Daily Archives: June 8, 2017

The augmented reality acquisition space is hot Facebook, Snap, Apple and others are throwing money at teams and technologies that promise to increase user engagement. Spektral, a Danish startup, is the latest venture-backed visual effects company setting its sights on the massive space. Spektral is announcing a $2.8 million round today from Litecap and Amp Ventures to continue development of its machine learning-powered, real-time, green screen technology.

Spektral, unlike 99 percent of venture-backed startups doesnt have a product or at least not in the traditional tech sense. Instead of spending time on a go-to-market, Spektral has been investing heavily in research and development and racking up patents. After first pursuing still frames under the name CloudCutout, the team is moving into real time video combining machine learning with spectral graph theory to separate people and objects from their original backgrounds and overlay them in a new stream.

Its quite easy to imagine this technology being implemented into Snapchat or Messenger, but just because its obvious doesnt make it statistically likely. This is probably why Spektral is making the effort to show how its technology could be useful in other use cases, like production and advertising.

Other research groups have been exploring how machine learning could open up new design possibilities for separating objects from their backgrounds. Adobe, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign worked together to publish research on automating that process. That said, video and pictures are two entirely different monsters.

Hair strokes have long been a key criteria for judging cut outs.Toke Jansen, founder and CTO of Spektral, explained to me just how easy it is to underestimate the difficulty of cutting around hair. Equipped with scissors, a human can cut around complex shapes without thinking about it. But even with the latest deep learning models trained on over a million images, machines struggle.

Spektral, as the name implies, is experimenting withspectral clustering for image segmentation within a video frame. This additional information can be added in as a prior to augment more traditional models. In the future, this technology could pave the way for more complex video editing. The team alluded to object manipulation, perhaps moving your friends hand wave with your own, as a natural next step.

To get the company and its technology to the next phase, its brining on a number of domain experts. Most notably,Danny Lange, the head of machine learning at Unity, is joining the startups Board of Directors.Lange was formerly the leader of machine learning efforts at Uber.

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Spektral raises $2.8 million for development of AI-powered green ... - TechCrunch

At an event about how technology is shaping the future of money, it seems counterintuitive to talk about a future where technology has mostly done away with the need for money to live.

But thats the future Peter Diamandis envisions.

At Singularity Universitys Exponential Finance Summit in New York this week, Diamandis talked about the broad and specific trends he believes are leading to a demonetized world.

Its no secret that technology is threatening to take away jobs. For all the talk about robots working alongside humans rather than replacing them altogether, automations higher efficiency, lower costs, and increasing capability mean eventually workers will be removed from the equation in many jobs.

No one wants to be replaced by a machine, but theres a silver lining.

The counterbalance to technological unemployment, Diamandis said, is the demonetization of livingin other words, pretty much everything we need and do in our day-to-day lives is becoming radically cheaper, if not free, and technologys making it happen.

The most obvious and tangible example of this phenomenon is, of course, the smartphone. 20 years ago, we had a bunch of different things that each performed a single function: a camera took pictures, a flashlight lit up the dark, a TV was for watching shows, a VCR played movies, a boom box played music, and so on and so forth.

Now we have all that and more in the palm of our hands. More significantly, though, we got most of it for far less than in the past. If, Diamandis said, you add up the cost of all that hardware 20 years ago, youre looking at thousands of dollarsnow reduced to a few hundred. Similarly, the average smartphone being microfinanced for $50 in developing nations holds millions of dollars worth of software.

Demonetization is the fourth of Diamandis six Ds of technological disruption, happening after digitization but before democratization. Taking money out of the equation for a given product or service is a key part of making that product or service available to everyone.

Below are just a few of the examples Diamandis gave of demonetization he sees across various industries.

If you dont have a smartphone or computer, you cant have your data collectedand companies want your data. They want it so badly theyll soon be giving smartphones away, specifically in the areas of the world where the vast majority of would-be consumers arent online yet.

We used to drive to Blockbuster and pay a few dollars to rent one movie. Now we can pay a low flat rate and watch as many movies and shows as we want each month. Or we can watch stuff for free; YouTube streams millions of hours of free video per day.

