Group items tagged

"Frances Haugen: When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other, the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world. 'Ethnic violence' including Myanmar in 2018 when the military used Facebook to launch a genocide. "

"The system is called as"Intelligent Classroom Behavior Management System" and it is being used at Hangzhou No. 11 High School. With scanning facial expressions the system has the ability to even analysis six types of behaviors by the students such as standing up, reading, writing, hand raising, listening to the teacher, and leaning on the desk."

"The Purdue researchers have created Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication (EQS-HBC) which uses low-frequency, carrier-less broadband transmission, and so keeps the signal almost entirely within the human body. That means data from pacemakers and other implantable medical devices would only be readable a handful of centimetres outside the wearer."

"Increasing numbers of implantable medical devices are now gaining internet connectivity, giving doctors the ability to monitor patients health remotely, and even update the devices to tweak a treatment plan. Unfortunately, that flexibility offers a way for hackers to hijack that hardware, and even potentially make changes to the way the devices work. While so far no attacks have been successful, proof-of-concept attacks have been available for years"

"Costco customers at four of the retailer's Chicago-area warehouses may have had their payment information compromised after employees discovered five card-skimming devices during routine PIN pad inspections at the end of August. "We promptly removed the skimmers, notified law enforcement, and engaged a forensics firm to analyze the devices," A Costco spokesperson told FOX Business in a statement. "It appears that these skimmers had the ability to capture information on the magnetic stripe of a payment card, including name, card number, expiration date, and CVV.""

"PhotoGuard works by altering select pixels in an image such that they will disrupt an AI's ability to understand what the image is. Those "perturbations," as the research team refers to them, are invisible to the human eye but easily readable by machines. The "encoder" attack method of introducing these artifacts targets the algorithmic model's latent representation of the target image - the complex mathematics that describes the position and color of every pixel in an image - essentially preventing the AI from understanding what it is looking at."

"Something that a lot of mourners find disconcerting is when they receive automated prompts from social networking platforms telling them to friend somebody who has died, or connect with their dead spouse. Some platforms such as Twitter [now known as X] and TikTok lack a mechanism to treat a profile as being that of a dead person. Or, as in the case of LinkedIn, a mechanism exists but most people are not aware of it or don't use it. And while most platforms do offer an ability to download your archive, which you can then bequeath, it is far from straightforward. These products emanate from people who haven't had to think too much about the messiness of human existence Platforms can also delete dormant accounts, which can have repercussions. And there are also no guarantees how long any of the platforms we participate in will survive. That death hasn't been baked into tech platforms to begin with is a sign of a particular kind of privilege: these products emanate from people who haven't had to think too much about the messiness of human existence."

"Our reliance on their information is now a matter of life and death. Misinformation online has real-world consequences. In the developing world, a hoax claimed India had banned coronavirus social posts, and in the US, 13 percent of people thought coronavirus was a hoax during the critical weeks where earlier notification to shelter-in-place would have saved thousands of lives. Tech platforms have an ability through their persuasive techniques and microtargeting to influence the behavior of society in ways traditional media can't. "

"It shows rapid technological advances are allowing governments and political actors to distort reality, and fake content is easier to publish than ever before. "The difference is being blurred between true and false, real and artificial, facts and artifices, jeopardising the right to information," the report said. "The unprecedented ability to tamper with content is being used to undermine those who embody quality journalism and weaken journalism itself." Artificial intelligence was "wreaking further havoc on the media world", the report said, with AI tools "digesting content and regurgitating it in the form of syntheses that flout the principles of rigour and reliability". This is not just written AI content but visual, too. High-definition images that appear to show real people can be generated in seconds."

"Now researchers have taken a step forward by combining fMRI's ability to monitor neural activity with the predictive power of artificial intelligence language models. The hybrid technology has resulted in a decoder that can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person listened to or imagined telling in the scanner. The decoder could even guess the story behind a short film that someone watched in the scanner, though with less accuracy."

"This is the broad goal of a new field known as embodied AI, and Li's not the only one embracing it. It overlaps with robotics, since robots can be the physical equivalent of embodied AI agents in the real world, and reinforcement learning - which has always trained an interactive agent to learn using long-term rewards as incentive. But Li and others think embodied AI could power a major shift from machines learning straightforward abilities, like recognizing images, to learning how to perform complex humanlike tasks with multiple steps, such as making an omelet."

