Author: The Conversation

“Look away now if you don’t want to know the score”, they say on the news before reporting the football results. But imagine if your television knew which teams you follow, which results to hold back – or knew to bypass football altogether and tell you about something else. With media personalisation, which we’re working on with the BBC, that sort of thing is becoming possible. Significant challenges remain for adapting live production, but there are other aspects to media personalisation which are closer. Indeed, media personalisation already exists to an extent. It’s like your BBC iPlayer or Netflix suggesting content…

While we have been focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine mandates and related protests for much of the past two years, a wave of financial fraud has spread rapidly across Canada and around the world. While not a deadly respiratory virus, this new approach to scamming has affected thousands of individuals globally, with victims defrauded of a record US$14 billion in 2021. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre reported nearly $100 million stolen from victims in Canada alone in 2020 and 2021. Emotional manipulation The pig-butchering, or “sha zhu pan,” scam is a highly sophisticated form of romance and cryptocurrency investment scam. Scammers — mainly working for…

3D printed concrete may lead to a shift in architecture and construction. Because it can be used to produce new shapes and forms that current technologies struggle with, it may change the centuries-old processes and procedures that are still used to construct buildings, resulting in lower costs and saved time. However, concrete has a significant environmental impact. Vast quantities of natural sand are currently used to meet the world’s insatiable appetite for concrete, at great cost to the environment. In general, the construction industry struggles with sustainability. It creates around 35% of all landfill waste globally. Our new research suggests a way to…

The world’s five leading tech companies – Google (now Alphabet), Apple, Facebook (now Meta), Amazon and Microsoft – have taken steps to impose significant and (mainly) voluntary sanctions on Russia, in response to its invasion of Ukraine. But the decisions didn’t come unprompted. Ukraine has lobbied the major tech companies in the same way it sought assistance from the European Union, NATO and the US government. Facing the largest military action in Europe since the second world war, Ukraine appealed directly to big tech companies as though they were nation states. It’s a reminder that in today’s world, these giants…

You probably know what a crystal is. We’ve all seen one, held one in our hands, and even tasted one on our tongue (for instance sodium chloride crystals, also known as “salt”). But what on earth is a “time crystal”, if not a sci-fi gadget in the latest Marvel movie? Why do we need a quantum computer to make one? And what is a quantum computer anyway? Bits and qubits Let’s start there. Computers are all around us. Some are compact, portable and primarily used to stream Netflix, while others fill entire rooms and simulate complex phenomena like the weather…

An ill newborn’s life is hanging by a thread, and only the right diagnosis will afford her the treatment that may save her life. A cancer patient’s therapy can be tailored to the specific type of tumour they have, if only the doctors know what the molecular targets are that will make the drugs effective for that patient. Parents may finally get a name for the syndrome that their child has been living with. All of this can be achieved by sequencing the genome of a patient. A genome is a set of genetic instructions that can be deduced through examining blood or saliva. When scientists sequence genomes,…

Nasa has announced plans for the International Space Station (ISS) to be officially decommissioned in 2031. After dozens of launches since 1998 got the station up and into orbit, bringing it down will be a feat of its own – the risks are serious if things go wrong. Nasa’s plans for the decommissioning operation will culminate in a fiery plunge into the middle of the Pacific Ocean – a location called Point Nemo, also known as the “spacecraft graveyard”, the furthest point from all civilisation. Finding Point Nemo will be the final stop in a complex and multi-staged mission to transition…

Internet use has increased significantly over recent years, and through the pandemic, we have become even more dependent on online services. To meet this demand, the UK government and service providers have fast tracked the expansion of the high-speed internet infrastructure known as “fibre to the premises” (FTTP). FTTP connects homes and offices directly to fibre optic cables which, using light pulses as signals, can carry data very quickly. This compares to traditional broadband internet, which relies on “fibre to the cabinet”, meaning the high-speed fibre optic connection is delivered to local cabinets. From there, electromagnetic signals carry the data along copper wires into…

In a recent BBC news investigation, a reporter posing as a 13-year-old girl in a virtual reality (VR) app was exposed to sexual content, racist insults and a rape threat. The app in question, VRChat, is an interactive platform where users can create “rooms” within which people interact (in the form of avatars). The reporter saw avatars simulating sex, and was propositioned by numerous men. The results of this investigation have led to warnings from child safety charities including the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) about the dangers children face in the metaverse. The metaverse refers to a…

The average business receives 10,000 alerts every day from the various software tools it uses to monitor for intruders, malware and other threats. Cybersecurity staff often find themselves inundated with data they need to sort through to manage their cyber defenses. The stakes are high. Cyberattacks are increasing and affect thousands of organizations and millions of people in the U.S. alone. These challenges underscore the need for better ways to stem the tide of cyber-breaches. Artificial intelligence is particularly well suited to finding patterns in huge amounts of data. As a researcher who studies AI and cybersecurity, I find that AI is emerging as a much-needed tool…