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.

ultra-fast lasers turns quartz glass into metal

 

In an advance that can lead to ultra-fast light based electronics, scientists have used laser pulses to change the properties of quartz glass into metal.

Quartz glass does not conduct electric current, it is a typical example of an insulator. With ultra-short laser pulses, however, the electronic properties of glass can be fundamentally changed within femtoseconds.

If the laser pulse is strong enough, the electrons in the material can move freely. For a brief moment, the quartz glass behaves like metal. It becomes opaque and conducts electricity.

This change of material properties happens so quickly that it can be used for ultra-fast light based electronics.

Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) have now managed to explain this effect using large-scale computer simulations.

In recent years, ultra-short laser pulses of only a few femtoseconds have been used to investigate quantum effects in atoms or molecules.

Now they can also be used to change material properties. In an experiment at the Max-Planck Institute in Garching, Germany, electric current has been measured in quartz glass, while it was illuminated by a laser pulse.

After the pulse, the material almost immediately returns to its previous state.

TU Wien researchers explained this peculiar effect, in collaboration with researchers from the Tsukuba University in Japan.

Quantum mechanically, an electron can occupy different states in a solid material. It can be tightly bound to one particular atom or it can occupy a state of higher energy in which it can move between atoms.

"The laser pulse is an extremely strong electric field, which has the power to dramatically change the electronic states in the quartz," said Georg Wachter.

"The pulse can not only transfer energy to the electrons, it completely distorts the whole structure of possible electron states in the material," said Wachter.

That way, an electron which used to be bound to an oxygen atom in the quartz glass can suddenly change over to another atom and behave almost like a free electron in a metal.

Once the laser pulse has separated electrons from the atoms, the electric field of the pulse can drive the electrons in one direction, so that electric current starts to flow.

Extremely strong laser pulses can cause a current that persists for a while, even after the pulse has faded out.

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.

Intexs first Firefox smartphone coming today under Rs 2000

While Spice has already announced its Firefox smartphone, it's time for Intex to lift the veil of its first Firefox device. With the aim to take on Spice, the company will announce the launch of its Firefox phone in India on August 25.

Intex claims that the phone it is going to announce on Monday will be "India's lowest priced smartphone". It will be priced under Rs 2000.

The Firefox phone from Intex is expected to come with a 3.5-inch display, 2 megapixel camera and a 1GHz processor.

Priced at Rs 2,299, Spice's Firefox phone - the Fire One Mi-FX 1 - will go on sale starting August 29. Spice's dual-SIM 2G handset features a 3.5-inch touchscreen, 1 GHz processor and 1.3 megapixel rear and 0.3 megapixel front cameras.

Earlier this year, Mozilla (developer of Firefox web browser) had tied up with Intex and Spice to bring smartphones priced at about $25 (about Rs 1,500) to India.

The Firefox devices will compete with phones using Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows platforms.

Low-cost handsets prices less than Rs 5,000 and smartphones priced below Rs 7,000 from Asian handset makers including Huawei, ZTE, Micromax and Karbonn have been driving growth in the emerging markets of Asia and Africa.

Technology giant Google, under its Android One initiative, has also partnered Spice, Micromax and Karbonn from India to deliver a smartphone under USD 100 (about Rs 6,000) to tap the market.

Smartphone sales in the country grew almost three-fold to over 44 million in 2013, buoyed by affordable devices made by local firms such as Micromax and Karbonn, according to research firm IDC.

In the second quarter of 2014, smartphone sales grew 84 per cent to 18.42 million units from 10.02 million units (in April-June 2013 quarter, as per IDC data.

Samsung is the category leader with 29 per cent market share, Micromax (18 pc), Karbonn (8 pc) and Lava (6 pc).

"With the ultra-low cost Spice Fire One, we aim to convert the feature phone users into smartphone users. Our intentions are clearly to synthesise technology and style in our products and make them available at affordable prices," Spice Mobility Chief Executive Officer Prashant Bindal said.

