RANDY HUTCHINSON, Better Business Bureau Published 12:54 a.m. CT Jan. 1, 2020

Imagine you wired hundreds of thousands of dollars somewhere based on a call from your boss, whose voice you recognized, only to find out you were talking to a machine and the money is lost. One company executive doesnt have to imagine it happening. He and his company were victims of what some experts say is one of the first cases of voice-mimicking software, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), being used in a scam.

In a common version of the Business Email Compromise scam, an employee in a companys accounting department wires money somewhere based on what appears to be a legitimate email from the CEO, CFO or other high-ranking executive. I wrote a column last year noting that reported losses to the scam had grown from $226 million in 2014 to $676 million in 2017. The FBI says losses doubled in 2018 to $1.8 billion and recommends making a phone call to verify the legitimacy of the request rather than relying on an email.

But now you may not even be able to trust voice instructions. The CEO of a British firm received what he thought was a call from the CEO of his parent company in Germany instructing him to wire $243,000 to the bank account of a supplier in Hungary. The call was actually originated by a crook using AI voice technology to mimic the bosss voice. The crooks moved the money from Hungary to Mexico to other locations.

An executive with the firms insurance company, which ultimately covered the loss, told The Wall Street Journal that the victim recognized the subtle German accent in his bosss voice and moreover that it carried the mans melody. The victim became suspicious when he received a follow-up call from the boss that originated in Austria requesting another payment be made. He didnt make that one, but the damage was already done.

Google says crooks may also synthesize speech to fool voice authentication systems or create forged audio recordings to defame public figures. It launched a challenge to researchers to develop countermeasures against spoofed speech.

Many companies are working on voice-synthesis software and some of it is available for free. The insurer thinks the crooks used commercially available software to steal the $243,000 from its client.

Many scams rely on victims letting their emotions outrun their common sense. An example is the Grandparent Scam, in which an elderly person receives a phone call purportedly from a grandchild in trouble and needing money. Victims have panicked and wired thousands of dollars before ultimately determining that the grandchild was safe and sound at home.

The crooks often invent some reason why the grandchilds voice may not sound right, such as the child having been in an accident or it being a poor connection. How much more successful might that scam be if the voice actually sounds like the grandchild? The executive who wired the $243,000 said he thought the request was strange, but the voice sounded so much like his boss that he felt he had to comply.

The BBB recommends companies install additional verification steps for wiring money, including calling the requestor back on a number known to be authentic.

Randy Hutchinson is the president of the Better Business Bureau of the Mid-South. Reach him at 901-757-8607.

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Artificial intelligence takes scam to a whole new level - The Jackson Sun

Artificial intelligence (AI) is creating a great impact on the world by enabling computers to learn on their own. While in the real world AI is still focused on solving narrow problems, we see a whole different face of AI in the fictional world of science fiction movies which predominantly depict the rise of artificial general intelligence as a threat for human civilization. As a continuation of the trend, here we take a look at how artificial intelligence was depicted in 2019 movies.

A warning in advance the following listicle is filled with SPOILERS.

Terminator: Dark Fate the sixth film of the Terminator movie franchise, featured a super-intelligent Terminator named Gabriel designated as Rev-9, and was sent from the future to kill a young woman (Dani) who is set to become an important figure in the Human Resistance against Skynet. To fight the Rev-9 Terminator, the Human Resistance from the future also sends Grace, a robot soldier, back in time, to defend Dani. Grace is joined by Sarah Connor, and the now-obsolete ageing model of T-800 Terminator the original killer robot in the first movie (1984).

We all know Tony Stark as the man of advanced technology and when it comes to artificial intelligence, Stark has nothing short of state-of-the-art technology in Marvels cinematic universe. One such artificial intelligence was the Even Dead, Im The Hero (E.D.I.T.H.) which we witnessed in the 2019 movie Spider-Man: Far From Home. EDITH is an augmented reality security defence and artificial tactical intelligence system created by Tony Stark and was given to Peter Parker following Starks death. It is encompassed in a pair of sunglasses and gives its users access to Stark Industries global satellite network along with an array of missiles and drones.

I Am Mother is a post-apocalyptic movie which was released in 2019. The films plot is focused on a mother-daughter relationship where the mother is a robot designed to repopulate Earth. The robot mother takes care of her human child known as daughter who was born with artificial gestation. The duo stays in a secure bunker alone until another human woman arrives there. The daughter now faces a predicament of whom to trust- her robot mother or a fellow human who is asking the daughter to come with her.

