Генеральний секретар альянсу закликав Анкару, а також Угорщину завершити ратифікацію шведської заявки «якнайшвидше»
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Washington — A U.S. import ban on certain Apple smartwatch models came into effect Tuesday, after the Biden administration opted not to veto a ruling on patent infringements.
The United States International Trade Commission (ITC) decided in October to ban Apple Watch models over a patented technology for detecting blood-oxygen levels.
Apple contends that the ITC finding was in error and should be reversed, but last week paused its US sales of Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2.
The order stemmed from a complaint made to the commission in mid-2021 accusing Apple of infringing on medical device maker company Masimo Corp’s “light-based oximetry functionality.”
“After careful consultations, Ambassador (Katherine) Tai decided not to reverse the… determination and the ITC’s decision became final on December 26, 2023,” the president’s executive office said in a statement on Tuesday.
Apple has been steadily ramping up fitness and health features with each generation of its Apple Watch, which dominates the smartwatch category.
In September, Apple released its Apple Watch Series 9, touting increased performance along with features such as the ability to access and log health data.
“Our teams work tirelessly to create products and services that empower users with industry-leading health, wellness and safety features,” Apple said when the ITC ban was issued.
“Masimo has wrongly attempted to use the ITC to keep a potentially lifesaving product from millions of US consumers while making way for their own watch that copies Apple.”
In May, a trial of Masimo’s allegations ended in a mistrial after jurors failed to reach a unanimous verdict.
Late last year, Apple filed two patent infringement lawsuits accusing Masimo of copying Apple Watch technology.
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Paris — Even as human-caused climate change threatens the environment, nature continues to inspire our technological advancement.
“The solutions that are provided by nature have evolved for billions of years and tested repeatedly every day since the beginning of time,” said Evripidis Gkanias, a University of Edinburgh researcher.
Gkanias has a special interest in how nature can educate artificial intelligence.
“Human creativity might be fascinating, but it cannot reach nature’s robustness — and engineers know that,” he told AFP.
From compasses mimicking insect eyes to forest fire-fighting robots that behave like vines, here’s a selection of this year’s nature-based technology.
Insect compass
Some insects — such as ants and bees — navigate visually based on the intensity and polarisation of sunlight, thus using the sun’s position as a reference point.
Researchers replicated their eye structure to construct a compass capable of estimating the sun’s location in the sky, even on cloudy days.
Common compasses rely on Earth’s weak magnetic field to navigate, which is easily disturbed by noise from electronics.
A prototype of the light-detecting compass is “already working great,” said Gkanias, who led the study published in Communications Engineering.
“With the appropriate funding, this could easily be transformed into a more compact and lightweight product” freely available, he added.
And with a little further tweaking, the insect compass could work on any planet where a big celestial light source is visible.
Water-collecting webs
Fabric inspired by the silky threads of a spider web and capable of collecting drinking water from morning mist could soon play an important role in regions suffering water scarcity.
The artificial threads draw from the feather-legged spider, whose intricate “spindle-knots” allow large water droplets to move and collect on its web.
Once the material can be mass produced, the water harvested could reach a “considerable scale for real application”, Yongmei Zheng, a co-author of the study published in Advanced Functional Materials, told AFP.
Fire-fighting vines
Animals aren’t the only source of inspiration from nature.
Scientists have created an inflatable robot that “grows” in the direction of light or heat, in the same way vines creep up a wall or across a forest floor.
The roughly two-meter-long tubular robot can steer itself using fluid-filled pouches rather than costly electronics.
In time, these robots could find hot spots and deliver fire suppression agents, say researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“These robots are slow, but that is OK for fighting smoldering fires, such as peat fires, which can be a major source of carbon emissions,” co-author Charles Xiao told AFP.
But before the robots can climb the terrain, they need to be more heat-resistant and agile.
Kombucha circuits
Scientists at the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of the West of England in Bristol have found a way to use slimy kombucha mats — produced by yeast and bacteria during the fermenting of the popular tea-based drink — to create “kombucha electronics.”
The scientists printed electrical circuits onto dried mats that were capable of illuminating small LED lights.
Dry kombucha mats share properties of textiles or even leather. But they are sustainable and biodegradable, and can even be immersed in water for days without being destroyed, said the authors.
