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“You like your Tesla, but does your Tesla like you?” My new story for TechCrunch on robots understanding beauty and even whether they like your appearance or not:

Robots are starting to appear everywhere: driving cars, cooking dinners and even as robotic pets.

But people don’t usually give machine intelligence much credence when it comes to judging beauty. That may change with the launch of the world’s first international beauty contest judged exclusively by a robot jury.

The contest, which requires participants to take selfies via a special app and submit them to the contest website, is touting new sophisticated facial recognition algorithms that allow machines to judge beauty in new and improved ways.

Continue reading “The First International Beauty Contest Judged By Robots” | >

It’s a new resin.

Researchers at Panasonic PCRFY −0.78% in Japan have developed a new kind of resin that has the potential to make personal health electronics leaner and comfier.

The stretchy tech, announced by the company on Dec. 28, can be used as a base for electronic materials. Its physical properties makes electronics easier to apply to skin or clothing—like a Band-Aid or a tattoo, rather than a watch or a strap.

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Andrew Ng hands me a tiny device that wraps around my ear and connects to a smartphone via a small cable. It looks like a throwback—a smartphone earpiece without a Bluetooth connection. But it’s really a glimpse of the future. In a way, this tiny device allows the blind to see.

Ng is the chief scientist at Chinese tech giant Baidu, and this is one of the company’s latest prototypes. It’s called DuLight. The device contains a tiny camera that captures whatever is in front of you—a person’s face, a street sign, a package of food—and sends the images to an app on your smartphone. The app analyzes the images, determines what they depict, and generates an audio description that’s heard through to your earpiece. If you can’t see, you can at least get an idea of what’s in front of you.

Artificial intelligence is changing not only the way we use our computers and smartphones but the way we interact with the real world.

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Are you a current or aspiring researcher working in the #aging field? Then you may be interested in the 23rd annual RAND Summer Institute in Santa Monica. This July, institute participants will attend a series of master lectures that offer insights into the science of aging, and the relationships between the aging field and health, economic status, and public policy. Register by March 15.

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Interesting, but older…

Two separate research groups, one of which is from MIT, have presented evidence that wormholes — tunnels that may allow us to travel through time and space — are “powered” by quantum entanglement. Furthermore, one of the research groups also postulates the reverse — that quantum entangled particles are connected by miniature wormholes.

A wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen bridge to give its formal name, is a hypothetical feature of spacetime that exists in four dimensions, and somehow connects to another wormhole that’s located elsewhere in both space and time. The theory, essentially, is that a wormhole is a tunnel that isn’t restricted by the normal limitations of 3D Cartesian space and the speed of light, allowing you to travel from one point in space and time, to another point in space and time — theoretically allowing you to traverse huge portions of the universe, and travel in time.

An illustration of a wormholeWormholes, though, have never been observed — and while we’ve done a lot of theorizing about how a wormhole might work, and how they fit into general relativity, we’re still talking in purely theoretical terms. We don’t even know if wormholes would be traversable. Those caveats aside, though, a ton of new research suggests that each end of the wormhole is connected through spacetime with quantum entanglement.

Continue reading “Wormholes are just quantum entangled black holes, says new research” | >