Queen's University professor to unveil self-levitating displays called BitDrones

An interactive swarm of flying 3D pixels (voxels) developed at Queen's University's Human Media Lab is set to revolutionize the way people interact with virtual reality. The system, called BitDrones, allows users to explore virtual 3D information by interacting with physical self-levitating building blocks.

Queen's professor Roel Vertegaal and his students are unveiling the BitDrones system on Monday, Nov. 9 at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Charlotte, North Carolina. BitDrones is the first step towards creating interactive self-levitating programmable matter - materials capable of changing their 3D shape in a programmable fashion - using swarms of nano quadcopters. The work highlights many possible applications for the new technology, including real-reality 3D modeling, gaming, molecular modeling, medical imaging, robotics and online information visualization.

"BitDrones brings flying programmable matter, such as featured in the futuristic Disney movie Big Hero 6, closer to reality," says Dr. Vertegaal. "It is a first step towards allowing people to interact with virtual 3D objects as real physical objects."

Dr. Vertegaal and his team at the Human Media Lab created three types of BitDrones, each representing self-levitating displays of distinct resolutions. "PixelDrones" are equipped with one LED and a small dot matrix display. "ShapeDrones" are augmented with a light-weight mesh and a 3D printed geometric frame, and serve as building blocks for complex 3D models. "DisplayDrones" are fitted with a curved flexible high resolution touchscreen, a forward-facing video camera and Android smartphone board. All three BitDrone types are equipped with reflective markers, allowing them to be individually tracked and positioned in real time via motion capture technology. The system also tracks the user's hand motion and touch, allowing users to manipulate the voxels in space.

"We call this a Real Reality interface rather than a Virtual Reality interface. This is what distinguishes it from technologies such as Microsoft HoloLens and the Oculus Rift: you can actually touch these pixels, and see them without a headset," says Dr. Vertegaal.

Dr. Vertegaal and his team describe a number of possible applications for this technology. In one scenario, users could physically explore a file folder by touching the folder's associated PixelDrone. When the folder opens, its contents are shown by other PixelDrones flying in a horizontal wheel below it. Files in this wheel are browsed by physically swiping drones to the left or right.

Users would also be able to manipulate ShapeDrones to serve as building blocks for a real-time 3D model. Finally, the BitDrone system will allow for remote telepresence by allowing users to appear locally through a DisplayDrone with Skype. The DisplayDrone would be capable of automatically tracking and replicating all of the remote user's head movements, allowing a remote user to virtually inspect a location and making it easier for the local user to understand the remote user's actions.

While their system currently only supports dozens of comparatively large 2.5" - 5" sized drones, the team at the Human Media Lab are working to scale up their system to support thousands of drones. These future drones would measure no more than a half inch in size, allowing users to render more seamless, high resolution programmable matter.

Watch a video about BitDrones : http://www.hml.queensu.ca/bitdrones.

China state-owned firm to build $15 bn chip plant

A state-owned Chinese company said Friday it plans to pour nearly $15 billion into a giant memory chip factory, as Beijing seeks to create homegrown semiconductor champions to reduce reliance on foreign technology.

Tongfang Guoxin Electronics Co. aims to invest 93.8 billion yuan ($14.8 billion) in the plant, it said in a filing with the Shenzhen stock exchange.

Tongfang Guoxin is controlled by Tsinghua Holdings Co., the commercial arm of Tsinghua University in Beijing, and ultimately China's education ministry.

China is regularly accused of cyberspying by the West but says it is a victim of hacking, and it has been encouraging research and development of homegrown semiconductor technologies as part of its "national information security strategy".

China needed to overcome "long-time restrictions imposed by the United States, Japan and Europe" over semiconductor materials and equipment, the ministry of industry and information technology said in a statement in June.

In the stock exchange filing, Tongfang Guoxin said: "China will only be able to effectively guarantee its information security by making its own... integrated circuits."

