Tag Archives: applications

#432181 Putting AI in Your Pocket: MIT Chip Cuts ...

Posted on February 27, 2018 by Android

Neural networks are powerful things, but they need a lot of juice. Engineers at MIT have now developed a new chip that cuts neural nets’ power consumption by up to 95 percent, potentially allowing them to run on battery-powered mobile devices.

Smartphones these days are getting truly smart, with ever more AI-powered services like digital assistants and real-time translation. But typically the neural nets crunching the data for these services are in the cloud, with data from smartphones ferried back and forth.

That’s not ideal, as it requires a lot of communication bandwidth and means potentially sensitive data is being transmitted and stored on servers outside the user’s control. But the huge amounts of energy needed to power the GPUs neural networks run on make it impractical to implement them in devices that run on limited battery power.

Engineers at MIT have now designed a chip that cuts that power consumption by up to 95 percent by dramatically reducing the need to shuttle data back and forth between a chip’s memory and processors.

Neural nets consist of thousands of interconnected artificial neurons arranged in layers. Each neuron receives input from multiple neurons in the layer below it, and if the combined input passes a certain threshold it then transmits an output to multiple neurons above it. The strength of the connection between neurons is governed by a weight, which is set during training.

This means that for every neuron, the chip has to retrieve the input data for a particular connection and the connection weight from memory, multiply them, store the result, and then repeat the process for every input. That requires a lot of data to be moved around, expending a lot of energy.

The new MIT chip does away with that, instead computing all the inputs in parallel within the memory using analog circuits. That significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be shoved around and results in major energy savings.

The approach requires the weights of the connections to be binary rather than a range of values, but previous theoretical work had suggested this wouldn’t dramatically impact accuracy, and the researchers found the chip’s results were generally within two to three percent of the conventional non-binary neural net running on a standard computer.

This isn’t the first time researchers have created chips that carry out processing in memory to reduce the power consumption of neural nets, but it’s the first time the approach has been used to run powerful convolutional neural networks popular for image-based AI applications.

“The results show impressive specifications for the energy-efficient implementation of convolution operations with memory arrays,” Dario Gil, vice president of artificial intelligence at IBM, said in a statement.

“It certainly will open the possibility to employ more complex convolutional neural networks for image and video classifications in IoT [the internet of things] in the future.”

It’s not just research groups working on this, though. The desire to get AI smarts into devices like smartphones, household appliances, and all kinds of IoT devices is driving the who’s who of Silicon Valley to pile into low-power AI chips.

Apple has already integrated its Neural Engine into the iPhone X to power things like its facial recognition technology, and Amazon is rumored to be developing its own custom AI chips for the next generation of its Echo digital assistant.

The big chip companies are also increasingly pivoting towards supporting advanced capabilities like machine learning, which has forced them to make their devices ever more energy-efficient. Earlier this year ARM unveiled two new chips: the Arm Machine Learning processor, aimed at general AI tasks from translation to facial recognition, and the Arm Object Detection processor for detecting things like faces in images.

Qualcomm’s latest mobile chip, the Snapdragon 845, features a GPU and is heavily focused on AI. The company has also released the Snapdragon 820E, which is aimed at drones, robots, and industrial devices.

Going a step further, IBM and Intel are developing neuromorphic chips whose architectures are inspired by the human brain and its incredible energy efficiency. That could theoretically allow IBM’s TrueNorth and Intel’s Loihi to run powerful machine learning on a fraction of the power of conventional chips, though they are both still highly experimental at this stage.

Getting these chips to run neural nets as powerful as those found in cloud services without burning through batteries too quickly will be a big challenge. But at the current pace of innovation, it doesn’t look like it will be too long before you’ll be packing some serious AI power in your pocket.

Image Credit: Blue Planet Studio / Shutterstock.com Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#432036 The Power to Upgrade Our Own Biology Is ...

Posted on February 15, 2018 by Android

Upgrading our biology may sound like science fiction, but attempts to improve humanity actually date back thousands of years. Every day, we enhance ourselves through seemingly mundane activities such as exercising, meditating, or consuming performance-enhancing drugs, such as caffeine or adderall. However, the tools with which we upgrade our biology are improving at an accelerating rate and becoming increasingly invasive.

