Tag: technology

Data-grabbing biometric health monitoring is starting to make its way into cars

“Smart cars” – whether or not connected to the internet – are already harvesting massive amounts of data not only regarding locations and movements of vehicles but also from drivers themselves.

Many are starting to see this as a concerning trend in the way it impacts security both of individuals and countries – a heavily chip-dependent vehicle can be hacked, and even weaponized, some are warning – but development and deployment of these technologies don’t seem to be slowing down.

On the contrary, the industry of biometric sensors used in vehicles is growing and is projected to be worth over $1.1 billion in three years, according to a recent report from Market Research Future.

Korea’s Hyundai is now pioneering biometric-data-based healthcare monitoring with its upcoming biometric sensors system marketed as the first anywhere in the world healthcare-focused cabin controller, “that can integrate and analyze multiple bio-signs.”

It essentially aims to turn your car into a mobile healthcare center that monitors your posture, heart rate, and brain waves. The elaborate and intrusive system’s purpose is said to be to detect drunk and drowsy drivers, while the biometric dataset that will be built with its use will help improve “the smart cabin” and equip it to solve issues like stress and motion sickness – and, even block drunk driving, Korean media are reporting.

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Sen Liz Warren Now Pivots to Government Control of Big Tech … Charger Cords?

Is Elizabeth Warren hitting the bottle again? The Massachusetts senator, who just declared war on crisis pregnancy centers, has now pivoted to … charger cords.

Fauxcahontas is vewy, vewy, angwy about why it takes so many different types of charger cords to power a variety of devices at home and work.

Warren said on Twitter on Thursday that “consumers shouldn’t have to keep buying new chargers all the time for different devices. We can clear things up with uniform standards—for less expense, less hassle, and less waste.”

It’s annoying and expensive to have to get a new charger cord with every device. But should Warren and her aging far-Left Senate kin, Ed Markey and Bernie Sanders, the backers of a standardized power cord, really be the high-tech big idea guys in such a venture? Thankfully, in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, they don’t actually give ideas on how to standardize cords. No, they simply want to compel it.

The trio contended, “we cannot allow the consumer electronics industry to prioritize proprietary and inevitably obsolete charging technology over consumer protection and environmental health.”

Can anyone check to see which side of the Blockbuster versus Netflix issue Warren, Markey, and Sanders were on? Do you suppose these three thought “nah, Betamax all the way”?

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Feds Accessing Location Data from Millions of People Through Private Brokers

Big Brother is tracking your location with the help of private data brokers.

According to a recent report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), data brokers harvest location data from mobile apps and then sell it to government agencies including state and local law enforcement, ICE, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

Many of the apps on a mobile device track and record location data. These include navigation apps, social media apps, and weather apps, among many others. According to EFF, once a user gives an app permission to access location data, it typically has “free rein” to share it with just about anybody. Government agencies take advantage of these loose standards to purchase troves of location data relating to millions of individuals from data brokers.

“Once in government hands, the data is used by the military to spy on people overseas, by ICE to monitor people in and around the U.S., and by criminal investigators like the FBI and Secret Service.”

There is a tangled web of companies buying and selling data in this multi-billion-dollar industry. According to the EFF report, it’s virtually impossible to determine which apps share data. But apparently, a lot of them do. Data broker Venntel, a subsidiary of Gravy Analytics, claims to collect location data from over 80,000 apps.

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Scientists in China claim to have developed ‘mind-reading’ artificial intelligence

Researchers in China reportedly claimed this month that they had developed artificial intelligence capable of reading the human mind, though full information about the alleged breakthrough remains elusive shortly after it was announced. 

Multiple media outlets reported this week that a since-deleted video posted online from the Hefei Comprehensive National Science Centre claimed to have produced software that can monitor both brain waves and facial recognition in order to determine if subjects are being sufficiently attentive to state propaganda.

The tool will reportedly be used to further solidify … confidence and determination to be grateful to the party, listen to the party and follow the party.”

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Quantum Processor Completes 9,000 Years of Work in 36 Microseconds

Technology continues to move forward at incredible speeds and it seems like every week we learn about a new breakthrough that changes our minds about what is possible.

Researchers in Toronto used a photonic quantum computer chip to solve a sampling problem that went way beyond the fastest computers and algorithms.

The paper the researchers published says that the Borealis quantum chip took only 36 microseconds to solve a problem that would take supercomputers and algorithms 9,000 years to figure out.

Yes, you read that right…9,000 years.

The Borealis chip uses bursts of light to transmit quantum information and the researchers believe that this is a huge leap forward for quantum chips.

The authors of the study said,

“This work is a critical milestone on the path to a practical quantum computer, validating key technological features of photonics as a platform for this goal.”

Quantum computers are different from traditional computers and one major way is to process three units of data instead of only two. The computers we are used to use binary (0, 1) and quantum computers use what is called qubits (0, 1, both).

While this news is certainly exciting, quantum computers still have a long road ahead of them. The UK Ministry of Defence purchased its first quantum computer in order to run tests, but it could be years before we know how or when they’ll be used regularly.

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Higgs Boson researchers mark 10 year anniversary with return to particle studies 

July 4th marks 10 years since scientists at CERN, the world’s largest research centre based near Geneva, announced the existence of the Higgs Boson. A team of 6000 researchers working with the world’s first atom splitter, the Large Hardron Collider.

The discovery of the long-sought for particle behind the origin of mass saw François Englert and Peter Higgs awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. 45 years later after they proposed the theory, they cracked the practical side too. 

For this iconic anniversary, CERN has announced it will restart its Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the machine which studies the origins of matter, and the universe.

