http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/technology/bringing-big-data-to-the-fight-against-benefits-fraud.html?ref=technology

Bringing Big Data to the Fight Against Benefits FraudBy NATASHA SINGERFEB. 20, 2015Photo

CreditPaulo CamposA few years ago, the New York City Human Resources Administration decided to try a new way to root out fraud among people receiving government benefits. Data detectives began running benefit recipients through a computerized pattern-recognition system.

They discovered that the behavior of a small percentage of people stood out. The anomalies in themselves didn’t constitute fraud, but they pointed the agency’s data scientists in potentially fruitful directions.

One of those outliers, for instance, was Parvawattie Raghunandan, a Bronx resident, whose family had received more than $50,000 in health benefits over a decade. Her case was unusual because most families of similar size and income typically received multiple benefits — like health coverage, food stamps and cash assistance — but Ms. Raghunandan had applied only for Medicaid for herself and her three children, agency officials said.

So the data scientists followed up by searching state records on business ownership and car registration for more information about her family’s situation. They also tapped into a national database on property ownership from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, an information and analytics division of Reed Elsevier. Investigators subsequently concluded that the family had underreported its assets, among them: an electrical contracting business, owned by Ms. Raghunandan’s husband, where she had claimed to work for a low wage; three residential properties in New York and one out of state; and joint bank accounts with more than $100,000, according to agency officials. ** approach won’t scale **

…http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/3-austrian-men-mind-controlled-bionic-hands-article-1.2128484

3 Austrian men first to get mind-controlled bionic hands after amputation THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Wednesday, February 25, 2015, 8:00 AM

PreviousNextEnlargeDIETER NAGL/AFP/GETTY IMAGESThree Austrian men underwent bionic reconstruction in the world’s first use of mind-controlled bionic hands.

LONDON -- Three Austrians have replaced injured hands with bionic ones that they can control using nerves and muscles transplanted into their arms from their legs.

The three men are the first to undergo what doctors refer to as "bionic reconstruction," which includes a voluntary

amputation, the transplantation of nerves and muscles and learning to use faint signals from them to command the hand.

Previously, people with bionic hands have primarily controlled them with manual settings.

"This is the first time we have bionically reconstructed a hand," said Dr. Oskar Aszmann of the Medical University of Vienna, who developed the approach with colleagues. "If I saw these kinds of patients five to seven years ago, I would have just shrugged my shoulders and said, `there's nothing I can do for you.'"

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http://www.technologyreview.com/view/535446/googles-ai-masters-space-invaders-but-it-still-stinks-at-pac-man/\

Google's AI Masters Space Invaders (But It Still Stinks at Pac-Man)Google’s artificial intelligence researchers say software that learns to play video games could graduate to the real world before long.

Google DeepMind’s software takes on the classic Atari 2600 game Space Invaders.

Notch up another win for the machines. Software from Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence group has learned to play the classic Atari 2600 game Space Invaders to a superhuman level.

That news comes via a   new paper   in the scientific journal   Nature , which says that the software learned to play 22 classic Atari titles better than a human expert video game tester could. The work updates an earlier paper on the same software published at an AI conference in late 2013. Back then the software took on seven titles, and it could only outperform humans at three. At the time DeepMind was an independent startup.

Not long after, DeepMind was acquired by Google for $628 million, and Google CEO Larry Page was showing the software off at the 2014 TED conference. MIT Technology Review delved into its workings in a profile of DeepMind’s leader Demis Hassabis last December (see “Google’s Intelligence Designer”).

Hassabis’s team, called Google DeepMind, has now developed a more complex, tuned-up version of their “deep Q-network” that took on 49 different Atari games. That it became a superhuman player of 22 of them, including Space Invaders, underlines the power of DeepMind’s technology. But the way it lagged human performance at 20 others, and only matched it for the rest, is a reminder that even this unusually capable software still has only limited intelligence.

The classic game Ms. Pac-Man neatly illustrates the software’s greatest limitation: that it is unable to make plans as far as even a few seconds ahead. That prevents the system from figuring out how to get across a the maze safely to eat the final pellets and complete a level. It is also unable to learn that eating certain magic pellets allows you to eat the ghosts that you must otherwise avoid at all costs.

DeepMind’s software is essentially stuck in the present. It only looks back at the last four video frames of game play (just a 15th of a second) to learn what moves pay off, or how to use its past experience to choose its next move. That means it can only master games where you can make progress using tactics that have very immediate payoffs. That’s limiting, even if it works well for some Atari games. Even so, DeepMind’s software has proves capable of working out seemingly complex strategies, like digging the ball around the back of the wall of blocks in the game Breakout, something expert human players do.

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http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2015/02/24/guy-dreams-up-app-called-magic-then-things-get-nuts/

Guy dreams up app called 'Magic,' then things get nutsBy Evann Gastaldo

Published February 24, 2015

File photo of a man texting. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa)

Up until last week, Mike Chen was working on a blood pressure tracking app called Bettir. Then, four days ago, he took 20 minutes to put together a side project he'd been thinking about called Magic, and to say it's overshadowed Bettir would be an understatement.

