Worth reading: this Wired article that discusses the potential impact of banning political ads on social media. Political Ads serve as entry point to phony astroturf communities. For example, the now infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA for short) purchased only 3400 Facebook and Instagram ads. Compare this to the over 61500 Facebook posts, 116000 Instagram […]
Category Archives: News
Converging Solutions: Artificial Networks Shed Light on Human Face Recognition
Humans are almost hardwired to recognize faces. It’s important for us to tell people apart and we barely think about it. But the recognition process is far from being understood. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have compared how deep neural networks recognize faces and compared this with activation pattern data from […]
Why News-Pull is no Solution for WhatsApp Newsletters
With the approaching end of WhatsApp newsletters, companies are looking for alternatives to prevent the loss of their WhatsApp newsletter audience. One solution is the switch to News-Pull. Here the subscriber must open WhatsApp, switch to the newsletter channel and send a message (for example, a letter). Only then will the subscriber receive the newsletter […]
The End of Political Advertising on Social Media?
Twitter has announced to block all political advertising with November. Although it is still unclear how this is implemented in practice and what qualifies as a political advertising, one thing is clear: the times when political parties have simply bought advertising on social media sites are probably over. This also because of Cambridge Analytica, that […]
Google has reached “Quantum Supremacy”
Google has now officially made its proof of the so-called Quantum Supremacy public by publishing an article in Nature. According to Sundar Pichai on the company’s blog “We’ve shown that our newest quantum processor Sycamore with 53 qubits can perform a calculation within seconds that would take thousands of years even for the strongest supercomputers […]
Planting Tiny Spy Chips in Hardware Can Cost as Little as $200 | WIRED
Ever wondered how much it woud cost to add spy chips on a server motherboard? It can be as litte as $200. Of course, you need access to the hardware to do this. This comes after the Bloomber Businessweek bombshell article from last year, claiming Supermicro motherboards were bugged with tiny chips from Chinese hackers. […]
Most Deepfakes Are Porn, and They’re Multiplying Fast | WIRED
Two years ago, software was realeased that montaged faces of Hollywood actresses into pornographic video clips. This is now known as deepfakes and the technology has found a wide audience. While some of the manipulated videos are fun and mostly harmless like the picture above, a report by Deeptrace found 96% of deepfakes are pornographic. […]
We Are All Confident Idiots – Pacific Standard
Incompetent people cannot recognize just how incompetent are. In order to realize how incompetent they are, they must have expertise in the area they simply lack. It’s like a blind spot: they don’t know what they don’t know. This is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Read more here
Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis | WIRED
It has become notoriously difficult to replicate experiments in the AI field. Generally speaking, getting neuronal networks to perform well can be like an art and tweaks to the network often go unreported in publications. Also, as networks grow in size and complexity, studying those models is expensive, if not impossible for all but the […]
Facebook’s Latest Purchase Gets Inside Users’ Heads—Literally | WIRED
Facebook purchased CTRL-Labs (pronounced “Control” labs), a company that allows uses to control computer interafaces with brainpower. They use a mix of machine learning and neuroscience to accomplish that. While they are not the only company that tries to do that, CTRL-Labs is considered to have a quite pragmatic approach to brain computer interfaces. Users […]