Researchers use AI to banish choppy streaming videos

Nobody likes it when their binge watching is disrupted by a buffering video. While streaming sites like Netflix have offered workarounds for connectivity problems (including offline viewing and quality controls), researchers are tackling the issue head on. In August, a team from MIT CSAIL unveiled its solution: A neural network that can pick the ideal algorithms to ensure a smooth stream at the best possible quality. But, they’re not alone in their quest to banish video stutters. The folks at France’s EPFL university are also tapping into machine learning as part of their own method. The researchers claim their program can boost the user experience by 37 percent, while also reducing power loads by almost 20 percent.

The likes of YouTube and Netflix rely on systems that are "inefficient," claims post-doctoral researcher Marina Zapater Sanch. "They store either one copy of a video in the highest-quality format possible, or dozens of copies in different formats." This can result in slow and choppy streaming, or a crippling server storage load, according to Sanch.

Like CSAIL before them, her team taught their program to learn from experience. Specifically, the AI monitored 1,000 people playing a video across an exhaustive range of devices. The system then memorized the series of actions that led to better quality streams. The project is still in its infancy, which may explain why the researchers aren’t elaborating on its details. Still, it could have real world applications for video platforms in the future. But, first the team want to modify it for real-time streaming: A system where just one copy of a video can be optimized for each particular user.

Source: EPFL

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The year’s 10 most incredible aerospace inventions

This article is a segment of 2017’s Best of What’s New list. For the complete tabulation of the year’s most transformative products and discoveries, head right this way.


Boeing’s Starliner Space Suit

Lightweight boots with sneaker-like soles (designed by Reebok) plus knitted nylon-mesh joints let astronauts in the Starliner easily maneuver and stretch to reach distant control switches. A soft hood and zippers that loosen the torso fabric when standing, or tuck it away when sitting, add comfort. And conductive leather on the gloves allows deep-space snapchats and touchscreen interaction.

Storms develop fast and every minute can matter, so the GOES-16 satellite scans high-risk areas every 30 seconds. Five times speedier than prior sats, it gathers lightning-flash data and other information that forecasters haven’t had before.

Like a militarized fleet of ducklings, Mako drones fall into formation behind their leader. These 20-foot-long combat craft track and mirror a manned fighter jet’s movements. In battle, the mini flyers are expendable companions (armed with bombs and missiles) and can release even smaller versions Russian-nesting-doll-style to overwhelm enemies’ targeting defense systems.

Cirrus Aircraft’s Vision Jet

A single, seamless carbon-fiber frame makes the $2 million Cirrus Vision Jet sturdy enough to sport a panoramic 180-degree windshield. From their spots behind the cockpit, up to five passengers can enjoy almost unimpeded views at 28,000 feet from their luxury-car-like seats. The 30.7-foot plane’s single top-mounted engine won’t bother them either; its placement away from the cabin in the middle of the V-shaped tail, separate from the spin-resistant wings, reduces internal noise. In case of emergency, a parachute stashed in the nose can float everyone down to safety. Yes, it has cup holders.

DARPA’s Fast Lightweight Autonomy program

Drones don’t see objects; they see pixels. The Fast Lightweight Autonomy program teaches them to recognize doors as openings or trees as obstacles so they can navigate without humans or GPS. The system retrofits crafts with cameras and sensors, which guide them at up to 40 miles per hour through dense forests or warehouses. Without ground-to-drone contact, the bad guys will have trouble hijacking ’em.

Over-the-pole plane tracker

As long as planes have existed, they’ve been virtually unaccounted for when they fly more than 200 miles offshore. Air-traffic controllers track planes via ground-based receivers, called ADS-Bs, that pick up signals from transponders inside aircraft. By launching those receivers skyward on 81 satellites, 40 of which went up this year, Aireon will deliver the first unimpeded view of crafts flying over seas and poles.

Balloons’ buoyancy makes studying Earth from the edge of space simple. The trouble is, they float away. World View’s solar-powered Stratollite has a dual-balloon system that takes advantage of air currents to stay put. It’ll dip down into one gust for a few miles, then rise into an opposing breeze to move back. Up to 220 pounds of weather sensors and radio transmitters can hitch a ride—no pricey rocket fuel required.

Pods that ferry loads from the ISS today splash down in the ocean, where they float and wait for retrieval. The Dream Chaser will deliver cargo autonomously, straight to commercial strips. The smooth lander pulls 1.5 G’s versus the standard 4-plus, so sensitive experiments will arrive intact. At liftoff, the ship’s wings fold inward, allowing its 30-foot-long body to tuck inside the nose cone of a NASA Atlas V rocket.

The few carbon-rich asteroids circling our sun might hold the precursors to life on Earth, little changed over the millenniums. That’s why the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft blasted toward them late last year. The 20-foot-long explorer has spent
the intervening time positioning itself for a gravity-assisted slingshot around our pale blue dot. Next year, it will sidle up to the asteroid Bennu and extend its arm to collect samples.

