Lifeboat Foundation

Ask a member of Facebook’s growth team what feature played the biggest role in getting the company to a billion daily users, and they’ll likely tell you it was photos. The endless stream of pictures, which users have been able to upload since 2005, a year after Facebook’s launch, makes the social network irresistible to a global audience. It’s difficult to imagine Facebook without photos. Yet for millions of blind and visually impaired people, that’s been the reality for over a decade.

Not anymore. Today Facebook will begin automatically describing the content of photos to blind and visually impaired users. Called “automatic alternative text,” the feature was created by Facebook’s 5-year-old accessibility team. Led by Jeff Wieland, a former user researcher in Facebook’s product group, the team previously built closed captioning for videos and implemented an option to increase the default font size on Facebook for iOS, a feature 10 percent of Facebook users take advantage of.

Automatic alt text, which is coming to iOS today and later to Android and the web, recognizes objects in photos using machine learning. Machine learning helps to build artificial intelligences by using algorithms to make predictions. If you show a piece of software enough pictures of a dog, for example, in time it will be able to identify a dog in a photograph. Automatic alt text identifies things in Facebook photos, then uses the iPhone’s VoiceOver feature to read descriptions of the photos out loud to users. While still in its early stages, the technology can reliably identify concepts in categories including transportation (“car,” “boat,” “airplane”), nature (“snow,” “ocean,” “sunset”), sports (“basketball court”), and food (“sushi”). The technology can also describe people (“baby,” “smiling,” beard”), and identify a selfie.

Continue reading “Facebook begins using artificial intelligence to describe photos to blind users” »

My new article from Vice Motherboard on Direct Digital Democracy and a new branch of government:

When everyone has a mobile phone, why not use them to vote?

This $99 device turns your phone into a 3D printer.

China is like the Wild West of smartphones: everyone seems to be doing whatever they please with no regards to the generally accepted rules.

And here is Chinese super-unknown Gionee, a company that is so obscure it might not be recognized even in Asia, but maybe this is the reason why Gionee is not afraid to experiment with some wild phones.

DARPA’s new “Spectrum Collaboration Challenge” with a $2million prize for who can motivate a machine learning approach to dynamically sharing the RF Spectrum.

WASHINGTON, March 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — On March 23rd, 2016 DARPA announced its next Grand Challenge at the International Wireless Conference Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Program Manager, Paul Tilghman of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), made the announcement to industry leaders following the conferences Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Summit. The challenge will motivate a machine learning approach to dynamically sharing the RF Spectrum and has been named the “Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.” A top prize of $2million dollars has been announced.

While mostly transparent to the typical cell phone or Wi-Fi user, the problem of spectrum congestion has been a long standing issue for both the commercial sector and Department of Defense. The insatiable appetite for wireless connectivity over the last 30 years has grown at such a hurried pace that within the RF community the term spectrum scarcity has been coined. RF bandwidth, the number of frequencies available to communicate information over, is a relatively fixed resource, and advanced communication systems like LTE and military communications systems consume a lot of it. As spectrum planners prepare for the next big wave of connected devices, dubbed the Internet of Things, they wonder where they will find the spectrum bandwidth they need to support these billions of new devices. Equally challenging, is the military’s desire to connect every soldier on the battlefield, while using these very same frequencies.

Continue reading “DARPA Announces Next Grand Challenge — Spectrum Collaboration Challenge” »

Aipoly helps the blind and visually impaired see the world through their smartphone.

Clarius Mobile Health, a firm based outside of Vancouver, Canada, is unveiling a wireless ultrasound transducer that uses your Android or Apple iPhone as the display and control system. There aren’t many details provided by Clarius about the product, but the company expects these ultrasounds to be used for procedures such as nerve blocks and for helping to deliver needle injections. The device has yet to receive clearance from the world’s regulatory bodies.

Check out the preview video for the Clarius mobile ultrasound:

Continue reading “Clarius Introduces Wireless Ultrasound Transducer for Your Smartphone” »

Read more

And Steve Jobs was not yet back at Apple when he gave a remarkably prescient interview to Wired’s website the same year. Although the iMac, iPod, and iPhone were still years away, and Jobs was working at NeXT, he clearly saw where the computing industry was headed.

And although his later work at Apple clearly influenced the way things turned out, he still offered a slew of predictions that are shockingly accurate today.

Here’s what Jobs got right:

Continue reading “Steve Jobs gave an interview in 1996 with a bunch of predictions about the future — it turns out he nailed it” »