In recent decades, we have developed a wide array of powerful methods, such as genetic engineering and brain-machine interfaces, that are redefining our humanity. In the short run, such enhancement technologies have medical applications and may be used to treat many diseases and disabilities. Additionally, in the coming decades, they could allow us to boost our physical abilities or even digitize human consciousness.

What’s New?
Many futurists argue that our devices, such as our smartphones, are already an extension of our cortex and in many ways an abstract form of enhancement. According to philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ theory of extended mind, we use technology to expand the boundaries of the human mind beyond our skulls.

One can argue that having access to a smartphone enhances one’s cognitive capacities and abilities and is an indirect form of enhancement of its own. It can be considered an abstract form of brain-machine interface. Beyond that, wearable devices and computers are already accessible in the market, and people like athletes use them to boost their progress.

However, these interfaces are becoming less abstract.

Not long ago, Elon Musk announced a new company, Neuralink, with the goal of merging the human mind with AI. The past few years have seen remarkable developments in both the hardware and software of brain-machine interfaces. Experts are designing more intricate electrodes while programming better algorithms to interpret neural signals. Scientists have already succeeded in enabling paralyzed patients to type with their minds, and are even allowing brains to communicate with one another purely through brainwaves.

Ethical Challenges of Enhancement
There are many social and ethical implications of such advancements.

One of the most fundamental issues with cognitive and physical enhancement techniques is that they contradict the very definition of merit and success that society has relied on for millennia. Many forms of performance-enhancing drugs have been considered “cheating” for the longest time.

But perhaps we ought to revisit some of our fundamental assumptions as a society.

For example, we like to credit hard work and talent in a fair manner, where “fair” generally implies that an individual has acted in a way that has served him to merit his rewards. If you are talented and successful, it is considered to be because you chose to work hard and take advantage of the opportunities available to you. But by these standards, how much of our accomplishments can we truly be credited for?

For instance, the genetic lottery can have an enormous impact on an individual’s predisposition and personality, which can in turn affect factors such as motivation, reasoning skills, and other mental abilities. Many people are born with a natural ability or a physique that gives them an advantage in a particular area or predisposes them to learn faster. But is it justified to reward someone for excellence if their genes had a pivotal role in their path to success?

Beyond that, there are already many ways in which we take “shortcuts” to better mental performance. Seemingly mundane activities like drinking coffee, meditating, exercising, or sleeping well can boost one’s performance in any given area and are tolerated by society. Even the use of language can have positive physical and psychological effects on the human brain, which can be liberating to the individual and immensely beneficial to society at large. And let’s not forget the fact that some of us are born into more access to developing literacy than others.

Given all these reasons, one could argue that cognitive abilities and talents are currently derived more from uncontrollable factors and luck than we like to admit. If anything, technologies like brain-machine interfaces can enhance individual autonomy and allow one a choice of how capable they become.

As Karim Jebari points out (pdf), if a certain characteristic or trait is required to perform a particular role and an individual lacks this trait, would it be wrong to implement the trait through brain-machine interfaces or genetic engineering? How is this different from any conventional form of learning or acquiring a skill? If anything, this would be removing limitations on individuals that result from factors outside their control, such as biological predisposition (or even traits induced from traumatic experiences) to act or perform in a certain way.

Another major ethical concern is equality. As with any other emerging technology, there are valid concerns that cognitive enhancement tech will benefit only the wealthy, thus exacerbating current inequalities. This is where public policy and regulations can play a pivotal role in the impact of technology on society.

Enhancement technologies can either contribute to inequality or allow us to solve it. Educating and empowering the under-privileged can happen at a much more rapid rate, helping the overall rate of human progress accelerate. The “normal range” for human capacity and intelligence, however it is defined, could shift dramatically towards more positive trends.

Many have also raised concerns over the negative applications of government-led biological enhancement, including eugenics-like movements and super-soldiers. Naturally, there are also issues of safety, security, and well-being, especially within the early stages of experimentation with enhancement techniques.