"Perkins' report offers a dizzying list of data the TikTok app can access while it's running, including the device location, calendar, contacts, other running applications, wi-fi networks, phone number and even the SIM card serial number. He concludes: For the TikTok application to function properly, most of the access and device data collection is not required. This leads us to believe that the only reason this information has been gathered is for data harvesting. It is also notable that the device only needs to ask the user for permission to perform each of these actions once and then follow the user's preferences. The application however has a culture of persistent access or continuously asking for a decision reversal by the user. The hourly checking of location is also unnecessary. Finally, device mapping, external storage access, contacts and third-party applications data collection allows TikTok the ability to reimage the phone in the likeness of the original device."

"Artificial Intelligence has the ability to perform illegal financial trades and cover it up, new research suggests. In a demonstration at the UK's AI safety summit, a bot used made-up insider information to make an "illegal" purchase of stocks without telling the firm. When asked if it had used insider trading, it denied the fact. Insider trading refers to when confidential company information is used to make trading decisions. Firms and individuals are only allowed to use publicly-available information when buying or selling stocks. "

"There's no concrete evidence of long-term harm to our children caused by using our phones around them, but there's enough evidence of potential short-term effects that it makes sense to be mindful of it. Some amount of phone use around our kids is probably okay, but if we're absorbed in our devices in a way that interferes with our ability to connect with and respond to them, this can become a problem. Also, let's be kind to ourselves."

"A fake, AI-generated image of Pope Francis stepping out in a stylish white puffer jacket and bejewelled crucifix racked up millions of views over the weekend - with many mistaking it for a real image. Experts fear the rapidly developing technology behind the image could soon undermine our ability to distinguish fake photos, which can be generated in seconds, from reality."

"Two high-ranking "admins" - volunteer administrators with privileged access to Wikipedia, including the ability to edit fully protected pages - have been imprisoned since they were arrested on the same day in September 2020, the two bodies added. The arrests appeared to be part of a "crackdown on Wikipedia admins in the country", Dawn and Smex said, naming the two people imprisoned as Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani."

"Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency. Though I don't have a certain answer to this question, I am skeptical. AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool's ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI's guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs' tendency to "hallucinate" and confabulate, there's an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a "human in the loop" to carefully review their judgments. In other words, an AI-supported radiologist should spend exactly the same amount of time considering your X-ray, and then see if the AI agrees with their judgment, and, if not, they should take a closer look. AI should make radiology more expensive, in order to make it more accurate. But that's not the AI business model. AI pitchmen are explicit on this score: The purpose of AI, the source of its value, is its capacity to increase productivity, which is to say, it should allow workers to do more, which will allow their bosses to fire some of them, or get each one to do more work in the same time, or both. The entire investor case for AI is "companies will buy our products so they can do more with less." It's not "business custom­ers will buy our products so their products will cost more to make, but will be of higher quality.""

" Virtual reality games helping UK's deaf children to understand speech Scientists have found that immersing kids in computer games can train their brains to localise sounds better Robin McKie Science Editor Sat 25 May 2024 13.00 BST Share Scientists have recruited an unusual ally in their efforts to help children overcome profound deafness. They are using computer games to boost the children's ability to localise sounds and understand speech. The project is known as Bears - for Both Ears - and it is aimed at youngsters who have been given twin cochlea implants because they were born with little or no hearing. "These are children who are profoundly deaf," said audio engineer Lorenzo Picinali, a scientist on the project from Imperial College London. "They require major interventions to restore their hearing and we have found that computer games can make these much more effective.""

"As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI's benefits while minimizing its harms. As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we'll run out of things to do (even if they don't look like "real jobs" to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games. Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable."

"On a zoomed-out time scale, technological progress follows an exponential curve. Compare how the world looked 15 years ago (no smartphones, really), 150 years ago (no combustion engine, no home electricity), 1,500 years ago (no industrial machines), and 15,000 years ago (no agriculture). The coming change will center around the most impressive of our capabilities: the phenomenal ability to think, create, understand, and reason. To the three great technological revolutions-the agricultural, the industrial, and the computational-we will add a fourth: the AI revolution. This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need, if we as a society manage it responsibly. The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we've made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel. We have already built AI systems that can learn and do useful things. They are still primitive, but the trendlines are clear."

"The tablets are scheduled to be introduced next year, and by 2028, teachers are supposed to be using these AI textbooks for all subjects except music, art, physical education and ethics. The government hasn't shared many details about how it will all work, except that the material is supposed to be customized for different speeds of learning, with teachers using dashboards to monitor how students are doing. In response, more than 50,000 parents have signed a petition demanding that the government focus less on new tech and more on students' overall well-being: "We, as parents, are already encountering many issues at unprecedented levels arising from [our children's] exposure to digital devices." Lee Sun-youn, a mother of two, told FT, "I am worried that too much usage of digital devices could negatively affect their brain development, concentration span and ability to solve problems - they already use smartphones and tablets too much.""