Research News & Events

In a paper called Reading Digits in Natural Images
with Unsupervised Feature Learning researchers from Google and Stanford University reveal a new method of identifying house numbers in Google Street View.

It’s just another attempt to add a bit of AI to Googles ability to understand the world.

As a result however, this algorithm is obviously very useful for Captcha hackers as well, as I’ve announced many times before. Captchas are those annoying characters you have to re-type when you leave a comment on a forum, to get access to certain information or when you register for a website, The purpose of Captchas are to separate computers from real human beings, assuming that humans are better in complex character recogntion than computers. This will soon be something of the past.

The result: computers will be able to create new accounts, register everywhere, spam everywhere. It will also retrieve password, access email boxes and send emails on behalf of real humans. It’s an unstoppable development. The only way to stop this: collaborate worldwide and define a new internet which is suitable for consumer usage. Also, we should get rid of the idea that we should protect privacy on the internet allowing people to stuff around anonymously without the chance of getting caught, and that everything should be available for free. Nothing is for free.

This will be part of a new concept for the future world, which I will refer to as

The Utopia Manifesto

Soon more!

Most conventional hard robots are composed of metallic structures. However, the development of soft robots can find new applications in robotics and virtual humans in augmented reality environment. An elastomeric gripper of an embodied agent equipped with an embedded pneumatic network could touch, recognize and gently pick up an egg!

You live in a big city. Each day after work you pick up your kid from a large kindergarten. One day you got the flu. You call your father and ask him to pick up his grandchild. He agrees to do it. But… will the kindergarten release the kid? How could they be sure that this is an “authentic” grandfather?

Researchers from Polytechnic Institute of New York University have developed multitouch gesture-based applications for logging into smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Instead of text typed passwords, they propose biometric authentication: your hand size, finger placement, and speed of movement can serve as a unique signature for login applications.

With the trend of having data stored in the cloud and continuously increasing bandwidths, the idea of a mobile phone being an individual device is no longer necessary. SecurePhone research project, funded partly by the European Commission’s Framework Program 6, aims to change the way people interact and make business. SecurePhone is expected to improve trust and confidence in new technologies by masking high-tech functionalities under the reassuring interface of a smartphone.

We are soooo excited to reveal our new companies section showing all leading providers in conversational AI, (3D) animation, speech synthesis and speech recognition and visual biometrics, and an additional Vendor Selector tool to select providers, designed for organizations their buying process!

This companies section will also reveal our advanced business members: Industry leaders who have joined our business program, contributed financially and therefore empowered us to move this industry forward. With their support, we have been able to further develop our role as an Industrial Catalyst, advancing the industry of Intelligent Virtual Characters.

Look carefully at the scene presented on the picture below:

If somebody asked you a question: “Where is the coffee cup?”, you could give a simple answer: “on the mat’. But you could also say “to the left of the lamp” as well as “on the table”. All those answers are correct, although they require several subjective and nuanced judgements which we - humans - do intuitively. What about chatbots?