Archive For The “Diane Israel” Category

Raising The Temperature On Wearable Devices

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Raising The Temperature On Wearable Devices

By Diane Israel

Self-repairing health wearables high-powered by body heat

Israeli scientists have developed Associate in the Nursing integrated system of wearable monitors that passively notice and transmit very important signs as early markers for illness. Such wearables aren’t distinctive, however, this technique is new as a result of it’s high-powered by energy from the wearer’s movements and body heat, and may fix its own tears or scratches. The wearable system may spare patients pain, greatly cut back medical expenses, and supply in-depth and careful data for medical specialty studies, say Prof. Hossam haik and postdoctoral scientist Weiwei Chinese, WHO fabricated the system at the Wolfson School of Chemical Engineering of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in port.

“Normal health is characterized by famed markers reminiscent of sixty to one hundred heartbeats per minute and 7 to eight breaths per minute. If we tend to notice dramatic changes within the numerous markers in real time, we are able to refer the patient to an additional comprehensive designation and forestall illness from developing or worsening,” aforementioned haik.

Made of advanced self-healing materials, the Technion wearable watching system would ne’er ought to be turned off for repair or charging.

Although the system’s parts exist already, a platform that integrates all of them has not nevertheless been developed. It needs a fancy array of sensors, a small and versatile printed circuit for measurement the markers, and parts that method the data and transfer it to the cloud. All of those square measure being enforced within the new system being developed by Haick’s analysis cluster.

Haick and Chinese conferred their ends up in the journal Advanced Materials.

Haick has fabricated nanotech medical diagnostic systems as well as the NaNose for police work cancer and alternative diseases from breath samples with eighty-six accuracy on the average. He heads the SNIFFPHONE syndicate, that integrates this technique into a radiotelephone to alter uploading the info to the cloud for medical analysis.

Wu, currently an academician within the college of Advanced Materials and engineering science at Xidian University in China, was a post-doctoral scientist in Haick’s workplace.

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Phone App Saves Arizona Teen

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Phone App Saves Arizona Teen

By Diane Israel

This parental management app may be smart for parents and protect their children, however, it additionally imposes on rights to privacy.

Sentry helps folks monitor what their children do on their cell phones. Illustration by Shutterstock

An Israeli-made mobile app alerted the oldsters of a 13-year-old boy in Phoenix, Arizona, that their son was in an exceedingly relationship together with his 27-year-old teacher.

The app from Ra’anana-based Sentry Parental Control flagged suspicious content on the teenager’s phone, as well as sexually specific text messages and nude photos, that diode to the arrest of the teacher earlier this year. The boy’s folks expressed the concern that, while not the app, the link may need to be continued.

Michael Druker began developing the AI-based machine-driven tools that may become picket once his own son – then solely eight – demanded a telephone. Druker, a programmer UN agency had been engaged on image-recognition technology, says he knew “from operating during this business the risks youngsters square measure exposed to from social media and electronic communication apps.”

Druker looked around to envision if there have been any computer code programs to observe what children do on their devices. “There were no solutions,” he realized. So, alongside a partner, he set out to create one himself.

Sentry, that presently runs on humanoid devices, monitors text messages on all the most social networks – Facebook, WhatsApp, Kik, Instagram, and Snap – similarly as SMS. It will see each pic opened on the device, track that apps square measure opened, monitor decision history and update folks on wherever the phone is getting used supported its geolocation.

Sentry will do all that while not requiring the phone’s user (the child) to share his or her passwords. that creates picket totally different than competitors like Qustodio, Bark, and UKnow, that need youngsters to produce their folks with login credentials.

“We see everything that happens on the device,” Druker tells ISRAEL21c. “If a baby extremely needs to cover content from his or her folks, it’s straightforward to vary the Arcanum or open another social media account. youngsters square measure terribly sensible these days!”

Druker used his background in image recognition to develop the algorithms picket deploys to find status in pictures and to analyze texts. The app works entirely through machine learning. “No human is observing those photos, thank God,” he says.

It’s then up to the parent to confront the kid on the content of the alert – that begs the question: Why would a baby permit his or her parent to put in an observance app?

