Drones you can control with your mind..

At the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai last week, Emotiv, an Australian-based company were showing off one of their highly impressive innovations.

They have developed a headset which monitors your brainwaves and can be used to control electronic devices, including drones.

We have previously written about Samsung’s plans for flying screens that follow you around and are controlled through hand gestures and eye movements. This invention, however, takes things to a whole new level.

Wow! Are you telling me people can literally move objects using the power of their minds?

Yes indeed. We are literally at a point in society where you can become a poor man’s version of Professor X for just a few hundred bucks.

It’s an exciting new horizon and offers a whole range of possibilities, particularly for people with disabilities. Emotiv have designed many of their technolgies with disabled people in mind. Think for a second of the recently departed Stephen Hawking. If it were not for a sophisticated computer, he would have been severely limited in his ability to communicate. The world would never have come to know his brilliant insights on the world, life and the universe. If people’s bodies are not able to perform as they would wish them to, why not augment our brains using technology to increase our scope of possibilities?

How does it work?

First you place their headset on. Fact: wearing the headset will make you look like a bit of goober. I’d argue that’s a price well-worth paying given the incredible stuff you can do with it.

The headset is an electroencephalogram (EEG) device which picks up your brain’s electrical impulses through sensors on your scalp. It records them on a computer and translates those thought patterns into flight instructions for a small drone.

Basically – you imagine the drone lifting off the ground and voila – it does. It doesn’t seem from the videos that you have much control aside from take0ff and landing but, being honest, that’s already pretty frigging cool!

As a matter of fact – these headsets are not primarily for controlling drones. They have been developed to measure individual’s brain functions including concentration levels and stress and can be worn by users who have an interest in learning more about their brain or becoming more productive. There are apps which can show your brain

How AI Is Impacting Industries Worldwide

A common goal among companies in today’s data-driven world is to become smarter—to know where the market opportunities lie, where supply chain logjams are and where process improvements can be found. Data science has been the fuel behind this trend, and now data science is itself becoming smarter. Thanks to astonishing advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and its sub-segments machine learning and deep learning, companies are achieving new levels of efficiency in data analysis that impact their entire business. The rising tide of AI adoption across industries will drive significant growth in the next decade, with AI software revenue set to reach almost $90 billion by 2025. AI’s presence is tantalizing to data scientists and business managers alike who seek to let machines do the number crunching to make the business smarter on a holistic level.

AI on the Fast Track

A leading indicator of a market segment’s growth path can usually be found by following the money trail. Investors and venture capital (VC) firms are always looking for big growth opportunities, and they are finding one now in the AI business. Forbes recently reported that there has been a 14x increase in the number of active AI startups since 2000, and investment into these startups by VC firms has increased 6x in that period. Meanwhile, companies that both build and utilize AI applications are on a similar growth path, with jobs requiring AI skills increasing 4.5x since 2013.

IT Is a Big AI Beneficiary

It should come as no surprise that the department that deals full-time with data—namely the IT organization—is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of AI’s capabilities. A Harvard Business Review study reports that between 34 and 44 percent of global companies they surveyed are using AI to help resolve employee technical support issues (imagine a smart response system to streamline common questions and troubleshoot others), automate internal system enhancements (machine codes can be used to calculate where bottlenecks can be fixed), and ensure that employees only use technology from approved vendors (picture a smart authorization engine that keeps up with daily updates and knows vendor subsidiaries and partners).

But AI Is Cross-enterprise Too

Where else is AI finding a home? Among the most common examples of AI in the enterprise are image recognition and tagging, patient data processing, localization and mapping, predictive maintenance, predicting and thwarting security threats, and intelligent recruitment and HR management techniques. But perhaps the most active adoption is being seen in the marketing and sales operation, where intelligent use of data and the ability to learn from human interactions can produce big financial benefits. In a Statista worldwide survey, 87 percent of current AI adopters said they were using or considering using AI for sales forecasting and for improving e-mail marketing. While sales forecasting is often automated by technology to a point, it can be vastly improved with an AI agent that monitors and reacts to customer interactions and shifting market patterns. Email marketers similarly can create the sense of one-to-one marketing through more intelligent targeting and content creation for various audiences. 

The bottom line is also important. McKinsey found that companies who benefit from AI initiatives and have invested in infrastructure to support its scale achieve three to 15 percentage point higher profit margin. Healthcare, financial services, and professional services are seeing the greatest increase in their profit margins as a result of AI adoption.

Examples of Companies Taking the Lead in AI Adoption

Here are a few examples of how specific companies in various industries are leveraging AI in their businesses:

According to the McKinsey study, tech giants including Baidu and Google spent between $20B to $30B on AI in 2016, with 90 percent of this spent on R&D and deployment, and 10 percent on AI acquisitions. The current rate of AI investment is 3x the external investment growth since 2013. 

