Field doctors still diagnose burns by sight, smell and touch. A smart bandage and smart phone camera may be all we need to change that — and prevent serious and lasting complications.
This article was produced for AMEDD by Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.
AI startups can rake in investment by hiding how their systems are powered by humans. But such secrecy can be exploitative.
The nifty app CamFind has come a long way with its artificial intelligence. It uses image recognition to identify an object when you point your smartphone camera at it. But back in 2015 its algorithms were less advanced: The app mostly used contract workers in the Philippines to quickly type what they saw through a user’s phone camera, CamFind’s co-founder confirmed to me recently. You wouldn’t have guessed that from a press release it put out that year which touted industry-leading “deep learning technology,” but didn’t mention any human labelers.
The practice of hiding human input in AI systems still remains an open secret among those who work in machine learning and AI. A 2019 analysis of tech startups in Europe by London-based MMC Ventures even found that 40% of purported AI startups showed no evidence of actually using artificial intelligence in their products.
Have you ever wondered how much water is needed to charge an iPhone? Probably not, because it takes electricity to charge a phone, not water. But, say if you had a hydraulic generator, you could be able to generate some electricity using only your garden hose. That is precisely what is being done in a video by the YouTube channel The Action Lab
The owner of the channel, James Orgill, demonstrates the power output of his setup, and how the voltage output goes up as he increases the water flow. The power that comes straight out of the generator is AC power, so he connects a full bridge rectifier to the output to convert it to DC. He makes sure the generated voltage is 12V at maximum by adjusting the flow, to prevent the iPhone from frying.
But, if you ever decide to do this at home, you should probably buy a voltage regulator, just to be safe. He then proceeds to charge his phone to figure out how much water would it take to fully charge his phone, and calculates that he would need 528 gallons (2,400 liters) of it! If you want to watch the demonstration, make sure you watch the video above.
Not all who wander are lost – but sometimes their cell phone reception is. That might change soon if a plan to project basic cell phone coverage to all parts of the globe comes to fruition. Lynk has already proven it can use a typical smartphone to bound a standard SMS text message off a low-earth-orbiting satellite, and they don’t plan to stop there.
Formerly known as Ubiquitilink, Lynk was founded a few years ago by Nanoracks founder Charles Miller and his partners but came out of “stealth mode” as a start-up in 2019. In 2020 they then used a satellite to send an SMS message from a typical smartphone, without requiring the fancy GPS locators and antennas needed by other, specially made satellite phones.
The company continued its success recently by demonstrating a “two-way” link this week using a newly launched satellite, its fifth, called “Shannon.” They’ve also proved it over multiple phones in numerous areas, including the UK, America, and the Bahamas.
Can the AI as a service paradigm curb big tech’s tendency towards iterative hardware? Perhaps it’s time we moved beyond the iPhone model.
MIT trained an AI to generate photorealistic holograms in milliseconds using just the processing power of a smartphone.
Posted in mobile phones
As 5G is deployed in the next several years, engineers and policymakers must start thinking about a 6G in the decade ahead. For example, the Center for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue is launching a task force on “Roadmap to 6G” in October, with participation from Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm, and other partners. We don’t know exactly how 6G will turn out, but we get to shape it today.
With the current speed of 5G phones not quite as advertised — and it will take some time to get even close — some may wonder why we need to already think about the next generation.
But first, Facebook is going to have to bridge the territory of privacy — not just for those who might have photos taken of them, but for the wearers of these microphone and camera-equipped glasses. VR headsets are one thing (and they come off your face after a session). Glasses you wear around every day are the start of Facebook’s much larger ambition to be an always-connected maker of wearables, and that’s a lot harder for most people to get comfortable with.
Walking down my quiet suburban street, I’m looking up at the sky. Recording the sky. Around my ears, I hear ABBA’s new song, I Still Have Faith In You. It’s a melancholic end to the summer. I’m taking my new Ray Ban smart glasses for a walk.
The Ray-Ban Stories feel like a conservative start. They lack some features that have been in similar products already. The glasses, which act as earbud-free headphones, don’t have 3D spatial audio like the Bose Frames and Apple’s AirPods Pro do. The stereo cameras, on either side of the lenses, don’t work with AR effects, either. Facebook has a few sort-of-AR tricks in a brand-new companion app called View that pairs with these glasses on your phone, but they’re mostly ways of using depth data for a few quick social effects.
Researchers at McGill University have developed the strongest and toughest glass ever known. Inspired, in part, by the inner layer of mollusk shells, this glass does not shatter when hit, and acts more like plastic.
The material, once commercially viable, could be used to improve cell phone screens, among other applications in the future.
Interestingly, this may be an example of modern science rediscovering an old technology, now long lost.
On the northwest coast of Taiwan, nestled between mudflats teeming with fiddler crabs and sweet-scented persimmon orchards, sits the world’s most important company that you’ve probably never heard of. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC, is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of the semiconductor chips—otherwise known as integrated circuits, or just chips—that power our phones, laptops, cars, watches, refrigerators and more. Its clients include Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia.
Inside its boxy off-white headquarters in sleepy Hsinchu County, technicians in brightly hued protective suits—white and blue for employees, green for contractors and pink for pregnant women—push polished metal carts under a sallow protective light. Above their heads, “claw machines”—nicknamed after the classic arcade game—haul 9-kg plastic containers containing 25 individual slices, or “wafers,” of silicon on rails among hundreds of manufacturing stations, where they are extracted one by one for processing, much like a jukebox selecting a record. Only after six to eight weeks of painstaking etching and testing can each wafer be carved up into individual chips to be dispatched around the planet.
“We always say that it’s like building a high-rise,” one TSMC section manager tells TIME, pointing to how his technicians diligently follow instructions dictated to them via tablet. “You can only build one story at a time.”
