Steven Max Patterson
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Steven Max Patterson
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Researchers find gaps in IoT security
Researchers from the University of Michigan and Stony Brook University published a paper explaining a novel approach to IoT security challenges (pdf). The researchers pose the question: “What are the new intellectual challenges in the science of security when we talk about the Internet of Things, and what problems can we solve using currently known security techniques?” This research approach is very accessible because it uses existing categories and concepts by comparing security methods developed for smartphones, PCs and the cloud to identify the gaps and challenges to IoT security. The IoT stack is defined with the familiar layers:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Researchers find gaps in IoT security
Researchers from the University of Michigan and Stony Brook University published a paper explaining a novel approach to IoT security challenges (pdf). The researchers pose the question: “What are the new intellectual challenges in the science of security when we talk about the Internet of Things, and what problems can we solve using currently known security techniques?” This research approach is very accessible because it uses existing categories and concepts by comparing security methods developed for smartphones, PCs and the cloud to identify the gaps and challenges to IoT security. The IoT stack is defined with the familiar layers:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Top 20 AI experts you should follow on Twitter
As artificial intelligence (AI) increases in importance in new technology and applications, several people have risen to the top of the field—achieving expert-level status and providing insight into breakthroughs, new applications and ideas about the technology.The people on this list are an interesting collage with very different backgrounds. Some are traditional AI Ph.D. scholars who have slogged through research long before AI’s recent resurgence. Others are cross-over experts from one advanced science who saw the benefit of AI in their research and became experts in a second field. + Also on Network World: What AI can and cannot do today + The short summaries of each persons’ biographical information add depth to the tweets. The biographical information was extracted from public sources, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, university websites, Crunchbase and business websites. Given the suspicions about the authenticity of news stories, the biographical information about each person adds a level of diligence to choose if the reader finds personal value in following one of them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google’s AI shifts from the next platform to its next products
Last October, when Google Home was announced, Google CEO Sundar Pichai christened AI as the next platform. Yesterday, AI became a Google product that could become as transformative and as large and potentially pervasive as Google Search.Google’s grand bargain with its users will not change: indispensable free apps in return for users’ data. Easier to use conversational interfaces such as Google Home and Google Assistant built with AI could be the next free indispensable Google app purchased with the users’ information as the currency. It is a virtuous cycle. User interaction with indispensable apps like Google Search, Translate and Assistant that use AI, creates more data to create new indispensable AI systems. Pichai confirmed this during the Google I/O keynote when he said:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Tech majority disagrees with AI warnings from Hawkings, Musk and Gates
Tech star personalities Stephen Hawkings, Elon Musk and Bill Gates warned the public about artificial intelligence (AI). The tech-oriented public and AI experts disagree, though, according to a recent research paper, “Tweeting AI: Perceptions of AI-Tweeters (AIT) vs Expert AI-Tweeters (EAIT),” (pdf) published by researchers at the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering at the University of Arizona. One of the insights from this work, extracted from the tweets analyzed:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google I/O 2017: AI, IoT and VR/AR predictions
Google I/O 2017, Google’s other annual developer conference, begins next week (May 17). It is the other developer conference because Google filled the Moscone Center with 10,000 enterprise cloud developers at its Cloud Next conference last March. Compared that to the 7,000 attendees at Google I/O 2016. The two conferences explain two different developer audiences and Google’s cloud growth ambitions.The list of code labs at Google I/O 2017 confirms this: accessibility, ads, Android, Android devices, Google Assistant, Firebase, IoT, location & maps, machine learning & AI, Flutter, mobile web, Google Play, virtual reality. Though many developers attending I/O will attend both conferences, this is a much different schedule than Cloud Next.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Who should be on the Tech Mount Rushmore?
