Emerging Drone uses in War

Cheaper and increasingly autonomous, they will be in our  future.  For war and for humanitarian aiding  in its aftermath. 

The Drones of War

By Esther Shein, Commissioned by CACM Staff, May 10, 2022

North American professional drone maker Draganfly has sent the first of nearly a dozen humanitarian drones to the non-profit Ukraine organization Revived Soldiers Ukraine (RSU) in Europe, to be used to deliver insulin to hard-to-reach hospitals in the war-torn country.

RSU has ordered 200 medical response drones from Draganfly, each costing $30,000 and equipped with temperature-managed payload boxes that can transport up to 35 pounds of blood, pharmaceuticals, insulin/medicines, vaccines, and wound care kits, the drone maker said. Because insulin is a temperature-sensitive product, quick and safe transportation is a top priority.

There are roughly 2.3 million people living with diabetes in Ukraine, according to the International Diabetes Association, many of whom have Type 1 diabetes and require multiple daily injections of insulin to survive. For those living in high-conflict areas of the country, access to life-saving insulin is limited or non-existent.

Draganfly's drones are equipped with temperature-managed payload boxes that can transport blood, pharmaceuticals, insulin/medicines, vaccines, water, and wound care kits. 

Also aiding in the delivery of medical supplies in Ukraine is Coldchain Delivery Systems, a Spring Branch, TX-based company that provides logistics services and connected RSU with Draganfly to deliver the medical equipment to people in besieged areas.

Because Draganfly's drones are equipped with thermal cameras, they can "look through debris to see if there are heat signatures, meaning a warm body,'' according to CEO Cameron Chell.

So far, RSU has purchased 10 drones and Draganfly has donated three, he said. There are three types of Draganfly drones being sent to Europe, ranging in price from $7,500 to $30,000, Chell said.

Other organizations have reached out to offer to provide insulin and other medical suppies, and "We're going to work with Revived Soldiers Ukraine and help them continue to do what it takes to accept donations and let people be involved,'' he said. "I suspect it will become a long-term thing for us."

After seeing how Draganfly's advanced drones were being used to deliver temperature-sensitive medical supplies and to assist search-and-rescue operations, "We knew they would be invaluable to our crews on the ground,'' said RSU president Iryna Vashchuk Discipio. She added that Draganfly is providing its drones at cost. ... ' 

Success of AI is in Infrastructure

 In VentureBeat

Artificial intelligence (AI) is bringing many changes to the enterprise, none of which is more vital to its success than infrastructure. Changing the nature of workloads – not just how they are generated and processed but how they apply to the operational goals – requires changes in the way raw data is handled, and this extends right down to the physical layer of the data stack.

As VB pointed out earlier this year, AI is already changing the way infrastructure is being designed all the way out to the edge. On a more fundamental level, basic hardware is becoming optimized to support AI workloads, and not just on the processor level. But it will take a coordinated effort, and no small amount of vision, to configure hardware to handle AI properly – and indeed, there isn’t likely to be one right way of doing it anyway.

How Gap Inc. is leveraging the modern data-stack and building AI to solve age-old customer problems

Foundational change for AI infrastructure

In a recent survey of more than 2,000 business leaders by IDC, one of the lead findings was the growing realization that AI needs to reside on purpose-built infrastructure if it is to bring real value to the business model. In fact, lack of proper infrastructure was cited as one of the primary drivers for failed AI projects, which continues to stymie development in more than two-thirds of organizations. As with most technological initiatives, however, key hurdles to more AI-centric infrastructure include costs, lack of clear strategies and the sheer complexity of legacy data environments and infrastructure.

All hardware is interrelated in the enterprise, whether it sits in the data center, the cloud or the edge, and this makes it difficult to simply deploy new platforms and put them to work. But as tech author Tirthajyoti Sarkar points out, there are plenty of ways to gain real value from AI without the latest generation of optimized chip-level solutions entering the channel.

Cutting-edge GPUs, for example, may be the solution-of-choice for advanced deep learning and natural language processing models, but a number of AI applications – some of them quite advanced, such as game theoretics and large-scale reinforcement learning – are better-suited to the CPU. And since much of the heavy-lifting in AI development and utilization is typically performed by front-end data conditioning tools, choices over cores, acceleration technologies and cache may prove more consequential than the type of processor. ... '

Alexa Together Caregiving

 Newly announced, recalls work we saw in Japan, which also connected multiple people, as needed, to the eldercare dynamic.

Alexa Together will let caregivers remotely set up routines for aging loved ones

A person receiving support can now have up to 10 caregivers through the service.

K. Holt   @krisholt

Amazon is rolling out some more features for Alexa Together, a service designed to help aging folks and caregivers stay connected using the voice assistant and Echo devices. One of these is called Circle of Support, which is now available to all users. This allows the person receiving support to have up to 10 designated caregivers.

Both that person and their primary caregiver can add or remove trusted people such as siblings, cousins, friends and close neighbors. All caregivers will receive daily alerts and check-ins through the activity feed. Circle of Support could be especially useful if the primary caregiver doesn't live close to the person receiving care. If the person receiving support enables Remote Assist, only the primary caregiver will be able to use it. 

Speaking of Remote Assist, Amazon will soon upgrade that feature to let the primary caregiver set up Alexa Routines for their loved one. For instance, to make life a little simpler for the person receiving care, a routine might group together early morning actions like switching off the alarm, playing a news bulletin and turning on the coffee machine, all of which can be triggered with a single voice command.   .... ' 

Earthquake Detection Algorithms

Relates to our previous examination of work  done on earthquake detection.  Makes sense such work is out of Japan.

Gravity signals could detect earthquakes at the speed of light

Algorithm set for deployment in Japan could identify giant temblors faster and more reliably

11 MAY 202211:30 AMBYZACK SAVITSKY

Two minutes after the world’s biggest tectonic plate shuddered off the coast of Japan, the country’s meteorological agency issued its final warning to about 50 million residents: A magnitude 8.1 earthquake had generated a tsunami that was headed for shore. But it wasn’t until hours after the waves arrived that experts gauged the true size of the 11 March 2011 Tohoku quake. Ultimately, it rang in at a magnitude 9—releasing more than 22 times the energy experts predicted and leaving at least 18,000 dead, some in areas that never received the alert. Now, scientists have found a way to get more accurate size estimates faster, by using computer algorithms to identify the wake from gravitational waves that shoot from the fault at the speed of light.

“This is a completely new [way to recognize] large-magnitude earthquakes,” says Richard Allen, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. “If we were to implement this algorithm, we’d have that much more confidence that this is a really big earthquake, and we could push that alert out over a much larger area sooner.”

Scientists typically detect earthquakes by monitoring ground vibrations, or seismic waves, with devices called seismometers. The amount of advance warning they can provide depends on distance between the earthquake and the seismometers, and the speed of the seismic waves, which travel less than 6 kilometers per second. Networks in Japan, Mexico, and California provide seconds or even minutes of advance warning, and the approach works well for relatively small temblors. But beyond magnitude 7, the earthquake waves can saturate seismometers. This makes the most destructive earthquakes, like Japan’s Tohoku quake, the most challenging to identify, Allen says.  ...

Context In Machine Intelligence

I often make this point ... context is everything ... in fact I like to make the expansion of this as well:  'Context is everything', and its always changing"      Its like how we use all 'intelligence' that  is presented in a context, and included in that context are usually a number of uncontrolled time dimensions, like history and customer status and  other domain considerations, random context elements, etc  

Advancing Machine Intelligence: Why Context Is Everything  in TowardsDataScience  By Gadi Singer May 10

Most of us have heard the phrase, “Image is everything.” But when it comes to taking AI to the next level, it’s context that is everything.

Contextual awareness embodies all the subtle nuances of human learning. It is the ‘who’, ‘why’, ‘when’, and ‘why’ that inform human decisions and behavior. Without context, the current foundation models are destined to spin their wheels and ultimately interrupt the trajectory of expectation for AI to improve our lives.

This blog will discuss the significance of context in ML, and how late binding context could raise the bar on machine enlightenment.

Why Context Matters

Context is so deeply embedded in human learning that it is easy to overlook the critical role it plays in how we respond to a given situation. To illustrate this point, consider a conversation between two people that begins with a simple question: How is Grandma?

In a real-world conversation, this simple query could elicit any number of potential responses depending on contextual factors, including time, circumstance, relationship, etc.:

Fig 1. A proper answer to “How’s Grandma?” is highly context-dependent. 

The question illustrates how the human mind can track and take into account a vast amount of contextual information, even subtle humor, to return a relevant response. This ability to fluidly adapt to a variety of often subtle contexts is well beyond the reach of modern AI systems.

