Daily Archives: June 17, 2017

The Hindu

Technology stocks shaken, but US market not stirred The Hindu The five largest U.S. technology companies may have lost enough market capitalisation over the past week to buy plane maker Boeing, but the benchmark S&P 500 stock index has managed to remain within a stone's throw of its record high. Apple, Alphabet ... and more »

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Technology stocks shaken, but US market not stirred - The Hindu

CROWN POINT The Crown Point Fire & Rescue Department's new ambulance is equipped with the latest in patient care technology.

The ambulance is equipped with an electronic arm that will lift a cot holding a patient into the ambulance.

The power load system eliminates back issues with firefighters from lifting the cot and also eliminates potential drops off the ambulance. The system will unload a patient as well.

"It is cool," Fire Chief Dave Crane said. "It also secures the cot in the truck a lot better than our standard mounting brackets. The cot stays intact during an accident."

Crane said the system will soon be a required safety standard.

"We wanted to get ahead of it," he said. "I hope to take our other ambulances and upgrade them."

The ambulance itself is custom-made for the department, with cabinets arranged how the department wanted them.

"It makes it a little more user-friendly," Crane said.

The department also recently received new cardiac monitors and CPR machines called the LUCAS 3 Chest Compression System. According to the LUCAS 3 website, experimental studies show that the mechanically controlled LUCAS compressions are able to sustain a higher blood flow to the brain and heart compared to manual compressions.

Although the department has not had them long enough to gather good data Crane said other departments nationwide said seen an increase of about 38 percent of return of spontaneous circulation where the heart "actually starts back again and gives you pulses back."

Crane said in order to get return of spontaneous circulation there has to be good quality CPR with few interruptions. One example is issues with performing good quality CPR when off-loading patients from a multiple story structure.

"This machine allows that to continue even while going downstairs," he said.

The department has five of the machines on four ambulances and one fire engine that is also a life support engine.

"We have paramedics on everything," Crane said. "So if all of our ambulances are busy or whatever happens we have all the advanced life support equipment on the fire truck. There is no delay in starting patient care."

Crane said the only reason the department is able to acquire new technology is "the city takes good care of us and supports us."

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Crown Point's new ambulance provides latest technology - nwitimes.com

A small Rochester technology team thinks the hot gee-whiz technology of augmented and virtual reality has the potential for lot more than just fun and games.

Virtual reality refers to an immersive technology that usually uses a headset to create the illusion that a person is inside a software-created scene.

Augment reality is used to describe the newer process of using software to combine projected images with real physical spaces. The most common example is the Pokemon Go game, where players would find cartoon "creatures" on city streets by looking through the camera on their phones. Facebook and Snapchat have also rolled out AR filters that automatically add cat ears, halos or whatever to people in photos and videos.

Rochester couple, Hunter and Traci Downs, hope to use this new, rapidly improving technology to do much more than just create the next Pokemon Go or a new first-person shooter video game.

They have filled their Area 10 Labs office with the latest AR and VR devices and software from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oculus, HTC and others.

"Everybody's struggling to find the killer app for these things," said Hunter Downs said gesturing at the cameras and headsets scattered around Area 10's office on the second floor of the Conley Maas building in downtown Rochester.

Apple just released a new collection of software development tools last week called ARKit that uses "world tracking" which can use the iPhone or iPad's camera and motion sensors to "pin" virtual objects to specific point.

Downs, who has worked to combine technology with humans for many years, sees a lot of potential for uses in training of all kinds for the technology that Apple, Google and others are spending "billions and billions" of dollars to develop.

While engineer Adam Salmi's image was displayed in a virtual operating room as he stood in front of green screen, AJ Montpetit talked about the vast possibilities of the technology.

"Through a worldwide network, you can bring people together and create a virtual classroom. Two students from different sides of the planet could stand next to a doctor, who is somewhere else, and help him do a surgery," he said as Salmi's image moved on the computer screen.

'You have to experience it'

So how does it feel to have your eyes and ears covered to create an artificial "reality"?

"There's almost no way to explain it. You have to experience it," Salmi said.

That description fits for a lot of the projects that the Downses and Area 10 have been involved with over the years,

They have a lot of experience working with highly technical and novel projects to solve specific problems, usually linked to the health care field. In 2013, Area 10 started working with Mayo Clinic and currently have seven projects in the works with them.

