Tag Archives: technology

Unlock Your Account by Your Friends’ Faces

Posted on February 29, 2016 by | 3 comments

Passwords are the most common authentication method we use today to prove one’s identity. One of the major problems with using passwords is that people are often faced with a trade-off between security and usability; people are either making their passwords too simple, and are easily hacked into, or are making them extremely complicated to remember.

In general, compared to other existing authentication systems, such as digital signature and fingerprint recognition, passwords are cheap and simple to use. Therefore, it is the most widely used authentication mechanism today. Recently, something possibly “better” than passwords has arrived. A paper that was published on PeerJ proposed a new authentication system called “Facelock” based on the facial recognition technology. See the following YouTube video for a short introduction of facial recognition.

YouTube Preview Image

 

The physiological principle behind this new authentication system is that our brains have the ability to recognize familiar faces. You can easily recognize many different faces of the same person who you know pretty well, but you may find it is difficult to identify strangers across a range of images. Facelock is built on the fact that only authentic users can reliably identify the target faces but attackers are unlikely to recognize them. When logging in, Facelock allows users to go through a series of pages that each contains nine faces of different people with only one face that is familiar to the account holder. To unlock your account, you need to successfully select the target face on each page.

faces

Can you recognize the person who appears twice in the image? Image from http://theconversation.com/us

However, such a system also has certain limitations. The system is vulnerable to an attacker who has many friends in common with the user, which means your closest acquaintances are likely to be able to recognize your target faces. Additionally,  if the target person whose appearance is distinctive (i.e. has an outstanding characteristics such as a full beard or have a bald head) or if the images of the same person are not sufficiently different, then an attacker may still be able to identify the target faces without many challenges. On the other hand, there is no boundary to determine whether the image is distinctive or not and it is hard to tell if the two images are different enough. So how should we select the images for the system to avoid similarity and distinctiveness? Finally, Does Facelock actually benefit to a user when compared to the password authentication system? In fact, Facelock is not as easy to use as passwords and it takes more time to unlock your account because you have to spend more time recognizing faces.

In conclusion, this new authentication system seems reliable and implementable with current technology, but to make it a viable replacement of passwords, the developers should pay attention on how to make appropriate target selection to make it more user-friendly.

Ying Yu

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Posted in Science Communication, Science in the News, Uncategorized

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Future of the Solar Panels – Clear!

Posted on February 8, 2016 by | 4 comments
Solar panels on roof (Wikimedia Commons, author: Parker D)

Solar panels on roof (Wikimedia Commons, author: Parker D; cropped)

It’s, probably, hard to find a person who haven’t heard about the solar energy panels or solar batteries. Apparently, the solar market is one of the booming markets in North America, especially in the United States. The solar panels are used for telecommunicating and powering of many things, starting from the small households and vehicles and finishing with the giant power stations and spacecrafts. What new would we expect from the technology?

Appeared to be, there is one possible application of the technology, which is hard to achieve – a discrete integrating of the photovoltaic materials into the existing structures or the advanced technologies, like the smartphones. Here, I’m talking about the transparent solar panels. Noticeably, the majority of the solar batteries are dark coloured and solid, which allows them to harvest the maximum of the solar energy, but at the same time makes the installation possible mainly on the non-transparent surfaces. That’s why the scientists put their efforts to find a new solution for the transparent surfaces.

In the beginning, the existed technologies for the photovoltaic glass allowed the researchers to reach 60% of transparency with an efficiency of 2% . The later adoption of the perovskite semitransparent “islands” opened the new opportunities in integrating the solar panels into the transparent surfaces. However, despite the technologies above tried to solve a problem of discrete integrating, they were still not perfect due to visible distortion of the view and a low transparency rate.

Illustration from Near-infrared (NIR) harvesting transparent luminescent solar concentrators. Authors: Yimu Zhao, Garrett A. Meek, Benjamin G. Levine, Richard R. Lunt. Advanced Optical Materials Volume 2, Issue 7, pages 606–611, July 2014

At the same time, the team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started to work on the project with a key word  “transparent” for it, because, according to Richard Lunt, MSU’s College of Engineering, “No one wants to sit behind coloured glass.” By 2014 they have developed a fully transparent solar concentrator, which could be embedded in any glass surface and transform it to a power source. As for the way it works, the organic luminescent salts absorb specific non-visible wavelengths of ultraviolet and infrared light, which they transmute into another wavelength of infrared light. This light falls onto the thin plastic photovoltaic strips, which convert it into electricity. The only drawback of such technology is the efficiency, which is currently being around 1%. However, the team of researchers hopes to bring it up to 10% in the nearest future.

An interesting video from MSU (Youtube.com):

YouTube Preview Image

So, why is this invention is so important for us? Imagine to have an entire glass-covered multi-storey building as a power generator or to use your own phone/tablet as a charger! The best part is the ability to integrate such transparent panels into the existing structures without bringing any discomfort to people, such as a dimmed light or a distorted picture. That is, definitely, one of the big steps towards a brighter future!

