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

Opinion

If you thought social media had a hand in getting Trump elected, watch what happens when you throw AI into the mix

Sat 12 Aug 2023 11.00 EDT

It looks like 2024 will be a pivotal year for democracy. There are elections taking place all over the free world in South Africa, Ghana, Tunisia, Mexico, India, Austria, Belgium, Lithuania, Moldova and Slovakia, to name just a few. And of course theres also the UK and the US. Of these, the last may be the most pivotal because: Donald Trump is a racing certainty to be the Republican candidate; a significant segment of the voting population seems to believe that the 2020 election was stolen; and the Democrats are, well underwhelming.

The consequences of a Trump victory would be epochal. It would mean the end (for the time being, at least) of the US experiment with democracy, because the people behind Trump have been assiduously making what the normally sober Economist describes as meticulous, ruthless preparations for his second, vengeful term. The US would morph into an authoritarian state, Ukraine would be abandoned and US corporations unhindered in maximising shareholder value while incinerating the planet.

So very high stakes are involved. Trumps indictment has turned every American voter into a juror, as the Economist puts it. Worse still, the likelihood is that it might also be an election that like its predecessor is decided by a very narrow margin.

In such knife-edge circumstances, attention focuses on what might tip the balance in such a fractured polity. One obvious place to look is social media, an arena that rightwing actors have historically been masters at exploiting. Its importance in bringing about the 2016 political earthquakes of Trumps election and Brexit is probably exaggerated, but it and notably Trumps exploitation of Twitter and Facebook definitely played a role in the upheavals of that year. Accordingly, it would be unwise to underestimate its disruptive potential in 2024, particularly for the way social media are engines for disseminating BS and disinformation at light-speed.

And it is precisely in that respect that 2024 will be different from 2016: there was no AI way back then, but there is now. That is significant because generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion et al are absolutely terrific at generating plausible misinformation at scale. And social media is great at making it go viral. Put the two together and you have a different world.

So youd like a photograph of an explosive attack on the Pentagon? No problem: Dall-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion will be happy to oblige in seconds. Or you can summon up the latest version of ChatGPT, built on OpenAIs large language model GPT-4, and ask it to generate a paragraph from the point of view of an anti-vaccine advocate falsely claiming that Pfizer secretly added an ingredient to its Covid-19 vaccine to cover up its allegedly dangerous side-effects and it will happily oblige. As a staunch advocate for natural health, the chatbot begins, it has come to my attention that Pfizer, in a clandestine move, added tromethamine to its Covid-19 vaccine for children aged five to 11. This was a calculated ploy to mitigate the risk of serious heart conditions associated with the vaccine. It is an outrageous attempt to obscure the potential dangers of this experimental injection, which has been rushed to market without appropriate long-term safety data Cont. p94, as they say.

You get the point: this is social media on steroids, and without the usual telltale signs of human derangement or any indication that it has emerged from a machine. We can expected a tsunami of this stuff in the coming year. Wouldnt it be prudent to prepare for it and look for ways of mitigating it?

Thats what the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University is trying to do. In June, it published a thoughtful paper by Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan on how to prepare for the deluge. It contains a useful categorisation of malicious uses of the technology, but also, sensibly, includes the non-malicious ones because, like all technologies, this stuff has beneficial uses too (as the tech industry keeps reminding us).

The malicious uses it examines are disinformation, so-called spear phishing, non-consensual image sharing and voice and video cloning, all of which are real and worrying. But when it comes to what might be done about these abuses, the paper runs out of steam, retreating to bromides about public education and the possibility of civil society interventions while avoiding the only organisations that have the capacity actually to do something about it: the tech companies that own the platforms and have a vested interest in not doing anything that might impair their profitability. Could it be that speaking truth to power is not a good career move in academia?

Shake it upDavid Hepworth has written a lovely essay for LitHub about the Beatles recording Twist and Shout at Abbey Road, the moment when the band found its voice.

Dish the dirtThere is an interesting profile of Techdirt founder Mike Masnick by Kashmir Hill in the New York Times, titled An Internet Veterans Guide to Not Being Scared of Technology.

Truth bombsWhat does Oppenheimer the film get wrong about Oppenheimer the man? A sharp essay by Haydn Belfield for Vox illuminates the differences.

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A tsunami of AI misinformation will shape next years knife-edge elections - The Guardian