To grasp the significance of this deficit in machine learning, consider the development of reinforcement learning (RL)-based autonomous agents and robots. Despite the hype and success that RL-based architectures have had in simulated game environments like Dota 2 and StarCraft II, even purely gaming environments like NetHack pose a formidable obstacle to current RL systems due to the highly conditional nature and complexity of policies that are required to win the game. Similarly, as noted in many recent works, autonomous robots have miles to go before they can interact with previously unseen physical environments without the need of a serious engineering effort to either simulate the correct type of environment prior to deployment, or to harden the learned policy.

Current ML and Handling of Contextual Queries

With some notable exceptions, most ML models incorporate very limited context of a specific query, relying primarily on the generic context provided by the dataset that the model is trained or fine-tuned on. Such models also raise significant concerns about bias which makes them less suited for use in many business, healthcare, and other critical applications. Even state-of-the-art models like D3ST used in voice assistant AI applications require manually creating descriptions of schemata or ontologies with possible intents and actions that the model needs to identify context. While this involves a relatively minimal level of handcrafting, it nonetheless means that an explicit human input is required every time the context of the task is to be updated.

That’s not to say there haven’t been significant developments in context awareness for machine learning models. GPT-3, a famous large language model from the OpenAI team, has been used to generate full articles that rival human composition — a task that requires keeping track of at least local context. The Pathways Language Model (PaLM), introduced by Google in April 2022, demonstrates even greater capability, including the ability to understand conceptual combinations in appropriate contexts to answer complex queries.  ... 

Interactive Big Data Journalism

Finding information and useful interaction with it.   Though unclear what a 'big data journalism' means here. 

Interactive Tools May Help People Become Big Data Journalists

By Penn State News, May 6, 2022

Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) researchers say people could use interactive tools to navigate, save, and tailor online content to extract meaning from big data.

The researchers found people more engaged with news websites that offered modality, message, and source interactivity tools than with sites that did not.

Penn State's S. Shyam Sundar said user experience is shaped by how these tools may be combined and how engaged users are in the topic; for example, the most engaging sites boasted a high concentration of modality tools and message interactivity.

"The types of interactivities we are talking about here can help users find information that they find personally meaningful and that they care about," Sundar said.

From Penn State News

View Full Article  

Archaeological Artifact Visualization

Thinking of some other uses of creation and identification.

 DIY Digital Archaeology: Methods for Visualizing Small Objects, Artifacts

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, April 13, 2022

Researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (SHH), the U.K.'s University of Exeter, and Japanese videogame developer Cygames collaborated on new techniques for visualizing small artifacts. The Small Object and Artifact Photography (SOAP) protocol guides users through the process of photographing small objects and artifacts. The High Resolution Photogrammetry (HRP) protocol is a manual for developing high-resolution three-dimensional models by combining methods applied in academic and computer graphic fields. The researchers developed the techniques using Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Photoshop, RawDigger, DxO Photolab, and RealityCapture, leveraging native functions and tools that simplify and accelerate image capture and processing. "By clearly explaining every step of the process, including theoretical and practical considerations, these methods will allow users to produce high-quality, publishable two- and three-dimensional visualizations of their archaeological artifacts independently," said SHH's Jacopo Niccolò Cerasoni. .... ' 

UK Blames Russia For Satellite Hack

In the BBC, more examples of tech warfare and implications.

UK blames Russia for satellite internet hack at start of war   By Chris Vallance,  BBCTechnology Reporter

Russia was behind a cyber-attack targeting American commercial satellite internet company Viasat, UK and US intelligence suggests. The attack began about an hour before Russia invaded Ukraine, on 24 February.

It caused outages for several thousand Ukrainian customers - and affected windfarms and internet users in Central Europe. Officials have long believed Russia was to blame but lacked the evidence to say so publicly. Viasat provides high-speed satellite broadband to commercial and military customers.

The company has previously said "tens of thousands of terminals" were damaged beyond repair, in the cyber-attack, though its core network infrastructure and the satellite itself remained unscathed.  .... ' 

IBM's Plan for Quantum

Reasonable?  See links in the article to former quantum roadmaps. 

 IBM wants its quantum supercomputers running at 4,000-plus qubits by 2025  By A. Tarantola in Engadget

That's nearly a full magnitude more powerful than today's state-of-the-art systems.

Forty years after it first began to dabble in quantum computing, IBM is ready to expand the technology out of the lab and into more practical applications — like supercomputing! The company has already hit a number of development milestones since it released its previous quantum roadmap in 2020, including the 127-qubit Eagle processor that uses quantum circuits and the Qiskit Runtime API. IBM announced on Wednesday that it plans to further scale its quantum ambitions and has revised the 2020 roadmap with an even loftier goal of operating a 4,000-qubit system by 2025.

Before it sets about building the biggest quantum computer to date, IBM plans release its 433-qubit Osprey chip later this year and migrate the Qiskit Runtime to the cloud in 2023, “bringing a serverless approach into the core quantum software stack,” per Wednesday’s release. Those products will be followed later that year by Condor, a quantum chip IBM is billing as “the world’s first universal quantum processor with over 1,000 qubits.”

This rapid four-fold jump in quantum volume (the number of qubits packed into a processor) will enable users to run increasingly longer quantum circuits, while increasing the processing speed — measured in CLOPS (circuit layer operations per second) — from a maximum of 2,900 OPS to over 10,000. Then it’s just a simple matter of quadrupaling that capacity in the span of less than 24 months. .... '

Ricardian Contracts vs Smart Contracts

 Brought to my attention, unsure as yet how broadly the definition is used at this time, can see the need for the understanding of such an agreement by human and machine means.

The Ricardian contract, as invented by Ian Grigg in 1996, (Wikipedia)  is a method of recording a document as a contract at law, and linking it securely to other systems, such as accounting, for the contract as an issuance of value.[1][2] It is robust through use of identification by cryptographic hash function, transparent through use of readable text for legal prose and efficient through markup language to extract essential information.

A Ricardian contract places the defining elements of a legal agreement in a format that can be expressed and executed in software.[3] The key is to make the format both machine-readable, such that they can easily be extracted for computational purposes, and readable as an ordinary text document such that lawyers and contracting parties may read the essentials of the contract conveniently.[4]

From a legal perspective, the use of markup language embedded within a mostly legal prose document leads to reduced transaction costs, faster dispute resolution, better enforceability and enhanced transparency.[4][5] From a computing perspective, the Ricardian contract is a software design pattern to digitize documents and have them participate within financial transactions, such as payments, without losing any of the richness of the contracting tradition. Publication of the content and reference to that content by the unique cryptographic message digest eliminates frauds based on multiple presentations.[5]

The method arises out of the work of Ian Grigg completed in the mid-1990s in contributions to Ricardo,[6] a system of assets transfers that was built in 1995-1996 by Systemics and included the pattern. The system and the design pattern was named after David Ricardo in honour of his seminal contribution to international trade theory.  .... '  

Government Authority Falls Due to Algorithm

Regulation 0f algorithms causes Dutch Tax Authority to fail.  An unusual event.  Fairness and impacts. 

The Dutch Tax Authority Was Felled by AI—What Comes Next? European regulation hopes to rein in ill-behaving algorithms by RAHUL RAO     in Spectrum IEEE

Until recently, it wasn’t possible to say that AI had a hand in forcing a government to resign. But that’s precisely what happened in the Netherlands in January 2021, when the incumbent cabinet resigned over the so-called kinderopvangtoeslagaffaire: the childcare benefits affair.

When a family in the Netherlands sought to claim their government childcare allowance, they needed to file a claim with the Dutch tax authority. Those claims passed through the gauntlet of a self-learning algorithm, initially deployed in 2013. In the tax authority’s workflow, the algorithm would first vet claims for signs of fraud, and humans would scrutinize those claims it flagged as high risk.

In reality, the algorithm developed a pattern of falsely labeling claims as fraudulent, and harried civil servants rubber-stamped the fraud labels. So, for years, the tax authority baselessly ordered thousands of families to pay back their claims, pushing many into onerous debt and destroying lives in the process.

“When there is disparate impact, there needs to be societal discussion around this, whether this is fair. We need to define what ‘fair’ is,” says Yong Suk Lee, a professor of technology, economy, and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, in the United States. “But that process did not exist.”

Postmortems of the affair showed evidence of bias. Many of the victims had lower incomes, and a disproportionate number had ethnic minority or immigrant backgrounds. The model saw not being a Dutch citizen as a risk factor.

