3D printing is being used to produce more and more novel items: tools, art, even rudimentary human organs. What all those items have in common, though, is that theyre small. The next phase of 3D printing is to move on to things that are big. Really big. Like, as big as a house.

In a small town in western Russia called Stupino, a 3D printed house just went up in the middle of winter and in a days time.

Pieces of houses and bridges have been 3D printed in warehouses or labs then transported to their permanent locations to be assembled, but the Stupino house was printed entirely on-site by a company called Apis Cor. They used a crane-sized, mobile 3D printer and a specially-developed mortar mix and covered the whole operation with a heated tent.

The 38-square-meter (409-square-foot) house is circular, with three right-angled protrusions allowing for additional space and division of the area inside. Counter-intuitively, the houses roof is completely flat. Russias not known for mild, snow-free winters. Made of welded polymer membranes and insulated with solid plates, the roof was designed to withstand heavy snow loads.

Apis Cor teamed up with partners for the houses finishing details, like insulation, windows, and paint. Samsung even provided high-tech appliances and a TV with a concave-curved screen to match the curve of the interior wall.

According to the company, the houses total building cost came to $10,134, or approximately $275 per square meter, which equates to about $25 per square foot. A recent estimate put the average cost of building a 2,000 square foot home in the US at about $150 per square foot.

Since these houses are affordable and fast to build, is it only a matter of time before were all living in 3D printed concrete circles?

Probably notor, at least, not until whole apartment buildings can be 3D printed. The Stupino house would be harder (though not impossible) to plop down in the middle of a city than in the Russian countryside.

While cities like Dubai are aiming to build more 3D printed houses, what many have envisioned for the homes of the future are environmentally-friendly, data-integrated smart buildings, often clad with solar panels and including floors designated for growing food.

Large-scale 3D printing does have some very practical applications, though. Take disaster relief: when a hurricane or earthquake destroys infrastructure and leaves thousands of people without shelter, 3D printers like Apis Cors could be used to quickly rebuild bridges, roads, and homes.

Also, given their low cost and high speed, 3D printed houses could become a practical option for subsidized housing projects.

In the US, tiny houses have been all the rage among millennials latelywhat if that tiny house could be custom-printed to your specifications in less than a week, and it cost even less than youd budgeted?

Since software and machines are doing most of the work, theres less margin for human errorgone are the days of the subcontractor misread the blueprint, and now we have three closets and no bathrooms!

While houses made by robots are good news for people looking to buy a basic, low-cost house, they could be bad news for people employed in the construction industry. Machines have been pouring concrete for decades, but technologies like Apis Cors giant printer will take a few more human workers out of the equation.

Nonetheless, the company states that part of their mission is to change the construction industry so that millions of people will have an opportunity to improve their living conditions.

Banner Image Credit: Apis Cor

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See How This House Was 3D Printed in Just 24 Hours - Singularity Hub

In mathematics, a singularity is in general a point at which a given mathematical object is not defined, or a point of an exceptional set where it fails to be well-behaved in some particular way, such as differentiability. See Singularity theory for general discussion of the geometric theory, which only covers some aspects.

For example, the function

on the real line has a singularity at x = 0, where it seems to "explode" to and is not defined. The function g(x) = |x| (see absolute value) also has a singularity at x = 0, since it is not differentiable there. Similarly, the graph defined by y2 = x also has a singularity at (0,0), this time because it has a "corner" (vertical tangent) at that point.

The algebraic set defined by { ( x , y ) : | x | = | y | } {displaystyle {(x,y):|x|=|y|}} in the (x, y) coordinate system has a singularity (singular point) at (0, 0) because it does not admit a tangent there.

In real analysis singularities are either discontinuities or discontinuities of the derivative (sometimes also discontinuities of higher order derivatives). There are four kinds of discontinuities: typeI, which has two sub-types, and typeII, which also can be divided into two subtypes, but normally is not.

To describe these types two limits are used. Suppose that f ( x ) {displaystyle f(x)} is a function of a real argument x {displaystyle x} , and for any value of its argument, say c {displaystyle c} , then the left-handed limit, f ( c ) {displaystyle f(c^{-})} , and the right-handed limit, f ( c + ) {displaystyle f(c^{+})} , are defined by:

The value f ( c ) {displaystyle f(c^{-})} is the value that the function f ( x ) {displaystyle f(x)} tends towards as the value x {displaystyle x} approaches c {displaystyle c} from below, and the value f ( c + ) {displaystyle f(c^{+})} is the value that the function f ( x ) {displaystyle f(x)} tends towards as the value x {displaystyle x} approaches c {displaystyle c} from above, regardless of the actual value the function has at the point where x = c {displaystyle x=c} .

There are some functions for which these limits do not exist at all. For example, the function

does not tend towards anything as x {displaystyle x} approaches c = 0 {displaystyle c=0} . The limits in this case are not infinite, but rather undefined: there is no value that g ( x ) {displaystyle g(x)} settles in on. Borrowing from complex analysis, this is sometimes called an essential singularity.

In real analysis, a singularity or discontinuity is a property of a function alone. Any singularities that may exist in the derivative of a function are considered as belonging to the derivative, not to the original function.

A coordinate singularity (or cordinate singularity) occurs when an apparent singularity or discontinuity occurs in one coordinate frame, which can be removed by choosing a different frame. An example is the apparent singularity at the 90 degree latitude in spherical coordinates. An object moving due north (for example, along the line 0 degrees longitude) on the surface of a sphere will suddenly experience an instantaneous change in longitude at the pole (in the case of the example, jumping from longitude 0 to longitude 180 degrees). This discontinuity, however, is only apparent; it is an artifact of the coordinate system chosen, which is singular at the poles. A different coordinate system would eliminate the apparent discontinuity, e.g. by replacing latitude/longitude with n-vector.

In complex analysis there are several classes of singularities, described below.

Suppose U is an open subset of the complex numbers C, and the point a is an element of U, and f is a complex differentiable function defined on some neighborhood around a, excluding a: U {a}.

Other than isolated singularities, complex functions of one variable may exhibit other singular behaviour. Namely, two kinds of nonisolated singularities exist:

A finite-time singularity occurs when one input variable is time, and an output variable increases towards infinity at a finite time. These are important in kinematics and PDEs (Partial Differential Equations) infinites do not occur physically, but the behavior near the singularity is often of interest. Mathematically the simplest finite-time singularities are power laws for various exponents, x , {displaystyle x^{-alpha },} of which the simplest is hyperbolic growth, where the exponent is (negative) 1: x 1 . {displaystyle x^{-1}.} More precisely, in order to get a singularity at positive time as time advances (so the output grows to infinity), one instead uses ( t 0 t ) {displaystyle (t_{0}-t)^{-alpha }} (using t for time, reversing direction to t {displaystyle -t} so time increases to infinity, and shifting the singularity forward from 0 to a fixed time t 0 {displaystyle t_{0}} ).

An example would be the bouncing motion of an inelastic ball on a plane. If idealized motion is considered, in which the same fraction of kinetic energy is lost on each bounce, the frequency of bounces becomes infinite as the ball comes to rest in a finite time. Other examples of finite-time singularities include the Painlev paradox in various forms (for example, the tendency of a chalk to skip when dragged across a blackboard), and how the precession rate of a coin spun on a flat surface accelerates towards infinite, before abruptly stopping (as studied using the Euler's Disk toy).

Hypothetical examples include Heinz von Foerster's facetious "Doomsday's equation" (simplistic models yield infinite human population in finite time).

In algebraic geometry, a singularity of an algebraic variety is a point of the variety where the tangent space may not be regularly defined. The simplest example of singularities are curves that cross themselves. But there are other types of singularities, like cusps. For example, the equation y2 x3 = 0 defines a curve that has a cusp at the origin x = y = 0. One could define the x-axis as a tangent at this point, but this definition can not be the same as the definition at other points. In fact, in this case, the x-axis is a "double tangent."

