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Imagine all you needed at the ATM was your face, no card

Mamadu Yvonne
You may soon withdraw money from an Automated Teller Machines without using your credit or debit card, thanks to a face recognition technology in the making.
Known as the Basic Intelligent Automated Teller Machine, if the new device is incorporated in the current ATMs, all one will require to get money is to stand in front of the machines.
It is the brainchild of Dr Waweru Mwangi, the director of the Institute of Computer Science and Information Technology at Jomo Kenyatta University, and is on display at the national scientific conference in Nairobi.
The smart ATM removes the need to carry cards every time one wishes to access the bank account. The idea behind the machine’s development is to make banking friendly.
“We realised that many people feel uncomfortable with the card, which in some cases is retained by the machine,” Dr Mwangi says.
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Its use could also reduce the now common incidents where carjackers force their victims to empty their accounts at gunpoint, often taking the card and the personal identification number (PIN).
The Intelligent ATM comes equipped with a camera that recognises the customer’s face and sends details of the facial dimensions to a database for verification.
The camera uses the system of biometrics to recognise the account holder — those used in computer science are the distance between the eyes and the proportion of the nose to the mouth and the location of the cheekbones.
Once the image is found to be authentic, the customer is then prompted to enter their PIN or asked a personal question such as “What’s your pet’s name?”
The correct PIN or answer would then allow the person to use the ATM in the normal way. Your twin brother or sister would pass the face test but fail at the PIN or question stage.
It also impossible to use a life-size photograph of the account holder as the machine uses three dimensions, length, width and depth, to recognise the image.
Dr Mwangi said the only requirement would be for the software to be working properly and then it would be linked to the current system of machines in use.
Face recognition technology is used to control access to buildings, but Dr Mwangi said it has never been used in ATMs anywhere in the world.
Dr Mwangi said at the current rate of progress, a prototype would be ready for testing in a few months and then the idea would be sold to banks and implemented.
It is one of the projects being developed by the National Council for Science and Technology and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.
However, face recognition technology has struggled to perform under certain conditions in other countries where the technology has been tested, some researchers say.
Mr Ralph Gross, an American researcher at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, says where face recognition does not work well include poor lighting, sunglasses, long hair, or other objects partially covering the face, and low resolution images.
However, the Kenyan innovators are optimistic that they will beat the setback upon further improvement of the technology.
And at the same exhibition, two student innovators have finally presented the bicycle-powered smart mobile phone chargers in the market.
This is a year after Pascal Katana, 24, and Jeremiah Murimi 25, featured their innovation at the national scientific conference. The simple device is expected to change lives in rural areas as well as boost the boda boda industry.
(The Nation)

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African intellectuals building other nations

(Reuters)
African graduate leaving the continent for greener pastures
 
Africa's contribution to the global body of scientific research is very small and does little to benefit its own populations, according to a report from Thomson Reuters released on Monday.
 
Like India and China, Africa suffers from a "hemorrhage of talent," the report said, with many of its best brains leaving to study abroad and failing to return.
 "The African diaspora provides powerful intellectual input to the research achievements of other countries, but returns less benefit to the countries of birth,"  Jonathan Adams, director of research evaluation at Thomson Reuters, said in a statement as the report was published.
More information about the report is available here
Adams and colleagues, who use a Thomson Reuters database to track scientific publications, found that three nations dominate Africa's research output — with South Africa leading by a long way, ahead of Egypt in second place and then Nigeria.
 
"Africa's overall volume of activity remains small, much smaller than is desirable if the potential contribution of its researchers is to be realized for the benefit of its populations," said Adams.
 
The report found that part of the problem was down to a "chronic lack of investment in facilities for research and teaching" — a deficit the authors said must be remedied.
 
Adams said the reason behind this was not simply money: "The resources available in some African countries are substantial, but they are not being invested in the research base."
In fields of research relevant to natural resources, however, the study found a relatively high representation of African research as a share of world publications.
 
South Africa's 1.55 percent share of research in plant and animal science is the continent's biggest share in any field, it said, with this output surpassing Russia's 1.17 percent but well behind China's 5.42 percent share in the same field.
The report pointed to a few examples of countries which, despite low output, produced much higher quality research than larger neighbors.
 
Malawi, for example, with one-tenth the annual research output of Nigeria, produces research of a quality that exceeds the world average benchmark while Nigeria hovers at around half that impact level, the report said.
 
"The challenges that the continent faces are enormous and indigenous research could help provide both effective and focused responses," it added.
The study is part of a series showing the changing landscape and dynamics of scientific research around the world.
 
Previous studies found that China had more than doubled its output of scientific papers to rank second only to the United States in terms of volume, while Russia's influence in science and scientific industries was rapidly shrinking.
(Editing by Michael Roddy)
 
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African Fossils Suggest Complex Life Arose Early

By Gwyneth Dickey (Science News)
Researchers have found what may be the earliest evidence of multicellular life on Earth. Large fossils uncovered in 2.1 billion-year-old rock from Gabon, in western Africa, appear to be incipient examples of macroscopic life in what was then a sea of single-celled microbes.
A three dimensional X-ray image of the outer (left) and inner (right) body of a fossil from the Gabonese site. Scientists believe that multicellular life really took off much later, in the great expansion of animal body plans known as the Cambrian explosion 545 million years ago.
“The discovery is fantastic because it shows the existence of multicellular fauna 1.5 billion years earlier than what we know,” says team leader Abderrazak El Albani, a sedimentologist and paleobiologist at the University of Poitiers in France. “This is important to understand the evolution of life on Earth.”
Some researchers have suggested multicellular organisms arose as early as 1.6 billion years ago, but the evidence is controversial. El Albani and his colleagues were thus surprised to find large fossils in the newly excavated ancient Gabonese rocks. So far, the team has collected over 250 specimens that range in size from 1 to 12 centimeters.
Using detailed X-ray imaging called microtomography, the team created three-dimensional images of the fossils inside and out. The organisms had flat, round, soft bodies, with slits around the edges and complex, patterned folds inside. The creatures belong to new species that have never been described, the team reports in the July 1 Nature.
Other researchers agree that the large size, thickness, and three-dimensionality of the organisms suggest that they were, indeed, multicellular. “There does seem to be something more than just a clonal colony of bacteria,” says paleobiologist Philip Donoghue of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.
El Albani and his team believe the complex patterns and folding mean that cells must have coordinated their growth through chemical signaling, like all multicellular organisms do. The fossils could even be the first examples of eukaryotes, cells with membrane-bound nuclei, according to the team.
But since actual cells were long gone from the sediments, the team had to prove these fossils were not simply mineral formations that looked like animals.
Pyrite, a sulfur-containing mineral also known as fool’s gold, filled the fossils, providing evidence that sulfate-breathing bacteria had eaten away at living tissue. Carbon and sulfur isotopes also confirmed the fossils’ organic origins.
Further analysis showed that the fossils couldn’t have been more recent organisms that burrowed deep into sediments, because the surrounding rock was the same inside and outside the organisms’ folds.
Rock chemistry indicates the organisms lived about 30 to 40 meters deep in sea water. They likely breathed oxygen, which by that time had been building up in the oceans and atmosphere for 350 million years. Donoghue says it’s exciting that scientists are “edging back” the fossil record toward this so-called “great oxidation event” 2.5 billion years ago.
The research team plans to do more experiments to determine how these organisms lived and how to further categorize them
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