The company will raise up to 80 billion yuan by selling new shares to eight companies and employees, it said, in what could be one of the world's biggest private placement deals.

Six of the eight corporate buyers in the placement are themselves affiliates of Tsinghua Holdings, according to the statement.

Most of the proceeds will go towards the new plant—which will take two years to go into trial operations—while 25 percent will be used to acquire firms in the semiconductor industry, it added.

Study shows some 3-D printed objects are toxic

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have found parts produced by some commercial 3D printers are toxic to certain fish embryos. Their results have raised questions about how to dispose of parts and waste materials from 3D printers.

"These 3D printers are like tiny factories in a box," said William Grover, an assistant professor of bioengineering in the Bourns College of Engineering. "We regulate factories. We would never bring one into our home. Yet, we are starting to bring these 3D printers into our homes like they are toasters."

The researchers studied two common types of 3D printers: one that melts plastic to build a part, and another that uses light to turn a liquid into a solid part. They found that parts from both types of printers were measurably toxic to zebrafish embryos, and parts from the liquid-based printer were the most toxic. They also developed a simple post-printing treatment - exposure to ultraviolet light - that reduced the toxicity of parts from the liquid-based printer.

The research comes as the popularity of 3D printers is soaring. The value of the 3D printing market grew from $288 million in 2012 to $2.5 billion in 2013 and is projected to grow to $16.2 billion by 2018, according to a report by Canalys.

And, as the price of 3D printers continues to drop -printers that use melted plastic are currently available for as little as $200, and the liquid-based printer used in this study can be bought for less than $3,000 - they are moving beyond industry and research labs to homes and small businesses.

The research started about a year ago when Grover bought a 3D printer for his lab. Shirin Mesbah Oskui, a graduate student in Grover's lab, is developing tools for studying zebrafish embryos, and she wanted to use the printer in her research. However, her plans were thwarted when she noticed that zebrafish embryos die after exposure to parts from the 3D printer.

From those observations, Oskui and Grover then decided to test the toxicity of printed objects from the two types of 3D printers. Their results are described in a paper, "Assessing and Reducing the Toxicity of 3D-Printed Parts," which was published online today (Nov. 4) in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters. Joining Oskui and Grover as authors on the paper are Jay Gan and Daniel Schlenk, professors in the Department of Environmental Sciences; Graciel Diamante, a graduate student working with Schlenk; and Chunyang Liao and Wei Shi, both of whom work in Gan's lab.

Oskui used two commercial 3D printers in their study, a Dimension Elite printer made by Stratasys (which uses melted plastic to build parts) and a Form 1+ stereolithography printer made by Formlabs (which uses liquid resin to make parts).

She used each printer to create disc-shaped parts, about an inch in diameter. Then she placed the discs in petri dishes with zebrafish embryos and studied survival rates and hatch rates and monitored for developmental abnormalities.

While the embryos exposed to parts from the plastic-melting printer had slightly decreased average survival rates compared to control embryos, the embryos exposed to parts from the liquid-resin printer had significantly decreased survival rates, with more than half of the embryos dead by day three and all dead by day seven. And of the few zebrafish embryos that hatched after exposure to parts from the liquid-resin printer, 100 percent of the hatchlings had developmental abnormalities.

Oskui also investigated methods for reducing the toxicity of parts from the liquid-resin printer. She found that after exposing the parts to ultraviolet light for one hour, the parts are significantly less toxic to zebrafish embryos. The UC Riverside Office of Technology Commercialization has filed a patent for this work.

The researchers' findings call attention to regulations related to the materials used to create 3D printed parts.

The substances used to create the 3D-printed parts would be regulated by the Toxic Substances Control Act, which is administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. But the precise identity of these substances is often unknown to researchers and printer users because the printer manufacturers don't disclose this information.

In the future, the researchers plan to further study the toxicity of the components of the 3D printer material both individually and when mixed together in a completed part. They also want to find out at what level the material could be harmful to humans.

