Group items tagged

"In Los Angeles, the theft of computers from a county contractor's office that contained personal data for over 342,000 patients has led to a call for tighter security."

"Insurance is just one area which could benefit from mining patient information in order to acquire the best business outcomes - although at the detriment of the person attempting to get insurance. After all, why would a company agree to hand out a policy to a person whose data suggests has a high risk of a heart attack?"

GREAT ARTICLE ON AI "There is some debate about how soon AI will reach human-level general intelligence-the median year on a survey of hundreds of scientists about when they believed we'd be more likely than not to have reached AGI was 204012-that's only 25 years from now, which doesn't sound that huge until you consider that many of the thinkers in this field think it's likely that the progression from AGI to ASI happens very quickly. Like-this could happen: It takes decades for the first AI system to reach low-level general intelligence, but it finally happens. A computer is able understand the world around it as well as a human four-year-old. Suddenly, within an hour of hitting that milestone, the system pumps out the grand theory of physics that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, something no human has been able to definitively do. 90 minutes after that, the AI has become an ASI, 170,000 times more intelligent than a human."

"Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are costing companies an average of $40,000 (£25,400) per hour, with around half of attacks lasting at least six hours and costing $500,000 (£317,570) per event."

"HTTP/2 is a more modern protocol that essentially speeds web browsing up using new ways of transporting data between the browser and server across the internet. It is backwards compatible with HTTP1.1 and uses most of the same technologies, but it is more efficient and allows servers to respond with more content than was originally requested, removing the need for the user's computer to continually send requests for more information until a website is fully loaded."

"The files were then downloaded through the Bitglass proxy service, in which a unique watermark was applied to each copy, so that the company could track when the data was viewed and/or downloaded from that point forward. The firm used a basic "phishing" technique to entice criminals on the Dark Web. The data had been viewed over 200 times in just a few days, and in 12 days it had received more than 1,000 clicks, and had spread across the globe in 22 different countries, in five different continents."

"What if technology provided the ultimate resolution of this existential crisis by allowing you to plug your brain into a boundless, cognitive melting pot with other humans?"

"The US computer programmer came up with the idea of electronic messages that could be sent from one network to another in 1971. His invention included the ground-breaking use of the @ symbol in email addresses, which is now standard."

"The bill will now allow police to access all web browsing records in specific crime investigations, beyond the illegal websites and communications services specified in the original draft bill. It will extend the use of state remote computer hacking from the security services to the police in cases involving a "threat to life" or missing persons. This can include cases involving "damage to somebody's mental health", but will be restricted to use by the National Crime Agency and a small number of major police forces."

"Apple has warned the UK government that proposals in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to demand technology firms weaken encryption would make the data of millions of law-abiding citizens less secure and make it easier for hackers to "cause chaos"."

"At the heart of the problem that troubles Ming is the training that computer engineers receive and their uncritical faith in AI. Too often, she says, their approach to a problem is to train a neural network on a mass of data and expect the result to work fine. She berates companies for failing to engage with the problem first - applying what is already known about good employees and successful students, for example - before applying the AI."

"His software is not labeled anything as grand as artificial intelligence. It's machine learning, facilitating and extending his own words, his own imagination. At one level, it merely helps him do what fledgling writers have always done - immerse themselves in the works of those they want to emulate. Hunter Thompson, for instance, strived to write in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, so he retyped "The Great Gatsby" several times as a shortcut to that objective."

"Hassabis was a child chess prodigy, who learned the game aged four and was able to beat his dad three weeks later - indeed, when he started playing competitively he was so small he had to bring a pillow with him to reach the board - and became a strong player. Yet in AlphaZero's case there was no human input, other than telling it the rules of each game. "In a matter of a few hours it was superhuman," Hassabis says proudly."

"The researchers, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, and Timo Aila, came up with a new way of constructing a generative adversarial network, or GAN. GANs employ two dueling neural networks to train a computer to learn the nature of a data set well enough to generate convincing fakes. When applied to images, this provides a way to generate often highly realistic fakery. The same Nvidia researchers have previously used the technique to create artificial celebrities (read our profile of the inventor of GANs, Ian Goodfellow)."

" Critics have pointed out that the old computing adage "garbage in, garbage out" also applies to ML. If the data from which a machine "learns" is biased, then the outputs will reflect those biases. And this could become generalised: we may have created a technology that - however good it is at recommending films you might like - may actually morph into a powerful amplifier of social, economic and cultural inequalities."

"Big data and artificial intelligence are some of today's most popular buzzwords. Both are promised to help deliver insights that were previously too complex for computer systems to calculate. With examples ranging from personalised recommendation systems to automatic facial analyses, user-generated data is now analysed by algorithms to identify patterns and predict outcomes. And the common view is that these developments will have a positive impact on society."