“The performance of the model, of the algorithm, needs to be transparent or published by different groups,” says Lee. That includes things like what the model’s accuracy rate is like, he adds.  .... '

Reducing COVID-19 Patient Breathing Effort

 Respitatory Support for COVID Patients with computational modeling

Reducing COVID-19 Patients' Breathing Efforts Could Be Key to Success of Non-Invasive Respiratory Support

University of Warwick (U.K.),   April 21, 2022

A team of U.S., U.K., and Irish researchers has used computational modeling to demonstrate that non-invasive respiratory support is more likely to be successful if it relies on significantly reducing patients' efforts to breath. Researchers at the U.K.'s University of Warwick created computer simulations of 120 COVID-19 patients to measure the internal mechanics generated by different types of non-invasive support at different levels of breathing intensity. They found that while non-invasive measures improved oxygenation, stresses and strains within the lung could be elevated to potentially dangerous levels without any reduction in breathing effort. Said Dr. Luigi Camporata, “These results provide urgently needed evidence to help clinicians manage and optimize the treatment of COVID-19 patients in a way that averts additional and preventable lung injury.” .... ' 

Swarms of Drones for Forestry

 Recal my previous mentioning the use of drones in Forestry, with the potential of advanced sensors and cooperation with mapping and multitasking activity.  We did that with photography and later with Satellite images and helicopters.   Drone use makes sense.     Some evidence of advanced uses: 

Chinese scientists have proven that aerial robots can work together, navigate obstacles and, perhaps worryingly, track humans out of sight

By Sarah Knapton,  SCIENCE EDITOR

Drone swarms that dart nimbly around obstacles, mapping their surroundings or searching for fugitives, have long been the stuff of science fiction.

But now Chinese scientists have proven that aerial robots can work together, manoeuvring at speed through a dense bamboo forest without crashing into the plants or themselves.

In new footage, released by a team from Zhejiang University, a swarm of 10 lightweight drones was filmed moving gracefully through the gaps between trunks, successfully navigating uneven ground, weeds and tangled branches.  ... '

Beyond Interpretability, Towards Language

Yes, with training in the questions we need to ask to shape the results we need for a given context. Not always easy. 

Beyond Interpretability: Developing a Language to Shape Our Relationships with AI  By Medium, May 9, 2022 in CACM

By Been Kim, Google Research, Brain Team

Artificial intelligence (AI) is more than just a tool; we will be influenced by it, and that will influence the next generation of AI. Without a language to meaningfully communicate with it, we do not understand its decisions and, therefore, will not know what we are creating.

Building a language to communicate with AI will not be easy, but it is the only way to gain control of the way we want to live. Languages shape the way we think. We have an opportunity to shape our own thinking and future machines.

From Medium  

Building Decision Trees by Hand without Code

 Cool little piece that is instructional and even inspirational.   Math and process seen together to produce real value.

Random Forest and Decision Trees by hand — no coding

By Thomas Le Menestrel,      Computational Engineering student at Stanford | Passionate about Machine Learning and Data Science  in TowardsDataScience 

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss Decision Trees and Random Forest, two algorithms used in Machine Learning for classification and regression tasks.

I will show how to build a Decision Tree from scratch using a pen and paper and how to generalise this and build a Random Forest model.

Dataset

Let’s see how this work in practice with a simple dataset. .... ( much more )

Yes to a Passkey Standard

Yes, need easy to use, clear, very secure and broadly available. Have now worked some of the methods from the major players.  Work well, but not well enough together.   Make it happen.

 Apple, Google, Microsoft Want to Kill the Password with 'Passkey' Standard

Ars Technica, Ron Amadeo, May 5, 2022

Members of the FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance announced in a blog post on “World Password Day” (the first Thursday in May) that Apple, Google, and Microsoft are launching a "joint effort" to "expand support for a common password-less sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium." The multi-device FIDO credential or passkey would have applications or websites validate the user's login by pushing authentication requests to their phone; the user would unlock the phone, and authenticate with a personal identification number or biometric. The new scheme operates over Bluetooth, which the FIDO Alliance said is needed "to verify physical proximity." The Alliance said it expects these capabilities to be available across Apple, Google, and Microsoft platforms “over the course of the coming year."  ...' 

IFIF Design Futures Class

 I worked with IFTF for years as part of their connection to our big enterprise,   connecting with our  top corporate level.    Were always very thought provoking and useful.  Here an intro, click through for much more details and registration. 

IFTF Design Futures

Institute for the Future (IFTF) is pleased to offer a training with our team of award-winning design futurists to learn to imagine and prototype informed alternatives to the future, and design new offerings and policies for the next decade.   Creating artifacts from the future is one way IFTF uses design t ostart the futures thinking process. They are the first prototypes of a world to come. The artifact from the future, at left, creates a plausible vision of what direct-action climate activism might look like in 10 years.  .... 

Expand your design practice with foresight:

Combine professional design practices with foresight methods and tools to identify forces of change, signals, and alternative futures.

Recognize biases and assumptions about the future:

Identify the visions embedded in products, strategies, and media, and learn how to redesign them.

Build future worlds:

Describe future contexts with evidence-based world building and user journeys to anticipate problems, dilemmas and opportunities of the next decade.

Prototype experiences of a future world: Design experiential scenarios to feel life in the next decade, and engage audiences in tangible ways.

Design a new offering for the future:

Use a future values canvas to create innovative revenue and impact models for people and systems  ...

Live, multi-session instruction conducted by IFTF researchers and award-winning design futurists, Jake Dunagan, Ilana Lipsett, and Jacques Barcia

Immersion in design futures, thinking skills, methodologies, and processes

IFTF Design Futures Toolkit

Full set of proprietary PowerPoint presentations, Personalized strategic Foresight-Insight-Action plan for post-training application, Networking with a diverse cohort of foresight practitioners and designers, Official certificate of completion of IFTF Design Futures Training  .... 

The Simulated Kiss in VR

 New Experiences in VR 

VR Researchers Have Basically Figured Out How to Simulate the Feel of Kisses

A modified VR headset can create the sensation of touch, either on a user's lips or even inside their mouths.

By Andrew Liszewski  in Gizmodo

Without adding any hardware that actually makes contact with the wearer’s face, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Future Interfaces Group have modified an off-the-shelf virtual reality headset so that it recreates the sensation of touch in and around a user’s mouth, finally fulfilling virtual reality’s inevitable one true purpose.

Aside from handheld controllers that occasionally vibrate, most consumer-ready virtual reality devices ignore senses like taste, smell, and touch, and instead focus on visuals and sounds. It’s enough to make virtual reality experiences far more compelling than they were decades ago, but not enough to truly fool the brain into thinking that what your eyes are seeing is possibly a real-life experience.  ... ' 

See also:  https://www.figlab.com/research/2022/mouth-haptics

Better Mouse?

 New Logitech Mouse. Better?   We did many explorations of data and process entry in varying contexts. 

l mouse that’s easier to grasp

A trimmer build and left-handed option make the Lift extra helpful.  SCHARON HARDING - 4/19/2022, 3:01 AM  in Ars Technica

With shockingly tall stature and non-traditional curves, vertical mice require some adjustment to use. But the purported payoff, if you're to believe mouse-makers, is greater arm, wrist, and hand comfort due to a more natural hand position.

But like any ergonomic peripheral, you won't reap any benefits if you don't get used to the device. Logitech is one of the biggest names in vertical mice, thanks to the MX Vertical, one of the most feature-rich vertical mice on the market. The Logitech Lift wireless mouse isn't as feature-rich, but it's more inviting due to a smaller build targeting small to medium-sized hands, a left-handed option, and more colors.

These options make it easier to find a good fit, which is critical in ergonomics. And despite having a hand size appropriate for both the Lift and MX Vertical, I found the Lift easier to grasp while navigating its side buttons than any other vertical mice I've used.  ... '

A Look at Ransomware

 No End in sight?

Researchers Share In-Depth Analysis of PYSA Ransomware Group

April 18, 2022Ravie Lakshmanan in ThehackerNews

An 18-month-long analysis of the PYSA ransomware operation has revealed that the cybercrime cartel followed a five-stage software development cycle from August 2020, with the malware authors prioritizing features to improve the efficiency of its workflows.

This included a user-friendly tool like a full-text search engine to facilitate the extraction of metadata and enable the threat actors to find and access victim information quickly.

"The group is known to carefully research high-value targets before launching its attacks, compromising enterprise systems and forcing organizations to pay large ransoms to restore their data," Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT said in an exhaustive report published last week.

PYSA, short for "Protect Your System, Amigo" and a successor of the Mespinoza ransomware, was first observed in December 2019 and has emerged as the third most prevalent ransoware strain detected during the fourth quarter of 2021.

Since September 2020, the cybercriminal gang is believed to have exfiltrated sensitive information belonging to as many as 747 victims until its servers were taken offline earlier this January. ....'

Pentagon Needs More Nerds

 (In another time,  between some other wars, I was a nerd at the Pentagon.  Even now with much smarter devices, we need more hard and software, even beyond the AI enablement.

from ACM OPINION

To Win the Next War, the Pentagon Needs Nerds     By Wired, May 5, 2022

 When Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) turned to a team of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) experts to make sense of an avalanche of information about the conflict. These tech experts crafted code and ML algorithms, creating systems that are "especially valuable for synthesizing the complex logistics picture," said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks in a recent interview.

