Unless you’re a literal hermit living in a remote place with little human contact, it’s nearly impossible to stay “off the grid,” so to speak, when it comes to facial recognition databases. But for now, at least, there are a few ways to stymie the technology, and one of them involves obscuring your features in ways that the software finds confusing.

The Incognito Mask by Polish designer Ewa Nowak offers an easy way to do just that. Looking like a pair of strange sculptural sunglasses, the accessory is made of brass and features a vertical piece that sits on your forehead and two circles that hang over your cheeks, just below your eyes.

It may look a bit ridiculous, but according to Nowak, it actually works. She uploaded images of models wearing the device to Facebook, and its algorithms were unable to detect the wearers’ faces.

She explains: “The project touches on the subject of social surveillance and protection of one’s own image in public places. The object is designed to protect the image against [the] face recognition algorithms used in modern cameras installed in public space[s]. It is a kind of mask made of brass, shaped to the shape of the face.”

“The three elements on it make the human face unrecognized by the camera. This project was preceded by a long-term study on the shape, size, and location of mask elements so that it actually fulfill[ed] its task. When testing solutions, I used the DeepFace algorithm, which is used by Facebook. The second part of the project is a kind of object — a joke, a mirror hood [likening] the user to the environment.”

This kind of “face camouflage” confuses cameras by making it hard for them to discern features. This technique can also be used with makeup and hairstyles, as modeled by the open-source face detection toolkit CVDazzle, which derives its name from the cubist-inspired designs used by the World War I naval camouflage system Dazzle. Facial recognition algorithms rely on the identification and spatial relationship of key facial features like the symmetry of eyes and tonal contours of cheeks and noses.

Unfortunately, only a few people will want to walk around looking quite so avant-garde — at least for the time being. Perhaps fashion will evolve in the near future with these kinds of privacy-protecting styles in mind. Nowak’s Incognito Mask has the benefit of being easy to put on and take off, which is particularly handy if you’re trying to be relatively inconspicuous.

Who knows — maybe this is the future of fashion for those who don’t want to be relentlessly tracked at every moment. Or maybe facial recognition technology will advance far enough to see beyond such tricks, and we’ll have to fight for our privacy in ways that are a little more direct.

The post Evade Facial Recognition Software With This Anti-AI Mask first appeared on Dornob.

Founded in 2016, GrokStyle is a San Francisco-based company that allows users to take photos of furniture, upload them to a visual search engine, and receive a list of matching items that can then be purchased online. It’s easy to see why this technology is useful to shoppers: virtually all of us have, at some point, spotted an amazing piece of furniture in person or in someone else’s photographs and wished we could own something similar. It’s the next logical step in the age of accelerated consumption, taking a whole lot of time and effort out of the process of identifying things we like and later acquiring them for our homes.

For Facebook, the appeal of GrokStyle lies in its artificial intelligence technology. The company is investing heavily in AI and computer vision, as well as its “Marketplace” (the built-in furniture shopping search engine connecting individual sellers to buyers in their areas). It’s easy to see how the acquisition could add another layer of functionality to Marketplace, but the technology behind the process could potentially be used in other ways, too. It’s not too far off from the sort of facial recognition tech Facebook is already working to develop, mapping data points in photographs to find matches within its sprawling databases.

No terms of the deal have been released as of yet, though GrokStyle has indicated that it will be winding down its operations without acknowledging Facebook’s involvement.

“We founded GrokStyle to reimagine the retail experience,” reads a message on the company’s website. “We built state-of-the-art AI and visual search technology to help consumers readily find, explore, and decide on purchases. We partnered with major retailers, demonstrated revenue lift with our technology, and improved the lives of consumers across the globe. We are incredibly proud of what we have built — and believe we have only scratched the surface of what is possible with computer vision.”

“Today, we are excited to share that we are moving on as a team. Our team and technology will live on, and we will continue using our AI to build great visual search experiences for retail. As part of this next chapter, we are winding down our business.”

Earlier this month, Facebook purchased the team behind blockchain technology company Chainspace, suggesting that it’s pushing forward with reported plans to build a cryptocurrency that would have a steady value relative to a global currency like the United States dollar. This “talent acquisition” was carried out for an undisclosed sum, but we do know that the startup was in the middle of seed funding when key members of its team got hired by Facebook.

The post Facebook’s New Furniture Shopping Startup Uses AI to Help You Buy first appeared on Dornob.

