Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: privacy – Page 19

Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve likely come across at least one news story talking about facial recognition technology. As a form of biometrics, facial recognition promises to enhance society’s experience with industry as a whole, from retail to travel. At the same time, there have also been fears of mismanagement at the expense of peoples’ privacy.

While the debate over “right to privacy” continues raging on, post-privacy technology is pushing forward at an international scale with no end in sight.

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By Julianna Photopoulos

A laser device can monitor vital signs such as your heartbeat, breathing rate, and muscle activity from up to a metre away. The device is intended for hospital patients or those with chronic diseases who need close monitoring at home. What’s more, it works through your clothes.

“No wires — everything is non-contact — continuously measuring different biomedical parameters with a single sensor,” says Zeev Zalevsky who developed the SmartHealth Mod with his team at ContinUse Biometrics, based …

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Army researchers have developed an artificial intelligence and machine learning technique that produces a visible face image from a thermal image of a person’s face captured in low-light or nighttime conditions. This development could lead to enhanced real-time biometrics and post-mission forensic analysis for covert nighttime operations.

Thermal cameras like FLIR, or Forward Looking Infrared, sensors are actively deployed on aerial and ground vehicles, in watch towers and at check points for surveillance purposes. More recently, thermal cameras are becoming available for use as body-worn cameras. The ability to perform automatic face recognition at nighttime using such thermal cameras is beneficial for informing a Soldier that an individual is someone of interest, like someone who may be on a watch list.

The motivations for this technology—developed by Drs. Benjamin S. Riggan, Nathaniel J. Short and Shuowen “Sean” Hu, from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory—are to enhance both automatic and human-matching capabilities.

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In the last year, the business and consumer markets alike have seen the release of advanced technologies that were once considered the stuff of science fiction. Smart gadgets that control every facet of your home, self-driving vehicles, facial and biometric identification systems and more have begun to emerge, giving us a glimpse of the high-tech reality we’re moving towards.

To find out which futuristic technologies are on the horizon, we asked a panel of YEC members the following question:

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Is humanity doomed? Are we one of the last generations of homo sapiens — soon to be supplanted by engineered cyberbeings, with a distant semblance to their creators (us)?

On Jan. 24, historian and international best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari presented his view of the future at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Harari wrote Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and also Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.

In a riveting 25-minute presentation, Harari painted a very gloomy — but possible — view of the future, based on his thesis that we are now in our third grand revolution: the control of data, following the control of land (Agrarian Revolution) and the control of machinery (Industrial Revolution). The point of no return, Harari contends, will happen when technology will be able to extract high-precision biometric data from people and report back to a centralized decision-making control system, owned by governments or by corporations — or both. By biometric, he means your pulse, pressure, sweat composition, dilation of your pupils, etc.: kind of a lie-detector on steroids.

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State broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) and Tencent Research surveyed 8.000 respondents on their attitudes toward AI as part of CCTV’s China Economic Life Survey. The results show that 76.3 per cent see certain forms of AI as a threat to their privacy, even as they believe that AI holds much development potential and will permeate different industries. About half of the respondents said that they believe AI is already affecting their work life, while about a third see AI as a threat to their jobs.

A China Central Television and Tencent Research survey found that three in four respondents are worried about the threat that artificial intelligence poses to their privacy.

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In just 32 years, humans won’t speak to each other and will instead communicate through a worldwide consciousness instead – using just our brains — new research shows.

According to artificial intelligence research, this “hybrid intelligence” will understand the feelings of the people connected to it, and use their minds to help it grow.

Called HIBA, which stands for Hybrid Intelligence Biometric Avatar, it will take on the personas of its users, exchange information with them and become part of the very fabric of the human brain.

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A new ultrathin elastic display that fits snugly on the skin can show the moving waveform of an electrocardiogram recorded by a breathable, on-skin electrode sensor. Combined with a wireless communication module, this integrated biomedical sensor system, called “skin electronics,” can transmit biometric data to the cloud.

This latest research by a Japanese academic-industrial collaboration, led by Professor Takao Someya at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Engineering, is slated for a news briefing and talk at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas on February 17th.

Thanks to advances in semiconductor technology, wearable devices can now monitor health by measuring vital signs or taking an electrocardiogram, and then transmitting the data wirelessly to a smartphone. The readings or electrocardiogram waveforms can be displayed on the screen in real time, or sent to the cloud or a memory device where the information is stored.

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