For affine and projective varieties, the singularities are the points where the Jacobian matrix has a rank which is lower than at other points of the variety.

An equivalent definition in terms of commutative algebra may be given, which extends to abstract varieties and schemes: A point is singular if the local ring at this point is not a regular local ring.

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Singularity (mathematics) - Wikipedia

A boring, linear, heavily scripted shooter, with tons of health packs and mountains of ammo scattered everywhere.

Worse, this game is strongly anti-Russian, on a level of a cheap B-movie. Also, it's obvious that not a single Russian native speaker was in the dev team. There are many flags and banners and posters everywhere in the scenery with Russian sentences or words - all of them Google-translated from English. I mean, as a native speaker, I usually was confused by those sentences as they didn't make sense, but after I literally translated them backwards to English, then I understood what they meant. Even the name of the place, katOrga-12, with O stressed, is totally wrong! First, there is a Russian word "kAtorga" (A stressed!) which is obsolete and was mostly used until end of 19th century, and means "imprisonment" (the process of being in prison) or "hard work" and not "prison" itself as a place - I guess the devs meant to call this place a "prison" or "labor camp". Even then, Russians would never name a secret military/sci installation a "prison" ("turmA"), instead it would be something like "camp" or "base" or just "objekt 12345" or something. I could provide tons of other examples.

So that you could understand me, imagine you are playing a Chinese game where everything is in Chinese, and the Chinese devs make a game about the USA, so to make Chinese players feel it's about the USA they insert random broken English sentences which they Google-translated from Chinese in hope that no American will ever play the game, and Chinese don't know English anyway. Yes, it will feel like a nuthouse to you as an English native speaker, should you ever play this game. It will clearly show that devs are amateurs. You would think: are there so few Americans in China so that they couldn't hire a single guy for proofreading?

If I were on the dev team, I'd suggest writing every banner and every poster in Russian purely, as it should have been in reality in a Russian military base. But when the player looks at them, there would be subtitles shown with an English translation. Btw those sentences with mirrored R and N (to look like and ) are almost unreadable!

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Singularity for PC Reviews - Metacritic

In BriefTrying to get children to understand artificial intelligenceis a feat in its own right. Explaining how it could one day becomesmarter than us is an entirely different challenge. Supercomputers to Superintelligence

Heres an experiment that fits all ages: approach your mother and father (if theyre asleep, use caution). Ask them gently about that time before you were born, and whether they dared think at that time that one day everybody will post and share their images on a social network called Facebook. Or that they will receive answers to every question from a mysterious entity called Google. Or enjoy the services of a digital adviser called Waze that guides you everywhere on the road. If they say they figured all of the above will happen, kindly refer those people to me. Were always in need of good futurists.

The truth is that very few thought, in those olden days of yore, that technologies like supercomputers, wireless network or artificial intelligence will make their way to the general public in the future. Even those who figured that these technologies will become cheaper and more widespread, failed in imagining the uses they will be put to, and how they will change society. And here we are today, when youre posting your naked pictures on Facebook. Thanks again, technology.

History is full of cases in which a new and groundbreaking technology, or a collection of such technologies, completely changes peoples lives. The change is often so dramatic that people whove lived before the technological leap have a very hard time understanding how the subsequent generations think. To the people before the change, the new generation may as well be aliens in their way of thinking and seeing the world.

These kinds of dramatic shifts in thinking are called Singularity a phrase that is originally derived from mathematics and describes a point which we are incapable of deciphering its exact properties. Its that place where the equations basically go nuts and make no sense any longer.

The singularity has risen to fame in the last two decades largely because of two thinkers. The first is the scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who wrote in 1993 that

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

The other prominent prophet of the Singularity is Ray Kurzweil. In his book The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil basically agrees with Vinge but believes the later has been too optimistic in his view of technological progress. Kurzweil believes that by the year 2045 we will experience the greatest technological singularity in the history of mankind: the kind that could, in just a few years, overturn the institutes and pillars of society and completely change the way we view ourselves as human beings. Just like Vinge, Kurzweil believes that well get to the Singularity by creating a super-human artificial intelligence (AI). An AI of that level could conceive of ideas that no human being has thought about in the past, and will invent technological tools that will be more sophisticated and advanced than anything we have today.

Since one of the roles of this AI would be to improve itself and perform better, it seems pretty obvious that once we have a super-intelligent AI, it will be able to create a better version of itself. And guess what the new generation of AI would then do? Thats right improve itself even further. This kind of a race would lead to an intelligence explosion and will leave old poor us simple, biological machines that we are far behind.

If this notion scares you, youre in good company. A few of the most widely regarded scientists, thinkers and inventors, like Steven Hawking and Elon Musk, have already expressed their concerns that super-intelligent AI could escape our control and move against us. Others focus on the great opportunities that such a singularity holds for us. They believe that a super-intelligent AI, if kept on a tight leash, could analyze and expose many of the wonders of the world for us. Einstein, after all, was a remarkable genius who has revolutionized our understanding of physics. Well, how would the world change if we enjoyed tens, hundreds and millions Einsteins that couldve analyzed every problem and find a solution for it?

Similarly, how would things look like if each of us could enjoy his very own Doctor House, that constantly analyzed his medical state and provided ongoing recommendations? And which new ideas and revelations would those super-intelligences come up with, when they go over humanitys history and holy books?

Already we see how AI is starting to change the ways in which we think about ourselves. The computer Deep Blue managed to beat Gary Kasparov in chess in 1997. Today, after nearly twenty years of further development, human chess masters can no longer beat on their own even an AI running on a laptop computer. But after his defeat, Kasparov has created a new kind of chess contests: ones in which humanoid and computerized players collaborate, and together reach greater successes and accomplishments than each wouldve gotten on their own. In this sort of a collaboration, the computer provides rapid computations of possible moves, and suggests several to the human player. Its human compatriot needs to pick the best option, to understand their opponents and to throw them off balance.

Together, the two create a centaur: a mythical creature that combines the best traits of two different species. We see, then that AI has already forced chess players to reconsider their humanity and their game.

In the next few decades we can expect a similar singularity to occur in many other games, professions and other fields that were previously conserved for human beings only. Some humans will struggle against the AI. Others will ignore it. Both these approaches will prove disastrous, since when the AI will become capable than human beings, both the strugglers and the ignorant will remain behind. Others will realize that the only way to success lies in collaboration with the computers. They will help computers learn and will direct their growth and learning. Those people will be the centaurs of the future. And this realization that man can no longer rely only on himself and his brain, but instead must collaborate and unite with sophisticated computers to beat tomorrows challenges well, isnt that a singularity all by itself?

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Singularity: Explain It to Me Like I'm 5-Years-Old - Futurism - Futurism

What

On February 27, Elon Musks SpaceX announced plans to fly two non-astronauts, or private citizens, on a loop around the moon.

No one except Elon Musk and the two moon-explorers-to-be know who they are yet. SpaceX has stated only that the individuals approached the company asking to be flown around the moon (as opposed to the company recruiting them), that theyre not linked to Hollywood in any way, and that theyll be paying SpaceX a large sum for the journey.

Since Apollo 8, the first voyage to the moon in 1968, only 24 people have flown to the moon, and 12 have walked on its surface. Theyve all been American, and theyve all been men. If either of the moon mission passengers are female, SpaceX will make history in more than one way.

Interestinglyand terrifyinglyMusk said the mission will be completed on autopilot, without a trained astronaut or technician on board. The two passengers will be on their own.

Passengers will ride in SpaceXs Dragon 2 capsule, powered by itsFalcon Heavy rocket.

