2018-05
Uber Self-Driving Car Crash: What Really Happened
Back in March, an Uber self-driving car killed 49-year-old Elain Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, after failing to do an emergency stop. After a US federal investigation, it is thought that the car did not stop because the system put in place to carry out emergency stops in dangerous situations was disabled . National Transportation Safety Board officials inspecting the car that killed Mrs Herzberg. So, how do self-driving cars actually work? Most self-driving cars have a GPS unit, a range of sensors such as radar, video and laser rangefinders as well as a navigation system.
Amazon Echo Recorded And Sent Couple's Conversation -- All Without Their Knowledge
A couple in Portland, Ore., discovered that their Amazon Echo had recorded their conversation and sent it to one of their contacts. A couple in Portland, Ore., discovered that their Amazon Echo had recorded their conversation and sent it to one of their contacts. As secret recordings go, the Portland couple's conversation was pretty mundane: They were talking about hardwood floors. But their Amazon Echo was listening and recording their discussion. The device then sent the recording to someone in their contacts -- without the couple's knowledge.
Robots learning war from video games - MoD
Robots that train themselves in battle tactics by playing video games could be used to mount cyber-attacks, the UK military fears. The warning is in a Ministry of Defence report on artificial intelligence. Researchers in Silicon Valley are using strategy games, such as Starcraft II, to teach systems how to solve complex problems on their own. But artificial intelligence (AI) programs can then "be readily adapted" to wage cyber-warfare, the MoD says. Officials are particularly concerned about the ability of rogue states and terrorists to mount advanced persistent threat attacks, which can disable critical infrastructure and steal sensitive information.
Deep Learning Hunts for Signals Among the Noise
Over the past decade, advances in deep learning have transformed the fortunes of the artificial intelligence (AI) community. The neural network approach that researchers had largely written off by the end of the 1990s now seems likely to become the most widespread technology in machine learning. However, protagonists find it difficult to explain why deep learning often works well, but is prone to seemingly bizarre failures. The success of deep learning came with rapid improvements in computational power that came through the development of highly parallelized microprocessors and the discovery of ways to train networks with enormous numbers of virtual neurons assembled into tens of linked layers. Before these advances, neural networks were limited to simple structures that were easily outclassed in image and audio classification tasks by other machine-learning architectures such as support vector machines.
3D Sensors Provide Security, Better Games
Sensor technology is designed to allow machines to interact with real-world inputs, whether they are humans interacting with their smartphones, autonomous vehicles navigating on a busy street, or robots using sensors to aid in manufacturing. Not surprisingly, three-dimensional (3D) sensors, which allow a machine to understand the size, shape, and distance of an object or objects within its field of view, have attracted a lot of attention in recent months, thanks to their inclusion on Apple's most-advanced (to date) smartphone, the iPhone X, which uses a single camera to measure distance. Indeed, the TrueDepth system, which replaces the fingerprint-based TouchID system on the Apple handset, shines approximately 30,000 dots outward onto the user's face. Then, an infrared (IR) camera captures the image of the dots, which provides depth information based on the density of the dots (closer objects display a dot pattern that is spread out, whereas objects that are farther away create a denser pattern of dots. Altogether, the placement of these dots creates a depth map with 3D data that is used to supply the system with the information it needs to check for a facial identity match, which then unlocks the device.
The US military is funding an effort to catch deepfakes and other AI trickery
Think that AI will help put a stop to fake news? This summer, under a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the world's leading digital forensics experts will gather for an AI fakery contest. They will compete to generate the most convincing AI-generated fake video, imagery, and audio--and they will also try to develop tools that can catch these counterfeits automatically. The contest will include so-called "deepfakes," videos in which one person's face is stitched onto another person's body. Rather predictably, the technology has already been used to generate a number of counterfeit celebrity porn videos.
Few Rules Govern Police Use of Facial-Recognition Technology
They call Amazon the everything store--and Tuesday, the world learned about one of its lesser-known but provocative products. Police departments pay the company to use facial-recognition technology Amazon says can "identify persons of interest against a collection of millions of faces in real-time." More than two dozen nonprofits wrote to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to ask that he stop selling the technology to police, after the ACLU of Northern California revealed documents to shine light on the sales. The letter argues that the technology will inevitably be misused, accusing the company of providing "a powerful surveillance system readily available to violate rights and target communities of color." The revelation highlights a key question: What laws or regulations govern police use of the facial-recognition technology?
Stickman Explores the Physics of Flying Through the Air
This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Olympic gymnast Simone Biles has a signature move that is named after her because she is the only woman on earth capable of performing it. The move starts as a layout double flip, but more than halfway through suddenly develops a twist that rotates her body through an extra 180 degrees to land face first. The only visible source of this sudden change in rotation is a small motion of one hand as her arm goes from straight to bent.