Information Science – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Jun 26
2019

Retailers Are Judging Consumers

China isn’t the only country with a draconian “social credit score” system — there’s one quite a bit like it operating in the U.S. Except that it’s being run by American businesses, not the government.

There’s plenty of evidence that retailers have been using a technique called “surveillance scoring” for decades in which consumers are given a secret score by an algorithm to give them a different price — but for the same goods and services.

But the practice might be illegal after all: a California nonprofit called Consumer Education Foundation (CEF) filed a petition yesterday asking for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into the shady practice.

Jun 24
2019

Is artificial consciousness the solution to AI?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging field of computer programming that is already changing the way we interact online and in real life, but the term ‘intelligence’ has been poorly defined. Rather than focusing on smarts, researchers should be looking at the implications and viability of artificial consciousness as that’s the real driver behind intelligent decisions.

Consciousness rather than intelligence should be the true measure of AI. At the moment, despite all our efforts, there’s none.

Significant advances have been made in the field of AI over the past decade, in particular with machine learning, but artificial intelligence itself remains elusive. Instead, what we have is artificial serfs—computers with the ability to trawl through billions of interactions and arrive at conclusions, exposing trends and providing recommendations, but they’re blind to any real intelligence. What’s needed is artificial awareness.

Continue reading “Is artificial consciousness the solution to AI?” | >

Jun 23
2019

New deepfake algorithm allows you to text-edit the words of a speaker in a video

It is now possible to take a talking-head style video, and add, delete or edit the speaker’s words as simply as you’d edit text in a word processor. A new deepfake algorithm can process the audio and video into a new file in which the speaker says more or less whatever you want them to.

Jun 22
2019

An AI “Vaccine” Can Block Adversarial Attacks

For as smart as artificial intelligence systems seem to get, they’re still easily confused by hackers who launch so-called adversarial attacks — cyberattacks that trick algorithms into misinterpreting their training data, sometimes to disastrous ends.

In order to bolster AI’s defenses from these dangerous hacks, scientists at the Australian research agency CSIRO say in a press release they’ve created a sort of AI “vaccine” that trains algorithms on weak adversaries so they’re better prepared for the real thing — not entirely unlike how vaccines expose our immune systems to inert viruses so they can fight off infections in the future.

Jun 21
2019

Researchers demonstrate new path to reliable quantum computation

Researchers at the University of Chicago published a novel technique for improving the reliability of quantum computers by accessing higher energy levels than traditionally considered. Most prior work in quantum computation deals with “qubits,” the quantum analogue of binary bits that encode either zero or one. The new work instead leverages “qutrits,” quantum analogues of three-level trits capable of representing zero, one or two.

The UChicago group worked alongside researchers based at Duke University. Both groups are part of the EPiQC (Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computation) collaboration, an NSF Expedition in Computing. EPiQC’s interdisciplinary research spans from algorithm and software development to architecture and hardware design, with the ultimate goal of more quickly realizing the enormous potential of quantum computing for scientific discovery and computing innovation.

Jun 20
2019

Quantum Computing for English Majors

Poet who discovered Shor’s algorithm answers questions about quantum computers and other mysteries.

Jun 20
2019

Researchers develop ‘vaccine’ against attacks on machine learning

Researchers from CSIRO’s Data61, the data and digital specialist arm of Australia’s national science agency, have developed a world-first set of techniques to effectively ‘vaccinate’ algorithms against adversarial attacks, a significant advancement in machine learning research.

Jun 14
2019

DNA could store all of the world’s data in one room

New algorithm delivers the highest-ever density for large-scale data storage.

Jun 14
2019

A Data Storage Revolution? DNA Can Store Near Limitless Data in Almost Zero Space

In the age of big data, we are quickly producing far more digital information than we can possibly store.

Last year, $20 billion was spent on new data centers in the US alone, doubling the capital expenditure on data center infrastructure from 2016.

And even with skyrocketing investment in data storage, corporations and the public sector are falling behind.

Jun 13
2019

Terrifying AI Matches DNA to Facial Recognition Databases

Cops would love to have a system that uses DNA from a crime scene to generate a picture of a suspect’s face, but that tech is still restricted to science fiction.

That technology may never exist, but a team of Belgian and American engineers just developed something similar. Using what they know about how DNA shapes the human face, the researchers built an algorithm that scans through a database of images and selects the faces that could be linked to the DNA found at a crime scene, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications — a powerful crime-fighting tool, but also a terrifying new way to subvert privacy.