iPhone 8 to ditch fingerprint sensor for face scanner, reports say

iPhone 8 – Refurbished Security System

The upcoming iPhone 8 of Apple would be featuring a refurbished security system wherein the users can unlock the device by utilising their face instead of their fingerprints. The 10th anniversary of iPhones is estimated in having a radical redesign that would comprise of a security system which will scan the faces of the users in order to check who could be using the device.

As per Bloomberg, it is said that the 3D scanning scheme would be replacing the Touch ID as a means of verifying payments, log in to apps as well as in unlocking the phone. It could function at various angles and hence the iPhone has the tendency of getting unlocked by merely looking at it, if the same is flat on the table and also held up right. It has been reported that the scanning system has been designed for the purpose of speed and precision and can scan the face of the user and unlock the device within a few hundred milliseconds.

Since it tends to analyse 3D instead of 2D images, it is likely to be capable of differentiating between a persons’ face and an image of the person. Presently available in Galaxy S8 of Samsung in strengthening the security of the device, Apple could also utilise the eye scanning technology.

Face Scanning Technology

Bloomberg had reported that the face scanning technology could secure more than the Touch ID, first released in 2013 on the iPhone S5 since it tends to draw on more identifiers. Apple has claimed that its fingerprint scanner tends to have only a 1 in 50,000 chance of being unlocked by a stranger’s fingerprint. According to an analyst having reliable track record, Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone 8 is said to feature an edge-to-edge OLED screen having the maximum screen-to-body ratio than any smartphone prevailing at the moment.

Apple would probably remove the Home button as well as the Touch ID scanner in order to make provision for the display. Kuo has also predicted that Apple would be releasing three new phones in September, namely the iPhone 8, iPhone 7S and iPhone 7S Plus. The iPhone 8 would be featuring the most vivid redesign among the three, having a 5.2-inch size screen retained in a device which would be the same size as the iPhone 7. Besides that it would also have less colour options and will be available with a glass front with steel edges towards the back.

New Chip Dedicated to Processing Artificial Intelligence

A well-linked Apple blogger, John Gruber had mentioned that the top iPhone could be named as `iPhone Pro’ recommending that the cost could be $1,500 or higher. The remaining two devices would be featuring LCD screens and will be available in sizes of 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch. Like the present iPhone 7, these devices would probably have a Home button together with Touch ID.

It is also said that the three phones would be having a Lightning port together with an embedded USB-C equipped with storage of 64GB or 256GB, if the predictions of Kuo tends to be accurate. Moreover they would be available with a new chip that is dedicated to processing artificial intelligence and the same is being verified presently.

New Tool Offers Snapshots of Neuron Activity

Get to see the neuron activity with a snapshot taking tool

Scientists have always wondered how the human brain works and this has led to various huge budget researches. A number of cognitive processes take place within few seconds or minutes with the help highly efficient and fast paced neuron activity in the brain. It was a dream of the neuroscientists to find some way to capture and study how the neurons works in tandem to successfully perform wide variety of tasks within the shortest amount of time. A team of scientists has just built such tool which is capable of taking snapshots of the neuron activity and this feat is regarded nothing than scientific marvel.

Team behind the development of snapshot tool

A team of researchers from MIT and Stanford University has come up a noble solution to map the activity of the neurons in the brain. They had developed a smart and influential way of labeling the neurons as they turn active which in turn helps in creating a snapshot of the activity in real time. Their approach has been applauded by many as offers new exciting insights into the core functioning of the neurons. It has found to be extremely precise and capable than the currently used cell labeling techniques as it is helps in capturing the activity performed by the neurons over a time, hours or even days.

FLARE is the new age for labelling neuron activity

Researchers developed a technique called FLARE which they demonstrated on the mice to showcase how the neuron activity is mapped by this tool. Herein a red fluorescent protein which is also known as mCherry present in the motor cortex of the mice is turned as they started running on the treadmill. The future prospects of this tool are immense as it can be used for the cell belling in the light-sensitive proteins known as DREADDS. This will in turn allow the neurons to be controlled effectively in the small molecule drugs in future. The best thing about this tool is that its component has the potential to be delivered using the viral vectors which enhances the overall scope of its application.

Understanding the neuron activity using the snapshots by careful labelling is being seen as the first step towards the future where scientists will be able to manipulate multiple set of the neurons. This will allow them to perform specific set of tasks which was impossible for a really long time. An example will help in illustrating this point, using this technology researchers will be able to investigate the way in which brain during quick decision making, they will be able to find the strong emotions associated with it as well as helps I determining the behaviour which will be appropriate for specific situation.

FLARE will be extremely useful in studying as well as treating various diseases in future which even includes the Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists will be able to employ this tool to identify the diseased neuron and treat them specifically so a patient left with the healthy neurons only.

