Artificial intelligence (AI)

Technology proves able to identify dozens of species in thousands of hours of recordings

Sun 13 Aug 2023 05.00 EDT

Researchers have developed arrays of AI-controlled cameras and microphones to identify animals and birds and to monitor their movements in the wild technology, they say, that should help tackle Britains growing biodiversity problem.

The robot monitors have been tested at three sites and have captured sounds and images from which computers were able to identify specific species and map their locations. Dozens of different birds were recognised from their songs while foxes, deer, hedgehogs and bats were pinpointed and identified by AI analysis. No human observers are involved.

The crucial point is the scale of the operation, said Anthony Dancer, a conservation specialist at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). We have captured tens of thousands of data files and thousands of hours of audio from these test sites and identified all sorts of animals from them. We couldnt have done it at that scale using human observers. Only AI made it possible.

Land alongside rail lines at Barnes, Twickenham and Lewisham in London was chosen for the projects test sites. Owned by Network Rail, which has played a key role in setting up the project, the areas are fenced off to prevent people straying on to lines and are visited fairly infrequently by track maintenance staff.

Access to relatively wild land was therefore easy an important factor for starting our project, said Dancer.

And now that we have demonstrated the technologys promise, we can expand to other areas.

Network Rail owns more than 52,000 hectares of land, and many of these areas play a key role in protecting the nations biodiversity.

Take birds like the Eurasian blackcap, blackbird and great tit, said Neil Strong, biodiversity strategy manager for Network Rail. All three species require healthy environments including good supplies of berries and nuts and all three were detected by AI from the acoustic signals collected by our sensors at our three test sites. That is encouraging and provides important benchmarks for measuring biodiversity in future.

Other creatures pinpointed by the AI monitors included six species of bat, including the common pipistrelle.

Bats almost certainly use railway bridges for roosting, Dancer told the Observer. So if we can get more detailed information about the exact locations of their roosts using AI monitors, we can help protect them.

This point was underlined by Strong. In the past, we have had to estimate local wildlife populations from the dead animals such as badgers that have been left by the track or the roadside. This way we get a much better idea of population sizes.

Other animals that regularly commute on UK rail lines include the hedgehog, as was revealed by the project. Hedgehogs are really constrained to certain locations because they get fenced in, said Strong. But there are ways round that problem. In Scotland they are creating hedgehog highways on rail lines, which involves cutting small holes into the bases of all new fencing that is put up so hedgehogs can pass through but nothing larger can get in.

Now ZSL and Network Rail are planning to expand the use of AI monitors to other areas, including Chobham in Surrey and the New Forest. On the sites that we have already tested, we found signs of more than 30 species of bird and six species of bat, as well as foxes and hedgehogs, so we were pleasantly surprised with the relatively healthy levels of wildlife we found in London, said Dancer. However, that was not really the main purpose of our project.

The aim was to show that AI-led technology linked with acoustic and camera traps could be used effectively to survey wildlife on Network Rail land but also in other areas in the UK. It will tell us how species are moving in response to climate change and how we should be managing vegetation, not just beside rail lines but on road verges and other places.

The crucial point is that machine learning AI will be vital to protecting biodiversity as the country heats up. This technology will require the analysing of tens of thousands of hours of recordings and hundred of thousands of images, said Strong. Realistically, only computers can do that for us.

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Only AI made it possible: scientists hail breakthrough in tracking British wildlife - The Guardian

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Researchers create system using sound recordings that can work out what is being typed with more than 90% accuracy

Tapping in a computer password while chatting over Zoom could open the door to a cyber-attack, research suggests, after a study revealed artificial intelligence (AI) can work out which keys are being pressed by eavesdropping on the sound of the typing.

Experts say that as video conferencing tools such as Zoom have grown in use, and devices with built-in microphones have become ubiquitous, the threat of cyber-attacks based on sounds has also risen.

Now researchers say they have created a system that can work out which keys are being pressed on a laptop keyboard with more than 90% accuracy, just based on sound recordings.

I can only see the accuracy of such models, and such attacks, increasing, said Dr Ehsan Toreini, co-author of the study at the University of Surrey, adding that with smart devices bearing microphones becoming ever more common within households, such attacks highlight the need for public debates on governance of AI.

The research, published as part of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops, reveals how Toreini and colleagues used machine learning algorithms to create a system able to identify which keys were being pressed on a laptop based on sound an approach that researchers deployed on the Enigma cipher device in recent years.

The study reports how the researchers pressed each of 36 keys on a MacBook Pro, including all of the letters and numbers, 25 times in a row, using different fingers and with varying pressure. The sounds were recorded both over a Zoom call and on a smartphone placed a short distance from the keyboard.

