Don't Panic Labs Reading List

DPL Reading List – June 29, 2018

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| June 29, 2018 | in

Here are some of the articles we found this week.

The Internet of Things Will Need Better Ways to Locate Stuff – “With 5G, more devices than ever will be deployed to work with little to no human supervision. The better they can talk to one another, and know where all of their fellow devices are, the easier it will be for them to carry out their work.”

A U.S. Machine Recaptures the Supercomputing Crown – “Today, U.S. supercomputer advocates are cheering, because for the first time since 2012, a U.S. supercomputer—Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s newly installed Summit supercomputer—has been ranked #1 in performance, capturing the world crown back from China in the twice-yearly TOP500 assessment of supercomputers, which was announced at the ISC High Performance conference in Frankfurt.”

Adobe is using AI to catch Photoshopped images – “Whenever someone alters an image, unless they are pixel perfect in their work, they always leave behind indicators that the photo is modified. Metadata and watermarks can help determine a source image, and forensics can probe factors like lighting, noise distribution and edges on the pixel level to find inconsistencies. If a color is slightly off, for instance, forensic tools can flag it.”

6 Reasons Why IoT Security Is Terrible – “In the IT world, there’s an entire industry of life-cycle-management software that tracks patches and rolls back buggy software. In the IoT world, we just aren’t there yet.”

Insurers turn to artificial intelligence in war on fraud – “Using artificial intelligence to pick out inconsistencies and unusual patterns has quickly become standard for insurance companies, whether they’re looking for sophisticated rings of fraudsters rigging auto accidents or just individuals embellishing how much their damaged property was worth.”

5 counterintuitive ways to beat distractions at work – “You’re constantly distracted, and you’ve tried every conventional method to beat it, from time blocking to the Pomodoro Technique and installing extensions to block certain websites. But no matter how badly you want them to work, they don’t. Doing any sort of deep work is a constant struggle, and you’re sick of not being able to focus. Don’t despair, you might just need to give unusual methods a go.”

I talked to Duplex, Google’s scarily human AI voice – “For now, the real-world impact of Duplex, particularly on the people who will interact with it, remains to be seen. It doesn’t sound quite sound like Scarlett Johansson, but I have a feeling that despite disclosing its status as AI, it’ll do just as good a job at convincing people it’s more human than robot.”