Month: July 2020

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Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 865+: Breaking the 3GHz Threshold

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15893/qualcomm-announces-snapdragon-865-breaking-the-3ghz-threshold

Today Qualcomm is announcing an update to its extremely successful Snapdragon 865 SoC: the new Snapdragon 865+. The Snapdragon 865 had already seen tremendous success with over 140 different design wins, powering some of the best Android smartphone devices this year. We’re past the hectic spring release cycle of devices, and much like last year with the S855+, for the summer and autumn release cycle, Qualcomm is providing vendors with the option for a higher-performance binned variant of the chip, the new S865+. As a bit of a arbitrary, but also important characteristic of the new chip is that this is the first ever mobile silicon to finally pass the 3GHz frequency mark.

via AnandTech https://ift.tt/phao0v

July 8, 2020 at 08:37AM

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A Plan to Make Police Data Open Source Started on Reddit

https://www.wired.com/story/police-accountability-data-project-open-source-reddit


On May 18, Kristin Tynski dropped a link into the Reddit community r/privacy: “I scraped court records to find dirty cops.” Tynski, who owns a marketing firm, had collected the public police records in Palm Beach County, where she lives, and wrote up her findings on data like traffic citations and race. She wondered if other Redditors might want to do the same in their counties. “If cops can watch us, we should watch them,” she wrote.

Exactly one week later, George Floyd was killed in custody of the Minneapolis police, his death captured on video by witnesses. As outrage began building in the streets of that city, Tynski once again took to Reddit. “I think I accidentally started a movement,” she wrote on May 26, describing how dozens of people had already joined her effort, which was now being organized in Slack. This time, there were more than just stirrings of interest. Tynski had no way to know, but the timing of her small data mining experiment coincided with what some experts say is the biggest protest movement in US history. Thousands of Redditors upvoted her post, and then migrated to a new subreddit, r/PoliceData, coordinating an effort to collect public police records en masse. Their mission: “to enable a more transparent and empowered society by making law enforcement public records open source and easily accessible to the public.”

That kind of centralized, nationwide database doesn’t exist in the US right now. For years, researchers, journalists, and activists have turned to official records, from incident reports to misconduct complaints, as one window into police behavior in the United States. “The problem is that all of this data, although it’s public, is buried inside of these really crappy or antiquated public records portals,” says Tynski. Few states make it easy to mass export law enforcement data, which can make the process tedious. Some states require a formal public records request to access the documents; sometimes people have had to sue for the data. And once the data has been downloaded, it has to be cleaned, combined, and standardized to create a national data set—the kind that might help researchers find patterns of racial bias, excessive use of force, or repeat complaints of misconduct. Tynski’s group, which calls itself the Police Data Accessibility Project, aims to do just that.

The Police Data Accessibility Project isn’t the first to try to amass public police data for analysis, but previous efforts have mostly fallen to universities and journalists. (The government has also made some effort: The FBI launched a new national use-of-force database in 2019, but participation by law enforcement agencies is voluntary.) The Police Data Accessibility Project, on the other hand, is a grassroots effort. More than 2,000 interested internet users have joined an associated Slack group, and over 6,000 have subscribed to r/DataPolice. (Advance Publications, which owns WIRED’s publisher, Condé Nast, is a Reddit shareholder.) Tynski’s project is also, in some ways, larger in scope. Unlike previous projects bound by geography or types of records, the Police Data Accessibility Project aims to aggregate all public police records nationwide into one easily searchable database. “The parameters are, what are local police forces publishing? We want all of that public data,” says Eddie Brown, a US Army veteran who has taken the role of chief operating officer for the group.

Doing so will be difficult, tedious, and technical work. So far, the members of the Police Data Accessibility Project have mostly spent their time building the custom scrapers needed to export files from data portals, rather than gathering the data itself. With so many volunteers chipping in, there have also been a number of debates about the ethics of the project: Should they include the names of police officers in their database? Should they use sources like Blue Leaks, a trove of stolen police documents released in June? The group has decided no on both counts, citing privacy and the importance of data custody, or having a legal right to the data in the set.

via Wired Top Stories https://ift.tt/2uc60ci

July 7, 2020 at 11:54AM

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Disney develops high resolution neural face-swapping

https://geekologie.com/2020/07/high-resolution-neural-face-swapping-for.php

high-resolution-neural-face-swap.jpg
The folks at Disney Research Studios have moved one step closer to replacing human actors by developing this algorithm for high resolution face-swapping in images and videos.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method capable of rendering photo-realistic and temporally coherent results at megapixel resolution. To this end, we introduce a progressively trained multi-way comb network and a light- and contrast-preserving blending method. We also show that while progressive training enables generation of high-resolution images, extending the architecture and training data beyond two people allows us to achieve higher fidelity in generated expressions. When compositing the generated expression onto the target face, we show how to adapt the blending strategy to preserve contrast and low-frequency lighting. Finally, we incorporate a refinement strategy into the face landmark stabilization algorithm to achieve temporal stability, which is crucial for working with high-resolution videos. We conduct an extensive ablation study to show the influence of our design choices on the quality of the swap and compare our work with popular state-of-the-art methods.

