Aurelia Butler

Fake audio or video content has been ranked by experts as the most worrying use of artificial intelligence in terms of its potential applications for crime or terrorism, according to a new UCL report.
The study, published in Crime Science and funded by the Dawes Centre for Future Crime at UCL (and available as a policy briefing), identified 20 ways AI could be used to facilitate crime over the next 15 years. These were ranked in order of concern — based on the harm they could cause, the potential for criminal profit or gain, how easy they would be to carry out and how difficult they would be to stop.
Authors said fake content would be difficult to detect and stop, and that it could have a variety of aims — from discrediting a public figure to extracting funds by impersonating a couple’s son or daughter in a video call. Such content, they said, may lead to a widespread distrust of audio and visual evidence, which itself would be a societal harm.
Aside from fake content, five other AI-enabled crimes were judged to be of high concern. These were using driverless vehicles as weapons, helping to craft more tailored phishing messages (spear phishing), disrupting AI-controlled systems, harvesting online information for the purposes of large-scale blackmail, and AI-authored fake news.
Senior author Professor Lewis Griffin (UCL Computer Science) said: “As the capabilities of AI-based technologies expand, so too has their potential for criminal exploitation. To adequately prepare for possible AI threats, we need to identify what these threats might be, and how they may impact our lives.”
Researchers compiled the 20 AI-enabled crimes from academic papers, news and current affairs reports, and fiction and popular culture. They then gathered 31 people with an expertise in AI for two days of discussions to rank the severity of the potential crimes. The participants were drawn from academia, the private sector, the police, the government and state security agencies.
Crimes that were of medium concern included the sale of items and services fraudulently labelled as “AI,” such as security screening and targeted advertising. These would be easy to achieve, with potentially large profits.
Crimes of low concern included burglar bots — small robots used to gain entry into properties through access points such as letterboxes or cat flaps — which were judged to be easy to defeat, for instance through letterbox cages, and AI-assisted stalking, which, although extremely damaging to individuals, could not operate at scale.
First author Dr Matthew Caldwell (UCL Computer Science) said: “People now conduct large parts of their lives online and their online activity can make and break reputations. Such an online environment, where data is property and information power, is ideally suited for exploitation by AI-based criminal activity.
“Unlike many traditional crimes, crimes in the digital realm can be easily shared, repeated, and even sold, allowing criminal techniques to be marketed and for crime to be provided as a service. This means criminals may be able to outsource the more challenging aspects of their AI-based crime.”
Professor Shane Johnson, Director of the Dawes Centre for Future Crimes at UCL, which funded the study, said: “We live in an ever changing world which creates new opportunities — good and bad. As such, it is imperative that we anticipate future crime threats so that policy makers and other stakeholders with the competency to act can do so before new ‘crime harvests’ occur. This report is the first in a series that will identify the future crime threats associated with new and emerging technologies and what we might do about them.” More

Traditional single-cell sequencing methods help to reveal insights about cellular differences and functions — but they do this with static snapshots only rather than time-lapse films. This limitation makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the dynamics of cell development and gene activity. The recently introduced method “RNA velocity” aims to reconstruct the developmental trajectory of a cell on a computational basis (leveraging ratios of unspliced and spliced transcripts). This method, however, is applicable to steady-state populations only. Researchers were therefore looking for ways to extend the concept of RNA velocity to dynamic populations which are of crucial importance to understand cell development and disease response.
Single-cell velocity
Researchers from the Institute of Computational Biology at Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Department of Mathematics at TUM developed “scVelo” (single-cell velocity). The method estimates RNA velocity with an AI-based model by solving the full gene-wise transcriptional dynamics. This allows them to generalize the concept of RNA velocity to a wide variety of biological systems including dynamic populations.
“We have used scVelo to reveal cell development in the endocrine pancreas, in the hippocampus, and to study dynamic processes in lung regeneration — and this is just the beginning,” says Volker Bergen, main creator of scVelo and first author of the corresponding study in Nature Biotechnology.
With scVelo researchers can estimate reaction rates of RNA transcription, splicing and degradation without the need of any experimental data. These rates can help to better understand the cell identity and phenotypic heterogeneity. Their introduction of a latent time reconstructs the unknown developmental time to position the cells along the trajectory of the underlying biological process. That is particularly useful to better understand cellular decision making. Moreover, scVelo reveals regulatory changes and putative driver genes therein. This helps to understand not only how but also why cells are developing the way they do.
Empowering personalized treatments
AI-based tools like scVelo give rise to personalized treatments. Going from static snapshots to full dynamics allows researchers to move from descriptive towards predictive models. In the future, this might help to better understand disease progression such as tumor formation, or to unravel cell signaling in response to cancer treatment.
“scVelo has been downloaded almost 60,000 times since its release last year. It has become a stepping-stone tooltowards the kinetic foundation for single-cell transcriptomics,” adds Prof. Fabian Theis, who conceived the study and serves as Director at the Institute for Computational Biology at Helmholtz Zentrums München and Chair for Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems at TUM.

