Author: The Conversation

Social media and messaging apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Messenger are increasingly used to buy and sell drugs in many countries. This trend is particularly popular among young people, who are often involved in trading recreational drugs such as cannabis and MDMA. These deals are generally small-scale, which means people believe the risks of getting caught and facing legal action are low. However, our new research shows how drug-linked “digital trace data” may lead to unexpected consequences in the future. Young people could see their data sold and used against them by job recruiters, insurance companies and others for decades to…

There’s a growing global movement to ensure that researchers can get access to the huge quantity of data assembled and exploited by digital operators. Momentum is mounting because it’s becoming increasingly evident that data is power. And access to it is the key – for a host of reasons, not least transparency, human rights and electoral integrity. But there’s currently a massive international asymmetry in access to data. In the European Union and the US, some progress has been made. For example, EU researchers studying risks have a legal right of access. In the US too, some companies have taken…

Google has rolled out its latest experimental search feature on Chrome, Firefox and the Google app browser to hundreds of millions of users. “AI Overviews” saves you clicking on links by using generative AI — the same technology that powers rival product ChatGPT — to provide summaries of the search results. Ask “how to keep bananas fresh for longer” and it uses AI to generate a useful summary of tips such as storing them in a cool, dark place and away from other fruits like apples. But ask it a left-field question and the results can be disastrous, or even dangerous. Google…

Over 2,000 years ago, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle came up with a way to build arguments. He called this “rhetoric” and described how logic in the text of an argument or speech, the needs and understanding of the audience, and the authority of the speaker could be used as strategies to persuade others. Rather than just relying on logic in the argument or trust in the speaker, politicians and actors have long recognised that there is nothing as effective as using emotion to win the hearts and, consequently, minds of an audience. With the launch of GTP-4o last week, we may have just…

On 8 January 2024, NASA launched Peregrine Mission One, which carried capsules to the Moon containing human remains and DNA samples. The goal was to deposit human remains on the lunar surface, and to release the content of the capsules in space. Some of the only firm opposition to the mission came from the Native American Navajo Nation. According to their culture, such activity is a desecration of the Moon. NASA’s response was telling: they were unable to check the payloads’ contents, as they belonged to a private company. Private companies depositing human remains in space is not a new idea: in…

Suburban residents often face challenges receiving reliable and accessible bus transit — riders often complain about infrequent schedules and long waiting times. Often, transit agencies are unable to provide additional buses because population density in such areas is usually low. On-demand transit (ODT) is an innovative transportation approach that enhances the accessibility and quality of service while reducing operating costs. Despite the rapid growth of ODT services in various cities across Canada and the United States, the mechanism of placing ride-requests with many ODT service providers remains reliant on mobile applications, telephone calls or websites. But privacy concerns may lead passengers to be…

Smartphone cameras have significantly improved in recent years. Computational photography and AI allow these devices to capture stunning images that can surpass what we see with the naked eye. Photos of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, provide one particularly striking example. If you saw the northern lights during the geomagnetic storms in May 2024, you might have noticed that your smartphone made the photos look even more vivid than reality. Auroras, known as the northern lights (aurora borealis) or southern lights (aurora australis) occur when the solar wind disturbs Earth’s magnetic field. They appear as streaks of colour across the sky. What makes…

Machine learning has pushed the boundaries in several fields, including personalized medicine, self-driving cars and customized advertisements. Research has shown, however, that these systems memorize aspects of the data they were trained with in order to learn patterns, which raises concerns for privacy. In statistics and machine learning, the goal is to learn from past data to make new predictions or inferences about future data. In order to achieve this goal, the statistician or machine learning expert selects a model to capture the suspected patterns in the data. A model applies a simplifying structure to the data, which makes it possible to learn patterns and make…

There are three ways to look for evidence of alien technological civilisations. One is to look out for deliberate attempts by them to communicate their existence, for example, through radio broadcasts. Another is to look for evidence of them visiting the Solar System. A third option is to look for signs of large-scale engineering projects in space. A team of astronomers have taken the third approach by searching through recent astronomical survey data to identify seven candidates for alien megastructures, known as Dyson spheres, “deserving of further analysis”. This is a detailed study looking for “oddballs” among stars – objects that might be…

Content created with the help of generative AI is popping up everywhere, and it’s worrying some artists and content creators. They’re concerned that their intellectual property may be at risk if generative AI tools have been built by scraping the internet for data and images, regardless of whether they had permission to do so. Now some artists and content creators are trying novel ways to sabotage AI to prevent it from scraping their work, through what’s called data poisoning. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak with a computer scientist who explains how data poisoning works and what impact…