Face Analysis can Tell What You’ll Buy after Watching Ads

Image: Daniel Allan/Cultura/Alamy

System by Affective – Pick up Hidden Emotions

A software has been developed that can sense how much one tend to get swayed by marketing by analysing the face as one watches the advertisements. Ad companies seems interested in assessing the reactions of the consumers to their latest TV spots and this is done by bringing in few customers in the office and pose queries to them.

However, the system adopted by Affective, a start up in Waltham, Massachusetts, has the capabilities of picking up hidden emotions by monitoring face movements. The approach according to Daniel McDuff, Affectiva’s principal scientist enables you to find out what the consumer generally thinks from time to time as the ad tends to run and not what they say once it is ended.

He has commented that that `it provides a way of getting at those more genuine, spontaneous interactions and this is their instinctive response. It is not sent through a cognitive filter where they have to evaluate how they feel’.

The software of Affectiva tends to first identify important facial signs like the mouth eyebrows and the tip of the nose. The machine learning algorithms tends to watch how these areas move or how the skin texture and the colour alter in the course of the video. These alterations are then broken down into distinct expressions portraying shifting emotions.

Focus on Emotions – Surprise/Confusion/Happiness

McDuff together with his colleagues, in a study which had been published recently, has asked 1223 people to give his team access to their home webcams while they watched a series of ads for pet supplies, groceries and sweets.

Prior and after the running of the ads, the subject filled out on online surveys was on how likely they would purchase the products shown.As they watched, the software focused on the lookout for emotions like surprise, confusion and happiness.

The researchers then found that they could utilise the facial data to predict precisely, the survey results of someone indicating that they could depend on the analysis of the computer to know if an ad was successful.

McDuff is of the belief that in the future, the system could plug in TV services like Netflix. He states that one can imagine suggesting TV programmes or even movies which people could watch or ads which they would find enjoyable.

Subtle Disparities in Emotional Responses

The team at Affectiva had accumulated a database of more than three million videos of people of various ages, ethnicities and gender. McDuff is of the opinion that there could be subtle disparities in emotional responses.

For instance women seem to have more positive facial expressions than men. However on understanding the respond of various groups, companies could put together ads which could be fine-tuned for certain audiences. Similarly, the data could also be helpful to advertisers to pull their adverts to draw closely the emotions of the viewers.

Michel Wedel, studying consumer science at the University of Maryland in College Park states that automated emotion analysis systems seems to be promising enabling advertisers to cut down an ad, to find out what exactly works and what does not. He adds that it is particularly unobtrusive and does not depend on introspection or recollection.

To do the research through the viewer’s home webcams is an added advantage though it would not be fool-proof. People could be eating a sandwich or turning at the computer or turning their head and so unable to classify their emotions consistently.

Making Liquid Fuels From Sun And Air

Liquid Fuel for Internal Combustion Engine – Inefficient

Liquid fuel for internal combustion engines is inefficient due to various explosions leading to kinetic work to be done as well as loads of heat together with various other reasons. With the same quantity of energy put in an electric motor and an internal combustion motor, it could produce more usable work for the earlier than the later.

 Moreover, electric motors tend to operate at the same efficiencies over a range of speeds where internal combustion motors need more messing around to alter the speed, besides the torque. Torque is probably at the core of coolness for several vehicles enthusiasts.If one could get the hot car or a motorcycle to go from zero to fast within a second or two, it is considered to be cool even if it tends to have no day to day application.

An electric motor has that potential and internal combustion motor need to be a super motor to perform well. Besides, liquid fuels tend to spill and smell bad and there could be chances of explosion. Electricity on the other hand has its own limitation. We would need to change most of the moving things, in the long run, like vehicles, planes etc. to electric, though fuel would still remain to be important to certain extent.

Liquid Fuel in Flying Machines

Mission critical backup generations which are not needed much but are life or death,are apparently run best on liquid fuels stored long term such as the one at the South Pole research station or in any hospital. We would eventually see electric airplanes though for long time we would apparently have to put liquid fuel in flying machines.

A present issue of Science has a write-up on recent research on machine that takes sunlight, CO2 from the atmosphere and some water producing burnable liquid. The write-up conveys about several alternative research projects which have approached this issue with various levels of success that is very early research though promising.

The job tends to boil down to run combustion in reverse, inserting energy from the sun or other renewable into chemical bonds. According to John Keith, chemist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania states that `it is a challenging issue since it is always an uphill battle’. It is what plants tend to do in making sugars they require to grow.

Methanol – Converted to Variation of Products

However, plants only convert around 1% of the energy into chemical energy and to power the industrial society, researchers need to do much better. Keith compares the challenge to putting a man on the moon. The simple method tends to be almost the same in all cases. One could take CO2 molecule and change it to CO by knocking off one Oxygen atom and then combing the CO with H2 to get syngas that can be changed to methanol.

Methanol is a type of alcohol which can be converted into a variation of products. Same process in the widespread use utilises fossil methane as a base molecule rather than atmospheric CO2. A paper is to be published in Advanced Science informing the process which utilises CO and H2 together with photovoltaic generated electricity.

