AI Not Makes "Fake News" Harder to Spot

An aspect of artificial intelligence that’s sometimes overlooked is just how good it is at creating fake audio and video that’s difficult to distinguish from reality. The advent of Photoshop got us doubting our eyes, but what happens when we can’t rely on our other senses? The latest example of AI’s audiovisual magic comes from the University of Washington, where researchers have created a new tool that takes audio files, converts them into realistic mouth movements, and then grafts those movements onto existing video. The end-result is a video of someone saying something they didn’t.

The system was designed by researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Max-Planck-Institude for Informatics, and Stanford University. The same team worked on a similar facial expression transfer project last year, but that involved controlling the expressions of someone in the same room. This time they're doing it with YouTube videos. First, the "target actor" (that's Bush, Trump, Putin, and Obama) is rendered with a neutral expression. Then, the expressions of the source actor (that's the other guy) are captured via webcam, and those expressions control the animation in the YouTube video.

Artificial intelligence could make fake news even harder to spot pic.twitter.com/wq6G68V6H3

— The Verge (@verge) September 25, 2017

Credits:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15957844/ai-fake-video-audio-speech-obama

Two UW Undergrads DevelopsGloves to Translate SIgn Language

Two University of Washington undergraduates have won a $10,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for gloves that can translate sign language into text or speech. Their invention, “SignAloud,” is a pair of gloves that can recognize hand gestures that correspond to words and phrases in American Sign

Language. Each glove contains sensors that record hand position and movement and send data wirelessly via Bluetooth to a central computer. The computer looks at the gesture data through various sequential statistical regressions, similar to a neural network. If the data match a gesture, then the associated word or phrase is spoken through a speaker.

They honed their prototype in the UW CoMotion MakerSpace — a campus space that offers communal tools and equipment and opportunities for students to tinker, create and innovate. For Azodi and Pryor, that meant finding a way to translate American Sign Language into a verbal form instantaneously and in an ergonomic fashion. Pryor and Azodi’s first target audience is the deaf and hard-of-hearing community and those interested in learning and working with American Sign Language. But the gloves could also be commercialized for use in other fields, including medical technology to monitor stroke patients during rehabilitation, gesture control and enhanced dexterity in virtual reality.

Click here for the video.

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Avast Anti-virus Software Hacked. Contains Malware

A popular PC-cleaning software used by over 130 million people put users at risk after hackers were able to insert malware into legitimate downloads. Piriform's CCleaner, owned by antivirus provider Avast, was found to be hosting a "multi-stage malware payload" that could install ransomware or keyloggers and further infect target computers on command. According to Avast, around 2.27 million people ran the affected software, which was delivered via a hacked server.

The malware sent hackers encrypted information including the name of the infected computer, a list of installed software, and running processes. It’s unclear what the hackers wanted to do with the computers. The malicious program was slipped into legitimate software called CCleaner, which cleans up junk programs and advertising cookies to speed up devices. CCleaner is the main product made by London’s Piriform, which was bought in July by Prague-based Avast, one of the world’s largest computer security vendors. At the time of the acquisition, the company said 130 million people used CCleaner.



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Ford Designs Cars With Microsoft Hololens

Ford is making cars using Microsoft’s HoloLens mixed reality headset, as part of a new test project the automaker is rolling out globally. The mixed reality design trial allows for rapid prototyping in a virtual environment, instead of having to create new physical models to see what new materials and angles will look like on a final design. Old clay models aren’t going the way of the dodo – using HoloLens means that designers can combine the physical and the virtual, to see how different materials will look on an actual scale version of the physical. This reduces the process of making and reviewing changes from weeks down to days, which is a massive time savings when it comes to car design.

HoloLens also means that collaborating can be digitized in clever ways, including allowing the recording and sharing of high-tech virtual mixed media “sticky notes,” which can be appended to specific spots on the vehicle. It isn’t the first time that automakers have turned to virtual and mixed reality in developing their designs: electric Tesla competitor Lucid told me they’ve used HTC Vive and VR extensively in designing their vehicle, in order to help keep down the time and cost it takes to iterate between prototypes.



