Attackers Use Artificial Intelligence Generated Deepfake For Phishing Campaigns

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July 5, 2021

Cyber attackers use offensive artificial intelligence for impersonation like deepfakes to perpetrate phishing campaigns. They also reverse engineer to steal proprietary algorithms and amplify attacks to expand their campaigns.

A research conducted by Microsoft, Purdue, and Ben-Gurion University explored the threat of offensive artificial intelligence on organizations. The research identified various capabilities that adversaries can use to strengthen cyber attacks and provide insight into the adversaries while ranking each by severity. Artificial intelligence is used to poison the machine learning models by disrupting their training data and stealing credentials through side-channel analysis.

The top artificial intelligence threat is the use of deepfakes for phishing campaigns, as AI is capable of automating processes, the adversaries may pace from having slow covert campaigns to fast-paced campaigns that will overwhelm defenders and increase the attacker’s chances of success. According to research conducted by Attesive, as bots gain the ability to make more realistic deepfakes, phishing campaigns will become more widespread. In the next few years, there will be an increase in offensive artificial intelligence in the areas of data collection, training, model development, and evaluation.

The researchers wrote that “With AI’s rapid pace of development and open accessibility, we expect to see a noticeable shift in attack strategies on organizations.” They also mentioned that artificial intelligence would enable adversaries to target more organizations frequently and parallelly. They result in overwhelming the defender’s response teams with thousands of attempts for the chance of one success. As adversaries begin to use artificial intelligence-enabled bots, defenders will also be forced to automate bots for their defense.

The researchers suggested a few ways to avoid the threats, like recommending the organizations to develop post-processing tools that can secure software from analysis after development, integration of security testing, protecting and monitoring models with MLOps for the organizations to maintain secure systems easily.

Egypt’s CIT Minister launches Artificial Intelligence Platform

By

Dipayan Mitra

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July 5, 2021

Egypt’s CIT Minister launches Artificial Intelligence Platform

Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology (CIT) and Chairperson of the National Council for Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Amr Talaat, recently announced the launch of a special artificial intelligence platform in the country.

The platform will be developed and controlled by the National Council for Artificial Intelligence and will serve as Egypt’s official portal in the field of artificial intelligence.

The launch of the ai.gov.eg platform is a part of Egypt’s willingness to keep pace with the digital age and interact with the most prominent technologies of this era. It also plans to consolidate Egypt’s position to become one of the world leaders in the field of artificial intelligence.

The artificial intelligence-powered platform’s launch guarantees a major qualitative leap in this field and will save workers time and effort to reach their goals.

According to Golestan Radwan, Advisor to the Minister of Communications and Information Technology for Artificial Intelligence, the document on Egypt’s national artificial intelligence strategy has been published in both English and Arabic on the platform.

The platform aims to accelerate the process of communication, innovation, and cooperation with startups, along with programs for creating public awareness on artificial intelligence and preparing special courses for university students and professionals in the private and public sectors.

The Government Readiness for Artificial Intelligence index of Oxford Insight Foundation and the International Development Research Center, issued in 2020, indicated that Egypt’s ranking in the general index advanced 55 places to 56 globally of 172 countries, compared to 111 among 194 countries in 2019.

The country has recently played a vital role in the ongoing discussions within UNESCO to adopt a recommendation on the ethical use of artificial intelligence. In addition, Egypt also participated in an Arab Working Group on Artificial Intelligence meeting, held last February.

Amazon Launched A New Development Center In To Support Amazon Scout In Finland

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 5, 2021

Amazon Launched A New Development Center In To Support Amazon Scout In Finland

Amazon recently in a blog, announced the launch of a new development center to develop electric autonomous delivery vehicles in Helsinki, Finland.

The company plans to deploy 24 engineers in its new Amazon Scout development center to focus on research and development. One of Amazon’s main aims is to develop 3D software that can simulate the complexity of real-life and ensure the autonomous vehicles can navigate safely while making deliveries.

The research center is now hiring bright minds in the field of robotics to kick start their research process, and they hope to grow many folds in the coming years.

The announcement of the new development center in Helsinki comes half a year after tech-giant reportedly acquired a native 3D modeling startup Umbra, which also has offices in the United States and the Asia-Pacific region. Founded in 2006 by Valter Baldaccini, Umbra raised $3.4 million from investors before being acquired by Amazon.