Tim Bajarin asked his friends to name the top contributors to the tech industry—people who should be on a Tech Mount Rushmore if one were to be built. Who is Bajarin? He is the president of Creative Strategies, an analyst, and a futurist located in Silicon Valley where he has followed technology for almost four decades.People such as financial analyst Mark Stahlman, long-time tech editor Joel Dreyfuss, and investor Roger McNamee—all with almost the same four decades of experience covering the tech industry in their separate fields—cast their votes. The 30 or 40 individuals that contributed the nominations are all experienced people in the tech sector, though fairly heavily weighted towards digital technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Star Wars Holochess can become a reality thanks to Vuforia and Tango
Over 25 percent of the 500 companies surveyed by IDC are testing augmented reality (AR) prototypes. Much of this interest, however, is stuck in the prototype stage because most hardware platforms are prototypes and many of the tools needed to build the killer app to move into production are still under development.Vuforia adds an important piece to the AR toolchain puzzle, though, with its announcement today of Smart Terrain for Google’s Tango tablet.Smart Terrain, announced in conjunction with Google and Unity3D during the opening keynote at the Vision VR/ AR Summit, builds on two mature components of AR: Vuforia’s early experience solving a very specific AR development problem and Google Tango, which looks like the first AR platform ready to emerge from prototype status and become a mainstream platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google focuses on a future of even better mobile cameras
Smartphone cameras are about to get even better.Peyman Milanfar, a Google software engineer who had worked in the computational photography group, posted a lengthy analysis about using a smartphone camera to shoot nighttime photos with the same quality of an expensive DSLR.Milanfar’s post chronicles his quest for high-quality nighttime images taken with a smartphone. DSLR cameras do well in this application, but smartphone cameras struggle. A DSLR can take good quality photos at night because it has a very large sensor that collects more light. The Nikon D500 DSLR boasts a 20.9 million pixel sensor with a pixel size of 4.2µm. The D500 sensor is enormous compared to the top ranked Google Pixel phone’s sensor with 12.3 million pixels that are 1.55µm. It also has a large, adjustable and precise lens that captures and focuses more light from the field of view on the sensor, reducing visual distortion, compared to the Pixel’s constrained, fixed camera lens assembly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Q1 2017 smartphone shipments: Samsung rebounds, Apple goes sideways, Chinese makers roar
Following quarterly investor calls by phone makers, research firms released a storm of market reports. Most notable, IDC, a little surprised by stronger 4.3 percent market growth than forecasted, reported Samsung’s market leadership rebound.Richard Windsor of Radio Free Mobile summed up Samsung’s rebound saying: “Despite this [the Note 7 disaster], the initial signs are good, as the reviews of the device are overwhelmingly positive despite the software shortcomings and pre-orders are pointing to no lasting damage having been done.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook diversifies VR development with JavaScript framework React VR
If Rodney Dangerfield were an engineer, he would insult tool makers because inventors get respect, but tool makers none. Everyone remembers Thomas Edison for the invention of the light bulb and phonograph, but no one remembers Edison’s tool maker, Thomas Watson, except that Edison once recorded beckoning him on a phonograph cylinder.Like Watson, web development tool JavaScript gets no respect from some people who consider themselves serious developers. Nevertheless, JavaScript persists because it is the core to responsive web pages and because it is the most widely understood and used programming language in the world outside of the enterprise. It has also proved extensible, adapting to new uses faster than its critics can disparage it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook beats Apple to the punch with AR announcement
Ahead of Apple’s rumored augmented reality (AR) product announcement due at the end of the summer, Facebook has turned its attention to AR with the announcement of the Camera Effects Platform at its annual F8 developer conference yesterday.The announcement included compelling demonstrations of the technology’s potential. Mark Zuckerberg described a long-term path to cross-platform AR, which contradicts the specialized proprietary hardware decisions decided by almost every other AR company including Apple if rumors are true. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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6 reasons why Google built its own AI chip
Data centers workloads once handled by IBM mainframes and Sun servers were commoditized by Intel PC hardware, driven by cloud companies like Google. The belief held by the tech industry, including Andreessen Horowitz VC Ben Evans up until recently, that this would continue forever changed last week when Google released a detailed research paper about performance and architectural details about its Tensorflow Processing Unit (TPU).An advertising, cloud services and software company breaking from its core business raises the question: Why are Intel, Qualcomm and NVIDIA not meeting Google’s data center needs?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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4 reasons Cisco’s IoT forecast is right, and 2 why it’s wrong