The team then fed part of the data into a machine learning system which, over time, learned to recognise features of the acoustic signals associated with each key. While it is not clear which clues the system used, Joshua Harrison, first author of the study, from Durham University, said it was possible an important influence was how close the keys were to the edge of the keyboard.

This positional information could be the main driver behind the different sounds, he said.

The system was then tested on the rest of the data.

The results reveal that the system could accurately assign the correct key to a sound 95% of the time when the recording was made over a phone call, and 93% of the time when the recording was made over a Zoom call.

The study, which is also authored by Dr Maryam Mehrnezhad from the Royal Holloway, University of London, is not the first to show that keystrokes can be identified by sound. However, the team say their study uses the most up-to-date methods and has achieved the highest accuracy so far.

While the researchers say the work is a proof-of-principle study, and has not been used to crack passwords which would involve correctly guessing strings of keystrokes or in real world settings like coffee shops, they say the work highlights the need for vigilance, noting that while laptops with their similar keyboards and common use in public places are at high risk, similar eavesdropping methods could be applied to any keyboard.

The researchers add there are a number of ways the risk of such acoustic side channel attacks can be mitigated, including opting for biometric passwords where possible or activating two-step verification systems.

Failing that, they say its a good idea to use the shift key to create a mixture of upper and lower cases, or numbers and symbols.

Its very hard to work out when someone lets go of a shift key, said Harrison.

Prof Feng Hao from the University of Warwick, who was not involved in the new study, said people should be careful not to type sensitive messages, including passwords, on a keyboard during a Zoom call.

Besides the sound, the visual images about the subtle movements of the shoulder and wrist can also reveal side-channel information about the keys being typed on the keyboard even though the keyboard is not visible from the camera, he said.

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AI can identify passwords by sound of keys being pressed, study suggests - The Guardian

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Multinationals turn to generative AI to manage supply chains - Financial Times

Tax evasion, money laundering and other financial crimes are massive, costly issues. In 2021, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that the U.S. loses $1 trillion a year due to tax evasion alone. IVIX thinks AI can help with that.

The Tel Avivbased startup uses AI, machine learning and public databases of business activity to help government entities spot tax noncompliance, in addition to other financial crimes. IVIX was founded by Matan Fattal and Doron Passov in 2020. Fattal was working at his prior cybersecurity startup, Silverfort, at the time, but when he discovered how large of an issue these financial crimes are and how governments didnt have the technology to fight them he switched gears.

I was shocked by the magnitude of the problem and the technical gap that they had, Fattal told TechCrunch+. State or federal, there are pretty much the same [technological] gaps.

Three years later, the startup has landed government contracts with federal agencies, including the IRS criminal investigation bureau; made notable hires like Don Fort, the former chief of criminal investigations at the IRS; and raised a $12.5 million Series A led by Insight Partners, which was announced last week.

Read the original:

This AI startup is racking up government customers - TechCrunch

While technology experts sound the alarm on the pace of artificial-intelligence development, philanthropists including long-established foundations and tech billionaires have been responding with an uptick in grants.

Much of the philanthropy is focused on what is known as technology for good or ethical AI, which explores how to solve or mitigate the harmful effects of artificial-intelligence systems. Some scientists believe AI can be used to predict climate disasters and discover new drugs to save lives. Others are warning that the large language models could soon upend white-collar professions, fuel misinformation, and threaten national security.

What philanthropy can do to influence the trajectory of AI is starting to emerge. Billionaires who earned their fortunes in technology are more likely to support projects and institutions that emphasize the positive outcomes of AI, while foundations not endowed with tech money have tended to focus more on AIs dangers.

For example, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and wife, Wendy Schmidt, have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to artificial-intelligence grantmaking programs housed at Schmidt Futures to accelerate the next global scientific revolution. In addition to committing $125 million to advance research into AI, last year the philanthropic venture announced a $148 million program to help postdoctoral fellows apply AI to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Also in the AI enthusiast camp is the Patrick McGovern Foundation, named after the late billionaire who founded the International Data Group and one of a few philanthropies that has made artificial intelligence and data science an explicit grantmaking priority. In 2021, the foundation committed $40 million to help nonprofits use artificial intelligence and data to advance their work to protect the planet, foster economic prosperity, ensure healthy communities, according to a news release from the foundation. McGovern also has an internal team of AI experts who work to help nonprofits use the technology to improve their programs.