Other unanswered questions include how to dispose of the waste material - both solid and liquid - created by 3D printers. At this point, the researchers think it is best to take it to a hazardous waste center.

"Many people, including myself, are excited about 3D printing," Grover said. "But, we really need to take a step back and ask how safe are these materials?"

Source : Journal Environmental Science and Technology (http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.estlett.5b00249)

System automatically converts 2-D video to 3-D

By exploiting the graphics-rendering software that powers sports video games, researchers at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have developed a system that automatically converts 2-D video of soccer games into 3-D.

The converted video can be played back over any 3-D device -- a commercial 3-D TV, Google's new Cardboard system, which turns smartphones into 3-D displays, or special-purpose displays such as Oculus Rift.

The researchers presented the new system last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Multimedia conference.

"Any TV these days is capable of 3-D," says Wojciech Matusik, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and one of the system's co-developers. "There's just no content. So we see that the production of high-quality content is the main thing that should happen. But sports is very hard. With movies, you have artists who paint the depth map. Here, there is no luxury of hiring 100 artists to do the conversion. This has to happen in real-time."

The system is one result of a collaboration between QCRI and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Joining Matusik on the conference paper are Kiana Calagari, a research associate at QCRI and first author; Alexandre Kaspar, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science; Piotr Didyk, who was a postdoc in Matusik's group and is now a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics; Mohamed Hefeeda, a principal scientist at QCRI; and Mohamed Elgharib, a QCRI postdoc. QCRI also helped fund the project.

Zeroing in

In the past, researchers have tried to develop general-purpose systems for converting 2-D video to 3-D, but they haven't worked very well and have tended to produce odd visual artifacts that detract from the viewing experience.

"Our advantage is that we can develop it for a very specific problem domain," Matusik says. "We are developing a conversion pipeline for a specific sport. We would like to do it at broadcast quality, and we would like to do it in real-time. What we have noticed is that we can leverage video games."

Today's video games generally store very detailed 3-D maps of the virtual environment that the player is navigating. When the player initiates a move, the game adjusts the map accordingly and, on the fly, generates a 2-D projection of the 3-D scene that corresponds to a particular viewing angle.

The MIT and QCRI researchers essentially ran this process in reverse. They set the very realistic Microsoft soccer game "FIFA13" to play over and over again, and used Microsoft's video-game analysis tool PIX to continuously store screen shots of the action. For each screen shot, they also extracted the corresponding 3-D map.

Using a standard algorithm for gauging the difference between two images, they winnowed out most of the screen shots, keeping just those that best captured the range of possible viewing angles and player configurations that the game presented; the total number of screen shots still ran to the tens of thousands. Then they stored each screen shot and the associated 3-D map in a database.

Jigsaw puzzle

For every frame of 2-D video of an actual soccer game, the system looks for the 10 or so screen shots in the database that best correspond to it. Then it decomposes all those images, looking for the best matches between smaller regions of the video feed and smaller regions of the screen shots. Once it's found those matches, it superimposes the depth information from the screen shots on the corresponding sections of the video feed. Finally, it stitches the pieces back together.

The result is a very convincing 3-D effect, with no visual artifacts. The researchers conducted a user study in which the majority of subjects gave the 3-D effect a rating of 5 ("excellent") on a five-point ("bad" to "excellent") scale; the average score was between 4 ("good") and 5.

Currently, the researchers say, the system takes about a third of a second to process a frame of video. But successive frames could all be processed in parallel, so that the third-of-a-second delay needs to be incurred only once. A broadcast delay of a second or two would probably provide an adequate buffer to permit conversion on the fly. Even so, the researchers are working to bring the conversion time down still further.

Source : MIT

Vast energy value in human waste: UN University

Empathy is a basic human ability. We often feel empathy toward and console others in distress. Is it possible for us to emphasize with humanoid robots? Since robots are becoming increasingly popular and common in our daily lives, it is necessary to understand our interaction with robots in social situations.

