Author - Maduri Hansanie

Google Maps is getting the coolest new features

July 1, 2018

3 min read

Currently, Google Maps is the guiding source for most people’s destinations. It gives the sense of security and the knowledge to everyone where they are going. It plays a crucial role when there are disasters and the roads are getting blocked. With the constant updates of the status of the roads in the app, people can safely reach their destination.

With the increase in demand for the Google Maps app, Google is making massive improvements to it. Many cool features were introduced for Google Maps in the Google I/O 2018 Developer Conference.

A new tab named “For you” is added which can make suggestions based on personalized interests and experiences. It shows us what is trending on local day-to-day life and helps to keep people connected with their peers and keeps people updated. It also helps to provide recommendations when people are in doubt. For an example, if we want to try out a new restaurant and there are always a number of trending restaurants to try out. Google has come up with a score called “Your Match” which uses Machine Learning to analyze millions of restaurants and compare with the user’s personal preferences based on previous ratings of hotels, check-ins, information Google has about us and suggests the restaurant we would enjoy the most.

Another problem that the new features help to overcome is the collisions that might happen when picking places to go out with friends. A new functionality is added where you can easily select favorite places, shortlist them and share easily with friends via any communicating platform such as Whatsapp, Facebook and get the friends’ feedback and they also can add their preferences and make changes.

With the advent of the AI and computer vision technologies, Google is able to implement many amazing developments. Augmented Reality is used to help in finding directions in walking navigation. Here, the camera is used in Maps, with computer vision and Street View. GPS is only enough to locate the users’ current location but VPS (Visual Positioning System) is used in the new feature that estimates precise positioning and orientation. VPS analyses the visual features in the environment and identifies the landmarks, buildings and help the user to find directions easily. Here there is an AR overlay on the Map’s Street View and will show the directions the user has to navigate. This AR overlay will help to identify the surrounding buildings. A helpful guide, an AR fox is added which is a pretty cool feature where users can follow and safely reach their destination.

The new features are yet to be implemented in the Google Maps app and it would be introduced to both Android and iOS operating systems.

Stay tuned for more information on the newest features of Google Maps.

AI Experts, Elon Musk Want UN Ban On AI Military Weapons

January 3, 2018

Maduri Hansanie

AI, News

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3 min read

Now more than ever, with the advancement of technology, life has been given the possibility to flourish or to lead towards self-destruct. It is up to us to make the difference.

CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk and leading many other tech industry figures and researchers have signed an open letter to the United Nations insisting to regulate the use of AI in building autonomous weapons.

The Open Letter by Future of Life Institute backed by 116 signees including Elon Musk and Alphabet’s Mustafa Suleyman raises awareness how Artificial Intelligence and Robotics may be repurposed to develop autonomous weapons causing destruction to life.

Autonomous weaponry refers to using Artificial Intelligence to target locations to attack, or avoiding from such an attack.Used in applications such as AI driven, drone weaponry systems that independently analyze the surroundings and attack when seeing a specified target. If such technology is fallen into the hands of wrong people, it will cause a massive destruction.

As stated in the letter:

“Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.”

In previous instances, professionals have warned that deployment of autonomous weapons will be achievable within years, rather than in decades. Even though with the help of AI, could reduce casualties among human soldiers – at least in the most powerful and advanced nations but the risk to civilians is still high.

The industry experts and researchers had called for lethal autonomous weapons to be included in the list of banned weapons under the UN’s convention on certain conventional weapons (CCW) brought into force in 1983. It consists of chemical and intentionally blinding laser weapons.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has warned on many occasions about taking proactive measures for regulation of AI :

“ by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late ”.

Once he also stated that AI is one of the existential threats to the human race.

Looking at the continuous development achieved by AI, AlphaGo winning against world’s best human Go player, AlphaGo Zero defeating a world champion program, the Sea Hunter US’s autonomous warship built by Vigor Industrial, it is high time for humans to decide on the future of AI.

AI creates fictional scenes out of real-life photos

December 6, 2017

Maduri Hansanie

AI, Education, News, Science

1 Comment

2 min read

With the advent of AI technology, self-driving cars, facial recognition and speech recognition are some of the adaptations that people make use of, in their day to day life. Presently AI is on its way to build photorealistic worlds on its own.

