UCI Blockchain Bootcamp – event pics!

Thank you to all of our amazing speakers and attendees for coming along last Saturday to our Blockchain Bootcamp.

In case you missed it, our videos for each speakers talk can be found here on our youtube channel!

And here are some awesome moments from our day!

This was our event agenda so you can see the amazing speakers we had and the topics of their talks:

10.00am

Blockchain & the History of Money

Professor Bill Maurer, Dean, School of Social Sciences

Professor, Anthropology, Law, & Criminology, Law and Society

11.00am

Clovyr.io

Amber Baldet and Patrick Nielsen co-founders of Clovyr.io

11.30am

Blockchain and Cyber Security

Rahul Gupta, Orange County District Attorney

12.00pm

From Wall Street to ICOs and Beyond

Bryan Courchesne, daim.io

12.30pm

LUNCH in the courtyard

1.30pm

Decentralized Apps and Networks

Sonu & Surag, The Den

2.15pm

Cryptoeconomics

Sonu & Surag, The Den

3.00pm

A UCI Blockchain Consultancy

Ryan Eshaghi, UCI Blockchain Lab

4.00pm

The Future of Blockchain

David Luce, mobi

4.40pm

NETWORKING in the courtyard

Tips for UI Design

Clean and good looking UI design is expected of any website nowadays if you want to leave a lasting impression on users. Luckily, there are a couple of tips to get any website started.

Mail Service Landing Page by tubik in Web Design

Text Over Images

There is an abundance of images available to use for free now across various stock photography sites to decorate your page with an aesthetic photo. And to finish it off, put some text on top! Make sure, however, that the image is dark and that the text is white. Any other combination makes the text hard to read or might distract the user from the main focus of the page. This method can be used as the entire landing page or for contained thumbnails. If you are set on the image you want to use and the text is still hard to read, there are some tricks that can help solve that. Try adding a solid colored box behind the text to make it completely legible. Or, blur part of the underlying image to make the focus on the text.

eCommerce vol.2 | Daily UI by Bakhtiyar 😱 Sattarov for Craftwork in Daily UI

Make Text Pop

A page full of the same repetitive text across the screen is no good either. There’s a lot you can do to the text as well to catch the user’s attention. Make it bigger, change the color, change the font weight, use capitalization, italicize it, change the letter spacing, or adjust the margins. When you want to draw attention, combinations such as big, bold, and capitalized seem to do the job. And when you want to tone it down, make the text small, less contrast, and less margin space. Whatever you choose to do, remember to balance everything out. Making everything bold on a page makes nothing stand out.

Inspiration from Others

There is no better place to learn than learning from others. Ideas don’t come out of the blue, it takes time and looking at plenty of examples from other designers. Sites like Dribble provide a variety of work for you to browse. Learn to mimic others’ designs to get a hands on feel on what makes good design and then slowly take the pieces that you’ve learned to piece together something in your own style. Everyone starts out as a student at first, there’s no shame in that.

Photo by Federica Galli on Unsplash

 

The Upcoming Hololens 2

Just three years ago, Microsoft revealed the Hololens to the world, opening the doors for a holographic headset world. A number of augmented reality applications were available including: viewing 3D holograms, 3D modeling, virtual Skype, and virtual tours. Despite its capabilities, however, people criticized that the hardware was simply too heavy and not immersive enough. $3000 just wasn’t an amount any normal consumer could throw away for an impressive looking tech. And now in February 2019, Microsoft announced the new Hololens 2, a more “comfortable, immersive, and out of the box value” of the previous Hololens, as described by Microsoft’s technical fellow, Alex Kipman.

One of the first note-able changes for people who were able to test the new Hololens was it was considerably lighter. Microsoft designed better ergonomics for the device based on previous feedback. In the device’s new architecture, some of the computing power was relocated from the front to the back of the headset to relieve pressure on the front of the head to help extended periods of use. In addition to its comfort, the headset is able to conform to almost any head type or shape. And if the user ever wants to get out of mixed reality, they don’t need to take the whole headset off, they can simply flip up the visor.