Wandering Earth is another 2019 Chinese post-apocalyptic film with a plot involving Earths imminent crash into another planet and a group of family members and soldiers efforts to save it. The films artificial intelligence character is OSS, a computer system which was programmed to warn people in the earth space station. A significant subplot of the film is focused on protagonist Liu Peiqiangs struggle with MOSS which forced the space station to go into low energy mode during the crash as per its programming from the United Earth Government. In the end, Liu Peiqiang resists and ultimately sets MOSS on fire to help save the Earth.

James Camerons futuristic action epic for 2019 Alita: Battle Angel is a sci-fi action film which depicts the human civilization in an extremely advanced stage of transhumanism. The movie describes the dystopian future where robots and autonomous systems are extremely powerful. To elaborate, in one of the initial scenes of the movie, Ido attaches a cyborg body to a human brain he found (from another cyborg) and names her Alita after his deceased daughter, which is an epitome of advancements in AI and robotics.

Jexi is the only Hollywood rom-com movie depicting artificial intelligence in 2019. The movie features an AI-based operating system called Jexi with recognizable human behaviour and reminds the audience of the previously acclaimed film Her, which was released in 2014. But unlike Her, the movie goes the other way around depicting how the AI system becomes emotionally attached to its socially-awkward owner, Phil. The biggest shock of the comedy film is when Jexi the AI which lives inside Phils cellphone acts to control his life and even chases him angrily using a self-driving car.

Hi, AI is a German documentary which was released in early 2019. The documentary was based on Chucks relationship with Harmony an advanced humanoid robot. The films depiction of artificial intelligence is in sharp contrast with other fictional movies on AI. The documentary also depicts that even though human research is moving in the direction of creating advanced robots, interactions with robots still dont have the same depth as human conversations. The film won the Max Ophls Prize for best documentary for the year.

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Vishal Chawla is a senior tech journalist at Analytics India Magazine (AIM) and writes on the latest in the world of analytics, AI and other emerging technologies. Previously, he was a senior correspondent for IDG CIO and ComputerWorld. Write to him at vishal.chawla@analyticsindiamag.com

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Top Movies Of 2019 That Depicted Artificial Intelligence (AI) - Analytics India Magazine

Twentieth and twenty-first-century fiction has had a fascination with AI, and that fascination, of course, extends to movies. There are all sorts of AI programs in movies. With this ranking of AI in cinema, you can learn a little more about movie AI with typical adult intelligence.

Maria MetropolisMetropolis was released in 1927, and thats one of the reasons that its so interesting even to this day. As a robotic replica of another individual, Marias robotic double has the ability to process language, navigate itself, and even overthrow a whole city.

MU-TH-UR 6000 AlienAs an artificial intelligence mainframe, MU-TH-UR 6000, often referred to as Mother, was able to operate the main ships background systems with no human interaction necessary. Still, its less a character and more a database.

Replicants Blade RunnerReplicants are an important part of the Blade Runner films theyre stronger, smarter, and faster than humans, and have false human-like memories. That means in most circumstances, they behave just like their flesh-and-blood adult counterparts.

KITT Knight RiderIronically, KITT was developed after the executives had a difficult time getting good actors to play physical parts in Knight Rider. The car became a permanent fixture, sporting self-driving capabilities and an adult personality, complete with a fragile ego.

Bishop AlienAs viewers learn when it demonstrates its high-stakes knife trick, Bishop is able to move at near lightning speed with incredible accuracy. But although it can physically perform at levels above an ordinary human, it only learns human behaviours.

Evil Bill and Ted Bill & Teds Bogus JourneyThis movie may be a comedy, but the evil Bill and Ted robots are no joke. In fact, they actually murder the real Bill and Ted. But these evil doppelgangers eventually prove to be no match for the good Bill and Teds robotic bodyguards.

Agents The MatrixThe agents in The Matrix are comprised of software in a humans body. Although this allows them to do incredible feats like rewriting aspects of the world in which humans live, they still work at a similar level as other adults.

Bender FuturamaSure, Benders comic relief, but hes also an essential part of the world that Futurama builds for its viewers. He can disassemble body parts and has multiple processors. Still, he functions as basically another adult in the Futurama party.

