Artificial intelligence: the new ghost in the machine

Engineering and Technology Magazine (a publication of the British [Institution of Engineering and Technology]() has an article that highlights adversarial machine learning research: Artificial intelligence: the new ghost in the machine, 10 October 2018, by Chris Edwards. Although researchers such as David Evans of the University of Virginia see a full explanation being a little way off in the future, the massive number of parameters encoded by DNNs and the avoidance of overtraining due to SGD may have an answer to why the networks can hallucinate images and, as a result, see things that are not there and ignore those that are.

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Violations of Children’s Privacy Laws

The New York Times has an article, How Game Apps That Captivate Kids Have Been Collecting Their Data about a lawsuit the state of New Mexico is bringing against app markets (including Google) that allow apps presented as being for children in the Play store to violate COPPA rules and mislead users into tracking children. The lawsuit stems from a study led by Serge Egleman’s group at UC Berkeley that analyzed COPPA violations in children’s apps.

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Cybersecurity Summer Camp

I helped organize a summer camp for high school teachers focused on cybersecurity, led by Ahmed Ibrahim. Some of the materials from the camp on cryptography, including the Jefferson Wheel and visual cryptography are here: Cipher School for Muggles. Cybersecurity Goes to Summer Camp. UVA Today. 22 July 2018. [archive.org] Earlier this week, 25 high school teachers – including 21 from Virginia – filled a glass-walled room in Rice Hall, sitting in high adjustable chairs at wheeled work tables, their laptops open, following a lecture with graphics about the dangers that lurk in cyberspace and trying to figure out how to pass the information on to a generation that seems to share the most intimate details of life online.

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