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"More than just a poetic metaphor, the butterfly effect says that there are some things that even the most advanced science can never predict. Well, that list of things just got a lot shorter. Scientists from the University of Maryland have used machine learning to predict chaos."

"From our vantage point, this arc from the stocking frames of the Luddites to the Factory Acts makes total sense: a transformative technological change, its adaptation unfettered by regulation, and then the demand for a collective response as the implications of those changes become clearer."

"Research by Imperial College in London and Samsung's AI research center showed how a single photo and audio file can be used to generate a singing video portrait. "

""I don't really care about data privacy because I think it's all an illusion anyway." It's interesting to see how this encounter also reflects the general behavior of a majority of people when it comes to privacy. Although user data has long been a gold mine for companies, would it be more acceptable if they started paying their users in exchange for it?"

"It is in the nature of AI that makers do not, and often cannot, predict what their creations do. We know how to make machines learn. But programmers do not understand completely the knowledge that intelligent computing acquires. If we did, we wouldn't need computers to learn to learn."

"Once it's verified, the transaction's information, plus both your digital signature and your friend's digital signature, are stored in a block alongside many other transactions like it. Once the block is full, it gets a hash, which is a unique code that sort of acts like its nametag. It also stores its position on the chain and the hash of the previous block on the chain. (Here's an example block to illustrate what kind of information is stored there.) "

"Bias in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a popular topic over the last few years as AI-solutions have become more ingrained in our daily lives."

"There are three big challenges in the Internet space that all countries must face in the near future. China's approach to the challenges will impact not only Chinese Internet users, but potentially all Internet users. What interface follows the smart hone, whether it be AR-enabled glasses, foldable screens, or wearable projectors, will not only be influenced by China's substantial Internet-using population, but also by their manufacturing. Privacy, as it relates to online information collecting and sale, has consequences for broader community standards, and there is no one-size fits all approach to this issue. China must engage their own ethicists, community, government and technologists to develop a solution that works for China. Finally, globalization. Most of China's internet success has been within China, but as China begins to consider how it might attract users from outside its borders, it will need to consider dialing back the protections that have held foreign Internet companies at bay."

"The arcane nature of "protein folding", a mind-boggling form of molecular origami, is rarely discussed outside scientific circles, but it is a problem of profound importance. The machinery of biology is built from proteins and it a protein's shape defines its function. Understand how proteins fold up and researchers could usher in a new era of scientific and medical progress."

"The study by US-based thinktank the Technology Policy Institute (TPI) is the first that attempts to quantify the value of online privacy and data. It assessed how much privacy is worth in six countries by looking at the habits of people in the United States, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Argentina."

"Specifically, the question is whether that algorithm is sorting suggestions based on the race of the creator - something TikTok denies it's doing intentionally. But it's another example of the need for more scrutiny into how the app and other social media platforms promote particular creators or content."

"Now, work posted online shows how artificial intelligence (AI) can easily produce accurate emulators that can accelerate simulations across all of science by billions of times."

"But an analysis of the app's code found that it does more than decide in real time whether someone poses a contagion risk; it also shares information with the police, setting "a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides"."

"An AI system developed by Chinese tech company Baidu that uses an infrared sensor and AI to predict people's temperatures is now in use in Beijing's Qinghe Railway Station, according to an email sent to Baidu employees that was shared with VentureBeat."

"Apart from biases in the training databases, it's hard to know how well face-recognition systems actually perform in the real world, in spite of recent gains. Anil Jain, a professor of computer science at Michigan State University who has worked on face recognition for more than thirty years, told me, "Most of the testing on the private venders' products is done in a laboratory environment under controlled settings. In real practice, you're walking around in the streets of New York. It's a cold winter day, you have a scarf around your face, a cap, maybe your coat is pulled up so your chin is partially hidden, the illumination may not be the most favorable, and the camera isn't capturing a frontal view.""

"Where the researchers struck gold was by realising that a large (but not overly large pair of glasses) could act to "change the pixels" even in a real photo. By picking a pair of "geek" frames, with relatively large rims, the researchers were able to obscure about 6.5% of the pixels in any given facial picture. Printing a pattern over those frames then had the effect of manipulating the image."

"As coronavirus threatens to become a global pandemic, everyone's keeping a close eye on how it's spreading across the world. Several organizations have made dashboards to keep track of COVID-19. But now, hackers have found a way to use these dashboards to inject malware into computers."

"Computer scientists and machine learning researchers are tackling the pandemic the way they know how: compiling datasets and building algorithms to learn from them."

"The company, Unacast, went live with its Social Distancing Scoreboard Tuesday. The dashboard, billed as a public health utility, includes a county-by-county breakdown of people's movement patterns. It assigns each county a grade, which Unacast based (at least in part) on how much people are traveling. "

"The computers are connected into a kind of hive mind via a downloadable software, allowing the system to run calculations with greater speed and efficiency than any individual device. This is necessary to do the complex work of simulating how the proteins that make up the novel coronavirus behave and where there could be potential binding sites for drugs to latch on to."