James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Algorithms to reduce child sex trafficking: an interview with the creators of Spotlight
Thousands upon thousands of escort ads are posted online every day in the United States, and unfortunately some of these ads represent and exploit children. It has been the job of law enforcement in the U.S. to look through these ads and detect the ones believed to be related to the exploitation of children and ...
Unlikely big hitters back Microsoft in legal battle over data privacy
Microsoft’s ongoing case with the US government has taken lots of twists and turns since the FBI first demanded that Microsoft hand over data stored on one of its servers in Ireland. The case has been dubbed as historic, given that Microsoft paints it as a People vs. Government landmark situation at a time in which the ...
It’s the end of the world as we know it and AI feels fine
“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop … ” For many of those born before the 1990s, those lines from the movie Terminator were their introduction to artificial intelligence (AI). And like the film’s much wiser older brother, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, ...
Uber wants to tackle air pollution with fleet of electric cars, in a city it’s currently butting heads with
Uber Technologies Inc. just announced that it is taking on air pollution with its first fully electric vehicles available in London, U.K., a similar initiative to Uber’s electric car programs in Chicago and Lisbon/Porto in Portugal. Another Uber electric car project just finished in South Africa. Uber will partner with manufacturers BYD and Nissan (BYD ...
Facebook: Human editors go, fake news arrives, everyone gets what the doctor ordered
Just as soon as news emerges that Facebook shuts the door on several of its former news editors so that an algorithm can do the job of picking the latest ‘trending’ news, rather than the sometimes biased brain of a breathing individual, we hear that the algorithm has its own way of screwing things up. ...
Crowdsourcing mishap: Outrage in Saudi Arabia after Microsoft Bing translation says the country is ISIS
Representatives of Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, as well as netizens in the country, have called for a boycott of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, after an unfortunate translation of the word ‘daesh’. Daesh, which has been used to replace ISIS, ISIL, IS, was recently discovered to translate to Saudi Arabia when using Bing translate. The conversion to the word daesh, ...
The Internet of Things: A 101 guide to privacy in the digitized world
It was after writing a story earlier this year concerning a connected sex toy sending very private information about its users back to the manufacturer that I started to muse about the ever-expanding Internet of Things and consumer privacy. What are the implications of being more connected apropos the mass of data collected on us? Do we ...
Australian academics say Microsoft Excel is messing up many scientific research papers
According to a recent report, Microsoft’s spreadsheet software, Excel, is to blame for numerous errors in academic papers. The report states that when the software has been used to name genes in the study of genetic science, the default settings in Excel have been converting the correct names into dates and floating point numbers. An example ...
As robots take driving jobs, who will pick up the pieces?
Since the advent of improved artificial intelligence a lot has been said about a future of mass unemployment, often under the perhaps hyperbolic umbrella threat of ‘The Robots are Coming!’. The robots might be coming to take your job, but there are limits to what occupations a computer can handle. Nonetheless, the automobile industry is sure to ...
The race is on: Two companies have joined together to create a self-driving car system that can be put in any vehicle
Two companies have recently joined together to create an autonomous car system for any vehicle, which should be ready, they believe, sometime in 2019. The companies are Delphi Automotive PLC, a U.K.-based high-tech auto-parts provider, and Mobileye NV, an Israeli advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving technology provider – responsible for Tesla Motors, Inc.’s autonomous driving system. ...