Category Archives: Technology

Delta just announced it will launch a new, self-service bag drop powered by facial recognition technology, the first of its kind at U.S. airports.

In short, instead of handing over your luggage to a Delta agent, you'll check it in yourself as a computer scans your face to confirm that you are who you say you are.

The pilot program will begin at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport this summer, Delta said Monday. The airline spent $600,000 on its four new self-service stations, one of which uses facial recognition technology to match customers with their passport photos.

Delta's new self-service facial recognition-powered bag drop, pictured here, is coming to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport this summer.

Delta Airlines

Using facial recognition technology will free up Delta agents to help customers in other areas, the airline said. It cited research saying that self-service bag drops can process customers' bags up to twice as fast as humans can.

Delta's announcement is the latest sign that facial recognition technology is "catching on," biometrics expert Anil Jain told CBS News.

A professor at Michigan State University who's done extensive research on facial recognition, Jain called Delta's bag drop program a "viable" use of the rapidly evolving technology, which has already become a mainstay in surveillance, law enforcement, counterterrorism, immigration enforcement, and more.

Facial scanning could accelerate the clumsy check-in process, especially as customers get familiar with it and faster at using with the technology, Jain said. (That familiarization is unfolding in countless other areas; for instance, afterApple introduced Touch IDin 2013, fingerprint scans have since gone from awkward to intuitive for millions of smartphone users.)

Using police mugshot databases, researchers from Michigan State University found that "recognition accuracy" begins to drop when facial recognition programs try to identify an individual using images more than six years apart. Here, a repeat offender is shown from ages 28 to 38.

Michigan State University

But facial recognition at the airport could come with complications, Jain said. Earlier this year, he and other MSU researchers conducted a large-scale study evaluating how accurate facial recognition technology proves to be when only outdated photos are available to use for identification.

The results: in general, facial recognition systems show remarkable accuracy in identifying individuals using photos taken in the past six years. But, that accuracy drops when using photos older than six years.

Passport photos, however, are often older than that. For adults, passport photos only need to be renewed every ten years.

Passport technology is also not optimal, Jain said. Some passports, like all U.S. and E.U. passports, contain a chip that includes all passport data, including one's photo, digitally. But other nations' passports, particularly those from developing countries, don't use this chip technology, meaning customers may have to physically scan their passport photos at bag check resulting in lower-quality images and potentially less accurate match results.

"There are uncontrolled factors," Jain said.

Law enforcement has made increasing use of facial recognition technology in recent years. Other high-tech methods of identification, like iris scanning, demonstrate strong results. But iris data is not nearly as available as facial images, which government agencies worldwide keep on file.

Nearly half of U.S. adults have their faces in facial recognition databases, CBS News reported in 2016.

Facial recognition is still a slippery science in security and surveillance operations, particularly covert operations.

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Nearly half of American adults have their photos on file in facial recognition databases. Law enforcement's use of the technology has some export...

Facial recognition programs are most effective at matching faces when there are official photos, like passport photos, driver's license photos, and mugshots on file the more standardized, the better. In those types of photos, individuals are typically well lit, stand at a fixed distance from the camera, show their whole faces, and refrain from smiling.

In these contexts, facial recognition accuracy is "very high" at around 98 percent, Jain said. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government research laboratory, isclosely monitoring how facial recognition technology is evolving and improving over time.

But once you throw in certain variables individuals not fully facing the camera, sunglasses or hats disguising some features, individuals rapidly moving through dimly lit areas the accuracy of matches plummets.

Improving matches for so-called "uncooperative users," such as suspects captured in security footage, is the next frontier for facial recognition, Jain said.

"The government is investing heavily in unconstrained imaging environments with uncooperative users," he said.

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Delta to roll out facial recognition technology at airport bag check - CBS News

Pinterest offers advertisers a unique opportunity for its audience of 175 million users: the ability to catch them at all points of theirpurchasing lifetime. Brands can advertise against moments of discovery and people searching for and saving products, eventually pushing them down to the point of actually buying a product. But since it fired up its ads business, its had to give advertisers the kinds of tools theyre used to using.

