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New artificial intelligence software has worrisome implications – The Ticker

September 7, 2022 | Author: admin

Art produced by artificial intelligence is popping up more and more on peoples feeds without them knowing.

This art can range from simple etchings to surrealist imagery. It can look like a bowl of soup or a monster or cats playing chess on a beach.

While a boom in AI that has the capacity to create art has been electrifying the high tech world, these new developments in AI have many worrisome implications.

Despite positive uses, newer AI systems have the potential to pose as a tool of misinformation, create bias and undervalue artists skills.

In the beginning of 2021, advances in AI created deep-learning models that could generate images simply by being fed a description of what the user was imagining.

This includes OpenAIs DALL-E 2, Midjourney, Hugging Faces Craiyon, Metas Make-A-Scene, Googles Imagen and many others.

With the help of skillful language and creative ideation, these tools marked a huge cultural shift and eliminated technical human labor.

A San Francisco based AI company launched DALL-E paying homage to WALL-E, the 2008 animated movie, and Salvador Dal, the surrealist painterlast year, a system which can create digital images simply by being fed a description of what the user wants to see.

However, it didnt immediately capture the publics interest.

It was only when OpenAI introduced DALL-E 2, an improved version of DALL-E, that the technology began to gain traction.

DALL-E 2 was marketed as a tool for graphic artists, allowing them shortcuts for creating and editing digital images.

Similarly, restrictive measures were added to the software to prevent its misuse.

The tool is not yet available to everyone. It currently has 100,000 users globally, and the company hopes to make it accessible to at least 1 million in the near future.

We hope people love the tool and find it useful. For me, its the most delightful thing to play with weve created so far. I find it to be creativity-enhancing, helpful for many different situations, and fun in a way I havent felt from technology in a while, CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman wrote.

However, the new technology has many alarming implications. Experts say that if this sort of technology were to improve, it could be used to spread misinformation, as well as generate pornography or hate speech.

Similarly, AI systems might show bias toward women and people of color because the data is being pulled from pools and online text which exhibit a similar bias.

You could use it for good things, but certainly you could use it for all sorts of other crazy, worrying applications, and that includes deep fakes, Professor Subbarao Kambhampati told The New York Times. Kambhampati teaches computer science at Arizona State University.

The company content policy prohibits harassment, bullying, violence and generating sexual and political content. However, users who have access can still create any sort of imagery from the data set.

Its going to be very hard to ensure that people dont use them to make images that people find offensive, AI researcher Toby Walsh told The Guardian.

Walsh warned that the public should generally be more wary of the things they see and read online, as fake or misleading images are currently flooding the internet.

The developers of DALL-E are actively trying to fight against the misuse of their technology.

For instance, researchers are attempting to mitigate potentially dangerous content in the training dataset, particularly imagery that might be harmful toward women.

However, this cleansing process also results in the generation of fewer images of women, contributing to an erasure of the gender.

Bias is a huge industry-wide problem that no one has a great, foolproof answer to, Miles Brundage, head of policy research at OpenAI, said. So a lot of the work right now is just being transparent and upfront with users about the remaining limitations.

However, OpenAI is not the only company with the potential to wreak havoc in cyberspace.

While OpenAI did not disclose its code for DALL-E 2, a London technology startup, Stability AI, shared the code for a similar, image-generating model for anyone to use and rebuilt the program with fewer restrictions.

The companys founder and CEO, Emad Mostaque, told The Washington Post he believes making this sort of technology public is necessary, regardless of the potential dangers. I believe control of these models should not be determined by a bunch of self-appointed people in Palo Alto, he said. I believe they should be open.

Mostaque is displaying an innately reckless strain of logic. Allowing these powerful AI tools to fall into the hands of just anyone will undoubtedly result in drastic, wide-scale consequences.

Technology, particularly software like DALL-E 2, can easily be misused as tools to spread hate and misinformation, and therefore need to be regulated before its too late.

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Mobile phone app accurately detects COVID-19 infection in people’s voices with the help of artificial intelligence – EurekAlert

September 7, 2022 | Author: admin

image:Early identification of COPD exacerbations can be managed via the myCOPD mobile app view more

Credit: my mHealth Ltd

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to detect COVID-19 infection in peoples voices by means of a mobile phone app, according to research to be presented on Monday at the European Respiratory Society International Congress in Barcelona, Spain [1].

The AI model used in this research is more accurate than lateral flow/rapid antigen tests and is cheap, quick and easy to use, which means it can be used in low-income countries where PCR tests are expensive and/or difficult to distribute.

Ms Wafaa Aljbawi, a researcher at the Institute of Data Science, Maastricht University, The Netherlands, told the congress that the AI model was accurate 89% of the time, whereas the accuracy of lateral flow tests varied widely depending on the brand. Also, lateral flow tests were considerably less accurate at detecting COVID infection in people who showed no symptoms.

These promising results suggest that simple voice recordings and fine-tuned AI algorithms can potentially achieve high precision in determining which patients have COVID-19 infection, she said. Such tests can be provided at no cost and are simple to interpret. Moreover, they enable remote, virtual testing and have a turnaround time of less than a minute. They could be used, for example, at the entry points for large gatherings, enabling rapid screening of the population.

