Category Archives: T – tech

T - domestic, T - tech, W - now

IBM For Fashion

 

The I.B.M. solution, at least at this point, involves tracking biometrics through a mini camera in a mannequin’s eye or placed somewhere in a store.

There are two tests going on in Milan, one for a fashion company’s flagship store and the other, in an electronics store. The clients have sworn I.B.M. to secrecy for fear of customer backlash, although I.B.M. promises that the data is collected only in aggregated form and cannot be traced to any individuals.

[…]

I.B.M.’s applications are different. At the pilot in the Milan fashion store, for example, the client noticed that almost all Asian customers enter the store through one particular door, even though five are available.

“We thought it was a mistake, but we checked it out and it was right and it continues to happen,” Mr. Bozzi said. “We don’t know why yet but, in the meantime, the store is considering positioning products by that door that are known to appeal particularly to Asian shoppers.”

Once shoppers can be tracked, the next step could be advertisements selected to match biometric triggers: A customer walks into a shop and a piped-in voice asks if the jacket she bought last time has been satisfactory and would she like to see something similar from a new line. (Tom Cruise’s character received the same treatment in the 2002 movie “Minority Report.”)

 

Ref: Biometrics Take on a New Style – NYTimes
Ref: Les yeux du mannequin – Le dernier des blogs (via Beta Knowledge)

T - tech, W - now

Entropica

 

In the paper, which now appears in Physical Review Letters, Harvard physicist and computer scientist Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross posits a Maximum Causal Entropy Production Principle — a conjecture that intelligent behavior in general spontaneously emerges from an agent’s effort to ensure its freedom of action in the future. According to this theory, intelligent systems move towards those configurations which maximize their ability to respond and adapt to future changes.

 

Ref: Entropica
Ref: How Skynet Might Emerge From Simple Physics – io9

T - tech, W - now

The End of Insight

 

I worry that insight is becoming impossible, at least at the frontiers of mathematics. Even when we’re able to figure out what’s true or false, we’re less and less able to understand why.

An argument along these lines was recently given by Brian Davies in the “Notices of the American Mathematical Society”. He mentions, for example, that the four-color map theorem in topology was proven in 1976 with the help of computers, which exhaustively checked a huge but finite number of possibilities. No human mathematician could ever verify all the intermediate steps in this brutal proof, and even if someone claimed to, should we trust them? To this day, no one has come up with a more elegant, insightful proof. So we’re left in the unsettling position of knowing that the four-color theorem is true but still not knowing why.

Similarly important but unsatisfying proofs have appeared in group theory (in the classification of finite simple groups, roughly akin to the periodic table for chemical elements) and in geometry (in the problem of how to pack spheres so that they fill space most efficiently, a puzzle that goes back to Kepler in the 1500’s and that arises today in coding theory for telecommunications).

In my own field of complex systems theory, Stephen Wolfram has emphasized that there are simple computer programs, known as cellular automata, whose dynamics can be so inscrutable that there’s no way to predict how they’ll behave; the best you can do is simulate them on the computer, sit back, and watch how they unfold. Observation replaces insight. Mathematics becomes a spectator sport.

If this is happening in mathematics, the supposed pinnacle of human reasoning, it seems likely to afflict us in science too, first in physics and later in biology and the social sciences (where we’re not even sure what’s true, let alone why).

When the End of Insight comes, the nature of explanation in science will change forever. We’ll be stuck in an age of authoritarianism, except it’ll no longer be coming from politics or religious dogma, but from science itself.

– Steven Strogatz

 

Ref: Explain It to Me Again, Computer – Slate
Ref: The World Question Center – Edge

T - tech, W - future

Kurzweil on the Computers That Will Live in our Brains

“I think we’re going to ultimately move beyond these little devices that are like looking at the world through a keyhole,” Futurist Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, says. “You’ll be online all the time. Google Glass is a solid first step.”

[…]

“Ultimately these devices will be the size of blood cells, we’ll be able to send them inside our brain through the capillaries, and basically connect up brain to the cloud,” Kurzweil says. “But that’s a mid-2030’s scenario.”

In Kurzweil’s vision, these advances don’t simply bring computers closer to our biological systems. Machines become more like us. “Your personality, your skills are contained in information in your neocortex, and it is information,” Kurzweil says. “These technologies will be a million times more powerful in 20 years and we will be able to manipulate the information inside your brain.”

He has a particular message for those who fear increasing sophisicated artificial intelligence.

“When computers can achieve these things it’s not for the purpose of displacing us it’s really to make ourselves smarter,” Kurzweil says. “And smarter in the sense of being more loving… Really enhancing the things that we value about humans.”

—

Today, he [Ray Kurzweil] envisions a “cybernetic friend” that listens in on your phone conversations, reads your e-mail, and tracks your every move—if you let it, of course—so it can tell you things you want to know even before you ask. This isn’t his immediate goal at Google, but it matches that of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who said in the company’s early days that he wanted to build the equivalent of the sentient computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey—except one that wouldn’t kill people.

For now, Kurzweil aims to help computers understand and even speak in natural language. “My mandate is to give computers enough understanding of natural language to do useful things—do a better job of search, do a better job of answering questions,” he says. Essentially, he hopes to create a more flexible version of IBM’s Watson, which he admires for its ability to understand Jeopardy!queries as quirky as “a long, tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie topping.” (Watson’s correct answer: “What is a meringue harangue?”)

