The intersection between cybersecurity and artificial intelligence is ripe for serious study from a variety of angles. There are purely technical aspects of great importance, such as how artificial intelligence changes the discovery of software vulnerabilities useful for hacking computer systems and the capacity for defenders to detect malicious code within their networks. Yet many of these technical questions have already been well-specified and are the subject of promising inquiries. This research agenda instead examines a different angle, one of national security.
A national security-driven research agenda is informed by technical evidence, but not limited by it. It considers how the balance of technical facts shapes questions likely to matter to national security policymakers and scholars who would otherwise overlook the technology. More generally, it offers policymakers a set of questions—and, someday, answers—that they should consider, but that are probably unfamiliar to them. Read More
Monthly Archives: May 2020
Velocity is the Most Dangerous Metric for Dev Teams
Agile Velocity is arguably the most popular software development metric in the world. It’s a very powerful metric when used for individual team sprint capacity planning. And there are two things we know about power… it comes with great responsibility and it corrupts. Read More
Corporate Tools for GPU Access and Software Development
Is the Brain a Useful Model for Artificial Intelligence?
IN THE SUMMER of 2009, the Israeli neuroscientist Henry Markram strode onto the TED stage in Oxford, England, and made an immodest proposal: Within a decade, he said, he and his colleagues would build a complete simulation of the human brain inside a supercomputer. They’d already spent years mapping the cells in the neocortex, the supposed seat of thought and perception. “It’s a bit like going and cataloging a piece of the rain forest,” Markram explained. “How many trees does it have? What shapes are the trees?” Now his team would create a virtual rain forest in silicon, from which they hoped artificial intelligence would organically emerge. If all went well, he quipped, perhaps the simulated brain would give a follow-up TED talk, beamed in by hologram. …
What computer scientists and neuroscientists are after is a universal theory of intelligence—a set of principles that holds true both in tissue and in silicon. What they have instead is a muddle of details. Read More
An AI future set to take over post-Covid world
Rabindranath Tagore once said, “Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark”. The darkness that looms over the world at this moment is the curse of the COVID-19 pandemic, while the bird of human freedom finds itself caged under lockdown, unable to fly. Enthused by the beacon of hope, human beings will soon start picking up the pieces of a shared future for humanity, but perhaps, it will only be to find a new, unfamiliar world order with far-reaching consequences for us that transcend society, politics and economy.
Crucially, a technology that had till now been crawling — or at best, walking slowly — will now start sprinting. In fact, a paradigm shift in the economic relationship of mankind is going to be witnessed in the form of accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the modes of production of goods and services. — Read More
Hydras and IPFS: A Decentralised Playground for Malware
Modern malware can take various forms, and has reached a very high level of sophistication in terms of its penetration, persistence, communication and hiding capabilities. The use of cryptography, and of covert communication channels over public and widely used protocols and services, is becoming a norm. In this work, we start by introducing Resource Identifier Generation Algorithms. These are an extension of a well-known mechanism called Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA), which are frequently employed by cybercriminals for bot management and communication. Our extension allows, beyond DNS, the use of other protocols. More concretely, we showcase the exploitation of the InterPlanetary file system (IPFS). This is a solution for the “permanent web”, which enjoys a steadily growing community interest and adoption. The IPFS is, in addition, one of the most prominent solutions for blockchain storage. We go beyond the straightforward case of using the IPFS for hosting malicious content, and explore ways in which a botmaster could employ it, to manage her bots, validating our findings experimentally. Finally, we discuss the advantages of our approach for malware authors, its efficacy and highlight its extensibility for other distributed storage services. Read More
#cyber, #roboticsNeuro-symbolic AI seen as evolution of artificial intelligence
Symbolic AI algorithms have played an important role in AI’s history, but they face challenges in learning on their own. After IBM Watson used symbolic reasoning to beat Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings at Jeopardy in 2011, the technology has been eclipsed by neural networks trained by deep learning.
The power of neural networks is that they help automate the process of generating models of the world. This has led to several significant milestones in artificial intelligence, giving rise to deep learning models that, for example, could beat humans in progressively complex games, including Go and StarCraft. But it can be challenging to reuse these deep learning models or extend them to new domains. Read More
New Artificial Intelligence Tools Will Revolutionize The Visual Effects Industry!
Renowned Visual Effects industry veteran Helena Packer, currently marking her 30th anniversary year working within the VFX arena, is currently working to enhance the next era of the visual effects field by developing new tools which will utilize the powerful advancements in digital technologies offered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Read More
Is Augmented Intelligence The Best Perspective On AI?
When people think about artificial intelligence, they often think about what intelligence machines can do on their own, without human interaction. However. some of the most powerful and useful AI systems are those that help or augment human capability. The idea of AI systems that augment human ability is known as augmented intelligence. On a recent AI Today Podcast, Professor Tom Davenport from Babson College, senior adviser to Deloitte’s Analytics and AI practices, and fellow of MIT initiative for digital economy shared his perspectives on the power of AI as applied to augmented intelligence. Read More
Artificial Intelligence Outperforms Human Intel Analysts In a Key Area
A Defense Intelligence Agency experiment shows AI and humans have different risk tolerances when data is scarce.
In the 1983 movie WarGames, the world is brought to the edge of nuclear destruction when a military computer using artificial intelligence interprets false data as an imminent Soviet missile strike. Its human overseers in the Defense Department, unsure whether the data is real, can’t convince the AI that it may be wrong. A recent finding from the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, suggests that in a real situation where humans and AI were looking at enemy activity, those positions would be reversed.
Artificial intelligence can actually be more cautious than humans about its conclusions in situations when data is limited. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 