They can only dream of what it's like to burst onto the field in The Big Show on Opening Day, but Purdue University outfielders Cam Thompson and Curtis Washington Jr. are among thousands of college baseball players with access to more data-juiced tech than ever to use in the hopes of getting to the majors. One of the tools their team has tested tracks and visualizes every joint in their bodies to measure and analyze their dynamic movements, helping them become a split-second faster on the base paths or gain an edge on runners when they throw home. "I was the slowest on the team," said Thompson in a video describing Purdue's use of 3D Athlete Tracking, or 3DAT, technology developed by Intel, which captures video footage and applies computer vision and deep learning to digitize an individual player's skeletal data and calculate biomechanics. The data and analytical insights gave Thompson and his coaches information revealing that he was bent over just slightly when launching himself from a base. "To the eye, you might not see this, but those first four or five steps were actually slowing him down," said John Madia, director of Baseball Player Development at Purdue.

We are witnessing an exciting time in the automotive industry. As innovation is reaching new heights with connected and autonomous vehicles, the auto insurance industry is also experiencing its own evolution, using technology to enhance the way road accidents and damages are handled, saving people time and money and improving the often stressful experiences of handling the aftermath of accidents. A transformation is badly needed in the insurance industry. In addition to poor customer experiences when making claims, some $25 billion goes unaccounted for each year due to adjuster costs, fraud, delays in repair shops and more. Innovation can change that -- and it is already starting to.

Imagine a camera that's mounted on your car being able to identify black ice on the road, giving you a heads-up before you drive over it. Or a cell phone camera that can tell whether a lesion on your skin is possibly cancerous. Or the ability for Face ID to work even when you have a face mask on. These are all possibilities Metalenz is touting with its new PolarEyes polarization technology. Last year, the company unveiled a flat-lens system called optical metasurfaces for mobile devices that took up less space while purportedly producing similar- if not better-quality images than a traditional smartphone camera.

Have you ever wondered how a camera detects objects? For instance, during the pandemic, the government in many parts of the world installed cameras at the airport that can detect people without a face mask and alarm the airport authority. Similarly, phone cameras can detect a face, puppy, and other objects and tell you what the object is. How does a camera do that? Or for that matter, how does your phone camera unlocks your phone only on seeing your face and not others.

Look into your camera for thirty seconds. You've just given your phone enough information to check your heart rate, oxygen saturation, breathing rate, heart rate variability, blood pressure, stress level, and ten other health indicators at medical grade levels of reliability. Now imagine doing that 50 times a day without even thinking about it. And having the results funneled to your personal medical AI engine to monitor you for any signs of poor health, ready to notify your physician if anything looks out of the ordinary. Like higher temperature, which might indicate a fever, flu ... or Covid-19. That's part of the vision of Binah.ai, an Israeli health startup that uses high-end artificial intelligence and low-end cameras built into all our phones and laptops to continuously monitor health.

This week, a new AR-centric social networking app launched, which will let users pull up their friends' profiles by pointing their smartphone camera at them. Called Octi, the app will let people make a personal profile by choosing photos, favorite songs from Spotify, fun links from YouTube, and sticker-like custom messages. Instead, they'll hover around you as a halo of thumbnail-sized icons whenever someone with the app on their phone points their camera at you. Octi uses facial recognition software to identify whether someone you point your camera at has a profile, and will automatically pull it up as an AR overlay if you're already connected as friends. The app will also let you add new friends by pointing your camera at someone and then send them a friend request, so long as they have a profile with Octi.

Yet the most impressive demo was much subtler: Abhay Parasnis, Adobe's CTO, was showing a portrait photo he'd taken on a recent trip to India. Each time he selected a new lighting effect, it would cast a different pattern of shadows, highlights, and colors across the subject's face, as if someone was rearranging the room's lighting around him. The Adobe Photoshop Camera app, which is launching though an invite-based preview program today, is the culmination of Adobe's efforts to bring its Sensei AI services to a consumer product, and it's part of a broader attempt to expand the company's software beyond the realm of creative professionals. "For the engineer in me, this is super, super cool," Parasnis says. "Consumers can now express themselves in ways that were just impossible before."

Without doubt, artificial intelligence and machine learning are major areas of innovation for the greater tech community. If you are a tech freelancer and eager to stay in touch with future directions, you will want to know what companies like Google are investing in, the new technologies they are advancing and the research priorities they are supporting or sponsoring. And, you are in luck! A post yesterday by Jeff Dean, senior fellow and Google AI lead, on behalf of the Google Research Community, reviews how Google has focused its research talent and dollars. I've provided a thumbnail summary of the priorities, quoting descriptions from the blog post.

To try to get a glimpse of the everyday devices we could be using a decade from now, there are worse places to look than inside the Future Interfaces Group (FIG) lab at Carnegie Mellon University. During a recent visit to Pittsburgh by Engadget, PhD student Gierad Laput put on a smartwatch and touched a Macbook Pro, then an electric drill, then a door knob. The moment his skin pressed against each, the name of the object popped up on an adjacent computer screen. Each item had emitted a unique electromagnetic signal which flowed through Laput's body, to be picked up by the sensor on his watch. The software essentially knew what Laput was doing in dumb meatspace, without a pricey sensor needing to be embedded (and its batteries recharged) on every object he made contact with.

The Pixel 2 had arguably the best smartphone camera on the market, and Google wants to make sure it stays that way. During its Pixel unveiling today, it introduced a raft of new camera features for the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3XL smartphones, including an improved zoom, wider-angle camera, smile and blink detection, bokeh control and more -- all with just a single lens on the back. The quality is apparently good enough for Terrence Malick, who shot a video that was featured at the event, so it might be good enough for the rest of us, too. Some of the features are enabled with the fresh hardware, to be sure. There's a brand new 12.2-megapixel sensor on the back, with a sharper wide-angle lens to allow for zooming.