It’s been an exciting week for all of us here at InteraXon. This past Wednesday, our CEO Ariel Garten gave a keynote speech at Mesh, one of Canada’s premier digital conferences. The keynote was received with an overwhelming response; your questions, comments, and personal reactions started to flood in almost immediately, and we’re still catching up! You also shared a lot of thoughts on how thought controlled computing will affect the technology we use (like this tweet from @dawncharlton below) On Friday, InteraXon staff were treated to company day at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). We gathered for a day-long think tank, drew mind maps, played memory games, and shared a round of drinks afterwards.
Now, onwards to our weekly news roundup!
1// Art & Research Residency in China Focuses on Technological Sensorium
Tsinghua University Art & Science Research Center Media Laboratory (TASML) is offering an international artist summer residency focusing around “thematically structured research initiatives”. The residency’s Sensorium of The Extraordinary stream offers discussion on wearable technologies, brain computer interfaces, and augmented reality. Leaning towards the sensorial, resident students and artists will research biological complications to these augmented environments. This is coupled with a stream called Zone of Impending, looking at environmental disruptions and strategies to protect. TASML has a leaning towards the trans-disciplinary, and we wish we could be there for what looks like a fabulous curriculum!
The deadline for applications is June 1st, 2o12.
2// X Prize Announces: The Nokia Sensing X Challenge
The X Prize Foundation, first awarded it’s first prize in 2004, is a high-profile incentive based competition to encourage global innovation in technology. This week it was announced that Nokia will be partnering with The X Prize Foundation to award $2.25 Million, in three competition rounds over the next three years, in sensor technology. The Nokia prize will focus on a new generation of health sensors and sensor technologies. These mobile and wearable devices can have huge application and benefit for improving health and wellness, especially when enabling individuals to monitor and self-regulate health in real time. Potentially, this will also reduce the financial strain on health providers and the health care system as a whole. Investments in this next generation of technology is becoming more common. For example, earlier this month we shared a news story about how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested in a wearable brain computer interface tattoo which also acts as a health sensor.
3// “Read My Lips!”: This Software Does Exactly That
Well, not just your lips. Your whole smile, and what type of smile it is. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have developed a computer system that can understand and distinguish between different types of smiles. Tests were run on computers users in a simulated situation, where their facial reactions where recording which participating in tasks that were either frustrating or delightful. This system is one step closer towards a computer that researchers are calling “more intelligent and respectful.” This is also technology that gets to know the human user, learning to read emotional responses or facial cues, and (according to the International Business Times) “better assess the emotional states of their users and respond accordingly.” Read more here
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The InteraXon news roundup is published weekly, every Sunday night, to recap trends and breaking news in the world of brain computer interfaces and thought controlled computing. Do you have a story you’d like to submit or share? Contact us at info@interaxon.ca (subject line “News Story”) or leave a comment here.
