Blind Sight: The Next Generation of Sensory Substitution Technology - The Crux It’s long been known that blind people are able to compensate for their loss of sight by using other senses, relying on sound and touch to help them “see” the world. Neuroimaging studies have backed this up, showing that in blind people brain regions devoted to sight become rewired to process touch and sound as visual information. Now, in the age of Google Glass, smartphones and self-driving cars, new technology offers ever more advanced ways of substituting one sensory experience for another. These exciting new devices can restore sight to the blind in ways never before thought possible. A female blind user wearing the vOICe. Seeing with the Ears One approach is to use sound as a stand-in for vision. Over a series of training sessions they learn, for example, that a short, loud synthesizer sound signifies a vertical line, while a longer burst equates to a horizontal one. The concept has tried and true analogs in the animal world, says Dr. According to Dr. Navigating with the Fingertips
The Battle For The Connected Home Is Heating Up Editor’s note: Matt Turck is a managing director of FirstMark Capital. Follow him on Twitter at @mattturck. Almost 15 years ago, a friend of mine at McKinsey spent a few nights writing a document called “The Battle for the Home”. The thesis at the time was that with broadband, the home PC was gradually going to challenge the TV as the core home digital system. Over the following few years, that battle gradually grew more complex, as the home saw the adoption of a new generation of HDTV sets, game consoles, set-top boxes and DVR options. Now, the battle has expanded to the rest of the home. The irony of this market, not always acknowledged, is that a number of large companies with big brands and existing “pipes” in our homes, have been unusually innovative. The first battle for the home was not always kind to startups. While this new generation of startups has an exciting opportunity in front of it, the path to success will also be narrow. The new household brands Not so fast
Full Steam Ahead: Inside Valve's Grand Plan to Replace Game Consoles With PCs | Game|Life Clockwise from left: Anna Sweet, Eric Hope and Greg Coomer, three of the Valve employees at work on the company’s Steam Machines initiative, in the Valve offices in Bellevue, Washington. Photo: Matthew Ryan Williams/WIRED BELLEVUE, WA — Installed base. It’s what every gaming machine needs if it’s to get even a tenuous foothold in this ultra-competitive market. The difficulty of squaring this circle is the reason why the history of the gaming business is strewn with the bodies of failed platforms. Nintendo’s fall from grace might give Sony and Microsoft, the current kings of the living room, more confidence when it comes to the launches of their respective new platforms, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, later this month. Last week, Valve announced that 65 million people were now active users of Steam, its gaming umbrella service for personal computers. Our customers love all those Steam titles, but they also like their families. Valve doesn’t need to convince anybody to give up their Xbox.
The Gigaom guide to deep learning: Who’s doing it, and why it matters The field of deep learning is picking up steam to the point that it’s now inspiring a growing list of startups in areas such as natural language processing and image recognition. It’s also commanding a growing percentage of research and acquisition budgets at companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo. This post highlights some of the companies involved in this space and the type of products or projects they’re working on. What deep learning is First, though, a little primer: Despite its cognitive moniker, deep learning isn’t really about teaching machines to mimic the human brain a la the BRAIN Initiative President Obama announced in 2012. One layer of a Google deep learning network for image recognition. And how a visualization of the output of network might look, with a cat (left) or human body (right). With that in mind, here’s a brief look at some of the companies, people and places I’ve come across in researching the field. The startups AlchemyAPI: Denver, Colo.
The Threat of Artificial Intelligence If the New York Times’s latest article is to be believed, artificial intelligence is moving so fast it sometimes seems almost “magical.” Self-driving cars have arrived; Siri can listen to your voice and find the nearest movie theatre; and I.B.M. just set the “Jeopardy”-conquering Watson to work on medicine, initially training medical students, perhaps eventually helping in diagnosis. Scarcely a month goes by without the announcement of a new A.I. product or technique. Still, at some level, the only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame. But a century from now, nobody will much care about how long it took, only what happened next. For some people, that future is a wonderful thing. Most people see that sort of fear as silly science-fiction drivel—the stuff of “The Terminator” and “The Matrix.” Of course, one could try to ban super-intelligent computers altogether. Already, advances in A.I. have created risks that we never dreamt of.
