Archives for December 23, 2018

Samsung could be working to include faster charging technologies in its upcoming smartphones, according to a tweet from famed leaker Ice Universe. Presumably, this will make its debut in the company’s upcoming flagship, which is expected to be called the Galaxy S10.

The message doesn’t provide any specifics, simply hinting that the current 15W charging technology Samsung uses will “become history”. A second tweet confirms that there is indeed new fast-charging technology on the way, but it still doesn’t make things much clearer.

This upgrade may well be an attempt to fight back against OnePlus, who has typically had some of the faster charging speeds. Specifically, the company recently debuted Warp Charge one the OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition, which can fill up the phone’s battery to 50% in just 20 minutes, which might make traditional fast charging seem slow by comparison.

The rumors surrounding the Galaxy S10 have been endless, and they suggest that Samsung is changing things up in a number of ways. It will mark the debut of its Infinity-O displays on the Galaxy S line, include a total of up to six cameras depending on the model, and it will likely support 5G. The phones will also ship with the company’s new One UI experience.

Samsung should reveal all the details about its upcoming flagship in February when the Mobile World Congress takes place in Barcelona.

While the buzz around Artificial Intelligence (AI) gained ground in 2018, tech giants decided to utilise the Machine Leaning (ML)-based algorithms not just to help enterprises drive growth but also improve healthcare globally and India became an early adaptor.

Most of the year went into the debate on democratising or creating an ethical AI. In the meantime, real work took off on developing AI-based predictive models capable to perform human tasks such as visual perception, speech recognition, brain-computer network and translation between languages.

Today, only one in 10 people with disabilities globally has access to assistive technologies and products.

In May, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off “AI for Accessibility” — a $25 million, five-year programme for developers globally including in India.

The programme has put AI tools in the hands of developers to accelerate the development of accessible and intelligent AI solutions for nearly one billion people with disabilities.

Designed for the low-vision community, one such Microsoft app called “Seeing AI” is harnessing the power of AI to describe people, text and objects. It can tell visually-impaired persons what is around them.

Amazon’s Cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a ML service called SageMaker that is helping developers create AI models for health care. GE Healthcare is training computer vision models with Amazon SageMaker that are then deployed in its MRI and X-Ray devices.

Amazon Comprehend Medical is a natural language processing (NLP) service for medical text which uses ML to extract disease conditions, medications and treatment outcomes from patient notes, clinical trial reports and other electronic health records.

Google is also using AI models on smartphones to help the blind. It is working on an app called “Lookout” that uses image recognition and AI to describe a scene through a phone’s camera.

Touted as the world’s “most human” AI assistant, Amelia — created by New York-headquartered AI company Ipsoft — combines automation, cognitive and emotional intelligence with ML capabilities to perform as a digital colleague.

Amelia allows patients to self-manage in scheduling doctors’ appointments, tests and medicines. She also offers condition-specific advice and well-curated health management tips.

As tech giants began training AI for health care, the “AI for accessibility” dream also reached India in big way in 2018.

In December, Google announced it has developed an AI model that can detect diabetic retinopathy with a level of accuracy on par with human retinal specialists.

Google is working on rolling out this diabetic retinopathy initiative in clinics in India with Verily — an Alphabet-owned company which works on life sciences research and development.

According to Google, the new assistive technology can help doctors and staff screen more patients in less time, sparing people from blindness through a more timely diagnosis.

NITI Aayog in October entered into a partnership with Microsoft to deploy AI technologies in areas such as agriculture, health care, natural language computing and sustainable environment.

In a novel effort to predict the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) among the Indian population, Microsoft India and Apollo Hospitals in August launched the first-ever AI-powered heart disease risk score API (application programme interface).

Part of Microsoft’s “AI Network for Healthcare” initiative, it will help doctors across the Apollo network of hospitals leverage the AI-powered API to predict risk of CVD and drive preventive cardiac care across the country.