Brain-machine interfaces, for instance, could have implications on autonomy. The interface involves using information extracted from the brain to stimulate or modify systems in order to accomplish a goal. This part of the process can be enhanced by implementing an artificial intelligence system onto the interface—one that exposes the possibility of a third party potentially manipulating individual’s personalities, emotions, and desires by manipulating the interface.

A Tool For Transcendence
It’s important to discuss these risks, not so that we begin to fear and avoid such technologies, but so that we continue to advance in a way that minimizes harm and allows us to optimize the benefits.

Stephen Hawking notes that “with genetic engineering, we will be able to increase the complexity of our DNA, and improve the human race.” Indeed, the potential advantages of modifying biology are revolutionary. Doctors would gain access to a powerful tool to tackle disease, allowing us to live longer and healthier lives. We might be able to extend our lifespan and tackle aging, perhaps a critical step to becoming a space-faring species. We may begin to modify the brain’s building blocks to become more intelligent and capable of solving grand challenges.

In their book Evolving Ourselves, Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans describe a world where evolution is no longer driven by natural processes. Instead, it is driven by human choices, through what they call unnatural selection and non-random mutation. Human enhancement is bringing us closer to such a world—it could allow us to take control of our evolution and truly shape the future of our species.

Image Credit: GrAl/ Shutterstock.com Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#432021 Unleashing Some of the Most Ambitious ...

Posted on February 13, 2018 by Android

At Singularity University, we are unleashing a generation of women who are smashing through barriers and starting some of the most ambitious technology companies on the planet.

Singularity University was founded in 2008 to empower leaders to use exponential technologies to solve our world’s biggest challenges. Our flagship program, the Global Solutions Program, has historically brought 80 entrepreneurs from around the world to Silicon Valley for 10 weeks to learn about exponential technologies and create moonshot startups that improve the lives of a billion people within a decade.

After nearly 10 years of running this program, we can say that about 70 percent of our successful startups have been founded or co-founded by female entrepreneurs (see below for inspiring examples of their work). This is in sharp contrast to the typical 10–20 percent of venture-backed tech companies that have a female founder, as reported by TechCrunch.

How are we so dramatically changing the game? While 100 percent of the credit goes to these courageous women, as both an alumna of the Global Solutions Program and our current vice chair of Global Grand Challenges, I want to share my reflections on what has worked.

At the most basic level, it is essential to deeply believe in the inherent worth, intellectual genius, and profound entrepreneurial caliber of women. While this may seem obvious, this is not the way our world currently thinks—we live in a world that sees women’s ideas, contributions, work, and existence as inherently less valuable than men’s.

For example, a 2017 Harvard Business Review article noted that even when women engage in the same behaviors and work as men, their work is considered less valuable simply because a woman did the job. An additional 2017 Harvard Business Review article showed that venture capitalists are significantly less likely to invest in female entrepreneurs and are more likely to ask men questions about the potential success of their companies while grilling women about the potential downfalls of their companies.

This doubt and lack of recognition of the genius and caliber of women is also why women are still paid less than men for completing identical work. Further, it’s why women’s work often gets buried in “number two” support roles of men in leadership roles and why women are expected to take on second shifts at home managing tedious household chores in addition to their careers. I would also argue these views as well as the rampant sexual harassment, assault, and violence against women that exists today stems from stubborn, historical, patriarchal views of women as living for the benefit of men, rather than for their own sovereignty and inherent value.

As with any other business, Singularity University has not been immune to these biases but is resolutely focused on helping women achieve intellectual genius and global entrepreneurial caliber by harnessing powerful exponential technologies.

We create an environment where women can physically and intellectually thrive free of harassment to reach their full potential, and we are building a broader ecosystem of alumni and partners around the world who not only support our female entrepreneurs throughout their entrepreneurial journeys, but who are also sparking and leading systemic change in their own countries and communities.

Respecting the Intellectual Genius and Entrepreneurial Caliber of Women
The entrepreneurial legends of our time—Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin—are men who have all built their empires using exponential technologies. Exponential technologies helped these men succeed faster and with greater impact due to Moore’s Law and the Law of Accelerating Returns which states that any digital technology (such as computing, software, artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, biotechnology, nanotechnology, etc.) will become more sophisticated while dramatically falling in price, enabling rapid scaling.

