Osso VR raises $14 million to bring virtual reality to surgical and medical device training
3D render, visualization of a man holding virtual reality glasses, electronic device, head surrounded by virtual data with neon green grid. Player one ready for the VR game. Virtual experience.
As remote work becomes the order of the day in the COVID-19 era, any tool that can bring training and education services to folks across industries is gaining a huge amount of investor interest — and that includes healthcare.
The money came from a clutch of investors led by the investment arm of Kaiser Permanente, a healthcare giant whose network of managed care facilities and services spans the country.
Osso has seen its adoption skyrocket during the pandemic as medical device manufacturers and healthcare networks turn to training tools that don’t require a technician to be physically present.
According to company founder Dr. Justin Barad, the market for medical device education services alone is currently around $3 billion to $5 billion and growing rapidly.
Osso VR currently has around 30 customers, 12 of which are in the medical device space. The company uses Oculus Quest headsets and is deployed in 20 teaching hospitals across 20 different countries. In a recent validation study, surgeons training with Osso VR showed a 230% improvement in overall surgical performance, the company said in a statement.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/21/osso-vr-raises-14-million-to-bring-virtual-reality-to-surgical-and-medical-device-training/
“The Reasonable Robot” Looks At The Intersection Of Artificial Intelligence (AI) And Law
Chapter three is labeled with the book’s title, “Reasonable Robots.” It starts with a clear overview of liability and tort concepts as applied to AI. One key concept is the question of what is reasonable. For instance, current car accident law tends to view the actions of individuals and compare it to what a “reasonable person” would have done. So what happens when autonomous vehicles are statistically safer than people? Do we start incentivizing people to stop driving by comparing their actions to what a “reasonable robot” would have done? It’s a very intriguing concept.
Chapters 4 & 5 focus on AI systems as inventors and what rights they may have. I, again, answer that simply with a “none.”
The next chapter, six, again makes the novice mistake of ignoring the difference between AI and AGI. Punishing AI is no more logical than punishing the screwdriver used to kill somebody. “Bad! Bad screwdriver!”
See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidteich/2020/09/21/the-reasonable-robot-looks-at-the-intersection-of-artificial-intelligence-ai-and-law/#1263ee343e81
Traders set to don virtual reality headsets in their home offices
“If people really can’t come to the office, can we create a virtual presence?” Beatriz Martin, UBS UK chief executive, told the Financial Times. “We are thinking about experimenting with the tools that are out there.”
UBS has set up a working group focused on “reimagining the trading floor,” which has also considered setting up screens on traders’ desks with camera feeds from their co-workers to encourage collaboration.
This month, JPMorgan Chase summoned senior traders back to the bank’s tower blocks in Canary Wharf and midtown Manhattan in a move praised by US President Donald Trump. But the bank has already been forced to send staff home from its New York trading floor after an employee tested positive for COVID-19, according to Bloomberg.
See the full story here: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/traders-set-to-don-virtual-reality-headsets-in-their-home-offices/
Historic award for Chinese VR suspense movie
The short suspense film “Killing A Superstar” won the Best VR (virtual reality) Immersive Story award at the recent 77th Venice International Film Festival, the first time a VR film production from China’s mainland was honored at an international A-category film festival.
“Killing a Superstar” uses VR technology — considered a fashionable new trend in the film industry — to offer a panoramic, interactive telling of the story.
The film also features multiple parallel narratives. Viewers are given the freedom to switch between different scenes to identify clues and uncover the truth on their own. It leverages 8K HD and Dolby Atmos technology to present an immersive VR audio-visual experience, and is now available on iQiyi’s VR app and Qiyu’s all-in-one VR headset platform.
See the full story here: https://www.shine.cn/feature/entertainment/2009186327/
WHY DUNE’S APPROACH TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MAKES STAR WARS LOOK ABSURD
The lack of "thinking machines" in Dune is intentional, and the ban on this technology actually creates the basis for all of the world-building within the original six Frank Herbert novels. But what's brilliant is this backstory is not really a huge cautionary tale. Instead, Herbert uses the A.I. revolution trope as table-setting for Dune. In doing so, he makes the world-building of other droid-heavy sci-fi fantasy universes seem a little bit silly.
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The TL;DR version of this simply: The reason why there's no A.I. in the relative "present" of Dune is that by the time Paul Atreides and his family move to Arrakis, A.I. has already been banished for 10 millennia.
...Like the 2003 Battlestar Galactica reboot, Dune imagines a future where technology has been intentionally throttled back to keep people safe from it.
...Frank Herbert's sly decision to make robots and evil A.I. a part of "long time ago" backstory allows the original Dune books to be about something several sci-fi epics forget to focus on: Humans.
See the full story here: https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/dunes-2020-ai-tech-star-wars-differences
Apple’s new spatial audio feature is a headphone game-changer
When I first updated my iPhone 11 Pro to iOS 14 to try out Apple's new spatial audio feature, I was a bit mystified. "Not sure what's going on," I wrote a colleague. "I seem to have the new firmware [3A283] on AirPods Pro. It says I have spatial audio. But what some people are describing I'm not experiencing. Restarting phone and earbuds."
That made all the difference. After I turned the phone back on and reinserted the buds in my ears (after returning them briefly to their charging case), I launched a movie on Apple TV again and was greeted by a completely different audio experience. It's hard to describe the sensation but my immediate reaction was to check whether the earbuds were actually on because the audio sounded like it was coming from the phone (not the buds), which was sitting on the table about two feet away from me. It was an out-of-bud experience. (For instructions on how to enable spatial audio, go here.)
[Spatial Audio] changes the small-screen watching experience, adding a bona fide surround-sound experience, albeit one that's limited by the AirPods Pro's sound quality.
See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/news/apples-new-spatial-audio-feature-is-a-game-changer/
Quantum and classical computers handle time differently. What does that mean for AI?
In fact, scientists have proven that time’s arrow – a bedrock concept related to the classical view of time – doesn’t really work on quantum computers. Classical physics suffers from a concept called causal asymmetry. Basically, if you throw a bunch of confetti in the air and take a picture when each piece is at its apex, it’ll be easier for a classical computer to determine what happens next (where the confetti is going) than what happened before (what direction the confetti would travel in going backwards through time).
Quantum computers can perform both calculations with equal ease, thus indicating they do not suffer causal asymmetry. Time’s arrow is only relevant to classical systems – of which the human mind appears to be, though our brains are almost certainly quantum constructs.
But experts such as Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis believe an understanding of time is essential to the future of AI, especially as it relates to “human-level” artificial general intelligence (AGI). The duo penned an op-ed for the New York Times where they stated:
In particular, we need to stop building computer systems that merely get better and better at detecting statistical patterns in data sets — often using an approach known as deep learning — and start building computer systems that from the moment of their assembly innately grasp three basic concepts: time, space and causality.
Quantum physics tells us that, at the very least, our understanding of time is likely different from what might be the ultimate universal reality.
See the full story here: https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/09/17/quantum-and-classical-computers-handle-time-differently-what-does-that-mean-for-ai/