However, it is not clear how the human brain responds to robots in empathic situations.

Now, researchers at the Department of Information Science and Engineering, Toyohashi University of Technology in collaboration with researchers at the Department of Psychology, Kyoto University have found the first neurophysiological evidence of humans' ability to empathize with robots in perceived pain and highlighted the difference in human empathy toward other humans and robots.

They performed electroencephalography (EEG) in 15 healthy adults who were observing pictures of either a human or robotic hand in painful or non-painful situations, such as a finger being cut by a knife. Event-related brain potentials for empathy toward humanoid robots in perceived pain were similar to those for empathy toward humans in pain. However, the beginning of the top-down process of empathy was weaker in empathy toward robots than toward humans.

"The ascending phase of P3 (350-500 ms after the stimulus presentation) showed a positive shift in the observer for a human in pain in comparison with the no-pain condition, but not for a robot in perceived pain. Then, the difference between empathy toward humans and robots disappeared in the descending phase of P3 (500-650 ms)", explains Associate Professor Michiteru Kitazaki, "The positive shift of P3 is considered as reflecting the top-down process of empathy. Its beginning phase seems related to the process of perspective taking, as was shown in a previous study."

These results suggest that we empathize with humanoid robots in a similar fashion as we do with other humans. However, the beginning of the top-down process of empathy is weaker for empathy toward robots than toward humans. It may be caused by humans' inability in taking a robot's perspective.

It is reasonable that we cannot take the perspective of robots because their body and mind (if it exists) are very different from ours. The researchers are trying to manipulate humans' perspective taking of robots in a further study. This study will contribute to the development of human-friendly robots whom we feel sympathy for and comfortable with.

Source : Measuring empathy for human and robot hand pain using electroencephalography. Scientific Reports, 5:15924; doi: 10.1038/srep15924

Google founder hopes Alphabet spells innovation

Google founder Larry Page is hoping his newly created company called Alphabet becomes synonymous with innovation. In a Monday night appearance, Page described Alphabet as a way to give engineers and scientists the independence they need to develop breakthrough products that have little or nothing to do with Google's Internet search and advertising business.

Along the way, Page hopes Alphabet will take the drudgery and bureaucracy out of work.
"Companies have pretty bad reputations," Page told a dinner audience gathered in San Francisco for a forum presented by Fortune magazine. "It's not like a lot of people wake up in the morning and say, 'I want to go work for a company.' They do it because they have to."

Monday's 20-minute appearance marked Page's first public remarks since he announced in August that Alphabet would become Google's holding company, as well as the parent of riskier ventures involved in self-driving cars, Internet-beaming balloons, Internet-connected appliances and medical research.

Page now oversees the hodgepodge of companies as Alphabet's CEO. He turned over the Google CEO job to his top lieutenant, Sundar Pichai. Alphabet supplanted Google as a public traded stock in early October.
The idea for Alphabet's name came from Google's other founder, Sergey Brin, according to Page. Several other names were considered, Page said, but he declined to disclose them in case they are used for other subsidiaries. The new holding company will begin reporting Google's financial results separately from its other subsidiaries, known as "other bets," in January with the release of its fourth-quarter results.
Alphabet's rudimentary name was chosen, Page said, because it isn't supposed to overshadow Google or any of the other brands in its portfolio. "I didn't want it to be too catchy," Page said. "It's really for employees, more than the customers."

If there is a role model for Alphabet, Page said it would probably be Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company that billionaire Warren Buffet has built through acquisitions and investments in a wide variety of industries. Alphabet could become like a Berkshire Hathaway, with a "technology, science and engineering bent," Page said. Acquisitions will be part of Alphabet's plan to expand, although Page indicated the company will probably focus on startups with interesting ideas and relatively few employees.
There are few other companies besides Berkshire Hathaway that Page wants to mimic. "I wish I could look at someone else and say, 'I wish we were doing that,'" he said.