Moore's Law Is Dead, What Comes Next? The world’s most powerful computing machine is perhaps also the most ubiquitous: the human brain. It’s able to perform computations on a scale that even the most advanced supercomputers cannot hope to match. However, the circuitry underpinning our brains is surprisingly sloppy and slow. Neurons act on millisecond timescales – slow when compared to the fastest processors – and can fail to activate; one reason why the brain has so many neurons is this redundancy. “The problem we’re now facing is more fundamental than anything before” What allows the brain to run on this clunky machinery is parallel computing, the ability to solve problems simultaneously using many different parts of the brain. It’s the law that says the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years; it’s the law that accurately described the explosion in computing power that enables the modern world to function; it’s Moore’s Law and it is coming to a grinding halt. Comments
World's Fastest Computer Will Operate Like a Human Brain Google in Jeopardy: What If IBM's Watson Dethroned the King of Search? | Wired Opinion Photo: Sam Gustin / WIRED Remember Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy champion? A couple years ago, Watson beat the top two human champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at a game where even interpreting the cue is complex with language nuances. Yet after the initial excitement, most people – except for a notable few – forgot about Watson. Watson was arguably the first computer ever to pass the Turing Test, designed by British mathematician Alan Turing to determine whether a computer could think. Vasant Dhar is co-director of the Center for Business Analytics at the Stern School of Business at NYU and head of its Information Systems Group. If you had a choice between asking a question to a Jeopardy champion and a search engine, which would you choose – Watson or PageRank? Which means there would be no reason for anyone to start their searches on Google. Today, more than 90 percent of Google’s current revenues are from sponsored search. In other words: Google can retrieve, but Watson can create.
The Man Who Would Build a Computer the Size of the Entire Internet | Wired Enterprise Solomon Hykes, the driving force behind Docker, an open source project that seeks to recast the internet as one giant computer. Photo: Alex Washburn/WIRED Google runs its web empire on computers the size of warehouses. Inside the massive data centers that drive things like Google Search and Gmail and Google Maps, you’ll find tens of thousands of machines — each small enough to hold in your arms — but thanks to a new breed of software that spans this sea of servers, the entire data center operates like a single system, one giant computer that runs any application the company throws at it. A Google application like Gmail doesn’t run on a particular server or even a select group of servers. Solomon Hykes isn’t one of them. With a new open-source software project called Docker, Solomon Hykes wants to build a computer the size of the internet Sitting in his company’s offices, on the 16th floor of a high-rise in downtown San Francisco, Hykes is wearing a t-shirt with a whale on it. — Ted Dziuba
The real plan for Google Glass may be to sell it to businesses, not consumers - Quartz Yesterday evening in New York City, Google’s Glass team threw a party. It brought together “Explorers” and “Influencers”—the lucky few people who got to try out the computerized glasses Google is developing. Over cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, the diverse crowd gushed about the joys and dissected the drawbacks of the device, which they’ve been wearing for the last few months. The takeaway? Google Glass is not for who you think it is. Members of the Glass operations team have been on the road showing it off to companies and organizations, and they told Quartz that some of the most enthusiastic responses have come from manufacturers, teachers, medical companies, and hospitals. Those potential uses are manifold. Other uses of Glass would be in medicine. Finance companies are already taking to Glass. This is not to say that ordinary people won’t ever use Glass. These aren’t the kinds of uses that keep a Glass on your face 24/7.
The Rise of Minimalist Sex Apps In January of last year, Roman Sidorenko and Alexander Kukhtenko had an idea to break their sexual dry spells the way they solved many of their other problems: with an app. "We wanted an easy way to find sex, basically," says Sidorenko. But the two friends (who describe themselves as "pomosexuals") were too impatient to use the available dating apps on the market, all of which required them to spend hours flirting with potential flings via chat or text message before getting a date and, possibly, sealing the deal. They knew there were horny people around them looking for sex — and nothing more — but had no way of figuring out where, and who, they were. "We thought it would be cool to use an approach like Uber," Sidorenko says. "Where you basically create the request, and you get a car pretty soon. From that brainstorm came Pure, a new app that brings the on-demand convenience of Uber or Seamless to the bedroom. So far, minimalist sex apps have yet to find Fifty Shades–like appeal.
Technological singularity The technological singularity is the hypothesis that accelerating progress in technologies will cause a runaway effect wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human intellectual capacity and control, thus radically changing civilization in an event called the singularity.[1] Because the capabilities of such an intelligence may be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is an occurrence beyond which events may become unpredictable, unfavorable, or even unfathomable.[2] The first use of the term "singularity" in this context was by mathematician John von Neumann. Proponents of the singularity typically postulate an "intelligence explosion",[5][6] where superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds, that might occur very quickly and might not stop until the agent's cognitive abilities greatly surpass that of any human. Basic concepts Superintelligence Non-AI singularity Intelligence explosion Exponential growth Plausibility