Bio-inspired Robots

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Bio-inspired Robots
Number 3244
Broadcast Date MARCH 21, 2018
Episode Length 30:10
Hosts Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane
Guests Dr. Kiki Sanford

Researchers at Columbia University are working to develop polymer fingers and robot muscles in a drive to build a practical soft robot. But just what is a soft robot and how will it alter the way to interact with automation in the workplace and home? Plus, WhatsApp co-founder says you should delete Facebook and a study published in JAMA indicates the Apple Watch can detect abnormal heart rhythms with 97% accuracy.

Guest

Quick Hits

The Wall Street Journal reported Jimmy Iovine would leave Apple, Iovine denied it and now the Journal reports, its sources say, Iovine will transition into a consulting role with Apple this August, but technically won't leave Apple, he'll just step back from the day to day operations. Iovine has been with Apple since it acquired Beats in 2014.
Google announced new security features for Google Cloud Platform. Among the features are a new security level for API-based services, a tool called Cloud Security Command Center, and Denial of service prevention including Cloud Armor. G Suite also got security updates to its dashboard and defaults for flagging untrusted emails.
The European Commission proposed a new tax Wednesday for companies with annual worldwide revenue above 750 million euros and annual “taxable” EU revenues above 50 million euros. A 3% turnover tax would be charged on activities in which a user plays a role in value creation such as viewing ads, conducting online trading or allowing their data to be sold. Large tech companies would be the main ones affected.
Facebook will now let group admins approve people invited by non-admin members of a group chat, as well as remove people and make people admins. Any member of a group chat can create a link to send for people to join the chat in Messenger.

Top Stories

WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton posted on Twitter, "It's Time #deletefacebook." Back in 2014, along with co-founder Jan Koum, Brian Acton sold WhatsApp to Facebook for $16 billion. Acton left Facebook-owned WhatsApp earlier this year to start his own foundation and has since invested $50M in Signal. In a related note, Mark Zuckerberg finally responded to Facebook’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In a post, he said Facebook has made mistakes, that he's working to prevent similar abuses of user privacy, also that the company took the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today years ago. He laid out a three-step plan to rebuilding user trust. Notably, Facebook will remove developer access to your data if you haven’t used it in three months. The company is also performing audits on apps.
Multiple sources tell TechCrunch that Google will acquire Lytro which makes depth-data light-field technology for VR. It appears it would mostly be an asset sale to get Lytro's 59 imaging patents and not all employees might transfer to Google.
YouTube's global head of music, Lyor Cohen said in an interview at SXSW that YouTube will increase the number of ads played between songs on YouTube in order to encourage users to upgrade to its paid subscription service. A new music service is being tested at Google and includes exclusive videos and playlists among other features. Google has a service called Google Music that is included under the YouTube Red subscription which removes ads from YouTube.
Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco working with app-maker Cardiogram published a study in JAMA Cardiology showing the Apple Watch can detect abnormal heart rhythms with 97 percent accuracy. More than 139 million heart rate and step count measurements were collected from 9,750 users of the Cardiogram app who also enrolled in the UC San Francisco Health eHeart Study. The data was used to train Cardiogram's neural network to distinguish atrial fibrillation. Cardiogram and UCSF are also working on detecting hypertension, sleep apnea, and early signs of diabetes using wearable devices.
Netflix announced that it is opening a public bug bounty program on the Bugcrowd bug bounty platform. BUT an even bigger issues is that Netflix is changing its typeface from Gotham to something called Netflix Sans. The new typeface was developed with designers Dalton Maag and will save Netflix millions in licensing fees.

Discussion

Pick of the Day

Let's check in with Chris Christensen with some travel tech that's trying to do some good.
Submitted by Chris Christensen

Mailbag

If I Remember correctly, Uber is using Volvo XC90 hybrids for their autonomous cars. I wonder if it was in electric only mode at the time of the accident? Could it be that this is more an example of the dangers of a too quiet car than any of our other (societal) fears?
Sent by Andrew


Hi Tom, Sarah and Roger,

In regards to autonomous cars, I think people's expectations need to be more realistic. The software is never going to be perfect because the software was created by people and people are not perfect. That said, the goal should be, and probably is, that autonomous cars are safer than human drivers the vast majority of the time with the autonomous cars never being less safe than human drivers.
Planes are a good example because as safe as they are and as much money that's invested into their safety planes are still not 100% safe and there are still occasionally crashes and problems. But because autonomous cars will have to content with the randomness of people and animals there will always be a chance that something tragic will happen.

Thanks for the shows,
Sent by David from autonomous cars can't get here soon enough Minnesota

YouTube

Links



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"GDPR Greater Than EULA" 		Bio-inspired Robots
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