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There’s no questioning the promises of machine learning in nearly every sector. Lower costs, improved precision, better customer experience, and new features are some of the benefits of applying machine learning models to real-world applications. But machine learning is not a magic wand. And as many organizations and companies are learning, before you can apply the power of machine learning to your business and operations, you must overcome several barriers....

Back in 2007, it would have been hard to imagine the revolution of useful apps and services that smartphones ushered in. But they came with a cost in terms of intrusiveness and loss of privacy. As computer scientists who study data management and privacy, we find that with internet connectivity extended to devices in homes, offices, and cities, privacy is in more danger than ever. Internet of Things Your appliances, car, and home are designed to make your life easier and automate tasks you perform daily: switch lights on and off when you enter and exit a room, remind you that your tomatoes are about to go bad, personalize the temperature of the house depending on the weather and preferences of each person in the household....

Speech is one of the defining marks of humanhood. It is the interface of our social and societal relationships, and the baton through which individuals and generations pass information and knowledge from one to the other. Yet, how our species – and our species alone – developed such a powerful method of communication remains unclear. Perhaps chief among the necessary tools for speech is voice control. That is, the uniquely advanced ability to engage our vocal folds to produce sounds at will, as opposed to the reflexive screams and cries that other animals produce as automatic responses to changes in their environment and physiology....

The community has been discussing the need for a “Satoshi” symbol for some time. Twitter user BitFicus has been campaigning for one symbol for over a year. Five months ago, they compiled their idea into a bundle of assets and published a GitHub repository for a Satoshi symbol. Earlier this week, the conversation was given another kick up the backside after the head of operations at Lightning Network development house, Lightning Labs, Desiree Dickerson, asked if we can “crowdsource a symbol for the Satoshi?...

Several pirated copies of the movie have cropped up online over the past couple of days, TorrentFreak reports. Sources of the leak remain unclear, but the report notes one of the versions features Korean subtitles, while German subtitles can be seen in the other. There’s also a release with an overlaid text, inviting viewers to a certain gambling site, which is a common (and pretty sketchy) advertising tactic. Warner Bros has already been busy sending take-down notices for leaked footage and fake piracy releases of Tenet for the past couple of weeks, so chances are the company will do the same with the new leaks....

Research shows that diverse open source projects are more productive and make better decisions. This starts with creating teams that have a greater representation of gender, race, socioeconomic standings, ethnic backgrounds, and the like. Many open source communities are recognizing the need for new initiatives and a cohesive focus to tackle the lack of diversity in their projects. I predict that in 2021, building off the momentum of this past year’s focus on social inequality and steps made by open source-minded companies and foundations, open source communities will continue to increase the diversity of their communities so that it becomes the rule and not the exception....

In an interview with Clean Energy Wire, Auke Hoekstra, an academic researcher from Eindhoven University of Technology, says that fuel cell vehicles “won’t ever be able to compete with electric trucks’ business case.” Below are three of the key arguments he makes for why battery electric trucks will become the norm, leaving fuel cell vehicles, and diesel wagons in the past. Battery technology is nearly ready As he alludes, around 80% of trucks, in the Netherlands at least, travel 750 km (470 miles) per day, at the very most....

Until recently, my entire career had been spent in the tech industry. From the inside, leadership led a rallying cry that told employees they weren’t just there building software — they were making the world better. These ideas would often be delivered through a corporate purpose, a corporate responsibility statement, or sometimes they would be simplified down to a vow to put customers ahead of (or at least next to) shareholders....

SKYNET is a fictional artificial general intelligence that’s responsible for the creation of the killer robots from the Terminator film franchise. It was a scary vision of AI’s future until deep learning came along and big tech decided to take off its metaphorical belt and really give us something to cry about. At least the people fighting the robots in The Terminator film franchises get to face a villain they can see and shoot at....

My company, Jscrambler, recently closed a $15 million Series A round, which was led by cybersecurity investment firm Ace Capital Partners and with follow-on from Sonae and Portugal Ventures — definitely an outcome I’m grateful for, especially looking back at what a journey this has been. So today I want to share some of the things I’ve learned from this process. 1. Talk to VCs in their own language When you’re dealing with 100+ prospect VCs, it’s hard to get your message across to every single person....