The company said the development center in Helsinki will work alongside Amazon staff at the Amazon Scout research and development lab in Seattle and teams in Tubingen, Germany, and Cambridge, where Amazon has been developing delivery drones for many years.

The Amazon Scout vehicle has six wheels, is powered by an electric battery, and moves at a walking pace. Autonomous delivery robots are widely seen as a potentially serviceable asset in last-mile delivery, but they also possess a threat of eliminating thousands of jobs.

Amazon has been conducting trials of the Scout vehicle between Monday and Friday in a neighborhood in Snohomish County, Washington, to deliver shipments in daylight hours. Human overseers accompany the robots to ensure that the devices can safely and efficiently navigate around pets, pedestrians, and anything else in their path.

Heineken Unveiled Its Beer Outdoor Transporter or B.O.T

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Dipayan Mitra

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July 5, 2021

Heineken Unveiled Its Beer Outdoor Transporter or B.O.T

Heineken recently unveiled its Beer Outdoor Transporter, or B.O.T. This unique robot stores beer and uses motion sensors to follow its owner autonomously.

The Dutch beer brewing company launched an online raffle for people who want to buy one. The brand director of Heineken U.S.A., Joshua Egan, said, “Nobody loves lugging around like a giant cooler and sweating in the 100-degree heat.”

The autonomous driving machine was built with the help of artificial intelligence. This summer, it was revealed to mark the country’s return to semi-normalcy after gatherings were discouraged due to the coronavirus last year.

The product is not designed exclusively for Heineken’s products. The B.O.T. also comes with a refrigerating unit, allowing the user to store and chill any can-based beverage outdoors.

The robot features a touch screen, cameras, and sensors in the front to help it avoid obstacles. At the rear end, there is a cooler backpack branded with Heineken’s logo. The company did not reveal the number of robots they are producing, but they said that they have been working with many other companies since the past year to build this product.

The winners of the raffle will be announced within the next week, and the product will ship from Los Angeles after that. Heineken did not mention its plan for the second shipment of B.O.T.

The company noted that the robot weights around 32 Kgs when not filled with ice. They also said that the droid can travel up to 24 Kms in one go when fully charged. Beer Outdoor Transporter is currently priced at $3,250, which is quite expensive, but the company said that considering its capabilities and being the first consumer robot in the United States with such functionality, the cost is justified.

The robot features two modes. One allows the machine to follow you, and the other enables the operator to control where it goes through a smartphone application.

TikTok Sells Its Algorithm And Artificial Intelligence Technology

By

Manisha Kalagara

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July 5, 2021

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance sells its artificial intelligence technology and algorithms to companies worldwide. The company launched a new division called BytePlus in June to avail the AI technology at a price, including it’s groundbreaking recommendation algorithm.

BytePlus has put up many of its features for sale including, short video application computer vision technology, automated text to speech translation, real-time video effects, and data analysis tools. Companies can avail these tools at a certain price and tailor them according to their needs.

TikTok’s recommendation feature ForYou has been revolutionary, users claim that it was able to detect their sexuality, medical diagnoses even before they did. The algorithm recommends videos on the users feed using the metadata and how they interact on the platform, such as which videos they liked, shared, or commented on, what hashtags or captions on their posts, the device they are using, people they follow, content created by them, location settings, etc. This is one of the major reasons for the growth of the app, due to which ByteDance capitalized on it.

According to TikTok’s blog post “Ultimately, your ForYou feed is powered by your feedback: the system is designed to continuously improve, correct, and learn from your own engagement with the platform to produce personalized recommendations that we hope inspire creativity and bring joy with every refresh of your ForYou feed”.

Personalized recommendations are new in the AI community, still ByteDance stays positive and believes that in the long run, its tools will be up against the artificial intelligence services of Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. BytePlus is also looking to register trademarks in the U.S., although it’s unclear if the company has established a stateside presence yet.

Few of the companies such as Goat (american shopping app), WeGo (Singapore-based travel booking) and Indonesian online shopping start-up Chilibeli have already brought the features according to the ByteDance website.

