News

Members - please remember to register for TTI/V’s upcoming virtual conference, AI: Today and Tomorrow. Join us for 4 Tuesdays: June 22, June 29, July 13, and July 20. Register today! 

First, deepfake people (Chris Piehota, virtual conference, Jun 2020; Dan Brahmy and Yossef Daar, Israel Virtual Startup Forum, Jan 2021); now, deepfake geography. But why wouldn’t hoax protagonists fabricate satellite imagery depicting whatever might bolster their false claims? In fact, inserting fake features into maps is an age-old falsification ruse. University of Washington researcher Bo Zhao says the current challenge is to educate the public on how to spot realistic-yet-bogus geographic pics.  www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2021/4/27/22403741/deepfake-geography-satellite-imagery-ai-generated-fakes-threat 

Caregiving is a multifaceted endeavor, encompassing feeding, washing, dressing, and being social with the subject of that care. For instance, Karen Liu (Boston, Apr 2017) discussed her dress-the-patient robot not long ago. A team of Boston-area researchers, including MIT CSAIL’s Daniella Rus (Boston, Apr 2014), are extending the scope of robotic tasks to include hair brushing—a challenge that furthermore provides insights into mathematical models and control systems for manipulating all manner of soft fibers. Although the project purposefully considers how best to tame straight, wavy, and curly hair, the RoboWig demos do not appear to extend to the detangling of Black hair, further exacerbating the unintentional bias of far too many machine-learning systems. (Julie Ancis, Washington, D.C., Sep 2017) www.csail.mit.edu/news/untangle-your-hair-help-robots

It is time to register for TTI/V’s upcoming virtual conference, AI: Today and Tomorrow. Join us for 4 Tuesdays: June 22, June 29, July 13, and July 20. Register today! 

Congratulations to Michael Franz (Washington, D.C., Sep 2014), the winner of the 2020 Charles Thacker (San Diego, Nov 2002) Breakthrough in Computing Award for his work on just-in-time compilation—a body of work that includes the Rosette programming language, which makes it easy to create and implement domain-specific languages. www.//awards.acm.org/about/2020-thacker 

The U.S. Digital Service is seeking the services of people like you—or people you have fostered professionally. As the soon-to-be-outgoing USDS administrator puts it, “Serving at USDS offers incredible potential for impact at scale. As [the Biden] administration takes off, we need the help of even more folks who are passionate about how technology can make government more equitable and accessible. If you’re an engineer, designer, product manager, acquisition strategist, or policy expert who cares about making government work better for real people. Moreover, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers seeks to create the Civilian Cybersecurity Reserve, an by-invitation-only, National Guard-like corps that can be called upon to address cybersecurity threats as they arise. (Tom Kalil, San Francisco, Dec 2017) 

Congratulations to long-time friend of TTI/Vanguard Jordan Giddings on his new position as Chief Scientist at Improbable’s defence department, where he will be charged with leveraging the potential of multiparticipant simulations and synthetic environments for real-world applications. (Gilman Louis, Chicago, May 2011; Institute of Creative Technologies, field trip, Los Angeles, Mar 2018; William Swartout, Washington, D.C., May 2009; Richard LIndheim and William Swartout, Pasadena, Feb 2002) www.improbable.io/blog/improbable-appoints-professor-jordan-gidding-and-rob-solly 

Rutgers psychologist Randy Gallistel has a big idea, backed up by experiments conducted in ferrets: neurons (specifically, Purkinje cells) chemically store numerical memories (specifically, temporal durations). He describes the process as “performing the same function as the memory-registers in a conventional computer” and therefore underpinning a computational theory of mind. (Marvin Minsky, Atlanta, Feb 2008)  www://join.substack.com/p/is-this-the-most-interesting-idea

The biomimicking spiking neural network developed by researchers at KAUST in Saudia Arabia performs more quickly and energy efficiently than more conventional artificial neural nets. (Allan Jones, Seattle, Dec 2006; Henry Markram, Geneva, Sep 2005; James Gimzewski, Boston, Apr 2014) www.techxplore.com/news/2021-04-brain-on-a-chip.html Enabling a combination of bottom-up and top-down 3-D design capabilities, new software from Ohio State researchers is poised to accelerate the process of creating DNA-based nanoscale machines. (Andrew Hessel, San Diego, Feb 2015) www.scitechdaily.com/magicdna-tiny-complex-dna-robots-designed-in-minutes-instead-of-days/amp/