Standing in a wood-paneled room at the University of Oxford, surrounded by her artwork, Ai-Da looks out at her creations. “I want people to know that our times are powerful times,” she says slowly, pausing between sentences. Like many artists, she wants her work to promote discussion. And yet unlike other artists, Ai-Da tells us with a blank expression and glassy eyes that only blink occasionally, she does not have consciousness, thoughts and feelings. At least, not yet.
Ai-Da’s creators bill her as the world’s first robot artist, and she’s the latest AI innovation to blur the boundary between machine and artist; a vision of the future suddenly becoming part of our present. She has a robotic arm system and human-like features, is equipped with facial recognition technology and is powered with artificial intelligence. She is able to analyze an image in front of her, which feeds into an algorithm to dictate the movement of her arm, enabling her to produce sketches. Her goal is creativity. Read More
Daily Archives: June 19, 2019
Google Turns to Retro Cryptography to Keep Datasets Private
Certain studies require sensitive datasets: the relationship between nutritious school lunch and student health, the effectiveness of salary equity initiatives, and so on. Valuable insights require navigating a minefield of private, personal information. Now, after years of work, cryptographers and data scientists at Google have come up with a technique to enable this “multi-party computation” without exposing information to anyone who didn’t already have it.
Today Google will release an open source cryptographic tool known as Private Join and Compute. It facilitates the process of joining numeric columns from different datasets to calculate a sum, count, or average on data that is encrypted and unreadable during its entire mathematical journey. Only the results of the computation can be decrypted and viewed by all parties, meaning that you only get the results, not the data you didn’t already own. Read More
How not to prevent a cyber war with Russia
In the short span of years in which the threat of cyberwar has loomed, no one has quite figured out how to prevent one. As state-sponsored hackers find new ways to inflict disruption and paralysis on one another, that arms race has proven far easier to accelerate than to slow down. But security wonks tend to agree, at least, that there’s one way not to prevent a cyberwar: launching a preemptive or disproportionate cyberattack on an opponent’s civilian infrastructure. As the Trump administration increasingly beats its cyberwar drum, some former national security officials and analysts warn that even threatening that sort of attack could do far more to escalate a coming cyberwar than to deter it. Read More
The fourth Industrial revolution emerges from AI and the Internet of Things
Big data, analytics, and machine learning are starting to feel like anonymous business words, but they’re not just overused abstract concepts—those buzzwords represent huge changes in much of the technology we deal with in our daily lives. Some of those changes have been for the better, making our interaction with machines and information more natural and more powerful. Others have helped companies tap into consumers’ relationships, behaviors, locations and innermost thoughts in powerful and often disturbing ways. And the technologies have left a mark on everything from our highways to our homes. Read More
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