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News of the week selected by Impactscool – May 28th, 2018

28 May 2018 | Written by La redazione

The most important news on technology and the future, selected from all over the web for Impactscool’s readers

 

 

Facial recognition isn’t working as well as London Police hoped

The facial recognition system adopted by the London Metropolitan Police has not achieved the results they hoped for: the system has a 98% false positive rate and, to date, it only correctly identified two people, neither of whom were criminals, figures published last week revealed. The data in question were reported by the campaign group Big Brother Watch, which underlines how facial recognition systems can violate human rights and promote abuse of power. This is why activists are demanding that law enforcement agencies stop using the system immediately. Government minister Susan Williams explained that the government intends to create a board comprised of the information, biometrics and surveillance camera commissioners to oversee the tech.

 

LipNet, the new AI system that could help deaf people

The University of Oxford’s Department of Computer Science developed LipNet, a new artificial intelligence system that can lip-read and, it would seem, can do so much better than humans. LipNet was created using a data set called GRID, which is made up of short videos of people reading simple sentences with the same syntactic structure. When tested, the system was able to identify 93.4% of words correctly. Human lip-reading volunteers asked to perform the same tasks identified only 52.3% of words correctly. Although the work for developers of LipNet is not concluded yet, according to Jack Clark of OpenAI “A similar system could be used to help deaf people to understand the conversations that take place around them or to increase other systems of artificial intelligence that can listen to audio and video and quickly generate accurate captions”.

 

Some scientists (perhaps) understood how to transplant memories

A group of researchers from UCLA, the University of California-Los Angeles, claims to have transferred the memories of one living being to another: the study, published in the online scientific journal eNeuro, explains that the experiment was made on some specimens of Aplysia californica, a sea snail often used for research on memory because of its very simple nervous system. According to David Glanzman, who coordinated the project, the transplantation of some nerve cells from the brain of one of these molluscs to another allowed to remind the second experiences that it never lived. Although the discovery has been met with a lot of skepticism by the scientific community, the UCLA study will help to better understand the functioning of the memory from the physiological point of view.

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