able to control with gestures (touch, voice recognition or nodding for example) you can interact with apps intuitively without looking at your phone. Whether this is a technology easily replicated by giants like Google (it’s be perfect for Pixel Buds) or Apple remains to be seen.

It’s worth noting that the demo we were given isn’t an indicator of what it might actually be like in real life. The world is big, maps are inaccurate, and sensors can be fooled and confused. But it’s a promising start. If Bose can lure those developers over, and get its platform into a variety of devices, simply looking at something could be the go-to way of learning about the world.

Catch up on the latest news from SXSW 2018 right here.

Snapchat and Instagram pull Giphy stickers over racist GIF

When Snapchat and Instagram introduced Giphy stickers for Stories, they expected to offer PG-rated GIFs that even their young patrons can use. Unfortunately, things don’t always go as planned: both platforms have disabled the feature after users discovered an extremely racist GIF that says “N—- Crime Death Counter — Keep Cranking Bonzo, the Numbers Just Keep on Climbing!” among Giphy’s offerings. Since the sticker was first discovered on Snapchat, the ephemeral messaging app yanked it first. A spokesperson told TechCrunch that it disabled the feature while it waits “for Giphy’s team to take a look at it.”

[Image credit: TechCrunch]

People found the same thing on Instagram shortly after, and the social network decided to follow suit. Its spokesperson echoed Snapchat’s statement, telling TechCrunch that it has “stopped [its] integration with Giphy as they investigate the issue.” Snapchat has poor track record when it comes to racial sensitivity — it released racist image filters more than once — but the fact that the sticker is also available on Instagram makes this a Giphy issue.

Giphy’s community guidelines says it doesn’t allow anything that contains Hate Speech, but it looks like at least one fell through the cracks. A spokesperson told us the image made its way to the platforms due to a bug in its content moderation filters. The online GIF database has since fixed the issue and is currently reviewing every sticker it offers by hand:

“A user discovered an offensive GIF sticker in our library, and we immediately removed it per our content guidelines.

After investigation of the incident, this sticker was available due to a bug in our content moderation filters specifically affecting GIF stickers. We have fixed the bug and have re-moderated all of the GIF stickers in our library.

The GIPHY staff is also further reviewing every GIF sticker by hand and should be finished shortly.

We take full responsibility for these recent events and sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended.”

Source: TechCrunch (1), (2)

Here’s what you missed at the 2018 Geneva Motor Show

This year’s Geneva Motor Show seemed to be all about going fast without stopping at the gas pump. Gas-powered vehicles continue to dominate the market, but automakers took the opportunity to showcase their electrified roadmap as they transition from oil to electrons.

From supercar concepts like the Rimac Concept 2, to SUV’s that rival the Tesla Model X from Jaguar and Audi, this year’s show demonstrated the automotive world’s commitment to battery-powered vehicles. Even concept cars that will never make their way to an assembly line are now EVs. Hyundai’s Le Fil Rouge, its design blueprint for the future, was an EV.

It’s still early days for the EV as drivers overwhelmingly purchase gas-powered vehicles over electric. But while our collective preference is for internal combustion, the electric vehicle is clearly here to stay and frankly, it’s tough to overlook the offerings coming from automakers.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from the 2018 Geneva Motor Show.