The future of connectivity is no longer about faster downloads on your phone. It’s about stitching Earth and sky into one seamless network. For the first time, Korean researchers have demonstrated integrated terrestrial-satellite 6G hyper-space communication in real flight tests—a breakthrough that signals the dawn of a communication system where no place, and no moment, is offline.
Continue reading… “6G Hyper-Space Communication: Erasing the Boundary Between Earth and Sky”Breakthrough in Wireless Communication: Enhancing Indoor Location Precision with RIS Technology
Engineers from the University of Glasgow, along with colleagues from the U.K. and Australia, have made a significant breakthrough in wireless communications that could revolutionize indoor location tracking. This development has the potential to aid emergency services in locating individuals trapped in smoke-filled buildings and provide device-assisted navigation for the blind and partially sighted. Additionally, it could enhance mobile phone signal quality indoors, eliminating the need to search for optimal spots to make calls.
The research, detailed in a new paper published in the journal Communications Engineering, focuses on improving an emerging wireless communication technology known as Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS). RIS consists of flat surfaces with programmable elements that manipulate electromagnetic waves, including high-frequency signals used in wireless communications.
Continue reading… “Breakthrough in Wireless Communication: Enhancing Indoor Location Precision with RIS Technology”One Of The Creators Of Google Glass Is Experimenting With A Smart Retainer For Texting With Your Tongue
The academic project works by having users mouth letters to spell words — without actually speaking them.
A project led by one of the key creators of Google Glass, the tech giant’s influential but ultimately ill-fated smart eyewear, aims to let people have conversations without talking or using their hands to type, sign, or gesture.
Called SilentSpeller, the project is a communication system that allows people to send texts using a high-tech dental retainer to spell out words without actually voicing them, according to a demo video and academic paper reviewed by BuzzFeed News. The device works by tracking the movement of the user’s tongue. Researchers claim the system identifies letters with 97% accuracy, and 93% accuracy for entire words.
The research is the brainchild of Thad Starner, a pioneer in wearable technology. Starner played a lead technical role in developing Google Glass, the much-hyped device that helped introduce the world to a new genre of gadgets beyond smartphones. But the device courted controversy and pushed the bounds of society’s relationship with technology when Google introduced it almost a decade ago. SilentSpeller, by contrast, is a research project out of the Georgia Institute of Technology, where Starner is a professor, so the goal for now is more academic than product road map.
However, the device could eventually be used to help people with movement disorders including Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor, Starner told BuzzFeed News in an interview. He also sees potential consumer applications, like hands-free communication in really quiet places, like a library, or really loud places where people would have to strain their voices to be heard.
To develop SilentSpeller, researchers didn’t create a whole new retainer from scratch. Instead, they jury-rigged an existing product called SmartPalate, which looks like the kind of retainer used by orthodontists but is loaded with tiny sensors to track tongue movement for speech therapy. Software creates a visual map of how someone’s tongue functions while speaking, but while SmartPalate’s primary use is to help people correct speech disorders, researchers working on SilentSpeller adapted the system to transform the retainer into a communications tool.
Continue reading… “One Of The Creators Of Google Glass Is Experimenting With A Smart Retainer For Texting With Your Tongue”Alphabet will use beams of light to deliver internet in Kenya
The moonshot project has a new name, too.
It’s been a while since we’ve heard about Alphabet’s Free Space Optical Communications (FSOC) project. If you’ve forgotten all about it, we don’t blame you: the acronym doesn’t stick in the mind quite like Google Fiber or Project Loon. To solve the problem, Alphabet’s ‘X’ division has renamed the initiative Project Taara. (I like it, though Project Tidal already starts with the letter ’T.’ If both moonshots ’graduate’ and become fully-fledged companies, one will have to rebrand or ruin Alphabet’s otherwise immaculate naming scheme.) It suggests that Google’s parent company now sees the technology, which uses laser-beaming boxes to deliver connectivity, as something that can eventually become a real business.