COVID-19 infection usually affects the upper respiratory track and vocal cords, leading to changes in a persons voice. Ms Aljbawi and her supervisors, Dr Sami Simons, pulmonologist at Maastricht University Medical Centre, and Dr Visara Urovi, also from the Institute of Data Science, decided to investigate if it was possible to use AI to analyse voices in order to detect COVID-19.

They used data from the University of Cambridges crowd-sourcing COVID-19 Sounds App that contains 893 audio samples from 4,352 healthy and non-healthy participants, 308 of whom had tested positive for COVID-19. The app is installed on the users mobile phone, the participants report some basic information about demographics, medical history and smoking status, and then are asked to record some respiratory sounds. These include coughing three times, breathing deeply through their mouth three to five times, and reading a short sentence on the screen three times.

The researchers used a voice analysis technique called Mel-spectrogram analysis, which identifies different voice features such as loudness, power and variation over time.

In this way we can decompose the many properties of the participants voices, said Ms Aljbawi. In order to distinguish the voice of COVID-19 patients from those who did not have the disease, we built different artificial intelligence models and evaluated which one worked best at classifying the COVID-19 cases.

They found that one model called Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) out-performed the other models. LSTM is based on neural networks, which mimic the way the human brain operates and recognises the underlying relationships in data. It works with sequences, which makes it suitable for modelling signals collected over time, such as from the voice, because of its ability to store data in its memory.

Its overall accuracy was 89%, its ability to correctly detect positive cases (the true positive rate or sensitivity) was 89%, and its ability to correctly identify negative cases (the true negative rate or specificity) was 83%.

These results show a significant improvement in the accuracy of diagnosing COVID-19 compared to state-of-the-art tests such as the lateral flow test, said Ms Aljbawi. The lateral flow test has a sensitivity of only 56%, but a higher specificity rate of 99.5%. This is important as it signifies that the lateral flow test is misclassifying infected people as COVID-19 negative more often than our test. In other words, with the AI LSTM model, we could miss 11 out 100 cases who would go on to spread the infection, while the lateral flow test would miss 44 out of 100 cases.

The high specificity of the lateral flow test means that only one in 100 people would be wrongly told they were COVID-19 positive when, in fact, they were not infected, while the LSTM test would wrongly diagnose 17 in 100 non-infected people as positive. However, since this test is virtually free, it is possible to invite people for PCR tests if the LSTM tests show they are positive.

The researchers say that their results need to be validated with large numbers. Since the start of this project, 53,449 audio samples from 36,116 participants have now been collected and can be used to improve and validate the accuracy of the model. They are also carrying out further analysis to understand which parameters in the voice are influencing the AI model.

In a second study, Mr Henry Glyde, a PhD student in the faculty of engineering at the University of Bristol, showed that AI could be harnessed via an app called myCOPD to predict when patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) might suffer a flare-up of their disease, sometimes called acute exacerbation. COPD exacerbations can be very serious and are associated with increased risk of hospitalisation. Symptoms include shortness of breath, coughing and producing more phlegm (mucus).

Acute exacerbations of COPD have poor outcomes. We know that early identification and treatment of exacerbations can improve these outcomes and so we wanted to determine the predictive ability of a widely used COPD app, he said.

The myCOPD app is a cloud-based interactive app, developed by patients and clinicians and is available to use in the UKs National Health Service. It was established in 2016 and, so far, has over 15,000 COPD patients using it to help them manage their disease.

The researchers collected 45,636 records for 183 patients between August 2017 and December 2021 [3]. Of these, 45,007 were records of stable disease and 629 were exacerbations. Exacerbation predictions were generated one to eight days before a self-reported exacerbation event. Mr Glyde and colleagues used these data to train AI models on 70% of the data and test it on 30%.

The patients were high engagers, who had been using the app weekly over months or even years to record their symptoms and other health information, record medication, set reminders, and have access to up-to-date health and lifestyle information. Doctors can assess the data via a clinician dashboard, enabling them to provide oversight, co-management and remote monitoring.

The most recent AI model we developed has a sensitivity of 32% and a specificity of 95%. This means that the model is very good at telling patients when they are not about to experience an exacerbation, which may help them to avoid unnecessary treatment. It is less good at telling them when they are about to experience one. Improving this will be the focus of the next phase of our research, said Mr Glyde.

Speaking before the congress, Dr James Dodd, Associate Professor in respiratory medicine at the University of Bristol and project lead, said: To our knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to model real world data from COPD patients, extracted from a widely deployed therapeutic app. As a result, exacerbation predictive models generated from this study have the potential to be deployed to thousands more COPD patients after further safety and efficacy testing. It would empower patients to have more autonomy and control over their health. This is also a significant benefit for their doctors as such a system would likely reduce patient reliance on primary care. In addition, better-managed exacerbations could prevent hospitalisation and alleviate the burden on the healthcare system. Further study is required into patient engagement to determine what level of accuracy is acceptable and how an exacerbation alert system would work in practice. The introduction of sensing technologies may further enhance monitoring and improve the predictive performance of models.