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Materials provided by Helmholtz Zentrum München – German Research Center for Environmental Health. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

Researchers have demonstrated the use of a ground-breaking circuit design that could transform manufacturing processes for wearable technology.
Silicon-based electronics have aggressively become smaller and more efficient over a short period of time, leading to major advances in devices such as mobile phones. However, large-area electronics, such as display screens, have not seen similar advances because they rely on a device, thin-film transistor (TFT), which has serious limitations.
In a study published by IEEE Sensors Journal, researchers from the University of Surrey, University of Cambridge and the National Research Institute in Rome have demonstrated the use of a pioneering circuit design that uses an alternative type of device, the source-gated transistor (SGT), to create compact circuit blocks.
In the study, the researchers showed that they are able to achieve the same functionality from two SGTs as would normally be the case from today’s devices that use roughly 12 TFTs — improving performance, reducing waste and making the new process far more cost effective.
The research team believe that the new fabrication process could result in a generation of ultralightweight, flexible electronics for wearables and sensors.
Dr Radu Sporea, lead author of the study and Lecturer in Semiconductor Devices at the University of Surrey, said: “We are entering what may be another golden age of electronics, with the arrival of 5G and IoT enabled devices. However, the way we have manufactured many of our electronics has increasingly become overcomplicated and has hindered the performance of many devices.
“Our design offers a much simpler build process than regular thin-film transistors. Source-gated transistor circuits may also be cheaper to manufacture on a large scale because their simplicity means there is less waste in the form of rejected components. This elegant design of large area electronics could result in future phones, fitness tracker or smart sensors that are energy efficient, thinner and far more flexible than the ones we are able to produce today.”

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Materials provided by University of Surrey. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

Despite decades of positive messaging to encourage women and girls to pursue education tracks and careers in STEM, women continue to fall far below their male counterparts in these fields. A new study at Carnegie Mellon University examined 25 languages to explore the gender stereotypes in language that undermine efforts to support equality across STEM career paths. The results are available in the August 3rd issue of Nature Human Behavior.
Molly Lewis, special faculty at CMU and her research partner, Gary Lupyan, associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, set out to examine the effect of language on career stereotypes by gender. They found that implicit gender associations are strongly predicted by the language we speak. Their work suggests that linguistic associations may be causally related to people’s implicit judgement of what women can accomplish.
“Young children have strong gender stereotypes as do older adults, and the question is where do these biases come from,” said Lewis, first author on the study. No one has looked at implicit language — simple language that co-occurs over a large body of text — that could give information about stereotypical norms in our culture across different languages.”
In general, the team examined how words co-occur with women compared to men. For example, how often is ‘woman’ associated with ‘home,’ ‘children’ and ‘family,’ where as ‘man’ was associated with ‘work,’ ‘career’ and ‘business.’
“What’s not obvious is that a lot of information that is contained in language, including information about cultural stereotypes, [occurs not as] direct statements but in large-scale statistical relationships between words,” said Lupyan, senior author on the study. “Even without encountering direct statements, it is possible to learn that there is stereotype embedded in the language of women being better at some things and men at others.”
They found that languages with a stronger embedded gender association are more clearly associated with career stereotypes. They also found that a positive relationship between gender-marked occupation terms and the strength of these gender stereotypes.

