Lifeboat Foundation

Today, countless electronic devices have touchscreens, including smart phones, tablets and smart home appliances. Touchscreen interfaces have become some of the most common means for users to communicate with and browse through their devices.

With this in mind, a research group at imec in Belgium has recently carried out a study exploring the potential of touchscreen interfaces for enabling the simple transfer of data to and from devices connected to the internet. In a paper published in Nature Electronics, the team showed that commercial touchscreens can be used as reader interfaces for capacitive coupled data transfer using a 12-bit, thin-film identification tag powered by a battery or photovoltaic cell.

“Our field of expertise is flexible electronics for IoT and Internet of Everything applications,” Kris Myny, principal scientist at imec and one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “In this field, we look into thin-film circuits, i.e. flexible RFID tags that can be embedded in objects and communicate to RFID and/or NFC readers. Based on this, our next step was to investigate whether we could expand the number of readers.”

The film business used to run on hunches. Now, data analytics is far more effective than humans at predicting hits and eliminating flops. Is this a brave new world – or the death knell of creativity?

Cargo’s in-car vending machines sputtered out and now the Uber partner is turning ride-share drivers’ cars into mobile ads.

The laws of physics stay the same no matter one’s perspective. Now this idea is allowing computers to detect features in curved and higher-dimensional space.

A team of researchers – including the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching – have gained astounding insights into the galactic centre: The astronomers have spotted gaseous clouds which are spinning around the assumed black hole at the heart of the Milky Way at a speed of around 30 percent of the speed of light. The gas is moving in a circular orbit outside the innermost stable path and can be identified through radiation bursts in the infrared range. This discovery was made possible by the Gravity Instrument, which combines the light of all four eight-metre mirrors of the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Thanks to this technology, which is called interferometry, Gravity generates the power of a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of 130 metres.

This unusually compact object sits right in the middle of the Milky Way and generates radio emissions: Astronomers call it Sagittarius A*. It is highly probable that this is a black hole with the mass of approx. four million suns. But this is by no means certain, and scientists are always devising new tests to support this thesis. Researchers have now used the Gravity Instrument to take a close look at the edges of the alleged black hole.

According to this theory, the electrons in the gas approaching the event horizon should speed up and therefore increase in brightness. The region of only a few light hours around the black hole is very chaotic, in a similar way to thunderstorms on Earth or radiation bursts on the Sun. Magnetic fields also play a part here, because the gas conducts electricity making it a plasma. The latter should ultimately show up as a flickering “hot spot” circling the black hole on the final stable path.

Recently published an article on Deep Learning.

Examining the visual acuity of children who are younger than three years old is important for the early discovery of abnormal visual development, potential ophthalmic diseases, and neurological disease.

If the visual abnormal development is not diagnosed in time, later development will be affected, but performing visual examination in children is challenging due to their lack of understanding of instructions. Evaluating the visual acuity of children remains difficult since many children are unable to effectively express their understanding, especially with respect to directions (i.e., up, down, left and right). In addition, it is difficult for children to concentrate for a long time during the vision examination. The Teller visual acuity (TVA) card can be used to evaluate the visual acuity of children, but not all the operations are recorded and can be reviewed.

Continue reading “A human-in-the-loop deep learning paradigm for synergic visual evaluation in children | Article” »

Faced with mountains of image and audio data, researchers are turning to artificial intelligence to answer pressing ecological questions.

The sneaky, hungry invasives have been messing with reef ecosystems for decades—but Florida says, no more!

Astronomers have discovered a mysterious new class of objects at the heart of the Milky Way, unlike anything else found previously in our galaxy. The objects “look like gas but behave like stars,” according to senior researcher Andrea Ghez, as they start off small and compact but are stretched to a larger size when they approach the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy.

The researchers believe these objects could teach us about the evolution of stars and what happens to celestial bodies in environments of extreme gravity.

Continue reading “Astronomers Discover Stretchy Objects Unlike Anything Else in Our Galaxy” »