Apple is getting closer to figuring out your ‘brain print’
Who are you?
If you enjoyed TouchID, liked FaceID, you may be interested in EarID, which may (or may not) be on the list for future biometric authorization tech for future Apple products.
Via 9to5 I learned Apple researchers have published a new study that describes how an AI model can learn about brain activity.
Learning Electroencephalography
Here’s what they say:
“Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising approach for learning electroencephalography (EEG) representations from unlabeled data, reducing the need for expensive annotations for clinical applications like sleep staging and seizure detection. While current EEG SSL methods predominantly use masked reconstruction strategies like masked autoencoders (MAE) that capture local temporal patterns, position prediction pretraining remains underexplored despite its potential to learn long-range dependencies in neural signals. We introduce PAirwise Relative Shift or PARS pretraining, a novel pretext task that predicts relative temporal shifts between randomly sampled EEG window pairs. Unlike reconstruction-based methods that focus on local pattern recovery, PARS encourages encoders to capture relative temporal composition and long-range dependencies inherent in neural signals. Through comprehensive evaluation on various EEG decoding tasks, we demonstrate that PARS-pretrained transformers consistently outperform existing pretraining strategies in label-efficient and transfer learning settings, establishing a new paradigm for self-supervised EEG representation learning.”
The thing is that brain activity is seen as a unique identifier for people.
That makes sense once you consider how all those neurons work, all those memories and learnings literally craft unique maps and signals across your brain.
With this in mind, if Apple can figure out this much about brain activity, then it could for example use that as an authorization tool.
How might that work?
Think about AirPods, and how these already analyse the shape of your inner ear to figure out how to deliver the best possible music playback when you use them. Now imagine an additional sensor in those devices designed to read brain activity (securely and privately). IN that scenario, you’d pop your AirPods in your ears to open your phone, Mac, or even your front door or car. These things could act as a secondary authorization agent for MFA deployments and more.
Think I’m joking?
Just take a look at what’s being developed by Yneuro.
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