Now the company is starting to roll out the same image recognition that it uses to power its visual search and recommendations the same tools that will know to show you a cool stool based on that office chair you saw and liked to its base of advertising content. That means that instead of displayingjust on keywords and other kinds of traditional tagging, advertisers will get the benefit of their ad showing up next to a product that is related to the ad based on its core visual search technology.

Pinterest president Tim Kendall unveiled the plans and showed off a few of the mechanics of it on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017.

Until now weve only applied the visual discovery tech to the organic consumer facing products, Kendall said. But the news is were now applying it to ads. Think about Pinterest, we have a depth and breadth of visual signals on products and services. Weve got all that information, we haveall these Pins, and the way that people navigate those pins is very visual. We leveraged the way people actually use Pinterest. We can identify colors, shapes, textures. Were able to understand the combined affect people find appealing, even when it cant be communicated in words.

Tim Kendall (Pinterest) at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017

The ads for now will show up in the home Pinterest feed through Instant Ideas, a small circle at the bottom of a pin that jumps straight to related pins. They also show up in the related pins section when users tap a pin and blow it up on their feed. In the future, Kendall said the technology makes sense for its other products like Lens, its new real-world visual search product that works through your camera.

The company is effectively flipping a switch, adding the relevancy elements to its existing ad inventory. Part of the reason for this is to improve the Pinterest experience in general if users see more relevant ads that look closer to the kind of content they are seeking on the service, theyll feel better about going to Pinterest. But given that Pinterest is theoretically improving the experience with that move, the company is hoping to show advertisers right away the impact of the addition of that technology to its ad products.

The technology is getting better, its something wed always imagined that we do, and when youre building an ads business from scratch theres some things you have to build that are just standards, Kendall said. Were getting to that point now where weve hit parity in a lot of parameters. So were starting to be able to segwayinto differentiation and build things that other people cant. Or they could build it, but because of the nature of the products, this would make less sense.

Pinterest has been tapping into new kinds of ways to help consumers identify and discover products and catch them at the moment they begin to get interested in purchasing something. Pinterests Lens, for example, helps collapse the distance between the discovery process on Pinterest and the real world, making it easier to get users to make a sort of mental note to look into a product later. As they save those products or start to search more in-depth for something, Pinterest is able to dig deeper into their behavior and figure out the kinds of things they like.

All this is important as the company tries to convince advertisers that its not just a kind of experiment or curiosity. The company reportedly was on track to generate $300 million in revenue, an enviable number for any ad-driven startup. But if its going to make that leap from $300 million in annual advertising revenue to the kind of fire hose that Google or Facebook have created, it needs to be able to go to advertisers and show them a differentiated and equally powerful advertising opportunity.

So while this may seemlike a small tweak, its actually one of the first times that Pinterest is really flexing its Pinterest-iness against its advertising products. A tool like this is a kind of actualization of the full promise of Pinterest helping people discover the kinds of products they didnt know they wanted, or the content they didnt realize they thought is interesting. Pinterest is in a unique position because most of the content on the service is products, which is by design because thats what the user base enjoys. Brands have a unique opportunity to tap that desire, making it one of the highest-potential advertising platforms.

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Pinterest's visual search technology is coming to its ads - TechCrunch

Astartup called Lisnrwants to replace NFC and QR codes with a new technology that sends data over audio a communication protocol its calling Smart Tone. The technology its invented can be used across a number of applications, including point-of-sale transactions, ticketing and authentication, offline messaging, device to device connectivity and more.

The idea for Lisnr comes from co-founder and CEO Rodney Williams. Though not an engineer himself, his background at Lockheed Martin, Procter & Gamble and elsewhere exposed him to technology and taught him the value of patents and IP. He had an idea about it should work, versus how its working today, and saw the opportunity to make something better.

Weve created all these advanced technologies and experiences on top of these old protocols, Williams explains. The frustration was really that today we create products and services around the limitations of technologyI felt like if we could create a better connector, we could extract the best consumer experience.

The startup was founded in Cincinnati in 2012 by Williams, along with serial entrepreneur Chris Ostoich and software architect Josh Glick the latter who met Williams after his Startup Bus pitch. However, it wasnt until 2014 that the company invented its technology something Williams credits to one of the companys first hires, developer William Knauer.