Grand Award Winner: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy

With 28 engines firing ­together in a coordinated, cacophonous symphony of rocket fuel, the Falcon Heavy lifts off with 5 million pounds of force—more than any ship since the retired ’70s-era Saturn V—and twice the payload weight of any other modern spacecraft. Those thrusters equate to three space-cargo-hauling Falcon 9 rockets and will tote tens of thousands of pounds of satellites, a solar sailing spacecraft, and eventually two lunar tourists. The side boosters burn first and land back on Earth, while the center engine makes the final push out of the atmosphere. The more hardware SpaceX can recover, including that last stage, the cheaper (and cheaper) the flights become. Success in these early missions will prove that this is the ship with the horsepower, reliability, and price point to shuttle humans to Mars.


Best of What’s New was originally published in the November/December 2017 issue of Popular Science.

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Explore (most of) the solar system in Google Maps

Google first added the moon and Mars to Google Maps back in 2014 to commemorate the Curiosity rover’s second year exploring the red planet. Sure, you couldn’t zoom down to Street View level, but it’s the closest many of us will get to the celestial bodies. If that wasn’t enough extraterrestrial fun, Google has answered your prayers: Mercury, Venus, Pluto and ten moons from other planets have been included in the roster.

Notably missing are the gas giants. Instead, users can venture around several moons from Jupiter and Saturn, including Enceladus where the recently-deceased probe Cassini discovered evidence of a global ocean. After you’ve ventured out to the edge of our solar system viewing the non-planet Pluto, make sure to take a walkthrough of the ISS on the way back, which Google Maps added in July.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Google

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Studio Stick portable recording studio for smartphones

studio-stickThe modern day smartphone is indeed an indispensable tool for anyone and everyone, where it functions as our primary camera, our navigation device, our portable media player, our fitness tracker, and for some, a simple microphone to take down audio notes as and when required. All of these in addition to it being a primary communications device to keep us connected to the rest of the world. However, no one has really tried to turn the smartphone into a portable recording studio, not until now with the introduction of the Studio Stick.

The Studio Stick is touted to be the world’s first portable recording studio for smartphones which will enable users to record high quality songs/audio regardless of where they are, and at a far lower cost compared to renting a professional studio. Being a Kickstarter project, the Studio Stick will first need to raise the necessary amount of funds before it will become reality. The ultimate objective is to democratize the studio recording experience, so that artists can gain access to a professional recording studio without having to blow their budget.

Arriving in a tiny, 20-inch container which can open and expand to an adjustable height, the Studio Stick will feature a microphone, pop filter, mic stand, reflective filter, and phone holder once it is opened. This will then allow artists to be able to record high quality songs just about anywhere and at any time, making it a great tool to have around when inspiration hits. With the Studio Stick app, artists can also record, mix, and master songs, as though they were right smack in a traditional recording studio. Not only that, you can also proceed to sell or purchase beats directly from other users through the apps marketplace, and once the songs are completed, feel free to distribute them to major online retailers such as iTunes, Google Play, and Spotify among others via the Studio Stick App. Place a pre-order for the Studio Stick on Kickstarter now for $274 a pop.

Press Release
[ Studio Stick portable recording studio for smartphones copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

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Surprise! The Pixel 2 is hiding a custom Google SoC for image processing

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Google’s Pixel Visual Core, an SoC designed for image processing and machine learning.

Google


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Google’s newest flagship smartphone, the Pixel 2, is nearly out. The company has been talking a big game about the 2’s camera and calling it, definitively, “the best smartphone camera.” But Google has been keeping a huge secret under wraps: the Pixel 2 has a custom, Google-designed SoC dedicated exclusively to camera image processing. The SoC is not active yet, but Google claims it will make the Pixel 2 process photos faster and more efficiently than ever.

In addition to the usual Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, the Pixel 2 is equipped with the “Pixel Visual Core,” an extra, second SoC designed by Google with hardware-accelerated image processing in mind. At the heart of the chip is an eight-core Image Processing Unit (IPU) capable of more than three trillion operations per second. Using these IPU cores, Google says the company’s HDR+ image processing can run “5x faster and at less than 1/10th the energy” than it currently does on the main CPU.

The Pixel Visual Core is currently in the Pixel 2, but it doesn’t work yet. Google says it will be enabled with the launch of the Android 8.1 developer preview. At that time, the chip will let third-party apps use the Pixel 2’s HDR+ photo processing, allowing them to produce pictures that look just as good as the native camera app. The chip isn’t just for Google’s current camera algorithms, though. Google says the Pixel Visual Core is designed “to handle the most challenging imaging and machine learning applications” and that the company is “already preparing the next set of applications” designed for the hardware.

Having two entirely separate SoCs inside a smartphone is unusual. The Pixel Visual Core has its own CPU (a single Cortex A53 core to play traffic cop), its own DDR4 RAM, the eight IPU cores, and a PCIe line, presumably as a bus to the rest of the system. Ideally, you would have a single SoC that integrates the IPU right next to that other co-processor, the GPU. The Pixel 2 is based on the Snapdragon 835 SoC, though, and you aren’t allowed to integrate your own custom silicon with Qualcomm’s design. What Google can do is wrap a minimal SoC around its eight IPU cores and then connect that to the main system SoC. If Google ever set out to compete with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon line, an IPU is something it could build directly into its own designs. For now, though, it has this self-contained solution.

