China is known for their most sophisticated surveillance systems in the world. Government uses a combination of facial recognition, biometrics, AI in order to monitor all the citizens and control them.
Face recognition software is already present in our lives, and is mainly used to unlock phones, authenticate users in mobile apps, or locate people in videos or photos.
Chinese companies are the world leaders in exporting face recognition systems. They already have 201 export deals of these biometric systems. China is also a leader in exporting AI technology in general, with 250 AI deals. These solutions can be used for various purposes: security, surveillance, identity verification.
China has huge investments in AI and biometric technologies. The government is spending billions of dollars on AI research and development. It focuses on creating new, innovative face recognition software.
The country’s advantage is also that it has a huge amount of data available for the analysis. With over 1.4 billion people, with vast access to the internet, and huge surveillance system, China has a great source to train and test their solutions. This allowed them to make very reliable face recognition algorithms, making them a leader in this field.
Here you can watch how the system works:
With that big dominance comes also a number of challenges when trying to expand to other markets. There is a huge concern about privacy, ethics, and protection of using biometrics for control and surveillance. The government actively promotes the use of biometrics as it improves national security and public safety, but also provides more efficient services to citizens.
Chinese surveillance system is a powerful tool with potential to enhance public safety. However, we should be mindful about the potential risks of using such systems, and we have to make sure that it is really used to protect human rights. Chinese government has to take steps to increase transparency of their solutions and ensure people that they use it responsibly.
The game’s bosses are designed to challenge the player, requiring them to strategize and master their skills in order to win. For game developers, the process of designing and balancing boss behavior is difficult and time consuming. The solution to this problem could be machine learning. This will allow developers to create bosses that are not only more challenging, but also more dynamic and adaptable to player behavior.
Traditional bosses are often pre-programmed with different attack patterns that are easily recognizable by experienced players. However, machine learning can be used to train the boss AI and use previous encounter data to improve its strategy. This could lead to dynamic and challenging battles, and players couldn’t rely on patterns to beat it.
Romain Trachel and Alexandre Peyrot are Eidos-Sherbrooke specialists in machine-learning. Eidos-Sherbrooke is a game development studio, which takes advantage of two nearby universities (University de Sherbrooke and Bishop’s University) and bring new computing technology from them into their games. At Unreal Fest 2022 Romain and Alexandre have demonstrated a game which combines machine learning with EQS (Environment Query System). EQS is a AI system in Unreal Engine 5 that collects data from the environment. EQS query can be used to make decision on how to proceed based on the results of developers’ tests. It can instruct AI characters to find the best possible location that will provide a line of sight to a player to attach, the nearest health or ammo pickup. In most games, behaviour trees decide about possibilities, but in this demo the EQS is providing information to AI character about its environment and machine-learning decides what is the best response.
The game demo is pretty simple, but yet shows a huge potential of this model. The player has to collect orbs across a map while being chased by enemy. The gameplay is almost the same as Pac-Man, but the chaser’s behaviours are not scripted. Here you can watch the whole presentation:
The use of AI in video games can sometimes result in gameplay that is not enjoyable for players. Romain and Alexandre experienced this in one of their game modes, where the enemy AI used a camping strategy that made the game unenjoyable. The goal of Romain and Alexandre is to find ways to incorporate machine learning into existing game without making the game too difficult or unfair for players.
In summary, machine learning can be a difficult technology to implement in video game development due to performance issues and animation challenges. Acquiring large amounts of training data is necessary for successful results, but this can be difficult to achieve in the open-world environments that players expect. Also modern game engines are not optimised for machine learning. Animation is another problem as AI driven bots may behave in unexpected ways that animation methods can’t accommodate.
The ocean is a mysterious, fascinating place, that is constantly studied by scientists to learn more about the environment and the creatures that live in there. On the ocean’s seabed lies more than 1.2 million kilometers of cable. In recent years, researchers are developing a new way to monitor the ocean: use of undersea cables to detect earthquakes causing tsunamis. Their method doesn’t require any new tech or modification to the cables, so the coverage of sensors for detecting danger is already very large.