In addition, Lisnr now has an expert in data over audio, Dr. Andrew Singer, serving as its technical advisor.

The technology itself usesspeaker broadcasts to send out the Smart Tone to a device witha microphone, which then demodulates the Smart Tone and its content. That content could be data like a message, an image, a URL or anythingelse. Often, the receiving device will also send a Smart Tone back to the original broadcasting device, too, enabling two-way communications.

The Smart Tone itself has three parts a preamble, header and payload. The preamble is what tells the receiving device that a Smart Tone is present, ready for decoding.

Lisnr uses the audio frequency range of~18.7 kHz to 19.2 kHz for its communications, which is inaudible to 98 percent of people. (For those who can hear it, the audio sounds like white noise).

To decode the data in the waveform, the audio is run through a program called hflat. Lisnr doesnt make server calls the data is decoded locally.

The idea to transfer data via audio isnt brand new Google Nearby uses this for sharing data between devices, as a rival to Apples AirDrop. Anothercompany called Chirp is also doing data over audio.

However, Williams claims that Lisnr has five to 10 times the throughput of its next nearest competitor. For example, Google Nearby is 66 bits per second, while Lisnr has commercially deployed 300 bps. And it has some beta customers doing 1,000 to 3,000 bps.

Lisnr presents at Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017

Lisnr presents at Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017

Lisnr presents at Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017

Lisnr presents at Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017

Lisnr presents at Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017

But while data-over-audiotechnologies have the benefit of not needing an internet connection to work, theyalso have a limited range as the microphone has to be able to hear the speaker being used to send the data. Lisnrs Smart Tone, then, is more of a proximity protocol to replace things like Bluetooth, NFC or QR code scanning.

This has a lot of practical implementations, though. During its beta, Lisnr has at any one time anywhere from 100 to 200 companies trialing its technology. These have included those across a range of industries, like ticketing companies, airlines, transportation companies, theaters, retailers, banks, mobile wallet providers, real estate companies, security firms and more.

Jaguar/Land Rover has now adopted the protocol to personalize the car to your settings by identifying you by your smartphone. Lisnr has also just landed the worlds largest ticketing company as its customer, which has already gone live in a few locations.

In ticketing applications, instead of scanning QR codes on event goers phones at the door, the company could deploy the technology via its mobile app, or even an email or link.

Other customers who can be mentionedinclude MovieTickets.com, chipset company DSPG and manyof Intels partners. After years of testing, Lisnr is now on pace to be installed on 30 million devices, says Williams.

Businesses pay Lisnr on a per-device, per-year model, along with a small fee (pennies) per data transmission or per authentication. They can use the technology via SDK or API.

Today at Disrupt, the team is launching Smart Tone for commercial use.

Lisnr has raised $14 million to date fromIntel Capital, Jump Capital, Rubicon VC, Progress Ventures, Serra Ventures, Mercury Fund, R/GA, CourtsideVC, TechStars, CincyTech and others.

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Lisnr's data-over-audio technology aims to replace QR code scanning, NFC - TechCrunch

Island Packet

6 local schools featured in technology showcase Island Packet To celebrate innovation in local schools and showcase some of the technology being used by teachers and students in elementary school through high school, the Don Ryan Center for Innovation has created Tech Fest. The event, which is free and open to ...

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6 local schools featured in technology showcase - Island Packet

When Uncle Joshua, a character in Peter De Vriess 1959 novel, The Tents of Wickedness, says that nostalgia aint what it used to be, the line is played for humor: To those stuck in the past, nothingnot even memory itselfsurvives the test of time. And yet Uncle Joshuas words have themselves aged pretty well (despite being widely misattributed to Yogi Berra): Technology, though ceaselessly striving toward the future, has continually revised how we view the past.

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Nostalgiagenerally defined as a sentimental longing for bygone timesunderwent a particularly significant metamorphosis in 1888, when Kodak released the first commercially successful camera for amateurs. Ads soon positioned it as a necessary instrument for preserving recollections of children and family celebrations. According to Nancy Martha West, the author of Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, the camera allowed people to arrange their lives in such a way that painful or unpleasant aspects were systematically erased.

