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""With the ability to learn from emerging patterns and discover new correlations, Watson's cognitive capabilities hold enormous potential in Africa - helping it to achieve in the next two decades what today's developed markets have achieved over two centuries," Kamal Bhattacharya, the director of IBM's Research - Africa, said in a news release."

""A full inbox is a constant reminder of what we have not done and can impact our sense of accomplishment," Lukins says. "Inbox Zero is a powerful strategy we can implement to increase our sense of control about our workflow. Each time we achieve a task, we receive a hit of dopamine that is physically reinforcing, and [we] feel the psychological relief of achievement.""

"In a simulated test staged by the US military, an air force drone controlled by AI killed its operator to prevent it from interfering with its efforts to achieve its mission, an official said last month. AI used "highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal" in the simulated test, said Col Tucker 'Cinco' Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the US air force, during the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May. Hamilton described a simulated test in which a drone powered by artificial intelligence was advised to destroy enemy's air defense systems, and attacked anyone who interfered with that order."

"Google's neural networks have achieved the dream of CSI viewers everywhere: the company has revealed a new AI system capable of "enhancing" an eight-pixel square image, increasing the resolution 16-fold and effectively restoring lost data. The neural network could be used to increase the resolution of blurred or pixelated faces, in a way previously thought impossible; a similar system was demonstrated for enhancing images of bedrooms, again creating a 32x32 pixel image from an 8x8 one."

"DeepCoder uses a technique called program synthesis: creating new programs by piecing together lines of code taken from existing software - just like a programmer might. Given a list of inputs and outputs for each code fragment, DeepCoder learned which pieces of code were needed to achieve the desired result overall. "It could allow non-coders to simply describe an idea for a program and let the system build it""

"Jaron Lanier, the author and inventor of the concept of virtual reality, warned that digital infrastructure was moving beyond human control. He said: "When you try to achieve great scale with automation and the automation exceeds the boundaries of human oversight, there is going to be failure. That goes for governments, for consumer companies, for Google, or a big insurance company. It is infuriating because it is driven by unreasonable greed. In many cases, the systems that tend to fail, fail because of an attempt to make them run automatically with a minimal amount of human oversight.""

"Writing about Artificial Intelligence is a challenge. By and large, there are two directions to take when discussing the subject: focus on the truly remarkable achievements of the technology or dwell on the dangers of what could happen if machines reach a level of Sentient AI, in which self-aware machines reach human level intelligence). "

"A new artificial intelligence (AI) program recreated the periodic table of elements in just a few hours. It took nearly a century of trial and error for human scientists to organize the periodic table of elements, arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements in chemistry, into its current form."

Ahhh ITGS group - a great discussion on the evoting problem would have been perfect for your Paper 2. "Remember: all of these principles of security, anonymity and verifiability have to be achieved in an understandable way. If they can't be then you get the opportunity for losers to claim fraud, and their supporters to believe them."

""What is emerging is that [Aadhaar] is being used to create a panopticon, a centralized database that's linked to every aspect of our lives - finances, travel, birth, deaths, marriage, education, employment, health, etc.," Reetika Khera, an Indian economist and social scientist, told VICE News. Security concerns have plagued the system for years, but in recent weeks criticism has grown deafeningly loud. Earlier this month, as part of the Supreme Court case on privacy, an activist's freedom of information request suggested that foreign firms were being given "full access" to the classified data - including fingerprints and iris scans."

"With this BCI, our study participant, whose hand was paralysed from spinal cord injury, achieved typing speeds of 90 characters per minute with 94.1% raw accuracy online, and greater than 99% accuracy offline with a general-purpose autocorrect."

"What if this isn't just a one-off case of a popular professor dying. With so many classes online, why wouldn't universities just lay off any professor with a body of recorded lectures? We already know that tenure is harder to achieve every year, and schools are relying more and more on adjunct professors who teach a couple of classes on yearly contracts with no benefits. This scheme could save schools even more money! Of course, tuition will remain the same. One prof in the Twitter thread saw this possibility already."

""But this is the lead, and I think it's going to be a very, very important game changer for our country. It will be a pivotal battle in the defense of the first amendment and, in the end, I am confident that we will achieve a historic victory for American freedom and at the same time, freedom of speech." The lawsuit faces tough odds. Under a law known as Section 230, internet companies are generally allowed to moderate their content by removing posts that, for instance, are obscene or violate the services' own standards, so long as they are acting in "good faith"."

"LeCun argues that even self-supervised learning and learnings from neurobiology won't be enough to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), or the hypothetical intelligence of a machine with the capacity to understand or learn from any task. That's because intelligence - even human intelligence - is very specialized, he says. "AGI does not exist - there is no such thing as general intelligence," said LeCun. "We can talk about rat-level intelligence, cat-level intelligence, dog-level intelligence, or human-level intelligence, but not artificial general intelligence.""

"The researchers suggest guidelines for efficient regulations, such that AVs can cooperate and significantly enhance traffic flow even when fewer than 5% of the vehicles on the road are autonomous, as seen in the accompanying image. In their article, the researchers describe how AVs should behave on a freeway in order to self-organize into groups that split the traffic flow into controllable clusters. It was observed that it takes less than two minutes to achieve self-organized high-speed, greener and safer traffic flow when starting from congested traffic."

"Growth, then, is the animating ideal behind the platforms these companies build, and 'persuasive technology' is the means of achieving this. The research this technology is built on draws on everything from dopamine studies to behavioural psychology and addiction analysis. Features galore have emerged to keep our attention, from the endless scroll to dark patterns, but one is more important than all others, according to Fisher: recommendation algorithms."

"In Skinner's studies, lab rats were subjected alternately to electric shocks and treats to achieve a change in response. On social media, he says, we experience something similar. "I believe I see that people who are subject to operant conditioning online, meaning subjected to pleasant or unpleasant experiences." Approval, disapproval or being ignored, such techniques can be manipulated online as part of what is euphemistically called "engagement" and the creation of addictive patterns for individuals and then - by proxy - eventually whole societies."

"It forecast 14 earthquakes within a 200-mile area of the estimated epicenter and also made a very accurate forecast regarding their intensity, a report on the university's website said. It failed to warn of just one earthquake and gave eight false predictions. The research team trained the AI to detect statistical bumps in real-time seismic data that the research team had paired with previous earthquakes, the report explained. Once trained, the AI monitored for signs of approaching earthquakes. "Predicting earthquakes is the holy grail," said Sergey Fomel, a professor at UT's Bureau of Economic Geology and a member of the research team, adding: "What we achieved tells us that what we thought was an impossible problem is solvable in principle.""

"ns Work in Progress It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber Test scores have been falling for years-even before the pandemic. By Derek Thompson A student looking at their phone Darrell Eager / Gallery Stock December 19, 2023 Saved Stories This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America's biggest problems. Sign up here. For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers' phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it's systematically reducing student achievement. I hadn't quite believed that last argument-until now."