Hicks says this helps prove a point that she and others have been making within the Pentagon for some time—that technology is fundamentally changing the nature of war, and the U.S. needs to adapt in order to maintain its edge.   However, a 2019 report commissioned by the Defense Innovation Board, warns that software and its development has become a crucial strategic issue for the U.S. military. The board also notes that the DoD cannot typically compete with the salaries tech companies offer software developers. .... 

There are those—inside and outside of the Pentagon—who worry that the U.S. is ill-equipped to adapt to the challenges presented by war in the future.  ...

Full Article.

Europe's Future Beyond Energy

For example in tech ...

McKinsey Global Institute

Securing Europe’s future beyond energy: Addressing its corporate and technology gap  May 4, 2022 | Article

By Sven Smit, Magnus Tyreman, Jan Mischke, Philipp Ernst, Matthias Evers, Eric Hazan, Jurica Novak, and Solveigh Hieronimus

Securing Europe’s future beyond energy: Addressing its corporate and technology gap

European leaders have shown great resolve in their initial response at scale and speed to the war in Ukraine. They will need to build the same momentum to face the region’s slow-motion corporate and technology crisis. An estimated €2 trillion to €4 trillion of annual value could be at stake—six times the amount needed for the net-zero transition—and with it Europe’s long-term prosperity and strategic autonomy. A program of 11 actions can turn the tide.

Europe as it is today has been forged in times of crisis. The European Union (EU) was created in response to the ravages of World War II. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the start of a period of economic catching up by economies in Central and Eastern Europe. The 2008 financial crisis and the eurozone crisis that followed led to more financial cooperation among European countries. The COVID-19 pandemic then triggered a higher level of fiscal coordination through the Next Generation 

Most recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine not only is a humanitarian catastrophe but has exposed a range of fragilities, from food security and energy to defense. The war has accentuated the reality that resilience depends on a strong economy with strategic autonomy in these critical areas that has long been taken for granted.

Technology is pivotal, too. Unless Europe catches up with other major regions on key technologies, it will be vulnerable across all sectors on growth and competitiveness—compromising the region’s relatively robust record on sustainability and inclusion—as well as security and strategic strength, hindering long-term resilience.   .... ' 

War and Technology

 Good piece on the topic and related implications. 

War and Tech (and ACM)

By Moshe Y. Vardi  Communications of the ACM, May 2022, Vol. 65 No. 5, Page 9  10.1145/3528570

As COVID-19 surged around the globe two years ago, I reflected on a fundamental lesson that we must learn from our pandemic unpreparedness. I quoted the economist William A. Galston, who asked: "What if the relentless pursuit of efficiency, which has dominated American business thinking for decades, has made the global economic system more vulnerable to shocks?" arguing that efficiency, which comes through optimal adaptation to an existing environment, can be at the expense of resilience, which requires the capacity to adapt to disruptive changes in the environment.

But in those early days of the pandemic, I grossly underestimated how much our obsession with efficiency came at the expense of resilience. At that point, the main symptoms of our fragility were the shortage of paper products and personal protective equipment. But by late 2021, we were all talking about the supply-chain crisis, described by the New York Times as "Ships stuck at sea, warehouses overflowing, trucks without drivers: the highly intricate and interconnected global supply chain is in upheaval, with little end in sight." A specific aspect of the supply-chain crisis was the global chip shortage—everything "smart" requires a chip, but demand outstrips supply. .... ' 

Behavior Generation Method

I see that BJ Fogg, who we worked with at Stanford, always full of good ideas,  is giving a free training session on his wanding behavioral method,  I plan to attend.

BJ Fogg, PhD  Adjunct Professor at Stanford | Research Lab Director | Author of Tiny Habits (a New York Times Bestseller)

Use Behavior Design in your business projects right away. I invite you to learn the "magicwanding" method. I will teach you, and it's free.

With this method, you can take your team (even a remote team) from abstractions to specific actions that will help your project and your team progress.

Register here for the May 13 session at 11am PDT pacific:      https://lnkd.in/gH3AHc2s

or see  https: bg-fogg/magic-wanding

Grabbing With Feeling

 Deeper sensors for haptic interaction.

A Flexible Way to Grab Items with Feeling

MIT News, Rachel Gordon, April 15, 2022

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Edward Adelson and Sandra Liu have developed a robotic gripper with flexible fingers that can manipulate objects using touch sensors that can equal or surpass the sensitivity of human skin. The gripper employs two fin ray fingers, and the researchers hollowed out the inside to fit a camera that faces a layer of sensory pads made of silicone gel affixed to an acrylic sheet. The sheet is attached to the plastic finger piece at the opposite end of the inner recess, and the finger will seamlessly enfold an object. By measuring the silicone and acrylic sheets' exact deformation, the camera and accompanying algorithms can compute the object's shape, surface roughness, and spatial orientation, plus the force being applied by, and imparted to, each finger. ... '

AI and Synthetic Biology

Excellent topic we explored.  Here a very good,  largely non technical intro paper in the current ACM.  I see this as a very direction in the years to come.  

Artificial Intelligence for Synthetic Biology

By Mohammed Eslami, Aaron Adler, Rajmonda S. Caceres, Joshua G. Dunn, Nancy Kelley-Loughnane, Vanessa A. Varaljay, Hector Garcia Martin

Communications of the ACM, May 2022, Vol. 65 No. 5, Pages 88-97  10.1145/3500922

Biology has dramatically changed in the last two decades, enabling the effective engineering of biological systems. The genomic revolution,17 which provided the ability to sequence a cell's genetic code (DNA), is the primary driver of this dramatic change. One of the most recent discoveries and tools enabled by this genomic revolution is the ability to precisely edit DNA in vivo using CRISPR-based tools.11 Higher-level manifestations of the genetic code, such as the production of proteins, are known as phenotype (as shown in Figure 1 and the accompanying table). The combination of high-throughput phenotypic data with precision DNA editing provides a unique opportunity to link changes in the underlying code to phenotype.

Synthetic biology (synbio) aims to design biological systems to a specification3 (for example, cells that produce a desired amount of biofuel, or that react in a specific manner to an external stimulus). To this end, synthetic biologists leverage engineering design principles to use the predictability of engineering to control complex biological systems. These engineering principles include standardized genetic parts, and the Design-Build-Test-Learn (DBTL) cycle, iteratively used to achieve a desired outcome. The synbio DBTL cycle adapts the expected four stages to this discipline as follows:   .... ' 

Trees in Wolfram

 I see that the Wolfram language has added new and improved features using Trees.  Below a good intro.  As usual, Their capabilities,  which we used in house, are nicely done and described, worth a look. 

New in 13: Trees

April 22, 2022, Stephen Wolfram

Two years ago we released Version 12.0 of the Wolfram Language. Here are the updates in trees since then, including the latest features in 13.0. The contents of this post are compiled from Stephen Wolfram’s Release Announcements for 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 and 13.0.

Trees! (May 2021)

Based on the number of new built-in functions the clear winner for the largest new framework in Version 12.3 is the one for trees. We’ve been able to handle trees as a special case of graphs for more than a decade (and of course all symbolic expressions in the Wolfram Language are ultimately represented as trees). But in Version 12.3 we’re introducing trees as first-class objects in the system.

The fundamental object is Tree:  ....(much more at the link] 

Generating Product Reviews with AI

Generating opinionated product reviews.  Nice general idea, but how well?  

 Everyone Has Opinions, Even AI

Dartmouth College, David Hirsch, April 25, 2022

Dartmouth College computer scientists trained an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to produce opinionated product reviews. They trained the algorithm on thousands of published wine and beer reviews, then had it generate its own human-like reviews of such products. With the help of faculty at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, review-writing code was developed to turn the algorithm into a marketing tool. Said Tuck's Prasad Vana, "Using [AI] to write and synthesize reviews can create efficiencies on both sides of the marketplace. The hope is that AI can benefit reviewers facing larger writing workloads and consumers who have to sort through so much content about products."... ' 

Full Article

Introducing Quantum Sensing

 Also new to me,  quite the revelation that quantum effects can greatly improve how we sense.  Sensing makes for more and more accurate data, here a short intro.  

A Quantum of Sensing—Atomic Scale Bolsters New Sensor Boom Once-esoteric physics will underlie sensor revolutions in medicine, tech, and engineering By Charles Q. Choi  in IEEE Spectrum

Imagine sensors that can detect the magnetic fields of thoughts, help lunar rovers detect oxygen in moon rocks, or listen to radio waves from dark matter. Just as quantum computers can theoretically find the answers to problems no classical computer could ever solve, so too can an emerging generation of quantum sensors lead to new levels of sensitivity, new kinds of applications, and new opportunities to advance a range of fields, technologies, and scientific pursuits.

