AI & Robotics News and Discussions

[wjfox]

QAnon founder may have been identified thanks to machine learning

February 19th, 2022

With help from machine learning software, computer scientists may have unmasked the identity of Q, the founder of the QAnon movement. In a sprawling report published on Saturday, The New York Times shared the findings of two independent teams of forensic linguists who claim they’ve identified Paul Furber, a South African software developer who was one of the first to draw attention to the conspiracy theory, as the original writer behind Q. They say Arizona congressional candidate Ron Watkins also wrote under the pseudonym, first by collaborating with Furber and then later taking over the account when it eventually moved to post on his father’s 8chan message board.

The two teams of Swiss and French researchers used different methodologies to come to the same conclusion. The Swiss one, made up of two researchers from startup OrphAnalytics, used software to break down Q’s missives into patterns of three-character sequences. They then tracked how often those sequences repeated. The French team, meanwhile, trained an AI to look for patterns in Q’s writing.

https://www.engadget.com/qanon-machine- ... 18665.html

[weatheriscool]

Risks of using AI to grow our food are substantial and must not be ignored, warn researchers
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-02-ai- ... ntial.html
by University of Cambridge

Imagine a field of wheat that extends to the horizon, being grown for flour that will be made into bread to feed cities' worth of people. Imagine that all authority for tilling, planting, fertilizing, monitoring and harvesting this field has been delegated to artificial intelligence: algorithms that control drip-irrigation systems, self-driving tractors and combine harvesters, clever enough to respond to the weather and the exact needs of the crop. Then imagine a hacker messes things up.

A new risk analysis, published today in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, warns that the future use of artificial intelligence in agriculture comes with substantial potential risks for farms, farmers and food security that are poorly understood and under-appreciated.

"The idea of intelligent machines running farms is not science fiction. Large companies are already pioneering the next generation of autonomous ag-bots and decision support systems that will replace humans in the field," said Dr. Asaf Tzachor in the University of Cambridge's Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), first author of the paper.

"But so far no-one seems to have asked the question 'are there any risks associated with a rapid deployment of agricultural AI?'" he added.

[weatheriscool]

Researchers enhance human-robot interaction by merging mixed reality and robotics
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-03-hum ... otics.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Over the past decades, engineers have created devices with increasingly advanced functions and capabilities. A device capability that was substantially improved in recent years is known as "spatial computing."

The term spatial computing essentially refers to the ability of computers, robots, and other electronic devices to be "aware" of their surrounding environment and to create digital representations of it. Cutting edge technologies, such as sensors and mixed reality (MR), can significantly enhance spatial computing, enabling the creation of sophisticated sensing and mapping systems.

Researchers at the Microsoft Mixed Reality and AI Lab and ETH Zurich have recently developed a new framework that combines MR and robotics to enhance spatial computing applications. They implemented and tested this framework, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, on a series of systems for human-robot interaction.

"The combination of spatial computing and egocentric sensing on mixed reality devices enables them to capture and understand human actions and translate these to actions with spatial meaning, which offers exciting new possibilities for collaboration between humans and robots," the researchers wrote in their paper. "This paper presents several human-robot systems that utilize these capabilities to enable novel robot use cases: mission planning for inspection, gesture-based control, and immersive teleoperation."

[Yuli Ban]

[caltrek]

How AI Could Revolutionize COVID-19 Diagnosis
by Naeem Ramzan
March 3, 2022

https://www.sciencealert.com/how-a-19th ... -diagnosis

Extract:

(Science Alert) Investigations early on in the pandemic found that abnormalities showed up in the chest radiography images of patients with the virus, leading the World Health Organization to recommend using radiography for diagnosing COVID when PCR testing isn't available, especially for severe patients.

But there's a resource bottleneck here, too. Using X-rays and CT scans for diagnosis requires radiologists to carefully decipher the chest images, since COVID's visual pointers can be hard to spot. So, we created an artificial intelligence program to do this instead, to speed up diagnosis and allow radiologists to get on with their jobs.

The program is based on something called a deep convolutional neural network, a type of algorithm typically used to analyze images. Such algorithms can pick out the key features of images and classify those that have similarities and differences.
…
As well as being beneficial for patients, this could also speed up their passage onto suitable wards elsewhere in the hospital, and so relieve the strain on hard-pressed A&E departments.

The app could also be very effective at diagnosing COVID cases in low-income countries and remote areas where PCR is not readily available. So, as a next step, we're planning to test it out in Pakistan, as part of the EU-funded SAFE RH project, to see what impact it can have in the real world.

[Yuli Ban]

Ana-digital computer has been on my mind for half a decade now as being the most likely method for producing AGI.

[Yuli Ban]

[raklian]

[Yuli Ban]

[wjfox]

^ Exponential growth in action. I am seriously impressed with synthesia.io