The poorest countries in the world are the sunniest countries in the world, and solar power is becoming cheaper than coal. That means ultra-cheap electricity in developing nations.

When you own a car you have to pay for fuel, parking, insurance, tolls, and maintenancenot to mention buying the car itself. On-demand ride apps like Lyft and Uber are changing the way people get around and making it cheaper for them to do so. Why pay all that money for your own car when theres a service to get you from point A to point B at a fraction of the cost? Electric autonomous cars will disrupt transportation even more.

Self-driving cars will change the housing market by enabling people to commute from farther away more easily. Housing itself will get cheaper thanks to large-scale 3D printing.

The XPRIZE foundation recently launched its Global Learning XPRIZE. Participants are tasked with creating a software package that can take a group of illiterate kids to full literacy in 18 months. This sort of software will bring high-quality education to areas that currently lack itand it will be delivered in kids native language, in a context that fits their culture, at little to no cost to them.

Of all the industries listed, healthcare is the one most urgently in need of demonetization in the US. Its happening through AI-fueled diagnosis and personalization of care. Deep learning algorithms can now identify skin cancer as accurately as dermatologists can. IBMs Watson was able to diagnose a rare form of leukemia that no physician could diagnose by analyzing data from 20 million other diagnoses. The Tricorder XPRIZE yielded a system that can diagnose 12 different diseases and capture real-time vital signs using a smartphone and some add-ons. Genome sequencing will transition healthcare from being reactive to proactive, keeping people from getting sick in the first place.

I view the world as rapidly demonetizing, Diamandis said near the conclusion of his talk.

A world where lifes necessities are all cheap or free will be very different from the world we live in today. What will motivate people to work or be productive if they dont need money for the basics? What kinds of new innovations will spring up from people for who these resources used to be cost-prohibitive? How will social constructs built around wealth and class shift.

These are all questions well need to contemplate as technology continues to demonetize our lives. As the old saying goes, the best things in life are free, and if Diamandis vision becomes reality, well have to figure out which of the free things in life are best.

Image Credit: Pond5

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Technology Will Erase JobsBut Also Make Everything Cheap or Free - Singularity Hub

NEW YORK According to an unpublished kitchen table survey, conducted before last Novembers presidential election in the United States, approximately 95% of the predominantly Hispanic members of one of Americas largest domestic unions preferred the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton to her Republican opponent Donald Trump. Yet less than 3% of that unions members actually planned to vote. The reason came down to economics.

For most of the people surveyed, the costs of voting including lost wages from time off work, transport to the polling station, and the need to secure proper identification (such as a drivers license or passport) were simply too large. This reflects a broader trend in the US, with poor Americans often unable to participate fully in their countrys democracy.

According to the US Census Bureau, fewer than half of eligible adults with family incomes of less than $20,000 per year voted in the 2012 presidential election, whereas voter participation among households with incomes of more than $75,000 was 77%. In the 2014 midterm election, the think tank Demos reports, 68.5% of people in households earning less than $30,000 per year didnt vote.

This is a serious problem. But the proposals most often put forward to address it have serious drawbacks.

The proposed solutions typically focus on digital technology, which many claim would boost voter participation, by lowering the costs of voting. For example, mobile apps have been touted as a means to boost voter turnout: people could vote at their convenience, whether in the break-room at work or from the comfort of their own home.

The idea certainly sounds appealing. In Estonia, which is widely considered to be a leader in the use of voting technology, almost one-quarter of all votes in the 2011 parliamentary election were cast online.

Yet the actual impact of such technology on voter participation remains dubious. Although the rate of online voting in Estonia increased by nearly 20% between the 2007 and 2011 elections there, overall voter turnout increased by fewer than two percentage points (from 61.9% to 63.5%). This suggests that online voting may simply encourage regular voters to change how they cast their ballots, rather than encouraging additional voters to participate.

But voting technology may not just be ineffective; it could actually be damaging. Such technology doesnt reduce costs only for voters; it also reduces costs for the state, making it easier than ever to conduct elections. The risk is that lower costs would encourage more frequent elections and referenda, thereby undermining the efficiency of government.

