Gesture that Smartphones Can Appreciate

Can't get to the phone? Try waving at it. A device that enables a smartphone's camera to recognize gestures – without gobbling up precious battery life – looks set to transform the way we make calls.

Microsoft's Kinect and the soon-to-be-released Leap Motion have thrust 3D gesture-recognition technology into the mainstream. Touchless phones, however, are still a rarity. Korean company Pantech released a smartphone in 2011 that could use its camera to recognize simple gestures. But across the industry the capability has yet to catch on: of the 1.6 billion mobile devices shipped in 2012, just 27 million (about 0.2 per cent) were equipped with gesture-sensing technology, according to ABI Research, a market research firm based in New York.

One reason may be that existing techniques infer gestures based on 2D images captured by a phone's camera. This is problematic because visually cluttered backgrounds can confuse the software, as can low-light settings. Kinect and Leap Motion illuminate an area with either an infrared laser or intense infrared light to capture depth information about a scene, but this guzzles too much power to be useful on a mobile device.

Now Andrea Colaço at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab in Cambridge and colleagues have developed a system called 3dim that augments standard smartphone cameras with a low-powered infrared light source. 3dim's software then looks for mathematical structures in the 2D image data in order to simplify the scene. Differences in the time that the infrared light takes to bounce off objects and return to the camera are used to gauge how far away those objects are.

Colaço claims this approach allows 3dim to function in difficult environments while tracking 10 fingers to within a millimetre in space. She says her prototype only demands a few milliwatts of additional power from the phone – about one-seventh of the amount used by a standard smartphone camera.

Colaço presented 3dim at the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship competition on 15 May. It could be included in the next generation of smartphones, she says, and adapted to work with wearable devices such as Google Glass.

Tobias Höllerer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sees more promise for 3dim as a Google Glass system because he thinks it's awkward to make gestures while you're holding a phone. "Maybe the phone is not the device that will see this through. Maybe it will be glasses," he says.

<< source >> 

Posted by:

Okky Eldiana Muliaputri

125150200111092

10 Countries with World's Fastest Internet

Connectivity has so far turned from ‘wired’ to ‘wireless.’ In both the case, the last thing you wish to see would be a slow loading internet page.  Be it uploading a picture or having a video conference, everyone loves a lightning fast Internet connection. However, when most of the countries including India suffer from slow Internet connection, certain countries enjoy browsing at speeds as high as 1 Gbps, even at its outskirts.

Have a look at the top 10 countries with superfast internet, compiled by Bloomberg on the basis of the quarterly report prepared by Akamai technologies.

#10 Singapore (30.7 Mbps)

Singapore, known to be the ‘tech hub’ has cracked to take the 10th spot with an average of 30.7 megabits per second that is nearly double the global average of 15.9 megabits per second.

 # 9 Israel (30.9 Mbps)

The recent developments of broadband capabilities have made the country reach 9th in the world. The internet is provided through phone and cable infrastructure and has an average speed of 30.9 megabits per second.

#8 Bulgaria (32.1 Mbps)

The country is known to attract the global companies and investors because of its low taxes and cheap labour. Besides, it is also known for its high speed Internet where it reached an average of 32.1 megabits per second. Local Area Network (LAN) is the most common type of Internet access with over 60% of the consumers accessing it.

#7 Switzerland (32.4 Mbps)

Known to be the major hub of finance industry, Switzerland crossed at 32.4 megabits per second on average. The country has one of the highest Internet and broadband penetration rates in Europe.

#6 Belgium (32.7 Mbps)

The Internet connections in Belgium crossed an average of 32.7 megabits per second. Majority of the citizens have bandwidth caps to limit the amount of data users and these are between 5GB/month up to 500GB/month.

Computers See Faces in the Clouds, Just Like You

Humans are all about pattern recognition: we want and maybe need? to believe that there’s order and meaning behind everything we see and do in life. The future is divined in teacups, superstitions are put on random objects, and of course we see ourselves in everything around us. Like the sky.