Quantum technology relies on quantum effects that can arise because the universe can become a fuzzy place at its very smallest levels. For example, the quantum effect known as superposition allows atoms and other building blocks of the cosmos to essentially exist in two or more places at the same time, while another quantum effect known as entanglement can link particles so they can influence each other instantly regardless of how far apart they are.

These quantum effects are infamously fragile to outside interference. However, whereas quantum computers strive to overcome this weakness, quantum sensors capitalize on this vulnerability to achieve extraordinary sensitivity to the slightest disturbances in the environment. Below are just a small sampling of the many kinds and varieties of quantum sensors being developed and deployed today.

BRAIN SCANS: Electric currents within the brain generate magnetic fields that sensors can analyze to noninvasively scan brain activity. Now quantum sensors are enabling a wearable helmet to perform such magnetoencephalography (MEG) scans with unprecedented performance and cost.

Currently MEG scans are performed with sensors known as superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs). These require cooling with expensive liquid helium to -269 °C, making the scanners extremely large. In contrast, the new devices from startup Cerca Magnetics in Nottingham, England, are each about the size of a Lego brick. ... ' 

Meta Opens its OpenAI for Inspection

 Seeking to take a deeper view.  Examination can reveal key flaws. 

Home/News/Meta Has Built a Massive New Language AI—And It's Free   in ACM NEWS

Meta Has Built a Massive New Language AI—And It's Giving It Away for Free

By MIT Technology Review, May 4, 2022

Meta's AI lab has created a massive new language model that shares both the remarkable abilities and the harmful flaws of OpenAI's pioneering neural network GPT-3. And in an unprecedented move for Big Tech, it is giving it away to researchers—together with details about how it was built and trained.

"We strongly believe that the ability for others to scrutinize your work is an important part of research. We really invite that collaboration," says Joelle Pineau, a longtime advocate for transparency in the development of technology, who is now managing director at Meta AI.

Meta's move is the first time that a fully trained large language model will be made available to any researcher who wants to study it. The news has been welcomed by many concerned about the way this powerful technology is being built by small teams behind closed doors.

From MIT Technology Review

View Full Article  

A View of Industry 4.0

 Manufacturing pulls together all the tech, data and process, a good read.

McKinsey Talks Industry 4.0 and More

Digital transformations are notoriously difficult to scale up across manufacturing networks, but when implemented successfully, data and analytics, AI, and machine learning can generate significant benefits. So how can companies effectively leverage new tools and technology to see meaningful returns? Check out a special collection from The Global Lighthouse Network, a World Economic Forum initiative in collaboration with McKinsey & Company, to explore how Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies are shaping production, and learn how to successfully implement a value-driven approach with these insights.

Sent from McKinsey Insights, available in the App Store and Play Store.

A Stone Could hold the key to Quantum Computing?

Completely New to me. 

An Ancient Namibian Stone Could Hold The Key to Unlocking Quantum Computers?

DAVID NIELD 19 APRIL 2022  in ScienceAlert

One of the ways we can fully realize the potential of quantum computers is by basing them on both light and matter – this way, information can be stored and processed, but also travel at the speed of light.

Scientists have just taken a step closer to this goal, by successfully producing the largest hybrid particles of light and matter ever created.

These quasiparticles, known as Rydberg polaritons, were made with the help of a piece of stone containing cuprous oxide (Cu2O) crystals from an ancient deposit in Namibia, one of the few places in the world where cuprous oxide has been found in gemstone quality.

The crystal retrieved from the stone was polished and thinned to less than the width of a human hair and sandwiched between two mirrors to trap light, resulting in Rydberg polaritons 100 times larger than any previously seen.

This achievement brings us closer to producing a quantum simulator that can run off these Rydberg polaritons, using quantum bits or qubits to store information in 0s, 1s, and multiple values in between – rather than just the 1s and 0s of classical computing bits.

"Making a quantum simulator with light is the holy grail of science," says physicist Hamid Ohadi, from the University of St Andrews in the UK.

"We have taken a huge leap towards this by creating Rydberg polaritons, the key ingredient of it."  ... 

Security Now on Future Open Source

This week a  very good podcast session in TWIT:Security Now:  https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/869?autostart=false.   Regarding the future of security, especially on Open source efforts in the DOD and beyond.    Sent out to my former DOD colleagues.  

For full text https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-869-Notes.pdf   by Steve Gibson

This week on Security Now! This week we're going to examine the success of the abbreviation overloaded DoD's DIB-VDP pilot program. We’re going to introduce the relatively new OpenSSF - Open Source Security Foundation    -  “We believe open source is a public good and across every industry we have a responsibility to come together to improve and support the security of open source software we all depend on. It is one of the most important things we can do.”    and its Package Analysis Project. We're going to look at some hopeful new privacy legislation recently passed in Connecticut's house which if signed into law would cause it to join four other privacy-progressive states, and we're going to look at Moxie Marlinspike's irreverent rationale for the need for port knocking. Then, after sharing some interesting listener feedback, we're going to look at the background, implementation and future of a very encouraging development in user web browser and Internet privacy.... '

Referring further to: 

DIB-VDP Pilot Overview

The Defense Industrial Base Vulnerability Disclosure Program (DIB-VDP) Pilot is a 12-month voluntary event established collaboratively by DC3’s DoD Defense Industrial Base Collaborative Information Sharing Environment (DCISE), DoD Vulnerability Disclosure Program (DoD VDP), and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA).  ....' 

Chip Scans Possible

Chips scans possible to reveal designs

X-Ray Tech Reveals Chip Design    in IEEE

No trade secret or hardware trojan can hide from ptychographic X-ray laminography

By  ANTHONY F.J. LEVI GABRIEL AEPPLI30 APR 2022  

HEN YOU’RE BAKING a cake, it’s hard to know when the inside is in the state you want it to be. The same is true—with much higher stakes—for microelectronic chips: How can engineers confirm that what’s inside has truly met the intent of the designers? How can a semiconductor design company tell whether its intellectual property was stolen? Much more worrisome, how can anyone be sure a kill switch or some other hardware trojan hasn’t been secretly inserted?

Today, that probing is done by grinding away each of the chip’s many layers and inspecting them using an electron microscope. It’s slow going and, of course, destructive, making this approach hardly satisfactory for anybody.

One of us (Levi) works with semiconductors and the other (Aeppli) with X-rays. So, after pondering this problem, we considered using X-rays to nondestructively image chips. You’d need to go beyond the resolution used in medical X-ray scanners. But it was clear to us that the needed resolution was possible. At that moment, what we’ve been calling the “chip scan” project was born.  ...'

Optimized Face Recognition

 Advances in recognition.

An Optimized Solution for Face Recognition

MIT News.Jennifer Michalowski, April 6, 2022

Neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that a deep neural network taught to identify faces and other objects assigns specific components to perform these tasks. Former MIT researcher Katharina Dobs said any system trained to recognize faces and sort objects would hypothetically mimic the brain's approach of segregating facial and object processing. Dobs compiled scores of images of faces and objects, without telling the network which was which. In learning to recognize them, the network structured itself into an information-processing network that committed specialized units to face recognition, relying on general vision processing machinery in the early stages, and on face-dedicated components in the final steps. MIT's Nancy Kanwisher said the research addresses why the brain has a separate face recognition system, "because that is what an optimized solution looks like."  .... ' 

Kraft Heinz Tech Investment

Useful examples here. 

Kraft Heinz’s Latest Tech Investments Tackle Control Tower and Digital Twins

Lisa Johnston Senior Editor

The Kraft Heinz Company is investing heavily in its supply chain resiliency as part of the next step in its multi-year turnaround strategy.

The CPG is teaming with Microsoft for a series of digital initiatives that it described as one of its largest investments to date, including migrating the majority of its global data center assets to Azure and its ERP software to SAP on Azure. It expects the change to have a significant impact on its day-to-day operations, ultimately resulting in what it described as a more collaborative supply chain.

Kraft Heinz will also leverage predictive analytics to boost its inventory transparency, thereby upgrading the company’s consumer experiences by being better able to anticipate both consumer and channel demand.

As part of this, Kraft Heinz will work with Microsoft to build a supply chain control tower, intended to provide real-time visibility into plant operations and automation of its supply chain distribution across the No. 21 consumer goods company’s 85 product categories.

It will also create digital twins for the 34 manufacturing facilities it owns in North America. There, it will use the digital twin technology to test and refine solutions and processes, including those identifying optimal product capacity and proactively addressing issues to reduce mechanical downtime.

[See also: Increase in Digital Twins May Give Rise to Marketplaces]

A joint digital innovation office is being developed by the two companies to co-engineer new digital manufacturing solutions to further drive efficiencies. This will be done also through hybrid experiences leveraging Microsoft AI, machine learning, and IoT.