In a blog post, Taara general manager Mahesh Krishnaswamy announced that the team is formally working with telecoms giant Econet in Africa. It’s not clear, however, if any money is changing hands. Initially, Taara’s hardware will support Econet subsidiary Liquid Telecom in Kenya. It’s an obvious move given that the moonshot has already trialed its technology in the country, which followed pilots in Andhra Pradesh, a state in India.
Continue reading… “Alphabet will use beams of light to deliver internet in Kenya”
By 2024, 5G could be beamed to your phone using huge, hydrogen-powered aircraft
A Stratospheric Platforms antenna, inside a testing chamber
In the near future, your phone may take its 5G signal from the sky instead of a nearby mast on the ground. It’s an innovative way to solve the problem of increasing connectivity without relying on thousands of terrestrial cell towers. The concept is known as a High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS), and it essentially takes the cell tower from the ground and puts it in the sky.
The latest HAPS project to be unveiled is from Stratospheric Platforms and Cambridge Consultants. Today, the pair revealed the core of its efforts, a special antenna and unmanned aircraft, which it has been working on confidentially for the last four years.
Continue reading… “By 2024, 5G could be beamed to your phone using huge, hydrogen-powered aircraft”
New ‘A.I. lawyer’ analyzes your emails to find moneysaving loopholes
Email systems have gotten smarter. Whether it’s filtering out spam, prioritizing the messages we need to respond to, reminding us when we’ve forgotten to include a mentioned attachment, or suggesting appropriate responses, 2020 email has come a long way from the basic inboxes of yesteryear. But there’s still further they can go — and Joshua Browder, the creator of the robot lawyer service DoNotPay, believes he’s come up with a way to make email even more user-friendly. (Hint: It involves saving people money.)
Browder, for those unfamiliar with him, is the legal tech genius who has been creating automated legal bots for the past several years. Whether it’s helping appeal parking fines (where the original DoNotPay name came from) or aiding people in gaining unemployment benefits, he’s focused on one consumer rights area after the other to disrupt through automation.
Continue reading… “New ‘A.I. lawyer’ analyzes your emails to find moneysaving loopholes”
The quantum internet will blow your mind. Here’s what it will look like
The next generation of the Internet will rely on revolutionary new tech — allowing for unhackable networks and information that travels faster than the speed of light.
Call it the quantum Garden of Eden. Fifty or so miles east of New York City, on the campus of Brookhaven National Laboratory, Eden Figueroa is one of the world’s pioneering gardeners planting the seeds of a quantum internet. Capable of sending enormous amounts of data over vast distances, it would work not just faster than the current internet but faster than the speed of light — instantaneously, in fact, like the teleportation of Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk in Star Trek.
Continue reading… “The quantum internet will blow your mind. Here’s what it will look like”
New research advances U.S. Army’s quest for ultra-secure quantum networking
Two U.S. Army research projects at the University of Chicago advance quantum networking, which will play a key role in future battlefield operations.
Quantum networks will potentially deliver multiple novel capabilities not achievable with classical networks, one of which is secure quantum communication. In quantum communication protocols, information is typically sent through entangled photon particles. It is nearly impossible to eavesdrop on quantum communication, and those who try leave evidence of their tampering; however, sending quantum information via photons over traditional channels, such as fiber-optic lines, is difficult – the photons carrying the information are often corrupted or lost, making the signals weak or incoherent.
In the first project, the University of Chicago research team, funded and managed by the U.S. Army’s Combat Capability Development’s Army Research Laboratory’s Center for Distributed Quantum Information, demonstrated a new quantum communication technique that bypasses those traditional channels. The research linked two communication nodes with a channel and sent information quantum-mechanically between the nodes—without ever occupying the linking channel.
“This result is particularly exciting not only because of the high transfer efficiency the team achieved, but also because the system they developed will enable further exploration of quantum protocols in the presence of variable signal loss,” said Dr. Sara Gamble, program manager at the lab’s Army Research Office and co-manager of the Center for Distributed Quantum Information. “Overcoming loss is a key obstacle in realizing robust quantum communication and quantum networks.”
