Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve all sat in an airplane wondering why it’s not taking off only to find that the delay has been caused on a fellow passenger who decided to turn up at the gate later than they should have. Now perhaps that passenger just got lost or they got too distracted at the duty free shops but such delays may no longer be experienced by passengers flying out of Singapore’s Changi airport. It’s going to test facial recognition systems which will help locate late passengers.

Changi, widely regarded as one of the best airports in the world, has started testing facial recognition which may in the future allow it to locate passengers who are running late for their flights and have not yet turned up at the gate.

Changi Airport has actively been looking at smart technologies to improve many of its operations, be it the quicker prediction of flight arrivals or reducing taxi times on the runway.

It intends to mount cameras on lampposts in order to use facial recognition to locate late passengers. However, this has caused some to point out the potential privacy issues that this system could pose.

“We have lots of reports of lost passengers…so one possible use case we can think of is, we need to detect and find people who are on the flight. Of course, with permission from the airlines,” said Steve Lee, the Chief Information Officer at Changi Airport Group.

He added that they have tested the technology that could allow the airport to do this and that they should have some capability to pull this off in about a year from now.

Singapore Airport May Find Late Passengers Using Facial Recognition , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Facebook, the world’s largest social network, is going after the likes of Tinder by adding dating features on its platform. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed during the company’s annual F8 developers conference today that the social network is adding dating features to its main mobile app. Never before has Facebook offered such features even though it enabled users to tell their friends and followers their relationship status ever since the service was first launched back in 2004.

“This is going to be for building real, long-term relationships — not just for hookups,” Zuckerberg said in a lighter vein onstage during the conference, while clarifying that this layer of dating features will only be in the main Facebook app. He also confirmed that these features will be optional and opt-in.

It has been further explained in a press release that users will be able to create a dating profile on Facebook that is separate from their main profile. They will then see potential matches based on their dating preferences, things in common, and even mutual friends. Users will also get the option to discover others that have similar interests through their groups and events.

What users do within the dating feature will not be shared with their friends. Facebook is going to start testing this in the next few months and will share more information then.

Facebook Will Soon Add Dating Features , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Democracy dies in the Washington Hilton.

There’s no room in the party for a Christianity that puts economic justice before conservative social issues.

It goes without saying that getting dressed is one of the most critical steps in our daily routine. But long practice has made it second nature, and people suffering from dementia may lose that familiarity, making dressing a difficult and frustrating process. This smart dresser from NYU is meant to help them through the process while reducing the load on overworked caregivers.

It may seem that replacing responsive human help with a robotic dresser is a bit insensitive. But not only are there rarely enough caregivers to help everyone in a timely manner at, say, a nursing care facility, the residents themselves might very well prefer the privacy and independence conferred by such a solution.

“Our goal is to provide assistance for people with dementia to help them age in place more gracefully, while ideally giving the caregiver a break as the person dresses – with the assurance that the system will alert them when the dressing process is completed or prompt them if intervention is needed,” explained the project’s leader, Winslow Burleson, in an NYU news release.

DRESS, as the team calls the device, is essentially a five-drawer dresser with a tablet on top that serves as both display and camera, monitoring and guiding the user through the dressing process.

There are lots of things that can go wrong when you’re putting on your clothes, and really only one way it can go right — shirts go on right side out and trousers forwards, socks on both feet, etc. That simplifies the problem for DRESS, which looks for tags attached to the clothes to make sure they’re on right and in order, making sure someone doesn’t attempt to put on their shoes before their trousers. Lights on each drawer signal the next item of clothing to don.

If there’s any problem — the person can’t figure something out, can’t find the right drawer or gets distracted, for instance — the caregiver is alerted and will come help. But if all goes right, the person will have dressed themselves all on their own, something that might not have been possible before.

DRESS is just a prototype right now, a proof of concept to demonstrate its utility. The team is looking into improving the vision system, standardizing clothing folding and enlarging or otherwise changing the coded tags on each item.