A Mosquito’s Tell: 1,000 Wingbeats per Second
You’re walking around your home when you hear it, that annoying, buzzing vector that wants to suck your blood—and potentially give you some disease you’d rather not have. Depending where you are in the world, mosquitoes can pass along some pretty nasty stuff, like malaria, Zika, dengue, yellow fever. However, only some species of mosquitoes pass on these diseases, and identifying these species can be laborious and even expensive. But what if we could find an easier, cheaper way to differentiate among them?
This is what Oxford University researchers are working on right now: they’ve successfully trained a deep learning algorithm to identify mosquitoes from different buzzing noises (it now outperforms human experts at the task). And the next step is differentiating among the different species’ buzzing sounds. They’ve seen some success here, but they need more training data. Wanna download their Android app and record mosquitoes? Volunteers welcome.
That Crash Was Your Dog
AI and ML are making a lot of headway in surveillance. A new product, on the market as of today, allows you to talk to your camera like you’d talk to Alexa to find out what’s happened or is happening in your home. When you ask it questions, it’ll pull up video with active movement in it for you to review. Just heard a crash downstairs? Looks like it was your overzealous dog toppling a chair to get at his treats. Check out the video here:
Is Skincare Personalizable?
Proven’s founders think so. The creators of this company are building products based on the idea that they can tailor skincare to individuals, like a facialist would. They’ve built a large beauty database, perhaps the largest, from 8 million skincare product reviews and 4,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles on skin and ingredients’ effects on skin, and they’ve combed it with proprietary deep learning and machine learning algorithms to identify what ingredients actually work for different types of skin. We’ll soon see if it works or not because their products go live next week. What does the process look like? Their web visitors will fill out a survey on their website, and based on that survey, they’ll email them personalized product recommendations that they can buy.
Unique of the Week: Sometimes It Takes Shocking Yourself
There’s a camera aid that can help you take beautiful pictures. While you’re walking around pointing your new, sweet DSLR camera at potentially beautiful scenes, this assistant will identify perfect frames, and when it does it’ll send a shock signal through your hand that will cause your index finger to pull a lever to take that perfect picture . . . Watch the video here:
Update: It Now Takes Three Seconds
We recently told you that Lyrebird could create a quasi-acceptable digital reproduction of your voice with one minute of recorded audio. Baidu says it can now do it with three seconds.
Bonus
Autism diagnostic tool is one step closer to FDA approval
CGI animal fur is on its way to looking better