“I use the analogy of a seatbelt,” Druker tells ISRAEL21c. “I might imagine I’m an honest driver. I’m not concerned in several accidents, therefore perhaps I don’t have to be compelled to use a seatbelt. however, I still do. It’s constant here. youngsters square measure savvier at victimization their smartphones than their folks. however being sensible doesn’t mean they perceive all the results of what they are doing and what may happen.”

Moreover, typically the oldsters square measure paying for the phone. “As a parent, I even have the ‘keys,’” Druker says. “I use this as associate degree excuse to speak concerning the threats of social media with my children. we tend to don’t block something. We’re solely notifying folks concerning suspicious content. It’s then up to the parent to make a decision the way to handle it.”

Cyberbullying protection

The initial impetus for picket was preventing cyberbullying. Druker cites statistics showing that almost thirty-five p.c of kids have been threatened online and several square measure afraid to report it. As a result, they’ll “become depressed. Their square measure suicide tries.”

A lot of picket users their square measure, the higher the app works. that the app is freed from charge till a vital mass is reached. “Later, we’ll charge a monthly subscription,” says Druker, UN agency runs his bootstrapped company out of the Hubanana co-working space and is presently raising a seed spherical to develop higher prophetical behavior, boost selling and develop a version for the iPhone.

The app has generated respectable organic success so far, with some four,000 youngsters registered. The app will support multiple users; some folks have many youngsters monitored, Druker says. Sixty p.c of users square measure in Israel, eighteen square measure within the U.S.A. with a sprinkling in a European nation, the united kingdom, and Russia.

The parents of the 13-year-old in Arizona square measure choked with praise for picket.

“A TV can’t watch your children. A game system cannot watch your children. you’ve got to try and do that,” the child’s father told USA these days. “If we tend to didn’t have the app, and that we didn’t take all the steps, we’d ne’er have best-known this happened to my son.”

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Chicago Startups Could Use A Guy Like Hillel Fuld

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Chicago Startups Could Use A Guy Like Hillel Fuld

By Diane Israel

If you’re anywhere within the orbit of the Israeli startup scene, you already know the name Hillel Fuld. A serial entrepreneur, Fuld has been advising Israeli startups for decades and is rightly what you would call a guru. His passion for Israeli startups is without question, helping incubate early-stage ideas into products, services, and a real revenue stream, what the rest of us know as being in business.

Like the anonymous source that has been dropping real silver dollars into an unsuspecting Salvation Army bell ringer at Christmas season — whoever this person is has been doing it for over twenty years — Fuld may lack the anonymity only for his extraordinary success in Israeli startup nation is pure gratis. Like the anonymous good samaritan in Chicago, Fuld’s motives are suspect of that often talked about but rarely scene ideal. The altruist.

Here in Chicago, fledgling startup communities have sprouted up near the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) campus, and a few hamlets here and there in the newly rehabilitated West Loop/Fulton Market, nestled closely to the aspiring new digs of Google. All of this has forged two new industries to accommodate startup nations. The coworking concept of creating very flexible floor plans to expand and shrink to the needs of various startups and former startups who share common services and space with their contemporaries. And the latest trend, one that is its own form of disruption in real estate. Co-living housing.

The two innovations converge in one building in the West Loop, with coworking pioneer Industrious sharing space with Medici Living Group’s Quarters brand for co-living housing. Imagine that lucky employee who works in Industrious’ space and then has that long commute home to Quarters. Perhaps a Guinness record for shortest commute depending on whether they take the stairs or an elevator.

Yet the grandfather of startup hubs, the one that’s been around for over ten years now, is 1871 located on the 12th floor of the Merchandise Mart. Like Industrious, 1871 offers coworking space for hundreds of startups along with free legal, accounting, and marketing mentorship programs and various free seminar sponsored by the corporate establishment. And it doesn’t stop there. On the very same floor, coworking service provider Regus competes directly against 1871 to woo startups. It’s all very strange. All this competition for startup dollars who by definition don’t have much to spend. Sure. Some of them will get funded which will change their fate overnight, but how many? 1 percent? Maybe.