Netflix has also achieved impressive results from the AI algorithm it uses to personalize recommendations to its 100 million subscribers worldwide, improving search results and avoiding canceled subscriptions from frustrated customers who couldn’t find what they wanted (with a potential impact of $1B annually). 

Financial data specialist Bloomberg uses techniques like computer vision and natural language processing to improve the breadth of information available through their ubiquitous terminals that financial staff use to access market information. Users can use natural language in queries instead of specialized technical commands, which is analyzed and executed by AI. 

Uber has a core team providing pre-packaged machine learning algorithms 'as-a-service' to its team of mobile app developers, map experts, and autonomous driving teams. These capabilities are used to better predict traveling habits and improve maps using computer vision, and to create algorithms for its autonomous vehicles. 

And Royal Bank of Scotland recently launched a natural language processing AI bot that will answer its banking customer questions and perform simple banking tasks such as money transfers, with the goal to make digital customer support as powerful as face-to-face interaction. 

AI and machine learning are revolutionizing the way companies access and process data to become smarter and more efficient organizations. And IT and data science teams are gearing up for the immense benefits of AI in their enterprises

Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation

Change is a constant in business, and the companies that have outperformed their competitors over the years have steadily kept pace with changes in the economic landscape, technology innovation, and the latest business practices. And now that the global economy has stormed into the digital era with gusto, companies are on the cusp of reaping tremendous new benefits—thanks to their adoption of digital transformation. Digital transformation isn’t just creating one-off efficiencies in various departments. It is disrupting entire business operations that span across back-office, front-office and customer-facing processes. A full 87 percent of companies believe that digital transformation is a competitive opportunity.

Digital Transformation Creates Value

Digital tools and processes create a new foundation on which businesses can operate. They connect companies to customers, internal business units with each other, and employees with new opportunities to meet their career objectives. Digital supply networks are being built and rebuilt to improve efficiencies and create value for every business. We can already see companies benefiting from the digital transformation in multiple ways. According to the State of Digital Transformation Report from the Altimeter Group, 41 percent of companies that digitally transform customer experience increased market share, 37 percent see increased customer engagement on digital channels, 37 percent have more positive employee morale, 32 percent have greater web and mobile engagement, and 30 percent experience increased revenue. And since digital transformation touches so many areas of the business, benefits begin to snowball as the entire organization comes on board.

Customers Love It

Digital transformation impacts the customer experience in a big way. Today’s demanding consumers can easily access product and services data online, see how others are singing your praises on social media, identify solutions tailored for their business needs, and purchase and service products easily and in an affordable manner.  Improving the customer experience is one of the top three digital transformation drivers for mature businesses (along with increasing the speed of innovation and improving time to market), compared to less mature businesses being focused on cost reduction and profitability improvements. It’s all about the customer journey, and digital transformation makes it a more enjoyable ride.

Companies can use multiple digital tools and techniques to improve customer satisfaction. Big data and analytics make it easier to understand consumer behavior and target solutions accordingly, and digital marketing and digital selling teams are both keenly aware of how consumers respond to personalized content and social media-enabled customer service. Digital transformation revolutionizes the way customers interact with business and keeps them coming back for the experience.

Embrace the Edge of Technology Innovation

A new generation of smart technologies is having a tremendous influence on how companies adopt digital transformation, and they are preparing for it financially. The budget for digital transformation related technologies at the average company is expected to grow to 28 percent by 2018, up from 18 percent today. And the types of technologies involved are not only intriguing in what the do, but they are also geared to provide tangible benefits. One of Gartner’s predictions for 2018, for example, is that companies investing in the Internet of Things (IoT)-based operational sensing and cognitive-based situational awareness will see 30 percent improvements in the cycle times. With IoT, everything is connected, from consumer devices to data networks that evaluate dynamic data from the consumer edge to provide the best analysis and service in real-time.

Smart machines, artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation are also making a big splash as companies digitally transform. Analytics are routinely built into machines and devices to gauge and adapt to varying consumer needs and requests (think Echo and Siri), and intelligent automation (one that combines AI analytics with automated systems) is becoming the norm as companies seek greater efficiencies and cost-reduction tactics. In fact, according to Accenture, 92 percent of businesses say that intelligent automation will be put to wider use within their company during the next 12 months.

Electronics of the future: A new energy-efficient mechanism using the Rashba effect

Scientists have proposed new quasi-1D materials for potential spintronic applications, an upcoming technology that exploits the spin of electrons. They performed simulations to demonstrate the spin properties of these materials and explained the mechanisms behind their behavior.

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology proposed new quasi-1D materials for potential spintronic applications, an upcoming technology that exploits the spin of electrons. They performed simulations to demonstrate the spin properties of these materials and explained the mechanisms behind their behavior.

