Lifeboat Foundation

The number of bots and spam accounts on the platform has been a sticking point for Musk throughout the deal. After months of back and forth, Musk’s issues with spam accounts eventually led him to publicly pull out of the $44 billion deal.

Last month, Musk accused Twitter of withholding information about the number of bots on the platform, later citing it as the reason for withdrawing his bid.

Musk’s lawyers claimed in a termination letter that his analysis indicated the percentage of false accounts on Twitter was “wildly higher than 5%” — the number Twitter disclosed in its financial reports.

Researchers have observed the formation of 2D ice on gold surfaces that were thought to be too hydrophilic and too rough to support this type of ice.

Mobile devices use facial recognition technology to help users quickly and securely unlock their phones, make a financial transaction or access medical records. But facial recognition technologies that employ a specific user-detection method are highly vulnerable to deepfake-based attacks that could lead to significant security concerns for users and applications, according to new research involving the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.

Mobile devices use facial recognition technology to help users quickly and securely unlock their phones, make a financial transaction or access medical records. But facial recognition technologies that employ a specific user-detection method are highly vulnerable to deepfake-based attacks that could lead to significant security concerns for users and applications, according to new research involving the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.

The researchers found that most application programming interfaces that use facial liveness verification—a feature of facial recognition technology that uses computer vision to confirm the presence of a live user—don’t always detect digitally altered photos or videos of individuals made to look like a live version of someone else, also known as deepfakes. Applications that do use these detection measures are also significantly less effective at identifying deepfakes than what the app provider has claimed.

“In recent years we have observed significant development of facial authentication and verification technologies, which have been deployed in many security-critical applications,” said Ting Wang, associate professor of information sciences and technology and one principal investigator on the project. “Meanwhile, we have also seen substantial advances in deepfake technologies, making it fairly easy to synthesize live-looking facial images and video at little cost. We thus ask the interesting question: Is it possible for malicious attackers to misuse deepfakes to fool the facial verification systems?”

View insights.

An analysis of the 200 largest fossil fuel companies suggests that just 10 shareholders could influence the fate of nearly half of the world’s remaining fossil fuels.

Our new book Intuitive Rationality describes how to marry intuition and other heuristics with logic to create amazing predictions. Intuality AI’s predictive analytics platform has produced remarkable accurate forecasts in different sectors, like financial markets, elections, health and sports.

Companies specializing in cutting-edge construction techniques are aiming to make a difference by churning out high-quality homes at a lower cost than traditional industry standards. Among these are 3D printed homes, “foldable” homes, and homes that ship in kits then are assembled like Ikea furniture.

Now a new player is joining the list, and it just got a serious financial boost. Vantem Global has already helped construct a total of over three million square feet of living space in six different countries, and earlier this month closed a Series A funding round co-led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Breakthrough was founded by Bill Gates in 2015 to invest in sustainable energy and emissions-reduction technologies).

Continue reading “This Gates-Backed Startup Builds Modular Homes Out of Energy-Efficient Panels” »

Innovative Solutions For Unmet Needs Of Older Adults & Their Caregivers — Keith Camhi, Managing Director, Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator — A Partnership With Melinda Gates Pivotal Ventures.

Keith Camhi is Managing Director, Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator (https://www.techstars.com/accelerators/longevity), a program, run in partnership with Pivotal Ventures (https://www.pivotalventures.org/), an investment and incubation company created by Melinda French Gates, focusing on innovative solutions to address the unmet needs of older adults and their caregivers. The longevity accelerator core program themes include: Caregiver Support, Care Coordination, Aging in Place, Financial Wellness and Resilience, Preventive Health (both Physical and Cognitive), and Social Engagement.

Continue reading “Keith Camhi — Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator — Innovative Solutions For Older Adults” »

Minxin Pei is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a nonresident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Confidence in the safety of Chinese banks has been badly shaken by the failure of several small banks in Henan Province in April this year. In terms of their assets of about 40 billion yuan ($6 billion) and the number of customers, roughly 400,000, the shuttered rural banks are minions in China’s financial system.

Tech giants including Alphabet and IBM are racing toward building a quantum computer, and financial firms including JPMorgan are exploring possible uses.