Lifeboat Foundation

“We have developed a hydrogel based rapid E. coli detection system that will turn red when E. coli is present,” says Professor Sushanta Mitra, Lassonde School of Engineering. “It will detect the bacteria right at the water source before people start drinking contaminated water.”

The new technology has cut down the time taken to detect E. coli from a few days to just a couple of hours. It is also an inexpensive way to test drinking water (C$3 per test estimated), which is a boon for many developing countries, as much as it is for remote areas of Canada’s North.

“This is a significant improvement over the earlier version of the device, the Mobile Water Kit, that required more steps, handling of liquid chemicals and so on,” says Mitra, Associate Vice-President of Research at York U. “The entire system is developed using a readily available plunger-tube assembly. It’s so user-friendly that even an untrained person can do the test using this kit.”

Visit Singularity Hub for the latest from the frontiers of manufacturing and technology as we bring you coverage of Singularity University’s Exponential Manufacturing conference. Watch all the talks from the first day here and second day here.

The software startup launching out of a garage or a dorm room is now the stuff of legend. We can all name the stories of people who got together in a garage with a few computers and ended up disrupting massive, established corporations — or creating something the world never even knew it wanted.

Continue reading “The Personal Factory Is Here—and It Will Bring a Wild New Era of Invention” »

If you’ve ever seen a “recommended item” on eBay or Amazon that was just what you were looking for (or maybe didn’t know you were looking for), it’s likely the suggestion was powered by a recommendation engine. In a recent interview, Co-founder of machine learning startup Delvv, Inc., Raefer Gabriel, said these applications for recommendation engines and collaborative filtering algorithms are just the beginning of a powerful and broad-reaching technology.

Raefer Gabriel, Delvv, Inc.

Gabriel noted that content discovery on services like Netflix, Pandora, and Spotify are most familiar to people because of the way they seem to “speak” to one’s preferences in movies, games, and music. Their relatively narrow focus of entertainment is a common thread that has made them successful as constrained domains. The challenge lies in developing recommendation engines for unbounded domains, like the internet, where there is more or less unlimited information.

“Some of the more unbounded domains, like web content, have struggled a little bit more to make good use of the technology that’s out there. Because there is so much unbounded information, it is hard to represent well, and to match well with other kinds of things people are considering,” Gabriel said. “Most of the collaborative filtering algorithms are built around some kind of matrix factorization technique and they definitely tend to work better if you bound the domain.”

Continue reading “Recommendation Engines Yielding Stronger Predictions into Our Wants and Needs” »

Hmmm;

The intelligence community’s research arm released its annual solicitation looking for the most innovative ideas the private sector has to offer.

I find this amusing because much of the top US AI talent has worked for many decades in the National Labs and not always in academia. National labs often is a mix of top scientists, engineers as well as academia; not academia only. Granted universities do incubations such a GA Tech, VA Tech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, etc.; however, the bulk of AI and other patented innovations truly have come out of the national labs such as X10, Los Alamos, Argonne, over the years.

The high demand for AI talents at giant corporations This means the academe is directly affected because their smartest AI experts are rapidly transferring to the corporate world and leaving the academe.

AR working ; I cannot wait to see what we do with AR in many of the other enterprise apps.

Augmented reality is transforming field maintenance. With DAQRI Smart Helmet™, workers get real-time visual instructions, equipment diagnostics, and operational data, turning every user into a maintenance expert.

By combining DAQRI’s innovative design with Intel’s powerful technology, DAQRI Smart Helmet helps workers be more productive and less error-prone. As an example of how powerful augmented reality can be, Kazakhstan Seamless Pipe (KSP Steel) used the helmet to achieve a 40% increase in worker productivity and a 50% reduction in factory downtime.

Continue reading “Augmented Reality Transforms Worker Safety and Efficiency” »

New particle found can re-write Physics.

It could be nothing at all. Or it could be a breakthrough.

New engine for SpaceX to take them to Mars in 2018.

Ars takes a closer look at SpaceX’s innovative and essential engine.

I agree. Look at Australia or Canada as well as Israel or other companies rising up across Asia. In the next few years, Australia, China, and Israel will be key areas that folks should pay attention to as part of the “vNext Tech Valley” standard. Granted Silicon Valley will still be a leader; however, these other areas will be closing that gap.

Tech.eu contributor Jennifer Baker caught up with Ken Gabriel at the EIT Innovation Forum to talk about the difference between EU and US startups.