What's my Alzheimer's risk, and can I really do anything to change it? Can you escape your genetic inheritance, and do lifestyle changes actually make a difference? Daniel Cossins set out to understand what the evidence on Alzheimer's really means for him A few years ago, my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, just like his older brother and his mum before him. Slowly, his personality began to ebb away. Now, at the age of 75, his cognitive decline is accelerating: he no longer recognises his granddaughters, for instance, and he lives in a near-constant state of confusion, which means he is losing his independence, too. As I process this loss and try to support my parents, I have become increasingly curious about what my family history means for me.

This brief study focuses on the application of autoencoders to improve the quality of low-amplitude signals, such as gravitational events. A pre-existing autoencoder was trained using cosmic event data, optimizing its architecture and parameters. The results show a significant increase in the signal-to-noise ratio of the processed signals, demonstrating the potential of autoencoders in the analysis of small signals with multiple sources of interference.

For-profit companies have long sought to tap into the fears of consumers, offering pricey medical scans they can access without a doctor's recommendation, as long as they can pay the price out of pocket. Now, some of these ventures are trumpeting scans assisted by artificial intelligence, essentially cutting-edge computer technology they say can reveal hidden health problems, from cancer to obscure bone disorders, and analyze the results more quickly than those typically ordered by doctors. Researchers say artificial intelligence, known as AI, holds the promise of more precise diagnosis and also the ability to shorten waiting times for results. But are these new body scans for the "worried well" surging ahead of the current science on artificial intelligence? As the debate heats up, a California-based company is planning to open in Massachusetts.

For the past two years, I've been following a woman around the internet. It sounds ominous, I know, but hear me out. Her name is Albertina Geller, and I first stumbled across her online in October 2020, on LinkedIn. She'd listed herself as a "self-employed freelancer" in Chicago. I'm also a self-employed freelancer, so we had that in common. In her bio, she said that "I learn & teach people how to be healthy, balance their gut and improve their immune system for healthy living." I've had some gut and immune-system issues myself. It was a connection practically written in the stars. But I have to admit that what first interested me about her -- what led me to spend two years tracking her, at a distance -- wasn't our shared interests. Her LinkedIn photo was a straight-on headshot of a white woman, mid- to late 20s, with a pale complexion and lightly rosy cheeks. She had shoulder-length blond hair, swept neatly to one side.

We investigate a new threat to neural sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models: training-time attacks that cause models to "spin" their outputs so as to support an adversary-chosen sentiment or point of view -- but only when the input contains adversary-chosen trigger words. For example, a spinned summarization model outputs positive summaries of any text that mentions the name of some individual or organization. Model spinning introduces a "meta-backdoor" into a model. Whereas conventional backdoors cause models to produce incorrect outputs on inputs with the trigger, outputs of spinned models preserve context and maintain standard accuracy metrics, yet also satisfy a meta-task chosen by the adversary. Model spinning enables propaganda-as-a-service, where propaganda is defined as biased speech. An adversary can create customized language models that produce desired spins for chosen triggers, then deploy these models to generate disinformation (a platform attack), or else inject them into ML training pipelines (a supply-chain attack), transferring malicious functionality to downstream models trained by victims. To demonstrate the feasibility of model spinning, we develop a new backdooring technique. It stacks an adversarial meta-task onto a seq2seq model, backpropagates the desired meta-task output to points in the word-embedding space we call "pseudo-words," and uses pseudo-words to shift the entire output distribution of the seq2seq model. We evaluate this attack on language generation, summarization, and translation models with different triggers and meta-tasks such as sentiment, toxicity, and entailment. Spinned models largely maintain their accuracy metrics (ROUGE and BLEU) while shifting their outputs to satisfy the adversary's meta-task. We also show that, in the case of a supply-chain attack, the spin functionality transfers to downstream models.

It's a cloudy day in early October and I'm circling my rented Jeep Wrangler around a maze of industrial buildings in Hamilton, Ohio. Hamilton is a small city 30 miles north of Cincinnati with a population of just over 62,000 people. Like much of Ohio, farming is important here. I'm on my way to a farm called 80 Acres, but it isn't the sprawling midwestern wheat field you're picturing in your mind. This tech-centric farm is indoors, housed entirely in a nondescript 10,000-square-foot warehouse.

Artificial intelligence will take over from humans and force us to abandon our anthropocentric view of the world, curator and brand consultant Suzanne Livingston said at the Dezeen Day conference this week. "We will no longer be centre stage," Livingston said during a panel discussion on the future of cities. Humans will have to accept being "surrounded by a diversity of intelligence," she added. According to Livingston, who curated the AI: More than Human exhibition at the Barbican Centre this summer, this will be difficult for people living in western countries to accept, as they are used to an anthropocentric view of the world. "In the west we will find this difficult," she explained. "We have a model of the self that is top down, in control, autonomous, rational and the highest form of evolutionary life."

Suzanne Livingston, curator of the recent Barbican Centre exhibition about artificial intelligence, will speak about the impact of technology on cities at Dezeen Day on 30 October. She will take part in a discussion about future cities, which will explore how urban areas will change in the face of technological, social and environmental pressures. Livingston curated AI: More than Human, which ran in London from May to August this year and will now tour internationally. The exhibition explored how AI will affect our lives and featured cutting-edge work by designers including Neri Oxman, Es Devlin, TeamLab and Yuri Suzuki. It explored topics including facial recognition, robotics and how AI can improve urban planning and road safety. Livingston has a PhD in Philosophy from Warwick University, where she was a founding member of the influential Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU).

In a gallery in downtown Manhattan, people are huddling around four laptops, taking turns to control the apartments of 14 complete strangers. They watch via live video feeds, and respond whenever the residents ask "Someone" to help them. They switch the lights on and off, boil the kettle, put some music on – whatever they can do to oblige. The project, called Someone, is the latest in a series exploring our ever more complicated relationship with technology. It's by the American artist Lauren McCarthy and is a sort of outsourcing of Lauren, an earlier work in which she acted as a real-life Alexa, remotely watching over a home 24 hours a day, responding to its occupants' questions and needs like a flesh and blood version of Amazon's voice-operated virtual assistant. Lauren, a video work, features in AI: More Than Human, which opens this week at the Barbican in London as part of its Life Rewired season, an investigation into what it means to be human in the digital era.

Even in the middle of the day, the 50-mile trip from San Francisco to San Jose is a pain. Like a toddler, Bay Area driving toggles between slumber (rush-hour slogs) and frenzy (passing-happy speeding). It's enough to make one eager for the day when robots rule the roads. And it's more than enough to make me envy Evan Livingston, who doesn't have to show up in person this meeting, held in a Lincoln MKZ sedan roaming downtown San Jose. No, Livingston is sitting comfortably in his office in Portland, Oregon, when he appears on the screens inside the car and announces he'll be our teleoperator this afternoon.