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Authoritarian Regimes Could Exploit Cries of 'Deepfake'

WIRED

A viral video shows a young woman conducting an exercise class on a roundabout in the Burmese capital, Nyapyidaw. Behind her a military convoy approaches a checkpoint to go conduct arrests at the Parliament building. Has she inadvertently filmed a coup? The video later became a viral meme, but for the first days, online amateur sleuths debated if it was green-screened or otherwise manipulated, often using the jargon of verification and image forensics. Yet claims of audiovisual manipulation are increasingly being used to make people wonder if what is real is a fake.


10 Artificial Intelligence Predictions for 2021 - CLOUDit-eg

#artificialintelligence

The arrival of the New Year brings us to think in many areas. What does 2021 hold in store for artificial intelligence? Here are 10 Artificial Intelligence predictions, from academic research to capital markets to regulation. We will take stock in December 2021 to assess the results. Autonomous vehicle developers like Waymo and Cruise have ongoing and massive cash flow needs.


Council Post: Metaethics, Meta-Intelligence And The Rise Of AI

#artificialintelligence

His most recent book on AI is "Reimagining Businesses with AI." The rise of AI and digital technologies is enabling many capabilities, disrupting several business models and changing the way we live and work. At the same time, this technological shift is also giving rise to many concerns around ethics, privacy, security and the future of humanity. The notion of ethics has evolved. Decisions around right and wrong always depended on human cognition and were guided by popular sentiments and socially acceptable norms.


Perceptually Constrained Adversarial Attacks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Motivated by previous observations that the usually applied $L_p$ norms ($p=1,2,\infty$) do not capture the perceptual quality of adversarial examples in image classification, we propose to replace these norms with the structural similarity index (SSIM) measure, which was developed originally to measure the perceptual similarity of images. Through extensive experiments with adversarially trained classifiers for MNIST and CIFAR-10, we demonstrate that our SSIM-constrained adversarial attacks can break state-of-the-art adversarially trained classifiers and achieve similar or larger success rate than the elastic net attack, while consistently providing adversarial images of better perceptual quality. Utilizing SSIM to automatically identify and disallow adversarial images of low quality, we evaluate the performance of several defense schemes in a perceptually much more meaningful way than was done previously in the literature.


AI Ethics Needs Good Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this chapter we argue that discourses on AI must transcend the language of 'ethics' and engage with power and political economy in order to constitute 'Good Data'. In particular, we must move beyond the depoliticised language of 'ethics' currently deployed (Wagner 2018) in determining whether AI is 'good' given the limitations of ethics as a frame through which AI issues can be viewed. In order to circumvent these limits, we use instead the language and conceptualisation of 'Good Data', as a more expansive term to elucidate the values, rights and interests at stake when it comes to AI's development and deployment, as well as that of other digital technologies. Good Data considerations move beyond recurring themes of data protection/privacy and the FAT (fairness, transparency and accountability) movement to include explicit political economy critiques of power. Instead of yet more ethics principles (that tend to say the same or similar things anyway), we offer four 'pillars' on which Good Data AI can be built: community, rights, usability and politics. Overall we view AI's 'goodness' as an explicly political (economy) question of power and one which is always related to the degree which AI is created and used to increase the wellbeing of society and especially to increase the power of the most marginalized and disenfranchised. We offer recommendations and remedies towards implementing 'better' approaches towards AI. Our strategies enable a different (but complementary) kind of evaluation of AI as part of the broader socio-technical systems in which AI is built and deployed.


Multi-class Classification Based Anomaly Detection of Insider Activities

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Insider threats are the cyber attacks from within the trusted entities of an organization. Lack of real-world data and issue of data imbalance leave insider threat analysis an understudied research area. To mitigate the effect of skewed class distribution and prove the potential of multinomial classification algorithms for insider threat detection, we propose an approach that combines generative model with supervised learning to perform multi-class classification using deep learning. The generative adversarial network (GAN) based insider detection model introduces Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CGAN) to enrich minority class samples to provide data for multi-class anomaly detection. The comprehensive experiments performed on the benchmark dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of introducing GAN derived synthetic data and the capability of multi-class anomaly detection in insider activity analysis. Moreover, the method is compared with other existing methods against different parameters and performance metrics.


