Xpertfeed

An FDA-approved digital stethoscope opens the door to better diagnoses by an increasing number of healthcare providers, supplying artificial intelligence with data about the world's heartbeats. There are about two devices -- one wearable -- that are improving consumers' ability to monitor their intake of food and medication. While currently most of the health tracking gadgets in the marketplace have been sold directly to consumers, there are significant benefits to improving the tools used by physicians. To address this, Dr. Nayyar Hussain, who has a background spanning sports medicine and engineering, has worked with health and technology experts from Texas A&M University, MIT and the Mayo Clinic to create a product that challenges what he calls unmotivated monopolistic medical device companies. Targeting a tool synonymous with doctors,  Stethee  is a digital stethoscope that sends amplified heartbeat sounds to a companion app in real time. It houses a dual-core A...

IoT's limited capabilities have caused issues for security, but perhaps, no more. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed processors capable of providing encryption to low-power devices.The Internet of Things (IoT), including embedded industrial sensors, smart lighting, and monitoring systems, can be invaluable for the enterprise. These devices tend to have minimal power demands, can operate on Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN), and have entered the enterprise, industrial scene, and consumer realm rapidly over the past few years. However, when there is little power to draw upon, security can sometimes be an issue as there are no resources or means to implement traditional security solutions.Encryption, for example, is a sticking point for today's IoT devices. While many of our online transactions and communication are protected by public-key cryptography, many IoT devices cannot support individual encryption implementations d...

Microsoft continues to improve Windows on the desktop and take it to devices such as the Hololens. However, it continues to struggle in efforts to make a clean break with the operating system's past. Microsoft's Surface Laptop debuted with Windows 10 S. When it became clear that Windows 10 for Phones was chasing Windows Phone, Windows Mobile and Windows CE went gently into that good night. As Microsoft poured resources into supporting Android and iOS, some loyalists questioned the company's commitment to its own champion OS. But that is frankly laughable. Microsoft continues to invest deeply in Windows and devices optimized for it. It has brought it to the futuristic devices such as the Hololens. It continues to refine the user experience on the desktop. And its roadmap continues to evolve. Windows and its traditional PC associations have had a poor track record. These have included Windows 8, which virtually ignored the des...

Google developed an intelligent camera that learns what photos are meaningful to users. Behind the product is human-centered machine learning. Google's user experience (UX) proponents have shared how they have been able to apply a potent new tool to promote and embed human-centered design into the site's projects: machine learning. In a recent  post , Josh Lovejoy, UX Designer for Google, describes the process he and his team employed to integrate what they call "human centered machine learning" into a recent initiative. Machine learning systems were trained to seek out the best photos -- but it required a great deal of training to get the model right, Lovejoy relates. Plus, quite a bit of rethinking was required to reduce the complexity of the user interfaces."Our team at Google works across the company to bring UXers up to speed on core [machine learning] concepts, understand how to best integrate machine learning into the UX utility belt, and ensure w...

Microsoft is said to be creating a new Mixed Reality Studio and bringing together a number of its AR/VR/MR assets into a new organization. Microsoft is moving around a bunch of its augmented reality/mixed reality/virtual reality assets as one of its regular reorgs. The details of this latest shuffle  come courtesy of Brad Sams at Petri.com. Apparently, Microsoft has created a new Mixed Reality Studio that replaces its former Evoke Studio and other of its AR/VR/MR products, including Paint 3D, Mixed Reality Viewer and Remix3D. (Microsoft refers to these AR/VR/MR software assets as EDM, or "Every Day Magic," Sams says.) Evoke Studio was formerly the domain of Corporate Vice President Chris Pratley and was part of VP Kudo Tsunoda's Windows App Studios unit. Pratley was in charge of a team of artists, data scientists, and others working on "new digital memory and video storytelling" for Windows 10 and other platforms that involved mixed reality, deep learn...

Under the expanded partnership, Salesforce also names IBM a preferred cloud services provider, and IBM names Salesforce as its preferred customer engagement platform. IBM and Salesforce announced Friday an  expansion  of their strategic partnership that brings more data integration to companies so they can better interact with customers.Under the extended partnership, IBM will build a Watson app for Salesforce's Quip Live Apps, launching AI tools on the collaborative document platform. Salesforce introduced Live Apps in November 2017 to be embedded directly into any Quip document. IBM will utilize its Watson platform within Quip documents to "increase the effectiveness of sales teams across the lifecycle of an opportunity." Further, IBM Watson and Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein will be brought together and deliver AI-driven recommendations so companies can create personalized interactions based on the latest call or message they had with a cus...

Instead, the law ministry proposes the setting up of a government committee to assess the impact of "online falsehoods" in the country and how it should respond. Singapore is considering plans to set up a special ministerial committee to assess the impact of "online falsehoods" and recommend how it should respond, potentially backtracking on a previous proposal to introduce legislation. The country's Ministry of Communications and Information and Ministry of Law released a "green paper" detailing the   need to establish   a "select committee", comprising several MPs. This would be presented in parliament on January 10, which then would decide on whether one should be created to "study the problem of deliberate online falsehoods" and offer recommendations on how the country should respond. Select committees are seldom formed in Singapore, where they are  described as "ad hoc"  and serve to review details of bil...

A serious security memory problem in all Intel chips has led to Linux's developers resetting how to deal with memory. The result will be a more secure, but -- as Linux creator Linus Torvalds says -- slower operating system. Long ago,  Intel made a design mistake in its 64-bit chips   -- and now, all Intel-based operating systems and their users must pay the price. Linux's developers saw this coming early on and patched Linux to deal with it.  That's the good news. The bad news is it will cause at least a 5-percent performance drop. Applications may see far more serious performance hits. The popular PostgreSQL database is estimated to see at least  a 17-percent slowdown. How bad will it really be? asked Linux's creator Linus Torvalds, who said: "There's no one number. It will depend on your hardware and on your load. I think 5 percent for a load with a noticeable kernel component (e.g. a database) is roughly in the right ballpark. But if you do...

Organizations in the region are under pressure to increase their digital portfolios, says IDC research. Spending related to digital transformation in Latin American markets should reach $57 billion within the next two years, according to research by analyst firm IDC. This represents about 40 percent of all information technology spend, as companies in the region accelerate the delivery of projects related to digitizing products, services and back-office functionality. Noteworthy progress will be seen in the retail, banking and insurance sectors, whereas the public sector will be lagging behind. In terms of specific technologies that will be commonly seen in the digital transformation projects led by Latin firms, about a third of such initiatives will be using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, says IDC, with half of all apps powered by AI. In addition, customer service bots will deal with more than half of all consumers in the region, according to the research. A ...

Near-infrared image trickery can allow an attacker to bypass Window 10 Hello face authentication. Security researchers are urging Windows 10 users to update their systems to prevent attackers from using a printed headshot to bypass Windows Hello facial authentication. Researchers from German pen-testing firm SYSS reported that Windows 10 systems that have not yet received the recent Fall Creators Update are vulnerable to a "simple spoofing attack using a modified printed photo of an authorized person". The attack works against multiple versions of Windows 10 and different hardware.The researchers tested the spoofing attack against a Dell Latitude with a LilBit USB camera and against a Surface Pro 4 running various versions of Windows 10, going back to the one of the first releases, version 1511. SYSS claims the spoofing attack was successful on a Surface Pro 4 running version 1607 of Windows 10, the Anniversary Update rolled out in summer 2016, even with Microsoft...