Artificial intelligence is on the road to breaking the whole CAPTCHA system. The question that follows is: how are we going to prove we are humans then? According to a Forbes.com article, hackers who are trying to defeat CAPTCHAs are essentially creating programs to think like humans. To counter this, companies will tend to generate and invest on more sophisticated Turing tests in order to secure their sites to being invaded by bots. Although playing like antagonists, hackers and companies are pushing forward to the evolution of AI.

CAPTCHA which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” is the system that generates those distorted and blurry images and scribbles and asks you to solve for simple math problems before entering a particular website or verifying your log-ins. For those who have poor eyesight, this is no fun. But then again, there is the audio option. CAPTCHA is engineered to safeguard a site from malicious software or bots.

With extensive AI researches being funded, like the $15 million Series A round for Vicarious, we could be using blood samples, DNA tests or iris scanning just to ensure that our information will not be stolen. As for me, I just wish that CAPTCHA system get ahead of bots since using biological features as log-ins or passwords sounds really scary—brings back a lot of sci-fi flicks memories.

And when we talk of frightening futuristic sci-fi movies that move around AI, Terminator perhaps is at the forefront. I grew up with the Franchise from very unconvincing robot antics to shocks!-it-is-really possible-to-happen mentality. The man-made Skynet which was initially invented to eliminate human error turned to eliminating human (drop the error and replace it with race). How did this happen in the movie? With exponential growth of intelligence that outpaced human brains capacity. Day by day, with updates in AI, it seems that this is no fiction anymore. Paranoid as I may seem, I am not alone in this boat as a Sub-Reddit dedicated to preventing Skynet was set in place. The wide-ranging discussion contains uncanny and hilarious ideas from netizens. See the comments here.

Cloud-Based Teaching Assistant

Sooner or later, the many instances you see a teaching assistants along hallways rigorously checking essays of students will be a thing of the past. A Maryland psychology professor invented a cloud-based writing assignment evaluator to alleviate the workload of checking and grading student papers, which he called SAGrader.

Surprisingly, SAGrader was not made for English and journalism subject, but rather science and social science classes. The tool also is a time saver and engagement booster (professor-student) at the same time.

“Students know exactly what they got right, what they got wrong, and what they need to do to improve,” Swope said, adding that the program’s best value is likely found in the planning time educators and their classroom assistants will have once essay grading is left to the cloud. “With all the extra time on their hands, they can make themselves available to focus on the things in class that really matter.”

SAGrader inventor Joe Swope designed the system to analyze student submissions using several artificial intelligence strategies. At a glance, this seems like an absurd idea since essays are largely subjective and dependent on a lot of factors including the student’s writing style, keywords, etc. But according to the website, SAGrader was built to model thousands of ways a student can express a concept, not just identifying keywords. It has a framework that could actually assess if the essay is correctly explaining relationships between concepts. The tool works with professors for each assignment to build an outline of the correct content of knowledge. If the answers do not match the pre-determined outline, SAGrader will then furnish a feedback and tell students what information are they missing.

Traffic Control

The traffic authorities are also looking into utilizing AI to control traffic situations. The study conducted by the University of Southampton recently revealed that with ideal conditions, humans can control and manage traffic significantly better than the current city traffic computers. This gives the experts the idea that AI-based approaches could improve urban traffic and road capacity while reducing negative environmental impacts.

Dr Simon Box of the University of Southampton Transportation Research Group adds: “The demonstration carried out at innovITS Advance indicates that the human brain, carefully employed, can be an extremely effective traffic control computer. In our research we aim to be able to emulate this approach in a new kind of software that can provide significant benefits in improving the efficiency of traffic flow, hence improving road space utilisation, reducing journey times and potentially, improving fuel efficiency.”

The program was tested in a BBC show where the presenter tried controlling a real traffic light junction at the InnovITS ground.

Fruit Flies Outbreak Monitor

Taiwanese has found their way to predict fruit flies outbreak that pains farmers on a regular basis, destroying crops and prompting mandatory quarantine produce to keep the bacteria from spreading. The country’s scientists are using AI tech to improve the current method. The automated process makes use of infrared scanners with weather sensors that scan the traps. Everytime the beam is broken, it is counted as one. The tally is being sent to a station every 30 minutes for monitoring. Together with algorithms, alarms will be triggered if the threshold is reached and/or exceeded. So far, the tool has recorded 88% accuracy. Not bad for something improvised.