One of the limitations of the study is the small number of frequent users of the app. The current model requires a patient to input a COPD assessment test score, fill out their medication diary and then report they are having an exacerbation accurately days later. Usually, only patients who are highly engaged with the app, using it daily or weekly, can provide the amount of data needed for the AI modelling. In addition, because there are significantly more days the users are stable than when they are having an exacerbation, there is a significant imbalance between the exacerbation and non-exacerbation data available. This results in even further difficulty in the models correctly predicting events after training on this imbalanced data.

A recent partnership between patients, clinicians and carers to set research priorities in COPD found that the highest-rated question was how to identify better ways to prevent exacerbations. We have focused on this question ,and we will be working closely with patients to design and implement the system, concluded Mr Glyde. [4]

Chair of the ERS Science Council, Professor Chris Brightling, is the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Senior Investigator at the University of Leicester, UK, and was not involved with the research. He commented: These two studies show the potential of artificial intelligence and apps on mobile phones and other digital devices to make a difference in how diseases are managed. Having more data available for training these artificial intelligence models, including appropriate control groups, as well as validation in multiple studies, will improve their accuracy and reliability. Digital health using AI models presents an exciting opportunity and is likely to impact future health care.

(ends)

[1] Abstract no: OA1626, Developing a multivariate prediction model for the detection of COVID-19 from crowd-sourced respiratory voice data, presented by Wafaa Aljbawi in Digital medicine for COVID-19 session, 08.15-09.30 hrs CEST on Monday 5 September 2022, https://k4.ersnet.org/prod/v2/Front/Program/Session?e=377&session=14843

Also available as a pre-print paper at https://arxiv.org/ from 5 September: Developing a multi-variate prediction model for the detection of COVID-19 from crowd-sourced respiratory voice data, by Wafaa Aljbawi, Sami O. Simons and Visara Urovi.

[2] Abstract no. PA2728, Exacerbation predictive modelling using real-world data from the myCOPD app, presented by Henry Glyde, thematic poster Digital health interventions in respiratory practice, 13.00-14.00 hrs CEST on Monday 5 September 2022, https://k4.ersnet.org/prod/v2/Front/Program/Session?e=377&session=14775

[3] Data have been updated after the time of abstract submission. Please use the data in this release as they are the most recent.

[4] Research priorities for exacerbations of COPD. The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. 2021;9(8):824826. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-2600(21)00227-7

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5-Sep-2022

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Sex Scandals and the Evangelical Mind – ChristianityToday.com

September 7, 2022 | Author: admin

When news of Matt Chandlers inappropriate online relationship popped up in my phone notifications last week, I was in the middle of a church staff retreat with my copastors, who are all male. I interrupted one of them to read the story aloud.

The news landed like a lead balloon between us, and then we came together as a group and talked about how stories like this make us feel and whether our own ministry friendships might be inappropriate.

The larger evangelical world was shaken too. Twitter exploded with a reanimated debate over the Billy Graham Rule, and many called on The Village Church to publicly release the investigation report. It is always best practice to release the result of an independent assessment, said Rachael Denhollander to The New York Times.

Gods call for truth and justice demand that leaders get to the bottom of what happened at The Village Church. But as one of the pastors of my local village-with-a-small-v church, thats not the most important story for me to pay attention to. The question that matters more is not What happened there? but Whats happening here, in me and among us, when we read stories like this?

More specifically, how do scandals both small and large distort our view of male-female friendships in Christ? And when we read these narrativesone after another in the midst of an ever-accruing abuse crisishow do our minds close off to the possibility of healthy brother-sister relationships in the church?

The stories we hear powerfully shape our imaginations, both positively and negatively.

For example, seeing Beth Moore teach the Bible has inspired a generation of women to pursue ministry they might not have otherwise considered. In the context of marriage, focusing on good stories from our shared pasts can help heal and improve those relationships. And on social justice issues, representation matters, because stories kindle our imagination for the diverse good thats possible.

But painful news of scandal and failure affect us, too. They disciple us to be afraid, says Catherine McNiel, author of Fearing Bravely. Those fears are both particular and personal: For the 1 in 3 women (and 1 in 4 men) who are survivors of sexual assault, reading headlines about abuse and impropriety might trigger deep-seated trauma.

For those in vocational ministry, these scandals can leave us feeling trapped in a Catch-22 situation.

It makes me second-guess everything I do, one male pastor shared with me. I could get in trouble for reaching out to a woman Im pastoring, or in trouble for failing to care for the flock if I dont. Im damned if I do, and damned if I dont.

Women feel a similar tension in the wake of community reactions to sexual scandal. Will we be frozen out as men retreat behind the safety lines of the Billy Graham Rule? Or will we get hurt if we stay engaged?

Horror stories of abuse and scandal trigger our lizard-brain fears, writes Russell Moore, and we run the risk of being paralyzed with despair. In those situations, says Bren Brown, always ask: Whats the story youre telling yourself?

For many men and women, the story they might be tellinglearned from headlines over the yearsis that any male-female relationship is fraught with danger.

A case like Chandlers yet again sends the message that men, especially pastors, cannot have healthy sibling relationships with women, writes Aimee Byrd, author of Why Cant We Be Friends? Be careful not to talk frequently with us! Be careful not to be too familiar with us! Be careful not to joke around us! You will not be above reproach.

