One of the more striking pieces of journalism from the Ukraine war featured intercepted radio transmissions from Russian soldiers indicating an invasion in disarray, their conversations even interrupted by a hacker literally whistling “Dixie.”
It was the work of an investigations unit at The New York Times that specializes in open-source reporting, using publicly available material like satellite images, mobile phone or security camera recordings, geolocation and other internet tools to tell stories.
The field is in its infancy but rapidly catching on. The Washington Post announced last month it was adding six people to its video forensics team, doubling its size. The University of California at Berkeley last fall became the first college to offer an investigative reporting class that focuses specifically on these techniques. ...
The Post team is an outgrowth of efforts begun in 2019 to verify the authenticity of potentially newsworthy video. There are many ways to smoke out fakes, including examining shadows to determine if the apparent time of day in the video corresponds to when the activity supposedly captured actually took place. ...
The Times used security and cell-phone video, along with interviews, to tell the story of one Ukraine apartment house as Russians invaded. ...
As efforts expand, Koenig said journalists need to make sure their stories drive the tools that are used, instead of the other way around. ...
A group of researchers at the University of Cambridge has created a robot “chef’ that is trained to taste food at different stages of the chewing process. While it is tasting the food, the robot determines if it’s sufficiently seasoned.
... Humans go through a complex process when chewing food where we notice changes in texture and taste. The robotic counterpart tasted nine variations of scrambled eggs and tomatoes, and it did so during three different stages of the chewing process. The result was ‘taste maps’ of the different dishes. ...
The team of researchers belong to Cambridge’s Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory run by Professor Fumiya Iida of the Department of Engineering. This lab works to train robots to carry out tasks that humans find easy but prove difficult for robots. One of these tasks is cooking. ...
The technique is still a proof of concept, but the researchers believe robots will eventually be able to create food that humans will enjoy. They could even produce personalized food depending on the individual’s tastes. ...
... Meta’s team was in Italy to discuss future smart glasses plans with its current eyewear partner EssilorLuxottica (creators of the Ray-Ban Stories). “Here Leonard is using a prototype of our neural interface EMG wristband that will eventually let you control your glasses and other devices,” Zuckerberg wrote in his Instagram post. The man wearing the chunky band in question is Leonardo Del Vecchio, the cofounder and chairman of EssilorLuxottica. ...
Reports suggest the ideal version of Meta’s wristband (i.e. one that isn’t the size of a first-generation Garmin Forerunner) is still many years off, but Zuckerberg seems content to keep betting the farm on “the metaverse,” even if the methods seem even more invasive than cameras. Maybe his Italian friends are convinced too. ...
I visited Meta's first retail store that sells virtual reality and augmented reality devices.
Inside, the store was bright and welcoming and had loads of wearable tech products.
But overall, I was underwhelmed and felt the store didn't live up to the online hype.
An "experience expert," which is the title given to the Meta store's on-floor employees, handed me an oblong tray that contained the Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses. ...
Of all the products available, these smart glasses were the main item I'd consider purchasing. They allow you to take pictures and video without opening your smartphone, and can also play music and take calls via a set of built-in microphones and open-ear speakers. ...
Overall, Meta's first retail location felt more like a glorified Best Buy display counter than anything else, and I don't feel the need for another visit anytime soon.
Premiering on May 7 at 10 p.m. EDT on ESPN+, Michelob Ultra, in collaboration with tech and production company Unit 9, presents “McEnroe vs. McEnroe,” the world’s first tennis match to feature a real person versus a virtual player -- both being a version of the entertaining, confrontational tennis player, John McEnroe. In the match, the real McEnroe will face off against his ultimate opponent—his younger self. In this case, a virtual player powered by A.I.
The 45-minute film will showcase how the match was created using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, plus five virtual avatars of John McEnroe from pivotal points of his career. ...
The team at Unit 9 spent a day with John in order to bring the vision to life via full-body scanning, motion capture and Unreal Engine MetaHuman technology (a cloud-based app that creates photorealistic digital humans). The avatar game system will be projected on a hologram particle screen and will be a simulation of gameplay with a system of ball launchers and ball return robots. ...
When McEnroe sends the ball over the net, the avatar responds to the direction of the real ball. As the avatar swings, a new ball is fired from the ball cannon and then flies through a smokescreen at a precise point in space to make it appear from the avatar’s racket position. From what is shown in the trailer, the hologram particle screen makes the virtual John McEnroe look blurry and distorted. So we will have to see how this actually looks on the big screen when the film airs. ...
Irreverent Labs has raised $40 million to further boost its efforts to create MechaFightClub, a robot cock fighting game that uses non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Created by Voodoo PC founder Rahul Sood, the Seattle-based blockchain game company recently unveiled its first game: MechaFightClub. The characters are mechanical-looking roosters that are reminiscent of cock fighting, but Sood thinks of them as hilarious figures in a cruelty-free combat sport. ...
...The title is a “play-to-earn” game, where players can own the characters that they buy and profit from them if they can resell them to someone else once they’re leveled up. ...
Researchers have shown it is possible to perform artificial intelligence using tiny nanomagnets that interact like neurons in the brain. ...
The researchers showed nanomagnets can be used for 'time-series prediction' tasks, such as predicting and regulating insulin levels in diabetic patients. ...
A lot of the maths used to power neural networks was originally invented by physicists to describe the way magnets interact, but at the time it was too difficult to use magnets directly as researchers didn't know how to put data in and get information out. ...
Nanomagnets can come in various 'states', depending on their direction. Applying a magnetic field to a network of nanomagnets changes the state of the magnets based on the properties of the input field, but also on the states of surrounding magnets. ...
The team will next teach the system using real-world data, such as ECG signals, and hope to make it into a real computing device. Eventually, magnetic systems could be integrated into conventional computers to improve energy efficiency for intense processing tasks. ...
While at Kiva Systems in the early 2000s, Wurman, Mick Mountz and Raffaello D'Andrea developed an entirely new approach for material handling in distribution centers that revolutionized warehouse order fulfillment. The group leveraged thousands of mobile robots and sophisticated control software to bring inventory shelves to workers, significantly improving all areas of fulfillment center operations from safety and productivity to cycle time and throughput. ...
According to a recent survey of more than 2,500 U.S. adults, people are currently more likely to fear the metaverse than be excited about it. The survey, which ran from March 23-25 and was conducted by Axios and market research software company Momentive, asked respondents if the idea of the metaverse made them “more excited or scared about the future.”
Only 7% of respondents said the idea of a metaverse ... made them “more excited” about the future. Almost one-third of respondents said it made them “more scared.”
The largest contingent – 58% – answered “neither,” suggesting that the majority of Americans still treat the idea of the metaverse with relative indifference. That matched up closely with another of the poll’s findings: 60% of its respondents were unfamiliar with the idea of the metaverse, in the first place.
PhilNote: the short article gives some specifics but mostly generalities.
...The application of these product liability principles in the AI context was on display in the recent case Cruz v. Raymond Talmadge d/b/a Calvary Coach. The case featured an AI-driven product that has become a part of our everyday lives: a GPS device. In this case, the plaintiffs were injured when a bus struck an overpass. The plaintiffs’ lawsuit rested on claims of negligence, breach of warranty, and strict liability against the GPS device manufacturer. In particular, the plaintiffs pointed to what they said was a design defect in the GPS device. It routed the bus driver under an overpass. The plaintiffs asserted the GPS device should have been able to discern the overpass was too low for the bus. The parties eventually reached a settlement. ...
