Each week Nikolas Badminton, Futurist Speaker, summarizes the top-5 future looking developments and news items that I find to be inspiring, interesting, concerning, or downright strange. Each day he reads through dozens of blogs and news websites to find those things that we should be aware of.
In Future Trends: Global Risks, Spying, and Branded Dreams we feature some amazing future technologies we should be aware of today, January 15th, 2016.

WEF, Global Risks Report

You can read more on the World Economic Forum’s Global risk report here.
You can also view more analysis and report itself here.

Via World Economic Forum

Deep-Spying: Spying using Smartwatch and Deep Learning

Tony Beltramelli from the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark pressents this paper on the exposure and risks of spying to people wearing wearables:

• http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.05616v1.pdf

Wearable technologies are today on the rise, becoming more common and broadly available to mainstream users. In fact, wristband and armband devices such as smartwatches and fitness trackers already took an important place in the consumer electronics market and are becoming ubiquitous. By their very nature of being wearable, these devices, however, provide a new pervasive attack surface threatening users privacy, among others.
In the meantime, advances in machine learning are providing unprecedented possibilities to process complex data efficiently. Allowing patterns to emerge from high dimensional unavoidably noisy data.
The goal of this work is to raise awareness about the potential risks related to motion sensors built-in wearable devices and to demonstrate abuse opportunities leveraged by advanced neural network architectures.
The LSTM-based implementation presented in this research can perform touchlogging and keylogging on 12-keys keypads with above-average accuracy even when confronted with raw unprocessed data. Thus demonstrating that deep neural networks are capable of making keystroke inference attacks based on motion sensors easier to achieve by removing the need for non-trivial pre-processing pipelines and carefully engineered feature extraction strategies. Our results suggest that the complete technological ecosystem of a user can be compromised when a wearable wristband device is worn.
Via Cornell University Library

The Art of Neural Networks

Did you know that art and technology can produce fascinating results when combined? Mike Tyka, who is both artist and computer scientist, talks about the power of neural networks. These algorithms are capable to transform computers into artists that can generate breathtaking paintings, music and even poetry.
In 2009, Mike and a team of artists created Groovik’s Cube, a 35 feet tall, functional, multi-player Rubik’s cube. Since then, he co-founded ATLSpace, an artist studio in Seattle and has been creating metal and glass sculptures of protein molecules. In 2013 Mike went to Google to study neural networks, both artificial and natural. This work naturally spilled over to his artistic interests, exploring the possibilities of artificial neural networks for creating art.

Via TEDx Talks

How Google’s Airbender Team Accidentally Invents The Future

Via Nat and Lo

Branded Dreams

Nowadays young children know more brands and logo’s than bird or tree species. Advertisements are so present in our environment, it seems our dreams are the last safe and add-free place.
But what happens when advertisers gain the technology to enter our dreams? This animated short by our friends of Studio Smack introduces us in a dream infected by a brand we all know…

Via NextNature
See the last 4 week’s Future Trends (Top-5 Futures) articles here:

• Future Trends: Muscles, H-Bombs, and Drinking Robots

• Top-5 Futures for December 25th: Step Aside Santa, We’ve Got Elon Musk

• Top-5 Futures for December 18th: Laser weapons on planes by 2020

• Top-5 Futures for December 11th: Bacteria Unlocks Immortality

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Nikolas Badminton is a world-respected futurist speaker that researches, speaks, and writes about the future of work, how technology is affecting the workplace, how workers are adapting, the sharing economy, and how the world is evolving. He appears at conferences in Canada, USA, UK, and Europe. Email him to book him for your radio, TV show, or conference.