So just why has Japan been at the forefront of robotic development? One of the main reasons is its aging population, with 28 percent over the age of 65. Making the situation worse is a low birth rate of 1.43. In 2018 alone, less than one million babies were born in Japan, compared to 1.37 million deaths. One might think that the country would turn to immigration to make up for those losses, but Japan has only recently conceded that its policy towards immigrants has to change — and even then there’s resistance.

If all this was not bad enough, the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo is putting even more pressure on the country to find solutions to its labor shortage. This event alone will require thousands of volunteers to accommodate all the athletes, coaches, administrative personnel, media, and spectators that will be in attendance.

In an effort to fill that quota, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) will deploy the six-foot-tall, multilingual ARISA humanoid robot in subway stations throughout the city to act as an all-purpose guide. As of right now, people seeking help from ARISA (who comes equipped with an interactive touchscreen) can hear instructions in English, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. By the time the Olympics roll around, ARISA will also have to speak Spanish, French, and Arabic to accommodate even more people.

In December of 2018, ARISA was tested at two subway stops, with TMG preparing for a much wider rollout in the near future. After the Summer Games, there are plans to put an ARISA in other locations throughout Tokyo, and not just on the subway.

The artificial intelligence that ARISA has gives her an advantage over human volunteers and workers, especially when it comes to keeping her job after the most popular sporting event in the world wraps up. Humans forget things, after all, and even those who are extremely familiar with Tokyo would be hard-pressed to tell you the location of the nearest public restroom, post office, or local attraction every single time. It would be like asking a person to be a Google search engine.

The Japanese have become accustomed to dealing with robots on a daily basis. Unlike North America, where the presence of robots outside of manufacturing, law enforcement, and toy stores is viewed with incredulity and even suspicion, the Japanese have wholeheartedly embraced them, using them for things like elder care, education, security, and domestic help.

What does it say about a country when it is more willing to accept humanoid robots into its society but remains reluctant to inviting more immigrants to live among them? Some may say that the reason for choosing robots over people (specifically people from abroad) is plain old xenophobia. But Japan is merely choosing to do something that the rest of the world is leaning towards anyways. They’re just doing it at a faster rate out of necessity. Whether we like to admit it or not, and even with our concerns about smart technology, we are all slowly beginning to trust robots more than we trust humans.

The post Is the ARISA Robot the Answer to Japan’s Labor Shortage? first appeared on Dornob.

This charming little robot is more than just a sweet face. Unlike it’s stationary competition, Zenbo will cruise through the house to personally respond to requests, moving along lines and avoiding obstacles like a Roomba vacuum. Zenbo can also teach itself how to recognize the faces of individual family members and take pictures or videos on command. Interactive by design, the bot listens to voice commands and responds appropriately every time, with the ability to operate in several different languages.

Of course, Zenbo also performs tasks similar to other virtual assistants, serving as a hub for other smart household devices and connected services around the home. The difference is that Zenbo moves about and responds with undeniably adorable expressions, at long last bringing a lifelike face to AI. After all, many software programs can read a recipe out loud, but none also provide facial gestures and cute winks.

As if all that wasn’t enough, the first commercially-available home robot to offer assistance, entertainment, and companionship has also been equipped with storytelling and interactive game functionalities. It can monitor the home by connecting to smart security cameras and aid homeowners and seniors by notifying family members whenever there’s a fall or injury. This goes as far as letting you know if your toddler gets into the medicine cabinet or someone opens a window. Zenbo can also help the family stay connected via social media, shop online, and hear their favorite songs. He can even change the TV channel when you can’t locate the remote or turn lights on and off as you move through the house. With your personal comfort in mind, Zenbo will also turn on the air conditioning or crank up the heat when the weather’s less than ideal.

Although Zenbo can’t perform icky household chores like laundry and toilet cleaning, he can help you be more organized by providing reminders for upcoming events on your calendar like family portrait shoots, work meetings, and doctor’s appointments.

Artificial intelligence is extremely prevalent in Zenbo’s interactive capabilities, responding to simple voice commands in the appropriate way while also seeming to understand more complex requests like “follow me.” When providing step-by-step instructions for recipes and repairs, the little guy will even wait to read each step until you’re fully ready for them.

ASUS’ brilliant design has not gone unnoticed. In fact, Zenbo won big at the 2018 iF Design Awards, an international design competition with over 6,400 entries from 54 countries. The design was also recognized at the 2017 version of Computex Taipei, where they won three awards including Best Choice of the Year Award, Best Choice Golden Award, and the Computex d&i Award. With so much to offer, it seems like we’ll be seeing a lot more of our cartoonish friend in the future. For now, he’s on sale for the affordable price of $600.

