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Category: internet – Page 316

Second digital revolution

Many folks talk about the whole AI revolution; and indeed it does change some things and opens the door the for opportunities. However, has it truly changed the under lying technology? No; AI is still reliant on existing digital technology. The real tech revolution will come in the form of Quantum tech over the next 7 to 8 years; and it will change everything in our lives and industry. Quantum will change everything that we know about technology including devices, medical technologies, communications including the net, security, e-currency, etc. https://lnkd.in/bJnS37r

If you were born in the 1970s or 1980s, you probably remember the Jetsons family. The Jetsons are to the future what the Flintstones are to the past. That futuristic lifestyle vision goes back several decades; self-driving vehicles, robotic home helpers and so on. What looked like a cartoon series built on prolific imagination seems somewhat more real today. Newly developed technologies are becoming available and connecting everything to the internet. This is the-internet-of-things era.

These ‘things’ are not new. They are just standard devices – lights, garage doors, kitchen appliances, household appliances – equipped with a little intelligence. Intelligence that is possible thanks to three emerging technologies: sensors to collect information from surroundings; the ability to control something; and communication capability allowing devices to talk to each other.

Think of cars that park on their own or that brake automatically to avoid a collision; smart assistants that will notify you to leave early for a calendar appointment in case heavy traffic en route; or a robotic vacuum cleaner that starts cleaning once everyone has left the house. This is the Jetsons’ kind of future.

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WebTorrent Desktop Streams Torrents Beautifully

WebTorrent is best described as a BitTorrent client for the web. It allows people to share files directly from their browser, without having to configure or install any additional software. Now WebTorrent Desktop has arrived, offering a lightweight yet feature-rich streaming and castable experience on Windows, Linux and Mac.

wtd-logoEvery day millions of Internet users fire up a desktop-based BitTorrent client to download and share everything from movies, TV shows and music, to the latest Linux distros.

Sharing of multimedia content is mostly achieved by use of a desktop client such as uTorrent, Vuze, qBitTorrent or Transmission, but thanks to Stanford University graduate Feross Aboukhadijeh, there is another way.

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Your next car will need a firewall

As our cars become increasingly connected to the internet, and eventually drive themselves, we’re going to want them to be rock-solid secure. The recent Chrysler exploit and FBI warning both highlighted just how vulnerable our vehicles can be to malicious hackers.

The idea of anti-virus software for cars has been around for several years, and this year there’s even an entire conference about in-car cybersecurity. Karamba Security is a new company in the space that is offering what amounts to a firewall for your ride.

Don’t miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! Join us May 26 & 27 in Amsterdam.

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Samsung is developing a contact lens camera, triggered by blinking, that can also project images into the eye

Samsung is exploring the development of a contact lens that can project images directly into the users’ eye, take photographs and connect wirelessly to a smartphone, a patent application has revealed.

The South Korean copyright authority has published a 29-page application made by the consumer electronics firm two years ago, reported the technology blog Sammobile, offering a rare insight into a science fiction vision of a future technology that could be closer than we think.

The lens could overlay internet-connected services directly into the user’s line of sight, in an example of what is known as augmented reality. It could also discreetly – even covertly – take photographs. The device would be controlled by eye movements or blinking, according to the patent, and it would connect with a smartphone.

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Virtual reality helps farmers connect to kids, public

I expect education to be taught more through VR & AI. I know as a kid, my own elementary, Jr High/ Middle School, and HS experience was pretty mundane and boring at times. By having VR & AI technologies to enable the catering/ customizing of education to the student’s needs and pace will be awesome.

Virtual reality on a Nebraska farm tour combined with a live audience made for a first-time event Tuesday at Deere & Co. headquarters, Moline.

Designed to highlight innovation behind sustainable food production, the web broadcast may have originated in Moline, but it was seen online by 37,000 high school students in the United States.

It was sponsored by the U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance, St. Louis, and Discovery Education, an arm of the Discovery network.

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DNV GL to Validate ARPA-E ‘Internet of Energy’ Microgrid in Texas

BURLINGTON, MA—(Marketwired — Apr 5, 2016)

DNV GL, the world’s largest resource of independent energy experts and certification, together with its partners, Group NIRE and Geli (Growing Energy Labs, Inc.), will produce and operate an Internet of Energy (IoEn) platform integrating the management of up to 100 distributed energy resources (DER).

The award, DNV GL’s third from ARPA-E, is one of twelve new projects in the Department of Energy’s Network Optimized Distributed Energy Systems (NODES) program announced in December.

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IBM Watson is Working to Bring AI to the Blockchain

I consider this as a nice interim step in maturing the digital platform environment for financial services. However, once Quantum Computing, Quantum Internet, etc. is available to the masses such as in China, etc. this solution will fail in protecting financial data and other PPI related information as recent research is showing us.

https://lnkd.in/bjcCJ-U

IBM is currently attempting to merge artificial intelligence and the blockchain into a single, powerful prototype.

With blockchain tech’s promise of near-frictionless value exchange and artificial intelligence’s ability to accelerate the analysis of massive amounts of data, the joining of the two could mark the beginning of an entirely new paradigm.

Over the past three months, IBM’s chief architect in charge of Internet of Things security Tim Hahn has focused specifically on introducing the blockchain to his company’s artificially intelligent computer named Watson.

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Facebook begins using artificial intelligence to describe photos to blind users

Ask a member of Facebook’s growth team what feature played the biggest role in getting the company to a billion daily users, and they’ll likely tell you it was photos. The endless stream of pictures, which users have been able to upload since 2005, a year after Facebook’s launch, makes the social network irresistible to a global audience. It’s difficult to imagine Facebook without photos. Yet for millions of blind and visually impaired people, that’s been the reality for over a decade.

Not anymore. Today Facebook will begin automatically describing the content of photos to blind and visually impaired users. Called “automatic alternative text,” the feature was created by Facebook’s 5-year-old accessibility team. Led by Jeff Wieland, a former user researcher in Facebook’s product group, the team previously built closed captioning for videos and implemented an option to increase the default font size on Facebook for iOS, a feature 10 percent of Facebook users take advantage of.

Automatic alt text, which is coming to iOS today and later to Android and the web, recognizes objects in photos using machine learning. Machine learning helps to build artificial intelligences by using algorithms to make predictions. If you show a piece of software enough pictures of a dog, for example, in time it will be able to identify a dog in a photograph. Automatic alt text identifies things in Facebook photos, then uses the iPhone’s VoiceOver feature to read descriptions of the photos out loud to users. While still in its early stages, the technology can reliably identify concepts in categories including transportation (“car,” “boat,” “airplane”), nature (“snow,” “ocean,” “sunset”), sports (“basketball court”), and food (“sushi”). The technology can also describe people (“baby,” “smiling,” beard”), and identify a selfie.

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