The second Hololens’ target audience is still towards those in the working field that don’t sit behind a desk all day. Thus they deal with a lot of hands-on work. The new version adds on a couple more hand gesture controls so that users can freely manipulate 3D models in the air by resizing it, twirling it, or punch it. All these add-ons help better immersive the user into mixed reality.

The Hololens 2 can be preordered for $3500 and will be fully released soon in the coming months.

Photo by Bram Van Oost on Unsplash

Regulation on Facial Recognition

There is no doubt that facial recognition is becoming an important factor in this era of technology. After all, China has already begun implementing a nation-wide system utilizing facial recognition and artificial intelligence to watch its citizens’ every move and decision. It doesn’t just keep watch on criminal activities. It also analyses people’s every day activities and distributes points accordingly. If you’re caught jaywalking on camera, the algorithm will automatically deduct points from your social credit account. Though if you do positive things in society, you can gain back points. It’s an episode of Black Mirror made real. Though America is far from following the same steps as China, the technology is there and people fear its misuse.

One of the people’s main concern is of Amazon’s Rekognition, an image analysis service. When sent an image, the program can compare it against thousands of mugshots it has in its database. It seems efficient for police officers and law enforcers but it can be a nightmare for regular citizens, especially when it fails in accuracy for people of color. Amazon has replied to this concern by saying that law enforcers should only act on an image match when it is 99 percent accurate but has made no rules on its use. Police officers have countered that they take suggestions from 80 percent and up as simply a lead for their detectives. The fact remains that although Amazon has suggested rules are needed, they have not made any actions to implement those rules.

Amazon has a strong interest in government contracts as it is currently in a bid for a Pentagon contract. However, others such as ACLU senior legislative counsel Neema Singh Guliani are concerned that Amazon cannot be trusted as they can’t seem to take responsibility on their technology and enforce rules to prevent misuse. As new technology such as facial recognition and artificial intelligence take more steps to become an essential factor in our daily lives, it’s important to know their potential as well as dangers of potential misuse.

Photo by Robert Shunev on Unsplash

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

Facial Recognition with Memes

There is a new meme going around called the “10 Year Challenge”, where people across social media post pictures comparing how they’ve aged in 10 years. It’s a cute trend. Some people have changed drastically while others haven’t changed a bit. While it’s fun and interesting for your friends and family to see how you’ve aged, it’s also just as interesting for facial recognition algorithms. Some might immediately jump to a negative conclusion when they hear “facial recognition” but it can also be a positive thing.

As people put their social media profile pictures side by side, it makes it so much easier for algorithms to take those images and begin comparisons and learn how people change as they age. Most of the pictures are already available on social media but it’s quicker to learn when all the information you need is handed to you on a silver platter instead of hidden around like a needle in a haystack. Everything is neatly organized in a 10 year span, nicely tagged, and matched together.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing. With trained facial recognition, it can better learn how people age throughout the years. Children who were reported missing years ago could have higher chances of being recognized with updated pictures of how they might look now since they’ve aged from their last photo. In fact, the police of New Delhi stated that they tracked down almost 3000 missing children due to facial recognition.

Unfortunately, the technology isn’t completely being used for good. Companies such as Amazon have been selling their facial-recognition services to law enforcement and government agencies. You might think, isn’t that a good thing? It’ll help them track criminals easily and keep people safe. But that just means innocent people can be tracked just as easily as criminals. Anyone that the police considers a nuisance, legally or illegally, can be tracked and dealt with. And with improved algorithms, it’ll only become easier for them.

Technology will only continue to find subtle ways to gather data in direct or indirect ways. It doesn’t mean we have to abolish using social media altogether. We just need to become educated on what the possible implications are in participating and then be aware of whether you should take part or not.

Photo by Sylvie Tittel on Unsplash

Leading Tech of 2019

2018 saw the rise of multiple areas in technology and while some succeeded tremendously, others climbed slowly up the ladder. Of course, no technology is expected to become an integral part of people’s lives overnight. These things take years of buildup before reaching a level of mass popularity such as Google. Let’s take a look at some key technologies that ended strong in 2018 and can be expected to make more impact in 2019.

