On October 3, the whole nation got another reason to be infuriated: presidential alerts were finally being tested, and everyone’s phone rang with a message saying that the alarm is a test one, and no action is needed.

While the event was not supposed to be a big deal (it’s just a test, isn’t it?), the message divided the nation into two camps: those who believe the alert can be of great help should a really terrible event capable of affecting the entire country happen, and those who oppose the introduction of the system and doubt the President will not succumb to the temptation to abuse the new means of communication.

Why the rage?

It’s not that everyone is so bloodthirsty. Local alerts have long been praised as a good way to warn people living in a particular area that a hurricane is expected or some other act of God is about to happen. AMBER alerts, while their usefulness is doubted by some, can also help save someone’s life. But despite the recommendation not to turn off these alerts, many Americans opted for disabling the feature.

Some did it because they felt they did not need the information shared (mostly due to being too far away from the place where the event is taking or has taken place), others cannot stand hearing the screeching sound in the middle of the night. Whatever the reasons behind the decision, everyone went along with it when these systems went live – because we have an option to turn it off.

iOS and Android have special settings that enable one to refuse to receive emergency alerts (though it is not recommended to do so, as the information shared is really important).

But there is one type of alerts you cannot opt out, and that is presidential alerts.

What is it?

The very name suggests that it is a message sent by the President. No panic – it is not some two-digit number to which Mr Trump can send anything he wants. In fact, the name of the alert definitely contributed to the aggressive reaction it is now facing.

Yes, presidential alerts can be sent by the President or some other authorized person appointed by him or her, but all these messages are subject to be checked and approved by FEMA.

Most people hate the concept of the newly tested presidential alerts because they are afraid of being spammed by the current President, who is notorious for his controversial use of social media. The internet is teeming with jokes that Trump will fail to resist the temptation to use the system to share something stupid, like ‘The White House has run out of Diet Coke! I repeat!” and so on.

Let us reassure you: in spite of the proclivity of the President to abuse opportunities to share his opinion, chances are this will not happen.

First, all these messages are controlled by FEMA, so there is no direct communication.

Second, this system is for extremely dangerous situations affecting the entire country, i.e. it is going to be used very rarely, if ever (hopefully). Even hurricanes, floods and other disasters are announced locally and do not fall under the category of events worth a presidential alert.

Third, even if the President decides to use the system to his own benefit (which is an unlikely scenario), it will be a violation of the legislation, which will bring him a lot of problems should it really happen.

A matter of right

However, Trump is not the only reason why many people are opposed to it. It is the hijacking of personal devices that makes everyone see red and go as far as to file suits against the government. Since you cannot turn these notifications off, it is considered hijacking by some, and receiving these messages is a mandatory thing which is difficult to swallow by those who are used to the concept of ultimate freedom and want to defend their rights.

Still, there are several things you can try doing so as not to see these alerts.

• Try disabling other alerts. This measure is unlikely to work, but since you do not like being sent anything unapproved by you, it is something for you to consider.
• Put your smartphone on silent. Yes, it is inconvenient, but it appears to be the only way to avoid the sounds played by the device when such an alert is received. You will still receive a visual notification, though.
• There are unnamed smaller networks which do not participate in the program, so if you happen to be their user, you will not receive any alerts. However, these companies are rare, and switching to their services solely for the purpose of avoiding emergency alerts is unreasonable.

As of this moment, it’s all you can do about presidential alerts – you cannot opt out, but it sounds reasonable, since the scope of events which qualify is such that it is not designed to be part of your daily spam.

Whatever the reason for your anti-alert stance (be it Trumpophobia, the inability to digest such intrusion, or something else), we would like to echo the official recommendations and advise not to turn off any alerts: they are infrequent, and they can help you avoid dangerous situations or save someone’s life. Hearing a strange sound once in a while is not a serious price to pay for being informed.

Image Credit: Google Glass

We live in a time when technology is making amazing progress at a mind-boggling speed. Wearable technology in all its manifestations is one of the most apparent tech aspects that affects our lives more and more, and is bound to make a quantum leap in the very near future. For now, there are various attempts at creating the most efficient, functional, convenient devices, which would be considered pure sci-fi just a couple of decades ago.

What are the most impressive achievements of 2017? What surprised us the most? What is the most useful? Let’s take a look at what this year had contributed to the wearable technology
segment.

New devices and research directions

Smart watches and fitness trackers are no longer the fad, they’ve become a familiar part of life for many. The number of the functions they offer is expanding continuously, and now includes measuring heart rate variability and metabolic rates, but what are some of the more innovative gadgets?