This focuses on a band of sunlight on to a semiconductor panel converting 38% of the incoming energy into electricity at a high voltage. The electricity is shifted to electrodes in two electrochemical cells. One tends to split water molecules while the other splits CO2. Most of the remaining energy in the sunlight is trapped as heat and utilised to preheat the two cells to hundreds of degree, which helps to lower the amount of electricity essential to split water and CO2 molecules by 25%.

Unhackable Kernel could Keep All Computers Safe from Cyberattack

Unhackable Operating Systems – Kernel

An autonomous helicopter gunship which seems to be flying over a military base in Arizona suddenly tends to lose radio contact. This is due to hackers taking control of an on-board computer. New Scientist can reveal that US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – DARPA utilised a similar scenario in a drill to test the cybersecurity of an unscrewed Boeing Little Bird helicopter.

Inspite of the hackers having unbound access to the computer, and making great attempts to disable the helicopter, crashing the computer, they were unable to disrupt the critical system. DARPA which is focusing in developing an unhackable drone by 2018 as a part of its High Assurance Cyber Military System – HACMS programme, the drill seemed to be successful.

It is said that the software which had kept the helicopter’s computer secure was at the core of its operating system and could be the most appropriate thing what could make everything from pacemakers, insulin pumps, power stations, cars immune to hacking.

Gernot Heiser from the newly formed Australian national research agency, Data61 had commented that his hope was that in 10 years, anything which could be security critical would be running on the system or some other one built on the principles established. One of the predecessors had developed the crucial component of the unhackable operating systems – its kernel.

Central Staple of the Operating System of the Computer

The kernel is said to be the central staple of the operating system of the computer. If the hackers tend to gain access to it, for instance, they could perform actions which could be meant to be prohibited such as turning a mobile phone into a signal jammer. Heiser’s team last year had proved mathematically that their kernel is unhackable.

The kernel, known as seL4, has some highly secured properties and can do only do what it is developed to do. Its code cannot be altered without permission and its memory together with the data transfers cannot be read without permission. Earlier version of it was known as OKL4 which is now on millions of smartphones. Heiser has informed that the two features support seL4’s security and one of it is a new way of isolating data within the kernel.

 However, the main development was making the code proficient of being checked mathematically. The other kernels may tend to have these properties though it would be impossible to know precisely without mathematical proof according to Heiser.

seL4 – Keep the Systems Separate

Two of the hackers in the month of July had played a prank by accessing remotely the computer of a Chrysler Jeep, making it stop abruptly on a highway and then crash it into a ditch. The consequences were that the company recalled 1.4 million vehicles.

The question that arises is – could seL4 prevent such an incident in the future?Heiser informs that one cannot stop hackers from gaining access to things like a car’s entertainment system, if it communicates through Wi-Fi. Hackers often tend to use non critical systems as a springboard to critical areas such as steering as in the case of the Jeep prank.

However, the seL4 kernel could keep the systems separate. According to Heiser,there are attempts occurring to roll this out to cars in order to protect them. It seems a big deal for cybersecurity according to Iman Shames from the University of Melbourne in Australia who states that there are ways to attack hardware even if the software is secure. Hackers could be capable of tricking the sensors of a device or jam incoming communication or any other signal which could be quite overwhelming.

Microsoft has Developed Its Own Linux

Microsoft’s Own Linux Distribution

Microsoft has created its own Linux distribution with Azure running its networking. Redmond has revealed that it has built something known as Azure Cloud Switch – ACS, defining it as a cross platform modular operating system for data centre networking.

This is built on Linux and the foray in building their own software to run network devices like switches.It is supposed to make it easy for the IT pros in managing their networking infrastructure over various types of hardware. It is especially important while running a bunch of networks across a group of data centres at cloud computing scales.

The important element is that Microsoft has envisaged a problem and decided to create Linux, as the best option to fix it. ACS has also permitted Microsoft to share the software stack across hardware from various switch vendors which is done through the Switch Abstraction Interface – SAI specification.

 This is the first open standard C API in programming network switching ASICs of the Open Compute Project – OCP.Redmond’s main architect from Azure Networking, Kamala Subramaniam has written that `at Microsoft, they are of the belief that there are several excellent switch hardware platforms available in the market, together with healthy competition among several vendors driving innovation, increases in speed together with reduction in costs.

Challenges – Integrating Totally Different Software

However, what the cloud and enterprise networks found challenging was that it is integrating totally different software operating on each of the different kind of switch in a cloud-wide network management platform. One would prefer all the benefits of the features implemented and the bugs fixed to stay on even as one goes with the tide of updated switch hardware innovation.

The software-defined networking – SDN is a fine idea. However, it seemed that Redmond did not find the SDN code to accommodate its particular needs and so it required to build new systems based on what the other industry were using and the experience includes Linux and not Windows as the path to SDN.

 It states ACS…. focuses on feature development based on Microsoft priorities and enable to debug, fix and test software bugs much quicker. Moreover it also enables the flexibility to scale down the software and create features which are essential for their datacentre as well as their networking needs.

