Tech

Come talk with us about machine-learning experiments gone right—and wrong

Enlarge We’ve spent the past few weeks burning copious amounts of AWS compute time trying to invent an algorithm to parse Ars’ front-page story headlines to predict which ones will win an A/B test—and we learned a lot. One of the lessons is that we—and by “we, ” I mainly mean “me, ” since this […]

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Researchers demonstrate that malware can be hidden inside AI models

Enlarge / This photo has a job application for Boston University hidden within it. The technique introduced by Wang, Liu, and Cui could hide data inside an image classifier rather than just an image. (credit: Keith McDuffy CC-BY 2.0) Researchers Zhi Wang, Chaoge Liu, and Xiang Cui published a paper last Monday demonstrating a new technique […]

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Ars AI headline experiment finale—we came, we saw, we used a lot of compute time

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) We may have bitten off more than we could chew, folks. An Amazon engineer told me that when he heard what I was trying to do with Ars headlines, the first thing he thought was that we had chosen a deceptively hard problem. He warned that I needed […]

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Google turns AlphaFold loose on the entire human genome

Enlarge (credit: Sloan-Kettering) Just one week after Google’s DeepMind AI group finally described its biology efforts in detail, the company is releasing a paper that explains how it analyzed nearly every protein encoded in the human genome and predicted its likely three-dimensional structure—a structure that can be critical for understanding disease and designing treatments. In […]

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Our AI headline experiment continues: Did we break the machine?

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) We’re in phase three of our machine-learning project now—that is, we’ve gotten past denial and anger, and we’re now sliding into bargaining and depression. I’ve been tasked with using Ars Technica’s trove of data from five years of headline tests, which pair two ideas against each other in […]

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Google details its protein-folding software, academics offer an alternative

Enlarge (credit: University of Washington ) Thanks to the development of DNA-sequencing technology, it has become trivial to obtain the sequence of bases that encode a protein and translate that to the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein. But from there, we often end up stuck. The actual function of the protein […]

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Is our machine learning? Ars takes a dip into artificial intelligence

Enlarge Every day, some little piece of logic constructed by very specific bits of artificial intelligence technology makes decisions that affect how you experience the world. It could be the ads that get served up to you on social media or shopping sites, or the facial recognition that unlocks your phone, or the directions you […]

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Cheat-maker brags of computer-vision auto-aim that works on “any game”

A sample video shows how computer vision (running on an external computer) detects the enemy and calculates how far the mouse needs to move to target that enemy. When it comes to the cat-and-mouse game of stopping cheaters in online games, anti-cheat efforts often rely in part on technology that ensures the wider system running […]

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Google launches a new medical app—outside the United States

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Billions of times each year, people turn to Google’s web search box for help figuring out what’s wrong with their skin. Now, Google is preparing to launch an app that uses image recognition algorithms to provide more expert and personalized help. A brief demo at the company’s developer conference last month […]

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Apple and Google’s AI wizardry promises privacy—at a cost

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Since the dawn of the iPhone, many of the smarts in smartphones have come from elsewhere: the corporate computers known as the cloud. Mobile apps sent user data cloudward for useful tasks like transcribing speech or suggesting message replies. Now Apple and Google say smartphones are smart enough to do some […]