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Previous work has shown that children begin to ingrain gender stereotypes in their culture by the age of two. The team examined statistics regarding gender associations embedded in 25 languages and related the results to an international dataset of gender bias (Implicit Association Test).
Surprisingly, they found that the median age of the country influences the study results. Countries with a larger older population have a stronger bias in career-gender associations.
“The consequences of these results are pretty profound,” said Lewis. “The results suggest that if you speak a language that is really biased then you are more likely to have a gender stereotype that associates men with career and women with family.”
She suggests children’s books be written and designed to not have gender-biased statistics. These results also have implications for algorithmic fairness research aimed at eliminating gender bias in computer algorithms.
“Our study shows that language statistics predict people’s implicit biases — languages with greater gender biases tend to have speakers with greater gender biases,” Lupyan said. “The results are correlational, but that the relationship persists under various controls [and] does suggest a causal influence.”
Lewis notes that the Implicit Association Test used in this study has been criticized for low reliability and limited external validity. She stresses that additional work using longitudinal analyses and experimental designs is necessary to explore language statistics and implicit associations with gender stereotypes.
Lewis and Lupyan received funding for the project, titled “Gender stereotypes are reflected in the distributional structure of 25 languages,” from the National Science Foundation.

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Materials provided by Carnegie Mellon University. Original written by Stacy Kish. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

A current problem for a wide range of chemists is when stirring a solution in the laboratory there is a need to check the properties of the solution and monitor how they change.
In the paper, ‘Monitoring chemistry in situ with the Smart Stirrer — a magnetic stirrer bar with an integrated process monitoring system’ published in the journal ACS Sensors, researchers from the School of Engineering, the Mathematics Institute and WMG at the University of Warwick present their innovative stirrer sensor.
The small device, called “Smart Stirrer,” performed a function of a conventional laboratory stir bar, has an integrated microprocessor and various sensors capable of wireless and autonomous report the conversion of properties of a solution. The advanced sensor stir bar is a capsule shaped magnet encased in plastic.
A beaker filled with a solution is placed on a platform that generates a rotating magnetic field, when the magnetic stirrer is placed in the solution it continuously rotates stirring the liquid.
The Smart Stirrer then monitors:
– Colour
– Transparency
– Conductivity

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– Viscosity
– Temperature

Results are sent to a computer over Bluetooth, and any changes notify the user wirelessly. Although the idea of using magnetic stir bar with integrated sensors may not be entirely new, this new affordable, multi-sensor and easy programmable stirrer sensor device is first in its kind.
The concept is valuable to Research and Design laboratories and pharmaceutical and chemistry manufacturing industries because it allows wireless monitoring of several parameters of a chemical reaction simultaneously
Dr Dmitry Isakov, from WMG at the University who led the study comments:
“We are still continuing research into the stirrer, the next revision of the stirrer sensor that will be smaller size and with a bit more sophisticated sensors. We are collaborating with several chemists from Warwick University. This will help us to understand their needs and help to improve the device.

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“The beauty of the Smart Stirrer is that it can be used everywhere, such as a sealed vessels thus minimising the contamination of the reactor. It may give a push to new discoveries as well. It is easy to integrate the stirrer into the labware family and make it “speak” to other lab equipment.”
Samuel Baldwin, from the Mathematics institute at the University of Warwick worked on the smart stirrer during his WMG summer internship, he comments:
“I have found every stage of development of the Smart Stirrer to be very fulfilling, from circuit design, to manufacturing to finally programming. We have leveraged state-of-the-art technology to build a device with very low power consumption, a broad range of sensor capabilities, and high data-throughput over the Bluetooth Low Energy platform.
“The laboratory of the future is that of automation, reproducibility and safety; our all-in-one Smart Stirrer device eliminates the need for a vast array of individual wired sensors whilst maintaining the control and customisability that one would expect from any piece of advanced laboratory equipment. I look forward to seeing the Smart Stirrer solve laboratory problems and help us understand complex reactions.”

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Materials provided by University of Warwick. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

In some versions of the game blackjack, one way to win against the house is for players at the table to work as a team to keep track of and covertly communicate amongst each other the cards they have been dealt. With that knowledge, they can then estimate the cards still in the deck, and those most likely to be dealt out next, all to help each player decide how to place their bets, and as a team, gain an advantage over the dealer.
This calculating strategy, known as card-counting, was made famous by the MIT Blackjack Team, a group of students from MIT, Harvard University, and Caltech, who for several decades starting in 1979, optimized card-counting and other techniques to successfully beat casinos at blackjack around the world — a story that later inspired the book “Bringing Down the House.”
Now researchers at MIT and Caltech have shown that the weird, quantum effects of entanglement could theoretically give blackjack players even more of an edge, albeit a small one, when playing against the house.
In a paper published this week in the journal Physical Review A, the researchers lay out a theoretical scenario in which two players, playing cooperatively against the dealer, can better coordinate their strategies using a quantumly entangled pair of systems. Such systems exist now in the laboratory, although not in forms convenient for any practical use in casinos. In their study, the authors nevertheless explore the theoretical possibilities for how a quantum system might influence outcomes in blackjack.
They found that such quantum communication would give the players a slight advantage compared to classical card-counting strategies, though in limited situations where the number of cards left in the dealer’s deck is low.
“It’s pretty small in terms of the actual magnitude of the expected quantum advantage,” says first author Joseph Lin, a former graduate student at MIT. “But if you imagine the players are extremely rich, and the deck is really low in number, so that every card counts, these small advantages can be big. The exciting result is that there’s some advantage to quantum communication, regardless of how small it is.”
Lin’s MIT co-authors on the paper are professor of physics Joseph Formaggio, associate professor of physics Aram Harrow, and Anand Natarajan of Caltech, who will start at MIT in September as assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