The new handset also supports several Indian languages like Hindi, Tamil and Bengali.

"Just one year after the first Firefox OS device launched, Firefox OS smartphone is now available in 17 countries across Europe, Asia and Latin America. We are

confident that Firefox OS devices will realise a whole new category of smartphones with affordable price," Mozilla President Li Gong said.

Mozilla had showcased a smartphone prototype costing as little as USD 25 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, targeting developing countries including India and China.

Various reports suggest that the next billion population accessing the Internet for the first time will do so on their phones instead of personal computers.

Also, the next 100 million connected users are expected to demand mobile content and services in local languages across a range of smart devices at an affordable cost.

Companies like Microsoft, which acquired Nokia's handset division, are also targeting the affordable smartphone category aggressively, estimating it to be a $50 billion annual opportunity.

Other devices with Firefox OS to be available globally include the ZTE Open II and the Alcatel OneTouch Fire E.

Why Sun atmosphere is much hotter than its surface revealed

Researchers said that nanoflares - a constant peppering of impulsive bursts of heating, none of which can be individually detected - provide the mysterious extra heat. Scientists have discovered some of the strongest evidence to date to explain what makes the Sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than its surface.

The new observations come from just six minutes worth of data from one of NASA’s least expensive type of missions, a sounding rocket, researchers said.

The Sun’s visible surface, called the photosphere, is some 6,000 Kelvins, while the corona regularly reaches temperatures which are 300 times as hot.

Many theories have been offered for how the magnetic energy coursing through the corona is converted into the heat that raises the temperature.

The EUNIS rocket, short for Extreme Ultraviolet Normal Incidence Spectrograph, however, was equipped with a very sensitive version of an instrument called a spectrograph.

Spectrographs gather information about how much material is present at a given temperature, by recording different wavelengths of light.

EUNIS flew up nearly 321 km above the ground aboard a sounding rocket, a type of NASA mission that flies for only 15 minutes or so, and gathered about six minutes worth of observations from above the planet’s air.

During its flight, EUNIS scanned a pre-determined region on the Sun known to be magnetically complex, a so-called active region, which can often be the source of larger flares and coronal mass ejections.

As light from the region streamed into its spectrograph, the instrument separated the light into its various wavelengths. Instead of producing a typical image of the Sun, the wavelengths with larger amounts of light are each represented by a vertical line called an emission line. Each emission line, in turn, represents material at a unique temperature on the Sun. Further analysis can identify the density and movement of the material as well.

The EUNIS spectrograph was tuned into a range of wavelengths useful for spotting material at temperatures of 10 million Kelvin - temperatures that are a signature of nanoflares.

Scientists have hypothesised that a myriad of nanoflares could heat up solar material in the atmosphere to temperatures of up to 10 million Kelvins.

This material would cool very rapidly, producing ample solar material at the 1 to 3 million degrees regularly seen in the corona. However, the faint presence of that extremely hot material should remain.

Looking over their six minutes of data, the EUNIS team spotted a wavelength of light corresponding to that 10 million degree material.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10-5 and 8-4 launched India July 1

We’ve got confirmation that the Samsung Galaxy Tab S series which comprises of the 10.5 and 8.4 tablets is scheduled to go official in India tomorrow. The company has started sending out invites for the event and it has also been teasing the launch on its official Twitter account.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S series was launched this month itself and it’s already up for grabs in the US. Its quick release in India probably has something to do with the Tab Pro lineup not being officially made available. The new devices will go up against Apple’s iPad Air and Mini with Retina, featuring 6.6mm super slim designs and 2K Super AMOLED displays.

The overall design, however, is nothing new and it highly resembles the current 8-inch and 10.1-inch tablets in the market. While they might not look so premium, the Samsung tablets do pack some serious hardware with a couple of components even beefier than the ones on the Galaxy S5 flagship. What hasn’t been confirmed as yet is which versions of the tablets Samsung plans to launch in India.