Knowing this, an entrepreneur can plot her way to an ambitious global solution over time, releasing new applications just as the technology and market are ready. Furthermore, these rapidly advancing technologies often converge to create new tools and opportunities for innovators to come up with novel solutions to challenges that were previously impossible to solve in the past.

For various reasons, women have not pursued exponential technologies as aggressively as men (or were prevented or discouraged from doing so).

While more women are founding firms at a higher rate than ever in wealthy countries like the United States, the majority are small businesses in linear industries that have been around for hundreds of years, such as social assistance, health, education, administrative, or consulting services. In lower-income countries, international aid agencies and nonprofits often encourage women to pursue careers in traditional handicrafts, micro-enterprise, and micro-finance. While these jobs have historically helped women escape poverty and gain financial independence, they have done little to help women realize the enormous power, influence, wealth, and ability to transform the world for the better that comes from building companies, nonprofits, and solutions grounded in exponential technologies.

We need women to be working with exponential technologies today in order to be powerful leaders in the future.

Participants who enroll in our Global Solutions Program spend the first few weeks of the program learning about exponential technologies from the world’s experts and the final weeks launching new companies or nonprofits in their area of interest. We require that women (as well as men) utilize exponential technologies as a condition of the program.

In this sense, at Singularity University women start their endeavors with all of us believing and behaving in a way that assumes they can achieve global impact at the level of our world’s most legendary entrepreneurs.

Creating an Environment Where Woman Can Thrive
While challenging women to embrace exponential technologies is essential, it is also important to create an environment where women can thrive. In particular, this means ensuring women feel at home on our campus by ensuring gender diversity, aggressively addressing sexual harassment, and flipping the traditional culture from one that penalizes women, to one that values and supports them.

While women were initially only a small minority of our Global Solutions Program, in 2014, we achieved around 50% female attendance—a statistic that has since held over the years.

This is not due to a quota—every year we turn away extremely qualified women from our program (and are working on reformulating the program to allow more people to participate in the future.) While part of our recruiting success is due to the efforts of our marketing team, we also benefited from the efforts of some of our early female founders, staff, faculty, and alumnae including Susan Fonseca, Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom, Kathryn Myronuk, Lajuanda Asemota, Chiara Giovenzana, and Barbara Silva Tronseca.

As early champions of Singularity University these women not only launched diversity initiatives and personally reached out to women, but were crucial role models holding leadership roles in our community. In addition, Fonseca and Silva also both created multiple organizations and initiatives outside of (or in conjunction with) the university that produced additional pipelines of female candidates. In particular, Fonseca founded Women@TheFrontier as well as other organizations focusing on women, technology and innovation, and Silva founded BestInnovation (a woman’s accelerator in Latin America), as well as led Singularity University’s Chilean Chapter and founded the first SingularityU Summit in Latin America.

These women’s efforts in globally scaling Singularity University have been critical in ensuring woman around the world now see Singularity University as a place where they can lead and shape the future.

Also, thanks to Google (Alphabet) and many of our alumni and partners, we were able to provide full scholarships to any woman (or man) to attend our program regardless of their economic status. Google committed significant funding for full scholarships while our partners around the world also hosted numerous Global Impact Competitions, where entrepreneurs pitched their solutions to their local communities with the winners earning a full scholarship funded by our partners to attend the Global Solution Program as their prize.

Google and our partners’ support helped individuals attend our program and created a wider buzz around exponential technology and social change around the world in local communities. It led to the founding of 110 SU chapters in 55 countries.

Another vital aspect of our work in supporting women has been trying to create a harassment-free environment. Throughout the Silicon Valley, more than 60% of women convey that while they are trying to build their companies or get their work done, they are also dealing with physical and sexual harassment while being demeaned and excluded in other ways in the workplace. We have taken actions to educate and train our staff on how to deal with situations should they occur. All staff receives training on harassment when they join Singularity University, and all Global Solutions Program participants attend mandatory trainings on sexual harassment when they first arrive on campus. We also have male and female wellness counselors available that can offer support to both individuals and teams of entrepreneurs throughout the entire program.