Peter Corcoran, Ph.D., who describes himself as long-term IoT skeptic, published a research paper recently on arXiv.org—Third time is the charm – Why the World just might be ready for the Internet of Things this time around (pdf)—in which he speculates that this incarnation of the Internet of Things (IoT) may succeed.Technologies often fail on introduction, later to reemerge and become widely adopted. The PC, smartphone and tablet all went through at least one of these cycles.RELATED: IoT catches on in New England fishing town In the early 1990s, the Consumer Electronics Association first tried to promote CEBus, a specification for interconnecting devices in the home that supported multiple physical layers, including twisted pair, coaxial cable, powerline, wireless and even RF. CEBus was too early.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Meleap delivers augmented reality to the iPhone before Apple
Today, augmented reality (AR) could be translated to mean “prototype.” Waiting for improved software and lighter, lower-cost and faster headsets, developers build prototype applications. One example is Japanese company Meleap, which used used clever engineering to deliver light, fast and low-cost AR today—on an iPhone no less.Hado, an active game that was demonstrated at Virtual Reality Silicon Valley Expo, solves a lot of AR problems still on the horizon. Designed for a class of applications using tried and true technologies, meleap’s engineering is simple—beautifully simple.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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What AI can and cannot do today
A two-day artificial intelligence (AI) conference could overlook the opposing point of view, especially held in San Francisco—the epicenter of technology innovation and the center of over-hyped technology.But by adding Gary Marcus to the speaker roster of the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference, we got a balanced view about AI, including engaging criticism about where AI works, where it does not, and why Marcus says the direction of R&D in the AI field will not lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI is a theoretical machine intelligence that equals human intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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How Microsoft plans to address AI and machine learning challenges
Microsoft, Google and IBM face difficult challenges in winning early enterprise adopters of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Microsoft AI Research Vice President Peter Lee shed some like on how Microsoft will meet those challenges when we met at this week’s MIT Technology Review EmTech Digital conference.Lee began with the same explanation that he gave to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Nadella, a former research engineer, does not need to have technology spoon fed to him, but he does need to understand the framework used to manage the future of the vertical industries transferred to the stewardship of Microsoft’s AI group. It is a big bet, amounting to 6,000 employees or one-fourth of the company and includes leading industry businesses such as healthcare, education, automotive, finance and retail. A very big bet on the future of AI, indeed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Advanced technologies that are ready to make AR a consumer reality
Augmented reality (AR) is on the verge of entering the mainstream. Apple is preparing to introduce an AR product, not because it invented AR, but because the technology, long under investigation by academic researchers and Google is ready.Commercial prototypes Microsoft Hololens and Google Tango already have publicly demonstrated the potential of and have created enthusiasm for AR.But consumer electronics products we use every day are rarely invented and materialize right away on retails’ shelves. Often, well-understood technologies like AR, virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) have been proven in theory and built as prototypes in researchers labs but await practical applications and cheap hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Moto G5 Plus underscores why the iPhone 8 needs AR
Hands-on testing of Motorola's Moto G5 Plus drives home the point that Apple’s next-generation iPhone better have augmented reality (AR) to retain loyal customers willing to pay three times the cost of the G5 Plus.The next iPhone has to do something significantly different to maintain its premium brand position. AR and perhaps virtual reality (VR) are the only two features on the horizon that will meaningfully differentiate the iPhone 8 from the Moto G5 Plus.Moto G5 Plus features Sometimes smartphone reviews read like an oenophile waxing on about the subtleties of a fine wine. This review will not because the Moto G5 Plus designers deliver on four characteristics consumers want.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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How AR and VR can reach a billion users before 2028
We have seen it all before: This will be the year of (blank). Pick any technology—augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headsets, wearables, social networks, etc. The hype cycle starts three to five years early, and everyone—vendors, Wall Street and venture capitalists—is disappointed when last year was not the year.It is early days for VR and even earlier for AR. Sales of VR headsets were graded disappointing after the close of the Christmas season and seemingly confirmed when BestBuy closed half of its in-store Oculus demo stations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here