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"Could we soon send emails 'telepathically'? Scientist transmits message into the mind of a colleague 5,000 miles away using brain waves"

"Analysis - The need for businesses to adapt to the workplace demands of the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies, with clear implications for jobs and workers. But just how much employees worry about the threat of automation - and how real those fears are - can have implications for workplaces beyond the technological change itself. Our new research examined how employees feel about the introduction of "robotic process automation" (RPA) to the workplace. We also looked at how the willingness to embrace these new technologies influenced employees' assessment of the software bots and their work."

""The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains," said researcher Andrea Stocco, assistant professor in psychology at the University of Washington."

"At Imperial College London, Murray Shanahan and colleagues are working on a way around this problem using an old, unfashionable technique called symbolic AI. "Basically this meant an engineer labelled everything for the AI," says Shanahan. His idea is to combine this with modern machine learning. Symbolic AI never took off, because manually describing everything quickly proved overwhelming. Modern AI has overcome that problem by using neural networks, which learn their own representations of the world around them. "They decide what is salient," says Marta Garnelo, also at Imperial College."

"In Neural Photo Editing With Introspective Adversarial Networks, a group of University of Edinburgh engineers and a private research colleague describe a method for using "introspective adversarial networks" to edit images in realtime, which they demonstrate in an open project called "Neural Photo Editor" that "enhances" photos by predicting what should be under your brush."

""The person on the other line said, 'unplug your Alexa devices right now,'" Danielle told KIRO. "'You're being hacked.'" The couple had reportedly placed Amazon devices in every room of their house to control the heat, lights, and security system. All of the gadgets were pulled out after their colleague proved they had received the unauthorized recording."

"A group of current and former contractors who worked for years at the social network's Berlin-based moderation centres has reported witnessing colleagues become "addicted" to graphic content and hoarding ever more extreme examples for a personal collection. They also said others were pushed towards the far right by the amount of hate speech and fake news they read every day."

"Instead, the new work shows our brains rely on the kind of maths that an algorithm might use to perform the task. In fact, Tsao and her colleague, Steven Le Chang, stumbled on their discovery while working on computer vision. The pair had initially set themselves the challenge of coming up with a way of reliably converting facial images into a numerical representation."

"Brain scans, however, are quite telling, especially when analyzed with an algorithm, Brent and his colleagues discovered. "We're trying to figure out what's going on in somebody's brain when they're thinking about suicide," says Brent.  These scans, taken using fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, show that strong words such as 'death,' 'trouble,' 'carefree,' and 'praise,' trigger different patterns of brain activity in people who are suicidal, compared with people who are not. That means that people at risk of suicide think about those concepts differently than everyone else-evidenced by the levels and patterns of brain activity, or neural signatures."

"Wong opened the bag later that day and took her debit card from her purse. He then used it to top up his ez-link card with S$100 through the PayWave function at Somerset MRT Station."

"But users began to spot flaws in the feature over the weekend. The first to highlight the issue was PhD student Colin Madland, who discovered the issue while highlighting a different racial bias in the video-conference software Zoom. When Madland, who is white, posted an image of himself and a black colleague who had been erased from a Zoom call after its algorithm failed to recognise his face, Twitter automatically cropped the image to only show Madland."

"What Hamilton and his colleagues found surprising was that this approach could also be applied to helping find problems with existing deep networks, related to the surge of "deepfakes" that have recently cropped up. They applied this data structure to find areas where probabilistic models, such as the generative adversarial networks (GANs) that are often used to create deepfakes, break down. They coined these problematic areas "blind spots," and note that they give us insight into how GANs can be biased. Such blind spots further show that GANs struggle to represent particular areas of a dataset, even if most of their fakes can fool a human. "

"The long-running issues of traceability, transparency and enforcement were colourfully illustrated in September 2017 when a group of investigators from the Basel Action Network (BAN) - a non-for-profit group that monitors compliance with the 1989 United Nations Basel Convention on the trade of hazardous wastes - attempted to learn where exactly Australia's e-waste was going. The group fitted 35 old CRT televisions, LED monitors and printers with GPS devices of a special make. Out of this sample the team quickly focused on the fate of three LCD screens dropped at Officeworks storefronts around the Brisbane metro area. Hayley Palmer, BAN's chief operating officer, was on the team that followed where they went afterwards. As the signals left the country, Palmer, her nine-month-old and a colleague tracked the monitors to a warehouse in Hong Kong and then on to an illegal dump-yard in a rural part of Thailand where they talked their way inside."

"One of the beautiful things about the internet is the sheer amount of knowledge it contains: if you're interested in any topic, you can find a surfeit of information about it in an instant. But this can also have a downside. Search engines can end perpetuating bias, for example. And research by Adrian Ward from the University of Texas, Austin suggests that we can mistake information we've searched for as our own knowledge. Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Ward and colleagues have found that sharing information online also makes us feel that our knowledge has increased - even if we haven't read it."

"A new online study in Scientific Reports finds that drivers of these vehicles are assigned most of the blame for crashes which, the team argues, they can't reasonably avoid. This work is important because, as Niek Beckers at Delft University of Technology and colleagues point out, public opinion on this matter could shape future vehicle design and also legislation."

"The technology certainly has its flaws. While the system is theoretically designed not to cross some moral red lines - it's adamant that Hitler was bad - it's not difficult to trick the AI into sharing advice on how to engage in all sorts of evil and nefarious activities, particularly if you tell the chatbot that it's writing fiction. The system, like other AI models, can also say biased and offensive things. As my colleague Sigal Samuel has explained, an earlier version of GPT generated extremely Islamophobic content, and also produced some pretty concerning talking points about the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in China."

" A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company's chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police. The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday. "(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake," senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city's public broadcaster RTHK. Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company's UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said."