Spider Robots Minority ReportIn Minority Report, PreCrime uses arachnid-like robots to find people with audio, visual, and thermal scans, and then to identify them with eye scans. But despite this advanced location technology, theyre still marginally controlled by humans behind the scenes.

Connecticut Housewives The Stepford WivesBased on a 1970 novel about men recreating their wives as docile androids, the housewives in The Stepford Wives arent really good or evil. But they are intentionally made to be as similar to a typical human as possible.

TARS InterstellarOne of the most interesting interactions in Interstellar is when the TARS makes one too many jokes about enslaving the humans inside itself, after which a crew member asks it to tone down its humour. Thats very reflective of how many viewers feel about real-life AI.

Ava Ex MachinaAva looks very obviously mechanic, but part of the storys theme centres around how good she is at behaving like a human. Though she has immensely strong mechanical capacities, shes ultimately a very human-like character.

AI is always growing and changing, both in real life and in movies and television. These adult-like AI systems offer both an interesting character choice and a peek into the world of real AI.

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Artificial Intelligence at the movies - CineVue

IIT Hyderabad will also assist Telangana State in developing a strategy for artificial intelligence.

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad is going to collaborate with the Government of Telangana for research on artificial intelligence. The institute is partnering with the Information Technology, Electronics and Communication (ITE&C) Department, Government of Telangana, for building/identifying quality datasets, along with third parties such as the industry.

They will also work on education and training to prepare and deliver content and curriculum on AI courses to be delivered to college students along with industry participants.

The MoU was signed by BS Murty, Director, IIT Hyderabad, and Jayesh Ranjan, IAS, Principal Secretary to Government of Telangana, Departments of Information Technology (IT) and Industries and Commerce (I&C) during an event held on January 2 as part of '2020: Declaring Telangana's Year of AI' initiative. Several other MoUs with other organizations were also signed by the Government of Telangana during this occasion.

The Telangana government declared 2020 as the 'Year of Artificial Intelligence' with the objective of promoting its use in various sectors ranging from urban transportation and healthcare to agriculture and others. The ITE&C Department aims to develop the ecosystem for the industry and to leverage emerging technologies for improving service delivery as part of this collaboration.

IIT Hyderabad will also assist the Telangana State in developing a strategy for AI/HPC (Artificial Intelligence / High-Performance Computing) infrastructure for various state needs and provide technology mentorship to identified partners for exploring and building AI PoCs (Point of Contacts).

The Telangana State Information Technology, Electronics and Communication Department's (ITE&C Department) is a Telangana Government department with a mandate to promote the use of Information Technology (IT) and act as a promoter/facilitator in the field of Information Technology in the state and build an IT driven continuum of Government services.

The vision of the ITE&C department is to leverage IT not only for effective and efficient governance, but also for sustainable economic development and inclusive social development. Its mission is to facilitate collaborative and innovative IT solutions, and to plan for the future growth while protecting and enhancing the quality of life.

Read: IIT Hyderabad researcher finds people from rural Bihar migrate to urban areas but do not settle

Also read: IIT Hyderabad researchers unravel working of protein that repairs damaged DNA

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IIT Hyderabad to collaborate with Telangana government on artificial intelligence - India Today

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Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Agriculture Market- Qualitative Analysis, Key Manufacturers, Advance Technology Research, Innovation in...

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Global Industrial Artificial Intelligence Market 2019 Research by Business Analysis, Growth Strategy and Industry Development to 2024 - Food &...

We at Loop were wondering what the most popular new years resolutions are for 2020, so we decided to consult with the real brains behind public thinking: artificial intelligence.

Polly is artificial intelligence patented by market research firm Advanced Symbolics Inc. that manipulates publicly available online information to create representative samples of any population or target audience. The following list is based on Pollys sample of 274,779 people and their New Year's Resolutions or the past four years.

