Qualcomm today at MWC 2015 announced their newest device security measure: an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner. Dubbed Qualcomm Snapdragon Sense ID 3D Fingerprint Technology, the tech uses ultrasonic waves to penetrate through the outer layers of your finger to build a three-dimensional map of your fingerprint that's much harder to duplicate than a mere capacitive scanner as you'd find on the Samsung Galaxy S6 or iPhone 6 . Additionally, Qualcomm also announced their new "machine learning" platform Zeroth, which aims to go for a device that learns and adapts to how you use it.

The Sense ID scanner recognizes sweat glands and the layers of your fingerprint ridges. But more impressive is that it works through metal, plastic, and glass, so it can be installed differently in a phone than under the glass plates that fingerprint scanners are currently placed. Additionally, by going ultrasonic, Sense ID can scan through any lotion, grease, or other grime that might frustrate a traditional capacitive scanner. Sense ID adheres to the FIDO open standard secure authentication.

Qualcomm Zeroth might be the more interesting announcement long-term, however. Right now it's a bit vague — Qualcomm President Derek Aberle described it as a cognitive and machine computing platform that "will allow your device to learn about you and customize itself over time". All of the data collected by Zeroth is stored on the device, none of it's pushed to the cloud. And while they're initially targeting mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, Qualcomm sees the platform extending to automotive and other sectors in the future.

So what does Zeroth do? Qualcomm provided one interesting demo: the camera. The camera app leveraged Zeroth to actually recognize what was in a photo — people, architecture, food, etc. — and where it was being taken — indoor, outdoor, night — to engage in automatic scene detection and tweaking of the camera settings appropriately. Zeroth also amplifies face detection that most modern smartphones support with face recognition. Yes, it can see who is in the photo, not just that there are people in the photo.

The last big new announcement was the new Snapdragon 820 processor. Aberle teased the new chipset, which will include a custom Kryo CPU and a "leading" LinFET process (though they would not comment on what process they're using — Samsung's up to 14nm at this point). The new processor isn't expected to start sampling to manufacturers until the second half of 2015, so it'll probably be a while before we start seeing Snapdragon 820 smartphones and tablets start shipping.