They have worked with the Department of Defense, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Defense Advance Research Projects Administration, the University of Virginia and many other clients. They have helped create technology to allow completely paralyzed people communicate via only brain waves, devices to detect fatigue in soldiers, flight helmets to track consciousness and many other projects.

They have 14 active companies with five that have completely spun off from Area 10. Plus the Downses have non-tech businesses, like the Cafe Steam coffee shop and the Collider co-working center.

While they lived in Hawaii, their company grew to having more that 30 employees. However, that changed when they moved to Rochester in 2013 and opened a new office here in 2014.

"I didn't like it as much as when we had small team," said Hunter Downs.

The current version of Area 10 has six staffers with experts in hardware, design and software, including the owners.

"The best thing for us with a small group with this breadth of talent is that we can move faster than the giants like Google and Apple," he said. "We can crank things out rapidly. We can usually go from concept to prototype as quickly as 12 weeks."

Area 10 has a number of projects in the works including medical monitoring sensors powered by a patient's breathing, wheelchair sensors to help prevent pressure sores in paralyzed patients and designing a new, inexpensive microscope for cash-strapped schools to use in classrooms.

A reverse development process

So why is the team playing with AR and VR technology?

Downs admits that Area 10 usually starts with a problem and then finds a technological solution, so this is kind of the reverse of their typical process.

However, the major investments by Apple, Microsoft and Google attracted their attention and the technology has the potential to open the door to new markets. Pokemon Go generated $600 million in revenue in three months during its heyday. By 2021, the AR/VR market is estimated to grow to be worth $108 billion.

Area 10 recently contracted with the Destination Medical Center initiative's Economic Development Agency to create an interactive map of downtown Rochester to show where new development is slated to be built. In the short time since they created the map, the technology has improved to allow for more detailed maps with more features.

Beyond mapping and virtual training, Area 10 is also looking at using AR and VR to improve patient experience in hospitals. Studies have shown that patients in rooms with windows show more improvement and quicker healing than ones not near a window.

"Of course, not everyone can have a window in their room. So we're looking at VR to see if it can be used to replicate those results without an actual window," Downs said.

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Rochester technology team looks for the next killer app - Post-Bulletin

Earlier this month the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Microsoft that revealed a new hover sensing system for mobile devices such a Surface tablet, future smartphone and HoloLens. Hover touch sensing involves sensing a non-touch or pre-touch interaction of a finger or stylus with a surface, such as a display. A finger or stylus need not physically contact the surface. Our cover graphic above is from Microsoft's first granted patent for a hover touch system that we covered back in April. Hover touch technology is also being explored by Apple who was granted their first patent for this technology last April. They originally filed that patent back in 2009. Microsoft's technology could extend to Virtual and Augmented Reality applications. Whether Apple's application could extend to future AR applications is unknown at this time.

Microsoft's Patent Summary

Microsoft notes in their opening summary of the invention that "A front-facing camera of a display device (e.g., handheld smartphone or tablet) may, in some techniques, be fitted with a tilted mirror to sense and locate hover of an object, such as a finger or a stylus of a user relative to a display of the device.

In some examples, a tilted mirror may redirect the view of the front facing camera toward a region just above the display of the device. The mirror could be flat, curved, and the like. Using image processing techniques, images of a hovering object, a finger or stylus, captured by the camera may then be used to sense right-left and/or up-down positions of the hovering finger or stylus.

To measure distance to the hovering finger or stylus from the camera, a pattern, which may be a pattern of colors, is displayed by the display so that the hovering finger or stylus is illuminated by a particular portion or color of the pattern over which the finger or stylus hovers. The image processing techniques may be used to determine, from the captured image, which particular portion or color of the pattern illuminates the finger or stylus. This determination, in conjunction with the known displayed pattern, may provide the distance to the hovering finger or stylus from the camera.

In some examples, this determination, in conjunction with other known displayed patterns, may provide the three-dimensional (3D) location of the hovering finger or stylus."

Microsoft later notes that "In some examples, the term 'hover,' (sometimes called '3D touch') is used to describe a condition where an object is positioned in front of, but not in contact with, the front surface of the display, and is within a predetermined 3D space or volume in front of the display.

Accordingly, a hovering object may be defined as an object positioned in front of the display of the computing device within the predetermined 3D space without actually contacting the front surface of the display. The dimensions of the 3D space where hover interactions are constrained, and particularly a dimension that is perpendicular to the front surface of the display, may depend on the size of the display and/or the context in which the display used."

In some examples, Microsoft further notes that a display comprises a screen that illuminates light, which need not be in the visible spectrum. For instance, near-IR may be used to sense hover of a finger above a touch surface, without any visual display.