Google Sold $2.5 Million In AI To Pentagon For Covid-19 Recovery

By

Manisha Kalagara

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July 5, 2021

Google sells $2.5 million dollars in artificial intelligence to the U.S.Defence Department by supplying AI tools and cloud software. This was done to support the sector’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The $2.5 million deal is part of an undisclosed contract among both the agencies from May 2020. Google’s Reston, Virginia, partner Carahsoft provided cloud and AI tools to the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), a centralized command and control unit for the Department of Defense (DOD) homeland security efforts.

The contract was also based on an Artificial intelligence-integrated resource optimization solution for Covid-related disruptions. This was brought into action to aid the defense agency in allocating resources more effectively for both military and medical equipment. In collaboration with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the AI models were trained with data that was accessed from the existing data sets, to create and test improved algorithms. The tech could have been expanded to help the DOD predict future supply chain shortfalls.

The contract also leveraged Google’s tools while integrating with other DOD, federal, state, private, and international agencies and organizations. But, Google restricted itself from commenting on the nature of its work because it isn’t authorized to discuss contracts.

Google continues to work with the U.S government and is proud of the work it has done and will be doing, particularly on its Covid-19 response business. According to reports, the AI pioneer uses various contractors around the Washington, D.C., area for its government sales, such as a $2 million Customs & Border contract for a human and cargo surveillance system known as the Automated Targeting System.

Developing Artificial Intelligence Technology To Detect Early Signs Of Alzheimer’s Disease

By

Dipayan Mitra

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July 5, 2021

Developing Artificial Intelligence Technology To Detect Early Signs Of Alzheimer's Disease

Researchers at Michigan State University are developing an artificial intelligence-powered technology that analyzes speech and vocabulary patterns to recognize early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, which is the most common cause of dementia.

The research is being led by an associate professor at Michigan State University’s College of engineering, Jiayu Zhou. The research recently received a funding of $3.9 million from the National Institutes of Health. The study aims to develop a user-friendly smartphone application that can be used to diagnose patients for early symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

Jiayu Zhou said, “Alzheimer’s is hard to deal with, and it is quite easy to confuse its early stage, mild impairment, with normal cognitive decline as we are getting older.” He also mentioned that it’s only when the situation worsens, people realize the need for medication.

Although doctors do not have a specific cure for Alzheimer’s, early diagnosis could help researchers and doctors to prescribe medication to slow down its spread before any major loss.

The research team believes that artificial intelligence can recognize minor voice changes and expressions better than a human. Hence they plan to develop an artificial intelligence-powered app that will make Alzheimer’s’sAlzheimer’s’s diagnosis considerably affordable, widely accessible, and less time consuming.

Researchers have already proved in initial tests that the application is capable of recognizing early symptoms as accurately as MRI.

Zhou said, “If we want to develop an application that anyone can use, we don’t want to have people talking to it for hours.” He further added that they need to develop an efficient strategy to navigate the conversation and extract the required data in a short amount of time. The artificial intelligence-powered application would scrutinize all of this data, then give users risk scores of how likely it is that they are displaying signs of Alzheimer’s.

Artificial Intelligence Powered Precision Agriculture Can Revolutionize The Food Production Industry

By

Dipayan Mitra

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July 4, 2021

Artificial Intelligence Powered Precision Agriculture Can Revolutionize The Food Production Industry

Precision agriculture, site-specific crop management, or satellite farming is a farming management concept based on analyzing, measuring, and responding to inter and intra-field variability in crops. Precision agriculture research aims to define a decision support system for entire farm management and optimize returns on inputs while preserving resources.

It includes wind patterns, rain predictions, and other seasonal effects, mapping the field in terms of disparities within the area or other fields around it, the sunlight variation across the year using feeds from weather stations, Remote sensing equipment, GPS, and GIS.

Another critical feature of precision agriculture is having a trained artificial intelligence-powered software module on the specific crop being planned in that field.

This artificial intelligence software has an understanding of the growth patterns of that particular crop, potential diseases that are related to that crop, selection of specific fertilizer or pesticides depending upon the possible infections, and prediction of disease depending upon the growth of leaves, size, and color of the plant.

The technique uses feed sensors, soil sensors, weight sensors, temperature sensors, intensity sensors, and numerous cameras. These sensors may be deployed on a machine. This machine can be a small-sized robot moving across the field.

