How to hide from the AI surveillance state with a color printout

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How to hide from the AI surveillance state with a color printoutAI-powered video technology is becoming ubiquitous, tracking our faces and bodies through stores, offices, and public spaces. In some countries the technology constitutes a powerful new layer of policing and government surveillance.Fortunately, as some researchers from the Belgian university KU Leuven  have just shown, you can often hide from an AI video system with the aid of a simple color printout.Who said that? The researchers showed that the image they designed can hide a whole person from an AI-powered computer-vision system. They demonstrated it on a popular open-source object recognition system called YoLo(v2).Hide and seek: The trick could conceivably let crooks hide from security cameras, or offer dissidents a way to dodge government scrutiny. “What our work proves is that it is possible to bypass camera surveillance systems using adversarial patches,” says Wiebe Van Ranst, one of the authors.Get lost: Van Ranst says it shouldn’t be too hard to adapt the approach to off-the-shelf video surveillance systems. “At the moment we also need to know which detector is in use. What we’d like to do in the future is generate a patch that works on multiple detectors at the same time,” he told MIT Technology Review. “If this works, chances are high that the patch will also work on the detector that is in use in the surveillance system.”Fool’s errand: The deception demonstrated by the Belgian team exploits what’s known as adversarial machine learning. Most computer vision relies on training a (convolutional) neural network to recognize different things by feeding it examples and tweaking its parameters until it classifies objects correctly. By feeding examples into a trained deep neural net and monitoring the output, it is possible to infer what types of images confuse or fool the system.Eyes everywhere: The work is significant because AI is increasingly found in everyday surveillance cameras and software. It’s even being used to obviate the need for a checkout line in some experimental stores, including ones operated by Amazon. And in China the technology is emerging as a powerful new means of catching criminals as well as, more troublingly, tracking certain ethnic groups.ShareLinkAuthorWill KnightWill Knight is MIT Technology Review’s Senior Editor for Artificial Intelligence. He covers the latest advances in AI and related fields, including machine learning, automated driving, and robotics. Will joined MIT Technology Review in 2008 from the UK science weekly New Scientist magazine.ImageKU Leuven.ShareLinkAuthorWill KnightWill Knight is MIT Technology Review’s Senior Editor for Artificial Intelligence. He covers the latest advances in AI and related fields, including machine learning, automated driving, and robotics. Will joined MIT Technology Review in 2008 from the UK science weekly New Scientist magazine.ImageKU Leuven.10 Breakthrough TechnologiesMarch / April 2019Bill Gates: How we’ll invent the future01.The new, safer nuclear reactors that might help stop climate changeFrom sodium-cooled fission to advanced fusion, a fresh generation of projects hopes to rekindle trust in nuclear energy.02.A simple blood test to predict premature births could save babies’ livesComplications from preterm birth are the leading cause of death worldwide in children under five.03.The race to make a lab-grown steakMeat production spews tons of greenhouse gas and uses up too much land and water. Is there an alternative that won’t make us do without?04.One man’s two-decade quest to suck greenhouse gas out of the skyKlaus Lackner’s once wacky idea increasingly looks like an essential part of solving climate change.05.Wristwatch heart monitors might save your life—and change medicine, tooMaking complex heart tests available at the push of a button has far-reaching consequences.SpaceApr 23The first Marsquake has been detectedThe Mars InSight lander has sensed a quake within the planet….The news: On its 128th day on the red planet, the lander picked up the first definitive sign of shaking from within Mars. The small seismic activity that was measured was similar to the movement detected on the moon during the Apollo missions.Some background: The InSight lander arrived on Mars in November last year with the goal of learning more about the inside of our planetary neighbor. The crucial piece of hardware, a super-sensitive seismometer made by CNES, the French space agency, has had its ear to the ground since December. The first signal of a quake was picked up on April 6.What’s next: Although small, the quake is proof that there is seismic activity, and that bigger quakes may yet be detected, which could help researchers deduce the planet’s internal structure.  