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Submission + - The Real Story of Pixar (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith corrects some of the things legend got wrong, and gives a fast tour of computer graphics history, as he talks about the key computer graphics breakthroughs that led up to Pixar and how Moore's Law saved the company. Smith's narrative leads up to an excerpt from his new book, "A Biography of the Pixel"

Submission + - Cops Tap Smart Streetlights Sparking Controversy and Legislation (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: San Diego's smart streetlights were supposed to save money and inspire entrepreneurs to use streetlight sensor data to develop apps that would make the city a better place. The money savings didn't add up and the apps never emerged. Instead, the San Diego police realized the video data, intended to be processed at the edge by AI algorithms, could be tapped directly for law enforcement. Now consumer groups are looking to the city to pass legislation governing the use of data, and other cities are opting to avoid such issues by leaving cameras out of future intelligent lighting systems.

Submission + - Rapid Test for Covid-19 Arrives Via a 20-year-old Technology (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: In 2001, a rapid, easy-to-use, PCR-based testing system for biological testing was still in prototype form when letters containing anthrax spores started arriving in the mailboxes of journalists and senators. Its creators at startup Cepheid quickly adapted it to test for anthrax, and now it is used to run that test as part of U.S. mail sorting systems.

The tool, now called GeneXpert, is also installed in health care facilities around the world. And cartridges to allow these systems to test for COVID-19--the first rapid such test approved in the U.S.--are rolling out. The technology relies on microfluidics, and takes about 45 minutes to run an extremely accurate and sensitive test. Cepheid co-founder Kurt Petersen, now an angel investor, explains how it works.

Submission + - Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens: It's the Real Deal (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: Startup Mojo Vision announced a microdisplay mid-2019, with not a lot of talk about applications. Turns out, they had one very specific application in mind--an AR contact lens. Last week the company let selected media have a look at working prototypes, powered wirelessly, though plans for the next version include a battery on board. The demos included edge detection and enhancement (intended for people with low vision) in a darkened room and text annotations. The lenses are entering clinical trials (company executives have been testing them for some time already).

Submission + - Tech Executives Answer Tough Questions About Privacy at CES (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: Apple, Facebook, and P&G executives faced some tough questions about privacy during a CES panel, and pushback from U.S. FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. In one exchanged, Facebook's representative argued that Apple's model of adding noise to data to keep it anonymous and avoiding sending to much data to the cloud wouldn't work for Facebook, "if you come to Facebook, you want to share," she said, continuing: “I take issue with the idea that the advertising we serve involves surveilling people. We don’t do surveillance capitalism, that by definition is surreptitious; we work hard to be transparent.”

Submission + - San Diego's Connected Streetlights Learn to Spot Bicycles (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: Developers for the City of San Diego spent months training its smart streetlights to recognize and count bicycles from just about any angle. The system is now monitoring bicycle traffic, but a few issues remain--figuring out how to distinguish between bicycles being ridden--and those doing the riding, like on a bike rack or thrown in a pickup truck.

The software has a similar problem with pedestrian-counting: When a convertible comes into view, it is counted as both a car and a pedestrian--the visible driver.

Submission + - First the E-Bike, Next the Flying Car: A Do-Anything 3D Printing Tech (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: Arevo was aiming to get into the aircraft parts business when it started developing software and hardware to print three dimensional structures using a composite containing continuous carbon fibers. Its technology lays out the lines of the material in ways to maximize strength and minimize the amount of composite used. Printing out a bike frame? That was just going to be a demo for investors. Now the company is in the e-bike manufacturing business, but thinks the ultimate application of its technology will be flying cars.

Submission + - Early Soyuz Spacecraft Had a Peculiar User Interface, Says Charles Simonyi (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: When WYSIWIG pioneer Charles Simonyi went to space, he couldn't but help notice the awkward user interface on the rocket's control panel. It was a case of legacy systems, not wanting to change training and documentation, and an emulator that ran Unix on a 386 chip, he reported during a recent discussion on space software held at the Computer History Museum.

Submission + - U.S. Students Have Achieved World Domination in Computer Science Skills—fo (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: A study of fourth-year computer science students around the world ranked the skills of U.S. students on top, with China, India, and Russia students showing significantly weaker skills. The researchers also took a look at the skills of male vs female students, and the male students came out ahead in every country, with the gap biggest in the U.S. and smallest in China.

Submission + - How Window Washers Almost Sunk Salesforce Tower's Interactive Light Sculpture (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: More than 11,000 light fixtures, 8 LEDs in each, 1000 drivers, cables for data and power snaking through multiple floors to a central computer, cameras around the city sending images to the cloud, where AI selects the most interesting ones for display—that's only some of the technology involved in the light show at the top of Salesforce Tower. EE and artist Jim Campbell explains it all--and how the window-washer problem stumped him for nearly a year.

Submission + - Move Over Moore's Law, Make Way for Huang's Law (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: Are graphics processors a law unto themselves? Nvidia's Jensen Huang says a 25-times speedup over five years is evidence that they are. He calls this the "supercharged law," and says it's time to start counting advances on multiple fronts, including architecture, interconnects, memory technology, and algorithms, not just circuits on a chip.

Submission + - Sexual Harassment in Tech is as Old as the Computer Age (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: Historian Marie Hicks, speaking at the Computer History Museum talks about how women computer operators and programmers were driven out of the industry, gives examples of sexual harassment dating back to the days of the Colossus era, and previews her next research.

Hicks has started looking at the bias baked into algorithms--when did it first cross from human to computer. The first example she turned up had "something to do with transgender people and the government’s main pension computer. She says that when humans were in the loop, petitions to change gender on national insurance cards generally went through, but when the computer came in, the system was “specifically designed to no longer accommodate them, instead, to literally cause an error code to kick out of the processing chain any account of a ‘known transsexual.’”

Submission + - Turning the Optical Fiber Network into a Giant Earthquake Sensor (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: Researchers at Stanford have demonstrated that they can use ordinary, underground fiber optic cables to monitor for earthquakes, by using innate impurities in the fiber as virtual sensors. “People didn’t believe this would work,” said one of the researchers. “They always assumed that an uncoupled optical fiber would generate too much signal noise to be useful.” They plan a larger test installation in 2018. Their biggest challenge, they say, will not be perfecting the algorithms but rather convincing telcos to allow the technology to piggyback on existing telecommunications lines. Meanwhile, the same data is being used for an art project that visualizes the activity of pedestrians, bicycles, cars, and fountains on the surface above the cables.

Submission + - HBO's Silicon Valley Joins the Push for a Decentralized Web (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: Fictional HBO Silicon Valley character Richard Hendricks sets out to reinvent the Internet in something decentralized, with no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, no spying. That sound a lot like what Brewster Kahle, Tim Berners-Lee, and Vint Cerf have been calling the decentralized web. Kahle tells IEEE Spectrum about how closely HBO's vision matches his own, and why he's happy to have this light shined on the movement.

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