We’ve been hearing about Google’s desire to design its own SoCs for almost two years now. The original rumor from The Information (subscription required) nailed this announcement with the news of a special Google-designed camera chip. It also said the company was looking at building main application processors and chips designed for AR and VR. If all those are true, we could be looking at the first of many Google SoCs to come.

We’re amazed that Google never mentioned this until now—it had a whole two-hour-long hardware presentation on October 4, and we didn’t hear a peep about this. We can’t wait to see the teardowns of the Pixel 2 and make sure the phone isn’t hiding any other surprises.

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Gun waiting periods prevent hundreds of homicides, according to 45-year study


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A few days to cool off and think things through may be enough to prevent hundreds of murders each year, according to a new study in PNAS.

A study tracking handgun laws on wait periods over a 45-year period found that a delay in obtaining a firearm after purchase reduced gun homicides by 17 percent. That breaks down to about 36 murders per year for the average state. As of 2014, such laws in 16 states and the District of Columbia prevented about 750 gun homicides per year. If all 50 states required a wait, around 910 more lives could be spared, the authors report.

“Waiting periods would therefore reduce gun violence without imposing any restrictions on who can own a gun,” according to the authors, led by Deepak Malhotra, a negotiation and conflict-resolution expert at Harvard Business School.

About 33,000 people die in America from gun violence each year, mostly from suicides. The researchers found waiting periods reduce suicides as well, but the association wasn’t as strong and varied in different analyses from a 6 to 11 percent reduction. That would work out to a range of about 17 to 35 fewer suicides each year for an average state.

There have been hints in the research before that wait periods can reduce gun deaths, specifically suicides. For instance, a 2000 study in JAMA by violence researchers Jens Ludwig  and Philip Cook found that waiting periods imposed by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act between 1994 and 1998 reduced suicides among people aged 55 years and older. But the study saw no significant change in homicides from the switch. And the question of wait periods’ effect on gun homicides has lingered, leaving many policy makers to think that they are ineffective.

Malhotra and his colleagues argue that this is not the case. They note that the 2000 JAMA study found no effect because the study mis-coded 16 states. Those states were identified as being impacted by the Brady Act even though they previously had wait-period laws on the books. “As a result,” the authors conclude, “the coding of Brady states in the study by Ludwig and Cook fails to capture all states that had preexisting waiting periods,” Malhotra and co-authors concluded.

Cook and Ludwig did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

Delayed data

For the new study, Malhotra and colleagues repeated the analysis of the Brady Act’s impact and also looked at a wider timeframe: from 1970 to 2014. In that 45-year span, 43 states and DC had waiting period laws on the books for at least one year, which typically call for a delay of two to seven days.

To assess the impact of the laws, the researchers looked at the “difference-in-differences.” Basically, they compared the changes in gun deaths in states with new laws with any changes seen in states without new laws. The researchers controlled for economic and demographic differences between states, such as poverty levels, race and age breakdowns, and alcohol consumption trends.

In the 45-year analysis, they found that waiting periods slashed homicides by 17 percent and suicides by seven to 11 percent. That would work out to about 36 fewer homicides and 22 to 35 fewer suicides per year in an average state.

Next, the researchers narrowed their focus to just 1990 to 1998, when the federal Brady Act forced many states to adopt new waiting periods and background checks. They again saw a 17 percent dip in homicides from wait periods as well as a six percent drop in suicides. That works out to about 39 fewer homicides and 17 fewer suicides for an average state during that time frame.

The study doesn’t provide any clues as to how waiting periods might stifle deaths. But the researchers speculate that any delay may “close the window of opportunity” for any would-be criminals and “deter purchases among people who have malevolent, but temporary, motivations.” For the suicidal, the delay may allow them to rethink their plans.

Data on non-gun-related deaths suggests that homicidal people subject to waiting periods don’t substitute other weapons as means to commit suicide. However, there’s some evidence to suggest that some suicidal people may find another method if they can’t readily acquire a gun.

Malhotra and his colleagues note that waiting periods of broad support from the medical community as well as most Americans—including gun-owning Americans.

Last week, a collection of top medical experts wrote yet another commentary labeling the burden of firearm-related deaths and injuries in the US as a “health care crisis.” They called doctors and healthcare professionals to action to try to identify, develop, and implement policies and practices that could reduce harms—just as they would if they were reacting to an infectious disease outbreak.

“As health care professionals, we don’t throw up our hands in defeat because a disease seems to be incurable. We work to incrementally and continuously reduce its burden. That’s our job.”

The commentary was signed by Darren B. Taichman, executive deputy editor of Annals of Internal Medicine; Christine Laine, editor-in-chief of Annals of Internal Medicine; Howard Bauchner, editor-in-chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network; Jeffrey Drazen, editor-in-chief of New England Journal of Medicine; and Larry Peiperl, chief editor of PLOS Medicine.

PNAS, 2017. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1619896114  (About DOIs).

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