Effective epidemic modeling is essential for managing public health crises, requiring robust methods to predict disease spread and optimize resource allocation. This study introduces a novel deep learning framework that advances time series forecasting for infectious diseases, with its application to COVID 19 data as a critical case study. Our hybrid approach integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models to capture spatial and temporal dynamics of disease transmission across diverse regions. The CNN extracts spatial features from raw epidemiological data, while the LSTM models temporal patterns, yielding precise and adaptable predictions. To maximize performance, we employ a hybrid optimization strategy combining the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) and Gray Wolf Optimization (GWO) to fine tune hyperparameters, such as learning rates, batch sizes, and training epochs enhancing model efficiency and accuracy. Applied to COVID 19 case data from 24 countries across six continents, our method outperforms established benchmarks, including ARIMA and standalone LSTM models, with statistically significant gains in predictive accuracy (e.g., reduced RMSE). This framework demonstrates its potential as a versatile method for forecasting epidemic trends, offering insights for resource planning and decision making in both historical contexts, like the COVID 19 pandemic, and future outbreaks.

Digital recreations of dead people are on the cusp of reality and urgently need regulation, AI ethicists have argued, warning "deadbots" could cause psychological harm to, and even "haunt", their creators and users. Such services, which are already technically possible to create and legally permissible, could let users upload their conversations with dead relatives to "bring grandma back to life" in the form of a chatbot, researchers from the University of Cambridge suggest. They may be marketed at parents with terminal diseases who want to leave something behind for their child to interact with, or simply sold to still-healthy people who want to catalogue their entire life and create an interactive legacy. But in each case, unscrupulous companies and thoughtless business practices could cause lasting psychological harm and fundamentally disrespect the rights of the deceased, the paper argues. "Rapid advancements in generative AI mean that nearly anyone with internet access and some basic knowhow can revive a deceased loved one," said Dr Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, one of the study's co-authors at Cambridge's Leverhulme centre for the future of intelligence (LCFI).

The parents of a teenager who was killed in Florida's Parkland school shooting in 2018 have started a bold new project called The Shotline to lobby for stricter gun laws in the country. The Shotline uses AI to recreate the voices of children killed by gun violence and send recordings through automated calls to lawmakers, The Wall Street Journal reported. The project launched on Wednesday, six years after a gunman killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen at a high school in Parkland, Florida. It features the voice of six children, some as young as ten, and young adults, who have lost their lives in incidents of gun violence across the US. Once you type in your zip code, The Shotline finds your local representative and lets you place an automated call from one of the six dead people in their own voice, urging for stronger gun control laws.

Finding out Taylor Swift was her 11th cousin twice-removed wasn't even the most shocking discovery Cher Scarlett made while exploring her family history. "There's a lot of stuff in my family that's weird and strange that we wouldn't know without Ancestry," says Scarlett, a software engineer and writer based in Kirkland, Washington. "I didn't even know who my mum's paternal grandparents were." In February 2022, the facial recognition search engine PimEyes surfaced non-consensual explicit photos of her at age 19, reigniting decades-old trauma. She attempted to get the pictures removed from the platform, which uses images scraped from the internet to create biometric "faceprints" of individuals.

People have a continuous digital presence throughout their lives. This will be even more so in the future. It is discussed that if your father's habits, memories and behavior patterns are created with the information obtained from these digital assets, and with an algorithm that recognizes you, he can chat with you on these topics. It is mentioned that cemeteries will change shape in the future and will actually look like a forest or a park. Imagine that all the trees in this forest have holograms in front of them and these holograms belong to the deceased and have the memories of the deceased. That the deceased can answer you with his voice and image.

It's horrifying enough to have to deal with a person's social media accounts after their death. That's without the added stress of having that same account appear to be active. Facebook users have reported receiving friend requests from accounts associated with dead friends and family members. And aside from the obvious distress such a request can cause, it also points to a worrying scam that affects people on Facebook. Such requests appear to be the result of cloning or hacking scams that see criminals try and add people on the site, and then use that friendship as a way of stealing money from them or running other cons.