In the research carried out by Researcher Qifeng Chen of Stanford and Intel, 5000 photos from German streets were fed into the AI system. This was a Tensorflow implementation of cascaded refinement networks. With a small amount of human help AI system was able to build slightly blurry recreated scenes. The video above is a result of the research carried out.

In order to create an image using the AI system, humans have to enter details of what object goes where. For example, place a car there, place a tree here, put a building along to the right. It is sketched in numbers and the system manages to create an utterly unique scene based upon the input. In other words, when a semantic label map is input into the system, AI produces photographic images that conforms to the input layout.

Based on the paper “Photographic Image Synthesis with Cascaded Refinement Networks” presented at International Conference on Computer Vision, the system thus behaves as a rendering engine that takes a 2D semantic description and produces a corresponding image.

AI Model is a convolutional network, trained based on supervised learning on pairs of photographs and corresponding semantic layouts. The images that were synthesized, seamlessly scaled up to a resolution of 2 megapixels (1024×2048).

Even though AI is not able to create paintings to approach photorealism as highly trained craftsmen, these experiments have proved that artificial systems have the ability to synthesize an image that looks like a photograph based on a given novel semantic layout.

iRobot – Design and build robots for the future

September 28, 2017

Maduri Hansanie

Electronics, Science

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3 min read

With futuristic technology helping us in our daily tasks, consumer robots tend to play a prominent role.“ iRobot ” is such an American innovative company that designs and deploys consumer robots to help people perform their day to day tasks easily.

Let’s have a look at how it all started. iRobot is a public corporation, founded in 1990 by “Rodney Brooks”, “Colin Angle” and “Helen Greiner”, three graduates of MIT. Its headquarters is located in Bedford, Massachusetts.

The first ever robot developed by the company was “Genghis” in 1991. Its purpose was to serve as a test platform for researchers. It is currently exhibited at Natural Air and Space Museum (NASM), in Washington DC, USA.

Since the beginning of time, this robotics company has deployed many helpful robots to the market to make people’s daily lives easier. There are many different types of robots available in the market in the present context. Let’s take a look at some of the developed consumer robots.

“Roomba” a robot cleaner, that is designed for you and your home.

It has the ability to sweep the corners of houses which people find hard to reach. It has dual counter-rotating brushes which efficiently removes dirt, dust, and debris from floors. You can have a customized cleaning experience and view the cleaning history.

It can be connected with Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant and you just have to speak up to get the cleaning done!

“Braava” belongs to the family of mopping robots,

“Cleaner floors. Fresher home. Every day.”

It has a jet spray and a vibrating cleaning head that loosen dirt and stains while Braava pads breakup and lock away dirt.

iRobot “Mirra” is a pool cleaning robot.

“The underwater robot removes the debris you can see and the hidden stuff you cannot”- Forbes. Mirra has a deep cleaning ability that removes all the dirt particles and bacteria as small as two microns. Because of Mirra, pool cleaning never has been easier.

iRobot Looj 330 Gutter Cleaning Robot, it is able to blast away leaves, dirt, and clogs while brushing gutters clean.

It’s skilled in performing difficult and uncomfortable jobs for you. It has two operational modes; Manual mode and Automatic CLEAN mode. The user can select the manual mode and control the robot or just push the CLEAN button and let Looj travel down your gutter on its own where it senses and adapts to debris to provide a more effective cleaning facility.

From the origination of iRobot in 1990 by MIT roboticist, it has grown to become a leading global consumer robot company in the present-day. There have been sales of more than 15 million robots worldwide and more than 25 years of leadership in the robot industry.

Forging a new path entirely of home cleaning, iRobot stays committed to developing new social robots that can save people’s precious time and allow people to engage in their day to day activities in a relaxed manner.

Microsoft aims to make Artificial Intelligence mainstream

June 25, 2017

Maduri Hansanie

AI, News

4 Comments

3 min read

Microsoft went huge on Artificial Intelligence as they revealed the new AI integrated tools at Microsoft Build on Wednesday, the 10th of May.

The Technology Giant unveiled their vision, how AI driven tools can be incorporated into people’s day to day activities to make people’s lives smarter, efficient and improve wellbeing.

Microsoft research runs deep into areas of machine learning, speech recognition, image recognition and hand gesture recognition.

Microsoft executive vice president of artificial intelligence and research Harry Shum stated, “We are infusing AI into every product and service we offer. We’ve been creating the building blocks for the current wave of AI breakthroughs for more than two decades.”He also pointed out that now they are on the verge of using those research breakthroughs.