By Ted Smillie - Saturday, January 20th, 2018
Our June 2017 article How Dangerous Is Deep Learning? reviewed the deep learning arguments (sometimes acrimonious) as “part of an ongoing controversy which engages some of the best minds on the planet”. New evidence is offering further insights for and against the proposition that “Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon be able to set its own […]
By Esther Rajadurai - Saturday, January 20th, 2018
At the heart of Australia’s society and economy is the idea of the ‘fair go’: the notion that, if we work hard enough, we will be able to get ahead no matter our gender, ethnicity, or our post code. But in recent years, the fair go has been under threat, particularly as wage and income inequality has widened, leaving more Australians behind.1
By University of California - Riverside - Saturday, January 20th, 2018
Scientists have identified a unique structure that wraps around the mantis shrimp’s club to protect it from self-inflicted damage as it crushes hard-shelled prey. The finding will help researchers develop ultra-strong materials for the aerospace and sports industries.
By Jean-Louis Gassée - Saturday, January 20th, 2018
We hear so much about software security vulnerabilities that we forget how buggy microprocessors can be. Some of these are “honest” bugs?—?mistakes in firmware code, errors in execution. But others stem from industry-wide design principles. These bugs are very subtle, hard to detect and cure, and they should cause us to reconsider our trust in CPU hardware.
By Ted Smillie - Sunday, December 17th, 2017
Our December 2017 article Security flaw found: 10 million banking app users at risk may have appeared to be the worst of recent security breaches but security of mobile phone apps may be the least of our problems. The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) issued an alert on November 14, 2017, revised November 22, […]
By Rafael A Calvo, Professor and ARC Future Fellow, University of Sydney Dorian Peters, Creative Leader, Positive Computing Lab, University of Sydney - Wednesday, December 13th, 2017
If kids spend hours a day speaking to digital personal assistant Alexa, how will this affect the way they connect to real people? When a self-driving car runs over a pedestrian, who do you take to court? Is it okay to manipulate people’s emotions if it’s making them happier?
Together with an international team of researchers in fields as diverse as philosophy, engineering and anthropology, we set out to tackle these questions. The result is a new set of guidelines focused on the ethical and social implications of autonomous and intelligent systems. That includes everything from big data and social media algorithms to autonomous weapons.
By University of Birmingham - Wednesday, December 6th, 2017
Researchers have developed a tool to perform semi-automated security testing of mobile phone apps. After running the tool on a sample of 400 security critical apps, they were able to identify a critical vulnerability in banking apps.
By Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard - Wednesday, December 6th, 2017
A research team has leapfrogged their ‘DNA bricks’ technology by two orders of magnitude, enabling next-generation DNA bricks to self-assemble into three-dimensional nanostructures that are 100 times more complex than those created with existing methods. The study provides user-friendly computational tools to design DNA nanostructures with complex cavities (and possibly surfaces) that have the potential to serve as building components in numerous nanotechnological applications in medicine and engineering.
By Georgia Institute of Technology - Thursday, November 30th, 2017
Until now, assessing the extent and impact of network or computer system attacks has been largely a time-consuming manual process. A new software system being developed by cybersecurity researchers will largely automate that process, allowing investigators to quickly and accurately pinpoint how intruders entered the network, what data they took and which computer systems were compromised.
By University of Illinois College of Engineering - Wednesday, November 29th, 2017
Designing apps for maximum utility is mostly a hit or miss process, according to researchers. There are only limited guides to what works and what doesn’t. Scientists would like to change that, and they believe it is possible with the recent release of Rico, a huge database of mobile app designs.
