WORLD HYPERSCALE DATA CENTER MARKET EXPECTED TO REACH $71.2 BILLION BY 2022

According to a new report by Allied Market Research titled World Hyperscale Data Center Market, the world hyperscale data center market is expected to reach a revenue of $71.2 billion by 2022, with a CAGR of 20.7% from 2016 to 2022. Hyperscale data centers are most widely adopted by cloud service providers to house cloud-based resources and cloud services, accounting for a market share of around 63% in 2015. North America is the largest revenue-generating region for hyperscale data centers, followed by Europe and Asia-Pacific in 2015.

Rio Olympics 2016: Medal hopes ride on technology

RIO DE JANEIRO: The seeds for many of the 25, maybe 30, medals the US track team hopes to win in Rio de Janeiro were planted at a training center in California with the help of technology originally designed for golf.

One of the many tools USA Track and Field makes available to its athletes is called "Track Man," a computerized tracking device that sports fans might recognize from watching golf on TV . In addition to golf balls, "Track Man" can trace the trajectory of shot puts and hammers to allow the athletes who throw them keep track of how high and far they go.

"Immediate feedback," says Phil Cheetham, senior sport technologist for the US Olympic Committee, when asked about the greatest benefit of the technology. "Immediate knowledge of results is proven to help you improve technique much more quickly than if you don't have the feedback."

Saddled with restrictive sponsorship rules and less-than-ideal earning potential, athletes have been lashing out for years against organizations such as the USATF for not plowing their profits back into the pockets of the people who put on the show.

Track Man and the program at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California, are examples of how the federations are, indeed, trying to invest in athletes. Some of the investment comes in the form of direct cash into the pockets of the runners and throwers; other comes in training tools like Track Man and similar technologies that help sprinters and jumpers.

"Since I got here, I've improved over four feet," said Joe Kovacs, the 2015 world champion whose first coach was his mother. "It's been a combination of great coaching, awesome facilities and the technology we have."

Most notable among those who don't think USATF does all it can for athletes is 800-meter runner Nick Symmonds, who boycotted world championships last year over a dispute about what runners can wear in a sport where both athletes and institutions depend on shoe and apparel companies for most of their money. Symmonds was injured and didn't qualify for the Olympics, but he's hardly alone.

Read More@ http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Rio-Olympics-2016-Medal-hopes-ride-on-technology/articleshow/53596891.cms

New facial recognition algorithm is so smart it doesn’t need to see your face

Facial recognition already posed serious problems for privacy advocates. Used by everyone from law enforcement to churches, the privacy concerns with facial recognition are very real, and they’re about to get a lot worse.

The ability to identify anyone just by analyzing an image of their face creates a severe imbalance of power from the common citizen to the people in charge. The ability to identify those whose faces are blurred or otherwise obstructed kills that balance entirely. Yet that’s exactly what algorithms like the ‘Faceless Recognition System’ (FRS) are aiming to do.

FRS was a creation by researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Saarbrücken, Germany. The idea was to create a method of identifying individuals through use of imperfect - blurry or otherwise obscured — images. The system trains a neural network on a set of photos containing obscured and unobscured images before using that training to spot similarities from a target’s head and body.

It’s crazy accurate too. The algorithm is able to find an obscured face after seeing an unobscured version of the same face only once at a 69.6 percent accuracy rate. If the machine has 10 images of the person’s face, the accuracy rate climbs to 91.5 percent.

There are, however, limitations. For example, black boxes obscuring a person’s face drop the accuracy rating down to about 14.7 percent, but even that is three times more accurate than humans.

It’s not just one algorithm, either. Facebook has its own facial recognition algorithms that can reportedly identify users with obscured faces at an 83 percent accuracy rate. To do so, it uses cues such as stance and body type. The Faceless Recognition system, however, might be the first fully trainable system that uses a full range of body cues to correctly identify targets.

Read More@ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/08/08/new-facial-recognition-algorithm-is-so-smart-it-doesnt-need-to-see-your-face/#gref

Infotainment test: best in-car entertainment systems reviewed

Who makes the best in-car entertainment and sat-nav systems? Our top 10 includes verdicts on Audi, Ford and Vauxhall systems

Digital technology has transformed the way in-car entertainment and information is delivered, and for many drivers nowadays their car’s ‘infotainment’ system is as important as its performance on the road.

Technology: facial recognition to eye scans and thought control

You stare at a ceiling light and it switches on. The same applies when you stare at the coffee machine or focus your eyes on the button showing your preferred washing machine cycle. You refocus on the “on” button and away it goes.

Snapchat Suit May Influence Facial Recognition Technology Controversy

The lawsuit against Snapchat brought by two Illinois residents is making its way to federal court in California-and eventually may help address controversies about the use of facial recognition technology.

The lawsuit focuses on Snapchat’s “Lenses” feature and whether it conflicts with the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The plaintiffs say it does, but Snapchat contends it recognizes objects, not “a specific face.”

“Snapchat’s proprietary facial recognition technology scans a user’s face each time he or she uses Lenses to send a snap or story and collects, stores and uses geometric data relating to the unique points and contours (i.e. biometric identifiers of each face),” the lawsuit filed initially in Los Angeles Superior Court said.

Under BIPA, Snapchat or another company cannot obtain someone’s biometrics unless it informs the person in writing; receives a written release from the person who provides informed consent; and publishes guidelines for destroying biometric identifiers, with these guidelines being available to the public, according to the lawsuit.

But Snapchat never informed its users in Illinois about “the specific purpose and length of term for which their biometric identifiers or information would be collected, stored or used,” the lawsuit contends. Snapchat also did not get a written release or consent from these users, nor did the company have publically available guidelines on when the identifiers would be destroyed, the lawsuit adds.

It further claims that Snapchat has created, collected and stored tens of millions and maybe hundreds of millions of face templates, as it estimates that tens of thousands of Snapchat users live in Illinois. Snapchat creates the templates using “sophisticated facial recognition technology” that can extract and analyze data from the “points and contours of users’ faces when they use Snapchat’s Lenses feature,” according to the lawsuit.

Read More@http://www.law.com/sites/articles/2016/07/26/snapchat-suit-may-influence-facial-recognition-technology-controversy/?slreturn=20160627082736

Precision farming – the way to go for Africa

Windhoek – It is not wise and sustainable to continue practising conventional agricultural methods, such as ploughing and loosening the soil before planting as it puts stress on land resources and is worsened by effects of climate change, says global agricultural experts who convened in Brussels, Belgium, last week.