Credits:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/22/ford-is-now-designing-cars-in-mixed-reality-using-microsoft-hololens/amp/

Machine Learning / AI Takes on CyberSecurity

Each and every day techniques in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are changing our view of the world. They are impacting how we interact with technology and raising our expectations of what it is possible. AI has been touted as the natural next step to solving a whole range of problems in fields like fraud prevention, medicine, and transport. In reality, it’s cyber security that has arguably seen some of the most wide ranging and impacting implementations of machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and more.

Machine learning refers to systems that are able to automatically improve with experience. Traditionally, no matter how many times you use software to perform the same exact task, the software won't get any smarter. Always launch your browser and visit the same exact website? A traditional browser won't "learn" that it should probably just bring you there by itself when first launched. With ML, software can gain the ability to learn from previous observations to make inferences about both future behavior, as well as guess what you want to do in new scenarios. From thermostats that optimize heating to your daily schedule, autonomous vehicles that customize your ride to your location, and advertising agencies seeking to keep ads relevant to individual users, ML has found a niche in all aspects of our daily life.



Credits:
https://www.recordedfuture.com/machine-learning-cyber-security/

Study Reveals AI Accurately Identifies Sexual Orientation

As the accuracy and capability of AI improves, many of these advances are increasingly accompanied with novel ethical challenges that would not have been imaginable just a few years prior. Most recently, a paper from researchers at Stanford University claimed to demonstrate the ability of neural networks to automatically determine a person’s sexual orientation based purely on photographs of their face.

From a purely technical standpoint, the Stanford study is a fairly traditional entry in the area of applied deep learning. What made the study so controversial is the particular application area the researchers selected: training an AI system to attempt to discern a highly sensitive and deeply intimate personal attribute and forcibly identify individuals who have chosen not to self-identify that characteristic. Moreover, the characteristic selected, sexual orientation, is one for which involuntary identification can result in grave physical harm, up to and including death in some parts of the world.

We show that faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain. We used deep neural networks to extract features from 35,326 facial images. These features were entered into a logistic regression aimed at classifying sexual orientation. Given a single facial image, a classifier could correctly distinguish between gay and heterosexual men in 81% of cases, and in 71%of cases for women. Human judges achieved much lower accuracy: 61% for men and 54% for women. The accuracy of the algorithm increased to 91% and 83%, respectively, given five facial images per person.

Privacy advocates have long warned about the potential for facial recognition technology to be abused. Law enforcement agencies and private companies already quietly collect and analyze huge troves of information on people’s eyes, facial structure and other features. In the wrong hands, some argue, such data could be deployed for a range of nefarious purposes, including spying and suppressing certain groups.

Now, however, two prominent LGBT advocacy groups are denouncing the study as “junk science.” Far from protecting the LGBT community, they say, it could be used as a weapon against gay and lesbian people as well as heterosexuals who could be inaccurately “outed” as gay. The researchers, in turn, have issued multiple lengthy defenses of their work and said they are the victims of a “smear campaign.”

Jedi Augmented Reality

Here's something you probably weren't expecting out of a Disney fan event: a Star Wars augmented reality headset. Lenovo and Lucasfilm have teased headgear that uses your smartphone to bring the space epic into the real world. There's precious little to know about the hardware (not even a release date), but we already know a bit about the games you'll play. Lenovo and Disney are teasing holochess, for a start, but there's also a real-time ground battle game and Jedi Challenges, which will (naturally) have you wielding a lightsaber. In short: you're about to live out a lot of Star Wars fantasies.

