Latest Posts by techinfinity - Page 9

How Smart Cities Thrive by Focusing on Positive User Experience

In today’s age of smart cities, the new challenges of urban designing revolve around leveraging user experience to not only support urban activities but also inspire, educate, and empower the citizens. 

The user experience designs also need to foster a shift in values, transitioning the focus from convenience toward the notion of meaning.

For example, informing citizens about their smart city experience and creating awareness about choosing public transport can help create a more empathetic urban population. 

To assist individuals to derive value from their experience, it is also crucial to create spaces that are flexible enough to cater to various modes of use including entertainment as well as purely functional purposes. Read More

Protecting Nations- How to Secure a Nation as Smart Cities Grow

Amazon has been an e-commerce leader for the past decade for more reasons than one can imagine. Many opine it is the firm’s incredible ability in bridging gaps by delivering enticing products and services.

The greatest example is its virtual online shopping platform that set an example for many retail firms to follow. It continues to remain one of the favorite online shopping destinations today and has been irreplaceable.

The firm has been making waves recently for the launch of its latest cutting-edge product, Alexa. The world has been raving about this latest offering of the technology giant and the myriad benefits it can offer to the hospitality sector.

Amazon Alexa Various Benefits:

Owners of many hospitality concerns have started to realize the importance of Alexa and its potential in making the stay comfortable. The greatest advantage is that the Alexa can be entirely customized and tailored to align with the requirements of a hotel and the common expectations of its customer base.

For more information: Click Here

Next level Robotics: Artificial Intelligence - Programmed Robots - Will They Complement?

Follow my tumbler

BostonDynamics社の人型ロボット「Atlas」が軽快に丸太や段を飛び越える映像 (BostonDynamics) Parkour Atlas (BostonDynamics)

An alive human heart pumping…

Pixel 3 vs iPhone Xs camera face-off: AI makes a difference https://ift.tt/2J8g7Id

Google’s new long game: 100% clean energy all the time - Buying enough clean energy to make up for all the dirty energy you’re using is one thing; using all clean energy 24/7 is another. https://ift.tt/2RYIbBR

Automation is the Key to Better Patient Care

Automation has become an integral part of daily life and a necessity for carrying out different processes across various industries including healthcare. Automation acts as the silver bullet for health care providers, who often face seemingly inconsistent demands with regard to cost reductions, efficient service to patients, and improved quality of care. 

It’s important for healthcare providers to ensure that their services run smoothly and that they aren’t compromising the patient experience to achieve it, and one way to ensure that is to automate daily processes such as administering non-intravenous medications, data collection, reading radiological scans, and more such complex activities. 

Automation would save time by carrying out repetitive tasks, reduce labor costs, increase precision and reduce errors—making it possible to acquire real-time data thereby enabling to provide improved diagnosis and allowing healthcare professionals to focus on other core processes. 

For instance, appointment reminder systems like JustReminIt and TeleVox automate the process of reminding patients about their appointments. Instead of calling each patient, these systems automatically remind people of their upcoming schedules or remind them of their missed ones; through customized messages

Read More

The Stepping Stones for Decision Analysis and Optimization

While data analytics do help garner deep insights for smarter decision-making, the insights required varies based on the technology and the analysis approach and procedures used.

 Businesses need to ensure that they have a business intelligence architecture or data warehouse that offers a convenient and multi-faceted analytical ecosystem optimized for effective analysis of diverse datasets.

Descriptive Analytics

Descriptive analysis is all about using the past performance, understanding its nature by mining the historical data to analyze the reason for a previously occurred success or failure. Descriptive models enable businesses to classify the prospects or parameters by consolidating relationships in data.

Diagnostic Analytics

An advanced level of analytics, diagnostic analysis, dissects the data to answer the reason behind a specific event. Methods used to characterize the data include data discovery, mining, drill down, and  Read More

Source: APAC Business Intelligence 

The Pathway for Retailers to Attain Better Customer Loyalty

Today, loyalty programs have become one of the most powerful arsenals used by global retailers to incentivize consumers, ensure repeat business, and subsequently increase ROI. Recent surveys indicated that over 62 percent of these retailers plan on revamping their loyalty offerings next year, while many others are already battle-ready with offers no shopper can ignore.