At 230 feet high, 40 feet wide, and more than five million pounds of thrust at liftoff, the company claims Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two.

Its important to note, though, that the rocket hasnt been tested yetthats scheduled to happen this summer.

Dragon 2 is similar to the Dragon capsule SpaceX currently uses to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station (ISS).

The mission will need a license from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The Falcon Heavy will launch from the Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral, Florida.

More specifically, it will take off from launch pad 39A, which was used by the Apollo program for its lunar missions in the late 60s and early 70s.

The flights estimated distance is 300,000-400,000 miles into space, which would put humans farther from Earth than ever before.

SpaceX is aiming for the mission to take place as soon as late 2018. But this timeline is highly ambitious. As noted above, Falcon Heavy has yet to be tested. Anything short of a seamless performance would likely push the moon mission back by months, if not years.

Similarly, the crew version of Dragon is scheduled to make its first voyage at the end of this year, in automatic mode and without any passengers on board. Pending success of that trip, a manned flight would travel to the ISS in the second quarter of 2018.

Even if these tests are successful, it would seem more time would be needed to prepare both rocket and capsule for the much-longer moon orbit.

Though exact figures havent been disclosed, Musk called the cost comparable to that of sending astronauts to the International Space Station. That number was recently estimated to be over $70 million per person, going up to $81 million by 2018. The cost went up dramatically after NASA retired its own fleet in 2011 and began contracting with private companies and the Russian space agency to send people and cargo to and from the ISS.

In 2001, American multimillionaire Dennis Tito became the worlds first space tourist, booking a trip on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS for an estimated price tag of $20 million. Since then, six more wealthy individuals have gone to space because, well, they wanted to, and they could.

Besides being a high-profile test of its ability to get beyond Earth orbit, SpaceX's moon mission could serve as a stepping stone for future Mars missions. The unmanned Red Dragon Mars mission also plans to use a Falcon Heavy rocket and Dragon 2 capsule.

Theres a lot of speculation that the SpaceX announcement will set off the first public/private space race, pitting private companies against NASA. But SpaceX stated that NASA has encouraged private missions, as through them long-term costs to the government decline and more flight reliability history is gained, benefiting both government and private missions." NASAs Commercial Crew Program funded Dragon 2s development.

However, NASA did announce that it will be looking to put non-astronauts on its Space Launch System rocket, and the associated crew capsule, Orion.

If a public/private space race does ensue, NASA has decades of experience under its belt. But private companies like SpaceX have the advantage of less oversight, and manufacturing thats not politically-driven.

Space race or no space race, forget formerly exotic-seeming places like Bali or Fijiit seems the moon is set to become mankinds coveted tourist destination of the future.

Banner Image Credit: SpaceX

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What You Need to Know About Elon Musk's Plan to Fly People to the Moon - Singularity Hub

From time to time, the Singularity Hub editorial team unearths a gem from the archives and wants to share it all over again. It's usually a piece that was popular back then and we think is still relevant now. This is one of those articles. It was originally published March 6, 2016.We hope you enjoy it!

A cognitive neuroscientist and his team at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California, seem to have achieved the impossible.

According to a press release, the team measured the brain activity patterns of six commercial and military pilots, and then transmitted these patterns into novice subjects as they learned to pilot an airplane in a realistic flight simulator.

If youre picturing people downloading knowledge directly into the brain Matrix-style, sorry to hand you the blue pill its utter nonsense.

Which is a total shame, because the brain-boosting technique used in the study transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, is nothing short of fantastical.

Hook up some wires with a 9-volt battery, and you have a state-of-art thinking cap that activates select regions of the brain of your choosing. By directly tinkering with the brains electrical field no surgery required tDCS has the potential to treat depression, anxiety, chronic pain, OCD and motor symptoms in Parkinsons disease.

A handful of small studies including the HRL Laboratories research also tantalizingly suggest that it could heighten creativity, enhance spatial learning, boost math skills and language acquisition and even trigger lucid dreams sometimes weeks after the initial stimulation.

It seems to give you any kind of benefit you want, says Dr. Flavio Frohlich, a neurobiologist at the University of North Carolina and expert in tDCS-assisted cognition.

Sound too good to be true? Perhaps. Ask its doubters, and the only thing that tDCS is good at is giving people a nasty electrical burn.

Its high-tech brain gain riding the hype cycle train. Herere the facts and the fiction lets see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The short answer: no one really knows.

The techniques brain-boosting effects were discovered serendipitously. At the turn of the last century, Drs. Walter Paulus and Michael Nitsche at the University of Gttingen in Germany popularized the technique while studying motor learning and working memory. They carefully placed two electrodes over motor regions of the brain, using gel to ensure full contact with the scalp. This generates a weak electrical current about 1 or 2 milliamps, low enough to be powered by a 9-volt battery.

To the teams surprise, participants receiving the stimulation learned faster than those who received only sham stimulation a placebo zap to trick them into thinking they were getting the treatment. Almost all later studies followed this protocol, including the aforementioned flight simulator study.

So whats happening to the brain?

The tDCS current itself is too weak to activate neurons; instead, it changes the ability of neurons to respond to stimuli, such as learning a new task. There are two types of stimulation: anodal stimulation primes neurons to be more excitable and thus more likely to fire, boosting signal; cathodal stimulation makes it harder for neurons to fire, decreasing noise.

In this way, tDCS can modulate the signal-to-noise ratio in a select brain region and tweak information processing. The word tweak here is key. tDCS doesnt transfer meaningful information it only improves the ability of subjects to learn.

At the same time, the current jolts plasticity-related molecules into action in neurons, changing their ability to respond to neurotransmitters.

But it goes even deeper than that. In another study, scientists at the Office of Naval Research found that tDCS in mice strips away certain molecular markers on their DNA. This causes neurons to pump out more BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), a major vitality-boosting protein that promotes synaptic plasticity and the birth of new neurons and nurtures the brain.

These molecular changes could be why tDCS has long-lasting effects that linger for weeks, suggested the authors in their paper.

That said, its currently impossible to precisely target neural networks with tDCS in the way that optogenetics can. The current only flows in superficial layers of the cortex, rarely reaching deeper brain regions such as the hippocampus, a central hub for learning and memory.

And what happens to the rest of the brain during stimulation? Your guess is as good as mine.

Given the uncertainty in how tDCS works, its perhaps not surprising that it doesnt always work.

Several past meta-analyses cast serious doubt on the techs brain-boosting powers. Two such papers, both from the University of Melbourne, found that single-session tDCS had little-to-no reliable effect on executive function, language or memory in healthy young volunteers.

There are also disheartening reports that in some cases, zapping the brain impedes cognition.

Last year, Frohlich and colleagues published a report suggesting stimulation lowers IQ scores. His team measured the IQ of 40 healthy volunteers, then zapped them with either sham or real tDCS for 20 minutes over frontal areas of the brain specifically, the prefrontal cortex involved in flexible thinking and higher reasoning. When retested, people receiving tDCS performed worse than the non-stimulated controls.

Another team found that although tDCS could speed up the learning process associating Egyptian-like symbols with numbers it impaired the volunteers from automatically using this new knowledge in subsequent tests. The authors dubbed their finding the mental cost of cognitive enhancement.

Despite potential perils, optimism for the tech remains sky high.

The promise is so great that tDCS was featured in the prestigious academic journal Nature this week, with scientists warning against overzealous DIY use, already commercially available to biohackers for about $150 a pop.

Stimulating is easy, but doing it right is not, said Frohlich. Commercially available units arent regulated, and it takes at least some training to be able to correctly place the electrodes without injuring the scalp.

And since we still dont understand the long-term effects (not to mention potential side-effects) of tDCS, its far too early to call the technique totally safe.

People may well be damaging their brains, said Frohlich.

For now, the benefits arent worth the risk. As the story continues, however, that could change.

