Have you ever wanted to mix music and look like a wizard while you’re doing it? Well, Imogen Heap is a few steps ahead of you. The singer/songwriter plans to use a pair of high-tech musical gloves when she performs at a TED conference in Edinburgh tomorrow, editing sound with nothing but her hands, much like something out of Minority Report. NewScientist reports that the gloves were developed by Tom Mitchell, a music systems lecturer at the University of the West of England.
The gloves are full of sensors, accelerometers, and gyroscopes that detect where a user’s hands are in space and what pose their finger joints are in. A microphone is also part of the rig. With the help of a laptop and some advanced software, Imogen Heap will hopefully be able to edit live on stage. Heap is excited about the technology because it lets her edit without wires.
“The gestures lend themselves to the processes that they control,” said Mitchell. “For example, a grasping gesture is used to sample voice and instruments, panning is achieved by pointing in the direction that the sound should be positioned, and filtering is achieved by closing the hands as if you are smothering the sound.”
Don’t get too excited. The project is still experimental and it will be years before you’ll find music editing gloves on store shelves, if ever. In the mean time, we can’t wait to watch the TED video in a few days. We imagine it will look something like the video below, minus the murder.
(Image via the University of the West of England)
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.