Athos Training System

Training systems are a far more sophisticated invention than fitness trackers. They target the sports professionals rather than the mass consumer, and supply a wealth of biometrical information for the athlete and the trainer. A vivid example is provided by the Athos Training System, a highly advanced biometric sensor suite that provides clinical-level biometric data, crucial for analyzing and improving performance and enhancing training routines. Thousands of miniature biosensors are literally woven into Athos smart sports apparel – a shirt and a pair of shorts, and provide much more comprehensive and reliable data than any single sensor would. The information is then fed into the Athos App, allowing to interpret it in sophisticated ways, i.e. by providing a real-time view of muscle activity optimizing performance and easing recovery after injuries.

Promising developments

Smart rings, unveiled at CES 2017 in Las Vegas, are a product of Tappy, a Hong Kong-based company. They are the next step in making payments more convenient – the ceramic ring feeds back to the Tappy smartphone app, and allows to pay at contactless payment terminals.

Smart sports shoes that allow to analyze an athlete’s performance (Under Armor and Iofit) have been around for some time, but they are becoming more and more sophisticated.

Kids’ devices are also a growing segment. The Octopus watch, for instance, is designed for children 3-8 years old, and assists parents in creating a daily routine by sending visual reminders. It also teaches kids to tell the time.

Wearables

But the future is in hearables and visual wearable technology, and beyond. There is a range of hearables, augmented and virtual reality face gear, smart clothing connected to a smartphone or another device that allows to control various functions by means of swiping their specialized fabric (Jacquard, a denim jacket that is a product of collaboration between Google and Levi’s). The new Fove headset with eye-tracking technology was introduced in 2017 and is the first of its kind, opening up amazing possibilities in VR and AR.

Biohacking and beyond

We have only touched upon the wearable technology iceberg, but there’s another fascinating topic, which is merely the logical development of the current vector – biohacking. Temporary tech tattoos (MIT and Microsoft Research are working on these) and real-time translation earbuds (project of Pilot) are coming soon. But real biohacking – implanting various micro-devices into human bodies for various purposes – is already here, and prosthetic arms straight out of cyborg games, antennae that allows to sense infrared and ultraviolet ends of the spectrum, headsets that allow to control outside objects by focusing brain attention, and other inventions are creating a new reality. When some of these and other inventions grow popular, will humankind remain purely human, or are we moving towards a beehive matrix-type existence?

In any case, human population is growing more wired and interconnected by the minute, becoming more vulnerable to monitoring, hacking and being controlled, on one side, and providing amazing opportunities for creativity and positive developments – on the other.

No one knows what the future holds, but it’s certainly a breathtakingly interesting time to be around.

Emotional Intelligence has recently become a much-talked of concept despite the fact that it was first introduced some 20 years ago – in 1995. This special ability of a person to recognize and handle one’s feelings and emotions was studied by Dr. Daniel Goleman, who actually brought public’s attention to this particular cognitive ability area.

Since that time there have been carried out a great number of various studies in the field and the importance of EI was actually proposed to be placed higher than one of IQ level (in any interpersonal activity, and especially in business).

With the advent of technologies (that were unthinkable in 1995) emotional intelligence research has stepped onto a new level. We’ve learned everything about the concept as it is and how to implement the knowledge consciously on at least a personal basis, and we are already trying to dive deeper into emotional analytics with the range of tools we have recently acquired and are gradually updating.

The talk is about the plethora of APIs and SDKs that are able to interpret a person’s (a user’s) mood by means of tracking human emotive gestures. On the basis of reactions to visual, audio and kinaesthetic stimuli and distractions recent technologies are able to carry out the sorting of emotions into 7 major groups:

• joy,
• sadness,
• anger,
• fear,
• surprise,
• contempt,
• and disgust.

Methods used: facial detection, sonic algorithms and semantic analysis; tools are photo and video materials, text and speech samples.

Such a blend of psychology and technology provides a chance for a very specific analysis – with the conclusions that are all the more important, the larger the scale is.

Why does It Matter?

Because it is profitable. For any business, for every business literally.

Getting back to EI as a basis – on a personal level in business – it is about leadership and organization with the use of emotional intelligence skills; we talk about human resources management on a different level.