Electrodes get smaller all the time, making it increasingly possible to more precisely modulate brain activity. Although at the moment its hard to imagine targeting only a handful of neural networks using tDCS, its conceivable that next-gen non-invasive brain stimulation could dramatically improve in specificity.

More specific brain stimulation means more specific behavior outcomes.

There are already hints of this possibility: transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which uses magnetic fields to modulate brain activity, is already used in brain-to-brain communication, where scientists stimulate a receivers brain with EEG waves recorded from an encoder performing simple tasks.

Theres a hell lot of controversy, but preliminary (published) results show that the encoders brain waves contain enough information to cause specific motor responses in the receiver, such as moving his hand in a certain way.

Now imagine an experts brain waves teaching a novice on complicated tasks.

Here, tDCS will prime the novices brain to better encode and retrieve new information. This is, in fact, what the press release mentioned earlier hinted at: that expert pilots brain waves helped newbies master a flight simulator.

Thats not the case the tDCS used in that study was run-of-the-mill steady currents, not fancy EEG recordings. But in a few decades? We probably still wont be able to download knowledge or program learning directly into our brain.

Well just be learning really, really fast.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.com

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Does Zapping Your Brain Actually Help You Learn Faster? - Singularity Hub

The renowned Silicon Valley-based think-tank Singularity University has announced plans to establish a new innovation hub in Copenhagen.

The hub will be located at a 5,000 sqm space in Copenhagen Science City and will aim to provide a lift to Danish digitalisation, innovation and entrepreneurship.

When I visited Silicon Valley last week, Singularity University was the first item on my agenda and with good reason, said the foreign minister, Anders Samuelsen.

SU bridges the gap between global challenges and technological solutions, which is important tous if we want to keep one step ahead of the future.

READ MORE: Denmark stepping up tech diplomacy in Silicon Valley

CPH nails it The new innovation hub will become just the second to be established by Singularity University outside its headquarters in Silicon Valley. According to Samuelsen, this underlines Denmarks position as an elite location for innovation and digitalisation.

SingularityU Denmark, as the hub will be called, will offer a number of education and innovation courses that combine latest trends within exponential technology with future business arenas.

According to Rob Nail, the global head of Singularity University, the choice of Denmark was not a coincidence.

Denmark is a recognised global leader in many areas of technology, including green tech, biotech, pharmaceutical sciences, telecommunications, ITand design. We all know the successes born in Denmark: LEGO, Universal Robots and Skype to name just a few, said Nail.

Our intent with the new business venture is to build on these achievements and create new opportunities. I was told that LEGO is short for leg godt, and SU wants to play well in Denmark.

Read more about the project here (in English).

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Singularity University opening organisation in Denmark - The Copenhagen Post - Danish news in english

In the first week that US scientists recruited the public to help identify a possible ninth planet in our solar system, more than 20,000 people volunteered to join the search. About 50,000 people around the world have signed up to allow Australian astronomers to siphon off a bit of their computing power to study the universe. Thousands more are expected to help capture a mega-movie of a major solar eclipse this summer.

It seems that astronomers, astrophysicists and others who study life, the universe and everything are turning to citizen scientists to help them collect and even analyze data. Its possible that one of these amateur scientific sleuths might find the answer is something other than 42. Or, at the very least, spot a brown dwarf or a galaxy cluster.

Citizen science has a very promising outlook because of the way that so many research areas are becoming data-driven, says University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) postdoctoral researcher Aaron Meisner. Meisner is a physicist on a quest to discover the so-called Planet 9, hypothetically as large as Neptune but on an orbit so distant around the sun that its nearly impossible to detect. The researchers also hope to identify nearby, low-density stars called brown dwarfs.

What Meisner has is loads of data: millions of infrared images captured by NASAs Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer space telescope. Meisner has his teamincluding researchers from Arizona State University, NASA, American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimorehave created a website called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9.

The idea is for volunteers to log onto the website and analyze flipbooksshort movies made up of four or more frames, each taken from the entire sky several times during the last seven yearsto detect objects that appear to move or change appearance. The images have too much noise for an automated search by computer.

Meisner tells Singularity Hub that citizen scientists have already made nearly two million classifications, representing about 10 percent of the entire database.

At any given time, we'll have something like 250 to 500 users classifying data, and they're actually classifying so quickly that were racing to upload enough flipbooks to keep pace, he says. Our team has been blown away by the response.

The project coordinators promise to include the names of volunteers who contribute to a possible discovery on any published papers.

Some citizen scientists have enjoyed even more fame. Last year, two amateur astronomers helped discover one of the biggest galaxy clusters ever identified. The Matorny-Terentev Cluster RGZ-CL J0823.2+0333 now bears their name, and the duo also got credit in a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Citizen scientists arent just relegated to analyzing fuzzy pictures of distant celestial objects.

Researchers are recruiting amateur astronomers and photographers across the US to record a total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017. Photos from the participants on the ground will be stitched together into a movie documenting the entire path of the event, from the coast of Oregon until the moons shadow falls over the east coast off South Carolina.

The ubiquity of technology like smartphone cameras with GPS help make projects like the Eclipse Megamovie possible, according to UC Berkeley solar physicist Hugh Hudson, who proposed the Megamovie idea in 2011, along with Scott McIntosh of the National Center for Atmospheric Researchs High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado.

We hope to extract different movies from what we expect will be a huge and diverse database, Hudson says by email to Singularity Hub. We realized a couple of years ago that we could augment the good imagery, as obtained by our better-equipped volunteers, as well as programs such as Citizen CATE, with simple smartphones.

The Megamovie Project isnt just about making a cool-looking film. Hudson and his team hope to learn about the interactions between the suns outermost layer, the corona, and another layer of the suns atmosphere called the chromosphere. The thin chromosphere is difficult to observe, lost in the glare of another layer called the photosphere.

The technical advantage of an eclipse is that one can see right down to the chromosphere, Hudson says.

And the technical advantage of citizen scientists?

There are many questions about complex databases that require human ingenuity and insight, as well as patient observation, Hudson says, speaking more generally. Id say the main benefit to science is thus to generate unique facts about the database that otherwise would have gone unrecognized. For the Megamovie database, we have a list of things that we would offer the volunteers, but we are expecting them to generate ideas as well.

A project out of Australia called theSkyNet, with a tongue-in-cheek nod to the Terminator movies, isnt asking for brain power, but computing power. The International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) has run the citizen science project since 2011. Its 50,000 volunteers allow astronomers to connect their computers via the internet, basically creating a mid-range supercomputer.

Researchers use theSkyNet supercomputer to process data from various radio telescopes, which collect information on a different wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum. The research is diverse, from studying the evolution of the early universe to the formation of stars.

It turns out citizen science isnt just good for research. It can also be therapeutic.

Scientists showed in a paper just published by the journalPublic Library of Science (PLoS) that patients requiring physical therapy did betterand were more engagedwhen the exercises involved participating in a citizen science project.

In the case of the study published in PLoS, participants helped map a polluted canal in New York with a miniature instrumented boat. The boat was remotely controlled through physical gestures using a low-cost motion capture system. Scientists got environmental data, patients received needed exercise, and the researchers validated a new approach to physical therapy.

Our methodology expands behavioral rehabilitation by providing an engaging and fun natural user interface, a tangible scientific contribution, and an attractive low-cost markerless technology for human motion capture, says Maurizio Porfiri, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, in a press release.

Technology isnt just leading to new breakthroughs in space exploration and other fields, its enabling regular people to participate in scientific discovery at scales never before possible. Enlisting tens of thousands of people to engage in research to nearby stars and beyond is truly exponential.

