Showing results by narrator "Joe Knezevich" in All Categories

Despite what your local election officials may tell you, you can’t trust the Internet with your vote.

Facebook has announced a new AI-powered filter for your photos—a modest move, but one that signals the company’s grand ambitions to bake artificial intelligence into every aspect of its business.

Google is using a powerful new machine-learning approach to save huge amounts of energy (and hundreds of millions of dollars) each year at its vast data centers. It might not be long before the technique, which involves a machine-learning algorithm gradually learning to perfect a task with positive reinforcement, catches on in a range of other areas.

The debate over whether food companies should be required to label products containing genetically modified ingredients took an important turn this month when the nation’s first labeling law took effect in Vermont. Now Congress appears to be on the verge of passing the first-ever federal standard for disclosing information about genetically engineered food, a bill that would preempt state laws.

Spending thousands of hours playing Grand Theft Auto might have questionable benefits for humans, but it could help make computers significantly more intelligent. Several research groups are now using the hugely popular game, which features fast cars and various nefarious activities, to train algorithms that might enable a self-driving car to navigate a real road.

Whether or not your ethnic group has political power in the country where you live is a crucial factor determining your access to the Internet, according to a new analysis. The effect varies from country to country, and is much less pronounced in democratic nations. But the study, published today in Science, suggests that besides censorship, another way national governments prevent opposing groups from organizing online is by denying them Internet access in the first place.

As Facebook finally rolls out tools to clean up misinformation, another Internet giant must follow its lead.

A botched command inadvertently took down swaths of the Web, but it only serves to reveal that centralized Web services need to be built more robustly.

Step in front of an autonomous car, and it should stop. Cut one off while you’re driving, and it should hit the brakes. These are obvious safety features to build into robotic vehicles—but they also leave open the possibility for humans to game their behavior. It's easy to imagine how cyclists might rule the roads of New York City if all taxis are driverless.

As Natalya Brikner worked her way through a PhD at MIT’s Space Propulsion Laboratory, she assumed she’d go on to become a professor in the field. She grew up in a small town in northwest Oregon watching the stars and thinking about the aliens among them. Studying rocket propulsion represented a practical application.

Tractor-trailers without a human at the wheel will soon barrel onto highways near you. What will this mean for the nation’s 1.7 million truck drivers?

Swarm robotics, autonomous delivery vehicles, and machine-learned preferences will help deliver your food faster.

To PayPal, the transactions signal fraud: a US user’s account is accessed in the UK, China, and elsewhere around the world. But PayPal’s security system - thanks to a growing reliance on an artificial - intelligence technology known as deep learning - is now able to spot possible fraud without making mistakes. That’s because algorithms mine data from the customer’s purchasing history.

The octopus was about five feet off the ground, over my right shoulder. I turned and stepped closer to walk around it. Anyone watching might have thought I looked silly - I had a bulky black virtual-reality headset strapped onto my face. But at least there wasn’t a cable running down my back to connect it to a PC.

‘Detailed and impeccably researched. Eye-opening' GUARDIAN ‘Punchy and well-reported. Sommer is the perfect person to tell this story' NEW YORK TIMES How did a conspiracy theory reshape global politics? How did it tear families apart, inspire an insurrection and convince millions that a...

Ten years after graduation, a group of friends plan a reunion in a remote house in upstate New York. It isn't a bachelor party, as they've led one of their friends to believe, but instead an intervention for an escalating drug addiction. They lost one member of their friendship group in college, and they'll do anything to make sure that doesn't happen again. But from the moment they arrive, something doesn't feel right.

The next breathtaking novel in the Seraphim series - a soaring new fantasy adventure from USA Today best-selling author, David Dalglish. Bree and Kael Skyborn have seen their island invaded, their Seraphim disbanded and their royal family imprisoned. A rebellion grows from the ashes, demanding Bree to be their Phoenix, their symbol against Center's tyranny, and for Kael to find the doomsday prophet Johan and sway his cult to their side. Should they fail, the hope of their rebellion fails with them.

Had artificial intelligence been named something less spooky, we’d probably worry about it less.

Even if you don’t live in Britain, the U.K.’s new “Snooper’s Charter” is worth watching. It could inspire other democratic nations to adopt aggressive surveillance policies.

What's the best way to get a piece of the emerging field of self-driving cars? Automakers say it's to custom-make their own robotic vehicles, essentially from scratch. A handful of tech firms, however, are building systems that will allow carmakers to take a back seat.