Computer Vision News - June 2021

3 Spotlight News 1 Artificial Intelligence Translates Mental Handwriting into Tex t Back to the amazing things that AI already does. Apparently, an AI software , pairedwitha brain-computer interface , decodes neural signals to convert mental handwriting to text. This is per se amazing; but you will ask, what is this good for? That’s the point: it enables communication for patients with spinal-cord injuries, strokes, and other dire conditions. According to a study conducted at Stanford and published in Nature , a man with full-body paralysis was able to communicate at a speed of 18 words per minute. Compare that to able-bodied people who can type about 23 words per minute on a smartphone! Read More What can AI researchers do to help prevent Lethal Autonomous Weapons? A terribly serious subject now: more and more scientists and researchers question the potential (or actual) use of their AI as lethal weapons by governments and/or by organized crime. It is not difficult to imagine how dangerous could be autonomous weapons sent by armies, dictatures and actually anybody on enemy grounds. Shifting the burden of conflict even further on civil populations using autonomous weapons is a danger that a panel of scholars decided to address in the video here. If you are concerned too, have a look at the Stop Killer Robots website , where things are explained much better than I can do. Seeing-Eye Shoes Pair Computer Vision with Haptic Feedback Something cute now: if you wonder why ultrasonic or time-of-flight sensors have been placed on the wrist or head or anywhere else, except shoes - here, somebody did it. The purpose is of course to send pulses and measure the time it takes for the signal to bounce off the object and come back, in order to give visually impaired people a prompt notification of obstacles. They get the info through haptic feedback in the shoes as well as an audible phone notification via Bluetooth. The company is called InnoMake and their shoe was designed in partnership with Austria's Graz University of Technology. Read More