Apple and Nokia are at it again over patents

Apple and Nokia settled a patent lawsuit back in 2011, but now, they’re back at it once more. the two firms square measure suing one another over again, however this time Apple is filing an antitrust case, not against Nokia however instead against third-party firms called patent assertion entities, or PAEs, that are engaged on its behalf. In getting even for this cause, Nokia is suing Apple directly.

In its case, Apple argues that these PAEs aggressively pursue cash for patents Nokia transferred to them — one thing it says shouldn’t be allowed as a result of it’s “anti competitive and abusive.” Nokia is on an individual basis suing because it believes Apple owes it money for patents utilized in Apple products.

The two corporations last had a licensing spat back in 2009, when Nokia sued Apple over claims that Apple infringed on a number of its essential patents. These commonplace essential patents are used across the business and as such, are alleged to be authorised on honest, reasonable, and non-discriminatory — aka FRAND — terms. this implies corporations will make the most of these patents while not paying outrageous licensing fees because they’re essential to most products.

The companies eventually reached a settlement agreement during which Apple paid a one-time fee to Nokia then was scheduled to pay regular royalties in the future.

Apple’s new case, that was filed in California, goes after PAEs that Nokia has partnered with to pursue extra patent money. Apple claims these firms, that embody acacia research and conversant Property Management, are “conspiring with Nokia in a scheme to diffuse and abuse [standard essential patents] and, as the PAEs and Nokia absolutely supposed, monetize those false guarantees by extracting exorbitant non-FRAND royalties in manner Nokia couldn't.”



Apple continues to mention that these PAEs are able to pursue violation cases because in contrast to Nokia, they don’t manufacture anything and instead engineered a complete business around fighting violation. Apple implies the PAEs, and in particular, Acacia, has it out for the company, as proved by the quantity of patent lawsuits they’ve brought against it. PAEs have reportedly sued Apple a minimum of 12 times based mostly off former Nokia patents; by itself, tree has sued Apple over 40 times based mostly off patents from Nokia and other firms. Apple desires the court to declare this practice of habitually and aggressively suing based on other companies' patents extralegal.

Meanwhile, Nokia filed a suit today directly against Apple in Europe and the USA that claims the company remains infringing on Nokia patents. Nokia says that since settling that initial case, Apple has “declined resultant offers created by Nokia to license different [parts] of its proprietary inventions, which square measure utilized by several Apple product.” therefore primarily, Nokia is arguing that Apple owes money because it takes advantage of a lot of Nokia patents than it’s presently paying for. The lawsuit covers 32 patents, as well as display, user interface, software, and video-coding technology.



Nokia’s lawsuit is actually retribution for Apple’s lawsuit, but Apple, whereas facing two opponents — Nokia and PAEs — is trying to upend patent law. Apple’s case might ultimately be monumental in however future patent legal proceeding is tried. That is, if it wins and doesn’t simply settle things in an exceedingly couple years.

Using smartphone technology to combat workplace injury

Credit: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Manufacturing industries in the United States rely on the tireless efforts of factory employees—who work daily to make, package, prepare and deliver the products we find on our shelves.

And there's a lot of physical effort required of factory workers. The strain of repetitive motion can lead to various musculoskeletal injuries, such as carpal tunnel syndrome or tendonitis in the wrists, arms and shoulders. Risks of injury not only cause workers to suffer, but can create massive inefficiencies for companies themselves, through hidden costs such as workers' compensation, lost time and reduced productivity.

"We want to solve these problems before people get hurt," says Rob Radwin, a professor of industrial systems of engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Radwin has been studying this problem for more than two decades, and with the advent of technology, he may be able to create a solution that is easy, efficient and economically viable.

Existing methods for measuring risk of injury leave much to be desired: Health and safety professionals often make subjective judgments of risk based on a 0-10 scale of hand activity. Although these measurements provide fairly reasonable predictions, there is immense room for error in human observation, and such conclusions require valuable time, expertise and training in ergonomics and safety. It also requires following the nuanced actions of many individuals over a long period of time. Current technology may be the key to facing, and ultimately fixing, this issue.

Radwin and his students are collaborating with Yu Hen Hu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW-Madison. They already have developed computer vision algorithms to calculate hand activity level, funded through exploratory grants from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the National Institutes of Health. In September 2016, Radwin received additional three-year funding of $1.4 million from the NIOSH Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This new grant will allow Radwin and his colleagues to use videos collected from a variety of institutions—among them, UC-Berkeley, NIOSH, and the State of Washington Department of Labor and Industries—to develop an entirely new measure for assessing health outcomes. This measure will use their video footage to visualize and track repetitive motions—establishing pattern recognition at which the hand demonstrates repetitive movements, grasps and exertions. By combining their recent epidemiology findings with this new measurement, they can create a basis for engineers to measure risk for injuries and redesign certain jobs in the workplace.

