Author: The Conversation

If you think your manager treats you unfairly, the thought might have crossed your mind that replacing said boss with an unbiased machine that rewards performance based on objective data is a path to workplace happiness. But as appealing as that may sound, you’d be wrong. Our review of 45 studies on machines as managers shows we hate being slaves to algorithms (perhaps even more than we hate being slaves to annoying people). Algorithmic management — in which decisions about assigning tasks to workers are automated — is most often associated with the gig economy. Platforms such as Uber were built on…

It’s a well-worn stereotype: the image of an elderly person fiddling with technology that leaves them completely bamboozled. The media often depict older people struggling to use or manage digital technology. While this is often designed to be humorous, it can undermine them as users of technology. And that’s a problem if it turns older people off from trying to engage with digital devices, as it can affect their wellbeing. Older adults are already at a digital disadvantage: 18% of over-65s do not have internet access. Propelled by enforced isolation, older people increasingly turned to technology during the pandemic, but not all were able…

Over the past year, we’ve seen how dramatically misinformation can impact the lives of people, communities and entire countries. In a bid to better understand how misinformation spreads online, Twitter has started an experimental trial in Australia, the United States and South Korea, allowing users to flag content they deem misleading. Users in these countries can now flag tweets as misinformation through the same process by which other harmful content is reported. When reporting a post there is an option to choose “it’s misleading” — which can then be further categorised as related to “politics”, “health” or “something else”. According…

Artificial systems such as homecare robots or driver-assistance technology are becoming more common, and it’s timely to investigate whether people or algorithms are better at reading emotions, particularly given the added challenge brought on by face coverings. In our recent study, we compared how face masks or sunglasses affect our ability to determine different emotions compared with the accuracy of artificial systems. The study used full and partial masks and sunglasses to obscure parts of the face. Author provided We presented images of emotional facial expressions and added two different types of masks — the full mask used by frontline workers and…

We rely on experts all the time. If you need financial advice, you ask an expert. If you are sick, you visit a doctor, and as a juror you may listen to an expert witness. In the future, however, artificial intelligence (AI) might replace many of these people. In forensic science, the expert witness plays a vital role. Lawyers seek them out for their analysis and opinion on specialist evidence. But experts are human, with all their failings, and the role of expert witnesses has frequently been linked to miscarriages of justice. We’ve been investigating the potential for AI to study evidence…

It’s now well known that usernames and passwords aren’t enough to securely access online services. A recent study highlighted more than 80% of all hacking-related breaches happen due to compromised and weak credentials, with three billion username/password combinations stolen in 2016 alone. As such, the implementation of two-factor authentication (2FA) has become a necessity. Generally, 2FA aims to provide an additional layer of security to the relatively vulnerable username/password system. It works too. Figures suggest users who enabled 2FA ended up blocking about 99.9% of automated attacks. But as with any good cybersecurity solution, attackers can quickly come up with ways to…

Vaccine and drug development, artificial intelligence, transport and logistics, climate science — these are all areas that stand to be transformed by the development of a full-scale quantum computer. And there has been explosive growth in quantum computing investment over the past decade. Yet current quantum processors are relatively small in scale, with fewer than 100 qubits — the basic building blocks of a quantum computer. Bits are the smallest unit of information in computing, and the term qubits stems from “quantum bits”. While early quantum processors have been crucial for demonstrating the potential of quantum computing, realising globally significant applications will likely require processors with upwards…

This year the Internet Archive turns 25. It’s best known for its pioneering role in archiving the internet through the Wayback Machine, which allows users to see how websites looked in the past. Increasingly, much of daily life is conducted online. School, work, communication with friends and family, as well as news and images, are accessed through a variety of websites. Information that once was printed, physically mailed or kept in photo albums and notebooks may now be available only online. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed even more interactions to the web. You may not realize portions of the internet are constantly disappearing.…

Imagine what a lawyer does on a given day: researching cases, drafting briefs, advising clients. While technology has been nibbling around the edges of the legal profession for some time, it’s hard to imagine those complex tasks being done by a robot. And it is those complicated, personalized tasks that have led technologists to include lawyers in a broader category of jobs that are considered pretty safe from a future of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. But, as we discovered in a recent research collaboration to analyze legal briefs using a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, lawyers’ jobs are a lot less…

The online retail giant Amazon has moved from our screens to our streets, with the introduction of Amazon grocery and book stores. With this expansion came the introduction of Amazon One – a service that lets customers use their handprint to pay, rather than tapping or swiping a card. According to recent reports, Amazon is now offering promotional credit to users who enroll. In the UK we’re quickly becoming used to biometric-based identification. Many of us use a thumbprint or facial recognition to access our smartphones, authorise payments or cross international borders. Using a biometric (part of your body) rather than a…