Keeping to tradition, the company prefers to release the models with Qualcomm processors in LTE markets only, while the Exynos versions are sold in the remaining locations. We’ve got our money on the latter variants and chances are high that the slates may come without cellular support.

Here are the common specs of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S series:

- Android 4.4 KitKat
- Exynos 5 Octa/Snapdragon 801 chipset
- 2560 x 1600p WQXGA Super AMOLED display
- 3GB RAM, 16GB/32GB storage options
- 128GB expandable memory via microSD slot
- 8MP rear camera, 2.1MP front snapper

86 Percent of Android Devices Vulnerable to Bug

Android users, beware: 86 percent of Google OS-based devices may contain a high-risk vulnerability.

IBM security researchers uncovered the bug in September, quietly warning the Android Security Team, which two months later confirmed a patch for 4.4 KitKat. But the remaining Android versions do not yet have a fix, leaving them exposed to hackers.

According to June 4 data from Google, about 13.6 percent of Android devices are on 4.4 KitKat, while 10.3 percent are running version 4.3. Most (29 percent) are running 4.1.x, while 19 percent are on 4.2.x.

In last week's public reveal, the IBM team explained that the vulnerability lies in the Android KeyStore, where cryptographic keys and other credentials are stored. By exploiting the flaw, hackers can obtain banking and virtual private network credentials, PINs, and unlock patterns.

This isn't exactly an open door to attackers, though. According to IBM application security research team lead Roee Hay, Google has several barriers in place to slow, if not stop, hackers from successfully exploiting the vulnerability.

With built-in data execution prevention and address space layout randomization, the Android operating system isn't a pushover. Plus, as Ars Technica pointed out, an attacker would need to have an app installed on a vulnerable handset to infiltrate user information.

But that doesn't soften the blow: the weakness resides in KeyStore, which is one of the most sensitive resources in the OS, according to Ars.

"Generally speaking, this is how apps are going to store their authentication credentials, so if you can compromise the KeyStore, you can log in as the phone's user to any service where they've got a corresponding app," Dan Wallach, Rice University professor specializing in Android security, told the site.

Applications that require a password to be retyped each time—banking services, for example—are at lower risk than more easily compromised apps, like Twitter, Wallach said. Similarly, users should keep an eye on those apps that load VPN credentials onto their phone, which essentially hand hackers a key to bypass the firewall.

Google did not immediately respond to PCMag's request for comment.

This isn't the only security issue for Android owners. Despite multiple patches to its top products, Google admitted in April that Android 4.1.1 is still vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug, leaving about 34 percent of users exposed.

Don't go ditching your Google-based device for a more secure iOS smartphone, though: Apple's system isn't exactly foolproof.

ophone which transmits scents

Here’s a sniff of the future and it’s called the oPhone. It may sound suspiciously like an iPhone, but the ‘o’ is for olfactory and it refers to a revolutionary new messaging platform, which transmits scents. Vapor Communications, the company behind the scent-messaging platform, says: “With oPhone, people will be able to share with anyone, anywhere, not just words, images and sounds, but sensory experiences itself.” The first scent messages were exchanged last week between New York and Paris. At the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, co-inventors David Edwards, a Harvard professor, and Rachel Field, formerly an undergrad student at the same university, joined collaborators Christophe Laudamiel and Blake Armstrong in Paris via Skype. From Paris, they emailed a scent-tagged photograph of French delicacies and champagne they had just poured to celebrate the launch of the oPhone. When the oPhone on the New York side picked up the message, the device dissipated a subtle aroma that matched perfectly with the picture.

The scent-infused messages, called oNotes, are composed in an iPhone app called oSnap, which was launched simultaneously. Using oSnap, users can mix and match from 32 basic aromas to produce more than 3,00,000 unique scents. The 32 aromas are placed inside oPhone’s eight ‘oChips’, which are like a printer’s ink cartridges. When the device receives an oNote, it releases the corresponding aroma based on the aromatic tags assigned to the image. Each scent is designed to last roughly 10 seconds. If the images are tagged with more than one scent, the smells will release one after the other. The oPhone introduces a new kind of sensory experience into mobile messaging.