A few other potential quakes have been picked up as well, but they were even weaker, and not as clear in their origins. As InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt said in a statement, ”We’ve been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology.”ShareLinkAuthorErin WinickI am MIT Technology Review’s space reporter. I am particularly interested in the technology that enables space exploration, as well as space-based manufacturing, spurring from my background in mechanical engineering. I produce our space tech e-mail newsletter, The Airlock, your gateway to emerging space technologies. I previously served as Technology Review’s associate editor of the future of work. Before joining the publication I worked as a freelance science writer, founded the 3-D printing company Sci Chic, and interned at the Economist. Get in touch at erin.winick@technologyreview.com.ImageCNESExpandThe state of biotechNews on CRISPR and other developments in synthetic biology and medicine.Biotechnology30mA medical app uses your smartphone’s camera to carry out lab tests at homeHealthy-io’s system means patients at risk for kidney failure don’t have to visit the clinic—and has boosted the number who take the vital tests, it was announced today.You don’t need to go to the doctors for some testsBiotechnologyMar 26Genome engineers made more than 13,000 CRISPR edits in a single cellA team at George Church’s Harvard lab wants to redesign species with large-scale DNA changes.Read moreBiotechnologyMar 13CRISPR experts are calling for a global moratorium on heritable gene editingSome of the biggest names in gene editing want to stop anyone from playing around with cells that pass on changes to the next generation.Read moreBiotechnologyFeb 28Stick-on sensors will let premature babies get the skin contact they needBabies born too soon have to be closely monitored, but all that equipment stops parents from getting close. A new wireless sensor could help.Read moreArtificial IntelligenceApr 23Should a self-driving car protect a passenger or a pedestrian? Ideally, both.Much self-driving-car research focuses on pedestrian safety, but it is important to consider passenger safety and comfort, too. When braking to avoid a collision, for example, a vehicle should ideally…Researchers at Ryerson University in Toronto took on this challenge with deep reinforcement learning. If you’ll recall, reinforcement learning is a subset of machine learning that uses rewards and punishments to teach an AI agent to achieve one or multiple goals. In this case they punished the car anytime it hit a pedestrian (giving more severe punishments for higher-speed collisions) and also for causing jerking during braking (giving greater punishments for more violent stops).They then tested their model in a virtual environment with simulations, based on real-world data, of pedestrians crossing the road. Their model successfully avoided all accidents while also reducing the jerkiness of braking compared with another model that didn’t consider passenger comfort. It offers a proof of concept for how to give passengers a better riding experience without detracting from overall driving safety. More work needs to be done to test the idea in the physical world.This story originally appeared in our Webby-nominated AI newsletter The Algorithm. To have it directly delivered to your inbox, sign up here for free.ShareLinkAuthorKaren HaoKaren Hao is the artificial intelligence reporter for MIT Technology Review. In particular she covers the ethics and social impact of the technology as well as its applications for social good. She also writes the AI newsletter, the Algorithm, which thoughtfully examines the field’s latest news and research. Prior to joining the publication, she was a reporter and data scientist at Quartz and an application engineer at the first startup to spin out of Google X.ImageTony Avelar/APExpandEthical TechApr 23A Googler who brought down Google’s AI ethics board says she’s now facing retaliationOne of the leading figures in the movement to disband Google’s AI ethics board says she and other employee activists are now being punished for their activism….In an e-mail circulated internally within Google and obtained by Wired, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Research and cofounded the research institute AI Now, wrote that after the ethics board’s dissolution, she was informed that her role would be “changed dramatically.” “I’m told that to remain at the company I will have to abandon my work on AI ethics and the AI Now Institute,” she said.Since its founding, AI Now has become an influential cornerstone of research on AI ethics and social impact, releasing reports and hosting annual summits that have sparked vigorous debate within the rest of the field. “Meredith […] has been a real pioneer & thought leader on AI ethics, especially when it comes to ML bias, diversity, & inclusion,” François Chollet, a leading deep-learning expert at Google, wrote on Twitter. “I believe that her work is critical to Google’s mission, as an AI-first company [and…] I hope that she will be able to carry on her important work.”In a statement, a Google spokesperson denied the allegations: “Employees and teams are regularly and commonly given new assignments, or reorganized, to keep pace with evolving business needs. There has been no retaliation here.”To have more stories like this delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for our Webby-nominated AI newsletter The Algorithm. It’s free.ShareLinkAuthorKaren HaoKaren Hao is the artificial intelligence reporter for MIT Technology Review. In particular she covers the ethics and social impact of the technology as well as its applications for social good. She also writes the AI newsletter, the Algorithm, which thoughtfully examines the field’s latest news and research. Prior to joining the publication, she was a reporter and data scientist at Quartz and an application engineer at the first startup to spin out of Google X.ImageEric Risberg/APExpandArtificial IntelligenceApr 23Tesla says its new self-driving chip will help make its cars autonomousYesterday, during its Autonomy Investor Day in Palo Alto, California, Tesla unveiled its first custom AI chip, which promises to propel the company toward its goal of full autonomy….The 260-square-millimeter piece of silicon contains 6 billion transistors and is capable of processing 36 trillion operations per second, the company says. On stage it also claimed that this made its chips far more powerful than the Nvidia