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Quantum dealings
Entanglement is a phenomenon described by the rules of quantum mechanics, which states that two physically separate objects can be “entangled,” or correlated with each other, in such a way that the correlations between them are stronger than what would be predicted by the classical laws of physics and probability.
In 1964, physicist John Bell proved mathematically that quantum entanglement could exist, and also devised a test — known a Bell test — that scientists have since applied to many scenarios to ascertain if certain spatially remote particles or systems behave according to classical, real-world physics, or whether they may exhibit some quantum, entangled states.
“One motivation for this work was as a concrete realization of the Bell test,” says Harrow of the team’s new paper. “People wrote the rules of blackjack not thinking of entanglement. But the players are dealt cards, and there are some correlations between the cards they get. So does entanglement work here? The answer to the question was not obvious going into it.”
After casually entertaining the idea during a regular poker night with friends, Formaggio decided to explore the possibility of quantum blackjack more formally with his MIT colleagues.

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“I was grateful to them for not laughing and closing the door on me when I brought up the idea,” Formaggio recalls.
Correlated cards
In blackjack, the dealer deals herself and each player a face-up card that is public to all, and a face-down card. With this information, each player decides whether to “hit,” and be dealt another card, or “stand,” and stay with the cards they have. The goal after one round is to have a hand with a total that is closer to 21, without going over, than the dealer and the other players at the table.
In their paper, the researchers simulated a simple blackjack setup involving two players, Alice and Bob, playing cooperatively against the dealer. They programmed Alice to consistently bet low, with the main objective of helping Bob, who could hit or stand based on any information he gained from Alice.
The researchers considered how three different scenarios might help the players win over the dealer: a classical card-counting scenario without communication; a best-case scenario in which Alice simply shows Bob her face-down card, demonstrating the best that a team can do in playing against the dealer; and lastly, a quantum entanglement scenario.
In the quantum scenario, the researchers formulated a mathematical model to represent a quantum system, which can be thought of abstractedly as a box with many “buttons,” or measurement choices, that is shared between Alice and Bob.
For instance, if Alice’s face-down card is a 5, she can push a particular button on the quantum box and use its output to inform her usual choice of whether to hit or stand. Bob, in turn, looks at his face-down card when deciding which button to push on his quantum box, as well as whether to use the box at all. In the cases where Bob uses his quantum box, he can combine its output with his observation of Alice’s strategy to decide his own move. This extra information — not exactly the value of Alice’s card, but more information than a random guess — can help Bob decide whether to hit or stand.
The researchers ran all three scenarios, with many combinations of cards between each player and the dealer, and with increasing number of cards left in the dealer’s deck, to see how often Alice and Bob could win against the dealer.
After running thousands of rounds for each of the three scenarios, they found that the players had a slight advantage over the dealer in the quantum entanglement scenario, compared with the classical card-counting strategy, though only when a handful of cards were left in the dealer’s deck.
“As you increase the deck and therefore increase all the possibilities of different cards coming to you, the fact that you know a little bit more through this quantum process actually gets diluted,” Formaggio explains.
Nevertheless, Harrow notes that “it was surprising that these problems even matched, that it even made sense to consider entangled strategy in blackjack.”
Do these results mean that future blackjack teams might use quantum strategies to their advantage?
“It would require a very large investor, and my guess is, carrying a quantum computer in your backpack will probably tip the house,” Formaggio says. “We think casinos are safe right now from this particular threat.” More

A researcher is using ‘in silico’ analysis to fast-track passive immunity. More