Navigational Apps for the Blind

New Sensory Applications

Navigational Apps for the Blind Could Have Broader Appeal

The New York Times, Amanda Morris, January 4, 2022

New apps designed specifically for blind and low-vision people could also have mainstream appeal. Leveraging improvements in mapping technology and smartphone cameras, these apps can provide indoor navigation, detailed descriptions of the surrounding environment, and more warnings about obstacles. For example, MapInHood, released only in Toronto so far, offers information about sidewalk traffic, construction hazards, accessible curb cuts, and locations of benches, among other things. It also can help users avoid stairs or steep slopes, which would benefit disabled individuals as well as those carrying suitcases or pushing strollers. Meanwhile, GoodMaps is creating indoor navigational tools for airports, train stations, office buildings, malls, and hospitals. Said GoodMaps' José Gaztambide, "You as a sighted person are going to be able to enter more and more buildings and find your way around more quickly than ever before because of the work we're doing of enabling accessible navigation."   .... ' 

Alphabet's Loon Balloons for Internet Connectivity

Application of the general idea is expanding.  Here with autonomous navigation. 

Alphabet's Loon Balloons in Internet Connectivity

Alphabet’s Loon hands the reins of its internet air balloons to self-learning AI.  The company’s new AI flight control system outperforms its human-made one

By Nick Statt@nickstatt

Alphabet’s Loon, the team responsible for beaming internet down to Earth from stratospheric helium balloons, has achieved a new milestone: its navigation system is no longer run by human-designed software. ... " 

Safer Navigation in Unknown Territory

Key aspect of safer navigation .... dealing with uncertainty in unknown territory.

ML Guarantees Robots' Performance in Unknown Territory

Princeton Engineering News   By Molly Sharlach

Princeton University researchers have developed a machine learning (ML) technique for ensuring robots' safety and success in unfamiliar environments. The researchers came up with the technique by adapting ML frameworks from other fields to robotic movement and grasping. The new technique was tested in various simulations, and also validated by evaluating its use for obstacle avoidance using a small combination quadcopter/fixed-wing airplane drone that flew down a 60-foot-long corridor dotted with cardboard cylinders; it avoided those obstacles 90% of the time. The Toyota Research Institute's Hongkai Dai said, " Over the last decade or so, there’s been a tremendous amount of excitement and progress ... " 

New YouTube Navigation Capabilities

The virus also got us to look at YouTube more closely, contains some good adaptations that are worth understanding  Worth looking at.

New YouTube features to help you navigate the streaming boom
Debbie Weinstein in The Google Blog
Vice President, Global Video & YouTube Solutions
Published May 7, 2020

Viewer attention is shifting dramatically as we spend more time at home–and we’ve heard directly from many advertisers that are working quickly to adjust their creative and media strategies, especially to orient toward streaming platforms.

Today, we are sharing new advertiser insights and accelerating the launch of a number of tools–including Brand Lift measurement on the TV screen and more flexible formats for content casted onto the TV screen–to help advertisers navigate this rapidly changing environment.1

People are streaming on TV screens more than ever
As people spend more time at home, we’re seeing major shifts in streaming viewership. A recent Comscore report highlighted that over 70 million US households are now streaming content on their connected TV screens.

Nowhere is this shift more pronounced than on YouTube and YouTube TV. According to Comscore, YouTube has the highest reach and viewing hours among ad-supported streaming services, and represents a quarter of all streaming watch time across both subscription and ad-supported platforms in the US.2 Stay at home directives have amplified this shift to the TV screens, as overall watch time there has jumped 80 percent year over year in March 2020.3

Diversity of viewer passions and interests is what inspires people to stream YouTube on their big screens–from tuning into their favorite health and fitness videos to leaning back with a creator sharing a bit of their world to watching more traditional media outlets reinvent their content for this new reality.

Below, we’ve shared just a few of the top content growth areas across both YouTube and YouTube TV on TV screens during this time. While people are enjoying movies and shows to unwind, they are also watching live content from their favorite creators and cultural moments.  ... "

Brain Navigation

Combining visual inputs and motion to better understand the implications of navigation.     Help us predict the implications, e.g the context implications of planning for motion.

How the brain encodes landmarks that help us navigate
Neuroscientists discover how a key brain region combines visual and spatial information to help us find our way.  By Anne Trafton | MIT News Office

Press Inquiries
When we move through the streets of our neighborhood, we often use familiar landmarks to help us navigate. And as we think to ourselves, “OK, now make a left at the coffee shop,” a part of the brain called the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) lights up.

While many studies have linked this brain region with landmark-based navigation, exactly how it helps us find our way is not well-understood. A new study from MIT neuroscientists now reveals how neurons in the RSC use both visual and spatial information to encode specific landmarks.

“There’s a synthesis of some of these signals — visual inputs and body motion — to represent concepts like landmarks,” says Mark Harnett, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “What we went after in this study is the neuron-level and population-level representation of these different aspects of spatial navigation.”

