dueling banjos
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headline of the day
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future
Predicting The Future
If Steve Jobs predicted the future, it should also be pointed out that Bill Watterson had the same prescience, just with less optimism.
headline of the day
Army Wants Virtual Training to Really Hurt
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Black Mirror — Thought Controlled Siri
Some hobbyist hackers have rigged up an iPhone 4S to collect brain wave patterns from some simple ECG pads, translate them into synthesized speech, which is in turn pumped through the 3.5 mm headphone jack, and recognized by Siri as a usable command. Besides pressing the home key to initiate Siri, all you have to do is think your command, and your iPhone 4S will hop to it. The engineers expect that they’ll even be able to eliminate the need to press the home key, making it fully automatic. So far, the guys at Project Black Mirror have been able to link 25 brain wave patterns to specific Siri commands. Of course, right now the project is a bulky Arduino test board hooked up to a Macbook, which also occupies the headphone jack, and makes the user look like he belongs in Clockwork Orange, but these guys are putting up a Kickstarter page shortly to get funding and turn this thing into a real product.
I guess I should say this would be pretty easy to fake, but when Siri was announced I told my sister-in-law in ten years Siri would be in our heads. Maybe I was too pessimistic. Here’s the Black Mirror blog, so you can follow along.
Update: Mind-controlled Siri likely a hoax
(thanks, Joel)
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dear clusterflock
2031.
A Siri Demo
I know this iteration of Siri makes for a lot of amusement — and the ever increasing potential defilement of the public contract — but it’s hard to remember another technological innovation1 that makes my head immediately imagine ten years from now.
1Except for the last time Apple introduced a new technology.
(via stuff.tv)
dear clusterflock
Would you give up the experience of reading to have instant recall of all books?
I’m holding out for the iPhone Final
more on the possible iOS 5 Assistant
I posted a week or so ago about Assistant, a potential voice controlled personal management system available with the next version of the iPhone software. Joel was skeptical, Michael was amused. Here is what Norman Winarsky, the co-founder of Siri, which the software would be based on, thinks about the possibilities:
Let me first say I have no knowledge of what Apple plans to do with the Siri purchase. I read the rumors just like everyone else and it appears that Apple is getting ready to reveal what it has done with Siri over the past year and a half (we were actually expecting it at WWDC). Make no mistake: Apple’s ‘mainstreaming’ Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event. I’d go so far as to say it is a World-Changing event. Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go. Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies, or at least it was two years ago. This is REAL AI with REAL market use. If the rumors are true, Apple will enable millions upon millions of people to interact with machines with natural language. The PAL will get things done and this is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift.
I guess we’ll see tomorrow.
from the comments
In the future the environment sucks, so a bunch of American Apparel models travel back in time to get eaten by dinosaurs.
iOS 5 Assistant
An overview of potential features in Assistant, a voice controlled personal management system available in the next version of the iPhone software:
The system will actually speak back and forth with the user to gain the most information in order to provide the best results. The user essentially can hold a conversation with their iPhone like it is another human being. For example, if a user is making a meeting with me, they will say “setup meeting with Mark” and the first “bubble” of the conversation thread will say that. After that, the system will speak back: “which e-mail address should Mark be notified at, work or personal?” This question will both be spoken out loud by the iPhone Assistant and shown as a new “bubble” in the conversation thread. The user will then respond with the email address they want to notify me at, and the appointment will be made.
The speculation is this feature will only work with the new iPhones, and not the iPhone 4 or 3GS, because of processor and RAM requirements.
gaming for science and health
Over a three-week period, gamers playing Foldit, an online protein-folding game, helped to map out the structure of an enzyme that could be used to help fight HIV and AIDS.
One epilepsy patient moved a ball across a computer screen simply by imagining either an “ooh” sound or an “aah” sound. It marked one more step toward telepathy with machines.
For years, computers have been creeping ever nearer to our neurons. Thousands of people have become cyborgs, of a sort, for medical reasons: cochlear implants augment hearing and deep-brain stimulators treat Parkinson’s. But within the next decade, we are likely to see a new kind of implant, designed for healthy people who want to merge with machines. With several competing technologies in development, scientists squabble over which device works best; no one wants theirs to end up looking like the Betamax of brain wear. Schalk is a champion of the ECoG implant because, unlike other devices, it does not pierce brain tissue; instead it can ride on top of the brain-blood barrier, sensing the activity of populations of neurons and passing their chatter to the outside world, like a radio signal. Schalk says this is the brain implant most likely to evolve into a consumer product that could send signals to a prosthetic hand, an iPhone, a computer or a car.
“The burr hole in the skull will be small,” Schalk told me enthusiastically, as if urging me to get one of the plugs. The first dedicated trials in human beings, he says, are only a few years away.
(via @tylercowen)
Unlike Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Minority Report” or the film inspired by the novel, the program relies on algorithms, and not mutants to predict the likelihood of something happening
The police department in Santa Cruz has employed predictive algorithms to reduce burglaries and car break-ins.
The heart of the program is the belief that criminals often commit a second or third crime in the same location and the same time as a first successful crime. For example, if a burglar is successful breaking into a home at 2 p.m. in a certain neighborhood because no one is home, the criminal will use that experience to do it again to another house in the same neighborhood around the same time.
In the case of Santa Cruz, on California’s central coast and home to a University of California campus, that would be about four days later.
The algorithm knows this because Mohler has fed eight years of data on crimes in Santa Cruz into the algorithm.
Now you know, and I guess, so do the criminals.
How long do countries have until their populations disappear?
It never really occurred to me, until just now, that this could actually happen.
Is this something?
Software or (solar-powered) hardware modifications for hybrid/electric cars that offer the purchaser a selection of motor and/or muffler noises appropriately synchronized with accelerator use.
IBM’s Cognitive Computing Chips
IBM announced a computer chip that learns by mimicking the neurological processes of the brain:
Called cognitive computers, systems built with these chips won’t be programmed the same way traditional computers are today. Rather, cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember – and learn from – the outcomes, mimicking the brains structural and synaptic plasticity.
Goodness.
(via @tcarmody)
Holy Crap!
Using facial recognition in realtime via a webcam, this system lets you control the face of another person…like, say, John Malkovich.
Make sure you click through. The future is here, dude.
GM Futurliner Quarter Mile
Want to see the most amusing quarter-mile in automotive history?
General Motors built the Futurliner to promote a traveling show called the “GM Parade of Progress” in the 1940s and ’50s. The slippery-lined bus, which was penned by the legendary Harley Earl, is one of 12 that traveled the U.S. to show Americans the future of motoring and technology.
The Futurliner weighs 30 tons and is powered by a four cylinder diesel engine with a top speed of 40 mph. The Wikipedia article has a dozen pictures, and you can follow the history of its restoration at The GM Futurliner Restoration Project.
KinectFusion
At SIGGRAPH 2011, Microsoft Research demonstrated some absolutely phenomenal 3D scanning with their Kinect device:
This is all with a $150 video game accessory. The multitouch demo at the 7 minute point is especially impressive.
MacRumors iPhone 5 Mockups
MacRumors commissioned CiccareseDesign to create 3D renderings of what the iPhone 5 might look like based on leaked specs and Chinese case designs. You might enjoy looking at what the next iPhone might look like, maybe.