In the wake of scandal and sin, our deep-seated desire to protect the church from future harm often works itself out in a fresh iteration of policies and principles that are meant to demarcate male-female boundaries. In this case, for example, some leaders instincts to double down on the Billy Graham Rule seems understandable.

But, as Ive written elsewhere, its not enough to legislate against sin. We need the Cross, and we need Gods grace. If all we do is avoid getting things wrong, we cant grow a community of thriving relationships. The fear of the Lordnot the fear of sinis the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 9:10).

Our news feeds contribute to this problem. A bad-news diet gives us a partial and distorted vision of whats possible. The stories out there tacitly teach us that healthy community isnt realistic or even desirable for my church in here.

Im concerned by this dynamic. Im concerned that when stories of scandal ring in our ears and wring out our hearts, our vision for what the community of faith could and should look like becomes stunted and malformed by fear. Im concerned that we despair, withdraw, and give up because our fear of getting it wrong overrules the command to love the brother and sister right next to us.

How, then, can we cultivate communities with healthy male-female relationships?

The gospel does instruct us to take an honest and unflinching look at sin, but it also calls us to look beyond it. We are brothers and sisters in Christ, and avoiding each other for fear of doing harm falls far short of what the Father envisions for his family.

Just as I ultimately want more from my marriage than to avoid having an affair, and I want more for my children than not landing in jail, so too the Scriptures call us to a bigger vision for church than We had no sex or abuse scandals. We are called to love one another, which includes but far exceeds the bar of Dont hurt each other.

To be clear, Im not suggesting that we avoid telling or reading stories of sin in the church. Im not advocating for naivet, gaslighting, or silencing. What I am saying is that we must take care to be formed by other stories too.

We need narratives that teach us what to aim for. We need a biblically based (but not fear-fueled) theology of men and women, fleshed out by real-life, godly examples of men and women in partnership together. And we need to seek out and share testimonies of health where we see them: places where men have not given up working with women, and where marriages can flourish without going all Billy Graham Rule or Bust.

Redirecting our gaze is critical to this project. The mission of God depends on men and women faithfully working together in gospel work. We cannot afford to shrink back from that work just because were too afraid to put our hand to the plough with someone of the opposite sex.

Testimonies of those whove done this well are gateways to hope, guiding our minds and imaginations back toward what is beautiful, lovely, excellent, true, and praiseworthy (Phil. 4:8). Proclaiming Gods faithfulness in the past is a powerful way to store up our hope in the future (see Psalms 105 and 106).

For example, when I first started dating, I quickly realized that my own upbringing had taught me firsthand how infidelity, addiction, and hostility could wreck things. When I tried to envision myself as a happily married person in my 70s, my imagination sputtered.

So as a 20-year-old student, I started working with a therapist, but I also went looking for incarnational stories of hope among our congregation. I invited myself to dinner and asked time-tested couples to tell me their stories. Slowly, my vision for what was possible grew.

The same holds true for male-female friendship. Ive seen it in my own work life. As my copastors and I sat together last week and talked about the news of yet another scandal, we felt the pull to shrug and sigh. We mourned and then half-joked about quitting.

But then we took the opportunity to reflect on our own relationships. We told one another stories of healthy male-female friendships from our own community and beyond. We gave reminders of decades-long marriages and fruitful ministry partnerships. And we told quiet stories of a long obedience in the same directionstories that would never make the news but that shored up our hope in Gods church.

Bronwyn Lea is the author of Beyond Awkward Side Hugs: Living as Christian Brothers and Sisters in a Sex-Crazed World and the pastor of discipleship and women at First Baptist Church of Davis.

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The power of awe and the cosmos | Stanford News – Stanford University News

September 7, 2022 | Author: admin

The images to emerge from the James Webb Space Telescope have captured details of the cosmos never seen before, leaving the scientific community and public alike in a state of awe. In a Tweet, former President Barack Obama described them as mind-blowing. Even Stanford cosmologist Zeeshan Ahmed, for whom such images are commonplace, admitted: You cant contain it in your head. I think this is true for everybody I mean, scientists are human still.

NASAs James Webb Space Telescope has been able to show new, finer details of the galaxy group, Stephans Quintet. The rendering here was created from nearly 1,000 separate image files. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)

Awe is sort of this ineffable sense of transcendence, said Stanford neurosurgeon and compassion scholar James Doty. In some ways, you melt into it.

Scholars across disciplines have long sought to understand the stirring soul searching, even emotions the universe evokes. Some have described a shakiness they call cosmic vertigo. Others have used the term cosmic insignificance when confronted with ones littleness in a limitless universe. A few have found dwelling too long on such thoughts to be anxiety-inducing, an experience they label neuroexistentialism.

To describe how images from outer space can excite and expand the human mind, Stanford advanced lecturer in American studies Elizabeth Kessler, who studies the visual culture of astronomy, has found it useful to draw on the sublime, an aesthetic concept that the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant associated with natural phenomena of vast size, scale, or power, such soaring mountains, deep abysses, plunging waterfalls, and the star-filled sky in trying to understand the emotions evoked in himself by the Milky Way and the starry heavens. For Kant, the experience of such immensity overwhelmed the senses, but human reason could transcend those limits, which made it an affirming experience that expanded knowledge and understanding.