Technology is poised to once again revolutionize the way we recall the past. Not so long ago, nostalgias triggers were mostly spontaneous: catching your proms slow-dance song on the radio, riffling through photo albums while you were home for the holidays. Today, thanks to our devices, we can experience nostalgia on demand. The Nostalgia Machine website plays songs from your favorite music year; another app, Sundial, replays the songs you were listening to exactly a year ago. The Timehop app and Facebooks On This Day feature shower you with photos and social-media updates from a given date in history. The Museum of Endangered Sounds website plays the noises of discontinued products (the chime of a Bell phone, the chirping of a Eurosignal pager). Retro Site Ninja lets you revisit web pages from the 90s.

This is just the beginning: While these apps and websites let us glimpse the past, other technologies could place us more squarely inside it. But although psychologists believe nostalgia is crucial for finding meaning in life and for combatting loneliness, we dont yet know whether too much of it will have negative, even dystopian, effects. As technology gives us unprecedented access to our memories, might we yearn for the good old days when we forgot things?

In her 1977 essay collection, On Photography, Susan Sontag wrote that photos actively promote nostalgia by slicing out [a] moment and freezing it. Because a photographs perspective is fixed, a viewer cant move within it, and is unable to experience the captured space the way the photographer or her subject did. New technology, however, can turn old photos into 3-D graphics that provide the illusion of moving through space.

Imagine the bullet time effect made famous by The Matrixin which a scenes action is either stopped or dramatically slowed down, while a camera seems to weave through the tableau at normal speedapplied to an old family photo, viewed on your laptop. Whereas The Matrix required 120 cameras to achieve its signature effect, a new approach known as 3-D camera mapping allows special-effects teams to inexpensively add dimensionality to 2-D photos. Recently, media designers like Mikls Falvay have used the approach to enhance archival images taken with a single still camera, giving viewers the impression that they are navigating spaces photographed years ago.

Artists have used other new techniques to project old photographs onto 3-D spaces. For its production of A 1940s Nutcracker, for example, the Neos Dance Theatre, in Mansfield, Ohio, used 3Dgraphics software to transform 1940s photos of Mansfield into virtual set pieces that dancers could interact with, creating the illusion that they were moving through old city streets. In this way, audience members who grew up in the 40s were treated to the feeling of traveling through childhood landscapes.

Down the line, we may experience new forms of three-dimensional entertainment at home. Testing the appeal of holographic content, the BBC last year unveiled a rudimentary holographic TV, which used a variation on a Victorian theater techniqueinvolving a transparent acrylic pyramidto make footage of a beating heart and a dinosaur animation appear to float in midair. Although the BBC has no plans to bring such a TV to market, other companies are pursuing higher-tech commercial products, among them Samsung, which has patented a design for a TV that would broadcast laser-generated holographic images. When the technology is eventually perfected, people may watch home movies play out not on a screen but in the center of their living room.

Even in 3-D, movies have a limited capacity for evoking real-life experiences. A viewer will never be able to choose his own perspectiveto walk to another room, say, or to view a scene from the vantage point of a child rather than from that of a taller adult. Virtual-reality technology promises to give users a chance to do just that.

In a tantalizing example of how VR might be personalized in the future, Sarah Rothberg, an NYU researcher who specializes in virtual reality, has re-created her old house in Memory Place: My House, an Oculus Rift experience cum traveling art exhibit. Entering various rooms prompts the playing of home videos, filmed years before by Rothbergs late father, whose early-onset Alzheimers disease inspired the project. After months of poring over old footage and photos, Rothberg was skeptical that the resulting experience would dislodge additional memories, but when she put on the Oculus Rift headset and walked across the virtual houses parquet-floored hallway, something felt off: In the real house, a floorboard had been loose and rose at one end, though she had not thought about that fact in many years. As VR gear becomes cheaper, more of us might be able to re-create and then tour our own childhood homesimagine an immersive, autobiographical version of Minecraft or The Sims.

