The Chinese database Victor Gevers found online was not just a collection of old personal details. The discovery by Gevers, a Dutch cybersecurity researcher who revealed it on Twitter last week, has given a rare glimpse into China's extensive surveillance of Xinjiang, a remote region home to an ethnic minority population that is largely Muslim. The area has been blanketed with police checkpoints and security cameras that apparently are doing more than just recording what happens. The database Gevers found appears to have been recording people's movements tracked by facial recognition technology, he said, logging more than 6.7 million coordinates in a span of 24 hours.

A company operating a facial recognition system in China has exposed millions of residents' personal information online. Shenzen-based SenseNets is an artificial intelligence company that uses a network of tracking cameras to spot people and log their movements in its database. Unfortunately, the company exposed that information publicly online allowing anyone to access the information in plain text, it emerged this week. Dutch cybersecurity researcher Victor Gevers found the vulnerable database online and tweeted about it. There is this company in China named SenseNets.

Kim pointed to convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks, among others, each of which is designed to solve a specific problem, such as image recognition, speech or language translation. Norm Jouppi, a Google distinguished hardware engineer, unveiled details of the company's several-year effort, the Tensor Processor Unit (TPU), an ASIC that implements components of a neural network in silicon--as opposed to using raw silicon compute power and memory banks and software on top of that, which is something that Google also does. In discussing the Google TPU, Jouppi highlighted one way that teams of researchers and engineers around the world can benchmark their work and the performance of the hardware and software they are utilizing: ImageNet. Arnold Smeulders and Theo Gevers, the general chairs of ECCV 2016, told Semiconductor Engineering that many of the attendees of ECCV do work in the area of semiconductor technologies (as opposed to software that runs on silicon) that enable computer vision.

Technology has long been considered a resource-liberating mechanism, granting us better access to resources like information, food and energy. Yet what is often overlooked is the revolutionary impact technology can have on our ability to create art. Many artists are reacting to a world of accelerating change and rapid digitization through their work. Emerging artistic mediums like 3D printing, virtual reality and artificial intelligence are providing artists with unprecedented forms of self-expression. Many are also embracing the rise of intelligent machines and leveraging the man-machine symbiosis to create increasingly powerful works of art.