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NEC Corp has said that it will experiment using fingerprint recognition technology to promote vaccination among infants in developing nations.
It will be the first time in the world that fingerprint recognition will be used on children aged one to five.
The technology titan has signed a memorandum of cooperation with Gavi, a public-private partnership comprising governments around the world and the World Health Organisation, and Simprints Technology Ltd, a British biometrics startup. About 20 million infants, especially in developing countries, have not been administered standard vaccines such as for hepatitis B, and the lack of birth registration systems in some regions makes it difficult to identify whether a child has been vaccinated.
In the experiment, children will be identified by fingerprint, name, age and sex in order to distribute vaccines fairly based on vaccination records. Using fingerprint recognition technology on infants was thought to be difficult due to their soft fingertips and developing finger shapes. This has been made possible by combining the technologies of the Japanese and British companies. The experiment will be conducted in Bangladesh and Tanzania in the first half of 2020. – The Yomiuri Shimbun/ANN

Samsung expands into GPU market with AMD
A new technology partnership has been formed between South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and the US’ AMD on low-power and high-performance mobile graphics, according to the companies on Tuesday.
Under the multi-year partnership, Samsung Electronics will licence AMD’s graphics intellectual property, based on the recently announced, highly scalable Radeon graphics architecture, for use in its mobile devices including smartphones. Samsung will pay AMD licence fees and royalties.
The partnership is viewed as stemming from Samsung’s intention to expand into the graphic-processing unit field, which has been dominated by Nvidia.
Samsung has been working with UK-based chipset IP company ARM on GPU for use in its Exynos chips. According to Samsung, its current partnership with ARM will continue.
AMD is a strong rival to Intel in the central processing unit market, while being competitive enough against Nvidia in the GPU market. GPU is the core of high-resolution, fast-changing images on mobile devices in the era of the fifth-generation network, which also enables representation of augmented reality and virtual reality content. Some consider the Samsung-AMD partnership to be the result of ongoing global moves to boycott China’s Huawei. Last week, AMD announced the US company would stop providing its chips and design tools to Huawei. – The Korea Herald/ANN