Facebook is developing a way to read your mind

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“What if you could type directly from your brain?”

That was the question Facebook executive Regina Dugan, who runs the company’s secretive research and hardware lab Building 8, posed to the audience Wednesday at the company’s annual F8 developer conference in San Jose.

The question was not meant to be rhetorical. Dugan and Facebook are actually making technology intended to do just that.

Facebook is building what it calls a “brain-computer speech-to-text interface,” technology that’s supposed to translate your thoughts directly from your brain to a computer screen without any need for speech or fingertips.

The idea is that this technology will be able to take what you’re thinking to yourself in silence, using non-invasive sensors that can read exactly what you intend to say, and turn it into readable text.

Dugan says the idea is not that crazy. She showed video of a woman from a Stanford research experiment who could type eight words per minute using a small electrode implanted into her brain to move a computer cursor over a keyboard.

Dugan says Facebook’s goal is to create technology that could autonomously type 100 words per minute based on a person’s thoughts “in a few years.”

The goal is to “one day become a speech prosthetic for people with communication disorders or a new means for input to AR,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “Even something as simple as a ‘yes/no’ brain click or a ‘brain mouse’ would be transformative.”

It is supposed to only detect activity in a very specific region of the brain where thoughts are translated into speech. “We are not talking about decoding your random thoughts,” she said. “That might be more than any of us care to know.”

But in order to ensure that Facebook is only translating the thoughts you want to share, the company says it will need to build new sensor technology that can better detect brain activity at lightning speed.

That tech doesn’t yet exist, but the company says it has over 60 scientists working on it now. Facebook also expects to create and ship these sensors at scale, thanks in part to miniaturization advancements from the telecom industry.

Reading the human brain isn’t the kind of technology announcement we’re used to seeing from Facebook, which makes truckloads of money advertising against user selfies and home videos.

But Facebook signaled that it had widespread ambitions last year when Dugan was hired and her new secret research lab, Building 8, was announced alongside hundreds of millions in funding. And Facebook spent the better part of its F8 presentations talking about its plans for augmented reality; the company envisions a world where smartphones will be replaced by smart glasses and keyboards may not exist.

Dugan previously ran the U.S. military’s research lab, DARPA, and then worked at Google before joining Facebook, and her work thus far has been kept private. It turns out that her plans for Facebook are as audacious as you might have imagined when she joined.

“Is it a little terrifying? Of course,” she said at the end of her keynote address. “If we fail, it’s gonna suck.”
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has not been shy about his scientific ambitions — but most of those have been linked to his philanthropic efforts, specifically a pledge with his wife Priscilla to spend $3 billion over the next decade trying to cure all disease.

In a lengthy letter published in February, Zuck made just a small mention of “accelerating science” amid lots of talk about creating global communities.
It’s the interface

Facebook isn’t only planning to listen to your thoughts. The company is also building technology to communicate with humans through their skin.

Facebook says its technology will act like the cochlea part of the ear, which translates sound into frequencies that are sent to the brain and decoded. Only rather than using your ears, Facebook says it will use your skin.

Though details on this project are slim, the social media company compared its new project with braille, which translates specific surface textures into words and is used by those who are visually impaired.

Recode

A Wrist Sensor That Works up a Sweat

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Researchers who are trying to find a way to make wearable health technology real say they’ve taken a big step with a device that generates enough sweat to be useful.

They’ve built a prototype that generates a few drops of perspiration — enough to measure blood sugar and to monitor other bodily functions.

It’s not ready for the market yet, but shows it is possible for people to wear lightweight devices that can deliver on the promise of pain-free diagnosis.

“You don’t stick people with anything. You can just wrap it on people’s hands and have them engage in their daily activities and you can continuously monitor them,” said Sam Emaminejad, who helped work on the device while at Stanford University.

Many groups are working to develop wearable health tech, from the glucose-sensing contact lens that Google currently has put on hold, to a so-called artificial pancreas that is really a series of linked devices that monitor blood sugar and deliver insulin as needed for diabetes patients.