Of course, to appreciate detailed replications of ones past, one must have detailed memories of ones pastand memory typically deteriorates with age. But experiments on other primates suggest that technological interventions may one day help us overcome this frailty. Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, has developed a means of translating the neuron-firing pattern that the brain uses to code short-term memory into the pattern it uses to store long-term memorya method he likens to translating Spanish to French without being able to understand either language. In some human trials, the translations have been found to be 90 percent accurate. Using this method, Bergers team has created a mathematical model capable of recording the signals a rhesus monkeys brain produces in response to stimuli, translating them, and feeding them back to the brain in order to facilitate long-term recalleven when the monkey has been drugged so as to inhibit the formation of lasting memories.

One day, we may even be able to create backups of our memories. In 2011, UC Berkeley researchers led by Jack Gallant, a cognitive neuroscientist, conducted an elaborate series of experiments that involved showing subjects video clips while taking fMRI scans of their brains, and then using a mathematical model to map how visual patterns translated into brain activity. After presenting a new clip to the subjects, the researchers used the resulting fMRI data to reverse engineer, from an archive of other footage, a video mashup that bore a striking resemblance to the clip the subjects had actually seen. Gallant believes that we could one day map brain activity triggered by a recalled memory and then reverse engineer a video of that memory.

For now, though, memory movies are a long way off. In a 2015 experiment, Gallant found that his model was three times more accurate at guessing the image a subject was looking at than at guessing one she was merely recalling. Another difficulty is that memories, especially nostalgic ones, shift over time. What you recall is confabulated, made up, Gallant told me. Even if you can make a faithful reconstruction of a memory you decode from the brain, that memory is already wrong.

Even if we had total recall, it might be best to avoid incessantly replaying memories, both for the sake of our psychological equilibrium and for the sake of our lives in the here and now. Ditto clicking from one nostalgia app to another. Clay Routledge, a psychology professor at North Dakota State University who wrote the leading textbook on nostalgia, says the emotion is typically healthy; in moderation, it can even lead you to seek out new experiences. But he cautions that too much time focusing on the past could jeopardize your ability to engage in other opportunities that will form the basis for future nostalgic memories. In other words, nostalgia really wont be what it once was if, in the future, you have nothing to remember but the time you spent swiping through your phone, remembering.

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The End of Forgetting - The Atlantic

In 1999, while traveling through Eastern Europe, I was robbed in a relatively remote area of the Czech Republic.

Someone called the police, but we quickly realized we couldnt communicate: They didnt speak English and I could offer no Czech. Even the local high school English teacher, who offered her assistance, didnt speak English well enough for me to effectively communicate with the police.

At a time well before smartphones, I didnt realize then that technologists were already hard at work on innovationsthat could one day play a vital role in events like the one I had.

In 1994, several influential computer scientists at Microsoft, led by Xuedong Huang, began setting the groundwork to tackle our global language barrier through technology. Microsoft was developing a new voice recognition team one of the first in the world.

Image: Getty Images/dane_mark/DigitalVision

In the early days of the technology, voice recognition was imperfect. We measure the accuracy of voice recognition with something called the Word Error Rate (WER). The WER measures how many words are interpreted incorrectly. If I say five words and four of them are understood correctly while one word is not, we have a WER of 20 percent. Back in the 1990s, the WER was nearly 100 percent. Almost every word spoken was incorrectly heard by these computer systems.

But computer scientists such as Huang and his team continued to work. Slowly but surely, the technology improved. By 2013, the WER had dropped to roughly 25 percent, an improvement to be sure, but still not sufficient to be truly helpful.

While a WER of 25 percent might seem adequate, imagine the frustration a user might feel in a home automation environment when they say, turn on the BEDroom lights, and the LIVINGroom lights go on. Or imagine trying to dictate something and having to correct a quarter of your work after the fact. The long-promised productivity gains simply hadnt materialized after decades of efforts.

And then the magic of innovation and technology began to kick in.

Over the last three years, the WER has dropped from roughly 25 percent to around five percent.

The team at Microsoftrecently declared they had achieved human parity with the technology it was now as good at interpreting human speech as humans are. We have seen more progress in the last 30 months than we saw in the first 30 years.