A casual stroll across the university campus is enough to reveal the extent to which the universe can serve as a muse.

Seven art pieces at Stanford inspired by the wonder of the universe.

At Stanford, representations of outer space can be found beyond the research labs and classrooms of astrophysicists and cosmologists. Walk across the Engineering Quad Courtyard and one will encounter Alicja Kwades installation, Pars pro Toto, 12 human-sized stone planetary orbs that combine the geological with the cosmological to inspire new ways of thinking about the world. At the Cantor Arts Center, a cast of Auguste Rodins iconic thinker shines under the fluorescent glow of Spencer Finchs representation of the exploding Betelgeuse star. Wrapping the staircase to the David Rumsey Map Center at Green Library are reproductions of 17th-century star and constellation maps, beautifully blown up to emphasize figures from Greek mythology amid celestial heavens all reminders of humanitys place in the world and our connections to each other.

For Doty, who is also the founder and director of the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, of which His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the founding benefactor, awes power lies in its ability to make us feel connected to something much larger than ourselves.

James Doty (Image credit: Courtesy James Doty)

At the end of the day, we are all one, not only with each other but with every living being and in fact, with the universe, Doty said. The very nature of thinking about that, and understanding you are the part of this extraordinary thing that is going on around us, creates this deep sense of purpose and connection, and in some ways, happiness.

The transcendent experience of self-realization and oneness is also the basis of many religions, Doty points out. For example in Buddhism, there is a deep desire to attain enlightenment, which ultimately is about merging oneself with the universe.

According to Kessler, the art historian, who has examined the parallels between art and philosophy and astronomical images in her book, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), astronomical images are crafted in a way to represent scientific data and evoke an aesthetic response.

Elizabeth Kessler (Image credit: Courtesy Elizabeth Kessler)

As Kessler learned in her interviews with the team that produced images for the Hubble Heritage Project, NASA wanted to circulate imagery that would inspire the general public, not just individuals working in science and technology. Like any representation, every astronomical image involves decisions about how to depict celestial phenomena captured by the telescope in a way that wont feel strange to audiences.

Astronomers and image processors carefully balance the need for a scientifically valid image with the desire for an aesthetically compelling one, said Kessler.

Because telescopes collect data too faint for our eyes to see and beyond the visible light spectrum (JWST primarily in infrared light, Hubble in visible and ultraviolet), their images are assigned colors in order for us to appreciate them more fully. Every color picture from JWST, for example, is actually a composite of at least three different monochrome images, each one collected using a filter that captures a different wavelength of infrared light. Exposures can last hours or even days. Each filter is then assigned a different color, which is combined into the final images that get circulated.

While any color can be mapped onto any wavelength, astronomers believe some color combinations work better than others. For example, in the Hubble Heritage Projects early rendition of the planetary nebula NGC 3132, the team experimented with an unconventional color scheme of pinks and yellows. But the end result didnt feel right, said astronomer Keith Noll in an interview with Kessler, so they used colors less strange and more typical of terrestrial worlds.

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JusticeText Raises $2.2M Seed Round to Advance Its Mission of Building Police Accountability – LawSites

September 7, 2022 | Author: admin

JusticeText, a three-year-old startup that makes it easier for public defenders in criminal cases to review body cam and other video footage, has raised a seed round of $2.2 million, it said today.

Investors in the round include Bloomberg Beta, True Ventures, Tubbs Ventures, Higher Ground Labs, Parameter Ventures, Incite.org, Google Black Founders Fund, and MIT Solve, as well as angel investors such as LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Grammy-winning musician John Legend, Dorothy Chou, head of public affairs at DeepMind), and Aston Motes, the first employee at Dropbox.

The cofounders ofJusticeText, CEODevshi Mehrotraand CTOLeslie Jones-Dove, were in their senior year as computer science students at the University of Chicago when, inspired by the police killing in Chicago of Laquan McDonald, they partnered on a school project aimed at addressing inequities in the criminal justice system.

They discovered that the explosion in the quantity of body cam footage and video evidence was overwhelming public defenders and worsening backlogs in criminal cases.

JusticeText addresses this problem by automatically generating transcriptions of audiovisual evidence that is synchronized with the video files. The product allows public defenders and other criminal defense lawyers to store, analyze and share video from a single platform.

Since the formal launch of the product in 2021, is now being used in more than 50 public defender agencies, the company says.

In a blog post today, the company said it will use this latest round of funding to build its staff in customer success, marketing and sales, with the goal of scaling JusticeText to criminal justice agencies nationwide.

The impact our technology is already having in these offices is incredible, the blog post says. Hearing stories of how attorneys have used JusticeText to save hours reviewing discovery and secure dismissals for their clients has reaffirmed all the reasons we started this company to begin with.

JusticeText was a contestant in this years Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW (which I organize). In December 2020, cofounders Mehrotra and Jones-Dove were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2021.