Image Credit: NASA

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Citizen Science Means Anyone Could Discover Planet NineEven You - Singularity Hub

Minister for Foreign Affairs of Denmark, Anders Samuelsen, welcomes Singularity University to Denmark and predicts good prospects for the new innovation hub:

When I visited Silicon Valley last week Singularity University was the first item on my agenda and with good reason. SU bridges the gap between global challenges and technological solutions, which is important for us if we want to keep one step ahead of the future.

I am immensely pleased that SU has chosen Denmark as new innovation hub and the only second location outside Silicon Valley. It underlines that Denmark is world leading when it comes to innovation and digitisation. I am convinced that SingularityU Denmark will contribute to creating a dynamic hub for entrepreneurs, companies and researchers and prepare Denmark for the future.

SingularityU Denmark will offer a number of educational and innovation programmes that combine the latest within exponential technology with future business areas.

According to Singularity Universitys Global CEO, Rob Nail, who recently participated in the Danish government's Disruption Council, it is no coincidence that Denmark is chosen as location for the new hub:

Denmark is a recognized global leader in many areas of technology, including green tech, biotech, pharmaceutical sciences, telecommunications, IT, design and we all know the successes born in Denmark: LEGO, Universal Robots and Skype, to name a few. Our intent with the new business venture is to build on these achievements and create new opportunities. I was told that LEGO is short for "leg godt," and SU wants to play well in Denmark.

Laila Pawlak, CEO for the new SingularityU Denmark, adds:

Being able to announce SingularityU Denmark is a huge recognition of our country. It gives us not only an opportunity to strengthen the Danish business community, it also creates a unique international position for Denmark.

The educational programmes will have expert faculty selected from within Scandinavia and around the world. Large corporations, SMEs, start-ups and public organisations are able to enter partnerships with SingularityU Denmark and get access to customized programs.

Innovation Centre Denmark in Silicon Valley and Invest in Denmark have close ties with Singularity University and are supporting the establishment of SingularityU Denmark.

About Singularity University Singularity University (SU) is a global learning and innovation community using exponential technologies to solve the worlds biggest challenges and build an abundant future for all. Our collaborative platform empowers individuals and organizations to learn, connect, and innovate breakthrough solutions using accelerating technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and digital biology. Our offerings include educational programs, conferences, innovation workshops, corporate and startup accelerators, social impact programs, and online news and content.

The SU global community spans more than 110 countries and includes entrepreneurs, corporations, development organizations, governments, investors, and academic institutions. With over 370 impact initiatives, the SU community is driving positive change in the areas of health, environment, security, education, energy, food, prosperity, water, space, disaster resilience, shelter, and governance.

A certified benefit corporation, SU was founded in 2008 by renowned innovators Ray Kurzweil and Peter H. Diamandis. SU is headquartered at NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley. To learn more, visit SU.org, join us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @SingularityU.

About SingularityU Denmark SingularityU Denmark will be based in Copenhagen Science City in a +5000 m2 facility that will include among others: office space, co-working and networking space, meeting and conference facilities, makerspace, iLab and bio labs, fitness, rooftop terrace and recreational areas. SingularityU Denmark is registered as a Benefit Corporation, which means that the organisation is committed to making a positive difference in addition to its commercial activities. Thus, the organisation plans to initiate a number of initiatives for entrepreneurs and students and will include an impact board that will help to choose specific impact activities, which SingularityU Denmark will support. http://www.SingularityUdenmark.org

About Copenhagen Science City Copenhagen Science City is a partnership between the City of Copenhagen, the Capital Region of Denmark, Metropolitan University College, the University of Copenhagen, University Hospital of Copenhagen, the Danish Building & Property Agency, Copenhagen Bio Science Park, Symbion office community, the Danish Agency for Higher Education, Novo Nordisk and the Dreyer Foundation. Copenhagen Science City has one of Europes highest concentrations of education and research in the fields of medicine, health and natural sciences, centred around three institutions of education, research and applied science: Metropolitan University College, University Hospital of Copenhagen and the University of Copenhagens Campus North. http://copenhagensciencecity.dk/

How can we help you? If you want to know more about how we can help your company establish in Denmark please contact Lasse Grn Christensen, Team Leader ICT, via mobile phone +45 3392 0162 or e-mail lassch@um.dk.

If you want to know more about SingularityU Denmark please contact Laila Pawlak: via mobile phone +45 2924 5350 or e-mail Laila@SingularityU.dk.

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Singularity University establishes new organisation in Denmark - Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark

Wiring our brains up to computers could have a host of exciting applications from controlling robotic prosthetics with our minds to restoring sight by feeding camera feeds directly into the vision center of our brains.

Most brain-computer interface research to date has been conducted using electroencephalography (EEG) where electrodes are placed on the scalp to monitor the brains electrical activity. Achieving very high quality signals, however, requires a more invasive approach.

Integrating electronics with living tissue is complicated, though. Probes that are directly inserted into the gray matter have been around for decades, but while they are capable of highly accurate recording, the signals tend to degrade rapidly due to the buildup of scar tissue. Electrocorticography (ECoG), which uses electrodes placed beneath the skull but on top of the gray matter, has emerged as a popular compromise, as it achieves higher-accuracy recordings with a lower risk of scar formation.

But now researchers from the University of Texas have created new probes that are so thin and flexible, they dont elicit scar tissue buildup. Unlike conventional probes, which are much larger and stiffer, they dont cause significant damage to the brain tissue when implanted, and they are also able to comply with the natural movements of the brain.

In recent research published in the journal Science Advances, the team demonstrated that the probes were able to reliably record the electrical activity of individual neurons in mice for up to four months. This stability suggests these probes could be used for long-term monitoring of the brain for research or medical diagnostics as well as controlling prostheses, said Chong Xie, an assistant professor in the universitys department of biomedical engineering who led the research.

Besides neuroprosthetics, they can possibly be used for neuromodulation as well, in which electrodes generate neural stimulation, he told Singularity Hub in an email. We are also using them to study the progression of neurovascular and neurodegenerative diseases such as stroke, Parkinsons and Alzheimers.

The group actually created two probe designs, one 50 microns long and the other 10 microns long. The smaller probe has a cross-section only a fraction of that of a neuron, which the researchers say is the smallest among all reported neural probes to the best of their knowledge.

Because the probes are so flexible, they cant be pushed into the brain tissue by themselves, and so they needed to be guided in using a stiff rod called a shuttle device. Previous designs of these shuttle devices were much larger than the new probes and often led to serious damage to the brain tissue, so the group created a new carbon fiber design just seven microns in diameter.

At present, though, only 25 percent of the recordings can be tracked down to individual neurons thanks to the fact that neurons each have characteristic waveforms with the rest too unclear to distinguish from each other.

The only solution, in my opinion, is to have many electrodes placed in the brain in an array or lattice so that any neuron can be within a reasonable distance from an electrode, said Chong. As a result, all enclosed neurons can be recorded and well-sorted.

This a challenging problem, according to Chong, but one benefit of the new probes is that their small dimensions make it possible to implant probes just tens of microns apart rather than the few hundred micron distances necessary with conventional probes. This opens up the possibility of overlapping detection ranges between probes, though the group can still only consistently implant probes with an accuracy of 50 microns.

Takashi Kozai, an assistant professor in the University of Pittsburghs bioengineering department who has worked on ultra-small neural probes, said that further experiments would need to be done to show that the recordings, gleaned from anaesthetized rats, actually contained useful neural code. This could include visually stimulating the animals and trying to record activity in the visual cortex.

He also added that a lot of computational neuroscience relies on knowing the exact spacing between recording sites. The fact that flexible probes are able to migrate due to natural tissue movements could pose challenges.

But he said the study does show some important advances forward in technology development, and most importantly, proof-of-concept feasibility, adding that there is clearly much more work necessary before this technology becomes widely used or practical.

