philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

21Aug/17Off

The Novel Effects App May Be the Future of Bedtime Stories

The other day, I was reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to my daughter. When I got to the part where the caterpillar ate through one apple, I paused, surprised by an unmistakable munching sound coming from my coffee table.

The sound was actually emitted by an app called Novel Effect that uses voice-recognition technology to insert sound effects and music to books as you read them aloud—ideally, to make the experience of reading aloud more engaging for kids at home or in the classroom.

“You still get engagement, you still get interactivity,” says Matt Hammersley, Novel Effect’s CEO and one of its four cofounders. “But they’re not staring at a screen and you’re actually encouraging face-to-face personal communication.”

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608671/this-app-may-be-the-future-of-bedtime-stories/?

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21Aug/17Off

Military Robots: Armed, but How Dangerous?

The debate over using artificial intelligence to control lethal weapons in warfare is more complex than it seems.

Lin says that while the concept of unchecked killer robots is obviously worrying, the issue of automated weapons deserves a more nuanced discussion. “Emotionally, it’s a pretty straightforward case,” says Lin. “Intellectually I think they need to do more work.”

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539876/military-robots-armed-but-how-dangerous/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=49e52897c0-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-49e52897c0-153894145

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21Aug/17Off

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON CERTAIN CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS

 

https://futureoflife.org/autonomous-weapons-open-letter-2017/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=49e52897c0-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-49e52897c0-153894145

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON CERTAIN CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS

As companies building the technologies in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics that may be repurposed to develop autonomous weapons, we feel especially responsible in raising this alarm. We warmly welcome the decision of the UN’s Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) to establish a Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems. Many of our researchers and engineers are eager to offer technical advice to your deliberations.

We commend the appointment of Ambassador Amandeep Singh Gill of India as chair of the GGE. We entreat the High Contracting Parties participating in the GGE to work hard at finding means to prevent an arms race in these weapons, to protect civilians from their misuse, and to avoid the destabilizing effects of these technologies. We regret that the GGE’s first meeting, which was due to start today (August 21, 2017), has been cancelled due to a small number of states failing to pay their financial contributions to the UN. We urge the High Contracting Parties therefore to double their efforts at the first meeting of the GGE now planned for November.

Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close. We therefore implore the High Contracting Parties to find a way to protect us all from these dangers.

Translations: Chinese

FULL LIST OF SIGNATORIES TO THE OPEN LETTER

To add your company, please contact Toby Walsh at tw@cse.unsw.edu.au.