There are many seismometers on land but not that much on the seabed. The main cause of it is the cost of installation the devices underwater. Zhongwen Zhan, a professor of geophysics at the California Institute of Technology said „We suspect that earthquakes in the ocean are fundamentally different from the ones we have on land”. Earthquakes beneath the water, causing tsunamis are very destructive and deadly, and yet we still don’t have wide, precise detection system.
Research
Giuseppe Marra is a research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England. In 2021, Google allowed Marra to conduct his research on their 5800-meters cable starting in Southport, England stretching to Halifax, Canada. Marra’s team drove to the station in Southport to install customized lasers and detectors connected to remote access computers. Their devices were able to detect phase shifts beneath the water, but they still had to determine the exact location of seabed movements. To solve this problem, Marra with his team divided the cable into segments. Undersea cables have signal repeaters with built-in tiny mirrors, which normally allow technicians diagnose problems along specific sections. Each repeater is supposed to boost the signal making sure it reaches next one without loosing speed. The team sent their own signal and analyzed the frequency at every repeater. „In the case of no perturbation, we get stable signals: The frequency that we receive is the same that we sent,” says Marra. Between Southport and Halifax there are 128 repeaters, allowing the team to turn the cable into 128 vibrational sensors.
Submarine Repeater
Marra’s team managed to successfully detect two tremors. Furthermore, in November, they noticed a phase change in the cable section beneath the Irish Sea. The signal was something that they hadn’t seen before. It turned out that a cyclone was passing through the area. Next day, Marra confirmed the that the phase change was related to wave height by checking the data recorded by a nearby buoy.
The future
„The whole point of this is transforming the underwater infrastructure into a giant detector for earthquakes and more,” says Marra. Marra with his team developed a method that could help to detect earthquakes in real time, but also how the pressure of tides travel along the seabed. This new method covers a widespread area of the seabed as opposed to regular seismometers. „It becomes an incredibly powerful tool.” Marra said that there is still a lot to improve. They have to analyze the data and separate phase changes caused by waves, earthquakes, and other factors in order to avoid misleading signals. But Marra predicts a future in which cables could provide data and warnings to authorities about the exact location and height of tsunamis.
Since 2006, North Korea is struggling with sanctions. It was imposed shortly after NK’s first nuclear test. With every nuclear test and explosion, United Nations Security Council has been strengthening sanctions, banning new export and import products. The newest sanctions, banning North Korea from exporting their most profitable products, is estimated to take $1 billion from their annual trade of $3 billion. In order to compensate the loss, North Korea engages in various cyber crimes, violating international law. North Korea operations are thought to have generated over $2 billion, balancing their economical damage.
Cyber crimes are low cost, easily performed and hard to trace. Reward for good execution is also very attractive to North Korea. Behind those attacks stands the Reconnaissance General Bureau – top North Korean military intelligence agency. The Bureau targets mainly financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges to generate income. Targeting cryptocurrencies in their attacks make it a lot harder to trace than a regular banking sector. 2019 United Nations report stated that money from North Korea cyber crimes are raised for its WMD (weapons of mass destruction) programs. Anne Neuberger, US deputy national security adviser for cyber security, confirmed that information and provided additional numbers about North Korea funding „North Korea uses cyber to gain, we estimate, up to a third of their funds for their missile program”. North Korea is now treated as one of the world’s four principal nation state-based cyber threats, alongside China, Russia, and Iran. Thing also worth mentioning is that, because of the UN sanction North Korea is unable to export coal, they found a pretty good use for it. It uses the excessive coal to power its own crypto-mining plants to accumulate even more digital currencies, says Harvard University’s researchers.
Lazarus Group
It is a North Korean state-sponsored cybercrime group, attributed to the Reconnaissance general Bureau. The group has been active since at least 2009 and is responsible for numerous cyberattacks around the world. Multinational cybersecurity provider, Kaspersky Lab reported in 2017 that Lazarus have a sub-group called Bluenoroff which performs financial cyberattacks. Kaspersky found a direct connection between Bluenoroff and North Korea. According to a 2020 report by the U.S. Army Bluenoroff has about 1700 members. The group target is mainly financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges. The revenue most likely go towards development of missile and nuclear tech.
