Devices like the Peek Portable Eye Exam Kit, CellScope's Oto Home offer both convenience and security to diagnose medical conditions at home, without requiring transporting a crying child to the doctors office. Smartphones are proving to be a huge platform for medical devices as equipment that used to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars (like an oto scope) can now be had for … [Read more...]
Apache Spark Claims 10x to 100x Faster than Hadoop MapReduce
Apache Spark is a fast and general-purpose cluster computing system that claims 10x to 100x performance improvements over Hadoop. It runs "everywhere" from standalone to EC2 and runs on Hadoop, Mesos, standalone, or in the cloud. Spark runs provides high-level APIs in Java, Scala and Python, and an optimized engine that supports general execution graphs. It also supports … [Read more...]
Pattern Recognition Lets Amputee Control Two Prosthetic Arms and Hands
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) utilized a pattern recognition in concert with a surgical process called targeted muscle reinnervation that allowed a Colorado man to control two prosthetic arms and hands. The patient had lost both arms in an electrical accident about 40 years ago. Johns Hopkins Trauma Surgeon Albert … [Read more...]
First FAA Certified Drone Crashes Seconds Into VIP Demonstration Flight
For the first time an FAA-designated representative was authorized to issue an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) certificate. "Today marks the first time that a special airworthiness certificate has been issued to any UAS applicant at any UAS test site," Glen Martin said. Official certification was made when the pilotless airplane weighing less than 8 pounds and a wingspan … [Read more...]
Project ARA – A Customizable Cellphone with an NVIDIA K1 Option
The Google Ara project noted they now have prototype modules to for both NVIDIA K1 and the Marvel PXA1928. These modules can be used to create a highlighly customizable cellphone. The project team states we can anticipate seeing these as part of the reference designs in the upcoming MDK v0.20 release. Project Ara is not an official Google product but rather a development effort … [Read more...]
Printed 3D Wrench Demonstrates New Era in Space Flight
Astronauts on the International Space Station used a zero-gravity 3D printer to produce a working socket wrench complete with ratchet action that was printed from digital plans emailed to the station by NASA mission control on Earth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qspaTf-F9BU … [Read more...]
NVIDIA 32GB Shield LTE Holiday Bundle With Lots of Games
Good Dec. 20 12:01am PST – Dec. 24 11:59pm PST only, NVIDIA is offering a 32GB Shield LTE Holiday Bundle with Half-Life Episode, Half-Life 2, and Portal plus a host of games on the NVIDIA Grid on-demand game streaming service through the end of June 2015: Astebreed Alan Wake American Nightmare Batman: Arkham Asylum Batman: Arkham City Batman: Arkham … [Read more...]
ASpIRE – IARPA Automatic Speech Recognition in Reverberant Environments Challenge
Submission deadlines are Feb. 4, 2015 (single microphone) and Feb. 19, 2015 (multiple microphone). The ASpIRE challenge asks solvers to develop innovative speech recognition systems that can be trained on conversational telephone speech, and yet work well on far-field microphone data from noisy, reverberant rooms. Participants will have the opportunity to evaluate their … [Read more...]
MIT Study Finds Computer Neural Networks Identify Visual Objects As Well As The Primate Brain
A new study from MIT neuroscientists has found that one of the latest generation of so-called “deep neural networks” matches the object recognition ability of the primate brain. This improved understanding of how the primate brain works could lead to better artificial intelligence and, someday, new ways to repair visual dysfunction, notes Charles Cadieu, a postdoc at the … [Read more...]
Oculus Buys Nimble VR and 13th Lab
Oculus acquired Nimble VR and 13th lab on Thursday. The acquisitions expand the Oculus ecosystem of technology to include the gumpack sized Nimble Sense that captures a 3D point cloud across a 110 degree field of view and the 13th lab real-time 3D reconstruction framework that is claimed to be both accurate and efficient. In addition to data gathering the Nimble Sense also … [Read more...]