This robo will have multiple compartments filled with different ingredients required for the plants like pesticides, water, and fertilizers. Based on the real-time feedback of various sensors, the software will scrutinize that information according to the trained artificial intelligence model installed on that robot.

Farmers currently rent out heavy machines for sowing and cutting the crops, they will be able to hire various types of robots for their specific needs. Initially, the cost will be high, but gradually, when this becomes standard practice, the price will reduce considerably with volume and scale.

However, despite all these advantages, artificial intelligence technology also has a few drawbacks representing challenges. Firstly, the most important social challenge is unemployment that could be a threat due to the reduced human interference in the process..

Moreover, some risks and apprehensions could be posed regarding sustainability, especially the massive energy consumption, e-waste problem, market concentration, and job displacement.

Nvidia’s MLPerf Benchmark Show Impressive Results In AI Training

By

Manisha Kalagara

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July 4, 2021

Nvidia announced that their graphics processor units (GPU) based systems perform 3 to 5 times better while training artificial intelligence models, according to their latest MLPerf benchmarks.

The MLPerf benchmark is backed by Alibaba, Google, Facebook AI, Nvidia, and Intel and is managed by MLCommons Association, making the tests transparent. MLPerf gives users a clean source of information before buying the product. These benchmarks are based on AI workloads and scenarios like natural-language processing, covering computer vision, recommendation systems, and reinforcement learning. The training benchmarks are focused on time to train AI models.

NVIDIA has set new performance records by training models in the least amount of time across all eight benchmarks in the commercially available submissions category with its A100 GPU.

Nvidia ran the tests on Selene, the fastest AI supercomputer worldwide, based on Nvidia DGX SuperPOD architecture. Scaling is the most critical part of AI, but Nvidia obtained magnificent results in chip-to-chip comparisons. Overall, the results depict that the performance rose by 6.5x in 2.5 years, and 3 to 5 times than last year.

The MLPerf results depict the performance of various NVIDIA-based AI platforms with numerous new and innovative systems. They span from entry-level edge servers to AI supercomputers with thousands of GPUs. ”Our ecosystem offers customers choices in a wide range of deployment models — from instances that are rentable by the minute to on-prem servers and managed services — providing the most value per dollar in the industry” said Nvidia.

All the software used is available from the MLPerf repository, making it accessible for everyone to reproduce the benchmark results. Nvidia will continually add this code into the deep learning frameworks and containers available on NGC, the software hub for GPU applications.

Seoul Introduces AI-Integrated CCTV To Prevent Suicides On Bridges

By

Manisha Kalagara

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July 4, 2021

The Seoul metropolitan government rolled out artificial intelligence integrated CCTV cameras to prevent suicides on bridges. This was done under the new pilot project to address suicides on bridges. They are installed on 10 major bridges in and around Seoul, South Korea.

Seoul metropolitan government has been operating CCTV surveillance and response system to monitor the bridges and proactively respond to suicide attempts around the clock since 2012. The recent pilot project has been to monitor suicides on bridges spanning the Han River, which is the largest waterway bisecting the city.

The Seoul metropolitan government partnered with The Seoul Institute of Technology and the Seoul Fire and Disaster Headquarters (SFDH) for the pilot project with the main objective of improving the current suicide detection system. The artificial intelligence system is trained with tones of data from dispatch reports, CCTV footage, data from bridge sensors, information from people who had previously attempted suicide, report history, phone calls and text messages. The officials mentioned that under this project they have been analyzing data from SFDH since April 2020.

The AI system learns suicidal behavioural patterns from the previous data and analyzes the information received from the cameras and sensors. If it detects any suspicious behaviour or dangerous situation, it immediately alerts rescue teams. And the rescue teams will be there at the point under three minutes. “We believe that the new video surveillance system will allow our teams to detect cases a bit faster and help us to answer a call more quickly,” said Kim Hyeong-gil, head of a relief squad.

This project has been taking new forms because South Korea has recorded the highest number of suicides in 2019. According to studies, approximately 486 people attempt suicide on bridges spanning the Han River every year and authorities rescue about 96.63 per cent. The government also informed that the number of rescue dispatches surged about 30 per cent in 2020 compared to the year before which predominantly gave rise to this project.