Tiberio Caetano, founder & Chief Scientist at Ambiata, Australia.
Mark Chatterton and Leo Gui, founders, MD & of Ingenious AI, Australia.
Charles Gretton, founder of Hivery, Australia.
Brad Lorge, founder & CEO of Premonition.io, Australia
Brenton O’Brien, founder & CEO of Microbric, Australia.
Samir Sinha, founder & CEO of Robonomics AI, Australia.
Ivan Storr, founder & CEO, Blue Ocean Robotics, Australia.
Peter Turner, founder & MD of Tribotix, Australia.
Yoshua Bengio, founder of Element AI & Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, Canada.
Ryan Gariepy, founder & CTO, Clearpath Robotics, found & CTO of OTTO Motors, Canada.
James Chow, founder & CEO of UBTECH Robotics, China.
Robert Li, founder & CEO of Sankobot, China.
Marek Rosa, founder & CEO of GoodAI, Czech Republic.
Søren Tranberg Hansen, founder & CEO of Brainbotics, Denmark.
Markus Järve, founder & CEO of Krakul, Estonia.
Harri Valpola, founder & CTO of ZenRobotics, founder & CEO of Curious AI Company, Finland.
Esben Østergaard, founder & CTO of Universal Robotics, Denmark.
Raul Bravo, founder & CEO of DIBOTICS, France.
Raphael Cherrier, founder & CEO of Qucit, France.
Jerome Monceaux, founder & CEO of Spoon.ai, founder & CCO of Aldebaran Robotics, France.
Charles Ollion, founder & Head of Research at Heuritech, France.
Anis Sahbani, founder & CEO of Enova Robotics, France.
Alexandre Vallette, founder of SNIPS & Ants Open Innovation Labs, France.
Marcus Frei, founder & CEO of NEXT.robotics, Germany.
Kirstinn Thorisson, founder & Director of Icelandic Institute for Intelligence Machines, Iceland.
Fahad Azad, founder of Robosoft Systems, India.
Debashis Das, Ashish Tupate, Jerwin Prabu, founders (incl. CEO) of Bharati Robotics, India.
Pulkit Gaur, founder & CTO of Gridbots Technologies, India.
Pranay Kishore, founder & CEO of Phi Robotics Research, India.
Shahid Memom, founder & CTO of Vanora Robots, India.
Krishnan Nambiar & Shahid Memon, founders, CEO & CTO of Vanora Robotics, India.
Achu Wilson, founder & CTO of Sastra Robotics, India.
Neill Gernon, founder & MD of Atrovate, founder of Dublin.AI, Ireland.
Parsa Ghaffari, founder & CEO of Aylien, Ireland.
Alan Holland, founder & CEO of Keelvar Systems, Ireland.
Alessandro Prest, founder & CTO of LogoGrab, Ireland.
Alessio Bonfietti, founder & CEO of MindIT, Italy.
Angelo Sudano, founder & CTO of ICan Robotics, Italy.
Shigeo Hirose, Michele Guarnieri, Paulo Debenest, & Nah Kitano, founders, CEO & Directors of HiBot Corporation, Japan.
Luis Samahí García González, founder & CEO of QOLbotics, Mexico.
Koen Hindriks & Joachim de Greeff, founders, CEO & COO at Interactive Robotics, the Netherlands.
Maja Rudinac, founder and CEO of Robot Care Systems, the Netherlands.
Jaap van Leeuwen, founder and CEO Blue Ocean Robotics Benelux, the Netherlands.
Dyrkoren Erik, Martin Ludvigsen & Christine Spiten, founders, CEO, CTO & Head of Marketing at BlueEye Robotics, Norway.
Sergii Kornieiev, founder & CEO of BaltRobotics, Poland.
Igor Kuznetsov, founder & CEO of NaviRobot, Russian Federation.
Aleksey Yuzhakov & Oleg Kivokurtsev, founders, CEO & COO of Promobot, Russian Federation.
Junyang Woon, founder & CEO, Infinium Robotics, former Branch Head & Naval Warfare Operations Officer, Singapore.
Jasper Horrell, founder of DeepData, South Africa.
Toni Ferrate, founder & CEO of RO-BOTICS, Spain.
José Manuel del Río, founder & CEO of Aisoy Robotics, Spain.
Victor Martin, founder & CEO of Macco Robotics, Spain.
Timothy Llewellynn, founder & CEO of nViso, Switzerland.
Francesco Mondada, founder of K-Team, Switzerland.
Jurgen Schmidhuber, Faustino Gomez, Jan Koutník, Jonathan Masci & Bas Steunebrink, founders, President & CEO of Nnaisense, Switzerland.
Satish Ramachandran, founder of AROBOT, United Arab Emirates.
Silas Adekunle, founder & CEO of Reach Robotics, UK.
Steve Allpress, founder & CTO of FiveAI, UK.
Joel Gibbard and Samantha Payne, founders, CEO & COO of Open Bionics, UK.
Richard Greenhill & Rich Walker, founders & MD of Shadow Robot Company, UK.
Nic Greenway, founder of React AI Ltd (Aiseedo), UK.
Daniel Hulme, founder & CEO of Satalia, UK.
Charlie Muirhead & Tabitha Goldstaub, founders & CEO of CognitionX, UK.
Geoff Pegman, founder & MD of R U Robots, UK.
Demis Hassabis & Mustafa Suleyman, founders, CEO & Head of Applied AI, DeepMind, UK.
Donald Szeto, Thomas Stone & Kenneth Chan, founders, CTO, COO & Head of Engineering of PredictionIO, UK.
Antoine Biondeau, founder & CEO of Sentient Technologies, USA.
Brian Gerkey, founder & CEO of Open Source Robotics, USA.
Ryan Hickman & Soohyun Bae, founders, CEO & CTO of TickTock.AI, USA.
Henry Hu, founder & CEO of Cafe X Technologies, USA.
Alfonso Íñiguez, founder & CEO of Swarm Technology, USA.
Gary Marcus, founder & CEO of Geometric Intelligence (acquired by Uber), USA.
Brian Mingus, founder & CTO of Latently, USA.
Mohammad Musa, founder & CEO at Deepen AI, USA.
Elon Musk, founder, CEO & CTO of SpaceX, co-founder & CEO of Tesla Motor, USA.
Rosanna Myers & Dan Corkum, founders, CEO & CTO of Carbon Robotics, USA.
Erik Nieves, founder & CEO of PlusOne Robotics, USA.
Steve Omohundro, founder & President of Possibility Research, USA.
Jeff Orkin, founder & CEO, Giant Otter Technologies, USA.
Dan Reuter, found & CEO of Electric Movement, USA.
Alberto Rizzoli & Simon Edwardsson, founders & CEO of AIPoly, USA.
Dan Rubins, founder & CEO of Legal Robot, USA.
Stuart Russell, founder & VP of Bayesian Logic Inc., USA.
Andrew Schroeder, founder of WeRobotics, USA.
Gabe Sibley & Alex Flint, founders, CEO & CPO of Zippy.ai, USA.
Martin Spencer, founder & CEO of GeckoSystems, USA.
Peter Stone, Mark Ring & Satinder Singh, founders, President/COO, CEO & CTO of Cogitai, USA.
Michael Stuart, founder & CEO of Lucid Holdings, USA.
Massimiliano Versace, founder, CEO & President, Neurala Inc, USA.