Click here for video

Credits:
https://twitter.com/engadget/status/909568100126810112?s=09

Cassini Space Probe Crashes Into Saturn -- On Purpose

Early tomorrow morning, NASA scientists will say goodbye to their Cassini spacecraft — a hardy probe the size of a school bus that has been orbiting the Saturn system for the last 13 years. Launched in 1997, Cassini has spent a whopping 20 years in space, lasting through two mission extensions while going above and beyond what it was designed to do. But tomorrow, the probe will dive into Saturn’s atmosphere, where it will break apart and cease operating. It’s a sad time for the scientists who have worked on this mission for years, but also a triumphant one: Cassini leaves an impressive legacy of scientific discovery in its wake.

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• Cassini has given scientists a wealth of information about Saturn, including details about the planet’s most iconic features.
• Flybys of Enceladus led scientists to conclude that the moon’s jets were coming from a saltwater ocean lurking underneath the crust of Enceladus.
• Cassini carried with it a lander called Huygens, made by the European Space Agency. The probe landed on Titan on January 14th, 2005, becoming the first spacecraft to land on another world in the outer Solar System.
• When Cassini first arrived at Saturn, it quickly started mapping the planet’s rings —huge bands of particles that stretch up to 175,000 miles wide, but are only between 30 and 300 feet thick.
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Credits:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16298350/nasa-cassini-probe-saturn-enceladus-titan-end-of-mission

iPhone X -- Innovations for a mere $1,000

The brand new iPhone X -- that's pronounced "ten," by the way, not "ex" -- is a phone of firsts for Apple. The 5.8-inch OLED screen isn't just larger, it also uses a different technology that Apple says will make colors absolutely pop. It's also the first iPhone to completely do away with the iconic home button -- you know, the one Apple popularized on its very first iPhone. And, it's the first to offer Face ID as a new way to securely unlock the phone and pay in the check-out line. The iPhone X is Apple's only new device to nab optical image stabilization for both rear 12-megapixel camera lenses, a portrait mode on the front-facing camera (despite having just one lens and not two), and -- more breezily -- a new feature to animate emojis.

It's clear that Apple is prepping iPhone users to wave goodbye to the home button, by framing its dismissal as a feature. But until we can thoroughly test it to see how well it actually works, we're dubious if this is an empty upsell. If it does work well, you can bet Samsung will step up its game to make its own facial recognition software secure enough for mobile payments (right now, that's just iris scanning and the fingerprint reader). It's likely other phonemakers would ditch a current trend to put the fingerprint reader on the back and adopt -- or at least experiment -- with face unlocking, too.



Credits:
https://www.cnet.com/products/apple-iphone-x/preview/

Equifax Data Breach

Equifax is a company that keeps track of the detailed financial affairs of all Americans in order to gauge how much of a risk they are for borrowing money. It handles the data of 820 million consumers and more than 91 million businesses worldwide. Between May and July of this year 143 million people in the U.S. may have had their names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and even driver's license numbers accessed. In addition, the hack compromised 209,000 people's credit card numbers and personal dispute details for another 182,000 people. What bad actors could do with that information is daunting.

However the company has been scrambling to explain itself since disclosing last week that it exposed vital data about 143 million Americans — effectively most of the U.S. adult population. It's come under fire from members of Congress, state attorneys general, and people who are getting conflicting answers about whether their information was stolen. Equifax has been the focus of anger and distrust, not only for the breach but over how it initially was handled. It discovered the hack July 29, but didn't publicly announce it until more than a month later. People trying to find out if they were affected have gotten some confusing or contradictory information.

Click here for the video.

Credits:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/07/technology/business/equifax-data-breach/index.html

The Science of Hurricanes

With Hurricane Irma battering the west coast of Florida, experts are explaining the science behind the deadly storm. The hurricane, which has left a trail of devastation across the Caribbean, made landfall as a Category 4 storm in the Florida Keys Sunday morning, before setting out on a path along Florida’s western coast. Depending on where in the world they occur, hurricanes are also known as typhoons or cyclones. The scientific term for all these storms is a tropical cyclone, notes NASA. Hurricanes are tropical cyclones that form over the Atlantic Ocean and the eastern and central Pacific Ocean.