Tensions rise over 'Airbnb vote' in San Francisco

San Franciscans vote Tuesday on a measure to limit short-term housing rentals in what is seen as a referendum on surging startup Airbnb. The vote is a key test of sentiment over a simmering housing crisis and on Airbnb in a city experiencing waves of investments in tech startups, pressuring an already tight real estate market. In the "Proposition F" referendum, property dwellers would see a 75-day limit per year for rentals under 30 days, regardless of whether the property is "hosted" or not. That would be a significant change in the current law allowing 90 days per year if the resident is absent and places no limits on renting a "hosted" spare room. Airbnb, a San Francisco-based online service allowing property dwellers and owners to rent a room or entire home for short periods, would be the most affected if the law passes.

That would not trouble backers of the referendum, who claim the "sharing economy" startup has exacerbated the housing crisis in the California city. "At a time when San Francisco faces a severe affordable housing crisis, an increasing number of existing apartments are being illegally offered and advertised as short-term rentals on websites, such as Airbnb and VRBO," the referendum text reads. According to the coalition backing the measure, Share Better SF, up to 10,000 homes in San Francisco are now listed as short-term rentals, 70 percent of which are entire units. "This eliminates rent-controlled and affordable housing, driving up rent and causing displacement, including evictions of seniors and the disabled," says a statement from the coalition of renters, property owners and labor unions from the hotel and restaurant sector.

Airbnb critics claim the service unfairly competes with hotels, which face stricter regulations and taxes.
Some also claim the startup provides an incentive for property owners to toss out long-term residents and convert lodgings to short-term rentals, creating an upheaval in the traditional market for rentals.
The referendum aims "to prohibit converting rental units from residential use to tourist use, and help preserve the availability of housing in San Francisco," according to the wording.

Driving prices up

Housing prices have been surging in recent years in the region around San Francisco and nearby Silicon Valley. Some former low-income neighborhoods of San Francisco are being transformed by the arrival of highly paid technology workers. According to the real estate website Zillow, the average rent in the city in September was $4,390 per month, compared with less than $3,000 five years ago and an average nationwide of $1,386.

But Airbnb says it is not to blame for the housing crisis, and claims its service helps people by providing income to those who need it. "Home sharing is making it possible for thousands of middle class families to make ends meet and stay in the city, while Proposition F is a hotel-backed measure that is falsely drawing a line between regular San Franciscans sharing their homes and a decades-long housing crisis," said company spokesman Christopher Nulty.

Airbnb has been a major contributor to the "no" campaign, which has raises $8 million compared with just $800,000 for the backers, according to election filings. Opponents of the proposal contend it would raise privacy concerns, place a paperwork burden on property dwellers and encourage neighbors to snoop or file lawsuits. "What if the government required you to report when you're sleeping in your own home... or even in you own bed?" says a "no" campaign ad.

"If Proposition F passes, San Francisco will be the only city in the country where residents will be forced to do just that. It's just too extreme." Surveys indicate the measure is likely to fail—55 percent opposed in a poll last month compared with 36 percent supporting. It will nonetheless be a key moment for Airbnb, which calls the city its home but operates in some 34,000 cities around the world.
Earlier this year, the startup raised $1.5 billion in new capital, sending its value up to $25.5 billion.
The company was launched in 2008 and now has some 40 million users worldwide.

Britain to unveil new online spying laws

Britain's government gave the first details Sunday of contested plans to update Internet spying laws to keep pace with the digital age.

The proposed law comes as intelligence agencies and police grapple with monitoring terrorist activity online amid a debate sparked by Edward Snowden over government access to personal data online.
Home Secretary Theresa May told the BBC that the measures would not ban encryption and "will not be giving powers to go through people's browsing history".

However, the authorities will be able to look at Internet and social media activity if they get a special warrant.

Such warrants are currently issued by May but this authority could be handed to judges under the new measures.