Up until 2018, social media was considered to almost be the most important thing in people’s daily lives. It was how you kept in touch with friends and family, knew what was going on in the world, and it was an addiction of gaining popularity. We were warned of the dangers of social media but no one took it seriously, after-all, it was already too important to just cut out. Then the Facebook scandal last year opened people’s eyes as the company sold personally identifiable information unbeknownst to the users. With this large invasion of privacy, people reconsidered their obsession in social media and began to take a step back with apps to measure screen time. Social media is still no doubt an important aspect in technology but what may become more important is how much you can restrain your daily screen time from social media in 2019.

Though cryptocurrency had a major financial dip by the end of 2018, it doesn’t mean that it’s dying off any time soon. Many entrepreneurs are continuing to develop for cryptocurrency and we might soon see a focus of its use in other areas. Ohio become the first state in the nation to accept Bitcoin for tax payments, opening up a way for businesses to pay their taxes in Bitcoin. Soon individuals will also be able to do so as well. With further increased concerns of security, cryptocurrency may just rise back up.

States such as California are creating new plans to cut vehicle emissions due to their rising concern for the climate. In fact, California plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% from 1990’s levels by 2030 by supporting more clean cars and trucks on the road. By providing incentives to buy zero-emission vehicles and doubling the number of electric charging stations, California hopes to see an increase in cleaner car purchases. Sales by Tesla are already seeing a steady rise as Tesla’s Model 3 was the best selling sedan by revenue in the nation and as the sales continue to climb, we will also see a higher number of autonomous cars on the road.

Despite all the hype for virtual reality, augmented reality will steal the spotlight in 2019. More developers will experiment around with augmented reality as more phones are ready to support it. While virtual reality relies on users to buy expensive headsets, augmented reality can easily be utilized by your everyday handheld devices. Augmented reality can also greatly benefit the medical, military, and other fields where information can be overlayed over what is already available in the moment as people are training in their profession.

 

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

 

The Conformity of Web Design

Go to any stock photography website. Go to any online magazine website. If it weren’t for their company names, any user could easily mistake them to be the same page. Websites under the same genre all follow the same unspoken layout and it has become a bore. What happened to the imagination and creativity of design? In this day and age where we have even more power in implementing every conceivable design and layout, majority of our websites still all follow a container-styled layout. The fascination with unexplored possibilities in the past has been replaced with the convenient conformity of the future.

Websites take time to design and create. The process of having a web designer create a unique layout with optimal UI/UX and then passing off to a web programmer to implement can take weeks to complete. If you wanted each page of a website to be unique, the time and money it would take to make that happen would only rack up more. Considering how some people just want their own website for fun or for a startup business, they simply don’t have the resources to request a website be built from the ground up. It is much more efficient to use an already existing template from system software such as WordPress. All users need to take care of is what content they want on their page.

Why not extend that creativity? Instead of restricting users by making their ideas conform to the template, make it so the template conforms to their ideas. If we want to start seeing a rise in creativity, templates have to become dynamic enough to be manipulated and transformed without needing users to touch the code. Although the current trend of constrained templates work for the mass majority, it is nothing else but an efficient solution to creating websites and not to creating diverse websites.

Photo by Kobu Agency on Unsplash

Photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash

AI in the Space Industry

Since the arrival of cheaper, and faster processing power and infinite amounts of storage space in 2015, research and development in artificial intelligence has boomed. They can now learn from mistakes and identify patterns from large amounts of data at a rate that is beyond the human capability. As artificial intelligence continues to make an impact in the healthcare, transportation, and education sectors, it also is making a crucial mark in the space industry.

In a spacecraft, there can be more than a 1000 variables that must be analyzed to diagnose abnormalities within the vehicle. Takehashi Yairi and other collaborators have created a data driven approach to help detect anomalies by taking in data on high dimensionality, multi-modality, heterogeneity, temporal dependence, missing data and trivial outliers. The data is then modeled to created so that anomalies are easily identified.

As we continue to expand our space exploration with unmanned vehicles, there will only be more and more of a communication delay. A rover on Mars can only be given an instruction from engineers on Earth every 20 minutes due to the communication delay. Given that only 5 commands can be given in 20 minutes, a rover can only do up to 360 commands in a day, which is highly inefficient. If the rover had an autonomous navigation capability, it could make more than 5 decisions per min. Wilkinson and Meade have proposed an artificial neural network for satellite navigation to learn the effects of engine burn through magnitude variation and direction of burn on the spacecraft’s flight path. The algorithm will continually tweak its neuron parameters until its error parameter is minimized when compared to its desired state.

