Author: The Conversation

Lasers were created 60 years ago this year, when three different laser devices were unveiled by independent laboratories in the United States. A few years later, one of these inventors called the unusual light sources “a solution seeking a problem”. Today, the laser has been applied to countless problems in science, medicine and everyday technologies, with a market of more than US$11 billion per year. A crucial difference between lasers and traditional sources of light is the “temporal coherence” of the light beam, or just coherence. The coherence of a beam can be measured by a number C, which takes into account the fact light…

If the coronavirus pandemic has shown us anything, it’s just how much people depend on a few large technology companies. The use of mobile apps and web services has increased significantly in recent years, as people adapted to new ways to stay in touch. At the same time though, antitrust regulators in the US and Europe have been taking a much closer look as part of a growing desire to investigate the dominance of some large players in the technology market. One of the issues is the amount of control that platform operators have over significant parts of the economy, and their ability to act as “gatekeepers” to…

Imagine that you upload a photograph of yourself on holiday to your favourite social media platform. You are dressed in a swimsuit and you are smiling at the camera. Now imagine later coming across this image while scrolling through your newsfeed. You recognise your face and the background and it looks like your photo, but in this image, you are completely naked. There are some inconsistencies – you do not recognise the body in the image – but it is convincing nonetheless. This might sound like a scene from a Black Mirror episode but is in fact a real possibility…

Hashtags are a pervasive feature of social media posts and used widely in search engines. Anything with the intent of attracting a wide audience usually comes with a memorable hashtag — #MeToo, #FreeHongKong, #LoveWins, #BlackLivesMatter, #COVID19 and #SupremeCourt are just some examples. First conceived in 2007 by blogger and open source advocate Chris Messina on Twitter, hashtags are now also escaping from social media contexts and appearing regularly in advertising and protest signs, and even in spoken language. But are hashtags words? If there is one thing linguists ought to know, it’s words. But when it comes to hashtags, the definition is not straightforward. In…

There has been increasing interest in using health “big data” for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As such, it is important to understand which uses of health data are supported by the public and which are not. Previous studies have shown that members of the public see health data as an asset that should be used for research provided there is a public benefit and concerns about privacy, commercial motives and other risks are addressed. However, this general support may not extend to health AI research because of concerns about the potential for AI-related job losses and other negative impacts. Our research team conducted six…

In the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “The Measure of a Man,” Data, an android crew member of the Enterprise, is to be dismantled for research purposes unless Captain Picard can argue that Data deserves the same rights as a human being. Naturally the question arises: What is the basis upon which something has rights? What gives an entity moral standing? The philosopher Peter Singer argues that creatures that can feel pain or suffer have a claim to moral standing. He argues that nonhuman animals have moral standing, since they can feel pain and suffer. Limiting it to people would be a form of speciesism, something akin…

On September 9 2020, a woman died during a cyber-attack on a hospital in Düsseldorf, Germany. The woman was in a critical condition and about to be treated when hackers disabled the computer systems of the hospital. Unable to avert the attack, medical staff had to transfer the woman to another hospital, but the help came too late and the woman died. This incident was the first reported case of death after a cyber-attack and shows that such attacks are not just a threat to our data anymore, but also to our lives. In fact, the situation is urgent. We know…

Twitter over the weekend “tagged” as manipulated a video showing US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden supposedly forgetting which state he’s in while addressing a crowd. Biden’s “hello Minnesota” greeting contrasted with prominent signage reading “Tampa, Florida” and “Text FL to 30330”. The Associated Press’s fact check confirmed the signs were added digitally and the original footage was indeed from a Minnesota rally. But by the time the misleading video was removed it already had more than one million views, The Guardian reports. https://twitter.com/donie/status/1323048954662182913? If you use social media, the chances are you see (and forward) some of the more than 3.2 billion images and 720,000…

The world of computing is full of buzzwords: AI, supercomputers, machine learning, the cloud, quantum computing and more. One word in particular is used throughout computing – algorithm. In the most general sense, an algorithm is a series of instructions telling a computer how to transform a set of facts about the world into useful information. The facts are data, and the useful information is knowledge for people, instructions for machines or input for yet another algorithm. There are many common examples of algorithms, from sorting sets of numbers to finding routes through maps to displaying information on a screen.…

November 2 marks 20 years since the first residents arrived on the International Space Station (ISS). The orbiting habitat has been continuously occupied ever since. Twenty straight years of life in space makes the ISS the ideal “natural laboratory” to understand how societies function beyond Earth. The ISS is a collaboration between 25 space agencies and organisations. It has hosted 241 crew and a few tourists from 19 countries. This is 43% of all the people who have ever travelled in space. As future missions to the Moon and Mars are planned, it’s important to know what people need to thrive in…