While at a minimum our campus must be physically safe for women, we also strive to create a culture that values women and supports them in the additional challenges and expectations they face. For example, one of our 2016 female participants, Van Duesterberg, was pregnant during the program and said that instead of having people doubt her commitment to her startup or make her prove she could handle having a child and running a start-up at the same time, people went out of their way to help her.

“I was the epitome of a person not supposed to be doing a startup,” she said. “I was pregnant and would need to take care of my child. But Singularity University was supportive and encouraging. They made me feel super-included and that it was possible to do both. I continue to come back to campus even though the program is over because the network welcomes me and supports me rather than shuts me out because of my physical limitations. Rather than making me feel I had to prove myself, everyone just understood me and supported me, whether it was bringing me healthy food or recommending funders.”

Another strength that we have in supporting women is that after the Global Solutions Program, entrepreneurs have access to a much larger ecosystem.

Many entrepreneurs partake in SU Ventures, which can provide further support to startups as they develop, and we now have a larger community of over 200,000 people in almost every country. These members have often attended other Singularity University programs, events and are committed to our vision of the future. These women and men consist of business executives, Fortune 500 companies, investors, nonprofit and government leaders, technologists, members of the media, and other movers and shakers in the world. They have made introductions for our founders, collaborated with them on business ventures, invested in them and showcased their work at high profile events around the world.

Building for the Future
While our Global Solutions Program is making great strides in supporting female entrepreneurs, there is always more work to do. We are now focused on achieving the same degree of female participation across all of our programs and actively working to recruit and feature more female faculty and speakers on stage. As our community grows and scales around the world, we are also intent at how to best uphold our values and policies around sexual harassment across diverse locations and cultures. And like all businesses everywhere, we are focused on recruiting more women to serve at senior leadership levels within SU. As we make our way forward, we hope that you will join us in boldly leading this change and recognizing the genius and power of female entrepreneurs.

Meet Some of Our Female Moonshots
While we have many remarkable female entrepreneurs in the Singularity University community, the list below features a few of the women who have founded or co-founded companies at the Global Solutions Program that have launched new industries and are on their way to changing the way our world works for millions if not billions of people.

Jessica Scorpio co-founded Getaround in 2009. Getaround was one of the first car-sharing service platforms allowing anyone to rent out their car using a smartphone app. GetAround was a revolutionary idea in 2009, not only because smartphones and apps were still in their infancy, but because it was unthinkable that a technology startup could disrupt the major entrenched car, transport, and logistics companies. Scorpio’s early insights and pioneering entrepreneurial work brought to life new ways that humans relate to car sharing and the future self-driving car industry. Scorpio and Getaround have won numerous awards, and Getaround now serves over 200,000 members.

Paola Santana co-founded Matternet in 2011, which pioneered the commercial drone transport industry. In 2011, only military, hobbyists or the film industry used drones. Matternet demonstrated that drones could be used for commercial transport in short point-to-point deliveries for high-value goods laying the groundwork for drone transport around the world as well as some of the early thinking behind the future flying car industry. Santana was also instrumental in shaping regulations for the use of commercial drones around the world, making the industry possible.

Sara Naseri co-founded Qurasense in 2014, a life sciences start-up that analyzes women’s health through menstrual blood allowing women to track their health every month. Naseri is shifting our understanding of women’s menstrual blood as a waste product and something “not to be talked about,” to a rich, non-invasive, abundant source of information about women’s health.

Abi Ramanan co-founded ImpactVision in 2015, a software company that rapidly analyzes the quality and characteristics of food through hyperspectral images. Her long-term vision is to digitize food supply chains to reduce waste and fraud, given that one-third of all food is currently wasted before it reaches our plates. Ramanan is also helping the world understand that hyperspectral technology can be used in many industries to help us “see the unseen” and augment our ability to sense and understand what is happening around us in a much more sophisticated way.

Anita Schjøll Brede and Maria Ritola co-founded Iris AI in 2015, an artificial intelligence company that is building an AI research assistant that drastically improves the efficiency of R&D research and breaks down silos between different industries. Their long-term vision is for Iris AI to become smart enough that she will become a scientist herself. Fast Company named Iris AI one of the 10 most innovative artificial intelligence companies for 2017.