However, to have a successful loyalty program in place, it is vital that retailers need to understand customers’ behavior and preferences. A global study across retail and hotels published by Oracle Retail highlighted the fact that many organizations have the wrong idea about the end-users’ likes and dislikes.

For example, 58 percent of the retailers believed that consumers would sign up for every program they offered, but in reality, nearly 70 percent of the end-users limit their participation. This shows that organizations need to first understand the mindset that drives customer loyalty perceptions and then develop engaging programs accordingly.

Better Customer Loyalty for Retailers 

AI To Enhance Field Service Management and Boost Business Performance

Field Service Management is a type of software which helps an organization to simplify its field operations by automating them. FSM includes the detection of a field service need, scheduling and making the best use of the technicians on the field, thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR) are revolutionizing all the industries and field services is not left behind. AI in collaboration with technologies like AR and IoT will provide better device maintenance, repair, service, and other facilities as well.

•    Supported By Chatbots

Chatbots have simplified and have made communication more effective thereby providing a seamless experience to its customers. AI-powered chatbots are smart as they work according to the need of the customers; they comprehend easily if a client requires additional information or whether they require assistance in resolving any issue. Smart algorithms power chatbots and determine all necessary information before dispatching a technician.

•    Informed Scheduling

AI sensors deployed on machines emits alerts regarding the state of the machinery which informs the stakeholders to take necessary actions. Informed scheduling ensures that all the field services take place timely and making it cost-effective for organizations. The field service enables the workforce to work where it is needed, satisfying the customers and enriching the job of the workforce. 

Read More 

How Chrome and Firefox could ruin your online business this month

How Chrome and Firefox could ruin your online business this month

by Paul Ducklin

Chrome 70 comes out today.

Most people who use Google’s popular browser will receive the update, and either won’t realise or won’t especially care about the changes it contains.

Next Tuesday, Firefox 63 will be released, and much the same thing will happen for users of Mozilla’s browser.

But one of the changes common to both those products, which have a huge majority of the…

View On WordPress

Suggested: Cyber Security Predictions to Safeguard your Businesses

Source: Cybersecurity APAC 

Brain Waves Can be Used to Detect Potentially Harmful Personal Information

Cyber security and authentication have been under attack in recent months as, seemingly every other day, a new report of hackers gaining access to private or sensitive information comes to light. Just recently, more than 500 million passwords were stolen when Yahoo revealed its security was compromised.

Securing systems has gone beyond simply coming up with a clever password that could prevent nefarious computer experts from hacking into your Facebook account. The more sophisticated the system, or the more critical, private information that system holds, the more advanced the identification system protecting it becomes.

Fingerprint scans and iris identification are just two types of authentication methods, once thought of as science fiction, that are in wide use by the most secure systems. But fingerprints can be stolen and iris scans can be replicated. Nothing has proven foolproof from being subject to computer hackers.

“The principal argument for behavioral, biometric authentication is that standard modes of authentication, like a password, authenticates you once before you access the service,” said Abdul Serwadda a cybersecurity expert and assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas Tech University.

“Now, once you’ve accessed the service, there is no other way for the system to still know it is you. The system is blind as to who is using the service. So the area of behavioral authentication looks at other user-identifying patterns that can keep the system aware of the person who is using it. Through such patterns, the system can keep track of some confidence metric about who might be using it and immediately prompt for reentry of the password whenever the confidence metric falls below a certain threshold.”

One of those patterns that is growing in popularity within the research community is the use of brain waves obtained from an electroencephalogram, or EEG. Several research groups around the country have recently showcased systems which use EEG to authenticate users with very high accuracy.

However, those brain waves can tell more about a person than just his or her identity. It could reveal medical, behavioral or emotional aspects of a person that, if brought to light, could be embarrassing or damaging to that person. And with EEG devices becoming much more affordable, accurate and portable and applications being designed that allows people to more readily read an EEG scan, the likelihood of that happening is dangerously high.

“The EEG has become a commodity application. For $100 you can buy an EEG device that fits on your head just like a pair of headphones,” Serwadda said. “Now there are apps on the market, brain-sensing apps where you can buy the gadget, download the app on your phone and begin to interact with the app using your brain signals. That led us to think; now we have these brain signals that were traditionally accessed only by doctors being handled by regular people. Now anyone who can write an app can get access to users’ brain signals and try to manipulate them to discover what is going on.”

