Lifeboat Foundation

Over the past decade, digital cameras have been widely adopted in various aspects of our society, and are being massively used in mobile phones, security surveillance, autonomous vehicles, and facial recognition. Through these cameras, enormous amounts of image data are being generated, which raises growing concerns about privacy protection.

Some existing methods address these concerns by applying algorithms to conceal sensitive information from the acquired images, such as image blurring or encryption. However, such methods still risk exposure of sensitive data because the raw images are already captured before they undergo digital processing to hide or encrypt the sensitive information. Also, the computation of these algorithms requires additional power consumption. Other efforts were also made to seek solutions to this problem by using customized cameras to downgrade the image quality so that identifiable information can be concealed. However, these approaches sacrifice the overall image quality for all the objects of interest, which is undesired, and they are still vulnerable to adversarial attacks to retrieve the sensitive information that is recorded.

A new research paper published in eLight demonstrated a new paradigm to achieve privacy-preserving imaging by building a fundamentally new type of imager designed by AI. In their paper, UCLA researchers, led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan, presented a smart camera design that images only certain types of desired objects, while instantaneously erasing other types of objects from its images without requiring any digital processing.

Alex Martinelli writes:

This entry gives an introduction to and how you can use it via Blender to train performant and robust vision models. I provide the code and node-trees for a demonstrative visual classification scenario from the fashion domain. You’ll then be able to generate a technically infinite amount of images for your use-case.

Read the entry on Medium.

TerraPower, the nuclear innovation company founded by Bill Gates, announced a $750 million funding raise co-led by Gates himself and SK Group from South Korea.

This week our guest is NBC technology correspondent, Jacob Ward, who recently released his book, The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back. In this episode we focus broadly on the ways in which technology and AI are learning from the worst instincts of human beings, and then using those bad behaviors to shape our future choices. As a result, Jacob suggests this creates feedback loops of increasingly limited and increasingly short-sighted behavior. This conversation includes exploring topics such as big data, bad incentives for programmers, profit motives, historical bias reflected in data, system 1 vs system 2 thinking, and much more.

Find out more about Jacob at jacobward.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/byjacobward ** Host: Steven Parton — LinkedIn / Twitter Music by: Amine el Filali.

54 MINS

SpaceX says responsible researchers are welcome to hack into its satellite internet network, Starlink. It added that it could pay them up to $25,000 for discovering certain bugs in the service.

The announcement came after security researcher Lennert Wouters said last week he was able to hack into Starlink using a $25 homemade device. He said he performed the test as part of SpaceX’s bug bounty program, where researchers submit findings of potential vulnerabilities in Starlink’s network.

In a six-page document entitled “Starlink welcomes security researchers (bring on the bugs),” SpaceX congratulated Wouters on his research.

Welcome to our free science videos for teens and pre-teens, hosted by the interactive online science program for young explorers, Art of Inquiry!
www.artofinquiry.net.

Our speaker, Dr. Joscha Bach talks with the Art of Inquiry students about his work.

Continue reading “General Artificial Intelligence with Dr. Joscha Bach, AI Foundation” »

Topology and entanglement are two powerful principles for characterizing the structure of complex quantum states. In a new paper in the journal Physical Review X, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania establish a relationship between the two.

“Our work ties two big ideas together,” says Charles Kane, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Physics in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences. “It’s a conceptual link between topology, which is a way of characterizing the universal features that quantum states have, and entanglement, which is a way in which quantum states can exhibit non-local correlations, where something that happens in one point in space is correlated with something that happens in another part in space. What we’ve found is a situation where those concepts are tightly intertwined.”

The seed for exploring this connection came during the long hours Kane spent in his home office during the pandemic, pondering new ideas. One train of thought had him envisioning the classic textbook image of the Fermi surface of copper, which represents the metal’s potential electron energies. It’s a picture every physics student sees, and one with which Kane was highly familiar.

The world is highly dependent on fossil fuels to power its industry and transportation. These fossil fuels lead to excessive carbon dioxide emission, which contributes to global warming and ocean acidification. One way to reduce this excessive carbon dioxide emission that is harmful to the environment is through the electroreduction of carbon dioxide into value-added fuels or chemicals using renewable energy. The idea of using this technology to produce methane has attracted wide interest. However, researchers have had limited success in developing efficient catalysts for methane.

A Soochow University research team has now developed a simple strategy for creating cobalt copper alloy catalysts that deliver outstanding methane activity and selectivity in electrocatalytic carbon dioxide reduction. Their research is published in Nano Research.

Over the past 10 years, scientists have made notable progress in advancing their understanding of catalysts and applying the knowledge to their fabrication. But the catalysts that have been developed have not been satisfactory for use with methane, in terms of selectivity or current density. Despite the great insights scientists have gained, the strategies they have attempted in creating catalysts for methane are just too costly to be useful in practical applications.