Image: Mina De La O/Getty Images

Many of us have experienced the seeming magic that voice recognition has become. In using voice recognition platforms in recent years, youve also likely watched as the words transcribed are updated and changed after additional words are spoken.

Speech recognition is going beyond just individual word recognition to account for context and grammar as well. Network effects are kicking in and the application of big data is enabling the technology to move at a rapid pace unseen in its history.

Today, we talk to computers on an increasingly regular basis. While packing for a trip to Singapore, I talked with Google Homes voice-activated digital assistant to prepare for my trip going back and forth on everything from weather and history to the religious breakdown of the city-state.

Similarly, Amazons Alexa will order you an Uber or a pizza, read off your Fitbit stats or update you on the balance in your bank account. Alexa can help around the house, too, if you ask dishing you the daily news while youre in the kitchen or reading you an audiobook before bed. And paired with the right hardware, shell lock your front door, turn off your lights, or adjust the temperature in your home.

To be sure, the technology has a long way to go before it is omnipresent. But it is beginning to be deployed in new and interesting ways. And at CES 2017, voice-recognition was one of the clear winners, permeating every corner of the show floor. From Ford and Volkswagen to Martian Watches and LG refrigerators, voice-integration transcended every category. Voice is becoming the common OS stitching together diverse systems across a myriad of user applications.

As we have made these astronomical improvements in voice accuracy, I foresee two important directions voice will go from here.

First, digitization and connectivity will beget personalization. In the future, it wont be enough that we can talk to the connected objects around us. Each member of a household or office can and will have a unique relationship with voice-enabled objects. Google has started to push Google Home in this direction.

Second, remember that voice is the user-interface layer to a much richer computing environment. Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Google Home and others are bringing individuals face-to-face with an AI-infused computing experience. For many daily tasks where we might use voice today, doing them on our phones or other devices might currently be more efficient because we can see extra information. But the role of AI in these voice systems will begin to transform the user experience.

Context is the next dimension for voice-optimized platforms. For example, when I can open my refrigerator, read off a series of potential ingredients I have on hand, and get back receipt suggestions, Ill have accomplished something with my voice that would be cumbersome in other computing environments. Context is king and voice will make that more apparent and readily accessible than ever.

I sometimes think back to that incident in Eastern Europe when even the local English teacher couldnt communicate with me. Today, I could speak to her mobile phone and get a relevant reply in return. The technology now available to us would have changed my experience. And likewise, this technology will forever change how we interact with computing and with each other.

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As technology lends you its ear, these technologies will determine what it hears - TechCrunch

Blockchain is among the next big, transformational technologies being eyed for use by government in its ongoing quest to provide residents with easy, online access to services and transactions, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) said in an introductory brief released Tuesday, May 16.

The encrypted digital recording of a transaction or event via a shared incorruptible ledger is not currently in common usage among public agencies. But in Blockchains: Moving Digital Government Forward in the States, NASCIO authors forecast change, citing a survey of 19 state CIOs and singling out the state of Illinois, which is analyzing and in various stages of implementing five blockchain pilots, an official confirmed.

Eric Sweden, a NASCIO official and an author of the brief, told Government Technology that blockchain was not on anyones priority list during the organizations annual conference in 2016 but is now on a very steep acceleration.

The private sector, Sweden said, is getting into blockchain probably more out of fear of being left behind than anything else, but as with other technologies, this is driving interest in the public sphere.

Though blockchain isnt mentioned by name anywhere in NASCIOs State CIO Top 10 Priorities for 2017, it registered when the company asked CIOs to what extent blockchain technology and economics were on their agendas.

Twelve of 19, or 63 percent, said they were investigating blockchains in state government through informal discussions. Five, or 26 percent, said they werent discussing blockchain, but one official said his or her agency was engaged in formal discussions of blockchain.

Another CIO, representing 5 percent of the total, said his or her agency had adopted blockchain technology in support of some state government services.

When this arrives on that Top 10 list, thats going to tell us weve got a critical mass here in terms of the number of state CIOS that are considering this as a high priority, said Sweden, NASCIO program director of enterprise architecture and governance.