This shift is heating up Europe’s focus on the promise its hot young scaleups can bring. But what will define the ‘Made in Europe’ tech brand, and how can it compete against the Facebooks and Googles of the world? To find out, I attended this year’s EIT Digital Challenge to speak with the movers and shakers shaping this new era of European tech. Prediction 1: The balance between innovation and regulation will be the EU’s winning factor I first sat down with EIT Digital’s Chief Innovation Officer, Chahab Nastar, to discuss the broader context facing the European tech scene....

But, what if we want to get any specific data programmatically? There are two ways to do that: The concept of API (Application Programming Interface) was introduced to exchange data between different systems in a standard way. But, most of the time, website owners don’t provide any API. In that case, we are only left with the possibility to extract the data using web scraping. Basically, every web page is returned from the server in an HTML format, meaning that our actual data is nicely packed inside HTML elements....

Why are Apple and Epic fighting? In August last year, Apple and Google booted Epic’s hit battle royale game Fortnite from their app stores. The reason was that the game company had included a payment method that evaded these stores’ systems, and allowed users to buy the game’s internal currency, called V-bucks, directly from Epic. The game company thought that was against the 30% cut taken by Apple and Google from developers was unfair, and people needed alternative methods to make in-app purchases....

Recently a Redditor posted a short clip on a subreddit called r/Mildly Infuriating. The post depicted a tale of opting out of purchasing Audi’s tri-zone climate control (cooling and heating) in an SUV, but it still came with the sync button that a driver would use for temperature control. Video credit: Reddit In short, the driver pushed the button, and a message popped up on the digital dashboard saying, “This function has not been purchased....

Amid this video conferencing boom, Zoom’s security and privacy-related problems made a lot of people skeptical about using its products. Plus, the company wasn’t transparent about communicating its mishaps — this forced a lot of people to look for free open source products, and Jitsi emerged as a perfect solution for them. Apart from being open-sourced, Jitsi benefited from endorsements by a few highly-regarded names in the security community. In March, a privacy-focused browser Tor tweeted about the product as an alternative to Zoom....

The company showed off an AI-powered experiment at its Adobe Max conference that syncs your off-beat movement to the beat of the music. Researchers used computer vision to follow the body movement of the person in the video. As shown below, the algorithm also analyzes dance moves through popping orange circles to determine the time of movements. [Read: How Photoshop’s new Neural Filters harness AI to generate new pixels] The researchers also mark beats of the music track with orange lines and plot them against the orange dots to determine if dance moves are in sync with the music....

As pressures on the planet and its climate increase, so does the hope that these novel technologies will be able to help us detect, adapt and respond to the growing environmental crisis. There are plenty of examples of how artificial intelligence could do this. But for that to happen, the people who make and regulate this technology need to rethink some simplistic assumptions about how AI will shape the future of our planet....

Scientists have developed algorithms to separate this DNA soup and to measure the relative amounts of each person’s DNA in a sample. These “probabilistic genotyping” methods have enabled forensic investigators to indicate how likely it is that an individual’s DNA was included in a mixed sample found at the crime scene. And now, more sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are being developed in an attempt to extract DNA profiles and try to work out whether a DNA sample came directly from someone who was at the crime scene, or whether it had just been innocently transferred....

The mysterious landscape lurks beneath the visible surface of Picasso’s La Miséreuse Accroupie (The Crouching Beggar), a portrayal of a destitute woman. In 2018, researchers used an X-ray fluorescence imagining instrument to reveal a faint image of the covered scene. Art historians suspect it’s a painting of a park near Barcelona by Santiago Rusiñol, a friend of Picasso’s and leader of the Catalan modernism movement. They believe Picasso traced the hills on the landscape to shape the contours of the crouching woman’s back....

But contrary to what many companies profess, machine learning is not a silver bullet that will automatically protect individuals and organizations against security threats, says Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of ImmuniWeb, a company that uses AI to test the security of web and mobile applications. While machine learning and other AI techniques will help improve the speed and quality of cybersecurity solutions, they will not be a replacement for many of the basic practices that companies often neglect....