~Alex Budkina

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Nanotechnology: The Tools of Tomorrow

Posted on January 25, 2016 by | Leave a comment

I’m certain some of you remember back to an old ‘Magic School Bus’ episode where Ms. Frizzle shrinks the class on an adventure to see Arnold’s digestive system. While the method would probably not be practical, the idea of using micro-sized machinery to enter the human body system definitely is.

Enter: Nanobots!

Molecularpropeller

Molecular Nanotechnology. Source: Wikimedia Commons (by: Petr Král)

In the past, ideas like the PillCam was one of the pioneers for nanotechnology in medicine. In the current age,  nanotechnology is the current fad with new innovations coming out each year. By being able to send robotics one-thousandth the size of your hair to do complex tasks, we pave a new path for science. However, what’s more amazing are the applications that this futuristic technology can bring to healthcare.

 

Using Nanobots to Battle Cancer

Dr. Ido Bachelet of Israel developed nanobots made entirely of DNA which he said it could be used to combat cancer. These nanobots would follow the traits of the immune system and actively find and destroy cancer cells, but would not harm able-bodied cells.

The DNA nanobots model after white blood cells and flow through the bloodstream, looking for signs of cancer by examining proteins on the surface of cells. If cancerous surface proteins are found, the nanobots deliver a lethal dose of drugs and effectively kill the cell. After, these nanobots will naturally degrade as DNA.

Results have already been found as these nanobots successfully eliminated the cancerous cells out of a mixture of healthy and cancer cells, while leaving the healthy cells unharmed. Human trials are expected to be underway.

Here is an interesting video of Dr. Bachelet talking about his research:

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‘DNA Origami’ – A New Drug Delivery System

Another application of nanotechnology is the creation of ‘DNA origami’ by Dr. Paul Rothemund of Caltech. His invention allows for nucleotides to make complex shapes for many purposes. One such purpose is a drug delivery system, which has many benefits as it’s of the molecular scale.

drug delivery

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9OAKXlPsDw (by: Emmanuel Ho)

Kurt Gothelf of Denmark has made a box out of DNA origami in which he hopes would be able to store drugs and sufficiently deliver them inside a cell.

A team of scientists in China has also tested DNA origami as a carrier for drug delivery for cancer therapy as being both efficient and safe.

This is only the tip of what nanotechnology can provide for us. Besides healthcare, it also has significant research in energy, cleaning water systems, warfare (such as stopping wounds immediately), etc.

With this fast expanding industry on the horizon, we’ll surely see the problems of today become something of the past.

 

Henry Liu

 

 

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Posted in Biological Sciences, Science in the News

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Howdy, Dr. Robot?!

Posted on January 16, 2016 by | Leave a comment

Human health…. People spend tons of money to maintain

image from pixabay.com

Image from pixabay.com

their health in a good condition and even more when something goes wrong. Therefore, one would expect the accurate diagnosis and adequate treatment from the cohort of specialists available on the market nowadays, especially when it comes to the early stages of the most hardly detectable, but lethal diseases, like cancer. Till the latest time, there was no other alternative for the patients than to throw themselves into the hands of the most skillful, knowledgable, and experienced medical specialists in the field. But is it all shine and no rain?

According to a recent research, medical errors are on the third place among the all fatality causes in medical community. Among the main reasons are miscommunication, inability to keep track on the patients’s extensive medical history and history of drug consumption, and misreading the data patterns received from the tests. The latest peak of notorious cases occurred in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and related to the doctors who continuously misdiagnosed their patients with breast cancer and prescribed the unnecessary treatment or no treatment at all, when it was needed. The biggest issue there was lack of “quality control”, so, no one questioned or reviewed the diagnostic processes!

At the same time, the progress in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning brought to life several brilliant projects, which have a better accuracy in diagnosing patients than the doctors have. For instance, the IBM Watson Health system gathers different types of information, including the recognition of the medical images, into one immense database. From that, the “self-learning” analytical technology recognizes the patterns and makes more accurate predictions. In general, the machines are better in interpreting the patients’ symptoms and medical history. And it costs less money!

More on how the machines may “outsmart” people in the video below (Herbert Chase, MD, MA on TEDMED Day CUMC, Youtube).

Among the benefits of having machines, if not as “doctors”, but at least as the doctor’s “assistants”, are the better interpretation of the clinical tests, control over the prescribed treatment, ability to fast-track the possible negative reactions or, so-called, adverse effects, and creating a continuous medical history, which is easy to review. And that’s what the scientists at MIT Artificial Intelligence lab work at.

The only possible draw back is creating a sufficient “learning pool” for the

Bodymedia device collects data about the person’s activity and burnt calories. Image from flickr.com.

Artificial Intellect, as an enormous amount of data is required to predict the most possible outcomes. However, as the technological progress moves on, the problem of data collecting becomes less and less significant, as the personal wearable devices  open the new opportunities in this case.

As seen from above, new technologies are rapidly moving into the health industry. I hope, soon we all can step into the era where doctors and machines will work together for the benefit of society and where it will be no place for the medical errors.

~ Alex Budkina

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