The post Meet Zenbo: the Cutest Virtual Assistant You’ll Ever Own first appeared on Dornob.

If safety features like external sensors appear to be welcomed additions to the average automobile, then how would people respond to internal sensors? More specifically, what if your car actually cared about your feelings and personal comfort?

Introduced at CES 2019 earlier in January, the Real-time Emotion Adaptive Driving (R.E.A.D) System is an AI-based system developed by Kia Motors in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. When completed, the system will be capable of recognizing a driver’s emotions and adjusting their car’s temperature and lighting accordingly (though the creators have also been toying with the idea of working in sound, smell, and seat vibration adjustments).

If you don’t feel like going to work, R.E.A.D will know. If your favorite team won the game you just attended, R.E.A.D. will know. When your car is moving as slow as a sloth in traffic and you’re running late for your meeting, R.E.A.D will pick up on your frustration and put on some music to make you smile. Using bio-signal recognition technology, R.E.A.D will pick up on every one of your smiles, smirks, rosy blushes, eyerolls, tears, raised brows, quivering lips, and nervous ticks.

Is it really that important that your car pick up on your sadness after a funeral or your disappointment after losing your job? No, but the incorporation of AI-based systems in car interiors is impactful for gauging a driver’s fatigue level, intoxication level, and overall physical well-being. With all the sensors on the exterior warning people about getting too close to other objects and vehicles, it seemed like just a matter of time before manufacturers began making things safer inside cars, too. Kia is simply the first to develop a working system.

“Kia considers the interactive cabin a focal point for future mobility, and the R.E.A.D. System represents a convergence of cutting-edge vehicle control technology and AI-based emotional intelligence,” explains Albert Biermann, President and Head of the Research & Development Division at the Hyundai Motor Group. “The system enables continuous communication between driver and vehicle through the unspoken language of ‘feeling,’ thereby providing an optimal, human-sense oriented space for the driver in real-time.”

CES attendees were able to go inside Kia’s custom-building experiential modules and experience the ways a R.E.A.D-integrated car would react to them. These modules stood in front of a large screen that displayed the phrase “Amplify Your Joy with Emotive Driving,” with video showcasing some of the system’s other outstanding features.

The post Kia’s Emotive Driving System Will Change the Way We Interact with Car Interiors first appeared on Dornob.

To get things started, the company set us up to operate remote control cars with our minds. As strange as that concept may seem, the headband we used to do so made it feel incredibly natural. More specifically, our brainwaves were being converted into digital instructions that told the cars to move around the track they were on — an especially amusing feature given the fact that human beings can think faster than they can react. No need to remember which button did what.

Once the thrill of racing with our minds subsided, we started thinking about all the other potential applications for BrainCo products. With their FocusFIT headband, the link between mind and body is strengthened even more. Its accompanying tablet app uses neurofeedback technology to give users actionable information both before and after their workouts. The headband is put on pre-workout, with cognitive games available on the app to help sharpen your focus and achieve an ideal performance. Once your workout is over, FocusFIT uses guided meditation to help your muscles recover more efficiently. You can then track their progress over the course of several sessions.

In the classroom, BrainCo’s FocusEDU could be used to quantify a student’s level of engagement with course materials in real-time. In this scenario, each student would be given a headband to help them calm down, concentrate, and meditate on course material. If a student is having difficulty in mathematics, the teacher will instantly know exactly where the breakdown in comprehension has occurred. If they’re simply not paying attention, the educator will know that, too, no matter how hard the student may try to conceal their daydreaming.

Over the course of the school year, teachers could also use FocusEDU to critique their own teaching methods based on the brainwave data collected. Were the technology to become ubiquitous in schools, there would no longer be a need for report cards or teacher evaluations — the data would tell the students, teachers, school administrators, and parents almost everything that they needed to know.

Even if you’re not a fitness buff or a student, BrainCo’s FocusNow can help you work more efficiently, tracking your performance for you and determining the areas where the quality of your work could be better.

As double-amputee athlete Mincheng Ni showed us, even the most challenging of tasks can be done if we put our minds to it. Ni performs using one of BrainCo’s award-winning AI-powered prosthetic hands, which learn their users’ habitual motions to create a more fluid piece that feels like a real arm, further proving the company’s motto, “your brain controls everything.”

Considering the millions of people that stand to benefit from the convergence of machine learning and neuroscience, it’s safe to say that BrainCo’s potential is more pronounced than we can even begin to think about.

The post BrainCo Blows Minds at CES 2019 first appeared on Dornob.