The tech investments are part of Kraft Heinz’s “Agile@Scale” transformation strategy, which is the next step of its multi-year turnaround strategy. With Agile@Scale, the CPG intends to use its improved financial position to invest in technology and leverage Agile methodologies to develop its in-house capabilities through vendor partnerships. ... ' 

Platforms vs Users

 Obviously, but worth a thought:

Platforms Need to Work with Their Users – Not Against Them

by Ethan Bueno de Mesquita and Andrew Hall, May 04, 2022  in HBR.org

As online platforms have become dominant, many have leveraged their power by raising fees and changing rules. In the short run, this hurts the producers they work with — software developers, small retailers, game designers, content creators. In the long run,...more

As we write, thousands of online communities created for a wide variety of purposes — everything from providing crypto financial services to crowdsourcing art collecting — are building new democracies rapidly evolving systems for discussion, debate, voting, and representation. This movement, often known as Web3, has created an explosion of interest in giving ownership and decision-making power to community participants rather than to a small number of business executives.

This phenomenon highlights a critical challenge for traditional platforms like Amazon, Meta, Google’s play store, and Apple’s app store, gaming platforms like Roblox or Steam, and even for newer centralized crypto platforms like Coinbase and OpenSea. Historically, as platforms became dominant in their domain, they have raised fees and changed rules to their benefit and their producers’ loss. They could do so because those producers — be they software developers, small retailers, game designers, or content creators — had nowhere else to go. But once learned, twice a fool: How can platforms keep producers making new investments in building for environments whose undemocratic governance systems cannot credibly promise to reflect their interests in the long run?

There is a way. By granting governance tokens to producers that give them the unbreakable right to vote on key decisions about fees and rules, platforms can give producers the ownership and assurances they need to unleash their innovation — to the benefit of the platform, its users, and its creative partners.

We are academics who study democratic systems of governance, and we are also advisors in the tech sector who think about the future of decentralized governance. In this essay, we’ll explain the challenge platforms are facing in maximizing the efforts of their producers, we’ll show how insights from blockchain governance can help, and we’ll discuss some specifics of how to implement a governance-token system that avoids common pitfalls that democracies have been grappling with for thousands of years.

The Lock-in Problem

In the early days of Web 2.0 — the movement that gave us mega platforms like Amazon, Facebook, and Uber — producers flocked to build for new platforms because that’s where the users, and thus the profits, were. But as some platforms failed and others became dominant in their spaces, the producers’ outside options dwindled, and so did their market power.  ... ' 

Etna Volcanology with Fiber Optic Cables

Fraunhofer work on Etna Sensors

 Scientists Spy on Mount Etna with Fiber-Optic Cables

Wired, Matt Simon, April 8, 2022

Scientists at the German Research Center for Geosciences at the Technical University of Berlin, working with colleagues at Germany’s Fraunhofer Research Institution for Energy Infrastructures and Geothermal Systems IEG, Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, and the U.K.’s Silica Ltd., are monitoring Italy’s Mount Etna through fiber-optic cables, using distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) to detect seismic signals that conventional sensors overlook. The researchers buried the cables in a three-quarter-mile-long ditch less than a foot deep near the volcano’s rim. Deployed along two branches, the cable’s performance was compared to that of conventional colocated sensors like seismometers and geophones. The cable-facilitated DAS system detected degassing events, as well as distinctive single tremor pulses, which the other sensors missed. “One of the main benefits of DAS that often tends to be overlooked is that DAS can pick up things in a lot of frequencies,” said Ariel Lellouch at Israel’s Tel Aviv University. ... ' 

Robotic Library Inventory

Inventory taking and misplaced items.

Robot Takes Stock of Books at Akita Public Library

The Asahi Shimbun (Japan)

Tsutomu Yamatani, April 12, 2022

The loan and return procedures at the Omonogawa Library in Yokote, Akita Prefecture, Japan, have been fully automated as part of a trial in which a robot was used to locate books by reading data stored in integrated circuit (IC) tags on each volume. The test involved applying IC tags to 20,000 books; a converted dish delivery robot read the data stored in the IC tags to take inventory in "several tens of minutes," a task that library staff would have needed an entire day to complete. The robot achieved a 99.5% accuracy rate in reading data from the IC tags.  ...' 

Metals Use and Availability: Nickel

 Brought to my attention in another study.  Am a follower of materials use and supply chain of need and  availability.   Here as it is related to electric vehicles (EVs).

The perfect storm increasing the cost of a crucial metal   By Chris Baraniuk, Technology of Business reporter in the BBC

Nickel is essential for batteries and stainless steel but suppliers are struggling to meet demand.

In the next few years, millions of people will buy electric vehicles (EVs). All those cars and trucks will run on batteries containing metals such as cobalt, lithium and nickel.

But shortages of metals could potentially hobble the EV boom.

"Not a lot of people realise, we simply do not have enough of these critical materials at the moment mined around the world," says Megan O'Connor, chief executive and co-founder of battery materials mining and recycling firm, Nth Cycle.

Her company has designed a means of extracting nickel and other metals from minced-up old batteries - so that these materials can be used again.

It's called electro-extraction and it works by using an electrical current to separate metals out from crushed up battery waste known as "black mass". The separated metals are isolated and trapped in a special filter.

Nth Cycle's technology extracts nickel, not just from pulverised old batteries, but also from the clumps of rock and metals dug out of mines.

It's potentially a more sustainable method of recovering nickel than traditional techniques such as pyrometallurgy, which Dr O'Connor says is not an environmentally-friendly process.  ... '

Thoughts of Mining Asteroids

Was also involved in an analysis of making this possible.  Still difficult thing to do if we cannot easily determine the value of resources there.      Not too much different from mining the earth or ocean, though the risks and costs are still far different.   Look forward to new data.   Its also been brought up much recently:  'space elevator' solutions.  

NASA debuts the spacecraft bound for the $700-quintillion Psyche 16 asteroid

Although the bottom line has been cast into doubt.  By  Chris Young

NASA's Psyche spacecraft was shown off to the world as the space agency prepares for its summer launch.

NASA showcased its Psyche spacecraft for civilians — protective smock-wearing members of the media — to see before engineers make the final adjustments and the machine is sent to Florida in anticipation of liftoff in August.

The spacecraft will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida before making a roughly three-year trip to Psyche 16, an asteroid that could be a target for future space mining missions.

Will NASA's spacecraft uncover precious space metals?

One early estimate suggested the roughly 173-mile-wide Psyche 16 contains approximately $700 quintillion in heavy metals, though this initial analysis has been cast in doubt by follow-up studies. The initial estimate was made using spectroscopy readings, but gravitational calculations suggest the asteroid has a lower mass than would be expected from a space rock composed mainly of iron and nickel — leading some to believe it only has a thin outer coating composed of heavy metals.

The only recourse left is to actually travel to the asteroid, which is exactly what NASA will do with its Psyche mission. Now, NASA is showcasing its spacecraft to the world thanks to the press event it held on Monday, April 11, during which the asteroid-bound machine was on full display  .... ' 

Neural Nets Speed Simulations

 Very interesting piece, Often the speed of complex simulations can be key for their use.  Below an introductory text, makes a good case.  Think of it as a way to insert learned knowledge into  a model.  More at the link.

Neural Networks Learn to Speed Up Simulations  By Chris Edwards

Communications of the ACM, May 2022, Vol. 65 No. 5, Pages 27-29   101145/3524015

Physical scientists and engineering research and development (R&D) teams are embracing neural networks in attempts to accelerate their simulations. From quantum mechanics to the prediction of blood flow in the body, numerous teams have reported on speedups in simulation by swapping conventional finite-element solvers for models trained on various combinations of experimental and synthetic data.

At the company's technology conference in November, Animashree Anandkumar, Nvidia's director of machine learning research and Bren Professor of Computing at the California Institute of Technology, pointed to one project the company worked on for weather forecasting. She claimed the neural network that team created could achieve results 100,000 times faster than a simulation that used traditional numerical methods to solve the partial differential equations (PDEs) on which the model relies.

Nvidia has packaged the machine learning techniques that underpin the weather-forecasting project into the Simnet software package it provides to customers. Its engineers have used the same approach to model the heat-sinks that cool the graphics processing units (GPUs) that power many other machine learning systems.

Other engineering companies are following suit. Both Ansys and Siemens Digital Industries Software are working on their own implementations to support their mechanical simulation product lines, adding to a growing body of open source initiatives such as the DeepModeling community.

A key reason for using machine learning for scientific simulations is that a collection of fully connected artificial neurons can act as a universal function approximator. Though training those neurons is computationally intensive, during the inference phase the neural network often will provide faster results than running simulators based on finite-element or numerical approximations to PDEs.

One approach to training a neural network for scientific simulation is to record experimental data and augment that with simulated data using numerical methods. For example, a simulation of the motion of a shock wave in a fluid-filled pipe might use a combination of sensor recordings and the solutions of the Bateman-Burgers equation.