The idea originated two years ago in Edwards’ course at Harvard called ‘How to Create Things and Have Them Matter’. Field, then a mechanical engineering undergrad, and some of her classmates looked at creating a virtual world of aroma. They developed the idea at Le Laboratoire, Edwards’ creative hub in Paris known for conducting experiments at the intersection of science and art. In the scent-messaging project, Edwards is focusing on the food space. oPhones will be displayed in cafes in Paris to test the device’s business potential at places where aromas matter.

Edwards is the CEO of Vapor Communications. Currently, oNotes are transmitted via email or social media, and can be picked up at hotspots where there are oPhones in place to receive them. oPhones are available commercially at around $150, but it will take time to gauge their impact. In New York, people can try out the oPhone at The American Museum of Natural History during three weekends in July. oNotes add a new dimension to telecommunication. The possibilities for the technology are vast: scent messages could be aromatic pictures of a cup of coffee, olfactory tweets from a wine tasting, scented sounds from a family dinner party, or even a promotional campaign for a restaurant. “One day, fairly soon, any user of a mobile phone anywhere will not only be able to receive a scent message—invoking a culinary pleasure—but quickly send another back, similar to how we exchange audio information today with friends around the world,” says Edwards. So far, oNotes are limited to scent-tagged images composed in oSnap, a free mobile messaging app for iPhone devices. Whether that is the scent of success is too early to tell.

NASA plans to launch a flying-saucer-shaped vehicle

NASA plans to launch a flying-saucer-shaped vehicle to test technology for landing heavy loads - and one day even people - on Mars. The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) will be taken into the stratosphere from the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai. How the vehicle is launched.

After several weather delays, NASA will try to launch a "flying saucer" into Earth's atmosphere Saturday to test technology that could be used to land on Mars.

The attempt off the coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai will test the disc-shaped vehicle and a giant parachute. Those interested can watch live at 2:15 p.m. ET.

The test at the Kauai military range has been postponed several times since June 2 because of winds.

It may seem straight out of a B-movie, but the space agency says the launch has a serious purpose: to test technology that will help land spacecraft and someday humans on Mars.

NASA still relies on some of the basic designs developed more than 40 years ago to land the Viking spacecraft on Mars, principal investigator Ian Clark of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said earlier this month.

"We've been using the same parachutes for several decades now," he said. "If we want to eventually land a human on the surface of Mars, we realized we need to develop new technologies."

The low-density supersonic decelerator, as it's officially known, will ascend into the skies dangling from a gargantuan balloon filled with helium. At 34 million cubic feet, the balloon would fill the Rose Bowl, encasing the helium in a skin made of a high-tech film as thin as sandwich wrap.

After the balloon and its load soar to roughly 23 miles high, the balloon will break away from the vehicle and drop to Earth, the cue for a rocket attached to the saucer to fire. The rocket will propel the saucer to four times the speed of sound, duplicating the rapid clip of a spacecraft bound for Mars.

If all goes according to plan, the saucer's inflatable ring, made of the same material as bulletproof vests, will pop up, expanding to some 3 feet high in a fraction of a second. The ring is designed to brake the vehicle as it speeds through the atmosphere. Finally a parachute much bigger than anything of its kind will cushion the saucer as it drifts down to an ocean landing.

NASA's latest rover on Mars, the Mars Science Laboratory, weighed about a ton. The new technology being tested would allow the landing of a load twice as heavy, and the use of multiple parachutes could mean even spacecraft of 20 to 30 tons could make a soft landing, Clark said.

At the test location high above the Earth, the air will be as thin as the wispy atmosphere around Mars, but it will be a lot easier to recover the saucer if things go wrong. The balloon could fail or the vehicle itself may prove balky, Clark said.