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Cerebral and corporeal: Insight Body and Mind – Architecture AU

September 7, 2022 | Author: admin

Psychology practice Insight, in the north-west suburbs of Melbourne, decided it would evolve its practice to offer more holistic and integrative services, including mindful movement.

It approached Melbourne design studio Biasol to create a space that reflected its new approach to physical and mental health and generated a cogent brand identity.

Insights two-pronged approach is addressed in the spaces colour scheme and material language, which transition seamlessly from the consulting rooms to the movement studios.

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Deep teal tones were used for the psychology spaces on the ground floor.

Image: Timothy Kaye

The schemes are intended to be distinct yet integrated, gradually lifting and lightening across the three levels to provide a sensory and transcendental spatial experience.

Deep teal tones were used for the psychology spaces on the ground floor to engender a sense of professionalism and groundedness. Grey Venetian rendered walls provide a subdued stone-coloured backdrop for the deep greens of the reception counter, bathroom vanities and kitchen surfaces. The veining of the Cipollino Ondulato marble counter is evocative of the ocean floor and reinforces the rhythm of flow throughout the space.

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Softer tones of pale shell paired with Palladian terrazzo mosaic floor generate softness and calm.

Image: Timothy Kaye

In contrast, peach tones in the movement studios on the upper levels were employed to create a sense of uplift and evoke flow, energy and vitality. A pink-toned terrazzo and stone counter and textured Venetian plaster walls are used on the first floor, promoting ebullience and positivity, while on the second floor, softer tones of pale shell are paired with a terrazzo mosaic floor generate a sense of softness and calm. Petite neon signs reinforce messages of positivity and empowerment in the movement studios.

Biasol used minimalist circular forms to create a clean, modern brand identity and a spatial experience that inspires movement and positive change. The design creates a cohesive narrative from the cerebral to the corporeal, from the anchored stone fixtures on the ground floor to the sheer, billowy curtains on the top level.

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GUEST BLOG: Five steps to take when securing your data with multi-factor authentication – Military Embedded Systems

September 7, 2022 | Author: admin

Blog

September 06, 2022

Computer data exists in different states at different times: data in transit (information flowing through a network); data in use (active data that is being accessed and manipulated by a computer program); and data-at-rest, known as DAR, or data that is physically housed in a storage device like a solid-state drive. Many cybersecurity solutions focus on securing data in transit and data in use, but neglect securing DAR.

President Bidens Executive Order on Improving the Nations Cybersecurity, enacted on May 12, 2021, directs all branches of the federal government to improve their resilience to cybersecurity threats. This order directly calls out the need to secure data-at-rest (DAR) with encryption and multi-factor authentication (MFA).

MFA requires a user to provide multiple pieces of evidence that combine to verify a users identity. Depending on the application, MFA may be required at login or perhaps when trying to access an application or even a particular folder or file. MFA combines two or more independent credentials: what the user knows (password, for example), what the user has (an authentication app, for example), and what the user is (biometric palm vein scan, for example). Since most MFA implementations use two factors, its often called two-factor authentication, or 2FA.

There are five important considerations when protecting your data with MFA.

1. Understand the sensitivity of your data:First, note that not all data is subject to the same levels of protection. In the U.S., since all federal departments are part of the executive branch, the data-classification system is governed by executive order rather than by law. As of 2009, information may currently be classified at one of three levels: confidential, secret, and top secret. Subsequent executive orders may change these classifications and the levels of protection associated with each classification.

2. Use self-encrypting drives:Sensitive data needs to be encrypted, executive orders notwithstanding. Self-encrypting drives (SEDs) encrypt data as its written to the drive, which has a self-contained drive encryption key (DEK). The key and encryption process are transparent to users.

SEDs encrypt everything on the drive, which is called full-disk encryption (FDE), including operating system (OS), applications, and data. On-drive encryption is called hardware FDE (HWFDE) and uses an embedded encryption engine (EE), which should provide 256-bit AES encryption.

An SED should adhere to the TCG Opal standard, a secure standard for managing encryption and decryption in the SED. SEDs are often certified to Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS), developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For example, a FIPS 140-2 L2 certification assures that the SEDs EE has been properly designed and secured; the L2 ensures that there is visible evidence of any attempt to physically tamper with the drive.

The National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) is responsible for the U.S. implementation of the Common Criteria (CC), an international standard (ISO/IEC 15408) for IT product security certification. CC is a framework that forms the basis for a government-driven certification scheme required by federal agencies and critical infrastructure.

3. Employ pre-boot authentication:A designated security officer or administrator will define the user roles and identity management used to authenticate access to the SED. The password security that forms part of an OS is notoriously weak and subject to hacking, so the first level of authorization acquisition (AA) should occur prior to the booting of the OS, in which case it is known as pre-boot authentication (PBA).

Each user should have an individually assigned password, which authorizes the SED to use its cryptographic key to unlock the data. The security officer should have the ability to add new users and revoke access to existing users. When a users access is revoked, that user wont even be able to boot the OS.

A more robust PBA implementation will include MFA.

