Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Samsung works on mind-control tablet

Samsung is experimenting with a mind-controlled tablet that it hopes will shake up the way people interact with devices.

The South Korean firm, along with US researchers, has demonstrated how people can launch an application and make selections on a Galaxy tablet by concentrating on a blinking icon.
Users need to wear a cap studded with EEG-monitoring electrodes.
Such a device would be invaluable to people with mobility issues.
Playing music Samsung's lead researcher Insoo Kim told news website MIT Technology Review that thought control was a natural transition for interacting with devices.
"Several years ago, a small keypad was the only input modality to control the phone, but nowadays the user can use voice, touch, gesture and eye movement to control and interact with mobile devices.
"Adding more input modalities will provide us with more convenient and richer ways of interacting with mobile devices."
Samsung's Galaxy S4 smartphone already allows users to control the screen using their eyes. Using "smart pause" the user can pause a video by looking away from the screen while another feature uses eye movements to scroll through content.
Accuracy The smartphone maker demonstrated a person using the mind-control system to select a music application and play and pause a classical music track.

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These experiments give us a feeling for where the technology may take us, to help with things such as locked-in syndrome”

Kevin Brown IBM senior inventor

Mr Kim said that the speed with which a user can control the tablet averaged about one selection every five seconds with an accuracy of 80% to 95%.

Researchers from Samsung's Emerging Technology Lab worked with Roozbeh Jafari, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas.
Prof Jafari is also working on a way to make EEG headsets more user-friendly. Current caps have wet contact electrodes that require liquid to be placed between the scalp and the sensor.
He plans to develop a dry version that is also less intrusive.
Gauging mood Technology companies are beginning to look at mind-controlled devices and there are already headsets on the market from firms such as NeuroSky and Emotiv that measure moods and allow users to interact with apps and games.
IBM is also experimenting with mind control headsets. Kevin Brown, a senior inventor at IBM's emerging technology lab, has done a series of experiments with Emotiv headsets.
"Everyone finds it incredibly hard work on focus on controlling devices," he said. One experiment in which he sent an email using mind control took 20 minutes.
"These things are nowhere near usable by the general population but these experiments give us a feeling for where the technology may take us, to help with things such as locked-in syndrome, for instance."
He also envisages a future where mind-control headsets are used to gauge moods - so a focus group may use it to get a sense of how a crowd is responding to a politician, for example.

How are humans going to become extinct?

Prepare to meet your maker: Will humans become extinct at our own hand?

What are the greatest global threats to humanity? Are we on the verge of our own unexpected extinction?

An international team of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute is investigating the biggest dangers.
And they argue in a research paper, Existential Risk as a Global Priority, that international policymakers must pay serious attention to the reality of species-obliterating risks.
Last year there were more academic papers published on snowboarding than human extinction.
The Swedish-born director of the institute, Nick Bostrom, says the stakes couldn't be higher. If we get it wrong, this could be humanity's final century.
Been there, survived it So what are the greatest dangers?
First the good news. Pandemics and natural disasters might cause colossal and catastrophic loss of life, but Dr Bostrom believes humanity would be likely to survive.

The femur of a dodo: An estimated 99% of all species that have existed have become extinct

This is because as a species we've already outlasted many thousands of years of disease, famine, flood, predators, persecution, earthquakes and environmental change. So the odds remain in our favour.
And in the time frame of a century, he says the risk of extinction from asteroid impacts and super-volcanic eruptions remains "extremely small".
Even the unprecedented self-inflicted losses in the 20th Century in two world wars, and the Spanish flu epidemic, failed to halt the upward rise in the global human population.
Nuclear war might cause appalling destruction, but enough individuals could survive to allow the species to continue.
If that's the feelgood reassurance out of the way, what should we really be worrying about?
Dr Bostrom believes we've entered a new kind of technological era with the capacity to threaten our future as never before. These are "threats we have no track record of surviving".
Lack of control Likening it to a dangerous weapon in the hands of a child, he says the advance of technology has overtaken our capacity to control the possible consequences.

Nick Bostrom says there is a plausible threat of extinction in the next century

Experiments in areas such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and machine intelligence are hurtling forward into the territory of the unintended and unpredictable.
Synthetic biology, where biology meets engineering, promises great medical benefits. But Dr Bostrom is concerned about unforeseen consequences in manipulating the boundaries of human biology.
Nanotechnology, working at a molecular or atomic level, could also become highly destructive if used for warfare, he argues. He has written that future governments will have a major challenge to control and restrict misuses.
There are also fears about how artificial or machine intelligence interact with the external world.
Such computer-driven "intelligence" might be a powerful tool in industry, medicine, agriculture or managing the economy.
But it also can be completely indifferent to any incidental damage.
Unintended consequences These are not abstract concepts.
Seán O'Heigeartaigh, a geneticist at the institute, draws an analogy with algorithms used in automated stock market trading.

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This is the first century in the world's history when the biggest threat is from humanity”

Lord Rees Astronomer Royal

These mathematical strings can have direct and destructive consequences for real economies and real people.

Such computer systems can "manipulate the real world", says Dr O'Heigeartaigh, who studied molecular evolution at Trinity College Dublin.
In terms of risks from biology, he worries about misguided good intentions, as experiments carry out genetic modifications, dismantling and rebuilding genetic structures.
"It's very unlikely they would want to make something harmful," he says.
But there is always the risk of an unintended sequence of events or something that becomes harmful when transferred into another environment.
"We are developing things that could go wrong in a profound way," he says.
"With any new powerful technology we should think very carefully about what we know - but it might be more important to know what we don't have certainty about."
And he says this isn't a career in scaremongering, he's motivated by the seriousness of his work. "This is one of the most important ways of making a positive difference," he says.
Chain reaction This eclectic group of researchers talk about computers able to create more and more powerful generations of computers.
It won't be that these machines suddenly develop a line in sarcasm and bad behaviour. But research fellow Daniel Dewey talks about an "intelligence explosion" where the accelerating power of computers becomes less predictable and controllable.