Hla Hla Win co-founded 360ed in 2016, a startup that conducts teacher training and student education through virtual reality and augmented reality in Myanmar. They have already connected teachers from 128 private schools in Myanmar with schools teaching 21st-century skills in Silicon Valley and around the world. Their moonshot is to build a platform where any teacher in the world can share best practices in teachers’ training. As they succeed, millions of children in some of the poorest parts of the world will have access to a 21st-century education.

Min FitzGerald and Van Duesterberg cofounded Nutrigene in 2017, a startup that ships freshly formulated, tailor-made supplement elixirs directly to consumers. Their long-term vision is to help people optimize their health using actionable data insights, so people can take a guided, tailored approaching to thriving into longevity.

Anna Skaya co-founded Basepaws in 2016, which created the first genetic test for cats and is building a community of citizen scientist pet owners. They are creating personalized pet products such as supplements, therapeutics, treats, and toys while also developing a database of genetic data for future research that will help both humans and pets over the long term.

Olivia Ramos co-founded Deep Blocks in 2016, a startup using artificial intelligence to integrate and streamline the processes of architecture, pre-construction, and real estate. As digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and robotics advance, it no longer makes sense for these industries to exist separately. Ramos recognized the tremendous value and efficiency that it is now possible to unlock with exponential technologies and creating an integrated industry in the future.

Please also visit our website to learn more about other female entrepreneurs, staff and faculty who are pioneering the future through exponential technologies. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#431987 OptoForce Industrial Robot Sensors

Posted on February 2, 2018 by Android

OptoForce Sensors Providing Industrial Robots with

a “Sense of Touch” to Advance Manufacturing Automation

Global efforts to expand the capabilities of industrial robots are on the rise, as the demand from manufacturing companies to strengthen their operations and improve performance grows.

Hungary-based OptoForce, with a North American office in Charlotte, North Carolina, is one company that continues to support organizations with new robotic capabilities, as evidenced by its several new applications released in 2017.

The company, a leading robotics technology provider of multi-axis force and torque sensors, delivers 6 degrees of freedom force and torque measurement for industrial automation, and provides sensors for most of the currently-used industrial robots.

It recently developed and brought to market three new applications for KUKA industrial robots.

The new applications are hand guiding, presence detection, and center pointing and will be utilized by both end users and systems integrators. Each application is summarized below and what they provide for KUKA robots, along with video demonstrations to show how they operate.

Photo By: www.optoforce.com

Hand Guiding: With OptoForce’s Hand Guiding application, KUKA robots can easily and smoothly move in an assigned direction and selected route. This video shows specifically how to program the robot for hand guiding.

Presence Detection: This application allows KUKA robots to detect the presence of a specific object and to find the object even if it has moved. Visit here to learn more about presence detection.
Center Pointing: With this application, the OptoForce sensor helps the KUKA robot find the center point of an object by providing the robot with a sense of touch. This solution also works with glossy metal objects where a vision system would not be able to define its position. This video shows in detail how the center pointing application works.

The company’s CEO explained how these applications help KUKA robots and industrial automation.

Photo By: www.optoforce.com
“OptoForce’s new applications for KUKA robots pave the way for substantial improvements in industrial automation for both end users and systems integrators,” said Ákos Dömötör, CEO of OptoForce. “Our 6-axis force/torque sensors are combined with highly functional hardware and a comprehensive software package, which include the pre-programmed industrial applications. Essentially, we’re adding a ‘sense of touch’ to KUKA robot arms, enabling these robots to have abilities similar to a human hand, and opening up numerous new capabilities in industrial automation.”

Along with these new applications recently released for KUKA robots, OptoForce sensors are also being used by various companies on numerous industrial robots and manufacturing automation projects around the world. Examples of other uses include: path recording, polishing plastic and metal, box insertion, placing pins in holes, stacking/destacking, palletizing, and metal part sanding.

Specifically, some of the projects current underway by companies include: a plastic parting line removal; an obstacle detection for a major car manufacturing company; and a center point insertion application for a car part supplier, where the task of the robot is to insert a mirror, completely centered, onto a side mirror housing.