Shinseungback Kimyonghun, a Seoul-based tech art collective, focus largely on computer vision, so most of their work take the form of script, with results that often verge on poetic. Their latest project, Cloud Face, uses facial recognition to capture wisps and puffs of vapor that for a brief instant converge to form the likeness of a human face.
Speaking over email today, the artists explained that the idea came about after they attempted to capture real human faces using a webcam strung to the end of fishing rod, hanging out a window. It returned a fair number of human visages but it also picked up trees, grass, and random inanimate objects that the software recognized as human-enough. “I looked up in the sky and thought ‘What if I use this error and have it find faces in clouds?’,” Kim Yong Hun remembers. “The discovery of the error led me to explore computer’s vision itself.”

So the duo set out to build a system that would capture cloud faces automatically. They built a custom script using Processing and the OpenCV facial detection library, and set up a DSLR pointed at the sky, which transmitted images to a computer where the program was running. Then, they sat back and let the magic happen:
As soon as I opened my eyes in the morning I would check out the sky if it had a 'proper' pattern for face detection... The faces used in the 'Cloud Face' composition were selected by us manually. That means the faces are agreed upon as face by the computer vision and our vision.
They ended up capturing over 150,000 images of the sky in which their script detected 1,000 faces. Which isn’t a bad ratio, considering the odds?

Cloud Faces builds on research being done by scientists who are interested in why and how our brains are so good at seeing faces in things like clouds, toast, and rotting wood. A 2007 article in The New York Times spoke to several scientists working on facial recognition, at least one of whom argued that it represents a crucial piece of human evolution:
Dr. Sinha of M.I.T. says that whether the hair-trigger response to faces is innate or learned, it represents a critical evolutionary adaptation, one that dwarfs side effects like seeing Beelzebub in a crumpled tissue. “The information faces convey is so rich not just regarding another person’s identity, but also their mental state, health and other factors,” he said. “It’s extremely beneficial for the brain to become good at the task of face recognition and not to be very strict in its inclusion criteria. The cost of missing a face is higher than the cost of declaring a nonface to be a face.”
So before you tell Shinseungback Kimyonghun to get their heads out of the clouds, consider this: they're just forwarding the project of human evolution albeit with the help of a piece of script.

Source

by Rembulan Suci Fii Jannatin [125150200111086]

The Information Technology Era

There are about hundred and fifty years, companies have run their operations every day completely different from what companies are in the modern era to run their operations from day to day. People back then worked in the calculations by slightly math candle on paper the old fashion way, before the electricity is coming about in the early 20th century. Now, most of the civilized world wouldn't know what to do with themselves without technology.

Imagine having not even need a calculator that math or the Internet to do research. Yes, he knows it is hard to believe me that people could survive without these advanced tools for which we have given each day. Advances in communication technology have combined with changes in the IT industry has enabled people to do business around the world in real time. Improvements in IT improve our lifestyles and business by enabling computers to reduce complications and enhance opportunities.

Today, the “appointed and Information Technology”, has managed to surround many aspects of computer invented in the past couple decades. These IL spectra can be covered in many types of career fields such as management information systems, network management, computer and software design. Our ancestors couldn’t even fathom what our society has made. In medicine, information technology plays a substantial bread. Doctors take pictures with machines like a computerized axial tomography (CAT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and can print three-dimensional images of bones, muscles, and organs. These images can help map out patient  problems and using s save lives.

This day and age, it is difficult to find a field or industry that has not been significantly affected. It is completely responsible for how our civilization has become organized. The corporate world was only made possible by information technology communication established between the software and hardware. From a personal stand, it would be difficult as most people call a single person doesn’t use the Internet regularly. With new technologies emerging daily increasing, employees in the workforce in information technology must constantly re-educate themselves with all the new technologies.

This makes it a very demanding field while still grows and is perfected. The process of improvement is what makes this look so desirable to almost any business. It is very important that anyone in the IT field is always up to date with all the newly developing technologies that are relevant to their industry. Now is the backbone to complete almost any business and its ability to be competitive and efficient.

By : Muthiyana Cantya Puspita - 125150200111077