All things considered, Chicago’s startup community is thriving, and that’s a good thing by any measure. But let’s face it. One of these startups needs to hit the bigtime. And then just maybe, from its success may emerge its own Hillel Fuld. One can only hope.

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Education Middleman Is Now A Robot!

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Education Middleman Is Now A Robot!

By Diane Israel

Two hundred students from Israel and the United States used a robot to collaborate in a sophisticated scientific experiment. The 10-day science experiment helped them understand how antibiotic-resistant bacterial “superbugs” evolve.

The teens designed their experiments on Google Sheets, and these instructions were automatically carried out by a robot in a lab at the University of Massachusetts. Google Sheets is similar to Microsoft Excel. Comparatively, Google Docs is analogous to Microsoft Office or Microsoft 360. And while the applications are nearly identical, there are two striking differences, differences which explain why the students went the Google route on this one…

  1. Google Sheets is free
  2. All content creation, and collaboration is a snap since all content resides on Google Drive, Google’s cloud service.

Two webcams livestreamed the robot’s results on YouTube so the kids in both locations could monitor and provide input to the experiment via changes to the Google Sheets, explained project initiator Amir Mitchell, a Weizmann Institute alumnus who heads a research group at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

“We developed a science education platform in which geographical distance is irrelevant,” said Mitchell. “High school students from all over the world can do empirical research, direct the process, check results and make new decisions based on those results.”

During initial hands-on experiments in their own schools’ science labs using equipment developed in Mitchell’s lab, the students in six Israeli schools and in two classes at Worcester Technical High School grew bacteria and exposed them to antibiotics, controlling the types, timing and concentrations.

“The research level of this project was fairly complex,” said Dahan. “It was amazing to see the creativity, time and thought the students put into their work, and the levels of commitment and excitement showed in the lively discussions over the 10 days.

While the decision to go with Google for document management and centralized services, all cloud applications, especially with anyting with Google’s name on it, are big targets for pranksters, scammers and otherwise people with nefarious intent. But the benefits outweighed the risks for this record-setting teamwork. However, over the long-term, the reliability of publically available cloud solutions will always be suspect as individual and state-sponsored cyberattacks learn new ways to attack an already vulnerable cloud.

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Fake news, Fake People Auto-detection Is Now Reality

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Fake news, Fake People Auto-detection Is Now Reality

By Diane Israel

It’s about time. For many, say around 40 percent of the U.S. voting population, there are but two expressions of news. FoxNews and everyone else, with much derision, referred to by president Trump and many others as, Fake News. Similarly, the Robert Mueller III investigation into, among other things, Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, there is no longer any doubt that the Russians did indeed meddle, and meddle big time, creating Fake social personas, pages, events and Facebook advertising to create as much political division as possible with the hopes of a prescient Trump victory.

To counteract at least some of this mayhem, Israeli and American researchers have developed a method to detect fake user accounts on Twitter, Facebook and many other social networks.

Although not exactly a product, but an algorithm which can detect unusual link building that does not unfold in the way a human would do, it automatically flags these improbable links.

“With recent disturbing news about failures to safeguard user privacy, and targeted use of social media by Russia to influence elections, rooting out fake users has never been of greater importance,” said Dima Kagan, lead researcher and a PhD student in BGU’s department of software and information systems engineering.

The algorithm consists of two main iterations based on machine-learning algorithms.

  1. The first constructs a link prediction classifier that can estimate, with high accuracy, the probability of a link existing between two users.
  2. The second iteration generates a new set of meta-features based on the features created by the link prediction classifier.

The algorithm can also be used to reveal the influential people in social networks, but how it does it is still a mystery that compels additional scrutiny.

The irony is that human deceipt and meddling may have met its match, and not by any populist pushback, but rather, through an ethical algorithm. Perhaps the time has come whereby what’s wrong with human behavior can be best countermeasured by ethically-minded data mining. Of course, countermeasures to the countermeasure should be expected to follow suit. And maybe this is the future of artificial intelligence with automation serving as proxies to our moral dilemmas.

