From ShutEye to SleepScore, several smartphone apps are available if you're trying to better understand how snoring impacts your rest, allowing you to leave the microphone on overnight to record your raucous nasal grunts and rumbling throat reverberations. But while smartphone apps are helpful for tracking the presence of snores, their accuracy remains an issue when applied to real-world bedrooms with extraneous noises and multiple audible people. Preliminary research from the University of Southampton looks into whether your snores have a signature sound that could be used for identification. "How do you actually track snoring or coughing accurately?" asks Jagmohan Chauhan, an assistant professor at the university who worked on the research. Machine learning models, specifically deep neural networks, might provide assistance in verifying who is performing that snore-phonic symphony.

From ShutEye to SleepScore, several smartphone apps are available if you're trying to better understand how snoring impacts your rest, allowing you to leave the microphone on overnight to record your raucous nasal grunts and rumbling throat reverberations. But while smartphone apps are helpful for tracking the presence of snores, their accuracy remains an issue when applied to real-world bedrooms with extraneous noises and multiple audible people. Preliminary research from the University of Southampton looks into whether your snores have a signature sound that could be used for identification. "How do you actually track snoring or coughing accurately?" asks Jagmohan Chauhan, an assistant professor at the university who worked on the research. Machine learning models, specifically deep neural networks, might provide assistance in verifying who is performing that snore-phonic symphony.

Membership Inference Attacks exploit the vulnerabilities of exposing models trained on customer data to queries by an adversary. In a recently proposed implementation of an auditing tool for measuring privacy leakage from sensitive datasets, more refined aggregates like the Log-Loss scores are exposed for simulating inference attacks as well as to assess the total privacy leakage based on the adversary's predictions. In this paper, we prove that this additional information enables the adversary to infer the membership of any number of datapoints with full accuracy in a single query, causing complete membership privacy breach. Our approach obviates any attack model training or access to side knowledge with the adversary. Moreover, our algorithms are agnostic to the model under attack and hence, enable perfect membership inference even for models that do not memorize or overfit. In particular, our observations provide insight into the extent of information leakage from statistical aggregates and how they can be exploited.

At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, students are immersing themselves in Chinese culture without setting foot outside their classroom. The Mandarin Project, a collaboration between RPI, located in upstate New York, and the tech giant IBM, places students in a virtual world where they can practice their Mandarin language skills in a series of simulated scenarios, such as ordering lunch in a restaurant or taking a tai chi class. The project aims to make students feel as if they are actually in China, without the inconvenience of traveling there, says Helen Zhou, assistant professor of communication and media at RPI, who has been actively involved in designing the project. In a high-tech "cognitive immersive room," a classroom with a 360-degree floor-to-ceiling screen, students can practice their Mandarin with artificial intelligence-powered animated characters (including a floating panda head). The CIR combines several emerging technologies -- natural language processing, speech-to-text and movement tracking -- to create a unique learning experience, said Zhou.

Computer science professor Jacob Whitehill and his colleagues have received a $750,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to develop the Automatic Classroom Observation Recognition Neural Network platform, or ACORN for short, which will combine machine learning, natural language processing, and elements of psychology and educational theory to deliver rapid feedback on teacher-student interactions. "I've always loved teaching – I really enjoy the dynamics between myself and my students," Mr. Whitehill said, adding that he's been particularly fascinated with finding a way to identify the characteristics of a positive exchange between instructor and pupil. Currently, teachers rely on one-on-one and group feedback, as well as some video-aided assessment, to evaluate those interactions. Mr. Whitehill believes ACORN could allow them to critique themselves not only much more frequently, but also without the pressure of a peer or supervisor being involved. "This kind of technology allows them to get objective feedback on their own teaching every day if they wanted to," he said.

At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, students are immersing themselves in Chinese culture without setting foot outside their classroom. The Mandarin Project, a collaboration between RPI, located in upstate New York, and the tech giant IBM, places students in a virtual world where they can practice their Mandarin language skills in a series of simulated scenarios, such as ordering lunch in a restaurant or taking a tai chi class. The project aims to make students feel as if they are actually in China, without the inconvenience of traveling there, says Helen Zhou, assistant professor of communication and media at RPI, who has been actively involved in designing the project. In a high-tech "cognitive immersive room," a classroom with a 360-degree floor-to-ceiling screen, students can practice their Mandarin with artificial intelligence-powered animated characters (including a floating panda head). The CIR combines several emerging technologies -- natural language processing, speech-to-text and movement tracking -- to create a unique learning experience, said Zhou.