Chong actually worked on another promising approach to neural recording in his previous role under Charles M. Lieber at Harvard University. Last June, the group demonstrated a mesh of soft, conductive polymer threads studded with electrodes that could be injected into the skulls of mice with a syringe where it would then unfurl to both record and stimulate neurons.

As 95 percent of the mesh is free, space cells are able to arrange themselves around it, and the study reported no signs of an elevated immune response after five weeks. But the implantation required a syringe 100 microns in diameter, which causes considerably more damage than the new ultra-small probes developed in Chongs lab.

It could be some time before the probes are tested on humans. The major barrier is that this is still an invasive surgical procedure, including cranial surgery and implantation of devices into brain tissue, said Chong. But, he said, the group is considering testing the probes on epilepsy patients, as it is common practice to implant electrodes inside the skulls of those who dont respond to medication to locate the area of their brains responsible for their seizures.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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This Neural Probe Is So Thin, The Brain Doesn't Know It's There - Singularity Hub

Video: AI Is Getting Smarter, Says Singularity University's Neil ... Wall Street Journal (subscription) (blog) Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Chair at Singularity University Neil Jacobstein talks about some recent achievements where AIs have been able to solve ... and more »

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Video: AI Is Getting Smarter, Says Singularity University's Neil ... - Wall Street Journal (subscription) (blog)

With the recent release of v2.1 for Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, Stardock have decided to celebrate by discounting this grand space RTS until March 2. If you are at all interested in large scale combat and have been waiting to get into Escalation on the cheap, now is your chance.

Commander, these excellent PC strategy games may be useful to you.

The release of version 2.1 adds a whole host of features, with many of them helping new players to become more effective battle commanders. There is now a single player observation mode, where players can watch AI generals battle it out, by creating custom games with specific parameters. You can use this as a possible training tool or as a way to see if a bunch of normal AI players can combine their might to take down a single Insane AI.

Version 2.1 adds a special unranked match option for multiplayer, which is perfect for testing out new strategies or simply playing more chilled out, casual games. You can now also turn off supply lines at the start of a match, which makes it so you dont have to constantly keep checking if all of your surrounding regions are connected to you central Nexus in order to gain resources. When combined with unranked matches, this update is great for giving low level or new players a way to acclimatise themselves to the raw basics of battle, before launching into full scale warfare in ranked.

"In addition to making some adjustments with AI visibility and balance, we've added features that players have been asking for, like the single-player observer mode," said Derek Paxton, Stardock's Vice President of Entertainment. "You can learn how the AI makes decisions by watching it battle during customized games using any settings or parameters you want."

Three new maps have been added into the mix, set in Russia, Spain and Italy respectively. There have also been a number of balance changes, which you can check out in full via the changelog on the Ashes of the Singularity forums.

So, if these new features have piqued your interest and you want to smash up some robots, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation is now available on Steam for $19.99/14.99 until March 2.

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Stardock celebrate v2.1 of Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation with a ... - PCGamesN

Art and Science may not always be the best of friends, but when they do get together they throw one hell of a party. The Undivided Mind art show opens tonight, Friday November 19th, in San Francisco with free admission, wine, and conversation with those interested in the Singularity, Transhumanism and technology. The show will feature oil paintings created from digital images originally designed by the mysterious and provocative Imaginary Foundation. I had a chance to talk with Micah Daigle, the "Director of Meta-Pattern Affairs" for The Undivided Mind. He promises a great evening of art and science to those who make the journey to the Fifty24SF gallery space tonight. If you can't make it, more's the pity, but the work will be on display this week (Nov 20 to Nov 28) everyday in the afternoon. As you can see in the photos below, The Undivided Mind promises to be a unique experience. Why are there chalkboard equations covering the walls? Guess I'll have to go and find out.

Those who make it to The Undivided Mind should find it full of futurists and aficionados of the Singularity. Expected attendees include Jason Silva, Michael Annissimov,and Michael Vassar. While there won't be any planned presentations or speeches, Daigle told me there would be a hunt for the Higgs boson. The person who finds the 'God particle' will win a free painting from the show. (Someone should warn the guys at CERN).

Despite the wacky particle hijinks, tonight's discussion should be a fairly pertinent one. The Imaginary Foundation has made it its mission to enable human progress through the use of art (and clothing) and The Undivided Mind is aimed at exploring how art and science could combine to guide us through the disruptive technological changes on the horizon. In other words, the art show should be enlightening as well as fun. Sounds like my cup of tea. Those who attend should feel free to post some comments on the event below.

[image credits: Imaginary Foundation] [sources: Micah Daigle, Imaginary Foundation]

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Singularity Art Show Tonight In San Francisco!

PLEASE BE upstanding for the round-up of this week's Google-related stories.

Firstly, there's Google's plans to sue Uber for allegedly nicking design patents for self-driving cars, and a new hack that warns users of "missing fonts" which turn out to be malware are plaguing Windows Chrome users.

On the enterprise side, Google is now offering Tesla K80 CPU clusters to spin up a supercomputer on demand, In VR, the days of silly hats for VR could be numbered as the company appears to have designed a sort of scuba-diving helmet instead.

Remix OS has announced Singularity, it's plan for an Android phone OS that plugs into a monitor to become a computer.

Meanwhile, Google Project Zero has decided to go public on the exact glitches that caused Microsoft to delay this month's Patch Tuesday. Cheeky monkeys.

Other big news this week, Google suffered a technical glitch last night which meant that some people using the company's ON router may have had to reset their credentials. No harm done, but the company has had to apologise.

There's even more big news on the messaging front - a first leak of Allo for the desktop has leaked (on purpose) presumably as a "keep the faith" acknowledgement to people who have abandoned the messaging platform which is now outside the Top 500 Android apps, despite the company hoping to make it the replacement for Google Hangouts, which is now aimed at business customers.

But meanwhile Android Messages is coming to replace Messenger and will be the default messaging app for twenty OEMs, offering Rich Communication Services (RCS) and a joined up message service equivalent to Apple's iMessage. And about ruddy time.

Google Play Music has had a tweak, but really needs a bomb put under it for the mish-mash of different design concepts, bugs and missing features that remain. It also claims to have more than 40 million songs in its library. Yet still nothing from Cardiacs.

Finally, for anyone who has a Mac and likes tinkering about in betas, the Canary channel of Chrome now offers Mac Pro Touchbar support, which means it'll be live for the rest of us after Easter. You might want to hang on though as it's by all accounts, bobbins at the moment.

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Google Updates: Scuba, Singularity, SMS and suing - The INQUIRER

The massive-scale real-time strategy game, Ashes of Singularity: Escalation, is getting an update and a discount on Feb. 23, 2017.

Stardock Entertainment (the software company behind Ashes of Singularity, Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire) announced today that the expansion to their popular game, Ashes of Singularity, is getting a major update on Steam. Stardock also said that in celebration of this update, players wishing to buy Ashes of Singularity: Escalation will receive a 50 per cent discount on the game from Feb. 23 to March. 3, 2017. This is fantastic for anyone wanting to get into the franchise without back-tracking on the price.

Version 2.1 of Ashes of Singularity: Escalation features new maps, rebalances several maps, adds single-player observer mode, unranked matches and an option for disabling supply lines.

"In addition to making some adjustments with AI visibility and balance, we've added features that players have been asking for, like the single-player observer mode," said Derek Paxton, Stardock's Vice President of Entertainment in a press release. "You can learn how the AI makes decisions by watching it battle during customized games using any settings or parameters you want.

Ashes of Singularity: Escalations 2.1 update comes just after Stardock merged their base game, Ashes of Singularity with the expansion pack, Escalation, into a single title. Stardock even gave all owners of the base game a complimentary copy of Escalation.