The idea: You text what you want—anything legal, from flowers for your girlfriend to takeout sushi to a wrench—to a number, and the Magic team works out the details and has it delivered to you, anywhere in the US and as soon as possible ...

just like magic. "This is something that I’ve always wanted to create to make my life easier," Chen explains to Mashable. He sent the new site to a few friends, figuring if they liked it, he'd improve the site (the original landing page was pretty sad-looking) and then do an official launch.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/technology/quirky-tests-the-crowd-based-creative-process.html?ref=technology

Technology |NYT Now

The Invention Mob, Brought to You by QuirkyBy STEVE LOHRFEB. 14, 2015

Turning Ideas Into GoodsCreditSasha Maslov for The New York Times

As inventions go, Jake Zien’s was a clever fix rather than an imaginative breakthrough: Irritation was the mother of his invention.

He found the standard power strip maddening because electric plugs would often block the adjacent sockets. So after his senior year in high school, while attending a summer program at the Rhode Island School of Design, he devised an adjustable power strip that solved that problem. But his product concept — a brief description, drawings and a crude mock-up — went nowhere until he was a senior in college. At that point, he sent digital versions of his sketches to a start-up called Quirky.

Quirky’s designers and engineers refined the concept. “They made it a much more elegant solution,” he said. Quirky also handled the manufacturing and marketing, secured a patent and listed Mr. Zien as the lead inventor. A year later, in 2011, the snakelike adjustable strip, Pivot Power, was on its way to store shelves.

Mr. Zien, 25, now gets a few cents on the dollar for every Pivot Power sold. A software designer in New York, Mr. Zien has collected more than $700,000, and counting.

Photo

A sampler of products made and sold by Quirky, from top: Verseur wine opener; Pivot Power flexible surge protector; Pawcet pet drinking fountain; Pluck egg separator; Stem citrus spritzer; and Aros smart air conditioner. Credit Quirky

This flexible power strip is the biggest hit so far for Quirky, founded in 2009. The company, based in Manhattan, is a curious creation of the Internet era, a hybrid of the digital and physical worlds. It is a social network, an online retailer and an industrial designer, manufacturer and marketer.

Ben Kaufman, the company’s 28-year-old founder and chief executive, calls it “a modern invention machine,” whose mission is to commercialize product ideas.

Quirky is Exhibit A for the case that a digital-age renaissance of the small inventor is not only possible but underway. The company taps an online community of one million registered users. More than 400 Quirky-generated products have made it to the marketplace so far

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/technology/personaltech/despite-the-promise-of-technology-the-mysteries-of-sleep-lie-unsolved.html?ref=technology&_r=0

Despite the Promise of Technology, the Mysteries of Sleep Lie UnsolvedBy FARHAD MANJOOFEB. 24, 2015

The Sense sleep tracker comes in two parts: There’s a tennis-ball size orb that sits on your bedside table, and a battery-powered device that attaches to your pillow and detects the movement of your body.

Few of us are satisfied with how we sleep; we all want more sleep and better sleep in the hopes of improving our minds and bodies during our waking hours.

Technology holds out the promise of perfection. What happens when you’re out for the count? Are you sleeping poorly? Can you do better? Sleep-tracking devices use sensors to monitor and record how you sleep in an effort to answer some of these questions.

But the reality of these devices comes nowhere close to the promise. After using yet another unspectacular sleep tracker — this time the much-anticipated Sense, which raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter last year — I was reminded, again, of how fundamentally useless these devices can be.

The Sense works well enough, for what it is. It offers one primary advantage over most other sleep trackers. You don’t have to wear it or remember to keep it charged. Instead, it sits on your bedside table, watching what’s going on in your room. In my week using it, I found a few flaws in the system, though several were prerelease bugs that should be ironed out soon. If you’re in the market for a sleep tracker, the Sense should be on your list.

But why are you in the market for a sleep tracker? Sleep tracking is a little bit bogus. I’m a terrible sleeper, but neither the Sense nor any other sleep tracker has revealed anything particularly helpful about what was happening to me between the sheets. If you’re not sleeping well, you almost certainly know it already, and there’s a good chance you know why. At best, the tracker adds a layer of empirical precision to a situation already evident in your midafternoon yawns.

What do you do with its data? There are many potential reasons for your poor sleep — you’re working too hard, you’re partying too hard, you’re too stressed, you have insomnia, you have a baby, your neighbors are noisy, you suffer some physiological problem — but the sleep tracker isn’t going to be able to fix any of those. As I studied the Sense’s readings every morning over the past week, I was puzzled about what to do next. I knew I had slept poorly; I had gone to bed too late, woken up too early, and I felt terrible. Why did I need a device to prove that? And unless the sleep tracker was offering to take care of my children for me, why should I bother with its data?

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