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"The system is designed to solve the an often-ignored problem of 75% of the earth's population, an estimated 4 billion people, who have no address for mailing purposes, making it difficult to open a bank account, get a delivery, or be reached in an emergency."

"And these machines' vulnerabilities to hacking are "terrifying", Sarah Teale, co-director along with Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels, told the Guardian. America's current election infrastructure is, as Kill Chain explains, a prescription for disaster - an outdated, willfully naive system no more prepared for attack than four years ago."

"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.""

"YouTube will rely more on machine learning and less on human reviewers during the coronavirus outbreak. Normally, algorithms detect potentially harmful content and send it to human reviewers for assessment. But these are not normal times, and in an effort to reduce the need for employees and contractors to come into an office, YouTube will allow its automated system to remove some content without human review."

"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."

"As hospitals face a surge in patients and critical equipment shortages stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, they are increasingly becoming the target of hackers who see health care facilities as easy prey. Ransomware attacks, in which hackers lock up a network and demand payment to return access to these systems, have presented a growing threat to hospitals since January. "

"The system uses AI to predict situations before they occur - thus informing on how resources could be better allocated - and to provide insights for better decision-making."

"Raza wasn't the only one in her class who felt concerned about new levels of surveillance. Another student in the class, who did not want to be named, said that in addition to privacy worries, they were concerned that they didn't even have enough RAM to run the Proctorio software. Worse, the tool's facial detection algorithm seemed to struggle to recognize them, so they needed to sit in the full light of the window to better expose the contours of their face, in their view an indication that the system might be biased. "

"The company has revealed the latest evolution of the Captcha (short, sort of, for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which aims to do away with any interruption at all: the new, "invisible reCaptcha" aims to tell whether a given visitor is a robot or not purely by analysing their browsing behaviour. Barring a short wait while the system does its job, a typical human visitor shouldn't have to do anything else to prove they're not a robot."

"But, in fact, civic tech is a real thing, featuring real people, with real technical expertise, trying to hack around every democratic deficiency. They are trying to tackle everything from a sheer lack of easily accessible information to the shortcomings of the first-past-the-post system. "

"The Chinese government is planning on implementing a system that connects citizens' financial, social, political, and legal credit ratings into one big social trustability score. The idea would be that if someone breaks trust in one area, they'd be adversely affected everywhere."

"Facebook has detailed the steps it's taking to get help for people who need it. Which involves using artificial intelligence to "detect posts or live videos where someone might be expressing thoughts of suicide," identifying appropriate first responders, and then employing more people to "review reports of suicide or self harm". The social network has been testing this system in the U.S. for the last month, and "worked with first responders on over 100 wellness checks based on reports we received via our proactive detection efforts." In some cases the local authorities were notified in order to help."

""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."

"Serious security flaws that could let attackers steal sensitive data, including passwords and banking information, have been found in processors designed by Intel, AMD and ARM. The flaws, named Meltdown and Spectre, were discovered by security researchers at Google's Project Zero in conjunction with academic and industry researchers from several countries. Combined they affect virtually every modern computer, including smartphones, tablets and PCs from all vendors and running almost any operating system."

"AI software can now match footage of motorists throwing rubbish to their car's number plate and issue an automatic fine of £90. The first trial of the potentially controversial new system will begin in Maidstone in Kent in a few weeks with other councils expected to follow."

""Having a tamper-proof record-keeping system that can be shared across the vaccine supply chain is always important, but critically so here for the COVID vaccines," Harmon said. Hedera's chief executive believes that decentralized computer networks with hundreds or even thousands of participants can play an important role in other aspects of pandemic management - to combat vaccine counterfeiting, for example, and create unforgeable vaccination certificates."

"Consider abstract art. We've noted that machine learning, in aiming to make an accurate prediction, constructs a high-dimensional feature space that contorts and reconfigures the data representing features of the natural world. Likewise, artists "mash and rip" features of visual reality to create a system of forms, texture, and color that richly represent features of visual experience in an alien way. The subject of representation is abstracted but represented none-the-less. "

"In 2015, a research group fed an AI system called Deep Patient health and medical data from some 700,000 people, and tested whether it could predict diseases. It could, but Deep Patient provides no explanation for the basis of a diagnosis, and the researchers have no idea how it comes to its conclusions. A doctor either can either trust or ignore the computer, but that trust will remain blind."

"It is the first time scientists have created sentences from brain activity linked to handwriting and paves the way for more sophisticated devices to help paralysed people communicate faster and more clearly. The man, known as T5, who is in his 60s and lost practically all movement below his neck after a spinal cord injury in 2007, was able to write 18 words a minute when connected to the system. On individual letters, his "mindwriting" was more than 94% accurate."