Google Glass app real time detection of human emotions

German scientists have developed a software for Google Glass to measure human emotions by analysing their facial expressions, in addition to gauging a person's age and detecting gender.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits adapted its SHORE real-time face detection and analysis software to work with Google Glass, the first app of its kind.

With the aid of Glass' integrated camera, the app detects people's faces and determines their emotions by analysing their facial expressions.

The so-called Glassware (Google Glass app) simultaneously gauges the person's age or detects their gender among other things, but it cannot determine their identity, researchers said.

All calculations are performed in real-time by the CPU integrated in the eye-wear. The image data never leaves the device.

The advance opens up an entire spectrum of new smart eye-wear applications, including communication aids for people with disorders such as autism, many of whom have difficulty interpreting emotions through facial expressions.

This missing information could be superimposed in the person's field of vision with data glasses.

Even the visually impaired can benefit from the new software by receiving supplementary audio information about people in their surroundings, researchers said.

By taking advantage of the additional capability to determine someone's gender or estimate their age, the software could be used in other applications such as interactive games or market research analyses.

Google is building the largest information store in human history

 

Google is building the largest store of information in human history — a knowledge base that autonomously gathers and merges data from across the web to provide unprecedented access to all facts about the world.

The search giant is building Knowledge Vault, a type of knowledge base — a system that stores information so that machines as well as people can read it. Google’s existing knowledge base, called Knowledge Graph, relies on crowdsourcing to expand its information.

However, humans could only take it so far so Google decided to automate the process.

It started building the Vault by using an algorithm to automatically pull in information from all over the web, using machine learning to turn the raw data into usable pieces of knowledge.

Knowledge Vault has pulled in 1.6 billion facts to date. Of these, 271 million are rated as “confident facts”, to which Google’s model ascribes a more than 90 per cent chance of being true, New Scientist reported.

Tom Austin, a technology analyst at Gartner in Boston, said that the world’s biggest technology companies are racing to build similar vaults.

“Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and IBM are all building them, and they’re tackling these enormous problems that we would never even have thought of trying 10 years ago,” he said.

Google researcher Kevin Murphy and his colleagues will present a paper on Knowledge Vault at the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in New York.

Scientists hack into Gmail with 92 percent accuracy

 

Scientists have developed a novel method that allowed them to successfully hack into Gmail with up to 92 per cent accuracy.

A team of researchers, including an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering, have identified a weakness believed to exist in Android, Windows and iOS mobile operating systems that could be used to obtain personal information from unsuspecting users. They demonstrated the hack in an Android phone.

The researchers tested the method and found it was successful between 82 per cent and 92 per cent of the time on six of the seven popular apps they tested.

Among the apps they easily hacked were Gmail, CHASE Bank and H&R Block. Amazon, with a 48 per cent success rate, was the only app they tested that was difficult to penetrate.

The researchers believe their method will work on other operating systems because they share a key feature researchers exploited in the Android system.

The researchers believed there was a security risk with so many apps being created by so many developers. Once a user downloads a bunch of apps to their smartphone they are all running on the same shared infrastructure, or operating system.

“The assumption has always been that these apps can’t interfere with each other easily,” Zhiyun Qian, of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UC Riverside said.

“We show that assumption is not correct and one app can in fact significantly impact another and result in harmful consequences for the user,” said Qian.

The attack works by getting a user to download a seemingly benign, but actually malicious, app, such as one for background wallpaper on a phone.

Once that app is installed, the researchers are able to exploit a newly discovered public side channel – the shared memory statistics of a process, which can be accessed without any privileges.

The researchers monitor changes in shared memory and are able to correlate changes to what they call an “activity transition event,” which includes such things as a user logging into Gmail or taking a picture of a check so it can be deposited online.

Augmented with a few other side channels, the authors show that it is possible to fairly accurately track in real time which activity a victim app is in.

There are two keys to the attack. One, the attack needs to take place at the exact moment the user is logging into the app or taking the picture.

Two, the attack needs to be done in an inconspicuous way. The researchers did this by carefully calculating the attack timing.

CBI has registered a preliminary enquiry against internet giant Google

CBI has registered a preliminary enquiry (PE) against internet giant Google over Mapathon 2013, an event organised by the U.S. company, for allegedly violating laws by mapping sensitive areas and defence installations, prohibited by law.The CBI registered the PE based on a complaint filed by Surveyor General of India’s office to the Union Home Ministry in which Google was accused of had been indulging in activities of mapping several areas which were not included in the maps of the … read more at candidshare.com