This is basically like supercharged DeepFakes and the results are pretty impressive. Disney Research Studios claims they’re developing this for movies and visual effects, but I can think of some other *ahem* more adult oriented applications as well. Yes, I’m talking about porn. What else would I be talking about? I’m always talking about porn. This is the Internet. Everybody’s always talking about porn. Why is Disney Research Studios even pretending they’re not doing this for porn? I wonder how many more times I can type Disney and porn in the same sentence before I get sued.
Keep going for a video of the face-swapping in action. It’s still not perfect, but it’s significantly better than the alternative methods.

via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome https://geekologie.com/

July 7, 2020 at 09:49AM

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New H.266 codec uses half the data to stream 4K video

https://www.engadget.com/h266-vvc-codec-4k-streaming-data-half-133047705.html

Fraunhofer, the German company that helped develop the H.264, H.265 and MP3 encoding formats, has unveiled a new video encoding standard that could severely reduce streaming bottlenecks. Called H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC), it’s specifically designed for 4K and 8K streaming and reduces data requirements by around 50 percent compared to H.265 HEVC (high-efficiency video coding). At the same time, the improved compression won’t compromise visual quality.

The company developed the codec in collaboration with partners including Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Sony. It will be licensed by the Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF), a group with 34 major member companies. The aim there is to avoid the kind of licensing squabbles that plagued the H.264 codec a decade ago.

Because of the quantum leap in coding efficiency offered by H.266/VVC, the use of video will increase further worldwide. Moreover, the increased versatility of H.266/VVC makes its use more attractive for a broader range of applications related to the transmission and storage of video.

Fraunhofer said that if a 90-minute, H.265/HEVC-encoded movie is about 10GB, it would only be 5GB for the same quality when encoded with the new codec. “Because H.266/VVC was developed with ultra-high-resolution video content in mind, the new standard is particularly beneficial when streaming 4K or 8K videos on a flat screen TV,” Fraunhofer said. At the same time, it will support all formats from 480p on up.

Once implemented, VVC could allow a stark reduction in traffic from services like Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and Netflix. Video streaming takes the lion’s share of the world’s internet bandwidth, something that’s become starkly apparent in the COVID-19 era. Because of the jump in traffic during pandemic lockdowns, services like Netflix and YouTube agreed to reduce default streaming rates to take the strain off web infrastructure.

At the same time, streaming services could use VCC to offer higher 4K HDR quality without increasing bandwidth, given the more efficient compression. The new system will also be indispensable once 8K video — with quadruple the bandwidth requirements of 4K — enters the mainstream.

There’s no software standard yet for VCC encoding and decoding, though Fraunhofer said it will deliver one this fall. The company added that “the new chips required for the use of H.266/VVC, such as those in mobile devices, are currently being designed.” In other words, it might still be awhile before you see the tech working on your TV, smartphone or computer.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

July 7, 2020 at 09:36AM

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Olympus rolls out PC app that turns some of its cameras into webcams

https://www.engadget.com/olympus-webcam-app-for-pc-180019053.html

Olympus may be selling its camera business — to the same company that bought Sony’s VAIO PC division — but it’s not abandoning its products just yet. It has just released a new beta application called OM-D Webcam, which gives Olympus cameras webcam capabilities for livestreaming or video chats when attached to a PC via their USB-C tether. While the application definitely sounds useful in an era of Zoom work conferences and online classes, not all Olympus users will be able to take advantage of it.

To start with, it only works with Windows PCs, and it’s unclear if a macOS version will be available. Also, it’s only compatible with a handful of cameras at the moment. The software’s current version supports OM-D E-M1X, OM-D E-M1, OM-D E-M1 Mark II, OM-D E-M1 Mark III and OM-D E-M5 Mark II. Further, it doesn’t allow sound to pass through from the camera to the computer, which means users need to use their PCs’ internal mic or a USB mic.

Olympus isn’t the only camera brand that has rolled out software to make its products more useful in the midst of a pandemic. Canon launched its own app that turns DSLRs, mirrorless cameras and point-and-shoots into USB webcams for Windows 10 users back in April. And in early June, Panasonic introduced the Lumix Tether for Streaming to turn the GH5 and GH5S, as well as the G9 and S1 series cameras into webcams.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

July 3, 2020 at 01:03PM

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Harvard’s transforming robotic fabric could lead to therapeutic wearables

https://www.engadget.com/harvard-robotic-fabric-therapeutic-wearables-150108871.html

Robotic fabrics or textiles are far from new, but they’re usually attached to bulky external machines that can modulate air pressure inside them to make them move or change their shape. Since that could limit their potential applications, a team of Harvard researchers got together to develop a textile-based soft robot that can regulate itself without being tethered to any machine.

The researchers from Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology come from various disciplines. They designed a robotic fabric called Smart Thermally Actuating Textiles (STATs), which is composed of tightly sealed pouches containing a fluid known as Novec 7000. When heated, the fluid vaporizes, and its volume expands up to 100-fold to change the fabric’s shape. But when it’s cooled, it condenses back to a liquid, thereby deflating the fabric.

To eliminate the need for an external machine, they weaved electronically-conductive silver-plated threads into the material they used for the STATs. The threads serve as the smart fabric’s heater and sensor elements, enabling the temperature and pressure changes needed to switch Novec 7000’s phase from liquid to vapor and vice versa. The study’s co-first author, Christopher Payne, explained:

“With an integrated ‘closed-loop feedback’ controller, STATs autonomously maintained their pressure even when placed into environments in which the exterior temperature fluctuates, like close to an air tube that actively cools the system.”

The researchers said they can manufacture the fabric in bulk and with arbitrary geometries, giving it a wide number of potential applications. It could be used in mechanotherapeutic wearables that could apply pressure on injuries and accelerate tissue repair, for instance. It could also be used in responsive cushions to help prevent bed and wheelchair sores, and perhaps even in the creation of dynamic garments for avant-garde fashion shows.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

July 3, 2020 at 02:09PM