Rules governing the use of artificial intelligence across the EU will likely take over a year to be agreed upon. Last year, the European Commission drafted AI laws. While the US and China are set to dominate AI development with their vast resources, economic might, and light-touch regulation, European rivals – including the UK and EU members – believe they can lead in ethical standards. In the draft of the EU regulations, companies that are found guilty of AI misuse face a fine of €30 million or six percent of their global turnover (whichever is greater). The risk of such fines has been criticised as driving investments away from Europe. The EU's draft AI regulation classifies systems into three risk categories: Unacceptable risk systems will face a blanket ban from deployment in the EU while limited risk will require minimal oversight.

A group of scientists may have stumbled upon a radical new way to do cosmology. Cosmologists usually determine the composition of the universe by observing as much of it as possible. But these researchers have found that a machine learning algorithm can scrutinize a single simulated galaxy and predict the overall makeup of the digital universe in which it exists--a feat analogous to analyzing a random grain of sand under a microscope and working out the mass of Eurasia. The machines appear to have found a pattern that might someday allow astronomers to draw sweeping conclusions about the real cosmos merely by studying its elemental building blocks. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

A heart attack patient, recently discharged from the hospital, is using a smartwatch to help monitor his electrocardiogram signals. The smartwatch may seem secure, but the neural network processing that health information is using private data that could still be stolen by a malicious agent through a side-channel attack. A side-channel attack seeks to gather secret information by indirectly exploiting a system or its hardware. In one type of side-channel attack, a savvy hacker could monitor fluctuations in the device's power consumption while the neural network is operating to extract protected information that "leaks" out of the device. "In the movies, when people want to open locked safes, they listen to the clicks of the lock as they turn it. That reveals that probably turning the lock in this direction will help them proceed further. That is what a side-channel attack is. It is just exploiting unintended information and using it to predict what is going on inside the device," says Saurav Maji, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and lead author of a paper that tackles this issue.

Bernard Koch, Emily Denton, Alex Hanna and Jacob Foster won a best paper award, for Reduced, Reused and Recycled: The Life of a Dataset in Machine Learning Research, in the datasets and benchmarks track at NeurIPS 2021. Here, Bernard tells us about the advantages and disadvantages of benchmarking, the findings of their paper, and plans for future work. Machine learning is a rather unusual science, partly because it straddles the space between science and engineering. The main way that progress is evaluated is through state-of-the-art benchmarking. The scientific community agrees on a shared problem, they pick a dataset which they think is representative of the data that you might see when you try to solve that problem in the real world, then they compare their algorithms on a score for that dataset.

The year 2021 has been an exciting year for the Indian gaming market. This year, the online gaming sector has progressed and seen a paradigm shift it is because of a multitude of encouraging factors such as young and tech-savvy young population, feature-packed smartphones, affordable data connectivity, and overall technological development. According to a KPMG report, India's online gaming market collected revenues of Rs 136 billion in 2021. With people spending more time online due to the pandemic, the gaming industry received a massive push. With this growth trajectory, the industry is expected to advance at a compound annual rate of 21 per cent to Rs 290 billion ($3.84 billion) in the next five years.

The current wave of artificial intelligence can be traced back to 2012, and an academic contest that measured how well algorithms could recognize objects in photographs. That year, researchers found that feeding thousands of images into an algorithm inspired loosely by the way neurons in a brain respond to input produced a huge leap in accuracy. The breakthrough sparked an explosion in academic research and commercial activity that is transforming some companies and industries. Now a new trick, which involves training the same kind of AI algorithm to turn 2D images into a rich 3D view of a scene, is sparking excitement in the worlds of both computer graphics and AI. The technique has the potential to shake up video games, virtual reality, robotics, and autonomous driving.

Software can analyse millions of static photos of city streets taken atop cars and construct a realistic 3D model that could be used to create immersive maps or even train driverless cars safely in a virtual environment. Block-NeRF was created by a team of researchers at driverless car company Waymo and Google Research, which are both owned by Alphabet. The tool uses vast numbers of photos taken by cameras mounted atop Waymo's autonomous cars and builds numerous small 3D models, each covering just over one city block.

Ten years ago, a company called Agrobot demonstrated a strawberry-harvesting robot in a field in Davis, California. Today, Agrobot's strawberry picker remains a prototype. The long wait underscores the challenge for any berry-picking robot: Identify a berry that is ripe enough to pick, grasp it firmly but without damaging the fruit, and pull hard enough to separate it from the plant without harming the plant. Agrobot CEO Juan Bravo said his company's machine can't compete with people who can pick fruit by hand and pack it into clamshells. Still, growers are looking ahead to a day when it will be hard to find people willing to stoop in the fields all day, and expensive to pay them.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the Jan. 25, 2022 flipbook. A UT researcher, in collaboration with other schools and the Department of Energy, is using artificial intelligence to develop better strategies for flood predictions and preparedness. As part of the collaboration, University researcher Clint Dawson utilizes artificial intelligence and modeling to analyze...

Artificial intelligence can accurately remove tattoos from photos of people's faces – potentially helping face recognition systems, which can be flummoxed by such tattoos, work accurately. In previous research, Mathias Ibsen at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences in Germany and his colleagues had identified that face painting and tattoos can impair the performance of face recognition systems.