Author: The Conversation
by Alan Christoffels, University of the Western Cape and Sofonias Kifle Tessema Infectious disease outbreaks in African countries are, unfortunately, all too common. Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Uganda; Marburg virus in Guinea or Equatorial Guinea; cholera in Malawi; malaria and tuberculosis are among them. These diseases do not respect human-made or porous borders. So it’s essential that scientists in Africa are able to generate and share critical data on the pathogens in time to inform public-health decisions. Genomic sequencing technologies are powerful tools in this kind of work. They enable scientists to decode the genetic…
by Eden Kamar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Christian Jordan Howell, University of South Florida There has been a tenfold increase in sexual abuse imagery created with webcams and other recording devices worldwide since 2019, according to the the Internet Watch Foundation. Social media sites and chatrooms are the most common methods used to facilitate contact with kids, and abuse occurs both online and offline. Increasingly, predators are using advances in technology to engage in technology-facilitated sexual abuse. Once having gained access to a child’s webcam, a predator can use it to record, produce and distribute child pornography. We are…
by Chris Impey, University of Arizona The famous first image of a black hole just got two times sharper. A research team used artificial intelligence to dramatically improve upon its first image from 2019, which now shows the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy as darker and bigger than the first image depicted. I’m an astronomer who studies and has written about cosmology, black holes and exoplanets. Astronomers have been using AI for decades. In fact, in 1990, astronomers from the University of Arizona, where I am a professor, were among the first to use a type…
By Molly Jackson, The Conversation If you’re like me, you’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months trying to figure out what this AI thing is all about. Large-language models, generative AI, algorithmic bias – it’s a lot for the less tech-savvy of us to sort out, trying to make sense of the myriad headlines about artificial intelligence swirling about. But understanding how AI works is just part of the dilemma. As a society, we’re also confronting concerns about its social, psychological and ethical effects. Here we spotlight articles about the deeper questions the AI revolution raises…
By Victor R. Lee, Stanford University It turns out that pop stars Drake and The Weeknd didn’t suddenly drop a new track that went viral on TikTok and YouTube in April 2023. The photograph that won an international photography competition that same month wasn’t a real photograph. And the image of Pope Francis sporting a Balenciaga jacket that appeared in March 2023? That was also a fake. All were made with the help of generative AI, the new technology that can generate humanlike text, audio and images on demand through programs such as ChatGPT, Midjourney and Bard, among others. There’s…
By Primrose Freestone, University of Leicester We carry them everywhere, take them to bed, to the bathroom and for many people they’re the first thing they see in the morning – more than 90% of the world owns or uses a mobile phone and many of us couldn’t manage without one. But while health concerns about phones use usually focus on the distraction they can cause while driving, the possible effects of radiofrequency exposure, or just how addictive they can be. The microbial infection risk of your phone is much less appreciated – but it’s very real. A 2019 survey…
by John Licato, University of South Florida Each day, messages from Nigerian princes, peddlers of wonder drugs and promoters of can’t-miss investments choke email inboxes. Improvements to spam filters only seem to inspire new techniques to break through the protections. Now, the arms race between spam blockers and spam senders is about to escalate with the emergence of a new weapon: generative artificial intelligence. With recent advances in AI made famous by ChatGPT, spammers could have new tools to evade filters, grab people’s attention and convince them to click, buy or give up personal information. As director of the Advancing…
By Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder As public concern about the ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence keeps growing, it might seem like it’s time to slow down. But inside tech companies themselves, the sentiment is quite the opposite. As Big Tech’s AI race heats up, it would be an “absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later,” a Microsoft executive wrote in an internal email about generative AI, as The New York Times reported. In other words, it’s time to “move fast and break things,” to quote Mark Zuckerberg’s old…
by Robert Olson, Rochester Institute of Technology TikTok is not be the first app to be scrutinized over the potential exposure of U.S. user data, but it is the first widely used app that the U.S. government has proposed banning over privacy and security concerns. So far, the discussion has focused on whether TikTok should be banned. There has been little discussion of whether TikTok could be banned, and there has been almost no discussion of the effects on cybersecurity that a TikTok ban could cause, including encouraging users to sidestep built-in security mechanisms to bypass a ban and access…
by Michelle Lochner, University of the Western Cape New telescopes with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution are being unveiled around the world – and beyond. Among them are the Giant Magellan Telescope under construction in Chile, and the James Webb Space Telescope, which is parked a million and a half kilometres out in space. This means there is a wealth of data available to scientists that simply wasn’t there before. The raw data off just a single observation from the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa’s Northern Cape province can measure a terabyte. That’s enough to fill a laptop computer’s hard…