New Florence. New Renaissance.

Next-gen UX

FastCompany has 15 mind-blowing UX including the Microsoft Canetroller

It’s essentially a cane that works in virtual reality, allowing someone without vision to tap their way through simulated 3D environments. It’s a reminder that the next digital revolution cannot leave anyone behind. And it’s a marvel of engineering, to boot.

Brain to Vehicle interfaces

Nissan made big, brainy waves at CES by unveiling its brain-to-vehicle research project. If you’ve read recent headlines about people controlling robotic arms or quadcopters simply by thinking about doing so while wearing funny electroencephalography (EEG) caps bristling with sensors and wires, you might wonder whether the era of drive-by-wireless imagination is upon us. It is not. Nor is direct brain control of your commute what Nissan is after. This sandbox research project simply aims to use brainwaves to make your time in a car more pleasurable in two specific instances—when you’re driving and when you’re being driven.

Motor Trend

 

Universal standard for Braille displays

The USB Implementers Forum — a group that includes major tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google — has announced a new USB HID (Human Interface Device) standard for Braille displays. That may not sound like much, but it’s a big move forward to make computers more accessible to people who are blind or have impaired vision by making it much easier to use Braille displays across different operating systems and devices without having to worry about unique software or drivers for each device.

Ultimately, it means that soon, users will be able to simply use Braille readers as plug-and-play devices across a wide hardware ecosystem, much in the same way that users are able to simply plug in a USB mouse or keyboard. The standard seeks to make this process function similarly across operation systems, whether it’s a PC, Mac, or Android device.

The Verge

Fingerprints, DNA, now voice analysis?

During his keynote at Cognizant Community, Malcolm Frank described how Rita Singh at Carnegie-Mellon U had helped the Coast Guard with machine learning applied to voice recognition use cases. It could be the next frontier in helping law enforcement agencies.

Here’s more from the Tribune-Review

“That's long enough for Singh. She can pull troves of information from short snippets of sounds.

“There are things about your voice that you simply cannot change, like the sound of your breath,” Singh said. “Any information that we give them narrows the search. We're not at the point where we can say this is what the person looks like, go get him.”

Singh wasn't really sure what she had until the Coast Guard came asking. The Coast Guard came to her with a tape. She listened to it, ran in through her computer programs and was surprised with what she found.

“That was when we realized what we could do and that was when they realized we could do it,” Singh said. “You could actually get a lot of information from sound and it was actually pretty useful.”

Haptics of robotic screwing and unscrewing

This is how they found the universal pattern of screwing and unscrewing forces that can successfully drive home a screw or remove it. “Results show that people apply axial force to the screws to avoid screwdriver slippage (cam-outs) and this axial force is proportional to the torque which is required for screwing,” say Mironov and co.

The team also found that the required force depends on the type of screw head: screws with a Phillips head require significantly more axial force to avoid cam-outs than screws with a hex head. So given the same axial force, hex heads are less likely to slip than Phillips heads.

Finally, Mironov and co programmed a robot to re-create the same pattern of forces. This robot is  equipped with a screwdriver, a gripper to hold the screw, and machine vision to locate the screw in its socket.

MIT Technology Review

 

Pushing UX, drone and other frontiers

Samsung’s latest patent is for a drone with an integrated display that’s able to detect the face and pupils of a person as well as their hand gestures and position. The patent shows a unit that features a display at the center with four propellers on each corner.

The patent describes a drone that can include a camera and observation system to transmit information to the main control unit. The system can track the users’ eyes, head, hands, or fingers in real time. The drone’s flight speed and direction can be controlled by moving your head, eyes, or hands, and the unit can also automatically track users without any additional gestures.

The Verge

Photo Credit

 

Firefox Quantum

The new Firefox actually manages to evolve the entire browser experience, recognizing the multi-device, ultra-mobile lives we all lead and building a browser that plays along. It's a browser built with privacy in mind, automatically stopping invisible trackers and making your history available to you and no one else. It's better than Chrome, faster than Chrome, smarter than Chrome. It's my new go-to browser.