Here, according to Polly, are the 10 top New Year's resolutions for 2020:

1. Actually doing my New Year's resolution

2. Trying something new

3. Eat more of my favourite foods

4. Lose weight/diet

5. Go to the gym

6. Be happier/better mental health

7. Be more healthy

8. Be a better person

9. Upgrade my technology

10. Staying motivated

Continued here:

Top 10 New Years Resolutions according to Artificial Intelligence - Loop News St. Lucia

By Vivek Wadhwa

AI has the potential to be as transformative to the world as electricity, by helping us understand the patterns of information around us. But it is not close to living up to the hype. The super-intelligent machines and runaway AI that we fear are far from reality; what we have today is a rudimentary technology that requires lots of training. Whats more, the phrase artificial intelligence might be a misnomer because human intelligence and spirit amount to much more than what bits and bytes can encapsulate.

I encourage readers to go back to the ancient wisdoms of their faith to understand the role of the soul and the deeper self. This is what shapes our consciousness and makes us human, what we are always striving to evolve and perfect. Can this be uploaded to the cloud or duplicated with computer algorithms? I dont think so.

What about the predictions that AI will enable machines to have human-like feeling and emotions? This, too, is hype. Love, hate and compassion arent things that can be codified. Not to say that a machine interaction cant seem human we humans are gullible, after all. According to Amazon, more than 1 million people had asked their Alexa-powered devices to marry them in 2017 alone. I doubt those marriages, should Alexa agree, would last very long!

Todays AI systems do their best to replicate the functioning of the human brains neural networks, but their emulations are very limited. They use a technique called Deep Learning. After you tell a machine exactly what you want it to learn and provide it with clearly labelled examples, it analyses the patterns in those data and stores them for future application. The accuracy of its patterns depends on completeness of data. So the more examples you give it, the more useful it becomes.

Herein lies a problem, though an AI system is only as good as the data it receives. It is able to interpret them only within the narrow confines of the supplied context. It doesnt understand what it has analysed so it is unable to apply its analysis to other scenarios. And it cant distinguish causation from correlation.

AI shines in performing tasks that match patterns in order to obtain objective outcomes. Examples of what it does well include playing chess, driving a car on a street and identifying a cancer lesion in a mammogram. These systems can be incredibly helpful extensions of how humans work, and with more data, the systems will keep improving. Although an AI machine may best a human radiologist in spotting cancer, it will not, for many years to come, replicate the wisdom and perspective of the best human radiologists. And it wont be able to empathise with a patient in the way that a doctor does. This is where AI presents its greatest risk and what we really need to worry about use of AI in tasks that may have objective outcomes but incorporate what we would normally call judgement. Some such tasks exercise much influence over peoples lives. Granting a loan, admitting a student to a university, or deciding whether children should be separated from their birth parents due to suspicions of abuse falls into this category. Such judgements are highly susceptible to human biases but they are biases that only humans themselves have the ability to detect.

And AI throws up many ethical dilemmas around how we use technology. It is being used to create killing machines for the battlefield with drones which can recognise faces and attack people. China is using AI for mass surveillance, and wielding its analytical capabilities to assign each citizen a social credit based on their behaviour. In America, AI is mostly being built by white people and Asians. So, it amplifies their inbuilt biases and misreads African Americans. It can lead to outcomes that prefer males over females for jobs and give men higher loan amount than women. One of the biggest problems we are facing with Facebook and YouTube is that you are shown more and more of the same thing based on your past views, which creates filter bubbles and a hotbed of misinformation. Thats all thanks to AI.

Rather than worrying about super-intelligence, we need to focus on the ethical issues about how we should be using this technology. Should it be used to recognise the faces of students who are protesting against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act? Should India install cameras and systems like China has? These are the types of questions the country needs to be asking.The writer is a distinguished fellow and professor, Carnegie Mellon Universitys College of Engineering, Silicon Valley.

This story is part of the 'Tech that can change your life in the next decade' package.

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Quantum leap: Why we first need to focus on the ethical challenges of artificial intelligence - Economic Times

Each time any of us uses a tool, such as Gmail, where theres a powerful agent to help correct our spellings, and suggest sentence endings, theres an AI machine in the background, steadily getting better and better at understanding language. Sentence structures are parsed, word choices understood, idioms recognised.

That exact capability could, in 2020, grant the ability to speak with other large animals. Really. Maybe even faster than brain-computer interfaces will take the stage.

Our AI-enhanced abilities to decode languages have reached a point where they could start to parse languages not spoken by anyone alive. Recently, researchers from MIT and Google applied these abilities to ancient scripts Linear B and Ugaritic (a precursor of Hebrew) with reasonable success (no luck so far with the older, and as-yet undeciphered Linear A).