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Superhuman X-Ray Eyes Added To IoT Hopper

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Superhuman X-Ray Eyes Added To IoT Hopper

By Diane Israel

The Internet of Things (IoT) just added a new “thing” to its portfolio. At first blush, it’s just another sensor, a peripheral hardware piece that typically is the data capture point of a wholistic IoT data capture, sharing, and transactional framework. Indeed, IoT sensors are quickly becoming the widgets of IoT deployments as their costs continue to drop — about a dollar each right now and forecasted to be less than a dime each in the next two years.

All good news. But Israeli tech company Vayyar enters the sensor business as the latest sensor disruptor. And by digital disruption, I don’t mean a price disruption but rather a technological advancement so quantum at its very core that the definition itself must gain a second usage. That’s because this sensor doesn’t just capture data from shoppers walking down a retail store aisle, or passing data from a heard of cattle to a central server, or providing health diagnostics of the latest autonomous vehicle.

This sensor actually sees, and sees like Superman…literally. Vayvar’s sensor can, among other things, see through walls, human bodies, closed doors and what we mortals would consider to be otherwise sold objects.

The sensor comprises 72 receivers can also differentiate between human objects and nonanimated ones.

The practical uses include:

  • home monitoring
  • elderly care
  • distinguish between a walking person, a sitting person, or a person lying down

While Vayyar’s product might at first seem fantastical, the device has several practical uses when applied to the fields of breast cancer imaging, elderly care, robotics, retail, and more. The sensor was initially designed as an imaging device to detect cancerous growths, the applications for the product’s technology is now being applied in a myriad of fields.

The hi-tech startup has already raised over $78 million in venture capital. Vayvar’s next vertical target is the automotive industry as an augmentation to current relatively homogenous sensor devices with its smart device that can be configured to act as the car’s extra set of eyes.

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Israeli Company Pulls Water Out Of Your…Atmosphere

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Israeli Company Pulls Water Out Of Your…Atmosphere

By Diane Israel

The old adage is true. Where there’s water there’s life. But providing drinkable water in drought-stricken areas, along with rising global temperatures, human-generated pollution, and a worldwide population north of 7 billion, is straining water supplies and our ability to push it where it’s needed, and when it’s needed.

It’s estimated that by 2025, a full two-thirds of the world’s population will face regular drinking water shortages.

Israeli company Watergen may just have the solution for the entire world. And if recent deployments of its Water From Air solutions stand the test of time, we may well be on our way to solving the world’s water needs…forever!

In that past two years, Watergen has inked deals for its Water from Air systems in South Africa, India, Russia, and the United States, and is working with FEMA and the American Red Cross for disaster relief contingencies. It has also gained the attention of the United Nations for humanitarian aid.

Watergen’s Water from Air technology comprises three systems or products.

    1. Large Scale Water Generator:Requiring no infrastructure but electricity, the industrial scale Atmospheric Water Generator (AWG) is literally a plug-and-drink solution, aimed for schools, hospitals, commercial/residential buildings, whole villages, factories and off-grid settlements, providing a robust and renewable source for fresh, clean drinking water. LS Generator can potentially service millions around the world, eliminating their need to “hunt” for water every day, providing water independence and social stability.

 

    1. gen-350 water from air systemGEN–350 (Medium Scale Atmospheric Water Generator).The GEN-350 is a medium scale, and highly mobile water generator aimed for fast and easy deployment in all weather conditions. Weighing 800kg, the GEN-350 can be easily mounted on a small truck or SUV, servicing water to remote, and otherwise difficult to access locations.

 

  1. GENNY (Small Scale Atmospheric Water Generator).Genny water from air systemGENNY provides a renewable source of clean and fresh drinking water for homes and offices. Requiring no infrastructure what so ever but electricity, it is literally a plug and drink solution, that can be installed in minutes anywhere, eliminating the daily dependency on bottled water. Employing state of the art, multi-stage, оzone based water purification and circulation system ensure water quality at premium levels, keeping them cool and fresh over time.

 

About Watergen

Watergen’s vision is to provide humanity with an abundant, renewable source of fresh, clean drinking water, by extracting it directly from the air, our most abundant water resource.

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