Halting the activity of LHC for three years, CERN took the time to upgrade it. On July 5th, For the third time in its history, the Large Hadron Collider, will restart to an unprecedented level of collision energy (13.6 trillion electronvolts).

Delphine Jacquet, an engineer in charge of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), explains the technicalities the team will carry out to continue the studies.

“We will put in a collision, for the first time, in the LHC, protons at an energy record of 6.8 tev per beam. At this energy the collision will be at 13.6 tera electron volts (tev), and this will be a very nice record for the experiment.”

Jacquet continues: “From this moment on, it will be the data taken from the experiment, for a long run of 3 years, hoping that we will have new discoveries and interesting things coming out from these collisions.”

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As Chicago Crime Sends Businesses Packing, Scientists Create Algorithm To Detect In Advance

Chicago’s legendary crime has caused businesses to leave town amid the growing threat of violence.

“We would do thousands of jobs a year in the city, but as we got robbed more, my people operating rollers and pavers we got robbed, our equipment would get stolen in broad daylight and there would usually be a gun involved, and it got expensive and it got dangerous,” said Gary Rabine, who pulled his road paving company out of the city after his crews were repeatedly robbed.

Rabine told Fox News that the increased costs of security and insurance for “thousands” of jobs in the city eventually caused expenses to be “twice as much as they should be” per employee.

Billionaire Ken Griffin moved his firm, Citadel, from Chicago to Miami, after saying in October 2021 that “Chicago is like Afghanistan, on a good day, and that’s a problem,” adding that he saw “25 bullet shots in the glass window of the retail space” in the building he lives in.

“If people aren’t safe here, they’re not going to live here,” he told the Wall Street Journal in April. “I’ve had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city from.”

AI to the rescue?

Scientists from the University of Chicago have created a new “AI” algorithm that can predict crime a week in advance.

By learning patterns in time and geographic locations from publicly available data on violent and property crimes, the “AI” can predict crimes up to one week in advance with around 90% accuracy.

The tool was tested and validated using historical data from the City of Chicago around two broad categories of reported events: violent crimes (homicides, assaults, and batteries) and property crimes (burglaries, thefts, and motor vehicle thefts). These data were used because they were most likely to be reported to police in urban areas where there is historical distrust and lack of cooperation with law enforcement. Such crimes are also less prone to enforcement bias, as is the case with drug crimes, traffic stops, and other misdemeanor infractions.

Previous efforts at crime prediction often use an epidemic or seismic approach, where crime is depicted as emerging in “hotspots” that spread to surrounding areas. These tools miss out on the complex social environment of cities, however, and don’t consider the relationship between crime and the effects of police enforcement. –PhysOrg

The model isolates crime by analyzing time and spacial coordinates of discrete events and detecting patterns to predict future events. It worked just as well with data from seven other US cities; Atlanta, Austin, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Francisco

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New Israeli military technology allows operators to ‘see through walls’

New Israeli military technology allows users to detect objects and people behind walls by using an AI-based tracking algorithm, according to a report.

The Xaver 1000, produced by the Israeli imaging solutions company Camero-Tech, was unveiled for the first time at the Eurosatury 2022 exhibition in Paris, France. 

It’s part of the “See Through Walls” family of products which, according to the company, provide real-time information on objects and people concealed behind walls.

Camero-Tech claims the new XAVER-1000 is an “essential system” for militaries, law enforcement, intelligence units, and search and rescue teams.

The company said it is a new tool for tactical operations, as it can detect the presence of life in rooms, the number of people and their distance from the system, target height and orientation, and the general layout of a space.

The technology can display live objects, behind walls, in such high resolution that it can detect whether a person is sitting, standing, or lying down, even if they have been motionless for a significant period. Specific body parts are also detectable, the company said.

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MIT Engineers Create ‘Robotic Lightning Bug’ That Weighs Little More than a Paperclip

In a new study published in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters a team of engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) describes how it created a 650 mg aerial robot powered by four electroluminescent actuators (tiny “soft” motors), each able to generate distinct colors and patterns. This tiny flying bug-bot, the researchers say, “further shows the potential of achieving coordinated swarm flights without using well-calibrated indoor tracking systems.”

In the video immediately above the engineers outline how their “insect-scale” flying lightning bug robot works, noting it was inspired by the ever-whimsical firefly and its ability to use bioluminescent chemical reactions to create light.

“If you think of large-scale robots, they can communicate using a lot of different tools—Bluetooth, wireless, all those sorts of things. But for a tiny, power-constrained robot, we are forced to think about new modes of communication. This is a major step toward flying these robots in outdoor environments where we don’t have a well-tuned, state-of-the-art motion tracking system,” Kevin Chen says in an MIT press release. Chen is the D. Reid Weedon Jr. Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT and the senior author of the paper.

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Nebraska wants to test body and facial scans that work from a distance

The state of Nebraska is planning to test whole-body and facial recognition technology from far-off sensors. The project, funded by the Department of Defense, aims to test the accuracy of AI in identifying subjects from images and videos captured by stationary towers and drones positioned far from the subjects.

The project is backed by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) as part of its Biometric Recognition and Identification at Altitude or Range, aka Briar, program. The first phase, dubbed WatchID, of the three-part program will run for 18 months.

Researchers from the University of Nebraska’s Omaha and Lincoln campuses, University of Maryland College Park, Resonant Sciences, and BlueHalo Co. will participate in WatchID. The program will require 200 volunteers who will stand and walk in circles and straight lines in an open space. Once the first phase is successful, it will be expanded to require 600 volunteers.

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