What a wearable health device needs is enough bodily fluids to measure something, such as blood sugar, sodium or hormones. The time-honored method is a needle, and anywhere from a drop to a few vials of blood.

Non-invasive alternatives would have to use sweat.

There are several problems with that, number one being whether you can measure blood sugar or look for, say hormones, in sweat. Second is getting enough sweat to measure in the first place.

The Stanford team thinks they have done that.

They’ve put together sweat-stimulating compounds into a small device that delivers a low current. It can measure glucose, sodium and other compounds in the sweat and wirelessly relay that information.

“This platform extracts sweat (at a high secretion rate) on demand or periodically and performs sweat analysis in situ (in place),” they wrote in their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It was not painful and could be worn strapped to the arm. “It could be like a watch,” Emaminejad, who’s now at UCLA, told NBC News.

For proof of principle, the team measured blood sugar and minerals associated with flareups of cystic fibrosis in their volunteers. Such a device might be useful for monitoring a patient’s response to drugs, they said.

“One way I think this technology can be incorporated into our daily lives is to be incorporated into a smartwatch,” Emaminejad said. The compounds that stimulate sweating and that measure the desired compounds would need regular refreshing.

“We need a clever solution. Do we need a disposable cartridge that we can insert easily?” he asked.

And researchers will have to work on better ways to correlate measurements of blood sugar, lactase, potassium and other compounds taken from sweat to what doctors know they mean when measured in blood.

That’s one of the hiccups that held up work on the blood sugar-sensing contact lens — a lack of data on whether measurements in tears were as accurate as measurements taken from blood.

NBC News

Why You Should Wait Before Buying Samsung’s New Galaxy S8

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When a splashy new smartphone hits the market, consumers often weigh whether to place an order right away or to wait and see how others react to the device.

But with the Galaxy S8, Samsung’s first major smartphone release since the spontaneously combusting Galaxy Note 7 was discontinued last year, there isn’t much of a debate. Your best bet is to wait to buy the roughly $750 device — not just for safety reasons, but also because other uncertainties surround it.

Samsung declined to provide an early review unit of the Galaxy S8 to The New York Times, but several consumer electronics experts who tried the device ahead of its release this Friday were cautiously optimistic about the product. Even so, they said the phone had some radical design changes that might make people uncomfortable, a few key features were unfinished and Samsung’s recent safety record remained a concern.

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This Phishing Attack is Almost Impossible to Detect On Chrome, Firefox and Opera

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A Chinese infosec researcher has discovered a new “almost impossible to detect” phishing attack that can be used to trick even the most careful users on the Internet.

He warned, Hackers can use a known vulnerability in the Chrome, Firefox and Opera web browsers to display their fake domain names as the websites of legitimate services, like Apple, Google, or Amazon to steal login or financial credentials and other sensitive information from users.

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A bored intern created the original Windows Solitaire

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Solitaire has been a staple for office distraction since Microsoft first included the game in Windows 3.0 in 1990. But the digital adaptation wasn’t made by an iconic coder or just one of the company’s many full-time employees. It was programmed by an intern.

Great Big Story has an interview with Wes Cherry, who was an intern at Microsoft in 1988. He describes the experience as “all-encompassing,” but even internships at Microsoft have lulls. He put the downtime to good use. “I came up with the idea to write Solitaire for Windows out of boredom, really,” Cherry said. “There weren’t many games at the time, so we had to make them.” Read more

Google’s AutoDraw uses machine learning to help you draw like a pro

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Drawing isn’t for everyone. I, for one, am definitely not very good at it. But with AutoDraw, Google is launching a new experiment today that uses machine learning algorithms to match your doodles with professional drawings to make you look like you know what you’re doing. Read more

NSCDC secures conviction of 18 persons accused of downloading films

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The Nigerian Security and Civil Defense Corps (NSCDC), Kano State Command, has secured the conviction of 18 persons accused of downloading and sending Hausa films in Kano.

The command’s Public Relations officer, Mr Ibrahim Idris, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Kano on Monday.

Idris said the convicts were arraigned before a Magistrate’s Court in Kano on Friday, April 7, after they were arrested around Dakata in Ungoggo Local Government Area of the state. Read more