Besides, emotion analytics is very likely to take the place of many analytical marketing tools that are in use now and have been considered effective so far – but not for long. In accordance with the recent news the only pure facial recognition market is likely to grow up to $6.19bln in next five years; and provided that emotional recognition is added to this equation – the number gets unscalable. Well, so do the uses for the method.

Take any group testing in business – for a commercial, or an audience response for a movie or a specific product. This is actually a marketing campaign on entirely new level – you get huge amount of automatically accumulated data that is not only collected in a more efficient way but is also much more reliable as immediate emotional reactions are very hard to control.

Thus, the response of any target audience is likely to be more sincere and all the more exemplary. The implementation, as it has already been said, barely has any limitations: from getting real TV ratings to improving security systems of any public venues (stadiums, airports, etc.)

In the opinion of Paul Zak (the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University) we are likely to get emotion-optimized products and services very soon; it is not even the question of tomorrow but rather of today. And getting back to the question of profit – every business that directly deals with customers won’t be able to stay unaffected.

One of the most vivid examples is how large and influential businesses have already taken emotion analytics on board. Google and Pepsi along with 20th Century Fox and Jaguar have already applied for such “applied neuroscience platform” (in their own terminology) as Lightwave for parsing people’s biometrics, collecting and analyzing consumers’ emotional and mental states. The company also measured the audience’s response and the intensity of emotional reactions to the famous movie “The Revenant” by using real-time biometric data (with a number of quite far-fetching conclusions). Lightware, as well as a growing number of similar apps and platforms is paving the road to entirely new emotion economy.

Among other APIs that recognize mood is Affectiva: it represents a new solution that allows large scale data collection and analysis – of facial expressions to be precise – with the help of visual analytic tools. At the present moment it owns a database of 3,289,274 analyzed faces.

The company’s CEO and Co-founder Rana el Kaliouby points out that EI factor can no longer be neglected; besides, it can no longer be accounted separately in the era of Internet of things. Digital devices have already become an inseparable part of our life; thus, they are also in need of being adapted in terms of emotional intelligence as well – the result will be all the more beneficial.

The same can be referred to the other two examples that of Synesketch and Moodies.

The former represents text-to-emotion “converter”. It is an iTunes player for written text. Basically it represents an tool that allows analyzing text for emotive reaction that further on is converted into a unique visualization.

The latter deals with translation from speech to the language of emotions. Literally, the way one is speaking, the words used, the tone and speed and other speech-related factors are analyzed; from this information actual feedback about general emotional state and mood of a speaker is given. Besides, the analysis allows making some conclusions with regards to a person’s characteristics in decision-making.

EI and Emotion Recognition Perspective

While the achievements are numerous and impressive the perspective is not clear. Emotional recognition via facial detection (or any other means) is only likely to advance, and with it a number of ethical questions is also likely to raise – especially the ones with regards to the authorization and consent granting for any such analysis. It is especially true with regards to business and advertising sector – where profit runs the show – and misuse can be expected.

The other concern is about data privacy policy and access to this valuable data. It is very likely to be another matter of concern. With the growing importance of personal emotional data it is only natural to suppose that emotion-aware devices are the future; however, with the number of present day available tracking software that is permanently advancing,we are going to get not only unthinkable new technologies but also absolutely new type of surveillance. This was the story of GPS and location tracking some years ago – now it’s a standard of living. It is very likely that the same will happen with emotions in business.

Article by: Natallia Tsahelnik

Under the term the “Internet of things” (IoT) is currently understood a growing number of concepts; the idea has become increasingly popular. As a matter of fact, there is a lot of complexity behind the term as it is pretty much related to a number of things including technology and innovation and human factor and what not.

However, all this fails pretty much to cover up the idea of sense behind IoT. Thus, here are some things to understand.

What It It

Nowadays Internet as a phenomenon seems so natural, and it’s getting cheaper, more and more available, and inseparable from our daily lives with all the potential of Wi-Fi and smartphones and numerous other gadgets that inevitably invade our lives.

With all this in mind the basic concept behind IoT is that any device that has a potential for Internet access will be connected to it; and such devices will also be interconnected with one another. Thus, we are going to have all sorts of appliances and devices at home (and out) that create an actual network – and the prospects are that by 2020 we are going to have about 30 million devices connected in such a way. Pretty impressive, isn’t it?

So, we are getting at entirely new level – not only it is things-people relationship but all the possible combinations as well. One of the concepts is of a smart city; the one that will live and develop effectively and will be able both to serve as a comfortable place to live and harm environment to a minimum at the same time. There are others, of course, as the potential of IoT is really great. In a sense it is hard to imagine all the opportunities and openings that such technology is to offer.