The simulated data can be used to supply usable data for points where it is impossible to place a sensor to record pressure or simply to provide a higher density of data points. In principle, the machine learning model then will interpolate reasonable values for points where no data has been supplied. But the learned approximation can easily diverge from reality when checked against traditional models. The neural network likely will not learn the underlying patterns, just those that let it approximate the data points used for training.  .... ' 

VR Relieving Pain

Recall this being studied some time ago.  Seeking study.

Can VR Help Ease Chronic Pain?

Virtual reality has emerged as a tool to treat chronic pain and is gaining popularity.

The New York Times Magazine, From ACM TechNews | May 2, 2022

Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a tool to treat chronic pain and is gaining popularity because it has fewer side-effects than surgery and most drugs, headsets have gone down in price, and graphics have improved to enable a more immersive experience.

In November, AppliedVR received the first authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market a VR app for chronic lower-back pain, RelieVRx.

The system features what Stanford University's Beth Darnall, AppliedVR's chief science adviser, calls a "breath-fed tree," which provides the user a visual way to "reflect back to the user the changes that are occurring in their own physiology.",   Researchers at AppliedVR reported an almost 43% decrease in chronic back pain among study participants who used RelieVRx, versus 25% for a control group.

From The New York Times Magazine  

View Full Article - May Require Paid Subscription

Clearview and Facial Recognition.

 Remain intrigued by facial recognition. consider the similarity of its emergence to fingerprint techniques.  A comparison is useful. Can having enough data ultimately remove error? 

Why Facial Recognition Technology Has an Uncertain Future with Small Business.  Clearview AI's co-founder Hoan Ton-That recently defended his startup's use of controversial facial recognition software.

BY STEVEN I. WEISS, SENIOR STAFF WRITER

@STEVENIWEISS in Inc.

If you're skeptical about whether your company will ever use facial recognition technology as a business tool, you're not alone. Perhaps the most prominent facial recognition technology provider in the world, Clearview AI, has attracted significant criticism and raised ethical concerns even as it has been used by law enforcement.  

In a live interview with the Washington Post last week, New York-based Clearview AI's co-founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That addressed questions about the ethical and legal implications of his software, which became first known to many Americans when a billionaire used it to identify his daughter's dinner date, and for the involvement of far-right individuals in the creation of the company. Pressed on questions about the legal and ethical choices his firm has made while creating a searchable database of 20 billion facial images, Ton-That repeatedly brought up examples where the use cases of Clearview AI's technology would look better in the public eye, mentioning its use in helping catch criminals in child pornography and child abuse cases. Ton-That also pointed to the use of Clearview AI's technology by the Ukrainian government to identify dead Russian soldiers, for notifying their families of their passing.

While Clearview AI has some 20 billion facial images to feed its current product, the dataset is being used only by governments so far. "There's no non-governmental use of this dataset at this time," Ton-That said, adding that "we've developed as prototypes different versions of our technology for retail and banking."

Article continues after video. .... 

Amazon Investing in Robotics and Logistics

 Makes considerable Sense.

Amazon Plans to Invest $1 Billion in Logistics and Robotics Companies

April 21, 2022 Bloomberg

Amazon.com Inc. says it plans to invest $1 billion in companies developing technologies in logistics, supply chain management and safety, as the retailer seeks to keep an eye on new ideas that might aid its core business. 

The Seattle company on Thursday said it was launching the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, a venture investment program that will back companies “of all stages” working on technology to increase e-commerce delivery speeds and improve the experience of workers in warehousing and logistics. Amazon didn’t specify how many companies it aimed to invest in, or a timeline for the program. 

Alex Ceballos Encarnacion, vice president of worldwide corporate development, said in an Amazon blog post that target companies may work with Amazon, or opt to grow on their own. “We’re excited to help advance these technologies as online shopping becomes even more important to people who are looking for more convenience and time savings,” he said. 

Amazon’s corporate development group has a long track record of buying stakes in other companies, including several Amazon partners. The strategy lets Amazon explore new and emerging technologies, and share in the profits from the growth that can follow a relationship with the gigantic retailer.  ... '

NReal Glasses

 Still awaiting these,

NReal AR glasses set to launch this spring in UK

Details on a release date of the product’s release or pricing remain unclear

Chinese augmented reality (AR) startup Nreal will be bringing its smart glasses to the U.K. this spring. 

British mobile operator EE, which is owned by telecoms group BT, confirmed the news Tuesday, saying it has partnered with the Beijing-based company to "exclusively bring the Nreal Air AR glasses to the UK’s best network for 5G." ... ' 

Deepmind Startup Factory

 How successful in the current climate?

The team that built an AI to dominate poker is now picking stocks  in TheNextWeb

DeepMind's becoming a talent-churning startup factory

Three of the developers responsible for DeepStack, the first AI system to beat humans at heads-up, no-limit poker, have left their posts at DeepMind to form a new startup dedicated to dominating the stock market.

The new venture, called Equilibre Technologies, will employ algorithms to pick stocks and cryptocurrency., Up front: The stock market is a nebulous and challenging environment to try and “solve” with AI, but the team’s leadership appears more than up for the challenge.

Martin Schmid, Rudolf Kadlec, and Matej Moravcik, the company’s founders, all worked together at IBM and DeepMind. There’s something to be said for keeping a successful team together, but the existence of this startup does raise some questions about whether DeepMind is bleeding talent, or simply elevating it to the next stage.

There isn’t a lot of information to go on concerning Equilibre Technologies at this time, but we can be pretty sure they’ll stick close to the vest when it comes to developing algorithmic trading technology. Background: While they’re certainly not the first to attempt to demystify the stock market with artificial intelligence, they’re taking a slightly different approach than their competitors.

The typical stock-picking AI tries to “guess” what’s going to happen next in the market based on historical trends. But the Equilibre team’s known for creating incredibly complex algorithms to succeed at solving problems without a lot of information. They combine game theory with artificial intuition to gain a theoretical advantage over other computer-based or human trading methodologies.  .... ' 

Tracking Animals with Deep Learning

 Unusual Application

Time to Get Social: Tracking Animals with Deep Learning

EPFL (Switzerland), April 22, 2022

Researchers at Switzerland's École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) enhanced their DeepLabCut software to enable high-performance tracking of animals in videos. The open source software uses deep learning to teach computers "pose estimation" without requiring physical or virtual markers on the animals. The update allows DeepLabCut to track the movements of social animals, like mice or fish, which can confuse the computer because they look too similar or obscure each other. With the help of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, the EPFL team developed four datasets for benchmarking multi-animal pose estimation networks. The researchers also developed a multi-task neural network that can predict keypoints, limbs, and animal identity from single frames, and an assembly algorithm to help identify animals with varied body shapes.... ' 

On the End of Passwords

 Please, still will the crooks still be ahead of us, looking for new vulnerabilities. 

The end of passwords  Short piece in Technology Review, here an intro of the article. 

Companies are finally shifting away from notoriously insecure alphanumerics to other methods of authentication.  ...

By Mat Honan

In the early 1960s, MIT professor Fernando Corbató was developing a new kind of shared computer system and wanted a way for people to be able to protect their private files. His solution was a password. Over the years, Corbató’s fix won out over other means of authentication and became the standard way we log on to pretty much everything, everywhere. 

The catch? Passwords are inherently insecure. They can be stolen, guessed, or brute-forced. But mostly, people just use bad ones. (And, worse, reuse them.) 

Password managers like Dashlane and 1Password can track all those various alphanumerics for you and even replace the weak ones. But password management is a half measure when it comes to security. The real action is in eliminating passwords altogether.   ... '

The process is already underway. Enterprise-oriented companies like Okta and Duo, as well as personal identity providers like Google, offer ways for people to log in to apps and services without having to enter a password. Apple’s facial recognition system has taken biometric login mainstream. Most notably, Microsoft announced in March 2021 that some of its customers could go completely passwordless, and it followed up in September by telling people to delete their passwords altogether. Those other methods of authentication? They’re finally winning.  ...'

Russia will Quit ISS Space Station over Sanctions

Long of implications, here, loss of technical collaboration, other work threatened? 

Russia Will Quit International Space Station Over Sanctions  Via Bloomberg

Russia space agency head says partners to get 12 months notice

Agency had earlier this month threated to end ISS missions  .....'

Japanese VR Piloted Robotics for Rail Productivity Management

Having had some amount of experience in the use and maintenance of rail-based equipment, can understand the usefulness and safety issues  involved here.

ACM TECHNEWS

Japanese Rail Company Rolls Out VR-Piloted Gundam Robot Worker  By New Atlas, April 29, 2022

The West Japan Rail Company, working with advanced robotics firm Human Machinery Co. and transportation infrastructure solutions provider Nippon Signal Co., has deployed a humanoid heavy equipment maintenance robot that is directed through virtual reality (VR).

The company said the robot is designed "to improve productivity and safety" by allowing workers to elevate and manipulate equipment around the rail system without risking electrocution or falls.  The robot's torso is mounted to a hydraulic crane arm, which rides around the system on a rail car, and drops stabilizing legs when in operation.

