(Reuters) — The group behind a global cyber-espionage campaign discovered last month deployed malicious computer code with links to spying tools previously used by suspected Russian hackers, researchers said on Monday. Investigators at Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said the “backdoor” used to compromise up to 18,000 customers of U.S. software maker SolarWinds closely resembled malware tied to a hacking group […]

On Wednesday, we witnessed a coup attempt fueled by racism, disinformation, and the President of the United States. Video of the U.S. Capitol breach shows that Trump supporters were permitted to violate multiple federal laws, desecrate the people’s house, undermine national security, and violently oppose the largest exercise of the right to vote since the founding of this nation. People […]

Deep learning has come a long way since the days when it could only recognize handwritten characters on checks and envelopes. Today, deep neural networks have become a key component of many computer vision applications, from photo and video editors to medical software and self-driving cars. Roughly fashioned after the structure of the brain, neural networks have come closer to seeing […]

In late 2019, researchers affiliated with Facebook, New York University (NYU), the University of Washington, and DeepMind proposed SuperGLUE, a new benchmark for AI designed to summarize research progress on a diverse set of language tasks. Building on the GLUE benchmark, which had been introduced one year prior, SuperGLUE includes a set of more difficult language understanding challenges, improved resources, […]

As predictive models are deployed to make decisions ranging from employee hiring to loan approvals, there’s a growing emphasis on designing algorithms that explain their decision-making and provide recourse to affected individuals. (For example, when a person is denied a loan by a model, they should be informed of the reasons and what can be done to address them.) Several […]

Last week, on the heels of DeepMind’s breakthrough in using AI to predict protein-folding came the news that the UK-based AI company is still costing its parent company Alphabet Inc hundreds of millions of dollars in losses each year. A tech company losing money is nothing new. The tech industry is replete with examples of companies who burned investor money […]

To work effectively, algorithms need user data — typically on an ongoing basis to help refine and improve the experience. To get user data, you need users. And to get users, especially lasting users who trust you with their data, you need to provide options that suit their comfort levels now while still allowing them to change them in future. […]

Curating biological studies is an important yet labor-intensive process performed by researchers in life sciences fields. Among other tasks, curators must recognizing experiment methods, identifying the underlying protocols that net the figures published in research articles. In other words, “biocurators” need to take figures, captions, and more into their consideration and make decisions about how each were derived. This requires […]

(Reuters) — Tech giants including Microsoft and Google on Monday joined Facebook’s legal battle against hacking company NSO, filing an amicus brief in federal court that warned that the Israeli firm’s tools were “powerful, and dangerous.” The brief, filed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, opens up a new front in Facebook’s lawsuit against NSO, which […]

(Reuters) — The U.S. unit of SoftBank-backed robotics startup CloudMinds has changed its name to distance itself from the blacklisted China-based firm, two people with knowledge of the matter said, and is selling face-scanning temperature monitors through T-Mobile US. The unit is selling its cloud-connected products under the new name at a time of heightened concern in the United States […]