What to Expect

We will have everything connected, if it can be. Well, here is the point where questions and discussions start arising. Do we actually need so many things connected? Do we have to be surrounded by an invisible network of gadgets that, well, are able to think on their own? The discussions are numerous and some of the questions refer to a broader issue of artificial intelligence and all things related.

Some of the conversations do get negative hint that reflect eternal fear of the unknown and unconventional; and surely, there is plenty of challenge and risks to be taken. First and foremost is the question of security. With all the devices and gadgets brought up together in one network, there is no surprise that people may worry about their private data security. As the leak in one place will definitely be fraught with unpleasant (and sometimes even downright dreadful) consequences. Just imagine someone hacking into your coffee-maker and stealing all you personal photo from your smartphone, or credit card data, or else. Not nice, isn’t it?

Next issue the amount of data that is going to be produced and processed. Well, there’s going to be tons of information. And it will require monitoring, storage, analysis and so on – definitely there will be new job openings…

There are several talks about IoT on Ted.com. They dwell on the topic how IoT is going to affect our daily lives with the speakers trying to make attempts at understanding both the benefits and the challenges and how we can prepare ourselves to deal with such product of process to the best of our advantage.

Get a better idea by having a look at “The Internet of Things: Dr. John Barrett at TEDxCIT“.

Recently it is fairly hard to find anyone unaware of Pokémon Go – which is definitely saying something about the popularity of the game app. The guess is that such popularity can be explained by the rare (and successful) mix of reality and virtual in one small app.

Surely, most of us have already seen those crazy people trying to catch a Pokémon at the street, in a mall, in your grandmother’s garden. Well, you can hardly miss it as your phone starts sending vibrations as soon as you approach one. The fancy part of the game is that no matter where you are – in Lisbon’s Alfama or Aukland, New Zealand – your  Pokémon will be catching #28 tram, or taking a stroll around the city as real. The more of them you collect by capturing, the cooler.

Quite fascinating, it is. Right?

The Sad Part

However, there is a silver lining. One of the things you have to do in the first place to play is to log in with a Gmail account. Then, the app gets your location data – well, this one is essential, otherwise how else you are going to get all these realistic creatures in those definite locations? By logging in, you grant the app full access to your personal data… and here is the question – what information is actually being collected by the app?

Here are several things to understand. The first one is not to grant full access to your personal information to anyone.  Most users do not clearly understand the mechanism as well as consequences of such apps’ functioning; thus a great number of problems may arise.

Many have heard about identity theft, however, it is only when it happens, we do realize the scale of a problem. Personal data – from health to finance – is not something we want others to be aware of; when it is lost, it can be fraught with serious consequences.

About 1 billion of personal records are lost annually in accordance to official resources; and the situation isn’t likely to improve. Sad fact is that we often make it accessible on our own by allowing such apps as Pokémon Go into our smartphones.

Another study shows that about 43% of all software companies faced with identity theft issues recently and hackers are getting better and better in their ways to get personal data (FBI have numerous reports about email phishing campaigns and etc.) In many cases it is not anything complicated taking into consideration the fact that people grant access to their data by themselves simply by being unaware that a simple click and login/password procedure opens the doors wide to viruses, and consequently, to any third parties who gets your name, financial and private data in an instant.

Data breaches can never be harmless, no matter on a personal or a company level. Thus, it is quite essential to learn some tricks about security and use them.

What to Do

Getting back to Pokémon Go, here are some things to remember when you download and install any app to your smartphone:

Gaming is fun, let’s make sure it is safe for our kids. Don’t permit access to your personal data and privacy. Grant third-party applications limited access to your data and take precautions to protect your family from the possibility of being hacked.

• First of all, use two-factor authentication. This refers especially to the apps that deal with finances – e.g. banking apps, online shops and etc. Such measure allows higher level of security and your financial data will be much safer.
• Antimalware can also come handy. It won’t save you from a professional hack attempt, however, it will definitely keep away any unwanted apps and viruses, as well as intrusive spyware.
• Firewall and security apps. Those will help to keep away any attempts at security breach at least by blocking them.
• One more thing not to forget is to have a feature that allows remove blocking of a device. Dead useful in case of stealth.

To Cap It All

Pokémon Go is not that dangerous as any other app that you download to your device. It is fun to some extent and for some period of time it is likely to go on being popular. For those who haven’t joined this fun – make sure you take all the above mentioned precautions into consideration.