Lifeboat Foundation

This kit by Royal College of Art graduate Heeju Kim uses sweets to recreate the tongue-tying experience of living with autism. Kim created three tools and a mobile application as part of the project, which is titled An Empathy Bridge for Autism.

A set of six awkwardly shaped lollipops and candies impede tongue movement in various ways. They make it hard for users to hold a conversation, conveying how unclear pronunciation has an impact on autistic individuals.

An augmented-reality headset is worn over the eyes and connects to a smartphone to alter the user’s perception of what’s in front of them. It restricts the view of their periphery, gives them double vision or obscures their focus with a patch of black.

Continue reading “Empathy kit to help users better understand autism” »

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore published a remarkably prescient paper which observed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit was doubling every two years and predicted that this pace would lead to computers becoming embedded in homes, cars and communication systems.

That simple idea, known today as Moore’s Law, has helped power the digital revolution. As computing performance has become exponentially cheaper and more robust, we have been able to do a lot more with it. Even a basic smartphone today is more powerful than the supercomputers of past generations.

Yet the law has been fraying for years and experts predict that it will soon reach its limits. However, I spoke to Bernie Meyerson, IBM’s Chief Innovation Officer, and he feels strongly that the end of Moore’s Law doesn’t mean the end of progress. Not by a long shot. What we’ll see though is a shift in emphasis from the microchip to the system as a whole.

Continue reading “Moore’s Law Will Soon End, but Progress Doesn’t Have to” »

In Brief

• The Taiwanese company that manufactures Apple’s iPhone has announced a three-part plan to fully automate its factories, with hopes to achieve 30% automation by 2020.
• The move could put as many as a million people out of work, another example of automation’s major implications for the global workforce.

Foxconn Electronics, the Taiwanese manufacturing company behind some of the biggest electronic brands’ devices, including Apple’s iPhone, has announced that it will ramp up automation processes at its Chinese factories. The goal is to eventually achieve full automation.

In an article published in Digitimes, General Manager Dai Jia-peng of Foxconn’s Automation Technology Development Committee explains that the process will unfold in three phases.

Continue reading “Apple Manufacturer Foxconn to Fully Replace Humans With Robots” »

Apple’s first paper on artificial intelligence, published Dec. 22 on arXiv (open access), describes a method for improving the ability of a deep neural network to recognize images.

To train neural networks to recognize images, AI researchers have typically labeled (identified or described) each image in a dataset. For example, last year, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers developed a deep-learning method to recognize images taken at regular intervals on a person’s wearable smartphone camera.

Continue reading “Apple’s first AI paper focuses on creating ‘superrealistic’ image recognition” »

Now you can turn your smartphone into an eye doctor.

Well before the family came in to the Batson Children’s Specialty Clinic in Jackson, Mississippi, they knew something was wrong. Their child was born with multiple birth defects, and didn’t look like any of its kin. A couple of tests for genetic syndromes came back negative, but Omar Abdul-Rahman, Chief of Medical Genetics at the University of Mississippi, had a strong hunch that the child had Mowat-Wilson syndrome, a rare disease associated with challenging life-long symptoms like speech impediments and seizures.

So he pulled out one of his most prized physicians’ tools: his cell phone.

Using an app called Face2Gene, Abdul-Rahman snapped a quick photo of the child’s face. Within a matter of seconds, the app generated a list of potential diagnoses — and corroborated his hunch. “Sure enough, Mowat-Wilson syndrome came up on the list,” Abdul-Rahman recalls.

Continue reading “How machine learning Is revolutionizing the diagnosis of rare diseases” »

A new smartphone add-on has been demonstrated to detect cancer with 99% accuracy in the lab. The breakthrough could have significant implications for diagnostic capabilities in remote areas or when limited medical services are available.

Very cool; I do look forward to see where we land in the next 5 years on mobile imaging systems.

Years ago I remember developing software for a mobile blood gas analyzer to help researchers and doctors in some of the world’s most remote locations. And, the technology then did improve survival rates for so many. And, I see advances like this one doing so much for many who do not have access or the luxury of centralize labs, or hospitals, etc.

Continue reading “Now You Can Make Movies of Living Cells With Your Smartphone!” »

CTO Clive Brown announces new Oxford Nanopore sequencing and library prep devices during his keynote address to the company’s user group conference

Stop the presses! Not something we call on a regular bases at FLG towers because, well, our work is largely digital. But when the latest news from Oxford Nanopore landed on our desks this afternoon, this old print journalism adage felt rather apt.