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21Aug/17Off

How a Toronto hospital uses virtual reality to grant dying patients a last wish

meike-muzzi"I'm not just dumping a headset on them," he said. "I'm actually sort of progressing it so they get the feeling that they're doing a trip or doing something that's special.

"How can we virtually start to cross items off [the patient's] bucket list?"

There's limited data about the efficacy of virtual reality as therapy, but both he and Dr. Leah Steinberg — the palliative care physician who has supported the project — hope to change that.

They've already cleared several hurdles simply in starting the program. For example, they've ensured that the headset can be sterilized so that it doesn't bring in any bacteria to vulnerable patients.

It's not a typical medical tool, but the escape of virtual reality can help patients cope after learning they have a terminal condition, Steinberg said.

See the full story here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/palliative-care-virtual-reality-1.4254087

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21Aug/17Off

Beyond Virtual Reality: Synthetic Reality And Our Co-Created Futures

960x0-2Later this century, virtual environments may become experienced comprehensively as new versions of reality, as we have explored in past articles in Forbes and HuffPost. The only way you will know they are virtual (i.e. not the “default world”) is that you will know they are so, similar to how dreams feel real while dreamt.

As computational systems become more capable of deciphering and anticipating human preferences, such systems could generate customized environments in real-time with less conscious input from users. Eventually such systems may not require conscious input to capture and respond to shifting user preferences, though user intervention might still remain an option.

We propose a new moniker to describe where we’re heading: synthetic reality. Such systems will synthesize our will and preferences, whether or not consciously provided, into new, ever-evolving realities.

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwolcott/2017/08/18/beyond-virtual-reality-synthetic-reality-and-our-co-created-futures/#3af3a58a1320

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18Aug/17Off

A Mixed Reality Application to Heal Young Hearts

Surgical-Assistant-3 Surgical-Assistant-4A HoloLens visualization tool enables surgeons to treat heart chronic heart conditions more effectively

At this year’s Imagine Cup, Microsoft hosted dozens of student teams from across the world. They showcased an incredibly broad range of products developed to solve practical problems that ranged from getting rescue workers to disaster zones quickly to helping farmers manage the health of their livestock, improving water quality, battling fake news, and holding politicians to account.

