5G and the tactile internet: what really is it? — from techradar.com by Catherine Ellis
With 5G, we can go beyond audio and video, communicating through touch
Excerpt:
However, the speed and capacity of 5G also opens up a wealth of new opportunities with other connected devices, including real-time interaction in ways that have never been possible before.
One of the most exciting of these is tactile, or haptic communication – transmitting a physical sense of touch remotely.
Excerpts:
From DSC:
That last one reminded me of why I think the Living from the Living [Class] Room vision is so powerful…
Virtual reality helping those with developmental disabilities — from kivitv.com by Matt Sizemore
How VR is making autistic individuals more independent
Excerpts:
EAGLE, IDAHO — If you think modern day virtual reality is just for gaming, think again. New technology is helping those with developmental disabilities do more than ever before, and much of that can be found right in their own backyard.
…
“I see unlimited potential inside of their minds. I see us being able to unlock a certain person who can achieve things that we never thought could be done, and all of this could happen off of just exposing them to virtual reality,” said Smythe.
VR1 and the Autism XR Institute are constantly creating tools and ideas to help kids and adults with autism live a more independent life through virtual reality.
Also see:
Making a final wish comes true: Hospice expanding virtual reality therapy — from galioninquirer.com by Russell Kent
Excerpt:
ASHLAND — Hospice of North Central Ohio is extending its virtual reality therapy (VRT) in an effort to help Richland County hospice and palliative patients fulfill their last wishes, thanks to a $7,000 grant from the Robert and Esther Black Family Foundation Fund of The Richland County Foundation.
VRT uses video technology to generate realistic 360-degree, photographic or animated three-dimensional images, accompanied by sounds from the actual environment. When donning the headset and headphones, viewers are surrounded by visuals and sounds that give the impression of being physically present in the environment. Virtual reality therapy treatment allows patients to relive memories, return to places of emotional significance, or experience something or somewhere that they desire.
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality | The Future of Healthcare — from creativitism.blog by with thanks to Woontack Woo for this resource
Excerpt:
When we talk about virtual reality, most people think about its advancement in the gaming industry. But now Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) is being introduced in other sectors as well. A great example is the use of VR in the medical sector: the application of this latest technology has entered the field of healthcare and can bring great difference and be of great help both in training and in the practice of medical activities.
In fact, the medical sector is one of the main fields of action of Virtual Reality. There are so many applications to help both doctors and patients. The advantages of Virtual Reality are now applied in surgeries, in patients with disorders and phobias, in the treatment of diseases and especially in medical training.Frequently, people have such disorders as: tachycardia, panic attacks, antisocial behavior, anxiety, as well as psychological trauma after violence, traffic accidents, etc. Using VR / AR applications, patients receive a course of rehabilitation therapy.
Also see:
American students have changed their majors — from bloomberg.com by Justin Fox
Health professions are in, education and the humanities are out. Here are some reasons for the shift.
How the internet of things will change your life — from uk.rs-online.com
‘Internet of Things’ is transforming health care, Geneia president says — from unionleader.com by Kim Haas
What are the issues with Fog Computing? — from yourtechdiet.com by Brian Curtis
Advantages:
• It reduces the amount of data transferred to the cloud by having an edge location.
• Supports mobility and improves system response time.
• It minimizes network latency and conserves network bandwidth.
• Data can be processed with no bandwidth availability.
• Acts like an intermediate b/w IOT devices and Cloud computing infrastructure.
Disadvantages:
• It has some wireless security issues and privacy concerns.
• Authentication issues and trusted certificates concern
Fog computing helps in building some of the Smart Hi-Tech Cities, Buildings, Vehicle networks and Software Defined Networks (SDN).
Smart building complexity is creating dangerous new hacking opportunities — from techradar.com by Ian Heritage
Complex IoT environments can spell bad news for IT professionals
How 5G will fast track the internet of things — from .inkstonenews.com by Zheping Huang
Excerpt:
In Hangzhou, police officers are notified of major car accidents soon after they happen, traffic lights automatically adjust to changes in the volume of vehicles on the road and, in emergencies, fire trucks and ambulances are not stopped by a single red light until they arrive at the scene.
The city in eastern China’s Zhejiang province is one of the country’s major tech hubs. Its smart infrastructure powers the City Brain project, a cloud computing and AI-driven urban traffic-management system. It covers a total area of 162 square miles – that’s seven times the size of Manhattan.