Technology companies will reportedly have to keep records of emails and people's use of social media sites like WhatsApp and Facebook for 12 months and authorities will be able to access this with a second warrant.

The disclosures came ahead of Wednesday's release of the draft Investigatory Powers Bill.
It will be scrutinised by a committee of lawmakers, allowing changes to be made before it is formally debated by parliament.

Britain's intelligence chiefs have issued a string of warnings in recent months about the dangers posed by terrorist organisations recruiting and planning attacks online.

In a rare public speech last week, the head of domestic spying agency MI5 Andrew Parker said Britain was under threat "on a scale and at a tempo that I have not seen before".

He highlighted the Islamic State (IS) group's "sophisticated exploitation of technology" through "the full range of modern communications tools to spread its message of hate and to inspire extremists".
The previous coalition government led by Prime Minister David Cameron wanted to pass a law covering similar issues, dubbed a "snoopers' charter" by critics, but was blocked by junior coalition partners the Liberal Democrats as too intrusive.

Since winning May's general election outright though with a small majority, Cameron has more room for manoeuvre but is still likely to face opposition from some in his Conservative party over the measures.

Research shows Cuba's Internet issues

In December 2014, President Barack Obama made history by reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba, which included loosening its economic embargoes. Two months later, American companies like Netflix and Airbnb announced plans to expand into the once-banned island.

"Our first reaction was: 'Really?'" said Northwestern Engineering's Fabián E. Bustamante. "As a business model, Netflix and Airbnb rely on most people having Internet access. That's not quite the case in Cuba, so it really didn't seem to make much sense."

Wanting to see if these business ideas were feasible, Bustamante, professor of electrical engineering and computer science in Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering, and his graduate student Zachary Bischof decided to measure Cuba's Internet performance. They found that Cuba's Internet connection to the rest of the world was perhaps even worse than they expected.

Bischof presented their findings October 30 at the Association for Computing Machinery's 2015 Internet Measurement Conference in Tokyo.

Cuba's history with computing and Internet is a complicated one. Its citizens were not even allowed to own a personal computer until 2008. In February 2011, Cuba completed its first undersea fiber-optic cable with a landing in Venezuela, but the cable was not even activated until two years later. Today, about 25 percent of the population is able to get online and just five percent of the population has home Internet.

"If you're trying to connect anywhere, you either have to connect through these marine cables or up to the satellite," Bustamante said. "If you go up to the satellite, it would take significantly longer."

"For one, it's much farther to travel," Bischof added. "And the trip is on a very interference-rich environment, which include cosmic rays."

Since March 2015, Bustamante and Bischof have been conducting measurements from a server in Havana to observe Internet traffic going in and out of Cuba. They measure the amount of time it took for information to travel in both directions, taking note of the paths of travel. In early results, the team found that information returning to Cuba took a much longer route.

During their study, Bustamante and Bischof found that when a person in Havana searched for a topic on Google, for example, the request traveled through the marine cable to Venezuela, then through another marine cable to the United States, and finally landed at a Google server in Dallas, Texas. When the search results traveled back, it went to Miami, Florida, up to the satellite, and then back to Cuba. While the information out of Cuba took 60-70 milliseconds, it took a whopping 270 milliseconds to travel back.

"It takes so long that it's almost useless," Bustamante said. "You can start loading a webpage, go have coffee, then come back and maybe you'll find it."

Bustamante and Bischof said this could be the result of a configuration problem or routing policy and are currently exploring this further. For now, they can only say -- with certainty -- that Cuba's Internet performance appears to be among the poorest in the Americas, and its infrastructure would struggle to support web services hosted off the island, particularly network-intensive applications like Netflix. Understanding the problems and diagnosing their causes will help Bustamante, Bischof, and other teams propose future solutions.

"Beyond Internet services like Netflix, to continue societal progress in Cuba depends on better connectivity," Bustamante said. "To better understand how to improve it, we first have to better understand what is available now."

