Browsers including Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome have begun providing protections against cross-site tracking methods employing cookies and IP addresses. It’s an encouraging development, but there’s a fear it will push trackers to adopt more opaque, “stateless” tracking like browser fingerprinting, which tracks browsers by the configuration information they make visible.
To combat…
Ahead of the Hot Chips conference this week, photonics chip startup Lightmatter revealed the first technical details about its upcoming test chip. Unlike conventional processors and graphics cards, the test chip uses light to send signals, promising orders of magnitude…
This article is part of a VB special issue. Read the full series: Automation and jobs in the new normal.
In early spring 2020, Smithfield, Tyson, and other industrial food suppliers warned that upwards of millions of pounds of meat could disappear from the U.S. supply…
At the Hot Chips 2020 conference, which was held virtually this year, IBM announced the IBM Power10. It’s the successor to the Power9 and represents the next generation of the company’s processor family. IBM claims that the Power10 delivers up to three times greater efficiency than its predecessor while at the same time delivering higher workload capacity and container density.
The Power10 was…
Aside from staying alive and healthy, the biggest concern most people have during the pandemic is the future of their jobs. Unemployment in the U.S. has skyrocketed, from 5.8 million in February 2020 to 16.3 million in July 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor…
Using AI to uncover “risky” behaviors among parolees is problematic on many levels. Nevertheless, researchers will soon embark on an ill-conceived effort to do so at Tippecanoe County Community Corrections in Indiana. Funded by a grant from the Justice Department and in…
A team of AI researchers have created a way for humans to train robots to use cheap, freely available materials in order to scale the collection of training data and enable widespread adoption. The experiment utilizes reacher-grabber devices on a pole, the kind people with disabilities, senior citizens, and others commonly use to grab something that’s out of reach. Authors mounted a GoPro camera…
Researchers use AI classifiers to expose potential vulnerabilities in Microsoft remote desktop
August 13, 2020
Microsoft’s encrypted Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) contains vulnerabilities that could enable attackers to detect activities, keystrokes, and mouse movements in 30-second traces. That’s according to a preprint study from researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston…
What Kamala Harris’ record says about major AI policy issues
August 13, 2020
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden chose Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) to be his vice presidential running mate today. Born in Oakland, California and raised in Berkeley, Harris is the first African American woman and first Asian American woman to be chosen as a U.S.
Researchers claim bias in AI named entity recognition models
August 13, 2020
Twitter researchers claim to have found evidence of demographic bias in named entity recognition, the first step toward generating automated knowledge bases, or the repositories leveraged by services like search engines. They say their analysis reveals AI performs better at identifying names from specific groups, and the biases manifest in syntax, semantics, and how word uses vary across…