Ashes of Singularity: Escalation normally runs for $39.99 on Steam, so anyone wishing to buy the game should get it before the 50 per cent discount ends."The growing single-player modding community and the extensive multiplayer options convinced us that we needed to combine theAshes of the SingularityandEscalation communities together," said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock in a press release. "After all, there can only be one singularity."

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Ashes of Singularity: Escalation Gets an Update - CGMagazine

Damon Wayans Jr. will star in theSingularitypilot from producersSeth RogenandEvan Goldberg. FX won a bidding war for the AI comedy last August, which was around the time Rogen announced the project. The story depicts a future when artificial intelligencehas far exceeded human intelligence.

Below, learn about the Seth Rogen AI comedy.

In the series, society underwent some massive changes after artificial intelligence grew superior to humans. The Hollywood Reporter learned Wayans is set to play Doug, a man who enjoys the convenience and happiness provided by the best tech the world has to offer. His face isnt always glued to his phone, though. Doug loves to be in the moment and this makes me like this character already is often dressed in Yeezy street wear.

Sonny Lee(Silicon Valley) came up with the idea for the series. Hes writing and executive producing the pilot. Apparently, the writer went to Rogen, Goldberg, and their Point Grey Banner because Singularitystone is comparable toThis Is the End. Theres no mention of whos directing the pilot, but after their work onPreacher, it would be nice if Rogen and Goldberg got behind the camera for a concept as potentially funny as this one. If the show gets picked up, itll be the duos third project to go to series, followingPreacherand HulusFuture Man. (That one actually co-stars another former Happy Endings cast member, Eliza Coupe.)

Rogen revealed he and Goldberg were working on a show about the singularity back in August. We have a pilot for FX that were gonna shoot that were working on right now, he said. Were working on the script right now and were going to film that in the next year basically. Its about artificial intelligence, its a half-hour comedy about the singularity basically. Years ago, Rogen and Goldberg were developing another FX series, an animated showabout Bigfoot, which is still possibly in the works.

As forSingularity, Rogen, Goldberg, and Lee have a fine star for their series. Wayans appeared inLets Be CopsandHow to Be Single, but his performance in the endlessly enjoyableHappy Endingsis a good indicator of how funny he is. The Hollywood Reporter added Wayans was one of the most sought-after actors this pilot season. He was weighing offers from NBC, CBS, and FOX, but he instead went with the promising high-concept pilot from FX.

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Damon Wayans Jr In Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen AI comedy - /FILM

Never before have businesses been able to build billion-dollar valuations in so little time. Never before have incumbent enterprises been able to go out of business so quickly. Disruption is now commonplace, and augmented reality (AR) is emerging as yet another avenue to turn industries on their heads. But what direction will this new technology take?

AR overlays digital information on the physical world using a smartphone (think Pokmon Go) or a headset. In its simplest form, AR is simply a rectangular display floating in front of the eyes, la Google Glass. More advanced forms will drop video game characters or useful information seamlessly onto physical objects, from homes to industrial warehouses.

While virtual reality is moving into a more commercial phase, AR is a little earlier in its development. But ARs potential practical applications are significant. So, whats in store for AR in the coming years?

Most business leaders today are making their projections based on what we know todaya perspective that runs the potential risk of being too linear and possibly missing the point. By digging deeply into trends, cycles and clues from technology disruptions in the past, we can create frameworks to help us better strategize for how capabilities may unfold in the future.

Today, standard market projections focus on how AR will become smaller and faster, or they extrapolate on how existing capabilities could impact the enterprise once implemented. However, past technology disruptions demonstrate that this view is too narrow, and doesn't consider the impact of converging technologiesfor example, in the way mobile technology has converged with the internet.

Augmented reality (and to some extent, virtual reality as well) is on a collision course with other emerging exponential technologiesfor example, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing and machine learning, to name a few. Businesses that prepare themselves to capture the value that can unfold when they converge are more likely to find themselves as industry leaders in the resulting economy.

Mobile technology may be one of the largest technology disruptions to happen in the past 20 years. However, the mobile industry didnt just happen on its own.

Analysts thought that these devices would become smaller, gain longer battery life and that costs would falland even predicted a slow, linear growth. In fact, McKinsey predictions were that the total market for cell phones would be around 900,000 by the turn of the century. The phone would indeed become smaller, faster and cheaper, but no market prediction would come close to predicting what happened next.

Mobile technology became disruptive when it converged with the internet, introducing a slew of new consumer and enterprise use cases. The smartphone was born, and it took the ceiling off the cell phone market potential, unlocking billions of dollars of value that simply did not exist before.

Crowdsourcing was the next convergence as smartphones tapped a worldwide developer community. Traditionally, software companies made applications for mobile PDAs in a small, niche marketplace. By hosting a crowdsourced marketplace on the App Store online store, Apple initiated what would become an estimated $143 billion market opportunity for mobile apps in just 8 years.

Mobile converging with data analytics became another landmark example. As user adoption for smartphones and mobile apps began to skyrocket, the collection of user data to fuel business insights became very relevant. Today, mobile user data has an estimated value of $50 billion, across multiple layers of user data that are collected, sold, aggregated and analyzed.

The point is, mobile is a mega-billion-dollar market, but those who focused on the handset and what it could do missed a seismic shift in the technology paradigm.

Similar to the mobile revolution, ARs future will likely not be dictated by falling prices, smaller form factors or faster performance. They may help in the ubiquitous adoption of AR, but relying on these metrics to predict the future of AR will likely miss the greater market opportunity. Its only when we start to imagine what the combination of AR and industrial IoT, machine earning and 3D printing, among others, that we can begin to truly see its future potential.

Industrial IoT. Augmented reality and the industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) will most likely be the first to converge. AR device adoption is happening in the enterprise space at a faster pace than the consumer space (with the exception of Pokmon Go). And similar to how consumer connectivity created value with the smartphone, enterprise connectivity will provide an information layer thats expected to extend the value of AR devices.

As enterprises begin to rapidly develop connected infrastructure, from manufacturing to logistics, and ultimately to the consumer, massive amounts of data are being collected and used for analysis. AR can provide a data to human interface, allowing workers, managers and executives to see the world augmented with a rich dataset.

Enterprise resource planning, warehouse management and even electronic health record systems will be able to connect a workforce to its surrounding environment, whether a factory, warehouse or hospitalworkers will be able to see information projected onto their environment. Eventually, the value will likely be driven upstream, as well into concepting, design, layout and other knowledge worker tasks, connecting the digital world to the physical one through connected data ecosystems.

Machine learning. Machine learning is expected to be an important convergence for AR, as well. Well need to figure out the best user interface for what amounts to a more hands-free experience. Just as the keyboard was an important innovation in desktop or laptop computing and touchscreens were the key to mobile devicesmachine learning may play a big role in AR interfaces.

Moving from type to touchscreen is a great example of how new interfaces require novel UI. Machine-learning-enabled speech-to-text, as well as text-to-speech, could become important innovations in AR.

Our devices should understand the way we move, talk and touch. Data around user behavior will likely be extremely valuable, opening up markets to capture, transmit, store and utilize.

3D printing. 3D printing is an exploding market in industrial manufacturing, with unique potential benefits for complexity, performance and physical properties. However, specific 3D printing tools for modeling can be confusing for engineers trained on traditional design software for 2D monitors.

Often, the unique design requirements of complex 3D structures are not well suited for existing software tools. Crafting, editing and visualizing models with AR will help bridge the cognitive gap between engineer and design, removing the degrees of separation between designer and product that currently exist today (i.e., keyboard, mouse, 2D screen, interface), and enable the designer to directly interact with the product in an intuitive, creative way.

While there are technological hurdles to cover in stereoscopic processing, display technology, form factor and even social stigma, the future of AR does not lie in the headset, but the headset and

Simply looking at AR and hypothesizing about its value is not sufficient.