Rob Radwin. Credit: University of Wisconsin-Madison

The ultimate goal is to not only create functioning, accurate measurements, but to make them widely accessible to companies via computer vision. This is where smartphones come in.

"I envision an app, and I think all the technology we need exists on my smartphone today: a high definition camera, a high-speed processor, and the ability to do cloud computing," he says.

If Radwin can apply his measures to a smartphone application, manufacturing employers could assess risk of injury of their employees with relative ease. This would involve simply pointing a handheld video device, which is less intrusive and time-consuming than existing methods, such as attaching an instrument to a worker's arm or hand.

"We can program phones to measure motions and quantify them in a way that is not only more accurate than the current method, but also automatic and more objective and reliable," he says. "It's not just for big corporations using ergonomics to cut costs—it would allow medium-sized and small businesses to access this technology as well."

Combining the assets of multiple disciplines—electrical and computer engineering, industrial and systems engineering, and biomedical engineering—Radwin's research will help companies make often simple, but impactful changes to high risk jobs. The measurements can assess factors such as speed—for example, if a worker is struggling to keep up with a conveyer belt, they may have to move their arms and hands faster to keep up, leading to fatigue and potential injury. New measures would be able to pinpoint such hazards, so employers could figure out how to engineer things like excess speed out of the task. Sometimes problems like these require relatively minor fixes, such as limiting the distances that a worker has to move objects so they won't be forced to move too quickly.

"Sometimes it's not obvious until you try and break down the task into its components," Radwin says.

However, by looking at existing videos of worker motions, Radwin can use the same concept to ensure that these problems don't arise in the first place. "Now we can understand how to look at various factors in a job, and try to engineer out hazards before individuals are even involved. That's our goal, and the goal of companies today, to do it right the first time."

App to help Tackle Mental Health

How a former model decided to launch an app to tackle Mental Health

Mental health is one of the buzzwords of the moment, especially now Royalty like Prince William and Duchess Katherine have been championing it, along with Kid Cudi, Cara Delevingne and others saying that they would be open to sending their children to counselling.

One in five people have suffered from depression, one in two will suffer of some other mental disturbance in their lifetimes. If you haven’t been through a mental health issue, you will likely know someone who has.

After encountering it in amongst those closest to her, former international model Silja Litvindecided to do something about it: “I learned about depression when I was a young teenager: a friend died through suicide, leaving me shocked and determined to fight depression.”

Starting with the knowledge from her own PhD thesis in clinical psychology, it became clear to here that fighting depression with an app could be possible. By “psycho-educating” with a test app she found the symptoms of depression could be significantly reduced. The next step of finding quick and professional help locally could be achieved with a client-therapist matching system in the app.

So she launched PsycApps which does both of the the above, and brings therapy to the ultimate comfort-zone: an iOS smartphone app, now launched.

At its essence, PsycApps helps you find out whether you or a loved one is suffering from depression, what to expect if that is the case, how to help them or yourself and how to get professional help fast. “We also lower the 6-week on average search for a therapist down to 20-30 minutes,” says Litvin.

She says the app is anonymous and highly secure, it asks a few demographic questions and then goes straight to the menu. There you can choose between information (what is depression), the screening (3 tests with 1, 7 and 21 questions), the therapeutic features (morning immune-booster: exercises to help activate clients in the morning, CBT exercises, visualisation exercises and positive psychology exercises), ‘find my therapist’ and stats (the outcome of the screening as well as everyday mood tracking).

Once the user/client has gone through the screening he/she will get one of five results showing the probability that they are suffering from depression (no symptoms to high-probability). Directly after the results they are shown a number of tips to self-stabilize and are directed to both the therapeutic features and the ‘find my therapist’ option.

Competitor apps include SAM, The Big White Wall and apps like Headspace and Calm.com.

But Litvin says app developers, especially in the medical industry tend to either be all about the medical space, neglecting UX and UI, or all about marketing, not ensuring evidence based practice. “We go on a journey with our clients, our user experience being non-intrusive and intuitive making the threshold to dealing with mental health issues as small as possible, while ensuring up-to-date psychological care,” she says.

So far the startup has raised £250,000 seed money from Angels but hopes to raise more. Eventually Litvin hopes to take a referral fee from the therapists and later and subscription model for a premium model.