That’s where Serwadda and graduate student Richard Matovu focused their attention: attempting to see if certain traits could be gleaned from a person’s brain waves. They presented their findings recently to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Biometrics.

Brain waves and cybersecurity

Serwadda said the technology is still evolving in terms of being able to use a person’s brain waves for authentication purposes. But it is a heavily researched field that has drawn the attention of several federal organizations. The National Science Foundation (NSF), funds a three-year project on which Serwadda and others from Syracuse University and the University of Alabama-Birmingham are exploring how several behavioral modalities, including EEG brain patterns, could be leveraged to augment traditional user authentication mechanisms.

“There are no installations yet, but a lot of research is going on to see if EEG patterns could be incorporated into standard behavioral authentication procedures,” Serwadda said.

Assuming a system uses EEG as the modality for user authentication, typically for such a system, all variables have been optimized to maximize authentication accuracy. A selection of such variables would include:

The features used to build user templates.      

The signal frequency ranges from which features are extracted

The regions of the brain on which the electrodes are placed, among other variables.

Under this assumption of a finely tuned authentication system, Serwadda and his colleagues tackled the following questions:

If a malicious entity were to somehow access templates from this authentication-optimized system, would he or she be able to exploit these templates to infer non-authentication-centric information about the users with high accuracy?

In the event that such inferences are possible, which attributes of template design could reduce or increase the threat?

Turns out, they indeed found EEG authentication systems to give away non-authentication-centric information. Using an authentication system from UC-Berkeley and a variant of another from a team at Binghamton University and the University of Buffalo, Serwadda and Matovu tested their hypothesis, using alcoholism as the sensitive private information which an adversary might want to infer from EEG authentication templates.

In a study involving 25 formally diagnosed alcoholics and 25 non-alcoholic subjects, the lowest error rate obtained when identifying alcoholics was 25 percent, meaning a classification accuracy of approximately 75 percent.

When they tweaked the system and changed several variables, they found that the ability to detect alcoholic behavior could be tremendously reduced at the cost of slightly reducing the performance of the EEG authentication system.

Motivation for discovery

Serwadda’s motivation for proving brain waves could be used to reveal potentially harmful personal information wasn’t to improve the methods for obtaining that information. It’s to prevent it.

To illustrate, he gives an analogy using fingerprint identification at an airport. Fingerprint scans read ridges and valleys on the finger to determine a person’s unique identity, and that’s it.

In a hypothetical scenario where such systems could only function accurately if the user’s finger was pricked and some blood drawn from it, this would be problematic because the blood drawn by the prick could be used to infer things other than the user’s identity, such as whether a person suffers from certain diseases, such as diabetes.

Given the amount of extra information that EEG authentication systems are able glean about the user, current EEG systems could be likened to the hypothetical fingerprint reader that pricks the user’s finger. Serwadda wants to drive research that develops EEG authentication systems that perform the intended purpose while revealing minimal information about traits other than the user’s identity in authentication terms.

Currently, in the vast majority of studies on the EEG authentication problem, researchers primarily seek to outdo each other in terms of the system error rates. They work with the central objective of designing a system having error rates which are much lower than the state-of-the-art. Whenever a research group develops or publishes an EEG authentication system that attains the lowest error rates, such a system is immediately installed as the reference point.

A critical question that has not seen much attention up to this point is how certain design attributes of these systems, in other words the kinds of features used to formulate the user template, might relate to their potential to leak sensitive personal information. If, for example, a system with the lowest authentication error rates comes with the added baggage of leaking a significantly higher amount of private information, then such a system might, in practice, not be as useful as its low error rates suggest. Users would only accept, and get the full utility of the system, if the potential privacy breaches associated with the system are well understood and appropriate mitigations undertaken.

But, Serwadda said, while the EEG is still being studied, the next wave of invention is already beginning.

“In light of the privacy challenges seen with the EEG, it is noteworthy that the next wave of technology after the EEG is already being developed,” Serwadda said. “One of those technologies is functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which has a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than an EEG. It gives a more accurate picture of brain activity given its ability to focus on a particular region of the brain.”

The good news, for now, is fNIRS technology is still quite expensive; however there is every likelihood that the prices will drop over time, potentially leading to a civilian application to this technology. Thanks to the efforts of researchers like Serwadda, minimizing the leakage of sensitive personal information through these technologies is beginning to gain attention in the research community.

