Third-party skills and smart speaker incarnations also discontinued
Microsoft’s decided to restrict the roles its AI assistant Cortana is permitted to fill.…
US drugstore chain installed anti-shoplifter facial-recognition cameras in 200 locations – for eight years
Plus: Latest hardware results from MLPerf and why so-called text deepfakes are dangerous
In brief Rite Aid, an American drugstore chain, secretly deployed facial recognition cameras to spy on its shoppers across 200 stores for eight years.…
So many stars, so little time: Machine learning helps astroboffins spot the most oxygen-starved galaxy yet
Don’t bother packing your bags for HSC J1631+4426 just yet, it’s 430 million light years away
Astronomers have spied a tiny galaxy with the lowest oxygen levels yet observed, a discovery made possible thanks to a machine-learning algorithm.…
Someone made an AI that predicted gender from email addresses, usernames. It went about as well as expected
A neural net takes to heart the old, silly saying: ‘On the internet, men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents’
The creators of a controversial tool that attempted to use AI to predict people’s gender from their internet handle or email address have shut down their service after a huge backlash.…
Face masks hamper the spread of coronavirus. Know what else they hamper? Facial-recognition systems (except China’s)
Uncle Sam tests AI models with pics of immigrants, travelers. Wait, what?
Face masks worn to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus typically decrease the accuracy of commercial facial recognition algorithms by up to 50 per cent, according to an investigation by America’s technical standards watchdog, NIST.…
New Zealand government to explain its algorithms to stop robo-bias warping policy
But won’t reveal the actual algorithms – or even define what an algorithm is
New Zealand has created what it claims is the world’s first “Algorithm Charter” that sets out how government agencies should devise algorithms and explain their workings.…
Is that croaky voicemail of your CEO just a Fakey McFake Fake – or does he normally ask you to wire him $1m?
Plus: AI finance software house reportedly outsourced paperwork processing to… humans
In brief An infosec biz has shared an audio clip of what may be a software-generated voicemail message, designed to impersonate a CEO to trick a company employee into unwittingly committing fraud.…
Amazon’s auditing of Alexa Skills is so good, these boffins got all 200+ rule-breaking apps past the reviewers
Want your AI assistant to shout obscenities or hate speech at your child? There’s a program for that
Amazon claims it reviews the software created by third-party developers for its Alexa voice assistant platform, yet US academics were able to create more than 200 policy-violating Alexa Skills and get them certified.…
Sick of AI engines scraping your pics for facial recognition? Here’s a way to Fawkes them right up
Cloaking code contaminates snapshots so they’re useless for face matching
Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Sand Lab have developed a technique for tweaking photos of people so that they sabotage facial-recognition systems.…
SEC drags Silicon Valley AI upstart to court over claims of made-up revenues, investors swindled out of $11m
No, surely not, no way, we’re utterly shocked
America’s financial watchdog has taken a Silicon Valley AI startup and its CEO to court for allegedly swindling $11m from investors by forging fake bank statements to lie about its revenues.…
World Health Organisation AI chatbot goes deaf when asked for the latest COVID-19 figures for Taiwan, Hong Kong
Funny that!
The World Health Organisation’s Facebook Messenger chatbot refuses to break out the latest numbers of COVID-19 cornavirus cases and deaths for Taiwan and Hong Kong.…
Germany bans Tesla from claiming its Autopilot software is potentially autonomous
Also: Create the killer AI Doom player on a workstation
In brief A judge in Munich has ruled in favor of banning Tesla Germany from repeating misleading descriptions of its Autopilot software in adverts.…
51 years after humans first set foot on the Moon, a deepfaked Nixon mourns how Armstrong and Aldrin never made it home
I am not a …. {NASA nightmare brought to life by AI}
On the 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, MIT boffins have given an insight into an alternative history, one where US president Richard Nixon paid tribute to the astronauts who would not be returning from the Moon.…
Nvidia watches Brit upstart Graphcore swing into rear-view mirror waving beastly second-gen AI chip hardware
Colossus Mk2 boasts of even more transistors than the top GPU
Video British AI chipmaker Graphcore has announced a new series of hardware products based on its latest second-generation Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) known as the Colossus Mk2 GC200.…
Don’t want AWS training its AI systems from your pics, text, audio, code? It’s now easier to opt out of the slurp
And you’ve told your users their info may be harvested by Amazon, right? Across regions, yeah?
