Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Government


Airbus Wants to Replace Satellites With High-Flying Drones

WIRED

When Sputnik 1 reached low Earth orbit in 1957, it did more than kick-start America's space program and send American schoolchildren scurrying for cover under their desks. It launched the satellite age. The orbiting platforms, which now number in the thousands, revolutionized communication, navigation, and watching football. Satellites, though, are expensive to build, expensive to launch, and difficult to update once in orbit. They're relatively cheap, easily launched, and readily updated.


Automatic Identification of Replicated Criminal Websites Using Combined Clustering Methods

@machinelearnbot

The following publication was presented at the 2014 IEEE International Workshop on Cyber Crime and received the Best Paper Award on 5/18/2014. The original IEEE LaTeX formatted PDF publication can also be downloaded from here: IWCC Combined Clustering. To be successful, cybercriminals must figure out how to scale their scams. They duplicate content on new websites, often staying one step ahead of defenders that shut down past schemes. For some scams, such as phishing and counterfeitgoods shops, the duplicated content remains nearly identical. In others, such as advanced-fee fraud and online Ponzi schemes, the criminal must alter content so that it appears different in order to evade detection by victims and law enforcement. Nevertheless, similarities often remain, in terms of the website structure or content, since making truly unique copies does not scale well. In this paper, we present a novel combined clustering method that links together replicated scam websites, even when the criminal has taken steps to hide connections. We evaluate its performance against two collected datasets of scam websites: fake-escrow services and high-yield investment programs (HYIPs). We find that our method more accurately groups similar websites together than does existing general-purpose consensus clustering methods.


Voice assistants are coming for your home, and will listen to everything you say

The Independent - Tech

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display


Apple edits same-sex parents from Mother's Day ads in France, Germany and other countries

The Independent - Tech

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display


FBI chiefs want databases exempt from privacy protections

Engadget

The Washington Post has spoken to people within the bureau, who claim that the exemptions are necessary for it to work. Representatives say that the rules need to be tweaked, or else investigations would be compromised by people finding out they were on the database. It also pledges that its facial-recognition technology wouldn't be used for political purposes -- for instance to identify attendees at a presidential rally. One of the issues that the EFF wants to highlight is that the database, named NGI (Next Generation Identification), "disproportionately impacts people of color." It's been established that facial recognition technology struggles with non-white faces.


British anti-drone ray gets US trial

BBC News

A UK-developed system capable of jamming signals to small drones is to be trialled by the US aviation authority. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is expanding efforts to source technology that can detect small, unmanned aerial vehicles near airports. Three British companies developed the Anti-UAV Defense System (Auds), due to be included in new trials. It works by jamming signals to drones, making them unresponsive. A thermal imaging camera allows the Auds operator to target the unwanted drone before signal jamming, via a high-powered radio signal, is activated.


Should Humans Turn In Their Driver's Licenses?

Slate

If you're just talking about the time until we see some driverless vehicles on the road, probably not that long. Anthony Foxx, secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, went on the record in 2015 with the claim that "we're going to see [fully autonomous cars] within five years," though he allows that that "just means market availability." A more comprehensive timeline assembled by Recode suggests that by 2030, "Automakers will stop manufacturing cars that don't have at least some highly autonomous features." It goes on to predict that by the middle of the 21st century, we'll witness total fleet turnover, at which point virtually all vehicles on the road will be at least partially autonomous. If that's true, it's possible that driving your own car will rapidly come to be seen as a dangerous affectation like smoking


Is Artificial Intelligence going to take our jobs?

#artificialintelligence

The future of the way we work will be put under the spotlight by some of the leading minds in technology and computing at the International Festival for Business 2016 (IFB2016). The advancement of Artificial Intelligence and its use in modern life has prompted debate on whether men and women will be needed to work in business in years to come. Scientists have created robots who can do cognitive work and the nightmarish future of androids ruling the planet with brutal oppression has long been a science fiction storyline. A panel which will include a brain specialist, a tech lawyer, a technology expert and a union leader will explore the possibility of humans becoming obsolete in the workplace in reality. The discussion, Man and Woman vs Machine: Is AI Going to Take Your Job?' will take over the Blue Skies Stage in the Liverpool Exhibition Centre on Thursday June 16.


How to make opaque AI decisionmaking accountable

#artificialintelligence

Algorithmic systems that employ machine learning play an increasing role in making substantive decisions in modern society, ranging from online personalization to insurance and credit decisions to predictive policing. But their decision-making processes are often opaque--it is difficult to explain why a certain decision was made. We develop a formal foundation to improve the transparency of such decision-making systems. Specifically, we introduce a family of Quantitative Input Influence (QII) measures that capture the degree of influence of inputs on outputs of systems. These measures provide a foundation for the design of transparency reports that accompany system decisions (e.g., explaining a specific credit decision) and for testing tools useful for internal and external oversight (e.g., to detect algorithmic discrimination). Distinctively, our causal QII measures carefully account for correlated inputs while measuring influence. They support a general class of transparency queries and can, in particular, explain decisions about individuals (e.g., a loan decision) and groups (e.g., disparate impact based on gender). Finally, since single inputs may not always have high influence, the QII measures also quantify the joint influence of a set of inputs (e.g., age and income) on outcomes (e.g.


Google voice search records and stores conversations people have around their phones โ€“ but files can be deleted

The Independent - Tech

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display