At CES, Dornob’s Editor-in-Chief got the chance to go head-to-head with the mighty FORPHEUS in front of an initially skeptical audience. It wasn’t long before everyone’s face began to show looks of astonishment, as the machine managed to match her each and every move! Utilizing its high-speed multi-axis arm, FORPHEUS mimics the movements that a human wrist and elbow perform during a typical ping-pong match, allowing it to put things like topspin and backspin on all of it shots.

The newest incarnation of the ping-pong robot runs on a four-camera system, a quarter of which is made up of a high-speed image processing camera that helps its sense its opponent’s skill level, form, position, and racket speed, as well as the trajectory of the ball in play. The bot can then analyze this data and compare their opponent’s moves to those of professional players, further enhancing its personalized coaching feature.

FORPHEUS stands for “Future OMRON Robotics Technology for Exploring Possibility of Harmonized Automation with Sinic Theoretics,” so it’s pretty easy to see why the acronym was needed. According to the company website, the ultra-intelligent bot has the ability to detect a ping-pong ball’s location up to 80 times per second during a match. It might be hard to imagine this giant piece of machinery ever sitting in someone’s garage or game room, but we can see how the advanced technology behind it could soon be used to improve other areas of everyday life in the future.

When all was said and done, FORPHEUS was definitely one of the most impressive products Dornob got to interact with at CES 2019. The 10-foot-ball ping-pong robot vied for attention with customer service robots, motorcycle helmets with built-in tracking technology, gesture controlled drones, an 8,000-pound bionic exoskeleton that can allegedly reach speeds of up to 20 miles per hour, and a ton of other mind-blowing technology we didn’t even realize existed yet (or knew we needed).

The OMRON team explains that they aim “to improve lives and contribute to a better society,” upholding a key belief that businesses should give value to their communities, not detract from them. They strive to bring sustainability to their industry while using their innovation-driven technologies and concepts to solve large-scale social issues.

Who ever thought a ping-pong robot could have such a big impact?

The post Getting Served by FORPHEUS, the Ping-Pong Robot that Dominated CES 2019 first appeared on Dornob.

Truly Personalized Skin Care

This groundbreaking concept, tentatively called Identité, would provide you with the all cosmetics you needed based on your diet, schedule, and upcoming travel destinations. AI would analyze the data you supplied via an accompanying smartphone app, picking out and shipping extremely personalized selections of beauty and skin care products to your door on a weekly basis.

The AI analysis is two-tiered. First, it creates a profile based on each user’s personal and business lifestyle, skin type, and environment. Next, it refines that profile based on user-supplied information regarding upcoming events.

Each weekly drop-off would consist entirely of eco-friendly, single-use products like strength-appropriate BB (blemish balm) cream and sunscreen. On top of that, these products would be chalk-full of omega-3 enhancements and anti-pollution antigens. By using only single-use modules, the company can put fewer preservatives in their products without worry.

How It Works

Seymourpowell has given the public three different scenarios to illustrate the Identité business model, the first of which involves a client set to vacation in Tulum, Mexico. Identité analyzes the hot, humid atmosphere and the typical activities of a beachfront getaway and, without human intervention, ships the customer sea salt hair gel, bronzer, aloe vera after-sun lotion, and, just for fun, some temporary tattoos.

When that person returns and schedules a business meeting in New York, Identité automatically shifts gears. It automatically ships them a long-lasting lipstick based on the client’s skin and hair tones, along with double-cleansing, charcoal-infused purification pads to clean away a day’s worth of urban grunge.

If a client is going to spend a weekend hiking or doing double-time at the gym, the Identité AI would probably prioritize supplements to boost energy and stamina.

Looking Forward

Although Identité is still an abstract concept, it’s based on actual research conducted through extensive interviews with beauty market experts and influencers around the world. These conversations revealed that consumers are relying on digital culture more than ever to research and purchase beauty products and health supplements. Besides websites, social media platforms like Reddit and Instagram seem to be popular sources for advice and information sharing.

In a recent interview, Seymourpowell director Mariel Brown explained that “There’s currently a lot of disruption within the beauty category and as a result, many nuanced and contradictory behaviors to unpack. Widespread connectivity is having a profound impact on people’s attitudes toward personal identity. We became curious as to how new technologies might combine with these new behaviors.”

Identité also concentrates on using more natural products and more unobjectionable packaging. Currently, the planned packaging is made of injection-molded, fully biodegradable fiber.

The post Seymourpowell’s New AI-Based Delivery Service Lets You Customize Your Skin Care Practices first appeared on Dornob.