4. Multi-factor authentication methods:In addition to a username/password, MFA requires another form of authentication. One approach is to use a security dongle, such as a YubiKey, containing a license key or some other cryptographic protection mechanism that the user plugs into a device USB port. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), including civilian employees and contractor personnel, uses a smartcard called the common access card (CAC), in which case the computer must be equipped with a physical card reader.

Other MFA methods include applications, often on smartphones, that provide a one-time code synced to the device or system asking for authentication. Also taking advantage of the ubiquity of smartphones is an SMS-based system that will include a one-time code in a text message.

5. Provide the ability to destroy the data:There are various scenarios in which it may be necessary to destroy any data stored on the SED. A benign case is when an organization decides to upgrade its computers and/or drives, transfer computers and/or drives within the organization, or dispose of or recycle the computers and/or drives outside the organization. A worst-case scenario is when an unauthorized entity gains control of the drive with the intent of accessing the data.

Using standard operating system-based delete functions to remove files and folders is not sufficient because experienced hackers can still retrieve some or all the data. SEDs that are used to store confidential data should support special hardware functions to perform secure erase (write zeroes into every area where data is stored on the drive) and crypto erase (wipe any cryptographic keys stored on the drive, thereby rendering any encrypted data stored on the drive unreadable and useless to a bad actor).

To address the worst-case scenario, the organizations designated security officer should have the ability to define erase procedures to be automatically initiated by the drive itself; for example, failing AA a specified number of times should cause the drive to self-erase.

In the case of a SED equipped with appropriate PBA, any data stored on the disk will essentially be invisible until AA has taken place, thereby preventing bad actors from cloning the drive to circumvent the restricted number of permitted attempts at AA.

To sum up

Some organizations mistakenly assume that employing MFA such as fingerprint scans or facial recognition after the OS has booted offers a high level of confidence. However, once the OS has booted, any data on its drives is exposed to sophisticated hackers or potentially nation-state bad actors.

The highest levels of confidence and security are achieved by using MFA as part of a PBA environment implemented using HWFDE realized on a FIPS + CC certified and validated SED. (Figure 1.)

[Figure 1|An example of a secure solid-state drive, part of the Citadel family of secure data storage. Photo courtesy CDSG.]

CDSG directorof marketing Chris Kruell leads the sphere of marketing activities, including corporate branding, corporate and marketing communications, product marketing, marketing programs, and marketing strategy. Chris previously was VPofmarketing at ERP-Link and hardware startup Lightfleet. He was a marketing director at Sun Microsystems andheldseveral marketing positions in the high-tech industry. Chris holds a BSdegree from Cornell University and an MA degree from Hamline University.

CDSG (CRU Data Security Group) https://cdsg.com/

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You May Be Able to Send Secret Messages in the Molecular Code of Ink Someday – Twisted Sifter

September 7, 2022 | Author: admin

Do you remember those invisible ink sets you used to be able to buy out of magazines and comic books back in the day?

Theyd (sort of) work for a day or two and then that would be the end of it. It was a novelty for kids.

But thanks to scientists at the University of Texas, sending secret messages in the molecular code of ink might be something that well all be doing sooner than later.

A new study from the Texas researchers focuses on an example of steganography that is an encrypted message-within-a-message. Professor Eric Anslyn is a big fan ofThe Wizard of Ozand he encrypted the book by L. Frank Baum and sent it to a colleague.

And for this experiment, it was all about the ink. Anslyn explained that his team used a special kind of polymer and encoded a 256-character key to encrypt and decrypt the book.

The study says, To store 256 bits of information, we chose to encode a cipher key in hexadecimal (base-16) in a mixture of eight 10-mer [oligourethanes]. Eight of the 10 monomers encode information In base-16, each monomer provides a storage density of 4 bits per monomer, thus 32 bits per 10-mer, and overall, 256 bits in the sample.

The team then mixed these oligourethanes with soot, isopropanol, and glycerol, and they had an ink they could use for their project.

Anslyn said, The most important scientific breakthrough was the use of mass tags that allow us to sequence eight oligourethanes simultaneously. This is the real advance in the field. The encryption key was just a single application that can be envisioned.

Pretty exciting stuff, dont you think?

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A 14-Year-Old Cracked The Codes on Australias New Coin In Just Over An Hour – TechTheLead

September 7, 2022 | Author: admin

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Australias new limited edition commemorative coin was launched with five different encryption codes on it but it took little over an hour for a 14-year-old boy to crack four of them, delighting security experts everywhere.

On the 75th anniversary of the Australian Signals Directorate, the country released a limited edition coin covered in codes to pay homage to Australias foreign intelligence cyber security agency and find their future employees, hopefully.

The security experts behind the new coin, which was minted in just 50,000 pieces, included five different encryption codes on it, challenging buyers to try and solve them.

Theres a challenge out there to see who can correctly break all the layers, and, would you believe it, yesterday the coin was launched at 8:45am; we put up our web form and said, Hey, if you think youve got the answers, fill in the form.

And believe it or not, a boy, 14 years old in Tasmania, was the first person in just over an hour to get all four layers right, said ASDs director-general Racher Noble.

Delighted at the childs genius, she added Can you imagine being his mum? and that her organization hopes to meet him soon in the hopes of recruiting him to their ranks.