At a time of lackluster global economic growth and deteriorating living standards for many, efficient government could not be more important. According to the US Millennium Challenge Corporation, more efficient government helps to reduce poverty, improve education and health care, slow environmental degradation, and combat corruption.

A key feature of an efficient government is long-term thinking. Policymakers must work toward the policy goals that got them elected. But they must also be given enough political room to adjust to new developments, even if it means altering policy timelines.

Amid constant elections and referenda, that isnt really an option. Instead, policymakers face strong pressure to deliver short-term, voter-pleasing results or get punished at the polls. The likely result is a shortsighted agenda prone to sudden politically motivated reversals. Beyond hurting political credibility and market confidence, such volatility could create friction between elected politicians and civil-service technocrats, damaging a relationship that is critical to efficient, forward-looking, and fact-based decision-making.

Proponents of referenda hold them up as the epitome of democracy, giving ordinary citizens a direct say over specific policy decisions. But, in a representative democracy, referenda undermine the relationship between the voters and their political leaders, who have been entrusted to make policy on citizens behalf.

Ominously, referenda are already becoming an increasingly common and consequential feature of policymaking in the Western world. The United Kingdom has held just three referenda in its entire history; but two have been carried out just in the last six years (plus another in Scotland). Franois Fillon, a candidate for the French presidency, promised two referenda if he won the recent election and suggested that France needs as many as five.

Elections, too, are becoming more frequent. The average tenure of a G20 political leader has fallen to a record low of 3.7 years, compared to six years in 1946 a shift that, no doubt, is contributing to a rise in short-term thinking by governments.

It is not yet clear whether voting technology actually does spur greater voter participation. What is clear is that, if it is adopted widely, it could exacerbate trends that are undermining public policy, including governments ability to boost economic growth and improve social outcomes.

Reducing barriers to democratic participation for the poorest citizens is a worthy goal. But what good will achieving it do if those citizens interests are harmed as a result?

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The Dark Side of Voting Technology - Project Syndicate

The Jerusalem Post

Israeli company showcases drone interception technology The Jerusalem Post (photo credit:ORAD). With weaponized drones bringing a whole new assortment of security threats, several companies at the Israel Defense Exhibition in Tel Aviv this week, showcased the latest technology in neutralization and interception of the devices.

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Israeli company showcases drone interception technology - The Jerusalem Post

The technological side of road racing is on the fast track. Many runners and walkers want data and the more, the better

Joaquin Lara

The AJC Peachtree Road Race has changed a lot over the past 10 years, both in look and in execution. In fact, it wasnt until 2009 that every single participant of the worlds largest 10K was electronically chip-timed. This year, Atlanta Track Club is offering a 5K split time for each participant in addition to the finish time, and friends and family can receive updates on their runners progress in multiple ways.

The Club provided a 5K split as a test during the 2016 AJC Peachtree Road Race, and will offer this information officially this year. Each participant will be able to sign up for their race updates to be sent out automatically via Facebook and Twitter, and friends and family members will be able to sign up for social media or text message updates as well.

Were proud to be able to offer tracking options for the AJC Peachtree Road Race, says Paula Beebe, manager of registration and timing for Atlanta Track Club. There is a lot of excitement around running the largest road race in the country, and we want our participants to be able to easily share their performances with their friends and family.

Links to register for Facebook, Twitter and text message updates will be available in upcoming participant emails and in the participant instructions for the event.

Technology Timeline

2009: First year every participant is electronically timed

2010: First year start waves are assigned by verified performance; official race number transfer system implemented

2011: Registration switches to an online lottery application

2016: 5K split time test performed

2017: 5K split times officially offered for participants

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AJC Peachtree Road Race technology through the years - Atlanta Journal Constitution

Washington Times

National science competition winners agree technology is taking over Washington Times Stuyvesant chemistry teacher Gabriel Ting, the group's coach, did not say whether he agreed that technology is taking over much of society, but advocated for STEM education. Even if students do not pursue employment in the sciences, any job requires at ... and more »

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National science competition winners agree technology is taking over - Washington Times