The speed thing is real, by the way. Mozilla did a lot of engineering work to allow its browser to take advantage of all the multi-core processing power on modern devices, and it shows.

Wired

IoT and Voice interfaces on the farm

Mrinal Wadhwa, CTO at the IoT company, Fybr recently shared with me this interesting use case in farming.

"A plum farm lost $ 2 million dollars in revenue, last year, because the heat affected the crop and truck loads of fruit were rejected by Costco.

Fybr is working with this plum grower to create an early warning system with infrared sensors that continuously monitor the amount of heat that the tree canopy is experiencing. In contrast to weather forecasts, this sensor information is timely, granular, local and actionable. A farm manager may turn on irrigation sprinklers to cool down the field on a particularly hot day. Fybr also retrofitted their irrigation pumps and drip lines for wireless remote control, a step towards automating the sense-and-respond process.

Low cost sensing, remotely controllable equipment and data driven learning algorithms will help farms in the near future protect against the risk of sudden weather events, significantly reduce wasted water and improve crop yields. As the amount of real-time information available about their farm grows, it's impractical for farmers to navigate through apps on a tablet or a phone while they work in their fields. Voice based command and query will be a potent tool for growers to proactively respond to changing conditions.

Older voice technologies, like Apple's Siri, had minimal customization capabilities for enterprises, but the latest with Google's Assistant/Dialogflow/Cloud Speech and Amazon's Alexa/Lex/Polly provide powerful tools for enterprises to quickly build high quality natural language interfaces.

In the below video, Fybr's Alexa integration is able to interpret and identify the correct irrigation pump and opens it successfully. Even a small error rate in this would be unacceptable in business critical applications. The next challenge - improving user identity and authentication around voice technologies."

 

Microsoft’s Chief Literary Officer

Cortana is Microsoft’s personal AI assistant for smartphones, named for a fictional character from the company’s sci-fi video game series Halo.Strictly speaking, engineers coded her into existence, but her well-timed wit comes courtesy of Microsoft’s resident blabbermouth, principal content publishing manager Jonathan Foster, and his creative posse of novelists, journalists, poets, filmmakers and playwrights who together shape the sass and spunk behind the gabby digital helper.

So the need to soften a bot’s cold, calculated edges has led to a new emerging path for poets, comedians and fiction writers like Foster inside tech companies. Foster, who earned an M.F.A. in film and playwriting from the University of Southern California, has written several plays and one novel — and loves writing witty banter.

Oxy

See how Amazon Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana would do in a stand up routine

 

Facebook’s Sounds of Silence

From a post by Regina Dugan, VP of Engineering at Facebook

“Today, at F8, we announced two projects focused on building new capabilities for communication. Think of them as “silent speech interfaces” with all the convenience of voice and the privacy of text. We asked these questions: What if you could type directly with your brain? And what if you could hear with your skin? The answers reinforce what we intuitively know…

We are wired to communicate. And connect.

Over the next 2 years, we will be building systems that demonstrate the capability to type at 100 wpm by decoding neural activity devoted to speech. Just as you take many photos and decide to share some of them, so too, you have many thoughts and decide to share some of them in the form of the spoken word. It is these words, words that you have already decided to send to the speech center of your brain, that we seek to turn into text. And unlike other approaches, ours will be focused on developing a non-invasive system that could one day become a speech prosthetic for people with communication disorders or a new means for input to AR. Even something as simple as a ‘yes/no’ brain click, or a ‘brain mouse’ would be transformative.

We also described a system that may one day allow you to hear through your skin. You have 2 square meters of skin on your body, packed with sensors, and wired to your brain. In the 19th century, Braille taught us that we could interpret small bumps on a surface as language. Since then many techniques have emerged that illustrate our brain’s ability to reconstruct language from components. Today we demonstrated an artificial cochlea of sorts and the beginnings of a new a ‘haptic vocabulary’.”

Photo Credit from F8