Author: The Conversation

When your Netflix stream drops out in the middle of a rainstorm, can you blame the wild weather? Quite possibly. The weather can affect the performance of your internet connection in a variety of ways. This can include issues such as physical damage to the network, water getting into electrical connections, and wireless signal interference. Some types of connection are more vulnerable to weather than others. The behaviour of other humans in response to the weather can also have an effect on your connection. How rain can affect your internet connection Internet connections are much more complicated than the router…

While the pandemic has restricted us from doing many activities we like, household hobbies such as DIY, baking and crafts have become more popular. Now there’s a way to combine all of these skills to create something entirely new. What you will need, however, is a 3D printer. 3D printers will print anything made of plastic, quickly and in any shape you like. But there’s a lot they cannot do. You couldn’t 3D-print pasta shaped like your children’s favourite cartoon characters or make a pizza shaped like the logo of your football team – until now, that is. Our new research paper, published in Data in Brief, shows…

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) aren’t just for gaming anymore, they’re also proving to be useful tools for disaster safety research. In fact, they could save lives. Around the world, natural and human-made disasters such as earthquakes, bushfires and terrorist attacks threaten substantial economic loss and human life. My research review looked at 64 papers on the topic of using AR and VR-based experiments (mostly simulating emergency scenarios) to investigate human behaviour during disaster, provide disaster-related education and enhance the safety of built environments. If we can investigate how certain factors influence people’s decisions about the best course of action…

The ruthless war between the world’s leading video-on-demand companies reached a climax when the Amazon acquired the legendary Hollywood studio MGM (Metro Goldwyn Mayer) in a deal worth US$8.45 billion. The sale of MGM on May 26 followed more than six months of negotiations. The American studio known for its roaring lion had been weakened by major financial difficulties before the pandemic. The prolonged closure of movie theatres was the final nail in its coffin. Although the MGM studio had a low market value (estimated at only US$5.5 billion a few months ago), several giants of the digital industry, including Apple,…

There’s a scene in the 2008 film Iron Man that offers a glimpse of future interactions between human and artificial intelligence assistants. In it, Tony Stark’s virtual assistant J.A.R.V.I.S. responds with sarcasm and humour to Stark’s commands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZaAFADoF1M&feature=emb_logo Tony Stark and his AI assistant J.A.R.V.I.S. work on a project. Contemporary voice assistants like Siri and Alexa are yet to offer such natural, nuanced social chatter. To that end, our team of computer science researchers at the University of British Columbia investigated what might be missing. We found that voice interface designers dealt with an interesting dilemma: the tension between offering social…

Have you ever thought about all the ways social media is woven within your everyday life? This has been especially true over the past year, where social media has proven itself as a valuable communication tool to connect with family and friends, provide social support through online community groups and get a quick response to a burning question from a peer. Globally, prior to the pandemic, an estimated 3.4 billion people used social media and this number continues to rise annually. Yet the ways in which we use social media may determine whether it has a positive or potentially negative impact on our lives.…

When Apple announced in a 2019 blog post that it had patched a security vulnerability in its iOS operating system, the company sought to reassure its customers. The attack that had exploited the vulnerability, Apple said, was “narrowly focused” on websites featuring content related to the Uyghur community. It has since emerged that the vulnerability in question was discovered at China’s principal hacking competition, the Tianfu Cup, where a professional hacker won a prize for his work in uncovering it. The normal protocol would be to inform Apple of the vulnerability. But it’s alleged that, instead, the breach was kept secret, with the Chinese…

NASA has selected two missions, dubbed DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, to study the “lost habitable” world of Venus. Each mission will receive approximately US$500 million for development and both are expected to launch between 2028 and 2030. It had long been thought there was no life on Venus, due to its extremely high temperatures. But late last year, scientists studying the planet’s atmosphere announced the surprising (and somewhat controversial) discovery of phosphine. On Earth, this chemical is produced primarily by living organisms. The news sparked renewed interest in Earth’s “twin”, prompting NASA to plan state-of-the-art missions to look more closely at the planetary environment…

Unless you’re blind or know someone who is, you might not know that blind people use the same smartphones as sighted people. In fact, many blind people use touch-screen smartphones every day. The secret is that smartphones have a screen reader, a tool that allows blind people to use a mix of gestures and taps, along with vibrations or audio feedback, to use their apps. Screen readers work on desktop computers as well as mobile devices. You can usually find the screen reader in settings under accessibility. On iPhones the screen reader is VoiceOver. It provides a verbal description of what’s…

Most of us benefit every day from the fact computers can now “understand” us when we speak or write, thanks to machine learning. Yet few of us have paused to consider the potentially damaging ways this same technology may be shaping our culture. Human language is full of ambiguity and double meanings. For instance, consider the potential meaning of this phrase: “I went to project class”. Without context, it’s an ambiguous statement. Computer scientists and linguists have spent decades trying to program computers to understand the nuances of human language. And in certain ways, computers are fast approaching humans’ ability…