There are fears of unintended consequences from biological engineering

"Artificial intelligence is one of the technologies that puts more and more power into smaller and smaller packages," says Mr Dewey, a US expert in machine super-intelligence who previously worked at Google.
Along with biotechnology and nanotechnology, he says: "You can do things with these technologies, typically chain reaction-type effects, so that starting with very few resources you could undertake projects that could affect everyone in the world."
The Future of Humanity project at Oxford is part of a trend towards focusing research on such big questions. The institute was launched by the Oxford Martin School, which brings together academics from across different fields with the aim of tackling the most "pressing global challenges".
There are also ambitions at Cambridge University to investigate such threats to humanity.
Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society, is backing plans for a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
"This is the first century in the world's history when the biggest threat is from humanity," says Lord Rees.
He says that while we worry about more immediate individual risks, such as air travel or food safety, we seem to have much more difficulty recognising bigger dangers.
'Error or terror' Lord Rees also highlights concerns about synthetic biology.
"With every new technology there are upsides, but there are also risks," he says.

Geneticist Seán O'Heigeartaigh warns of the uncertain outcomes of biological experiments

The creation of new organisms for agriculture and medicine could have unforeseen ecological side-effects, he suggests.
Lord Rees raises concerns about the social fragility and lack of resilience in our technology-dependent society.
"It's a question of scale. We're in a more inter-connected world, more travel, news and rumours spread at the speed of light. Therefore the consequences of some error or terror are greater than in the past," he says.
Lord Rees, along with Cambridge philosopher Huw Price and economist Sir Partha Dasgupta and Skype founder Jaan Tallinn, wants the proposed Centre for the Study of Existential Risk to evaluate such threats.
So should we be worried about an impending doomsday?
This isn't a dystopian fiction. It's not about a cat-stroking villain below a volcano. In fact, the institute in Oxford is in university offices above a gym, where self-preservation is about a treadmill and Lycra.
Dr Bostrom says there is a real gap between the speed of technological advance and our understanding of its implications.
"We're at the level of infants in moral responsibility, but with the technological capability of adults," he says.
As such, the significance of existential risk is "not on people's radars".
But he argues that change is coming whether or not we're ready for it.
"There is a bottleneck in human history. The human condition is going to change. It could be that we end in a catastrophe or that we are transformed by taking much greater control over our biology.
"It's not science fiction, religious doctrine or a late-night conversation in the pub.
"There is no plausible moral case not to take it seriously."

Nintendo profits revived by weak yen

Super Mario is one of the best-selling game franchises of all time

Nintendo has bounced back into profit, thanks to a weaker Japanese yen.

The games maker reported an annual profit of 7.1bn yen ($72m; £47m), It suffered a loss of 43bn yen in the previous year.
But the company's sales dipped 1.9%, struggling against its rivals Sony and Microsoft, as the three battle it out in the $44bn games market.
Nintendo is behind Pokémon and Super Mario, one of the most successful ever game franchises.
The major players are also facing challenges from firms that make cheap downloadable games for smartphones and tablets
The Japanese yen has been trading at around 95 yen to the dollar in recent months, compared to around 80 a year ago.
A weak yen makes products cheaper to buyers outside Japan.
Woe is Wii? Sales of Nintendo's Wii U consoles came in at 3.45 million units, well short of the four million annual target.
The Wii U, which went on sale late last year, was the first major new game console to arrive in stores in several years.
The company said a lack of game software had caused console sales to miss the targets.
Sony is promising to launch the latest version of its Playstation console later this year and Microsoft could also be set to release an updated Xbox by the busy festive season.

Apple: Experts' views on tech firm's next big product

The iPad Mini marked the latest evolution of a product first launched in 2009

In a short time Apple has gone from Wall Street's darling to its favourite whipping boy.

The tech firm has seen its stock tumble more than 40% over the past seven months despite posting its highest ever sales and profit figures in January. Its second quarter update, due out later this Tuesday, could either restore or further erode confidence.
Part of the problem has been weak earnings from some of the firm's suppliers, coupled with a rash of "leaks" suggesting that Apple had cut component orders in the face of weaker-than-expected demand.
Chief executive Tim Cook has warned analysts that Apple's supply chain is "very complex", urging them to "question the accuracy" of rumours - but that has not stopped the speculation.
Investors' willingness to believe the worst can in part by explained by the rapid rise of Android - and in particular the popularity of Samsung's Galaxy range.

An Apple patent application filed in August 2011 fuelled speculation the firm was working on a smart-watch

Apple's defenders point out that the iPhone-maker's share of tech-hardware profits outweighs its market share, and that sales from the firm's digital stores also outperform those of rivals.
But the wider issue is that Apple's stock price had been inflated by the expectation it could repeat past successes with new categories of products, and investors have become impatient.
As popular as they have been, the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini are seen as evolution rather than revolution products. As a consequence, right or wrong, it has become fashionable to question whether Tim Cook can match the late Steve Jobs's ability to "think different".
With that in mind the BBC asked four company watchers their views about what the firm's research and development teams might be working on - a smart-watch, a major revamp of the iOS operating system, the long-rumoured Apple TV screen and the possibility of something unexpected.
Paddy Smith, Stuff magazine