Lifeboat Foundation

In a major step towards creating a tricorder, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers have invented a device that allows smartphones to perform the kinds of lab-grade medical diagnostic tests that previously had to be done on large and expensive instruments.

The device, called a spectral transmission-reflectance-intensity (TRI)-Analyzer, plugs into a smartphone and is able to run tests on a patient’s blood, urine, or saliva as reliably as clinic-based instruments that cost thousands of dollars. The researchers say their TRI Analyzer costs only $550.

“Our TRI Analyzer is like the Swiss Army knife of biosensing,” said Prof. Brian Cunningham, the Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering and director of the Micro + Nanotechnology Lab at Illinois.

Continue reading “Researchers Enable Lab-Grade Medical Tests on Smartphones” »

With sufficient training on digitized writing, spoken words, images, video streams and other digital content, ML has become the basis of voice recognition, self-driving cars, and other previously only-imagined capabilities. As billions of phones, appliances, drones, traffic lights, security systems, environmental sensors, and other radio-connected devices sum into a rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT), there now is a need to apply ML to the invisible realm of radio frequency (RF) signals, according to program manager Paul Tilghman of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office. To further that cause, DARPA today announced its new Radio Frequency Machine Learning Systems (RFMLS) program. Find out more: http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-08-11a

Why are we often so wrong about how the future and future technology will reshape society and our personal lives? In this new video from the Galactic Public Archives, Futurist Gray Scott tells us why he thinks it is important to look at all aspects of the future.

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Continue reading “Futurist Gray Scott: We Can’t Ignore Our Psychological Future” »

Whether you’re killing time in line at Starbucks or scrolling through an endless meme stream on Twitter, your smartphone is trying to seduce you. Former Google employee Tristan Harris felt something needed to be done to combat tech designers’ relentless efforts to influence our behavior. Special correspondent Cat Wise talks to Harris as part of a collaboration with The Atlantic.

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When James Vlahos’ father was dying from terminal cancer, he decided to preserve as many memories as possible and code them into a chatbot (Dadbot) that could run on his cell phone.

In A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality, James Vlahos recounts his efforts to turn the story of his father’s life — as told by his 80-year-old Dad in his final months after being diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer — into what Vlahos calls a Dadbot.

Continue reading “A Son Turned His Dying Father Into An Artificial Intelligence” »

Apple has officially been granted FCC approval for an experimental license to test 5G data technology — specifically in the short-range millimeter wave spectrum in the 28GHz and 39GHz bands, as reported by DSLReports. The FCC portioned off those chunks of spectrum last summer for companies to begin testing 5G technology, so it makes sense that Apple would want to start exploring 5G, especially given that it’s a major player in the world of mobile data due to the sheer weight of the iPhone in the market.