“Kombucha wearables could potentially incorporate sensors and electronics within the material itself, providing a seamless and unobtrusive integration of technology with the human body,” such as for heart monitors or step-trackers, lead author Andrew Adamatzky and the laboratory’s director, told AFP.
The mats are lighter, cheaper and more flexible than plastic, but the authors caution that durability and mass production remain significant obstacles.
Scaly robots
Pangolins resemble a cross between a pine cone and an anteater. The soft-bodied mammals, covered in reptilian scales, are known to curl up in a ball to protect themselves against predators.
Now, a tiny robot might adapt that same design for potentially life-saving work, according to a study published in Nature Communications.
It is intended to roll through our digestive tracts before unfurling and delivering medicine or stopping internal bleeding in hard-to-reach parts of the human body.
Lead author Ren Hao Soon of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems was watching a YouTube video when he “stumbled across the animal and saw it was a good fit.”
Soon needed a soft material that wouldn’t cause harm inside the human body, with the advantages of a hard material that could, for example, conduct electricity. The Pangolin’s unique structure was perfect.
The tiny robots are still in their initial stages, but they could be made for as little as 10 euros each.
“Looking to nature to solve these kinds of problems is natural,” said Soon.
“Every single design part of an animal serves a particular function. It’s very elegant.”
read moreNEW YORK — Artists under siege by artificial intelligence that studies their work and then replicates their styles, have teamed with university researchers to stymie such copycat activity.
U.S. illustrator Paloma McClain went into defense mode after learning that several AI models had been trained using her art, with no credit or compensation sent her way.
“It bothered me,” McClain told AFP.
“I believe truly meaningful technological advancement is done ethically and elevates all people instead of functioning at the expense of others,” she said.
The artist turned to free software called Glaze created by researchers at the University of Chicago.
Glaze essentially outthinks AI models when it comes to how they train, tweaking pixels in ways that are indiscernible to human viewers but which make a digitized piece of art appear dramatically different to AI.
“We’re basically providing technical tools to help protect human creators against invasive and abusive AI models,” said Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science on the Glaze team.
Created in just four months, Glaze spun off technology used to disrupt facial recognition systems.
“We were working at super-fast speed because we knew the problem was serious,” Zhao said of rushing to defend artists from software imitators. “A lot of people were in pain.”
Generative AI giants have agreements to use data for training in some cases, but the majority of digital images, audio, and text used to shape the way supersmart software thinks has been scraped from the internet without explicit consent.
Since its release in March, Glaze has been downloaded more than 1.6 million times, according to Zhao.
Zhao’s team is working on a Glaze enhancement called Nightshade that notches up defenses by confusing AI, say by getting it to interpret a dog as a cat.
“I believe Nightshade will have a noticeable effect if enough artists use it and put enough poisoned images into the wild,” McClain said, meaning they would be easily available online.
“According to Nightshade’s research, it wouldn’t take as many poisoned images as one might think,” she said.
Zhao’s team has been approached by several companies that want to use Nightshade, according to the Chicago academic.
“The goal is for people to be able to protect their content, whether it’s individual artists or companies with a lot of intellectual property,” Zhao said.
Viva Voce
A startup called Spawning has developed Kudurru software that detects attempts to harvest large numbers of images from an online venue.
An artist can then block access or send images that don’t match what is being requested, tainting the pool of data being used to teach AI what is what, according to Spawning co-founder Jordan Meyer.
More than 1,000 websites have been integrated into the Kudurru network.
Spawning has also launched haveibeentrained.com, a website that features an online tool for finding out whether digitized works have been fed into an AI model and allow artists to opt out of such use in the future.
As defenses ramp up for images, researchers at Washington University in Missouri have developed AntiFake software to thwart AI copying voices.
AntiFake enriches digital recordings of people speaking, adding noises inaudible to people but which make it “impossible to synthesize a human voice,” said Zhiyuan Yu, the Ph.D. student behind the project.
The program aims to go beyond just stopping unauthorized training of AI to preventing the creation of “deepfakes” — bogus soundtracks or videos of celebrities, politicians, relatives, or others showing them doing or saying something they didn’t.
A popular podcast recently reached out to the AntiFake team for help stopping its productions from being hijacked, according to Zhiyuan Yu.
The freely available software has so far been used for recordings of people speaking, but could also be applied to songs, the researcher said.
“The best solution would be a world in which all data used for AI is subject to consent and payment,” Meyer contended. “We hope to push developers in this direction.”
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