chips it had used before, but Nvidia quickly disputed the claim, saying Tesla had made a faulty comparison. Tesla’s self-driving computer board, which comes with two of its chips for redundancy, still has less than half the processing power of Nvidia’s equivalent computer. Regardless, Tesla is confident its custom design is best suited to quickly processing the massive amounts of data collected by its car’s sensors, so it can make safe driving decisions without draining the car battery.CEO Elon Musk said the boards have already been shipping in the Model S and X for a month and the Model 3 for 10 days, equipping them with the necessary hardware to convert into fully driverless vehicles in the near future. The timing of that will depend on when the company can overcome software, regulatory, and business challenges, but Musk said he feels confident that Tesla will have 1 million robotaxis (without human safety drivers) on the road next year. “I think the most profound thing,” he said in a recent interview, “is that if you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset, not a depreciating asset.”But this isn’t the first time he’s overblown his vehicles’ capabilities or been over-optimistic about his deadlines. The company was two years late in delivering semi-autonomous features and has yet to complete a hands-free trip across the US, which Musk originally claimed would happen by late 2017.Correction: A previous version of this story had a typo: the boards have been shipping in the Model 3, not X, for 10 days.To have more stories like this delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for our Webby-nominated AI newsletter The Algorithm. It’s free.ShareLinkAuthorKaren HaoKaren Hao is the artificial intelligence reporter for MIT Technology Review. In particular she covers the ethics and social impact of the technology as well as its applications for social good. She also writes the AI newsletter, the Algorithm, which thoughtfully examines the field’s latest news and research. Prior to joining the publication, she was a reporter and data scientist at Quartz and an application engineer at the first startup to spin out of Google X.ExpandSilicon ValleyApr 23Amazon is making its delivery drivers take selfies to reduce fraudThe company is using face recognition software to double-check that drivers are who they say they are, The Verge reports….Why? The new function has recently appeared in Amazon’s Flex app, used by its delivery drivers. A genuine issue: It’s a bid to stop multiple people from sharing one person’s account. It’s a problem that other “gig economy” platform apps like Uber also must deal with, given the lack of face-to-face interaction with colleagues. Uber implemented a virtually identical policy for its drivers in 2016.The risk: Although a few friends sharing an account to earn some extra cash might not seem too worrying, the practice could also be exploited by criminals trying to gain access to people’s homes.But: Face recognition is still far from fully accurate, particularly if you aren’t a white male. We can safely assume Amazon is using its own Rekognition software, which researchers recently found misidentifies darker-skinned women nearly one-third of the time.  This story first appeared in our daily newsletter, The Download. Sign up here to get your dose of the latest must-read news from the world of emerging tech.ShareLinkTaggedFace RecognitionAuthorCharlotte JeeI write The Download, the only newsletter in tech you need to read every day. Before joining MIT Technology Review I was editor of Techworld. Prior to that I was a reporter covering the intersection of politics, the public sector and technology. In my spare time I run a venture called Jeneo aimed at making tech events more inclusive. I regularly do public speaking and crop up on the BBC from time to time. Sign up for The Download here.ImageAssociated PressExpandHow the data mining of failure could teach us the secrets of successEurope’s copyright dispute shows just how hard it is to fix the internet’s problemsSign up for The Download — your daily dose of what’s up in emerging technologyStay updated on MIT Technology Review initiatives and events?YesNoClimate ChangeApr 23The desperate race to cool the ocean before it’s too lateHolly Jean Buck is a fellow at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. This is an adapted excerpt from her upcoming book After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (September 2019, Verso Books).Read moreAI and roboticsThe quest for artificial minds, and bodies to go with them.Artificial IntelligenceApr 23The three challenges keeping cars from being fully autonomousTechnical, regulatory, and business obstacles are still in the way of safe, useful, and affordable self-driving vehicles.Read moreArtificial IntelligenceApr 17AI’s white guy problem isn’t going awayA new report says current initiatives to fix the field’s diversity crisis are too narrow and shallow to be effective.Read moreArtificial IntelligenceApr 11A robot has figured out how to use toolsIn a startling demonstration, the machine drew on experimentation, data, and observation of humans to learn how simple implements could help it achieve a task.Read moreArtificial IntelligenceApr 11This robot can sort recycling by giving it a squeezeThe robot, called RoCycle, uses pincers to pick through garbage and identify what materials each bit contains. It could help reduce how much waste gets sent to landfill.Read moreArtificial IntelligenceApr 9This may be the Apple II of AI-driven robot armsA new low-cost robot arm that can be controlled using a virtual-reality headset will make it easier to experiment with AI and robotics.Read moreSilicon ValleyApr 