And given the company’s vision—which they set out at this year’s Build conference—of developing a Mixed Reality ecosystem, it’s hardly surprising that we also saw a few interesting HoloLens projects cropping up as well. One of those was developed by three Biomedical Engineering students from Xidian University in China, who came up with the idea after meeting at their school’s Innovation Lab.

The students had the opportunity during the course of their studies to work with children suffering from congenital heart disease, and found that often a child’s heart was so small that standard examination and diagnosis techniques were entirely unsuitable for them. In fact, in some cases these standard adult procedures could cause serious damage to their tiny and already fragile organs.

“With our platform we can localize a lesion, and observe all the details of that lesion in a non-invasive way,” explained Maoqing Yang from the Surgical Assistant Team.

See the full story here: https://vrscout.com/news/mixed-reality-heal-young-hearts/

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18Aug/17Off

AI Is Taking Over the Cloud

aaron-levieCloud storage company Box is using Google’s vision technology to make its service considerably smarter.

Cloud storage company Box announced today that it is adding computer-vision technology from Google to its platform. Users will be able to search through photos, images, and other documents using their visual components, instead of by file name or tag. “As more and more data goes into the cloud, we’re seeing they need more powerful ways to organize and understand their content,” says CEO Aaron Levie.

Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist of Google Cloud and a professor at Stanford University who specializes in computer vision and machine learning, said in a statement that the announcement shows how broadly available AI technology is becoming. “Ultimately it will democratize AI for more people and businesses,” Li said.

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608678/ai-is-taking-over-the-cloud/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=9770450a0f-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-9770450a0f-153894145

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18Aug/17Off

Ubiquiti Rolls Out $399 Wearable Camera for Live Streaming

Ubiquiti_FrontRow_CameraUbiquiti, a company known for selling networking products, has introduced FrontRow, a $399 Android-based wearable camera with a round display that enables “effortless capture” from a first-person point of view.

The two 55-gram (almost two-ounce) cameras, one on each side of the wearable device, offer a round 1.96-inch 640×572 LTPS (active matrix LCD) display. FrontRow features a quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage

The company claims that FrontRow’s battery is good for two hours of live streaming, 16 hours of the Story Mode time-lapse feature and 48 hours of standby; it can recharge in 20 minutes via its USB Type-C port and, more slowly via USB-C phones.

FrontRow — essentially a “more fashionable GoPro,...

See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/ubiquiti-rolls-out-399-wearable-camera-for-live-streaming/#more-119170

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18Aug/17Off

How virtual reality is changing the way we experience stage shows

file-20170725-30149-2dqcopWe later furthered this work with the performance “@nts”, a multi-dimensional theatre performance inspired by Philip K. Dick’s The Electric Ant. This was staged at the same time in parallel universes: the real world of a real theatre space and the cyberspace of Second Life.

The world is experiencing a “personal theatre” revolution where video games, film, music and stage performances are blending together. What has been a theatre performance for hundreds of years is changing. It is no longer just focused on the here and now, but the here, now and everywhere.

See the full story here: http://theconversation.com/how-virtual-reality-is-changing-the-way-we-experience-stage-shows-81542

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18Aug/17Off

Deciphering the New Digital Marketing Buzzwords: Immersive, Experiential, and Multisensory

636013474073413305-232737880_dunkin-donuts-near-meVisits to Dunkin’ Donuts spiked in South Korea when the company combined a musical jingle with a coffee aroma, released by an atomizer on municipal buses. Sales at nearby donut shops jumped 29 percent, according to Harvard Business Review.

Full article here: https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/marketing/deciphering-new-digital-marketing-buzzwords-immersive-experiential-multisensory/

HBR Korea story here: https://hbr.org/2015/03/the-science-of-sensory-marketing

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