New Florence. New Renaissance.

Waste Robotics

WINK News about a county, Sarasota, south of where we live

"That is where these recycling robots come in. They are the first in Florida. All six at the Single Stream Recyclers facility sort through recyclables coming from several counties, including Charlotte and Collier.

The robots are programmed to recognize colors, textures, shapes and patterns. By being able to recognize these, it can identify food and beverage cartons, picking up 80 cartons per minute, which can later be reused as writing paper and paper towels.

“It’s helping economics,” said Brent Hildebrand, managing director of enterprise sales at AMP Robotics. “It is helping pull more items out of the stream.”

The robot works like one in the video below

 

 

 

"Blockchain" farming

Your future chicken dinner is about to get its very own Fitbit-like device. Chinese online insurance company ZhongAn Online has developed a new GPS tracker for poultry called GoGo Chicken, according to the Wall Street Journal. The device fits around the animal’s leg while sensors monitor information like the chicken’s environment, what it eats, and how much exercise it gets.

ZhongAn refers to the product as “blockchain farming” because it utilizes the real-time public record technology popularized by cryptocurrency to store its data on the chickens.

The information GoGo Chicken collects isn’t just for those tending to the fowl. Consumers will be able to monitor the chicken’s day-to-day life via a mobile app as well.

Mashable

Photo Credit

 

 

The tech behind Apple’s Animoji

To solve for that, Li and his team treated the face like a geometry problem. They trained their algorithms on a set of faces and expressions that allowed them to build statistical 3-D models that could describe, generally, what a face looks like across different populations and in different environments. With that computational model in hand, the algorithm can more easily match itself to a face’s 3-D point cloud and create an illustrated avatar that mirrors facial expressions in real time.

So far, visual effects companies have mostly used this technology to streamline their production process. But the mainstream will soon experience it though features like Apple's Animoji and Intel’s Pocket Avatars, which uses facial recognition software to turn your face into a digital avatar.

Li says face mimicking emoji are only the beginning. He now runs Pinscreen, a startup looking to automate the creation of photorealistic computer graphics, where he and his team are working on technology that would allow algorithms to build a hyper-realistic 3-D avatar based on a single source photo.

Wired

 

An aquarium to replace TSA?

Starting in 2018 at the Dubai International Airport’s Terminal 3, passengers will no longer need to stop at any security clearance counter to show their passports. Instead, travelers will pass through a first-of-its-kind biometric tunnel equipped with 80 face and iris scanning cameras hidden behind an immersive aquarium video. Details about the Smart Tunnel were revealed during the five-day Gulf Information Technology Exhibition (GITEX) Technology week.

“It is the first of its kind in the world and it’s a biometric system that allows passengers to simply walk through the tunnel without doing anything,” Major Khalid Al Felasi, Assistant General Director of Smart Services in GDRFA-Dubai, told Gulf News. “They don’t even need to show their passport. It works on face recognition technology and the passenger can finish entry procedure within 15 seconds.”

VRROOM

The FBI Next-Gen Identification initiative

Popular Science

“This summer, the reach of facial-recognition software will grow further still. As part of its Next-Generation Identification (NGI) program, the FBI will roll out nationwide access to more than 16 million mug shots, and local and state police departments will contribute millions more. It’s the largest, most comprehensive database of its kind, and it will turn a relatively exclusive investigative tool into a broad capacity for law enforcement. Officers with no in-house face-matching software—the overwhelming majority—will be able to submit an image to the FBI’s servers in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where algorithms will return a ranked list of between 2 and 50 candidates.

The $1.2-billion NGI program already collects more than faces. Its repositories include fingerprints and palm prints; other biometric markers such as iris scans and vocal patterns may also be incorporated. “

but before you yell privacy violation consider this

“Facial recognition, on the other hand, never identifies a subject—at best, it suggests prospects for further investigation. In part, that’s because faces are mutable. Fingerprints don’t grow mustaches, and DNA can’t throw on a pair of sunglasses. But faces can sprout hair and sag with time and circumstance. People can also resemble one another, either because they have similar features or because a low-resolution image tricks the algorithm into thinking they do.” 

and the Cara facial recognition Reebok uses in some of its stores (in graph) and casinos in Macau and elsewhere are using are just as sophisticated