ACS – Designed to Utilise Switch Abstraction Interface

ACS has been designed to utilise Switch Abstraction Interface, an OpenCompute attempt which provides an API for programming ASICs internal network devices. Microsoft’s post exposing ACS states a fair amount about its features, though it does not clarify the association between Microsoft and Linux. Probably the complexity of theswitching ecosystem of the world could be the reason.

 Redmond has commented that it has demonstrated ACS across with `four ASIC vendors namely Mellanox, Broadcom, Cavium and the Barefoot software switch, six implementation of SAI – Broadcom, Dell, Mellanox, Cavium, Barefoot and Metaswitch with three applications stacks – Microsoft, Dell and Metaswitch.

Subramaniam ends his post by conveying that they were talking about ACS publicly as they were of the belief that this approach of disaggregating the switch software from the switch hardware would tend to continue as a growing trend in the networking industry and that they would like to contribute their insights as well as experiences to the journey starting from here.

Top Gadgets and Accessories for Hardware and Data Security

Encrypted Hard Drives to NFC Blockers

Hardware security solutions could help in preventing access to data and tends to offer some strong protection against tampering as well as unauthorized access on the devices. In order to securing data and physical items, one could consider investing in an encrypted NFC hard drives.Encrypted hard drives to NFC blockers have various options of protecting yourself and your data. The following gadgets and accessories could be helpful to the users according to their requirements:

Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC encrypted storage

Encrypted drives such as the Buffalo’s MiniStation Extreme NFC encrypted storage HD utilises NFC technology to prevent unauthorized access to information that could be stored on the device. User would find it difficult to unlock and access information from external smart card, removing the requirement for a password which could be tampered. An added benefit of the storage device is the military grade shock, dust and water protection which tends to protect the data from getting corrupted or lost in the event of it being dropped. One could get hold of a 1TB option for $129.99 or a 2TB drivefor $199.99.

iStorage datAshur Pro USB 3.0 secure flash drive

Should the need of something secure though smaller be essential, iStorage’s datAshur Pro USB 3.0 secure flash drive is the choice. Focused for business and government users, the flash drive includes FIPS 140-2 level 3, CESG CPA Foundation Grade together with NLNCSA level 2 accreditation together with 256-bit hardware encryption, a read only protect mode. A brute force hack detection tool is also included which tends to aid in keeping the data secure in case of theft or loss. The range of datAshur Pro is available from £69 to £129 in 8, 16, 32 and 64 GB models.

3M mobile device privacy filters

These are available for smaller mobile devices and laptops and are a sure way in stopping users from snooping on your phones when one could be using their devices. The anti-glare, transparent screen is placed across the display which tends to reduce the visibility and stops anyone from viewing at an angle. The right size depending on the dimension and brand with varying prices could be obtained accordingly.

Laptop Lock

One could consider investing in a simple laptop lock for a simple way of protecting the device and the data. Ruban’s laptops lock and cable system is available at $9.90 which is complete with a four digit lock that can swiftly attach the PC to a table when left for a moment. Though being away from the desk for a short while could mean that you come back to an empty surface, this simple lock could prevent a lot.

The Wocket smart wallet

A cause for worry for consumers is theft or loss of their credit cards. The Wocket smart wallet helps to store securely these cards together with permitting a one-time uses of various credit cards through a single physical card that has been provided by the company. This helps in enabling you to replace all the cards with a single one. To use the physical card one could swipe the credit or loyalty cards, get the verification of the identity through a PIN code and biometrics and thereafter Wocket utilises a wireless connection to pair with a payment provider. Chip and PIN does not support this system. One could store up to 10,000 cards together with other data inclusive of passwords.

Mobile device PIN codes, biometric scanners

This seems to be an easy to setup option in protecting the device and does not cost much, sadly often overlooked. By taking time in order to set up a digital PIN code password or a pattern on mobile device or to take advantage of biometric fingerprint readers, could help in stopping your personal data going into wrong hands in the event of theft or loss.

Yubico YubiKey Neo

These ranges of items are keys that tend to secure application. The keys which are adequately small to fit on the keychain tends to plug into devices to secure apps and services inclusive of remote access VPNs, password managers, online logins like Gmail and open source and enterprise solutions. The YubiKey backs the USB and contactless protocols, one-time passwords, OpenPGP and PIB. They can also be configured for utilisation with the Universal 2nd Factor –U2F protocol. YubiKey NEO or NEO is available for $50.

Silent Pocket RFID blocker

With the combination of fashion together with the post Snowden flow in privacy trimmings, Silent Pocket’s v2 range come with smooth leather wallets, briefcases as well as bags comprising of flat magnetic seal for the prevention of RFID, cellular, indicators getting through from Wi-Fi, GPS, NFC and Bluetooth. By averting these signals from getting to your cards, users could help in the prevention identity and credit card theft together with device tracking, staying off the grid in the process. The v2 range can be pre-ordered and is available in the price range from $16.95 to $675