23Sri Lanka has blocked access to social media to stop the spread of misinformationIn the aftermath of the Easter Sunday bombings that killed over 300 people, its government has blocked access to most of the main social networks and chat apps….What’s happened: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Viber, Snapchat, and Messenger have all been restricted, according to NetBlocks, an organization that monitors internet governance. It’s to stop people from spreading misinformation about the attacks, according to officials in Sri Lanka. They said the services will remain blocked until investigations into the attacks conclude. The government has blamed a local Islamist group called NTJ, although no organization has claimed responsibility yet.The logic: It’s easy to see why the government reacted this way. Sri Lanka is a country riven with ethnic tensions, where a volatile situation can spill over into violence. Just last month its government blocked Facebook during a wave of anti-Muslim violence.However: Social-media outages can have the opposite effect from the one intended, helping to stoke tensions further as people try to fill an information vacuum. In this case, it also has the knock-on effect of making it harder for people caught up in the attacks to let loved ones know they are safe. These sorts of blocks are also ineffective and easy to circumvent. Despite that, they’re an increasingly common tactic around the world.Sign up here to get your dose of the latest must-read news from the world of emerging tech in our daily newsletter The Download.  ShareLinkTaggedCybersecurityAuthorCharlotte JeeI write The Download, the only newsletter in tech you need to read every day. Before joining MIT Technology Review I was editor of Techworld. Prior to that I was a reporter covering the intersection of politics, the public sector and technology. In my spare time I run a venture called Jeneo aimed at making tech events more inclusive. I regularly do public speaking and crop up on the BBC from time to time. Sign up for The Download here.ImageAssociated PressExpandArtificial IntelligenceApr 23The three challenges keeping cars from being fully autonomousTechnical, regulatory, and business obstacles are still in the way of safe, useful, and affordable self-driving vehicles.Read moreSpaceApr 22SpaceX’s test of its Crew Dragon Capsule has ended in smokeThe failure of the uncrewed test likely means that astronauts won’t be heading back to space from US soil for a while yet….The news: During a static fire test of the Dragon Super Draco Engines, the capsule suffered an “anomaly” that produced excessive amounts of smoke on the platform at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The capsule in the test was the one successfully used in the DM-1 uncrewed launch to the International Space Station in March. So what happened? Not a lot of detail has been supplied yet. An unconfirmed, leaked video of the test shows the capsule engulfed in flame that appears to originate from the top of the craft. If the video is accurate, the capsule was likely destroyed.What it means: SpaceX has bounced back quickly from setbacks before, but with human lives on the line, substantial delays are likely while the company works to fix whatever went wrong. Boeing also recently pushed back test dates for its crew vehicle, so the launch date for humans from US soil may have to wait until 2020. “This is why we test. We will learn, make the necessary adjustments and safely move forward with the Commercial Crew Program,” NASA adminstrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement on Twitter.ShareLinkAuthorErin WinickI am MIT Technology Review’s space reporter. I am particularly interested in the technology that enables space exploration, as well as space-based manufacturing, spurring from my background in mechanical engineering. I produce our space tech e-mail newsletter, The Airlock, your gateway to emerging space technologies. I previously served as Technology Review’s associate editor of the future of work. Before joining the publication I worked as a freelance science writer, founded the 3-D printing company Sci Chic, and interned at the Economist. Get in touch at erin.winick@technologyreview.com.ImageSpaceXExpandBlockchain and cryptoAll you really need to know about the distributed-ledger craze.BlockchainApr 16How the hell are cryptocurrency holders supposed to file their taxes?Though it wasn’t in time for tax day, US lawmakers are pressuring the IRS to clarify its policies for digital currencies.Read moreBlockchainApr 2Venture capitalists are still throwing hundreds of millions at blockchainsA look at the data shows that despite the crypto market’s long downturn, VCs are still betting big.Read moreBlockchainMar 26Forget sketchy ICOs: a new kind of crypto-fundraising aims to go legitBlockchain-based “digital securities” promise to make it possible for anyone invest in new companies and technologies.Read moreBlockchainMar 25A multimillion-dollar criminal crypto-mining ecosystem has been uncoveredUsing stolen processing power to mine cryptocurrencies is a profitable criminal enterprise. But nobody realized the scale of the activity until now.Read moreBlockchainMar 22It’s still 2017 for one crypto exchangeBinance is doing million-dollar ICOs when everyone else has given up. But there’s a catch.Read moreClimate ChangeApr 22How greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industrySeoul had a solution to the world’s energy problems. Then everything went wrong.ComputingApr 20The Best of the Physics arXiv (week ending April 20, 2019)This week’s most thought-provoking papers from the Physics arXiv.

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