Intel working on new chips to compete with NVIDIA GPUs

Intel & NVIDIA – Combat for Turf

The battle between Intel and NVIDIA seems to have been locked in new combat for turf which is the booming data centre market and the core of this conflict is the technology which is changing the world- Artificial Intelligence. – AI. The revenue of NVIDIA in the recent quarter ended April 30, had augmented by 48% touching $1.94 billion in comparison to earlier year.

They had received a big revenue crash from its Data centre business that had recorded $409 million revenue in the first quarter of this fiscal, 186% up, year-on-year, due to the exponential increase in the spike in demand for specific type of microprocessor known as Graphic Processing Unit – GPU, prepared by NVIDIA. Most of the huge technology companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM as well as Alibaba have installed the best Tesla GPUs of NVIDIA to control their data centres to perform machine learning in analysing data collected from the cloud and gain awareness.

The MD of NVIDIA, Vishal Dhupar, had commented that they had seen the PC era that had been followed by the mobile era and now envisage the emergence of the AI era. Once viewed only as a gaming technology, GPU are now making inroads in data centres driving initiatives around machine learning- ML together with artificial intelligence – AI.

Data Centres – Storehouses of Huge Volumes of Data

Data centres are said to be storehouses of huge volumes of data that tends to connect the compute power of GPUs in order to make sense of huge repository of data. The arrival of GPUs have assisted in redefining the concept of systems designs for several of the high-performance application in the commercial and the non-commercial sectors of the market, according to Rajnish Arora, VP of enterprise Computing Research, IDC. Could it mean that Intel would be losing market share in the data centre space?

Arora had stated that they do not believe that Intel in losing share of the server CPU market to NVIDIA. The numbers evidently determine that Intelseemed to have consolidated its presence and market share in the server market. Presently Intel CPUs power data centres all across the globe and tends to revel in near control accounting for 95.7% of the entire server shipped in 2016.Moreover it is also betting big on AI and has financed greatly in start-ups that have assisted in building AI together with High-Performance Computing –HPC competences in its upcoming chips

Knights Mill/Knights Crest

Intel had bought Altera in 2015, for $16.7 billion, which was a company making programmable devices that could be optimised for AI and ML. It had gone ahead in August and had bought deep learning start-up Nervana Systems to strengthen AI specific solutions. The new chips called `Knights Mill’ will be sold later this year by Intel to address the growing Machine Learning – ML, market.

Moreover it is also working on `Knights Crest’ chips that will manage deep neural networks which is a component of deep learning – DL.A fellow at Intel Labs, Pradeep Dubey had stated that `competition has always been around and they are optimizing their chips for machine learning as well as deep learning applications since this is a big opportunity for them. There are also four new processors which will be released this year’. These products would be competing against NVIDIA GPU in the data centre market.

Can You Hear Me Now?

 

Lombard - Split Second Act from Ear to Brain –

It has been observed that humans as well as animals while trying to be heard over sound tend to raise their voices. It is said to be a split-second act from the ear to the brain for vocalization. The first to measure how fast it tends to occur in bats – 30 milliseconds, are researchers from Johns Hopkins University. This is 10 times quicker than the blink of an eye, a record for audio vocal response.

 Since this deed is known as the Lombard, its effect tends to take place very fast; the researchers were capable of solving a long overdue mystery considering the neural mechanism behind it. Recently in a paper publishing in the journal `Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’, they concluded that it could be a fundamental temporal reflex instead of a deeper, thinking behaviour as presumed earlier, which would be time consuming in processing.

The discoveries shedding light on the foundations of human speech control has also disclosed how species as diverse as fish, animals, and frogs together with humans tend to share the ability to be head over the fight. Co-author Ninad Kothari, a graduate student in Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins stated that scientist have been speculating for a century that, could there be a common auditory process in explaining how this phenomenon occurred in fish to frogs to birds to human species with wildly various hearing systems and they had resolved this question.

Lombard Effect

The new statistics could lead to improved treatment for diseases and the Lombard effect could be intensified like Parkinson’s disease as well as support in building assistive medical devices. Studies conducted on bats, animals which tend to depend on sonar-like echolocation, releasing sounds and listening for echoes in order to sense, track and catch prey, had been carried out by the researchers.

In contrast to humans, where the vocalization tends to be reasonably long and slow, bats seems to be perfect for such sensorimotor study since their extraordinary frequency chirps, unnoticeable to the human ear are said to be quick and accurate enabling the researchers to test the parameters of a mammalian brain.

While tracking an insect moving towards the animal on a tether, the team had trained big brown bats to stay balanced on a platform and while the bat hunted for the insect, the researchers had recorded the vocalization of the bat with an array of 14 microphones. The researchers at time permitted the bat to hunt in silence while at other times they played bursts of interfering white noise at different intensities from a speaker which has been placed in front of the bat.