Conventional electronics is based on the movement of electrons and mainly concerns their electric charge; unfortunately, we are close to reaching the physical limits for improving electronic devices. However, electrons bear another intrinsic quantum-physical property called "spin," which can be interpreted as a type of angular momentum and can be either "up" or "down." While conventional electronic devices do not deploy the spin of the electrons that they employ, spintronics is a field of study in which the spin of the conducting electrons is crucial. Serious improvements in performance and new applications can be attained through "spin currents."

As promising as spintronics sound, researchers are still trying to find convenient ways of generating spin currents with material structures that possess electrons with desirable spin properties. The Rashba-Bychkov effect (or simply Rashba effect), which involves a splitting of spin-up and spin-down electrons due to breakings in symmetry, could potentially be exploited for this purpose. A pair of researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology, including Associate Professor Yoshihiro Gohda, have proposed a new mechanism to generate a spin current without energy loss from a series of simulations for new quasi-1D materials based on bismuth-adsorbed indium that exhibit a giant Rashba effect. "Our mechanism is suitable for spintronic applications, having an advantage that it does not require an external magnetic field to generate nondissipative spin current," explains Gohda. This advantage would simplify potential spintronic devices and would allow for further miniaturization.

The researchers conducted simulations based on these materials to demonstrate that the Rashba effect in them can be large and only requires applying a certain voltage to generate spin currents. By comparing the Rashba properties of multiple variations of these materials, they provided explanations for the observed differences in the materials' spin properties and a guide for further materials exploration.

This type of research is very important as radically new technologies are required if we intend to further improve electronic devices and go beyond their current physical limits. "Our study should be important for energy-efficient spintronic applications and stimulating further exploration of different 1D Rashba systems," concludes Gohda. From faster memories to quantum computers, the benefits of better understanding and exploiting Rashba systems will certainly have enormous implications.

Controlling neurons with light -- but without wires or batteries

Dear Friends,
        Amazing Research of 'University of Arizona College of Engineering'

University of Arizona biomedical engineering professor Philipp Gutruf is first author on the paper Fully implantable, optoelectronic systems for battery-free, multimodal operation in neuroscience research, published in Nature Electronics.

Optogenetics is a biological technique that uses light to turn specific neuron groups in the brain on or off. For example, researchers might use optogenetic stimulation to restore movement in case of paralysis or, in the future, to turn off the areas of the brain or spine that cause pain, eliminating the need for -- and the increasing dependence on -- opioids and other painkillers.

"We're making these tools to understand how different parts of the brain work," Gutruf said. "The advantage with optogenetics is that you have cell specificity: You can target specific groups of neurons and investigate their function and relation in the context of the whole brain."

In optogenetics, researchers load specific neurons with proteins called opsins, which convert light to electrical potentials that make up the function of a neuron. When a researcher shines light on an area of the brain, it activates only the opsin-loaded neurons.

The first iterations of optogenetics involved sending light to the brain through optical fibers, which meant that test subjects were physically tethered to a control station. Researchers went on to develop a battery-free technique using wireless electronics, which meant subjects could move freely.

But these devices still came with their own limitations -- they were bulky and often attached visibly outside the skull, they didn't allow for precise control of the light's frequency or intensity, and they could only stimulate one area of the brain at a time.

Taking More Control and Less Space

"With this research, we went two to three steps further," Gutruf said. "We were able to implement digital control over intensity and frequency of the light being emitted, and the devices are very miniaturized, so they can be implanted under the scalp. We can also independently stimulate multiple places in the brain of the same subject, which also wasn't possible before."

The ability to control the light's intensity is critical because it allows researchers to control exactly how much of the brain the light is affecting -- the brighter the light, the farther it will reach. In addition, controlling the light's intensity means controlling the heat generated by the light sources, and avoiding the accidental activation of neurons that are activated by heat.

The wireless, battery-free implants are powered by external oscillating magnetic fields, and, despite their advanced capabilities, are not significantly larger or heavier than past versions. In addition, a new antenna design has eliminated a problem faced by past versions of optogenetic devices, in which the strength of the signal being transmitted to the device varied depending on the angle of the brain: A subject would turn its head and the signal would weaken.

"This system has two antennas in one enclosure, which we switch the signal back and forth very rapidly so we can power the implant at any orientation," Gutruf said. "In the future, this technique could provide battery-free implants that provide uninterrupted stimulation without the need to remove or replace the device, resulting in less invasive procedures than current pacemaker or stimulation techniques."

Devices are implanted with a simple surgical procedure similar to surgeries in which humans are fitted with neurostimulators, or "brain pacemakers." They cause no adverse effects to subjects, and their functionality doesn't degrade in the body over time. This could have implications for medical devices like pacemakers, which currently need to be replaced every five to 15 years.

The paper also demonstrated that animals implanted with these devices can be safely imaged with computer tomography, or CT, and magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, which allow for advanced insights into clinically relevant parameters such as the state of bone and tissue and the placement of the device.


Posted By Ram Kamal Yadav