TECH INFOMZ

3. 

   Paying with Your Face

   Face-detecting systems in China now authorize payments, provide access to facilities, and track down criminals. Will other countries follow?
4. 

   Reversing Paralysis

   Scientists are making remarkable progress at using brain implants to restore the freedom of movement that spinal cord injuries take away.
5. 

   Self-Driving Trucks

   Tractor-trailers without a human at the wheel will soon barrel onto highways near you. What will this mean for the nation’s 1.7 million truck drivers?
6. 

   Practical Quantum Computers

   Advances at Google, Intel, and several research groups indicate that computers with previously unimaginable power are finally within reach.
7. 

   The 360-Degree Selfie

   Inexpensive cameras that make spherical images are opening a new era in photography and changing the way people share stories.
8. 

   Hot Solar Cells

   By converting heat to focused beams of light, a new solar device could create cheap and continuous power.
9. 

   Gene Therapy 2.0

   Scientists have solved fundamental problems that were holding back cures for rare hereditary disorders. Next we’ll see if the same approach can take on cancer, heart disease, and other common illnesses.
10. 

    The Cell Atlas

    Biology’s next mega-project will find out what we’re really made of.
11. 

    Botnets of Things

    The relentless push to add connectivity to home gadgets is creating dangerous side effects that figure to get even worse.
12. 

    Reinforcement Learning

    By experimenting, computers are figuring out how to do things that no programmer could teach them.

Paying with Your Face

Face-detecting systems in China now authorize payments, provide access to facilities, and track down criminals. Will other countries follow?

Availability: Now

by aomar mezine

Shortly after walking through the door at Face++, a Chinese startup valued at roughly a billion dollars, I see my face, unshaven and looking a bit jet-lagged, flash up on a large screen near the entrance.

Having been added to a database, my face now provides automatic access to the building. It can also be used to monitor my movements through each room inside. As I tour the offices of Face++ (pronounced “face plus plus”), located in a suburb of Beijing, I see it appear on several more screens, automatically captured from countless angles by the company’s software. On one screen a video shows the software tracking 83 different points on my face simultaneously. It’s a little creepy, but undeniably impressive.

Over the past few years, computers have become incredibly good at recognizing faces, and the technology is expanding quickly in China in the interest of both surveillance and convenience. Face recognition might transform everything from policing to the way people interact every day with banks, stores, and transportation services.