When 5G mobile services start to roll out worldwide next year, smart cities such as Hangzhou will get even smarter as next-generation wireless technology helps industries realize the full potential of the internet of things (IoT).
“5G, from the beginning of its infrastructure design, has the internet of things in mind,” said Cui Kai, a Beijing-based IoT analyst with research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).
The stakes are high for industries around the world, as global spending on IoT is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in 2022, up from an estimated $745 billion this year, according to IDC.
With peak data rates up to 20 times faster than 4G, 5G will serve as “the connective tissue” for IoT, autonomous cars, smart cities and new mobile applications – providing the backbone for the industrial internet, according to a Deloitte report.
How the Internet of Things (IoT) can change the face of your business — from yourtechdiet.com by Brian Curtis
What is an IoT platform?
IOT platform is the support software which connects hardware, data networks and access points to other parts, i.e. to end-user application. Moreover, the IOT platform helps to automate their environment. So you can consider it as a middleware solution between data and the user.
…
Here are the five reasons why your business needs IoT.
Report: Over 60% of college students face hunger or housing insecurity — from educationdive.com by James Paterson
Excerpt:
Seven out of 10 students at two-year colleges and six out of 10 students at four-year colleges indicated that they faced food or housing insecurity sometime in the last 12 months, according to The Hope Center’s latest #RealCollege report, which surveyed almost 86,000 students last fall.
Also see:
Augmented Reality: The Future of Medicine — from interestingengineering.com by Susan Fourtané
Augmented Reality can change brain surgery thanks to powerful diagnostic platforms, revolutionize radiology, and open new doors to reconstructive surgery.
Excerpt:
Augmented Reality (AR), also known as spatial computing — a merging of digital and physical spaces — is one of the current technology trends that, together with Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR), is changing all industries, including healthcare and medical education.
Microsoft rolls out healthcare bot: How it will change healthcare industry — from yourtechdiet.com by Brian Curtis
Excerpt:
AI and the Healthcare Industry
This technology is evidently the game changer in the healthcare industry. According to the reports by Frost & Sullivan, the AI market for healthcare is likely to experience a CAGR of 40% by 2021, and has the potential to change industry outcomes by 30-40%, while cutting treatment costs in half.
In the words of Satya Nadella, “AI is the runtime that is going to shape all of what we do going forward in terms of the applications as well as the platform advances”.
Here are a few ways Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot will shape the Healthcare Industry…
Also see:
Voice as the Next Frontier for Conveniently Accessing Healthcare Services
Virtual embodiment: High impact learning — from tlinnovations.cikeys.com by
Excerpt:
It’s officially been one year since we started exploring immersive virtual learning with nursing students, starting with the Embodied Labs product:Becoming Alfred. The virtual product consists of an immersive simulated experience using virtual reality (VR) designed by Embodied Labs. Embodied Labs has three scenario series, referred to as labs:
From DSC:
I moderated a panel back at the NGLS Conference in 2017, and Carrie was one of the panelists talking about some of the promising applications of virtual reality. Carrie is doing marvelous work! Carrie’s mom had Alzheimer’s and my mom has that as well (as did my grandmother). It’s a tough disease to watch develop. Perhaps a student reading this out there will be the person to find a solution to this enormous issue.
Gradually, then suddenly: Lessons from Silicon Valley for the future of healthcare — from slideshare.net by Tim O’Reilly
Excerpted slides:
Microsoft built a chat bot to match patients to clinical trials — from fortune.com by Dina Bass
Excerpt:
A chat bot that began as a hackathon project at Microsoft’s lab in Israel makes it easier for sick patients to find clinical trials that could provide otherwise unavailable medicines and therapies.
The Clinical Trials Bot lets patients and doctors search for studies related to a disease and then answer a succession of text questions. The bot then suggests links to trials that best match the patients’ needs. Drugmakers can also use it to find test subjects.
Half of all clinical trials for new drugs and therapies never reach the number of patients needed to start, and many others are delayed for the same reason, Bitran said. Meanwhile patients, sometimes desperately sick, find it hard to comb through the roughly 50,000 trials worldwide and their arcane and lengthy criteria—typically 20 to 30 factors. Even doctors struggle to search quickly on behalf of patients, Bitran said.