Microsoft's hover technology will extend to augmented reality / mixed reality systems like their HoloLens. Microsoft notes that a user with a headset with the display in clear mode could view another display like a Surface device and point their finger at the display to cause an action. That could be to scroll a page or click on a link in a report and the headset display will understand or interpret the appropriate hover command.

In another example, Microsoft notes that "Hover sensing may be useful for systems involved with a virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) headset. For example, a user of a VR headset may not be able to see their fingers above a display. Though a system may render an image on a virtual display in a virtual world, sensing a real hover object (e.g., an object that has not physically contacted a surface such as a touchscreen) may require additional processes. Such processes may involve sensing an object (e.g., a finger or stylus) while the object hovers above the surface, prior to an actual touch."

Microsoft's patent was filed in December 2015 and published by U.S. Patent Office earlier this month. Considering that this is a patent application, the timing of such a product to market is unknown at this time.

For interest sake, one of the inventors noted on the patent is a senior researcher at Microsoft whose work is focused on "applying vision techniques to enable new styles of human-computer interaction and Augmented Reality."

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Microsoft Advances Hover Touch ('3D Touch') Technology for Future Smartphone, Tablet & HoloLens Devices - Patently Apple

Election hacking is much in the news of late and there are fears that the Russians/rogue lefties/Bavarian illuminati et al are capable of falsifying results.

For example, voters in the state of Georgia's sixth district are going to the polls on Tuesday for a close-fought election, and serious doubts have been raised about the security of the voting systems used. Georgia uses electronic voting machines that don't give a paper ballot, making recounts impossible, and security researcher Logan Lamb has doubts about their security. (This is, of course, amid evidence of Russian hackers targeting election boards and makers of voting software and hardware in the US.)

While investigating the Kennesaw State University's Center for Election Systems, which oversees Georgia's voting system, Lamb found that the website was misconfigured, exposing the state's entire voter registration record, multiple PDFs with instructions and passwords for election workers, and the software systems used to tally votes cast.

"You could just go to the root of where they were hosting all the files and just download everything without logging in," Lamb told Politico.

Lamb is not alone many in the security sphere have serious doubts about America's headlong rush into electronic voting. After the 2000 election hanging chads fiasco, the government threw money at the states to upgrade their voting machines and many systems are hopelessly bad.

Paper ballots have a number of advantages over electronic voting. They may be slower to count, but it's much harder to falsify results because you need large numbers of ballots to be prepared by hand. Electronic voting is, in its current form, potentially hackable, but there are systems that combine electronic voting with encryption to give an election that can be checked, protects voting privacy, and allows for on-the-spot checks.

At this year's Enigma conference, Ben Adida, veep of engineering at educational software firm Clever, detailed a new kind of secure voting system called Helios watch below.

Youtube Video

The system is fairly simple. Voters cast their ballot, which is then encrypted, and the voter is given a tracking number to keep. That number can be checked against an election tally system to ensure that the vote was cast as specified, while not compromising the privacy of the ballot.

The system allows for parties to check that their supporters have voted and lets vote checkers examine results as they come in, while keeping the ballot secret. Adida said that the voting system is already in use for student council elections at Princeton University in New Jersey, where it proved its worth.

In a recent Princeton election, one of the candidates, a sophomore, was standing against a senior. The sophomore complained that an email reminding students to vote hadn't been received by other sophomores, and was originally told by the university that no fault had occurred.

However, the Helios system allowed the voting team to check the levels of votes by different years of students (freshmen, juniors, etc), and saw that while voting rates among other years had spiked after the email had been sent out, this wasn't true for sophomore students.

The university later found out that a misconfigured email server had only sent out reminders to 10 per cent of sophomores. They rectified that error, and the sophomore later won the election by just 2 per cent.

The Helios software is all open source and is available for anyone to check up on or use. Adida told The Register that the system can scale to national elections, but that this was unlikely in the next election cycle.

"In the United States, the most difficult aspect of that question is that decisions on voting systems and equipment are very decentralized. So I don't see a way in which a Helios-type system is in broad use in 2020," he said.

"If anything, the difficulty of running pilots with new voting technology is probably the biggest impediment of all: no one wants to use a system that hasn't been proven at scale in national elections. It would be better if states were willing to try new technologies in controlled conditions at small scale. Then we could make more progress."

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Worried about election hacking? There's a technology fix Helios - The Register