In a study of mice, the researchers found that this brain region creates a “landmark code” by combining visual information about the surrounding environment with spatial feedback of the mice’s own position along a track. Integrating these two sources of information allowed the mice to learn where to find a reward, based on landmarks that they saw.

“We believe that this code that we found, which is really locked to the landmarks, and also gives the animals a way to discriminate between landmarks, contributes to the animals’ ability to use those landmarks to find rewards,” says Lukas Fischer, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the study. ... "

Ground Penetrating Radar for Driving?

This is unexpected.   But it has been known that weather is a problem with classic methods, now will ground penetrating radar solve this problem?

MIT’s Ground-Penetrating Radar Looks Down for Perfect Self-Driving    by Bill Howard

Ground-penetrating radar may soon be the sensor that makes your car autonomous in all weather conditions. It turns out that when you scan the 10 feet below the roadway surface, you get a unique identifier that is accurate to an inch or two. Mapping cars would scan the roadways once, then your self-driving car with its own ground-penetrating radar would rescan as you drive, matching its real-time scan to the master map. That would keep your car centered, even if pavement markings are covered by snow or ice, according to WaveSense, an MIT spinoff that already has already tested military applications.

Ground-penetrating radar can’t be the only sensor in a self-driving car. An autonomous car still needs surface radar, possibly lidar, and cameras to track other vehicles, pedestrians, animals, blocked lanes, and cars stopped or crashed in travel lanes. But it has the potential to be the breakthrough that allows bad-weather autonomous driving.  .... " 

Google Seeks Patent for ML Navigation Solution

Machine Learning patent for a particular application by Google:

Google seeks patent for ML model speed prediction to improve navigation services
The prediction of the speed of the vehicle can be used to predict a travel time, or recommend a route to the user.

By: Sajan C Kumar in FinancialExpress

In a bid to further strengthen its navigation services, American tech major Google has moved the Indian patent office seeking a patent to its new machine learning (ML) model for prediction of the speed of vehicles on particular routes, which will provide users the accurate travel time. ... " 

Navigating via Clues

More work on Robot navigation.   But where do the clues come from?  We already navigate from things like addresses.  But to get there precisely may need more than that.    And the hint that this will also require some common sense reasoning?

MIT and Ford help delivery robots to navigate to your doorstep
Their technique doesn't require mapping areas in advance.
By Christine Fisher, @cfisherwrites in Engadget

In order for delivery robots to drop your takeout, package or meal-kit at the door, they'll need to be able to find the door. In most cases, that requires mapping a location in advance so that the robot knows where to go. But to do that on a large scale is challenging and raises security and privacy concerns. Now, a team of engineers from MIT and Ford Motor Company think they might have an answer. They've created a technique that allows robots to navigate via clues, rather than maps.

The clues can be described in general terms, like "front door" or "garage." As MIT explains, the robot might be trained to know that a driveway often leads to a sidewalk which likely leads to the front door.  ... "

No Train Safety Yet on Navigation Apps

Useful for integration with in-vehicle systems.

Navigation apps still lack railroad safety info the NTSB requested
Apple, Google and Microsoft haven't complied with a 2016 safety recommendation.

By Amrita Khalid, @askhalid in Engadget

Your phone's GPS app can alert you when you approach a speed trap or accident -- but will remain silent if you come upon a dangerous railroad crossing. Politico reported that Google, Apple and Microsoft have yet to add information on US railroad crossings to their navigation apps, almost three years after a request from The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The agency asked several tech companies to update their map apps after a 2015 incident in which a truck driver following Google Maps turned onto the railroad tracks and caused a fatal collision. So far, only Garmin and TomTom -- which both make GPS devices -- have complied with the NTSB's demands.... "

Google Wants to Search Blockchains

Searchability means being able to measure, understand and ultimately regulate what is going on inside a blockchain.  Have talked to Washington regulatory compliance bureaucrats, and they are worried about blockchains.   Google is looking to make their search technology work within  blockchains.  And make money doing that.   Good overview of the recently revealed effort:

Navigating Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP: How Google Is Quietly Making Blockchains Searchable  by Michael del Castillo in Forbes  .... "

and as an example:

The SEC is looking for a blockchain analysis tool in TheBlock.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is publicly looking for a tool that would provide blockchain analysis data of the most widely used cryptocurrencies in order to monitor risk, improve compliance, and inform the policy with respect to digital assets.

One of the required abilities of the tool is a "capability to derive insights from the available data, including attribution data (i.e. to whom a particular address belongs)." The U.S. government have previously worked with multiple blockchain analysis companies including Chainalysis, Elliptic and CipherTrace. Most of the blockchain analysis tools still seem to be limited mainly to analyzing Bitcoin's blockchain while the SEC is looking for an analysis of "the most widely used blockchain ledgers."   ... "