“The basic idea behind this research is to motivate a direction of research which selects design parameters in such a way that we not only care about recognizing users very accurately but also care about minimizing the amount of sensitive personal information it can read,” Serwadda said.

Pixel 3 XL Hands-On Review: The New Camera Phone King Has Arrived https://ift.tt/2NIDt7H

Sony Shifts US 100% Renewable Energy Goal Forward By A Decade https://ift.tt/2pX9qQb

Web Development Insights for Organisations

Here Are Most Recommended Insights Organisations Need To Know Before Plan Ahead In Web Development

Web Development has advanced over a period of time

Taking a Mobile First Strategy to Web-development

Changing trends in web design via web development

Java’s Ongoing Popularity

The Era of Modern Web Development

Know these to get started with Python.

Web Development has advanced over a period of time

Taking a Mobile First Strategy to Web-development

Changing trends in web design via web development

Java's Ongoing Popularity

The Era of Modern Web Development

Python as a first language: a roadmap to getting started.

I personally prefer Java as a first language. Put non-technically, it is a lot less convenient, so you get a more realistic idea of how computers work. Nonetheless, Python is an amazing language (with convenience as one of it’s values) so it makes sense as a gentle introduction. It’s also a popular language for data science and machine learning, so it’s great to have experience with.

The 3 ingredients you need to get started:

The Python Language Interpreter: when you write some code in a text file and save it as a .py file, the Python interpreter is what turns that code into commands that your computer can then actually preform. This is necessary.

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE): An IDE is like a helpful text editor for programming. Some basic features include auto-complete, typo and mistake catching, and automatic text coloring to make some parts of your code easier to find. This is optional but highly recommended.

Some learning resources: We’re going to need something about programming basics, problem solving in computer science, using an API, learning how to use google and stackexchange, data types, control structures, and then maybe an object-oriented programming intro, and eventually all the neat advanced features of the python language. Then we need to learn how to use Numpy (for scientific computing), Pandas (for easy data storage), and Tensorflow (machine learning!). Add some handy cheat-sheets for python, numpy, pandas, and Tensorflow, and we’re good to go.

Other posts will adress download, installation, and resources.

A curriculum:

Like I said up above, we need to know how to do the following. Save this and make it a checklist.

Learn to use google to answer questions about installing or using python, any packages, or computer science.

This also includes getting to know how to search Stackexchange, the website for coding questions n’ stuff.

How to install python 3 and get set up

How to install an IDE like Eclipse (with PyDev), IDLE, or Notebook++.

Programming basics: how does python work? What does the language look like? How does tabbing work?

Understand basic logic, including AND, OR, XOR, NOR, NAND, XNOR, Implies, and If…Else statements.

Variables: what are they, how do I set one and change it?

Basic math in Python.

Data types: what kinds of variables can I have? How does my computer store data? How do I use those types of data? What are the key commands and operations I know how to do?

Control structures: if, else, elif, for loops, while loops, break, continue

Methods! What are they, how do I make one, what can I do with it?

The open() command, the all() command, other neat built-in methods

<function name>= lambda <your variables>: <single line method>

Problem solving in computer science: now do fizbuzz.

What’s a package?

Importing packages, installing packages you don’t have with PIP

Using an API: how do I find one and how do I read it?

object-oriented programming in Python: what’s a class, how do I make one, how do I reference and instantiate one, methods, class vars, etc

Error handling: how to do exceptions

All the neat advanced features of the python language: iterators, generators, list comprehensions, enumerate, range, assert, with…as, etc.

Read through the Numpy API (for scientific computing), data types, matrices, stats, methods, etc. A short detour through scikit would be helpful.

Read through Matplotlib.pyplot API, plotting, plotting options, histograms, scatterplots, etc.

Pandas (for easy data storage), data frames, series, built-in operations on columns and rows, loading from a CSV, saving as a csv, apply, etc

Tensorflow (machine learning!) For basic stuff, shoot for knowing how to use the estimator package, which is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Also get to know the nitty gritty, including tensors, layers, tensorboard, etc.

5 Questions from a Year of Education on the International Space Station

This year, we’re celebrating a Year of Education on the Station as astronauts and former teachers Joe Acaba and Ricky Arnold have made the International Space Station their home. While aboard, they have been sharing their love of science, technology, engineering and math, along with their passion for teaching. With the Year of Education on the Station is coming to a close, here are some of the highlights from students speaking to the #TeacherOnBoard from across the country!