Like the early code breakers in ASD, you can get through some of the layers with but a pencil and paper but, right towards the end, you may need a computer to solve the last level, Ms Noble said, adding that, as of yet, the fifth level of encryption was not broken yet.

Are you up to the challenge?

Also read: Authorities Spread Encrypted ANoM App To Criminals Worldwide, Bust More Than 800 Of Them In Massive Sting

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How to shore up data protection beyond cyber security policies and standards – Open Access Government

September 7, 2022 | Author: admin

Its all well and good having rigorous data protection policies and standards in place, as many organisations indeed do. However, we continue to see that if employees are not aware of these policies or apply them in practice, they may as well not exist.

We rarely go for long without hearing of an information security breach or cyber-attack to which a public sector body or local council has fallen prey despite significant ongoing efforts and resource deployment to prevent them.

A case in point appears to be Aberdeenshire Council, which revealed in response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request that some 243 breaches occurred between January 2020 and March 2022 with that figure representing an upward trend.

Whilst public and private sectors increasingly value best practices around information security: gaps in approach continue to result in exposure and risk. One area where improvements can often be made is in education and training.

After all, its commonly the human factor that is the weakest link in the cyber security plan; it wont matter how large your cyber security technology investment is if it is not paired with appropriate behaviours and understanding throughout the organisation.

At Apricorn, we have concluded that a solid requirement for comprehensive cybersecurity training should be written into every employees contract, with regular knowledge updates mandated and delivered, for all workers both internal and external to the company. This must be an integral, ongoing part of staff professional development.

From the onboarding stage onwards, employees must be kept up to date with evolving cyber threats as well as corporate cyber security, information and data handling policies, bolstered with regular refresher courses and bite-sized learning approaches added in.

Training shouldnt cover only the what and how of keeping data safe and data protection. A comprehensive education approach must also include the why element the specific risks to the organisation and its customers or service users if policies are not adhered to along with potential ramifications.

All must understand that cyber security cannot simply be delegated as someone elses problem least of all the IT teams, regardless of seniority, department or specific role.

Implementing training that builds upwards from this greater level of context will create the engagement required, alongside an understanding that the company must be accountable for the totality of its actions around the handling of information and data protection.

We often hear that accidental mistakes contribute to breaches and failings in cyber security and information security. To err is human, certainly but we should not forget that an effective mitigation strategy to defend the company against near-inevitable human error is essential.

More must realise too that change is possible Apricorns latest research shows that more than 60% of IT leaders still expect their remote workers to expose them to the risk of a data breach, regardless of the training theyve received.

Education should be combined with the automation and enforcement of security policies

To help bridge this gap, education should be combined with the automation and enforcement of security policies through technology wherever possible.

Robust, regularly reviewed and tested policy and practice, with appropriate technology choices and implementation, supported by education and comprehensive backup and recovery strategy, will deliver optimum protection where, even in the event of a pernicious cyber-attack such as ransomware or successful spear phishing of executives, a swift and efficient recovery can reduce the chance of costly downtime.

Scheduling automatic backups of all data on a regular basis is also important perhaps every day, depending on how often the data is altered or changed and how critical specific data sets are to the organisations mission.

In an Apricorn survey from April 2022, 99% of surveyed IT decision-makers stated they have backup strategies in place, but as many as 26% admitted they were unable to fully restore all data and documents when recovering from a backup.

Only 27% acknowledged having automated backup to both a central and personal repository. We have found that three in five companies do not back up their data or devices in advance of working remotely, while only one in five follow backup best practices such as the 3-2-1 storage strategy and backing up in real-time.

If a 3, 2, 1 backup policy is employed, information should always be recoverable and restorable in the case of cyber-attack, breach or employee error. Have at least 3 copies of data, held on at least 2 different media, with at least 1 copy held offsite a message that has not yet been heeded by everyone, it seems.

Also, the recovery process must be regularly tested to ensure full data restoration can be achieved in the event of a breach or mistake.

Additionally, the encryption of data as standard across the organisation should be mandatory, both when its in transit and at rest, and automated wherever possible. Currently, almost half (47%) of organisations now require the encryption of all data, whether its at rest or in transit a share thats growing, but still falling short of the level of protection possible.

We should add that the stakes appear to be rising for those organisations that dont give the approach sufficient attention: 16% of the IT leaders we surveyed admitted that a lack of encryption had been the main cause of a data breach within their company, up from 12% in 2021.

When data is encrypted, its fully protected, so if for instance, an unauthorised individual gains entry to an IT system, the information will remain unreadable.

In particular, selected storage locations should include an offline solution, such as high-capacity hardware-encrypted USBs that automatically encrypt all data written to them, again taking the human risk out of the equation even for distributed teams. Copies of critical files can be kept secure and disconnected from the network to create an air gap between information and threat.

In addition, built-in hardware encryption with onboard authentication affords stronger protection than software-based encryption, which can leave devices exposed to counter resets, software hacking, screen capture and keylogging. Encryption keys can be kept safe within a hardware crypto module.

With greater attention to the above points, cyber security defences can become fully embedded into ways of working, with full benefits accruing to the organisation.

Written by Jon Fielding, Managing Director EMEA Apricorn

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