Lifeboat Foundation

White-collar automation has become a common buzzword in debates about the growing power of computers, as software shows potential to take over some work of accountants and lawyers. Artificial-intelligence researchers at Google are trying to automate the tasks of highly paid workers more likely to wear a hoodie than a coat and tie—themselves.

In a project called AutoML, Google’s researchers have taught machine-learning software to build machine-learning software. In some instances, what it comes up with is more powerful and efficient than the best systems the researchers themselves can design. Google says the system recently scored a record 82 percent at categorizing images by their content. On the harder task of marking the location of multiple objects in an image, an important task for augmented reality and autonomous robots, the auto-generated system scored 43 percent. The best human-built system scored 39 percent.

Such results are significant because the expertise needed to build cutting-edge AI systems is in scarce—even at Google. “Today these are handcrafted by machine learning scientists and literally only a few thousands of scientists around the world can do this,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai last week, briefly namechecking AutoML at a launch event for new smartphones and other gadgets. “We want to enable hundreds of thousands of developers to be able to do it.”

Continue reading “Google’s AutoML Project Teaches AI To Write Learning Software” »

The Google, Apple and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks who worry the race for human attention has created a world of perpetual distraction that could ultimately end in disaster.

Most of us aren’t going to shell out for an iPhone X, but we can still log in with our faces.

Have you ever had the perfect photo ruined by someone with their eyes closed in the shot? You could fix the problem with a bit of cloning from an alternate shot using a photo editing app—but Adobe is making the process much easier in the new 2018 version of Photoshop Elements with a dedicated ‘Open Closed Eyes’ feature.

You can spend an entire career using Photoshop and still not master the software’s every last feature, but that complexity can be intimidating to the millions of amateur photographers born from the advent of affordable digital-SLRs, and even smartphones. That’s where Photoshop Elements comes in. It’s a lighter version of Photoshop with training wheels that simplifies many popular photo editing techniques. A better way to describe it might be as a version of Photoshop your parents could stumble their way through with minimal phone calls to you.

Researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Harvard Medical School and MIT have designed a smart bandage that could eventually heal chronic wounds or battlefield injuries with every fiber of its being.

The bandage consists of electrically conductive fibers coated in a gel that can be individually loaded with infection-fighting antibiotics, tissue-regenerating growth factors, painkillers or other medications.

Continue reading “Smart bandage could promote better, faster healing” »

Payne and another Google employee demonstrated a conversation between someone speaking Swedish and another person responding in English.

During the demonstration, one employee, speaking Swedish, had Pixel Buds and the Pixel phone. When the phone was addressed in English, the earbuds translated the phrase into Swedish in her ear. The Swedish speaker then spoke back in Swedish through the earbuds by pressing on the right bud to summon Google Assistant translated that Swedish reply back into an English phrase, which was played through the phone’s speakers so the English speaker could hear.

While this idea might sound far-fetched, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told investors in January that Google Translate was set to make big leaps this year.

Continue reading “Google shows off wireless headphones that it says can translate languages on the fly” »

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Russian IT security firm InfoWatch designed the phone for the corporate market, and claims users will control all information that passes through it.

Apple updated the security and privacy information on its website on Wednesday, revealing new details about how its new facial-recognition technology works.

The new details come about a month before Apple’s most advanced iPhone, the iPhone X, goes on sale. The banner feature of the iPhone X is a facial-recognition tool called Face ID that unlocks the phone, replacing the fingerprint sensor.

Since Face ID and its corresponding 3D camera, called TrueDepth, were announced earlier this month, the technology has attracted a lot of attention and speculation from privacy advocates and security experts. Sen. Al Franken even wrote an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook with 10 questions about the technology.

Continue reading “Apple just released new information about how facial recognition on the iPhone X works” »