Brain Monitors Background Noise Continuously

It was observed that the white noise had interfered with the echolocation of the bat and had caused the bat to emit louder and louder chirps not different from two neighbours attempting in making a conversation, first over a lurid radio and then over the clamour of a lawn mower and thereafter over the blast of a passing fire engine.

When the noise had stopped, the bat would also stop shouting, to speak and voice at a more usual level. The researchers capable of creating a computational model for the Lombard effect which tends to be applicable to all vertebrate, reached a conclusion that the brain of a bat or a person or a fish tends to monitor continuously the background noise and is inclined to adjust the vocal levels whenever the need arises.

 At first the auditory system is said to notice the background noise. Then the auditory system measures the level of sound pressure and tends to adjust the vocalization amplitude in order to compensate and when the background noise stops, the sound pressure level dissipates as well as the level of vocalization.

Connection Between Hearing & Vocalizations

The author observed that this complete intricate process tends to take place in only 30 milliseconds. In terms of near-instantaneous brain reactions, they name this reflex as `remarkably short’. Lead author Jinhong Luo, a Johns Hopkins postdoctoral colleague had stated that `typically, we breathe every three to five seconds, our heart beats once per second and eye blinking takes one third of a second.

If we believe that eye blinking is fast, the speed at which an echolocating bat responds to ambient noise is truly shocking – 10 times quicker than we blink our eyes’. Scientists are of the belief that the Lombard effect seems to be much slower, around 150 to 175 milliseconds for humans.

Johns Hopkins professor of Psychological and Brian Sciences and Neuroscience and a co-author, Cynthia Moss commented that their study features echolocating bats as valuable animal models for understanding connections between hearing and vocalizations, including speech control in humans.

 The research has been supported by the national Science foundation IOS-1010193 and IOS-1460149, the Human Frontiers Science Program RGP0040 and LT000279/2016-L, the Office of Naval Research N00014-12-1-0339 and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research FA9550-14-1-0398

Watching Cities Grow

Great Resolution Civilian Radar Satellite

Major cities in the world have been increasing and as per the estimates of United Nations, presently half of the population of the world tends to be living in cities. Towards 2050, the figure is expected to mount to two thirds of the population of the world.

 Professor for Signal Processing in Earth Observation at TUM, Xiaoxiang Zhu has informed that this growth has given rise to high demands on building and infrastructure safety since destruction events could threaten thousands of human lives at once. Zhu together with her team had established a method of early detection of probable dangers for instance; subterranean subsidence could cause the collapse of buildings, bridges, tunnels or even dams.

The new system tends to make it possible in noticing and visualizing changes as small as one millimetre each year. Data for the latest urban images tends to come from the German TerraSAR-X satellite which is one of the great resolution civilian radar satellite in the world. Since 2007, the satellite, circulating the earth at an altitude of approximately 500 kilometres tends to send microwave pulses to the earth and collects their echoes. Zhu has explained that at first these measurements were only in a two dimensional image with a resolution of one meter.

Generate Highly Accurate Four-Dimensional City Model

The TUM professor worked in partnership with the German Aerospace Centre – DLR and was also in charge of her own working team. The DLR tends to be in control of the operation and use of the satellite for scientific purposes.

The consequence of the images is restricted by the statistic that reflections from various objects which are at an equivalent distance from the satellite, will layover with each other and this effect tends to decrease the three-dimensional world to a two-dimensional image. Zhu had not only created her own algorithm that tends to make it possible in reconstructing the third and also fourth dimension, but also set a world record at the same time.

 Four dimensional point clouds having a density of three million points for each square kilometre had been reconstructed. This rich recovered information gave rise to generate highly accurate four-dimensional city models.

Radar Measurements to Reconstruct Urban Infrastructure

The trick was that the scientists utilised images taken from slightly various viewpoints. Every eleven days, the satellite tends to fly over the region of interest but its orbit position does not always seem to be precisely the same. The researchers utilise these 250 meter orbital variations in radar tomography to localize each point in three-dimensional space.

This system utilises similar principle used by computer tomography that tends to develop a three-dimensional view of the inner area of the human body. Various radar images taken from different viewpoints have been linked in creating a three-dimensional image. Zhu states that since this system processes only poor resolution in the third dimension, additional compressive sensing system which makes it possible for improving the resolution by 15 times is applied.

Scientists could utilise the radar dimensions to restructure urban organization on the surface of the earth with great accuracy, from TerraSAR-X, for instance the 3D shape of individual buildings. This system has already been utilised in generating highly precise 3D models in Berlin, Paris, Las Vegas and Washington DC.