Scientists are also studying planets and their geographical features to learn about their geological makeup and history. They must look through a large volume of image data sent back by on-ground rovers to Earth. If rovers had an algorithm to analyze the features and classify the images to decide its geological significance, they can then decide by themselves what the best course of action would be: disregarding the image or sending it back to Earth. Trained algorithms such as support vector machine (SVM) and continuously scaled template models (CSTM) were tested with images of Mars to detect craters. The SVM model was most successful and was as accurate as humans classifying the photos.

 

Photo by Margaux Olverd on Unsplash

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

Vyper: The New Ethereum Language

Vyper is the new Ethereum language that compiles down to Ethereum Virtual Machine bytecode, similar to Solidity, but in a simplified process to create a better understanding for both parties. Although it does not have all the features that are present in Solidity, it deliberately cuts things out to increase security. The language was created to be simple for quick understanding and easily readable so as to avoid misleading code. This way, Vyper was made with the goal of high security, language and compiler simplicity, and audit-ability.

While Vyper may have syntactical similarities to Python and logical similarities to Solidity, many of the Object Orientated Programming aspects are taken out on purpose. Vyper does not allow modifiers because it makes it too easy to write misleading code. It encourages developers to write code where execution jumps around and can harm audit-ability. Class inheritance has also been cut as it requires people to jump between files to understand what a single program is doing, which can cause confusion if they do not have a strong grasp on precedence in conflicts. Another aspect that easily causes confusion is function overloading and operator overloading. Writers and readers can easily be misled on which call referred to which function or if that operator actually means what it usually means. Since recursive calling and infinite length loops cannot set upper bounds on the gas limits, it can be an opening for gas limit attacks and are also not included in the Vyper language. Vyper prefers the decimal fixed point over the binary fixed point since any decimal fixed point value has an exact representation in the code.

There has already been positive feedback on the Reddit Ethereum community as people praise Vyper for its simplicity in reading/writing to limit opportunities to mess up and cost people money.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash

Utilizing AI to Assist Mental Health

Mental illness has always been a serious problem within our community that has not been openly addressed until now. As more and more people opened up about the issues and called for action to help those in need, more and more ideas are rising to help the situation. In multiple startups and companies to battle mental illness, they involve artificial intelligence to help identify and help those suffering under depression, anxiety, and more.

Tess

X2AI’s Tess is a psychological AI that uses already existing messaging platforms such as WeChat and Facebook Messenger to conduct psychotherapy and provide psycho-education to a patient through their conversations. Although patients are talking to a machine, there are multiple positive qualities to this. Tess is available 24/7 and will not forget anything as a machine, nor will patients feel judged or fear social stigma. With 8 years of development, Tess’s emotion algorithm can accurately tell how a person is feeling and along with its conversation algorithm, it can easily understand negative expressions and alert for human intervention to take over the conversation.

Instagram

Sometimes people don’t reach out about their issues or don’t even know it’s there in the first place. However, there are cues that can be picked up to recognize that mental illness is there. Using color analysis, metadata and algorithmic face detection, researchers from Harvard University and University of Vermont are utilizing machine learning and Instagram to detect signs of depression with a 70% accuracy rating. Some patterns they have noticed are that those with depression tend to post bluer, grayer, and darker colored photos. While they tend to avoid using Instagram filters, they seem to prefer to use the Inkwell filter to turn photos into black-and-white images.

IBM

Using transcripts and audio from psychiatric interviews, IBM research is using machine learning to help identify speech patterns typically found in patients with depression, schizophrenia, and more. What people say and write will be clear indicators of their mental health and provide early indicators of mental disease and help seek early treatment in the near future. IBM is currently creating an automated speech analysis application to run on mobile devises to provide a real-time overview of a patient’s mental health.

Photo by Akshar Dave on Unsplash

Photo by sarandy westfall on Unsplash