Agencies werent identified by name in the survey, but Sweden said given whats known about levels of state interest, its probably Illinois though the state of Delawares Division of Corporations is in the very early stages of exploring blockchain.

Illinois is looking at five focused pilots for blockchain, according to Jennifer ORourke, business liaison for the Illinois Blockchain Initiative (IBI) which was formally created in November by six state and municipal agencies.

Member agencies are the Illinois Pollution Control Board; state departments of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, Innovation and Technology, Finance and Professional Regulation, and Insurance; and the Cook County Recorder of Deeds.

They first came together informally during the spring and summer of 2016, making it official by years end with three goals for blockchain: ensuring thoughtful and light-touch governance as it applies to the technology; supporting building out the ecosystem from an economic development perspective; and promoting government integration of the technology itself.

Among its outreach, Illinois has joined a pilot exploring the use of blockchain to transfer property titles that was begun last year by the Cook County Recorders office, ORourke said.

John Mirkovic, the countys deputy recorder of deeds, said the agency likes the idea of making it harder to steal your neighbors house and believes its completely legal to trade property using a blockchain.

It makes property records a natural fit for a distributed ledger or a blockchain. Its a chronological timestamp ledger of a chain of events. Thats why it also makes sense for land records because thats also how land records are kept, Mirkovic told Government Technology.

The state of Illinois also intends to:

If we were going to start the digital octopus of digital identity, its most appropriate to do so at the beginning, said ORourke, who is also assistant deputy director for the Illinois Office of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology.

There's also movement on blockchain from other organizations in the state.

On Thursday, May 18, the collaboration catalyst organization Innovate Springfield will host an "iSPI tech talks" event to examine emerging technologies in payments, transactions and modernized governments.

Speakers will include state of Illinois Chief Technology Officer Mike Wons and Mike Redington, director of Disney financial services for The Walt Disney Company.

In June, NASCIO plans a webinar on IBI, Sweden said.

Also in June, Matthew Roszak, founder of the Chicago Bitcoin Center, said it will relaunch as the Chicago Blockchain Center, centered on programming, education, technical assistance and incubation.

The move, he said, is fueled in part by an increasing realization of the technologys promise.

Its not a surprise that a lot of finance companies and, quite frankly, government agencies are looking at this as a new operating system for business, government and beyond, said Roszak, who is chairman and co-founder of Bloq, a blockchain enterprise software company.

Agencies and companies, he added, are really trying to figure out what it means for them in terms of identity models. All those sparks are fantastic for the ecosystem and fantastic for the potential of government to use this technology.

In its brief, NASCIO said blockchains state-of-the-art cryptography gives it the potential to create a steadily-growing spreadsheet of records or blocks that create an immutable record where each block is chained or linked to the previous block.

Authors counseled public agencies to focus at first on permissioned pilots restricted to private blockchains with limited users.

Permissionless or unrestricted blockchains require immense computing power which is not there today. Permissionless blockchains also have a limited scalability, they wrote.

Use cases, NASCIO said in the brief, have state government relevance across property and financial transactions as well as for public and private records and physical access.

Authors singled out as examples the managing of voting, property deeds and criminal records, birth and death certificates and health-care records; authenticating academic credentials; and administering tickets, fines and citations.

ORourke, however, said she sees blockchain applications for state governments as concentrated in two large buckets: providing identity and asset registration documenting the registration of assets and ownership for items such as houses and property, but ultimately pushing the responsibility for ones identity out to the citizen.

That could be accomplished through blockchain, she said, with various participants like schools and hospitals attesting to various attributes of ones identity such as birth and college graduation.

Blockchain also has the potential to enhance state-level cybersecurity efforts, but will most likely change the way people work rather than add or subtract jobs, she said, citing as a similar example the fact that some law firms already require job candidates to have coding experience and characterizing this as an adaptation.

Sweden said blockchain will play an important role in cybersecurity processes with respect to identities, but its not yet clear what effect it could have on jobs.

I would say anybody in any field has got to be continually considering, How do I update my skills? he said, portraying it as a wait-and-see situation.