Reinforcement Learning for IoT Security: A Comprehensive Survey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The number of connected smart devices has been increasing exponentially for different Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Security has been a long run challenge in the IoT systems which has many attack vectors, security flaws and vulnerabilities. Securing billions of B connected devices in IoT is a must task to realize the full potential of IoT applications. Recently, researchers have proposed many security solutions for IoT. Machine learning has been proposed as one of the emerging solutions for IoT security and Reinforcement learning is gaining more popularity for securing IoT systems. Reinforcement learning, unlike other machine learning techniques, can learn the environment by having minimum information about the parameters to be learned. It solves the optimization problem by interacting with the environment adapting the parameters on the fly. In this paper, we present an comprehensive survey of different types of cyber-attacks against different IoT systems and then we present reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning based security solutions to combat those different types of attacks in different IoT systems. Furthermore, we present the Reinforcement learning for securing CPS systems (i.e., IoT with feedback and control) such as smart grid and smart transportation system. The recent important attacks and countermeasures using reinforcement learning B in IoT are also summarized in the form of tables. With this paper, readers can have a more thorough understanding of IoT security attacks and countermeasures using Reinforcement Learning, as well as research trends in this area.


Resilient Machine Learning for Networked Cyber Physical Systems: A Survey for Machine Learning Security to Securing Machine Learning for CPS

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are characterized by their ability to integrate the physical and information or cyber worlds. Their deployment in critical infrastructure have demonstrated a potential to transform the world. However, harnessing this potential is limited by their critical nature and the far reaching effects of cyber attacks on human, infrastructure and the environment. An attraction for cyber concerns in CPS rises from the process of sending information from sensors to actuators over the wireless communication medium, thereby widening the attack surface. Traditionally, CPS security has been investigated from the perspective of preventing intruders from gaining access to the system using cryptography and other access control techniques. Most research work have therefore focused on the detection of attacks in CPS. However, in a world of increasing adversaries, it is becoming more difficult to totally prevent CPS from adversarial attacks, hence the need to focus on making CPS resilient. Resilient CPS are designed to withstand disruptions and remain functional despite the operation of adversaries. One of the dominant methodologies explored for building resilient CPS is dependent on machine learning (ML) algorithms. However, rising from recent research in adversarial ML, we posit that ML algorithms for securing CPS must themselves be resilient. This paper is therefore aimed at comprehensively surveying the interactions between resilient CPS using ML and resilient ML when applied in CPS. The paper concludes with a number of research trends and promising future research directions. Furthermore, with this paper, readers can have a thorough understanding of recent advances on ML-based security and securing ML for CPS and countermeasures, as well as research trends in this active research area.


Us vs. Them: A Dataset of Populist Attitudes, News Bias and Emotions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Computational modelling of political discourse tasks has become an increasingly important area of research in natural language processing. Populist rhetoric has risen across the political sphere in recent years; however, computational approaches to it have been scarce due to its complex nature. In this paper, we present the new $\textit{Us vs. Them}$ dataset, consisting of 6861 Reddit comments annotated for populist attitudes and the first large-scale computational models of this phenomenon. We investigate the relationship between populist mindsets and social groups, as well as a range of emotions typically associated with these. We set a baseline for two tasks related to populist attitudes and present a set of multi-task learning models that leverage and demonstrate the importance of emotion and group identification as auxiliary tasks.


Hitting the Books: Why Travis Kalanick got Uber into the self-driving car game

Engadget

If you thought rocket science was hard, try training a computer to safely change lanes while behind the wheel of a full-size SUV in heavy drivetime traffic. Autonomous vehicle developers have faced myriad similar challenged over the past three decades but nothing, it seems, turns the wheels of innovation quite like a bit of good, old-fashioned competition -- one which DARPA was only more than happy to provide. In Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car, Insider senior editor and former Wired Transportation editor, Alex Davies takes the reader on an immersive tour of DARPA's "Grand Challenges" -- the agency's autonomous vehicle trials which drew top talents from across academia and the private sector in effort to spur on the state of autonomous vehicle technology -- as well as profiles many of the elite engineers that took place in the competitions. In the excerpt below however Davies recalls how, back in 2014, then-CEO Travis Kalanick steered Uber into the murky waters of autonomous vehicle technology, setting off a flurry of acquihires, buyouts, furious R&D efforts, and one fatal accident -- only to end up selling off the division this past December. Excerpt from Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car by Alex Davies.