In reversal, SXSW festival plans online harassment event

The SXSW Interactive technology festival said Friday that it will hold an "online harassment summit" after it was criticized for bowing to threats and canceling two panels related to video games and online harassment.

Canceling the panels "sent an unintended message that SXSW not only tolerates online harassment but condones it," SXSW Interactive Director Hugh Forrest said in a blog post.
The original inclusion of the panels triggered threats of violence against the festival. That led organizers to cancel them "in the interest of public safety," Forrest said.

But scrapping the sessions was "not an appropriate response" and the festival is now "working with the authorities and security experts," he said.

Both panels had been related to the online campaign dubbed "GamerGate" that began last fall, during which women were harassed for criticizing the lack of diversity in the video-game industry and women's portrayal in it. Neither of the panels mentions GamerGate specifically.

The tech festival, held every March in Austin, Texas, attracts 33,000-plus attendees and is part of the larger SXSW extravaganza for music and film. Online media companies BuzzFeed and Vox Media had threatened to pull their panelists and moderators from the festival if the panels weren't reinstated. Neither company responded to emails asking if they now planned to participate.

The festival said Friday that it would have a "day-long summit to examine" online harassment on Saturday, March 12. The event will be in-person and live-streamed, said Kelly Krause of SXSW's press team.
Forrest's post said the event would include speakers from both of the originally scheduled panels. One was called "Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games," the other "SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community." The "SavePoint" talk had been set to discuss the "current social/political landscape in the gaming community" and included speakers who shared some GamerGate concerns, such as ethics in gaming journalism. The "Level Up" panel included several women who have been subjected to harassment.

Not all the participants were comfortable with the new arrangement. Randi Harper, who had been scheduled to be on the "Level Up" panel, wrote in an emailed statement that the original panelists were "not confirmed to be speaking" at the summit after the two panels were combined into one event. Harper is the founder of the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative, a non-profit, according to its website.

"We were very surprised to find SXSW making GamerGate a part of the discussion about online harassment. While we fully support GamerGate being a part of SXSW Gaming, adding them to the summit creates a safety concern for many of the people who are currently scheduled to be participating," she wrote in the statement. "It is unfortunate that SXSW still lacks an understanding of online harassment, and I have no confidence in their ability to run this summit while keeping panelists safe and providing for a productive conversation."

Krause did not reply to an email asking for comment regarding Harper's statement.

"We're cautious. We want to play it by ear and see where it goes," said Perry Jones, who had been on the "SavePoint" panel and is founder of the Open Gaming Society. Jones said that was an advocacy group that is critical of both video game journalism and "pandering" in diversity efforts in video games.
"The last thing you want is for someone somewhere to take up arms and cause on-site violence of some sort," he said.

How we use our smartphones twice as much as we think

The study in the journal PLOS ONE compared the amount of time participants estimated they spent on their smartphones with their actual usage.

It found that people were accessing their phones twice as often as they thought.

Dr David Ellis, a psychologist at Lancaster University, said: "Psychologists typically rely on self-report data when quantifying mobile phone usage in studies, but our work suggests that estimated smartphone use should be interpreted with caution."

The researchers argue that 'rapid mobile phone interactions' are becoming habitual for smartphone users. They asked 23 participants, aged 18-33, asked to estimate how much time they had spent on their phone.

An app was also installed on their smartphones which recorded all their actual usage over a two week period. This included activities like checking the time, looking atmessage notifications or social media alerts, phone calls and playing music.

Researchers found that smartphone use was typically confined to short bursts – more than half of uses lasted less than 30 seconds.

The study was led by Lancaster University with Nottingham Trent, the University of Lincoln and University of the West of England.

More information: Sally Andrews et al. Beyond Self-Report: Tools to Compare Estimated and Real-World Smartphone Use, PLOS ONE (2015). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0139004 

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-10-smartphones.html#jCp