"We want to test them here — where it's a lot cheaper — before we we send them to Mars," said project manager Mark Adler, also of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Contributing: Associated Press

How government plans to leverage cloud computing

The Indian government is looking to leverage cloud computing in a big way, beginning with its multi-billion dollar mission-mode projects, six of which will be kick-started within a month's time, following an evaluation of what technological changes can be brought about in these to improve efficiency and provide better citizen services.

Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) secretary Ram Sewak Sharma told ET that he has identified six existing mission mode projects (MMP) which will be assessed by an internal group, based on the need for technology upgradation, scope of process simplification with emerging technologies and the possibility of leveraging newer technology platforms.

"We can redesign a lot of projects now. In a lot of these, we can provide SaaS (softwareas-a-service), deploy the software centrally, and everybody should become a client and start using it...you can converge this infrastructure so you can rewrite codes, make them more efficient, use more technologies, use more delivery mediums," said Sharma.

The government's MMPs focus on one aspect of e-governance such as pensions, banking, insurance and judiciary. These are classified as central, state or integrated projects, and each state can identify up to five MMPs for its own needs.

These projects include Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS) Scheme, e-Courts, road transport, treasuries and commercial taxes. It is also assessing the national social assistance programme and another one related to prisons.

The combined total outlay of these projects, most of which were sanctioned between 2007 and 2010, is over Rs 4,842.41 crore, according to figures obtained from a 2011 DeitY report.

The group will make recommendations on the possibility of using a common software across different MMPs, migration from legacy systems to newer ones, and implementing more such projects in different areas to enable better egovernance, Sharma added.

In tune with prime minister Narendra Modi's slogan of "minimum government, maximum governance", DeitY's roadmap seeks to leverage different media and technology including cloud, broadband and mobile.

The use of existing platforms such as Aadhaar, social media, payment gateways, and new delivery mediums such as real-time applications are just some of the ways this can be achieved, Sharma said.


-TOI

Apple announces iOS 8

Following the momentous visual overhaul of last year's iOS 7, Apple's next iteration of its mobile operating system tweaks and refines.

Apple unveiled the next iteration of its mobile operating system, iOS 8, at its annual World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Last year's bold mobile overhaul with iOS 7 was a stark departure for the iPhone maker's core philosophy of tweak and refine, but with iOS 8 Apple has returned to its tried-and-true approach of incremental but important enhancements. Some of the biggest changes for the software are interactive notifications and more fluid tie-ins with Apple's desktop OS X software.
For instance, users listening to music can now swipe down on a text message that pops up as drop-down notification and access the keyboard, replying directly from within iOS's Notification Center without having to leave the app you're currently in. Other, smaller changes include a better tab view for managing Internet browsing on iPad,

The biggest addition, however, is QuickType, which punctuates a greater SMS overhaul with iOS 8 -- Apple software head Craig Federighi said onstage that Messages is the most used app on iOS. QuickType gives users a predictive keyboard, meaning it will learn how you talk with different people to allow for quicker auto-correct and fill-out suggestions.

Beyond QuickType, the SMS tweaks include the capability to leave or mute specific message threads like group messages with a single button, as well as share location to users within the thread, as well as audio and video within the thread using a single swipe. Additionally, all media shared in a text thread is now grouped together in a single thread accessible by clicking any one of the audio, video, or photo messages.
iOS 8 marks the second major release of Apple's mobile operating system under the guidance of head designer Jony Ive and Federighi. Apple CEO Tim Cook fired the prior iOS chief, Scott Forstall, in October 2012 in part for refusing to take responsibility for Apple's Maps fiasco. Ive spearheaded the complete redesign of iOS 7, the first major overhaul since Apple introduced the software with the first iPhone in 2007.
iOS 7 featured different typography and color schemes from previous versions of the operating system, as well as a flatter design concept. iOS 7 also added useful features like automatic updates to make everyday use easier, AirDrop, and iTunes Radio, as well as a new control center that gives quick access to most-used features. The iOS 7.1 update in March incorporated CarPlay -- a way for the iPhone (5 and newer) to power a touch screen on a new car's dashboard -- and other bug fixes and tweaks.
This story is developing...

-from cnet.com