Current experiments with brain-computer interfaces have allowed an amputee to “feel” with his prosthetic hand — what other wonders will we achieve with this technology?
Category: computing – Page 983
Quantum physicists turn to the dark state
“Suppose you want to travel from Helsinki to New York and you have to change your flight in London,” explains Sorin Paraoanu. “Normally you would first fly on a plane from Helsinki to London, then wait for some time in the airport in London, then board the flight London-New York. But in the quantum world, you would be better off boarding a plane from Helsinki to London sometime after the flight London-New York took off. You will not spend any time in London and you will arrive in New York right at the time when the plane from Hesinki lands in London.” This is mind-boggling but the experiment shows that it is indeed happening.
Besides the relevance for quantum computing, the result also has deep conceptual implications. Much of our understanding of the reality is based on the so-called continuity principle: the idea that influences propagate from here to there by going through all the places in-between. Real objects don’t just appear somewhere from nothing. But the experiment seems to defy this. Like in a great show of magic, quantum physics allows things to materialize here and there, apparently out of nowhere.
The team would like to acknowledge the excellent scientific environment created in the Low Temperature Laboratory (part of OtaNano) at the Department of Applied Physics.
Portland firm DARPA research could make disputes like Apple v FBI obsolete
Portland computer science research company Galois snagged a $6.2 million grant from the Department of Defense for a project that, if successful, could make the current battle between the FBI and tech giant Apple obsolete.
The three-year research contract comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and will fund research into quantifying privacy preservation systems.
‘Can you quantify how private a system is or isn’t and can you make a judgment about it,’ said Galois CEO Rob Wiltbank,…
Dx3 to Demonstrate How Artificial Intelligence Is the Future of Retail Innovations Like Pepper the Robot to Debut at Annual Tech Conference
Still not sold on the whole robotics at this point; still not at the level where it needs from a multi-functional capability state plus still too jerky and most are more like a CPU on wheels.
TORONTO, ON –(Marketwired — February 23, 2016) — Astro Boy may be a fictional character, but Pepper the Robot is its real-world incarnation. Pepper – the world’s first humanoid robot – will join exhibitors like MasterCard, Fluid, Vizera and Eyris, as they interact with industry experts as part of The Retail Collective Lab, sponsored by MasterCard, at this year’s Dx3 Trade Show and Conference.
Play nice! How the internet is trying to design out toxic behavior — By Gaby Hinsliff | The Guardian
“Online abuse can be cruel – but for some tech companies it is an existential threat. Can giants such as Facebook use behavioural psychology and persuasive design to tame the trolls?”
FlexEnable has created a screen you can wrap around your wrist
Sometimes, it seems like the tech world is inexorably bending towards a future full of curved devices. At MWC in Barcelona, we saw yet another prototype display, this time from English firm FlexEnable. Now, this isn’t a working device of any kind — it’s essentially just a screen running a demo — and neither is FlexEnable a consumer electronics company. But the firm says its technology is ready to go, and it’s apparently in talks with unnamed hardware partners who want to make this sort of device a reality. How long until we see fully-fledged wristbands like this on the market? Eighteen months is the optimistic guess from FlexEnable’s Paul Cain.
The prototype uses plastic transistors to achieve its flexibility, creating what the company calls OLCD (organic liquid crystal display) screens. FlexEnable says these can achieve the same resolutions as regular LCD using the same amount of power, but, of course, they have that added flexibility. These transistors can be wrapped around pretty much anything, and also have uses outside of display technology. FlexEnable was also showing off thin flexible fingerprint sensors, suggesting they could be wrapped around a door handle to add security without it being inconvenient to the user.
The prototype we saw at MWC was encased in a stiff metal frame, like a lot of flexible displays, and although OLCD can flex a little, it’s not the sort of material you can endlessly bend and crease. That, says, Cain, will have to wait for flexible OLED displays, a technology that is going to need more development. Still, we are seeing truly flexible OLED prototypes popping up here and there, such as this device from Queen’s University, which lets you flex a screen to flick through the pages of a digital book. The future bends ever closer.
Terence Mckenna’s ‘cyberdelic’ predictions for Virtual Reality 25 years on
Cannot wait to hear Mckenna’s perspective on BMIs for brain connection to all things digital, and microbots used to extend life as well as bionic body parts.
Famed psychonaut Terence Mckenna envisioned a very radical approach of bridging psychedelics with virtual reality to create a supercharged version of consciousness in which language, or rather the meaning behind what we speak, could be made visual in front of our very eyes.
In Mckenna’s “cyberdelic” future of virtual reality, artists and the revival of art, would be at the forefront of innovation, according to a talk he gave to a German audience in 1991.
Does this not still ring true 25 years on? Are not computer programmers and virtual cartographers the modern artists who are pushing the boundaries of our understanding of reality and ourselves?