I am an incredible optimist about how these tools are going to improve our capacity to deliver on human welfare, says Vilas Dhar, president of Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. What I think philanthropy needs to do, and civil society writ large, is to make sure we realize that promise and opportunity to make sure these technologies dont merely become one more profit-making sector of our economy but rather are invested in furthering human equity. Salesforce is also interested in helping nonprofits use AI. The software company announced last month that it will award $2 million to education, workforce, and climate organizations to advance the equitable and ethical use of trusted AI.

Billionaire entrepreneur and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is another big donor who believes AI can improve humanity and has funded research centers at Stanford University and the University of Toronto to achieve that goal. He is betting AI can positively transform areas like health care (giving everyone a medical assistant) and education (giving everyone a tutor), he told the New York Times in May.

The enthusiasm for AI solutions among tech billionaires is not uniform, however. EBay founder Pierre Omidyar has taken a mixed approach through his Omidyar Network, which is making grants to nonprofits using the technology for scientific innovation as well as those trying to protect data privacy and advocate for regulation.

One of the things that were trying really hard to think about is how do you have good AI regulation that is both sensitive to the type of innovation that needs to happen in this space but also sensitive to the public accountability systems, says Anamitra Deb, managing director at the Omidyar Network.

Grantmakers that hold a more skeptical or negative perspective on AI are also not a uniform group; however, they tend to be foundations unaffiliated with the tech industry.

The Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller foundations number among several grantmakers funding nonprofits examining the harmful effects of AI.

For example, computer scientists Timnit Gebru and Joy Buolamwini, who conducted pivotal research on racial and gender bias from facial-recognition tools which persuaded Amazon, IBM, and other companies to pull back on the technology in 2020 have received sizable grants from them and other big, established foundations.

Gebru launched the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in 2021 to research AIs harmful effects on marginalized groups free from Big Techs pervasive influence. The institute raised $3.7 million in initial funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Kapor Center, Open Society Foundations, and the Rockefeller Foundation. (The Ford, MacArthur, and Open Society foundations are financial supporters of the Chronicle.)

Buolamwini is continuing research on and advocacy against artificial-intelligence and facial-recognition technology through her Algorithmic Justice League, which also received at least $1.9 million in support from the Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller foundations as well as from the Alfred P. Sloan and Mozilla foundations.

These are all people and organizations that I think have really had a profound impact on the AI field itself but also really caught the attention of policymakers as well, says Eric Sears, who oversees MacArthurs grants related to artificial intelligence. The Ford Foundation also launched a Disability x Tech Fund through Borealis Philanthropy, which is supporting efforts to fight bias against people with disabilities in algorithms and artificial intelligence.

There are also AI skeptics among the tech elite awarding grants. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has warned AI could result in civilizational destruction. In 2015, he gave $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that aims to prevent existential risk from AI, and spearheaded a recent letter calling for a pause on AI development. Open Philanthropy, a foundation started by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, has provided majority support to the Center for AI Safety, which also recently warned about the risk of extinction associated with AI.

A significant portion of foundation giving on AI is also directed at universities studying ethical questions. The Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, a joint project of the MIT Media Lab and Harvards Berkman Klein Center, received $26 million from 2017 to 2022 from Luminate (the Omidyar Group), Reid Hoffman, Knight Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (Hewlett is a financial supporter of the Chronicle.)

The goal, according to a May 2022 report, was to ensure that technologies of automation and machine learning are researched, developed, and deployed in a way which vindicates social values of fairness, human autonomy, and justice. One university funding effort comes from the Kavli Foundation, which in 2021 committed $1.5 million a year for five years to two new centers focused on scientific ethics with artificial intelligence as one priority area at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Cambridge. The Knight Foundation announced in May it will spend $30 million to create a new ethical technology institute at Georgetown University to inform policymakers.

Although hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars have been committed to ethical AI efforts, influencing tech companies and governments remains a massive challenge.

Philanthropy is just a drop in the bucket compared to the Goliath-sized tech platforms, the Goliath-sized AI companies, the Goliath-sized regulators and policymakers that can actually take a crack at this, says Deb of the Omidyar Network.

Even with those obstacles, foundation leaders, researchers, and advocates largely agree that philanthropy can and should shape the future of AI.

The industry is so dominant in shaping not only the scope of development of AI systems in the academic space, theyre shaping the field of research, says Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute. And as policymakers are looking to really hold these companies accountable, its key to have funders step in and provide support to the organizations on the front lines to ensure that the broader public interest is accounted for.

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This article was provided to The Associated Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Kay Dervishi is a staff writer at the Chronicle. Email: kay.dervishi@philanthropy.com. The AP and the Chronicle are solely responsible for this content. They receive support from the Lilly Endowment for coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits. For all of APs philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

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Foundations seek to advance AI for good and also protect the world from its threats - ABC News