The company also applied AI to devices for early detection of diabetic retinopathy to prevent blindness. Microsoft India also announced a partnership with SRL Diagnostics to expand the “AI Network for Healthcare” to pathology to detect cancer.

The Telangana government, which is known for its Tech initiatives like the T-Hub, also adopted Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE), which was developed in partnership with Hyderabad-based LV Prasad Eye Institute.

MINE uses ML and advanced analytics to predict regression rates for eye operations, enabling doctors to pinpoint the procedures needed to prevent and treat visual impairments.

The Telangana government is already using Microsoft’s Cloud-based advanced analytics solution to screen children from birth to 18 years of age for major conditions affecting their health.

In October, global health technology firm Philips selected 19 start-up companies for its first global start-up collaboration programme that is focused on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare.

The programme focuses on the application of AI-based clinical decision support tools, such as image interpretation, analysis and integration and workflow tools, such as intelligent treatment plans for radiology, ultrasound and oncology.

IBM in November joined hands with IIT-Delhi (IIT-D) to partake in a multi-year research collaboration on AI in India, with a focus on sectors such as healthcare and medicine.

According to Nadella, recent advances in AI have been “pretty stunning” but what the humanity is going to see soon will be even more profound across the spectrum and health care is set to become an AI-first industry, with 2018 setting up the pace.

Bethesda is continuing its apology tour of sorts for Fallout 76’s rough state on launch, and this time you don’t need to have spent a lot to receive compensation. The developer is promising a free copy of Fallout Classics Collection (1, 2 and Tactics) on PC for everyone who has logged into the full Fallout 76 in 2018, whether they played on a computer or console. You should have access to your freebie in early January, Bethesda said.

This won’t overcome Fallout 76’s ongoing problems, including connection issues and a lack of computer-controlled characters. However, it is an acknowledgment that the shared-world game fell short of expectations for many players, and that the company’s handling of the situation left something to be desired. The question now is whether or not Bethesda can address the quality of the game in the long run.

Some of you might consider it an upside down world that sees a high-profile Microsoft executive interviewed and praising the company’s well-regarded, successful line of hardware, at a time when the company is valued at $790 billion compared to longtime rival Apple’s $778 billion. All in all, Microsoft has certainly had a strong 2018 and continued to emerge as a resurgent player in tech, and it’s thanks in part to the company taking a heads-down focus on areas where it thinks the company excels, such as in work and productivity.

Along those lines, here comes Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, who dropped a few hints about what’s to come in a new interview with the top newspaper in Ireland, the Irish Independent.

Given that he’s a prominent figure at the company, he does the normal thing of sharing lots of non-answers, like professing that Microsoft “learned” a great deal from its misadventures in the mobile space (without really saying what it is that Microsoft actually learned). The interesting part of the interview, however, comes after Panos is asked about Microsoft’s new Surface Headphones, which critics generally liked and include features like noise-canceling technology.

Does this signal that Microsoft is moving its Surface hardware line beyond a focus on work and into the consumer space, Panos is asked? Not necessarily, he responds. Think about it, he continues — plenty of people use headphones to block out noise and work in an office, in cafes, in trains and elsewhere.

Which naturally leads the questioner to ask, okay, if you guys are thinking about blending the work and personal in that way, via bringing a typically personal product like that into usage for work, in what other ways are you similarly thinking about expanding the Surface line?

While acknowledging that he, of course, can’t lay out a product road map, here’s Panos’ answer:

“Are we completing experiences for people at work and at home? The answer is yes. So will you see new form factors that can do that, or need to do that? The answer is absolutely. And that’s how it kind of comes together. For me, work and home equals life, whether the device is in the kitchen at home, in the home office, in your work office or on your body. They’re coming together. So yeah, you’ll see more products that focus on where our customers are going to be.”

Does that mean we’ll finally get our hands on a long-rumored Surface phone, a foldable device or something entirely new, maybe that meshes a phone and PC together? We’ve seen an industry-wide contraction in PC and tablet sales, so it will certainly be interesting to see what Microsoft cooks up here given that it’s been by and large successful on the Surface front so far.