Naked Data

All the data you can eat

ROTM

Smellicopter takes to (and tastes) the air

Forget man-machine hybrids, the latest research brings us the terrifying month-machine, a flying device capable of smelling a scent one part in a trillion. It's actually pretty simple - freeze an unlucky moth, chop off its antennae, and plug an antenna into a sensor on a drone. Program the thing ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, ROTM

Not Tom Cruise is back

Should the real Tom Cruise die in a tragic accident while filming one of his own stunts, or even just finally age, deep faker Chris Ume is standing in the wings, ready to take his place. We've reported on this deep fakes account before, but at that point the account had been taken private due to ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Ask not what AI can do for you

It's a short and simple argument, but one eloquently made. Artificial intelligence specialist Kasper Groes Ludvigsen has a simple decision making tree that aims to see off problems with algorithmic bias by replacing the question "How can I use AI to solve this problem?" with "Should I use AI to s...

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2 months ago

Why cars shouldn’t cross the streams

Vampires and ghostbusters alike know that crossing the streams is very bad, but what about drivers? Specifically drivers of autonomous vehicles, which may rely on radar to "see" where they are going. According to this article on EE Times, which we are way underqualified to really comment on or ju...

2 months ago

AI or human? You be the judge

I was very proud that I got barely above average for this test that asks you to identify whether photos, text, music and artworks are produced by a bot or a human. It's really hard, and I found music by far the toughest to distinguish a machine from a real composer. Regarding music, the evil scie...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Can data help the “meningitis belt”?

Your correspondent learned two things from this story: 1) that meningitis affects a disproportionate across a belt of Africa north of the equator, and 2) that clever algorithms plugged into weather data might be able to reduce its severity. Read about the project to predict meningitis outbreaks, ...

3 months ago

Fighting for facts with machine learning

We missed this one a couple of weeks ago, so will mention it now. Noble warriors against the forces of misinformation, Africa Check, has been using AI to bolster its assault on truth warpers throughout the continent. There's a short update on its success here.

3 months ago

The robots are coming (again)

Keen to experiment with machine learning for storytelling? JournalismAI is hosting three new Collab Challanges, in which it will match up teams of five (or so) newsrooms and academic institutions to work on experiments in news products. Applications for African organisations close on 5 April...

4 months ago

Need a data analyst? Try Fiverr

Fiverr, the site that we've turned to for years when we've wanted a logo but have been too cheap to pay full-price for it can now be the site we turn to when we want data science but are too cheap to pay full-price for it. It's the first new vertical the company has launched in nine years, probab...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

The hard drive in all of us

DNA-based data storage has been on the theoretical radar for years, but researchers at the bleeding edge of data storage are now starting to actually encode digital data in DNA, and get it back again, reports Nature. Members of the "DNA Data Storage Alliance", which includes Microsoft, Twist Bios...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

Don't Miss, Nerds, ROTM

Time to face up to our facial data

Mozilla Fellow Deborah Raji and TechCongress Legislative Fellow Genevieve Fried have co-authored a paper looking back at the history of facial recognition datasets, and have highlighted a disturbing trend: We've gone from carefully curated datasets collected with the participants' permission, to ...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

Fight back against the AI with pen and paper

OpenAI's new image-recognising neural network, CLIP, blows previous deep learning algorithms out the water, especially when it comes to conceptual representations, like a drawing of a banana versus an actual banana. It works similarly to a human brain, the researchers believe, firing "neurons" th...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

It’s Carousel time

Oh, AI chat engine GPT-3 may well be close to achieving its first Booker Prize, but its bedside manner is somewhat lousy. Researchers testing its ability to act as a reception-bot for a hypothetical medical clinic had this rather disturbing exchange. The patient said “Hey, I feel very bad, I want...

4 months ago

Deepfakes: Making history really come alive

It's not just Tom Cruise getting deep faked -- literally everyone in history is having a GAN algorithm pointed at their faces, creating a disturbing yet fascinating Twitter thread: a Myheritage.com feature allows you to upload old photos (or paintings for that matter) and it will make them seemin...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

The real fake Tom Cruise

It's unclear whether Tom Cruise's face is just ideally suited to deep fakes, or if we've just taken a leap in deep fakery, but damn, the @deeptomcruise Instagram account dropped some stunning fakes last week that were frighteningly realistic. I won't bother with a link because all the videos have...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

Don't Miss, ROTM

People of Europe, rise up! Reclaim your face!

If the thought of secret government and private agencies using our bodies to track and trace us for commercial, criminal and political targeting sounds a little ominous, that's probably because it very much is. A new petition initiative, Reclaim your Face, is trying to garner enough signatures to...

Jason Norwood-Young

5 months ago

Robots to the rescue

The Partnership on AI has launched an initiative to see if bots can be used to build constructive online dialogues, instead of simply powering the troll farms. Shout out to pan-continental civic techies Code for Africa for lending its weight to the cause, joining PoAI this month alongside Adobe, ...

5 months ago

Don't Miss, ROTM

DALL·E is GPT-3 for images, and it’s terrifying

Sorry artists and photographers, you'll be joining town cryers, journalists, and people who tore up phonebooks on the Useless Skills pile. DALL-E applies GPT-3 to image generation, letting you use language to describe what you want, and the AI goes ahead and draws it for you. Need a harp snail? A...

Jason Norwood-Young

5 months ago

The meatsacks are superfluous to requirements

There's a well known truism that if you're the type of person who buys stocks and shares, you're better off getting into an index-linked fund rather than trusting a human broker to make purchasing decisions for you. Index funds almost always outperform managed ones, passive investing for the long...

7 months ago

The academic news in brief

Are there too many academic journals in the world, and too many articles being published? Far be it from us to complain that there's too much science - it genuinely doesn't feel like that when listening to certain politicians - but we have heard specialists complain over the years that they can't...

7 months ago