For more information, visit www.optoforce.com.

This post was provided by: OptoForce

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Posted in Human Robots

#431958 The Next Generation of Cameras Might See ...

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Android

You might be really pleased with the camera technology in your latest smartphone, which can recognize your face and take slow-mo video in ultra-high definition. But these technological feats are just the start of a larger revolution that is underway.

The latest camera research is shifting away from increasing the number of mega-pixels towards fusing camera data with computational processing. By that, we don’t mean the Photoshop style of processing where effects and filters are added to a picture, but rather a radical new approach where the incoming data may not actually look like at an image at all. It only becomes an image after a series of computational steps that often involve complex mathematics and modeling how light travels through the scene or the camera.

This additional layer of computational processing magically frees us from the chains of conventional imaging techniques. One day we may not even need cameras in the conventional sense any more. Instead we will use light detectors that only a few years ago we would never have considered any use for imaging. And they will be able to do incredible things, like see through fog, inside the human body and even behind walls.

Single Pixel Cameras
One extreme example is the single pixel camera, which relies on a beautifully simple principle. Typical cameras use lots of pixels (tiny sensor elements) to capture a scene that is likely illuminated by a single light source. But you can also do things the other way around, capturing information from many light sources with a single pixel.

To do this you need a controlled light source, for example a simple data projector that illuminates the scene one spot at a time or with a series of different patterns. For each illumination spot or pattern, you then measure the amount of light reflected and add everything together to create the final image.

Clearly the disadvantage of taking a photo in this is way is that you have to send out lots of illumination spots or patterns in order to produce one image (which would take just one snapshot with a regular camera). But this form of imaging would allow you to create otherwise impossible cameras, for example that work at wavelengths of light beyond the visible spectrum, where good detectors cannot be made into cameras.

These cameras could be used to take photos through fog or thick falling snow. Or they could mimic the eyes of some animals and automatically increase an image’s resolution (the amount of detail it captures) depending on what’s in the scene.

It is even possible to capture images from light particles that have never even interacted with the object we want to photograph. This would take advantage of the idea of “quantum entanglement,” that two particles can be connected in a way that means whatever happens to one happens to the other, even if they are a long distance apart. This has intriguing possibilities for looking at objects whose properties might change when lit up, such as the eye. For example, does a retina look the same when in darkness as in light?

Multi-Sensor Imaging
Single-pixel imaging is just one of the simplest innovations in upcoming camera technology and relies, on the face of it, on the traditional concept of what forms a picture. But we are currently witnessing a surge of interest for systems that use lots of information but traditional techniques only collect a small part of it.

This is where we could use multi-sensor approaches that involve many different detectors pointed at the same scene. The Hubble telescope was a pioneering example of this, producing pictures made from combinations of many different images taken at different wavelengths. But now you can buy commercial versions of this kind of technology, such as the Lytro camera that collects information about light intensity and direction on the same sensor, to produce images that can be refocused after the image has been taken.

The next generation camera will probably look something like the Light L16 camera, which features ground-breaking technology based on more than ten different sensors. Their data are combined using a computer to provide a 50 MB, re-focusable and re-zoomable, professional-quality image. The camera itself looks like a very exciting Picasso interpretation of a crazy cell-phone camera.

Yet these are just the first steps towards a new generation of cameras that will change the way in which we think of and take images. Researchers are also working hard on the problem of seeing through fog, seeing behind walls, and even imaging deep inside the human body and brain.

All of these techniques rely on combining images with models that explain how light travels through through or around different substances.

Another interesting approach that is gaining ground relies on artificial intelligence to “learn” to recognize objects from the data. These techniques are inspired by learning processes in the human brain and are likely to play a major role in future imaging systems.

Single photon and quantum imaging technologies are also maturing to the point that they can take pictures with incredibly low light levels and videos with incredibly fast speeds reaching a trillion frames per second. This is enough to even capture images of light itself traveling across as scene.

Some of these applications might require a little time to fully develop, but we now know that the underlying physics should allow us to solve these and other problems through a clever combination of new technology and computational ingenuity.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Posted in Human Robots