Lifeboat Foundation

Microsoft security researchers have found high severity vulnerabilities in a framework used by Android apps from multiple large international mobile service providers.

The researchers found these vulnerabilities (tracked as CVE-2021–42598, CVE-2021–42599, CVE-2021–42600, and CVE-2021–42601) in a mobile framework owned by mce Systems exposing users to command injection and privilege escalation attacks.

The vulnerable apps have millions of downloads on Google’s Play Store and come pre-installed as system applications on devices bought from affected telecommunications operators, including AT&T, TELUS, Rogers Communications, Bell Canada, and Freedom Mobile.

An asteroid mining firm, Astroforge, just had its ambitions to mine the first asteroid by the end of the decade, boosted by a new round of funding.

The Y Combinator startup closed a $13 million seed round, according to TechCrunch, and the money will help it carry out its first two key goals, including a demonstration flight launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission next year.

(2022). Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence. Ahead of Print.

AI has for decades attempted to code commonsense concepts, e.g., in knowledge bases, but struggled to generalise the coded concepts to all the situations a human would naturally generalise them to, and struggled to understand the natural and obvious consequences of what it has been told. This led to brittle systems that did not cope well with situations beyond what their designers envisaged. John McCarthy (1968) said ‘a program has common sense if it automatically deduces for itself a sufficiently wide class of immediate consequences of anything it is told and what it already knows’; that is a problem that has still not been solved. Dreifus (1998) estimated that ‘Common sense is knowing maybe 30 or 50 million things about the world and having them represented so that when something happens, you can make analogies with others’. Minsky presciently noted that common sense would require the capability to make analogical matches between knowledge and events in the world, and furthermore that a special representation of knowledge would be required to facilitate those analogies. We can see the importance of analogies for common sense in the way that basic concepts are borrowed, e.g., the tail of an animal, or the tail of a capital ‘Q’, or the tail-end of a temporally extended event (see also examples of ‘contain’, ‘on’, in Sec. 5.3.1). More than this, for known facts, such as ‘a string can pull but not push an object’, an AI system needs to automatically deduce (by analogy) that a cloth, sheet, or ribbon, can behave analogously to the string. For the fact ‘a stone can break a window’, the system must deduce that any similarly heavy and hard object is likely to break any similarly fragile material. Using the language of Sec. 5.2.1, each of these known facts needs to be treated as a schema,¹⁴ and then applied by analogy to new cases.

Projection is a mechanism that can find analogies (see Sec. 5.3.1) and hence could bridge the gap between models of commonsense concepts (i.e., not the entangled knowledge in word embeddings learnt from language corpora) and text or visual or sensorimotor input. To facilitate this, concepts should be represented by hierarchical compositional models, with higher levels describing relations among elements in the lower-level components (for reasons discussed in Sec. 6.1). There needs to be an explicit symbolic handle on these subcomponents; i.e., they cannot be entangled in a complex network. For visual object recognition, a concept can simply be a set of spatial relations among component features, but higher concepts require a complex model involving multiple types of relations, partial physics theories, and causality. Secs. 5.2 and 5.3 give a hint of what these concepts may look like, but a full example requires a further paper.

Continue reading “Projection: a mechanism for human-like reasoning in Artificial Intelligence” »

Multitask learning assumes that models capable of learning from multiple tasks can achieve better quality and efficiency via knowledge transfer, a key feature of human learning. Though, state of the art ML models rely on high customization for each task and leverage size and data scale rather than scaling the number of tasks. Also, continual learning, that adds the temporal aspect to multitask, is often focused to the study of common pitfalls such as catastrophic forgetting instead of being studied at a large scale as a critical component to build the next generation artificial intelligence. We propose an evolutionary method that can generate a large scale multitask model, and can support the dynamic and continuous addition of new tasks.

Deep Learning (DL) has shown great promise in the unsupervised task of clustering. That said, while in classical (i.e., non-deep) clustering the benefits of the nonparametric approach are well known, most deep-clustering methods are parametric: namely, they require a predefined and fixed number of clusters, denoted by K. When K is unknown, however, using model-selection criteria to choose its optimal value might become computationally expensive, especially in DL as the training process would have to be repeated numerous times. In this work, we bridge this gap by introducing an effective deep-clustering method that does not require knowing the value of K as it infers it during the learning. Using a split/merge framework, a dynamic architecture that adapts to the changing K, and a novel loss, our proposed method outperforms existing nonparametric methods (both classical and deep ones).

Note: This is a joint distillation of both Iterated Distillation and Amplification by Ajeya Cotra (summarizing Paul Christiano) and A Generalist Agent by DeepMind.

Oscillations are widespread throughout the natural world and a number of fascinating inorganic oscillating reactions are known—but the formation and control of oscillating, self-replicating synthetic systems has remained challenging. Now, it has been shown that chemically fuelled oscillations within a network of organic replicators can drive supramolecular assembly and disassembly.

“The Price of Immortality” is a balanced and fluent account of the diverse movement to make humans immortal https://econ.trib.al/wGM2Vwu

Credit: Murray Ballard.

New laws are meant to prevent espionage and leaking.