First, word-to-word relations for a specific language are mapped, using vast databases of text. The system searches texts to see how often each word appears next to every other word. This pattern of appearances is a unique signature that defines the word in a multidimensional parameter space. Researchers estimate that languages all languages can be best described as having 600 independent dimensions of relationships, where each word-word relationship can be seen as a vector in this space. This vector acts as a powerful constraint on how the word can appear in any translation the machine comes up with.

These vectors obey some simple rules. For example: king man + woman = queen. Any sentence can be described as a set of vectors that in turn form a trajectory through the word space.

These relationships persist even when a language has multiple words for related concepts: the famed near-100 words Inuits have for snow will all be in similar dimensional spaces each time someone talks about snow, it will always be in a similar linguistic context.

Take a leap. Imagine that whale songs are communicating in a word-like structure. Then, what if the relationships that whales have for their ideas have dimensional relationships similar to those we see in human languages?

That means we should be able to map key elements of whale songs to dimensional spaces, and thus to comprehend what whales are talking about and perhaps to talk to and hear back from them. Remember: some whales have brain volumes three times larger than adult humans, larger cortical areas, and lower but comparable neuron counts. African elephants have three times as many neurons as humans, but in very different distributions than are seen in our own brains. It seems reasonable to assume that the other large mammals on earth, at the very least, have thinking and communicating and learning attributes we can connect with.

What are the key elements of whale songs and of elephant sounds? Phonemes? Blocks of repeated sounds? Tones? Nobody knows, yet, but at least the journey has begun. Projects such as the Earth Species Project aim to put the tools of our time particularly artificial intelligence, and all that we have learned in using computers to understand our own languages to the awesome task of hearing what animals have to say to each other, and to us.

There is something deeply comforting to think that AI language tools could do something so beautiful, going beyond completing our emails and putting ads in front of us, to knitting together all thinking species. That, we perhaps can all agree, is a better and perhaps nearer-term ideal to reach than brain-computer communications. The beauty of communicating with them will then be joined to the market ideal of talking to our pet dogs. (Cats may remain beyond reach.)

Mary Lou Jepsen is the founder and CEO of Openwater. John Ryan, her husband, is a former partner at Monitor Group

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Artificial intelligence is helping us talk to animals (yes, really) - Wired.co.uk

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the face of computing, making its mark on everything from cybersecurity to modern medicine. There's no sign of a slowdown, with analysts predicting that by 2022 worldwide spending within the AI industry will soar to US$79.2 billion. There have been some incredible breakthroughs over the past decade, with some of the most significant highlighted below. 2010 Deep learning advances

While the foundations for deep learning sate to the 1980s, researchers George Dahl and Abdel-rahman Mohamed broke new ground in 2010 when they developed advanced deep learningspeech recognition tools. This paved the way for more deep learning advances focusing on anything from facial recognition to machine translation.

In 2011 a question-answering computer system developed by IBM's DeepQA project made headlines when it outplayed Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, two of the most successful contestants to take part in the popular American game show Jeopardy!

Artificial intelligence took another stride forward in October 2011 when Apple launched Siri, it's signature personal assistant. From reciting the weather forecast to plotting a route on Google Maps, Siri is now used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

In 2015 Google successfully pulled off "the world's first fully driverless ride on public roads" using its Waymomodel. The passenger was a blind American man called Steve Mahan, a close friend of principal engineer Nathaniel Fairfield.

Perceptions of artificial intelligence were challenged in 2018 when a set of original paintings created by machines using Generative Adversarial Network technology sold for more than US$400,000 at a Christies auction. The portrait was created using a two-part algorithm that analysed image data from 15,000 portraits dating from the 14th to 20th centuries.

Artificial intelligence won more headlines in 2019 when Google launched an AI system that can detect lung cancer with more accuracy than human radiologists. The system is powered by deep learning and uses an algorithm to analyse computed tomography (CT) scans and predict the risk of developing the disease.

Want to know more about the most significant scientific breakthroughs of 2019? Introducing the latest technology from robotics companyAndrew Alliance, 'Addressing the challenges of the reproducibility crisis with improved automation and protocol sharing' spotlights advanced laboratory automation and software infiltrating labs around the world.

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Science in the 2010s: Artificial Intelligence - Labmate Online