The operator wears motion-tracked VR goggles to control the movements of the unit’s head with stereo vision, and grips handles that direct the motions of the robot's arms and hands.

From New Atlas

View Full Article  

Can a robot vacuum work as an air purifier?

 Comments on multi function digital /physical assistants.   Useful? 

Can a robot vacuum work as an air purifier?  By Patrick Hearn  in DigitalTrends

April 24, 2022 6:00AM

Robot vacuums put out a lot of air, especially the high-powered models.

Asks:  What prevents robot vacuums from purifying the air?

Do robot vacuums help air quality?

Is there a future where robot vacuums and air purifiers combine?

For example, the Neato D10 can practically knock you out of your seat.

Alright, that may be an exaggeration — but on the maximum cleaning modes, robot vacuums move a lot of air, which raises a question about convergence: Could a robot vacuum double as an air purifier? ... '

AI for Handwriting Skills

 Always looking for things that will look for patterns that need to be selectively taught.  Here a good example, teaching children to improve handwriting.  Other examples?  Coding?  AI Management?

Innovative application helps students learn to write

EPFL startup School Rebound has developed a revolutionary application that uses artificial intelligence to help students improve their handwriting in a fun and personalized way. Nearly 15,000 students in Switzerland, France, and Italy are already putting it to work.

Handwriting problems affect nearly 25% of children aged 5 to 12. These problems, if not managed early on, can negatively impact them throughout their school years. EPFL startup School Rebound has provided a concrete solution to this problem by developing an application that uses tablets and artificial intelligence to better detect potential handwriting problems and support children as they learn. The subscription app is called Dynamilis, and can be used by all children learning to write – with difficulties or without – at home or at school. Dynamilis has already been downloaded more than 10,000 times and will be released soon in England and the United States.

While Dynamilis was free during its testing phase, it switched to a subscription model this past March. After a free trial week, parents, therapists, and schools are offered a monthly or annual subscription. Costs depend on the number of children using the application.

L. Boatto, A. Peguet, T. Asselborn, S. Viquerat, P. Dillenbourg © 2022 Dynamilis / Sven Viquerat

Strengths and weaknesses at a glance

School Rebound was founded in 2021 based on the research done by CEO Thibault Asselborn for his PhD thesis at EPFL’s Computer-Human Interaction in Learning and Instruction Laboratory (CHILI). “Some children have handwriting problems that may stay hidden for months. Because the problems are not obvious, parents and teachers may hesitate to consult specialists,” says Asselborn. “During this time, the students can accumulate learning difficulties as these handwriting problems monopolize their concentration and prevent them from developing other skills. This could cause students to lose confidence and develop significant educational blocks.”

As part of his PhD research, Asselborn helped develop an algorithm that can rapidly analyze a child’s handwriting. The child only has to write for 30 seconds on an iPad with an Apple Pencil for the application to establish their handwriting profile. “The tests we ran in the lab lasted about 20 minutes, but they didn’t take certain factors into account, which may reduce the accuracy of the analyses,” says Asselborn. Dynamilis evaluates dynamic aspects of handwriting that the human eye can’t see such as stability, pressure, speed, and angle. “Our app gives detailed analyses about the motor aspects of handwriting. This can give parents an initial indication before determining whether their child has difficulties with handwriting and, if so, to what degree. If the difficulties surpass a certain level, they’re recommended to go see a specialist.”

Learning dressed up like a game

Based on a child’s handwriting profile, the app recommends personalized activities to practice the fundamental aspects of handwriting – all while playing games. “The in-app tests don’t look like medical tests in the strictest sense,” says Asselborn. “It’s important to have an air of fun to avoid making children feel like they’re taking an exam, which can put them on edge.” The playful aspect during the testing phase is crucial for the School Rebound team and their Chairman, Pierre Dillenbourg, also head of CHILI. “While we were developing Dynamilis, our aim was to help children,” says Dillenbourg. “To do that, we knew we had to go beyond a simple handwriting-analysis program and give them activities to support learning and, for the more severe cases, correction. Games are an effective solution for children who are having problems in school because of their issues with handwriting.”  ... ' 

Proposed Easier Way to teach Robot Skills

Work out of MIT,  of particular efficiency and relearning interest

ACM TECHNEWS

An Easier Way to Teach Robots New Skills, By MIT News, April 28, 2022

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a machine learning method that enables robots to acquire new skills using a handful of human examples.  The technique allows a robot to pick up and place objects in never-before-seen random poses, within about 15 minutes.

It involves a Neural Descriptor Field neural network designed to reconstruct the three-dimensional geometry of objects, whose knowledge the system taps to grasp new objects similar to those seen in demonstrations.  The researchers used simulations and a robotic arm to show that the system can manipulate never-before-seen mugs, bowls, and bottles arranged randomly, using just 10 examples.

"Our major contribution is the general ability to much more efficiently provide new skills to robots that need to operate in more unstructured environments where there could be a lot of variability," said MIT's Anthony Simeonov. .... 

The new system could allow a human to reprogram a robot to grasp never-before-seen objects, presented in random poses, in about 15 minutes. ... ' 

MIT news  

Brain Like Chips

 And how might  do we apply them?

Reconfigurable Brain-Like Chips Top Deep Neural Net

By R. Colin Johnson, Commissioned by CACM Staff, April 26, 2022

Today's deep neural networks (DNNs) must be taken off-line to update their learned skills, but real brains update their skill set by reconfiguring their neurons and synapses constantly on the fly—a feat that can now be performed with reconfigurable brain-like chips using quantum materials.

Quantum materials—such as superconductors, topological insulators and even graphene—have remarkable electronic properties that manifest macroscopic quantum mechanical principles that traditional semiconductors only exhibit at the microscopic scale. Now researchers have found a way to form a nickelate (nickel-based) quantum material from the rare earth element neodymium bonded to nickel oxide, NdNiO3 (also known as NNO), with remarkable room-temperature electronic properties that make it ideal for lifelong neural learning hardware, according to a team of researchers from Purdue University, Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois Chicago, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the University of Georgia.

"The brain is continuously learning," said Purdue University professor Shriram Ramanathan. The formation of new neurons and synapses, a process known as neurogenesis, is ongoing in human brains from birth to death, while today's DNNs are routinely fixed after a lengthy training period, during which they learn a rote function. Ramanathan believes the new quantum material NNO will enable DNNs to learn continuously using neurogenesis, just like human brains.

"Neurogenesis and synaptic rewiring play a crucial role in the formation of memory, and a dynamic brain engaged in life-long learning," said Ramanathan. "Inspired by dynamic reconfiguration in the brain, we hypothesized: if we could mimic neurogenesis behaviors in electrical hardware, we can make AI machines that learn throughout their lifespan."

Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the researchers formed thin films of NNO on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) -compatible substrates to create proof-of-concept microchips that outperform traditional silicon in deep neural learning hardware. The NNO material demonstrates novel quantum properties that enable it to learn throughout its lifetime, forming new classification categories and deleting old unused ones. It seems ideal for Internet of Things devices on the network's edge, autonomous cars, and many other real-world functions where the world's raw data is in constant flux. .... ' 

Thoughts on Collaborative Intelligence

We have better tools, yes, but how well do they get to innovative solutions?  

How Collaborative Intelligence Can Boost Business Innovation, April 14, 2022

Ineffective meetings cost businesses $541 billion a year globally in lost productivity and employee time, according to Doodle’s 2019 State of the Meeting report. And according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, as much as 85% of employee time may be wasted on inefficient collaboration.

But the real costs of such disconnection go even deeper than money.

In a disconnected organization, innovation grinds to a halt. Individuals’ and teams’ great insights get trapped in silos. Employees feel stifled—unheard and disengaged. And with record numbers of knowledge workers quitting their jobs in the “Great Resignation,” the risks of disconnection are more urgent than ever.

Simply put: your organization can’t afford to have a disconnected workforce.

Building a company culture in which everyone is connected to their teams and has a shared sense of purpose is fundamental for collaboration and innovation. Building such a culture requires adopting collaborative intelligence (CI), a new systematic approach that connects teams to unlock their genius—taking insights and ideas from possibility to reality.

The Five Principles of Collaborative Intelligence

In the spirit of making collaboration intentional and purposeful, CI is comprised of three main components. First, there are collaboration spaces, both physical and online, where teams can connect. Second, there is collaboration design, the practice of introducing intentionality and technology to help teams connect and innovate. And finally, collaboration insights let organizations measure and improve their collaboration and innovation. Together, these yield a culture of collaboration where everyone feels connected and confident in delivering great work.

Collaborative intelligence is based on five principles:

People are greater together than apart.

Working in teams magnifies individuals’ power and value by coordinating a wider range of experience and expertise to tackle challenges and break down barriers to innovation and progress..... '