Articles - QESP
By Richard Matthews, PhD Candidate, University of Adelaide
- Wednesday, May 30th, 2018
My lounge room is bugged. My phone is broadcasting an ultrasonic signal to my blu-ray player via an acoustic side channel beyond human hearing.
The channel networks the two devices, similar to how a dial-up connection used to get our computers online before the days of the NBN. The same technology is behind Google’s Nearby API through their Eddystone protocol, and is the basis of products sold by the startup Lisnr. It’s also the reason more and more apps are requesting access permissions to your microphone.
By Ted Smillie
- Friday, May 25th, 2018
“Our tool turns complex data into intuitive 3-D shapes that can be visually examined and compared. Essentially, we are leveraging the visual system’s amazing ability to find patterns in the world around us to also find patterns in complex scientific data.” This research is from Dartmouth College, reported in a 7 May 2018 ScienceDaily paper, […]
By Ruhr-University Bochum
- Monday, May 14th, 2018
A research team has demonstrated that the two most common email encryption standards are vulnerable to attacks. Their attack, referred to as Efail, proved successful in 25 out of 35 tested email programs using the S/MIME encryption standard and in 10 out of 28 tested programs using OpenPGP.
By Frontiers
- Thursday, May 10th, 2018
A new study finds a free ‘massive, open, online course’ (MOOC) led to students feeling more positive about math, more engaged during math class, and scoring significantly higher in mathematics assessments. This is the first of its kind to focus on changing students’ mindsets and beliefs about their mathematics potential.
By David Tuffley, Griffith University
- Wednesday, May 2nd, 2018
Imagine you live in a smart city that knows your face and follows your every move – the places you go, the people you see, and all of the things you do along the way.
Over time, autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) builds a profile that reports on how likely you are to commit a crime. When that risk is high, the police take pre-emptive action. Welcome to hyper-surveillance and the next generation of predictive policing.
By Ted Smillie
- Sunday, April 29th, 2018
Our August 2015 article, New Ways of Teaching Lead to First Year Students Scientific Breakthrough,
was optimistic about improvements in teaching processes, globally and in Australia. However, recent research on teachers and teaching brings a mixture of good and bad news from various sources, especially The Conversation.
By Rice University
- Wednesday, April 25th, 2018
Computer scientists have created a deep-learning, software-coding application that can help human programmers by writing chunks of code in response to keywords.
Computer scientists at Rice University have created a deep-learning, software-coding application that can help human programmers navigate the growing multitude of often-undocumented application programming interfaces, or APIs.
By Verona Burgess
- Wednesday, April 4th, 2018
With tentacles that reach far across portfolio, federal, state and private sector lines, Bill Ferris has given the Prime Minister a blueprint for government reform that could be interpreted as ‘enough rope’. That it is tied so explicitly to innovation spells trouble, writes Verona Burgess.
By Ted Smillie
- Saturday, March 31st, 2018
Mark Zukerberg’s 21 March 2018 public post about Cambridge Analytica gives a timeline which starts In 2013, with Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan creating a personality quiz app. However, our March 2017 Cambridge Analytica article Fear the Geeks tells a different story. That article is primarily about “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency” […]
By American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
- Tuesday, March 13th, 2018
Off-the-shelf devices that include baby monitors, home security cameras, doorbells, and thermostats were easily co-opted by cyber researchers . As part of their ongoing research into detecting vulnerabilities of devices and networks expanding in the smart home and Internet of Things (IoT), the researchers disassembled and reverse engineered many common devices and quickly uncovered serious security issues.