Most of the opportunity around hardware innovation lies in emergent value. How AR technologies interface, integrate and converge with other future innovations will help unlock the multi-billion-dollar potential of what may initially seem like just a clunky device.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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Why the Potential of Augmented Reality Is Greater Than You Think - Singularity Hub

Posted February 23, 2017 by Mareile Kaufmann

When we discuss artificial intelligence, the digital technology that makes it happen, and singularity the idea that both of them will exponentially take over the progression of society we refer to them in singular. This is not a coincidence. Both, science and fiction have portrayed AI as a particular form of reason, digital technology as an autonomous driver of change, and singularity as a unidirectional technological revolution. However, none of them are necessarily as singular as they appear.

Singluarity represented by HAL, the rogue computer from Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey. PHOTO: Flickr.com/Rosenfeld Media

Rather, the different contexts in which digital technologies come to matter create a broad variety of knowledge and social effects. For example, digital technologies are currently used for predictions of any kind: from the spreading of pandemics to political elections and crime mapping. Not only does each of these predictions produce their specific societal effects: they influence whether or not we get vaccinated, for whom to vote or where to park our car. They also produce more complicated effects, some of which actually make us question their predictive power. Filter bubbles and fake news are just some of them. But what exactly makes these social effects complicated?

While the way in which digital technologies work is no longer intuitive to understand and question, the abovementioned effects also reveal that humans are still an important part of the game. And this complicates things. Digital technologies and the knowledge they produce are not as singular and independent of social processes as the term singularity suggests. After all, it is us who provide both data and context knowledge for predictions, and in many cases it is still humans who decide which parameters are included in prediction algorithms. This goes to show that the simplified idea of computer-versus-humans doesnt really hold. The production of intelligence through digital technologies doesnt happen outside social and political situations, but in relation to them.

In interviews I have conducted on predictive policing methods it became quite clear that digital technologies are closely linked to social and political situations. Both, police officers and programmers decide which crime data to collect, how to feed it into the computer and how to present the outputs of algorithmic calculations. All of these decisions taken by humans are part of defining which kinds of crimes police focuses on, even though the actual crime predictions are eventually generated by a computer. It shows that political and social data and context knowledge feed into digital technologies and influence the intelligence they generate. And vice versa digital technologies and the intelligence they produce again influence political and social situations in specific ways. One striking characteristic of digital technologies is, for example, that any knowledge they produce has to be calculable and captured in numbers. Even though this seems obvious, it still does determine and limit the ways in which digital machines can produce knowledge. For predictive policing this means, for example, that correlations and patterns are the main knowledge tools for algorithms to predict crime. This means that correlations and patterns influence actual policing decisions, for example where to mobilize personnel and which locations to focus on. In essence: how digital technologies work is specific to the social situation they are used in, and digital technologies create specific effects on society. This means that humans and machines co-produce the progression of society rather than dominating over each other.

Once we have understood how social situations are actually reflected in the way we engineer digital technologies and create digital knowledge, it may be more appropriate to explore the many specificities of the situations in which digital technologies and society influence each other instead of presuming a singularity.

Last month Morgenbladet published an engaging special edition on artificial intelligence. I followed up with an op-ed which was published in a later edition of the paper. This blog post provides further critical comment.

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After Man? From Singularity to Specificity - Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) (press release) (blog)

Damon Wayans Jr. will star inSingularity,a science fiction comedy pilot for FX. According to The Hollywood Reporter, theHappy Endingsalum had several other pilot offers on the table, but went with the Seth Rogen-backed comedy which is certainly a vote of confidence for the strength of the pilot.

Singularityis set in a future where AIs have passed humans in intelligence, resulting in big changes to society as we know it. (ThinkHumans, but with waymore jokes?) Wayans Jr. will star as Doug, a Yezzy streetwear-wearing dude who is totally fine with the turn humanity has taken. He enjoys being reliant on AIs to augment his day-to-day life.

The science fiction pilot comes from Sonny Lee, who has previously worked onSilicon Valley, It's Always Sunny, and 2 Broke Girls. We can expect a comedic tone similar to feature filmThis Is the End.Lee approached Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg to produce the project because of its tonal similarities to their end-of-the-world film. The producers currently have two other TV projects on the air: AMC's Preacher and Hulu's Future Man.

We'll have to wait to see ifSingularitygets picked up to series, but with Wayans Jr. starring, Rogen and Goldberg behind the scenes, and Lee writing the pilot, it's hard to imagine it not getting more episodes. Prior to landing at FX, the project was part of a network bidding war with at least five other interested parties.

More news as we hear it.

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Damon Wayans Jr. Joins FX Sci-Fi Comedy Singularity - Den of Geek US

A picture of the new AMD Vega logo. (Image Credits: PCWorld)

The Ashes of the Singularity benchmark results for AMDs upcoming RX 580 were leaked yesterday and while I am posting this slightly late, I promise I have a sweetener to make up for it. The RX 500 series is the generation of GPUs that is going to succeed AMDs current RX 400 series with the RX 580 being the direct successor to the RX 480. There were initially some rumblings and confusion on whether it will simply be a Polaris refresh, or the cut down Vega core, and this leak hopefully points us in the right direction.

The Radeon RX 580 graphics card was tested on an Intel i7 5820k hexa-core processor with a base clock of 3.3 GHz. The RX 580 manages to score an average framerate of 72.3 fps. The performance shown here is significantly faster than the RX 480 and roughly in the same league as the GTX 1070. The performance bump that we can see here leads me to suspect that this is probably a cut-down Vega core (Vega 11) and not a revised version of the RX 480. You cant really hope to gain multiple double digit performance bumps from simply an improved revision or better binned GPU. (The first and the last screenshot is courtesy of Videocardz.com)

The AMD Radeon RX 560 graphics card tested in Ashes of the Singularity benchmark. Picture courtesy of Videocardz

It does however mean that this is an RX 480 successor through and through and will probably be priced in the same range. It also means that we have yet to see the real flagship of AMD, the full-fledged Vega GPU, which will probably take on the name of the Radeon RX 590 graphics card. AMD has already revealed the new logo for the GPU and since Ryzen has already launched, we should be expecting it any time now since the company promised both as a combo.

This is also where the sweetener I promised comes in. Here below, we have the benchmark results of the Ryzen + CrossFire RX 580 combo (that is using an engineering sample clocked at comparable speeds to the Intel counterpart). This is really the ultimate AMD 4K setup you are looking at here in terms of value. A hexacore Ryzen processor as well as two RX 580s in crossfire and boy does it perform:

AMD 4K Setup: Dual RX 580s coupled with a 6-Core Ryzen processor benchmarked in AotS.

The interesting thing about this benchmark is that the processor is clocked at almost exactly the same clock as the Intel counterpart and of course, has the same core count. This would have been an almost perfect apples to apples comparison if not for the fact that we are looking at the 4K resolution, as well as a CrossFire combo of the RX 580. With an average framerate of 82.5 fps, we are looking at impressive 4K performance to say the least.

The AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics card tested in Ashes of the Singularity benchmark. Picture courtesy of Videocardz

Last up, we also have the benchmarks of the RX 560 graphics card. Given AMDs past trend, this card has a very high probability of being a Polaris refresh and I wouldnt be surprised if it proves to be a revised version of the same. We are seeing an average score of 34.3 on 1080p which is more or less an acceptable result considering this is DX12 and AotS. With NVIDIA gearing up for the Ti launch soon, it looks like the company will be able to hold on to the performance crown uncontested for a little while longer before it faces any competition from Vega.

Ashes Of The Singularity Benchmark of AMD Ryzen Sample With 4.0 GHz Turbo Leaks Out

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AMD Radeon RX 580 Ashes of the Singularity Benchmarks Leaked 4K, Ryzen Combo, CrossFire and More! - Wccftech