Blockchains encryption methods are generally seen as quite robust, but Sweden warned that the technology isnt bulletproof and will likely reveal its own vulnerabilities over time. He said its unclear whether blockchains connection to the cryptocurrency bitcoin using the sale of a bitcoin fraction as a way to conclusively record a transaction will count as a strike against it.

He and ORourke both pointed out that blockchains could eventually come to use another form of currency as a financial attribute to the transactions tokenization.

Were watching an evolution of that, but we cant get away from the fact that bitcoin has been around the longest, ORourke said, noting its value has also increased. Theres a variety of very good things to be said about this particular cryptocurrency and the value that underlies it.

The bottom line for blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, she said, is that theyre coming to the fore, fueled in part by their potential to resolve two persistent problems that have dogged authorities since the dawn of the Internet: establishing identity and creating trust in cyberspace.

Mirkovic agreed blockchain may have a bright future in Illinois depending, of course, upon a variety of factors including the outcome of Cook Countys pilot, which is expected later this year with the actual sale recording of an apartment house using blockchain.

We want the entire state to be on the same network," he said. "If this thing makes sense, which we think it does, we want everyone to do it. Thats how we intend to advocate for this technology."

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Blockchain a 'Next Big Transformational Technology' in Government - Government Technology

New York Times

Uber Engineer Barred From Work on Key Self-Driving Technology, Judge Says New York Times But the court mandated that Anthony Levandowski, a star engineer leading the program, be prohibited from working on a critical component of autonomous vehicle technology for the duration of the litigation, a setback that could hamper Uber's development ... Uber And Google Are Fighting Over Very Old Lidar Technology. Here's Why.BuzzFeed News Judge tells Uber to return Waymo files taken by engineerThe Seattle Times Two Big Blows to Uber's Self-Driving TechnologyThe Atlantic Fox News -CNBC -Financial Times -New York Times all 248 news articles »

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Uber Engineer Barred From Work on Key Self-Driving Technology, Judge Says - New York Times

Forbes

The Long Term Effects Of Carbon Capture Technology Forbes Wind and solar generation are actually carbon-neutral technologies, and are actually cost effective technologies. Every MWH of wind or solar electricity eliminates the generation of a MWH of fossil fuel generation and its attendant CO2. Spending money ...

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The Long Term Effects Of Carbon Capture Technology - Forbes

When I was a child and dreamed about the future, the only reference I had to go on about what society would be like was the movie Back to the Future II. Well now that it is 2017, I am seeing that we are so very far away from the possibility of interacting regularly with holograms or having flying cars. However there are some parts of the movie that are not completely inaccurate. We do have lights that can be voice command programmed and hover boards. Every day we use technology to keep our lives moving forward. There isnt a moment that you dont see someone with a cell phone or tablet. Modern technology is engrained in the fabric of our every movement in life. Sometimes I wonder how we ever got by without it all. The most important advances in technology have been in modern medicine. We have advanced medically from a culture who did know anything about the use of soap and hot water to prevent bacterial infection, to one that in recent years can use bionic limbs to help those who lost a limb. With the medical advancements we have made even in the last ten years so many more people are being helped on a daily basis. As I prepare for a surgical procedure next month, I am finding that there is a lot of new medical technology that will be very helpful. As I go through the various hoops to be cleared for surgery I was required to see one more doctor, a pulmonary specialist. I suffer from asthma, and they wanted to make sure that there would be no complications with my breathing while under anesthesia. One of the tests that they required me to participate in was a sleep study to determine if I had sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a condition which causes the body not to receive enough oxygen during the sleep process, therefore depriving you of reaching a deep enough sleep to allow your body to rest and heal. In earlier years the sleep apnea study was performed in a lab environment where the lab technicians could monitor your every sleep habit. Today the technology previously only accessible in a lab environment has now been condensed into a tiny monitor that you can take home and strap to your chest while you sleep. You can then sleep in the comfort of your own bed. After two nights of testing you then take the monitor back to the office and they read your results to determine whether you have sleep apnea or not. I am further amazed every day at the innovations that our world can come up with to help mankind. Who knows where we will be in even another ten years. I suppose I will have to look to the Star Trek series and imagine the possibilities.

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The Miracle of Modern Technology - Fayette Newspapers