Lazarus Group has been responsible for many cyberattacks against at least 17 countries. Examples:
The Sony Pictures studio hack in 2014. Sony Pictures released a comedy The Interview about a fictional assassination attempt on Kim Jong Un. Attack resulted in leaking unreleased movies and thousands of private documents. Lazarus Group was also responsible for this attack.
Theft of $951 million from the Central Bank of Bangladesh in 2016 via a hack of SWIFT banking system. Analysts cite that this heist is a great example of how time consuming it is to target traditional banking. Lazarus Group broke into the bank’s computer lurked inside a system for a year before executing the attack.
In 2017 the Lazarus Group unleashed WannaCry ransomware, which infected at lease 200k computers in 150 countries. It infected computers at hospitals, oil companies, banks and many other organizations around the world.
According to Chainalysis the Lazarus group have stolen more than $1.75 billion worth of cryptocurrency. They attacked exchange KuCoin and stole $275 million worth of cryptocurrency, which is a third-largest crypto theft of all time.
In 2018 Recorded Future report linked the Lazarus Group to attacks on Bitcoin and Monero. To perform this attack the group used phishing to steal users credentials from various crypto exchanges and then take the currency from the account.
Future risks
There are more and more decentralized exchanges on the market, and launch of new cryptocurrencies such as monero, are obviously make it a lot harder for law enforcement to track. Moreover, some analysts predict that more goods and services will be purchasable using crypto. It would allow North Korea to avoid sanctions on importing some products. Rohan Massey, partner at US law firm Ropes and Gray says „you could already use crypto to buy missile parts on the dark web years ago – so imagine what you could buy a few years from now.” This quote shows that even with ongoing sanctions on North Korea, it can bypass them easily with crypto which now they even mine themselves.
Artificial Intelligence in today’s world is developing rapidly. It is expected that by 2025 AI systems market will reach 791.5 billion dollars in revenue. In my article I want to focus on how AI is affecting the world’s health care. And I’m not going to show you a super fancy robot that will replace every doctor and even perform surgeries, but something that is way more accessible to people around the globe.
Ada Health is a free medical, symptom-checking app. It helps you check your symptoms and discover what might be causing them. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, Ada compares your case with thousands of medical documents and conditions to give you the most possible causes. The app is available in seven different languages: English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Swahili, and Romanian. Swahili and Romanian were added thanks to funding from Fondation Botnar. It gives 119 million people more access to medical guidance. Ada has now over 12 million users and completed 28 million symptom checks.
How does a symptom check work?
The app is designed like a chatbot. First you have to start symptom assessment. The AI gets smarter the more you tell so you are asked a few simple questions (name, gender, date of birth and some personal questions about your health state). Then you can choose whether this assessment is for yourself or someone else. From there you are searching for your symptoms and briefly describe it. If you don’t know any of the medical terms you have the ability to check it within the app (short explanation with a picture). When all the questions are finished Ada’s AI processes your answers and you get your report. Note that this is not a medical diagnosis, but only a suggestion what might be the cause and suggests what you could do.
Ada is providing people with more information about their current state and suggest taking better health related actions. With the use of Swahili, it will be a game changer in developing countries of Africa, where people don’t have access to proper healthcare, or it is too expensive for them. The app will make them aware of their own health.
Ada is doing a great job at what it is supposed to do, but there is still a problem with accessibility of healthcare. Governments in developing countries should work with initiatives like this one and develop a new healthcare system. In my opinion apps like Ada should be used to interview and diagnose. Then a person would only go for a quick examination and receive medical advice from a doctor. It could make the poor systems more efficient, and one doctor would serve more people at the time.
In the future the app should be developed to gain and use even more personal information about one’s health. It could involve congenital diseases, allergies, eating habits, sports activity, but also information gathered everyday thru your smart devices. It could be integrated into your personal medical system that guides you with every aspect of your health.
Thank you for your time. Let me know what you think about this project and could it actually improve healthcare?