Did you know if you upload pictures, text, audio, code, and other content to some Amazon Web Services’ AI systems for processing, the internet giant may quietly keep your data to retrain and improve its current and future technology?…
You call Verizon. A Google bot answers. You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the bot
The only winning move is… not to play?
Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate its customer-service phone calls and chatbot conversations.…
Detroit Police make second wrongful facial-recog arrest when another man is misidentified by software
Plus: IB students kick up a stink over algorithm grading, and more
In brief A man was charged after he was mistakenly identified as a thief by facial-recognition software used by the Detroit Police Department.…
Microsoft says ciao to Xiaoice: Formerly unpatriotic Chinese teenager sim flies the nest
Redmond will retain stake in popular chatbot service
Microsoft has kicked a five-year-old out onto the cold, hard Chinese streets by spinning off its Xiaobing (or Xiaoice) business.…
Privacy watchdogs from the UK, Australia team up, snap on gloves to probe AI-for-cops upstart Clearview
Investigation follows Canada’s decision to give image-scraping biz the boot
Following Canada’s lead earlier this week, privacy watchdogs in Britain and Australia today launched a joint investigation into how Clearview AI harvests and uses billions of images it scraped from the internet to train its facial-recognition algorithms.…
FYI: You do all know that America’s tech giants, even Google, supply IT to the US military, right?
They’re more than happy to take Uncle Sam’s coin no matter the protests from some corners of Silicon Valley
Despite all those protests, internal and external, by tech workers against their employers’ selling AI to the US military, the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JIAC) this week said the biggest names in IT are lining up to supply Uncle Sam.…
Brilliant article on the data behind this too
Detroit cops employed facial recognition algos that only misidentifies suspects 96 per cent of the time
Plus: Experts back a national cloud for ML research
In brief Cops in Detroit have admitted using facial-recognition technology that fails to accurately identify potential suspects a whopping 96 per cent of the time.…
MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs
Top uni takes action after El Reg highlights concerns by academics
Special report MIT has taken offline its highly cited dataset that trained AI systems to potentially describe people using racist, misogynistic, and other problematic terms.…
CodeGuru guesstimates how much AWS will charge you to run that source on its cloud
CodeGuru guesstimates how much AWS will charge you to run that source on its cloud
Amazon has made its machine-learning-tools that automatically review and profile code, so you can find out where bottlenecks are and how it’s going to cost you in the AWS cloud, generally available.
Click to read more…
Researchers used a pre-trained off-the-shelf model from Nvidia
Researchers used a pre-trained off-the-shelf model from Nvidia
A new computer vision technique that helps convert blurry photos of people into fake, realistic images has come under fire for being racially biased towards white people
Click to read more…
Another machine-learning model that can’t tell people of color apart? Shocker
Another machine-learning model that can’t tell people of color apart? Shocker
The American Civil Liberties Union has formally complained to Detroit police, who wrongfully arrested and locked up a dad after he was misidentified as a thief by facial-recognition software and a security guard
Amazon buys self-driving startup, and more – In brief
Amazon buys self-driving startup, and more – In brief
A handful of Democrat Senators and House reps say they will introduce legislation that would stop the Feds and cops in the US from using facial-recognition surveillance gear
Plus: AI for the benefit of humankind group loses a member and more
Plus: AI for the benefit of humankind group loses a member and more
Roundup Windows fans can finally train and run their own machine learning models off Radeon and Ryzen GPUs in their boxes, computer vision gets better at filling in the blanks and more in this week’s look at movements in AI and machine learning.
That AI-powered product and price recommendation engine? Useless now
That AI-powered product and price recommendation engine? Useless now
Machine learning models built for doing business prior to the COVID-19 pandemic will no longer be valid as economies emerge from lockdowns, presenting companies with new challenges in machine learning and enterprise data management, according to Gartner.
BOFH
Springer ditches paper from research tome, boffins rail against junk science
Updated Springer Nature has decided against publishing a paper describing a neural network supposedly capable of detecting criminals from their faces alone. Word of this decision comes as top boffins signed a letter branding the study harmful junk science.…
BOFH
Oh OK, so NOW the social network cares about getting people’s permission before using their data to train computer systems
Special report Five engineers missed out on sharing a top prize of $500,000 in a Facebook-backed AI competition – after they were disqualified for using images scraped from Flickr and YouTube to train their deepfake-detecting system.…