Philips, Microsoft Unveils Augmented Reality Concept for Operating Room of the Future — from hitconsultant.net by Fred Pennic
Excerpt:
Health technology company Philips unveiled a unique mixed reality concept developed together with Microsoft Corp. for the operating room of the future. Based on the state-of-the-art technologies of Philips’Azurion image-guided therapy platform and Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 holographic computing platform, the companies will showcase novel augmented reality applications for image-guided minimally invasive therapies.
Police across the US are training crime-predicting AIs on falsified data — from technologyreview.com by Karen Hao
A new report shows how supposedly objective systems can perpetuate corrupt policing practices.
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
Despite the disturbing findings, the city entered a secret partnership only a year later with data-mining firm Palantir to deploy a predictive policing system. The system used historical data, including arrest records and electronic police reports, to forecast crime and help shape public safety strategies, according to company and city government materials. At no point did those materials suggest any effort to clean or amend the data to address the violations revealed by the DOJ. In all likelihood, the corrupted data was fed directly into the system, reinforcing the department’s discriminatory practices.
…
But new research suggests it’s not just New Orleans that has trained these systems with “dirty data.” In a paper released today, to be published in the NYU Law Review, researchers at the AI Now Institute, a research center that studies the social impact of artificial intelligence, found the problem to be pervasive among the jurisdictions it studied. This has significant implications for the efficacy of predictive policing and other algorithms used in the criminal justice system.
“Your system is only as good as the data that you use to train it on,” says Kate Crawford, cofounder and co-director of AI Now and an author on the study.
How AI is enhancing wearables — from techopedia.com by Claudio Butticev
Takeaway: Wearable devices have been helping people for years now, but the addition of AI to these wearables is giving them capabilities beyond anything seen before.
Excerpt:
Restoring Lost Sight and Hearing – Is That Really Possible?
People with sight or hearing loss must face a lot of challenges every day to perform many basic activities. From crossing the street to ordering food on the phone, even the simplest chore can quickly become a struggle. Things may change for these struggling with sight or hearing loss, however, as some companies have started developing machine learning-based systems to help the blind and visually impaired find their way across cities, and the deaf and hearing impaired enjoy some good music.
German AI company AiServe combined computer vision and wearable hardware (camera, microphone and earphones) with AI and location services to design a system that is able to acquire data over time to help people navigate through neighborhoods and city blocks. Sort of like a car navigation system, but in a much more adaptable form which can “learn how to walk like a human” by identifying all the visual cues needed to avoid common obstacles such as light posts, curbs, benches and parked cars.
From DSC:
So once again we see the pluses and minuses of a given emerging technology. In fact, most technologies can be used for good or for ill. But I’m left with asking the following questions:
One other reflection here…it’s the combination of some of these emerging technologies that will be really interesting to see what happens in the future…again, for good or for ill.
The question is:
How can we weigh in?
Also relevant/see:
AI Now Report 2018 — from ainowinstitute.org, December 2018
Excerpt:
University AI programs should expand beyond computer science and engineering disciplines. AI began as an interdisciplinary field, but over the decades has narrowed to become a technical discipline. With the increasing application of AI systems to social domains, it needs to expand its disciplinary orientation. That means centering forms of expertise from the social and humanistic disciplines. AI efforts that genuinely wish to address social implications cannot stay solely within computer science and engineering departments, where faculty and students are not trained to research the social world. Expanding the disciplinary orientation of AI research will ensure deeper attention to social contexts, and more focus on potential hazards when these systems are applied to human populations.
Furthermore, it is long overdue for technology companies to directly address the cultures of exclusion and discrimination in the workplace. The lack of diversity and ongoing tactics of harassment, exclusion, and unequal pay are not only deeply harmful to employees in these companies but also impacts the AI products they release, producing tools that perpetuate bias and discrimination.
The current structure within which AI development and deployment occurs works against meaningfully addressing these pressing issues. Those in a position to profit are incentivized to accelerate the development and application of systems without taking the time to build diverse teams, create safety guardrails, or test for disparate impacts. Those most exposed to harm from 42 these systems commonly lack the financial means and access to accountability mechanisms that would allow for redress or legal appeals. 233 This is why we are arguing for greater funding for public litigation, labor organizing, and community participation as more AI and algorithmic systems shift the balance of power across many institutions and workplaces.
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