Why do you feel it’s important to complete Christa McAuliffe’s lessons?

“The loss of Challenger not only affected a generation of school teachers but also a generation of school children who are now adults.” Ricky’s personal mission was to bring the Challenger Mission full circle and give it a sense of closure by teaching Christa’s Lost Lessons. See some of Christa’s Lost Lessons here.

Have you ever poured water out to see what happens?

The concept of surface tension is very apparent on the space station. Fluids do not spill out, they stick to each other. Cool fact: you can drink your fluids from the palm of your hand if you wanted to! Take a look at this demonstration that talks a little more about tension. 

How does your equipment stay attached to the wall?

The use of bungee cords as well as hook and loop help keep things in place in a microgravity environment. These two items can be found on the space station and on the astronaut’s clothing! Their pants often have hook and loop so they can keep things nearby if they need to be using their hands for something else. 

Did being a teacher provide any advantage to being an astronaut?

Being an effective communicator and having the ability to be adaptable are great skills to have as a teacher and as an astronaut. Joe Acaba has found that these skills have assisted him in his professional development.  

Since you do not use your bones and muscles as often because of microgravity, do you have to exercise? What type can you do?

The exercises that astronauts do aboard the space station help them maintain their bone density and muscle mass. They have access to resistance training through ARED (Advanced Resistive Exercise Device) which is a weight machine and for cardio, there is a bicycle and treadmill available to keep up with their physical activity.

Learn more about the Year of Education on Station. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Developing an Alexa Skill can be the Smarter Way of Doing Business

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the key driving factors for the success of businesses across all industries. With increasing adoption of AI today, companies are now looking for more innovative and smarter ways of 

.. Read More

The Importance of AI in Automation

In this race for applying AI in unique and attractive ways, an important piece of the AI learning curve is missing—the flashy AI technology used at the front end cannot be fully appreciated without a complex infrastructure that comprises end-to-end process automation. Read More

Advanced Analytics Revamping the Healthcare Industry

Over the past few years, emerging technology trends like cloud, predictive analytics, big data analytics, and machine learning have been significantly transforming the healthcare landscape. 

The industry is leveraging advanced analytics to reshape the way care is delivered, identify gaps in quality documentation and assessment to produce insights that lead to better outcomes, address performance challenges, lower costs and build new Read More

 With a large section of the global population has moved to social media channels, e-commerce businesses of today are required to rethink their marketing and advertising models and execute digital strategies smartly.        

  Amplify E-commerce with zero investment 

✨ | futuristic car

Worth a read :)

Phew, reading this story was a trip.

TL;DR, this chinese hacker group (successfully) coerced chinese motherboard manufacturing plants into altering the designs for their motherboards to include a tiny chip- no larger than the tip of a pencil- so that they could have control over machines that were later assembled on top of these motherboards further down the supply chain.

Their targets appear to have been large tech corporations (Apple, Amazon were/are affected), as well as positions within the US government/military. Supposedly, no consumer data was stolen or affected.

This thing is so goddamn tiny, and yet it supposedly has the power to alter essentially any instructions that get passed from OS to CPU, as it acts as intermediary in between the RAM and CPU from what I understand. It has network access due to how it’s connected to the baseboard management controller, so it can call home for instructions on what code to run, since… it can do whatever it wants with the cpu, apparently? I’d love to see a more in-depth look into how this technology works, honestly.

Considering this doesn’t seem to affect end users at all, and mostly only has caused harm to large corporations and also the US government/military… my reaction to this is mostly a mixture of “lol” and “holy shit that sounds like something out of a goddamn action movie”.

Cosmonauts heading to the Soyuz T-3 Spacecraft. November 27, 1980.

Via Soviet Space (@soviet_space)

A new lego compatible prosthetic arm allows for kids to build their own attachments

Three Major Benefits of Integrating AI and Blockchain |  https://www.apacciooutlook.com/news/three-major-benefits-of-integrating-ai-and-blockchain-nwid-5634.html

AI tools empower workers to enable machines to automate so that they are freed to utilize their reasoning skills and logic. Here is an article helping businesses adopt AI in a better way possible