 

Ref: Google’s Ray Kurzweil on the computers that will live in our brains – MarketPlace
Ref: Deep Learning – MIT Technology Review

T - tech, W - future

Google Wants to Build the Star Trek Computer

 

So I went to Google to interview some of the people who are working on its search engine. And what I heard floored me. “The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Singhal told me. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build—the ideal version done realistically.” He added that the search team does refer to Star Trek internally when they’re discussing how to improve the search engine. “It comes up often,” Singhal said. “For instance, we might say, ‘Captain Kirk never pulled out a keyboard to ask a question.’ So in that way it becomes one of the design principles—we see that because the Star Trek computer actively relies on speech, if we want to do that we need to work to push the barrier of speech recognition and machine understanding.”

 […]

What does it mean that Google really is trying to build the Star Trek computer? I take it as a cue to stop thinking about Google as a “search engine.” That term conjures a staid image: a small box on a page in which you type keywords. A search engine has several key problems. First, most of the time it doesn’t give you an answer—it gives you links to an answer. Second, it doesn’t understand natural language; when you search, you’ve got to adopt the search engine’s curious, keyword-laden patois. Third, and perhaps most importantly, a search engine needs for you to ask it questions—it doesn’t pipe in with information when you need it, without your having to ask.

The Star Trek computer worked completely differently. It understood language and was conversational, it gave you answers instead of references to answers, and it anticipated your needs. “It was the perfect search engine,” Singhal said. “You could ask it a question and it would tell you exactly the right answer, one right answer—and sometimes it would tell you things you needed to know in advance, before you could ask it.”

T - domestic, T - medical, T - tech, W - now

PatientsLikeMe

 

Nearly 200,000 PatientsLikeMe members have created and shared their own medical records, often using standardized questionnaires or tests they conducted themselves. The new platform will include tools for developing standardized measurements for additional diseases, tools to evaluate and refine those measurements, and mechanisms for licensing the data and for open-sourcing the measurements used to collect the data under a Creative Commons license.

The plan, announced at the TED Conference Monday, is to rapidly accelerate the spread of medical data now hoarded by private companies, locked down by privacy laws, and collected using often proprietary and commercially licensed measurement systems.

 

Ref: Social Network Could Revolutionize Disease Treatment – Wired
Ref: PatientsLikeMe

T - tech, W - now

Facebook Likes Can Be Used to Determine User’s Personality

That might go without saying, but the brainiacs at the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Center and Microsoft Research Cambridge have the data to prove it – and a lot of other things about you, too. They analyzed the Likes of 58,466 volunteers and were able to determine with surprisingly high accuracy a range of personal information that some Facebook users may not have made public, including their sexuality, where they worship, how they’ll vote in the next election and what their IQ is.

Simply by delving into volunteers’ Likes, the researchers could determine in 95 percent of cases whether a person was Caucasian or African American and in 88 percent of cases whether the person was heterosexual or homosexual. They could determine whether the person is Christian or Islamic 82 percent of the time.

The researchers described Facebook Likes as “a generic class of digital record that could be used to extract sensitive information.” Volunteers used the myPersonality Facebook app to track their Likes, which were fed into algorithms to arrive at the results. The data were supported by information from volunteer profiles and personality tests.

Personality trait and predictive Likes, according to the study

High IQ

The Godfather

Lord of the Rings

The Daily Show

Low IQ

Harley Davidson

I Love Being A Mom

Tyler Perry

Emotional stability – neurotic

Emo

Dot Dot Curve

So So Happy

Emotional stability – calm and relaxed

Business administration

Climbing

Getting Money

Homosexual males

Wicked the Musical

No H8 Campaign

Human Rights Campaign

Homosexual Females

Not Being Pregnant

The L Word

Sometimes I Just Lay In Bed and Think About Life

Parents separated at 21

I’m Sorry I Love You

Never Apologize For What You Feel

It’s Like Saying Sorry For Being Real

When Ur Single, All U See Is Happy Couples N Wen Ur In A Relationship All U See Is Happy Singles

Parents did not separate at 21

Apples To Apples: The Helen Keller Card

Gene Wilder

Making Dirty Innuendos Out Of Perfectly Innocent Things

 

Ref: Study: Facebook Likes Can Be Used to Determine Intelligence, Sexuality – Wired
Ref: Facebook users unwittingly revealing intimate secrets, study finds – The Guardian

T - domestic, T - tech, W - future

Google Glass Will Identify People by Clothing Choices

 

A new technology built into the device,dug up by New Scientist, takes Google Glass from interesting to down right creepy. Google Glass can now pick a person out of crowd based on their fashion style.

The system, InSight, developed in partnership with Google, will take a nice little moment to assess the clothing in frame, and then point out exactly where your friends are in busy settings like a bar, concert, or sporting event. It could probably point you out in a protest or shopping mall too.

 

Ref: Creepier By The Minute: Google Glass Will Identify People By Clothing Choices – Macgasm

T - tech, W - future, W - now

Perfect Speech Recognition Using Crowdsourcing

Analyzing speech and improving speech-to-text machines has been a hobby horse for Darpa in recent years. But this takes it a step further, in exploring the ways crowdsourcing can make it possible for our speech to be recorded and stored forever. But it’s not just about better recordings of what you say. It’ll lead to more recorded conversations, quickly transcribed and then stored in perpetuity — like a Twitter feed or e-mail archive for everyday speech. Imagine living in a world where every errant utterance you make is preserved forever.

University of Texas computer scientist Matt Lease has studied crowdsourcing for years, including for an earlier Darpa project called Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text, or EARS, which sought to boost the accuracy of automated transcription machines. His work has also attracted enough attention for Darpa to award him a $300,000 award over two years to study the new project, called “Blending Crowdsourcing with Automation for Fast, Cheap, and Accurate Analysis of Spontaneous Speech.” The project envisions a world that is both radically transparent and a little freaky.

 

Ref: DARPA: Perfect Speech Recognition, Conversations Stored Forever – DarkGovernment