NASA compares tropical cyclones to “giant engines” that use warm, moist air as fuel. “That is why they form only over warm ocean waters near the equator,” it explains. “This warm, moist air rises and condenses to form clouds and storms.” This process starts the “engine” of the storm. To fill in the low pressure area, air from surrounding areas with higher air pressure pushes in. “That ‘new’ air near the Earth’s surface also gets heated by the warm ocean water so it also gets warmer and moister and then it rises,” explains NASA. With the warm air rising, the surrounding air swirls to take its place. Fed by the ocean’s heat and water evaporation, the maelstrom of clouds and winds spins and becomes larger.

Red Sox Caught Stealing Signs with an Apple Watch

Investigators for Major League Baseball have determined that the Red Sox, who are in first place in the American League East and very likely headed to the playoffs, executed a scheme to illicitly steal hand signals from opponents’ catchers in games against the second-place Yankees and other teams, according to several people briefed on the matter. The baseball inquiry began about two weeks ago, after the Yankees’ general manager, Brian Cashman, filed a detailed complaint with the commissioner’s office that included video the Yankees shot of the Red Sox dugout during a three-game series between the two teams in Boston last month.



Credits:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/sports/baseball/boston-red-sox-stealing-signs-yankees.html?mcubz=0

Something or Nothing 2: Moleskin Smart Writing Set

Moleskin, a company known for making old-school bound notebooks and journals and celebrating writing, has now tried to bridge the gap between the analog and digital world. Last year, the company unveiled its new Smart Writing Set, which promises to work together with a smart pen and an app to instantly digitize notes and sketches made on paper. And now, the company has added to the line with its Smart Planner, which combines your old-school paper planner with some new-age technology. Thanks to the special Paper Tablet notebook, the smart Pen+, the companion app, and now the Smart Planner, you will be able to digitally edit and share what you create on paper in real time, all without ever having to take a photo, upload, or scan anything at all.

The Planner, like its Paper Tablet notebook, uses real paper that is embedded with sensors that both read and sync anything and everything written using the Moleskine Pen+. Once you note a new meeting or appointment in your planner, it will automatically be transferred to your Google or Apple account. That way, you can continue practicing your penmanship and save your thumbs. The set doesn’t come cheap, launching at $199 for the Pen+ and the Paper Tablet. But considering what you are paying for their normal, non-advanced notebooks, maybe this isn’t such a splurge after all. The Planner will set you back an additional $29.



Credits:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/smart-writing-set-moleskine/

Voyager 1 & 2 Celebrate 40 Years in Space

Twenty years ago today, Voyager 1 was launched from earth at Cape Canaveral. In a nondescript office building in Altadena, California, not far from the main campus of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a few engineers keep tabs on humanity's most distant emissaries. Their job is to communicate with the twin Voyager probes, launched by NASA in 1977 and currently sailing out of the Solar System. At their launches, on 20 August and 5 September 1977, the school-bus-sized probes soared separately into space. After they zipped past the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, gathering photographs and scientific data, they went their separate ways, Voyager 2 sailing on to Uranus and Neptune — a first for any spacecraft — and Voyager 1 heading out of the Solar System.

Scientific discoveries come fast and furious each time one of the probes flies past a planet. Every image taken as the spacecraft approaches its target becomes the best ever made of it. Jupiter's Great Red Spot pops into focus, glaring balefully in a swirl of tempestuous clouds. Volcanoes on its moon Io hove unexpectedly into view. Saturn's extraordinary ring system appears, along with its haze-encrusted moon Titan. Even poor Uranus, that boring aquamarine blob, turns out to have an unusual magnetic field, torqued as the planet orbits on its side. And lurking in the cold, gassy clouds of Neptune was a vast dark spot. In August 2012, Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space, the first human-made object to leave the Solar System. Voyager 2 will soon follow. As their plutonium power sources wane, the craft leave us pondering much more about ourselves than about the cosmos.



Credits:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v548/n7668/full/548392a.html
http://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/home/