Continue reading… “New research advances U.S. Army’s quest for ultra-secure quantum networking”
Inside Facebook’s new power grab
Mark Zuckerberg is not a man used to failure. He has built a $600-billion empire, buying up or crushing most would-be competitors and brushing regulators aside. When, in 2015, he personally headed up an effort – first called internet.org, then “Free Basics” – to help 3.5 billion people worldwide who don’t have access to the internet get connected, he might have expected praise for what he framed as philanthropy. The service would offer free unlimited access to a selection of hand-picked websites to people in India and countries across Asia, South America and Africa – getting more people online while, incidentally, making Facebook the controllers of the front page of the internet for these new users.
The praise did not come. Facebook was accused of “digital colonialism”, and of creating “poor internet for poor people”. There were even street protests against Free Basics in India, the country Zuckerberg had visited to promote the initiative. As political pressure mounted, in 2016 Free Basics was effectively outlawed by Indian regulators. The debacle was for a time described as “Facebook’s biggest setback”. If you only look at the headlines, Free Basics – and Facebook’s mission to connect the world – all but disappeared after that. But the reality of what happened next is very different.
“The project kept expanding – albeit much more discreetly,” explains Dr Toussaint Nothias, director of research at the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab. “At the end of 2015, Facebook reported that Free Basics was available in 30 countries. Today, they say it’s available in ‘more than 55 countries’. In Africa [alone], I found that it’s available in 29 countries.”
Working far more quietly than before, Facebook has spearheaded efforts across the globe to connect people to the internet – working on technology, software, business models and more. The company refined Free Basics to give it less control over which sites users could access, and in May 2020 launched a successor, Discover, which allows users a daily allowance of data they can use to access any website.
Continue reading… “Inside Facebook’s new power grab”
The big future of satellite internet just took a promising step forward
As companies like SpaceX and Amazon scramble the satellites to build internet constellations, an old piece of tech gets an update.
Some of the biggest companies in the world, like Amazon and SpaceX, are looking towards space for the future of the Internet. Satellite-based Internet is a nascent enterprise, but analysts believe that broadband Internet beamed to Earth from orbit could be a massive business fewer than 20 years, earning hundreds of billions of dollars.
Attention has focused on the “space” part of “space Internet,” with news stories focused on the rocket launches getting SpaceX’s Starlink satellites into space, and how Amazon plans to catch up with satellites of its own. But all of these satellites will need transceivers on Earth to send and receive data. Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Socionext Inc. have built a new one that is made to work with the next generation of Internet satellites.
Continue reading… “The big future of satellite internet just took a promising step forward”
Cambridge researchers create a touchscreen you don’t have to touch
We’d assume at this point that every smartphone user knows that their touchscreen is one of the nastiest devices they own. The surface of a touchscreen can be packed with viruses and bacteria that have the potential to make people sick. This is a particularly significant issue in the current world climate with the coronavirus pandemic leading to illnesses that could potentially kill people.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have been working on a new type of touchscreen that doesn’t have to be touched. It’s called the “no-touch touchscreen” and was developed specifically for use in cars. Researchers believe that it could have widespread applications in the post-COVID-19 world thanks to its ability to reduce the risk pathogen transmission from the surface of devices. The patent behind the technology is known as “predictive touch” and was developed as part of research collaboration with Jaguar Land Rover.
Continue reading… “Cambridge researchers create a touchscreen you don’t have to touch”
How COVID-19 ended the Information Era and ushered in the Age of Insight
Tech companies will play a crucial role in making the next wave of progress a reality.
The COVID-19 crisis was the catalyst for rapid change and brought with it the opportunity to accelerate towards a brighter future;
A new era that is defined by insights and discoveries that benefit all of society has arrived;
Technology companies will play a crucial role in ensuring this transformation is sustainable, inclusive, and trustworthy.
COVID-19 introduced challenges that we as a society were not ready to address. We are converting to a digital-first world overnight. Becoming fully connected. Ensuring all of our personal data is protected. And taking steps to not leave anyone behind in this new digital economy.
Continue reading… “How COVID-19 ended the Information Era and ushered in the Age of Insight”
