Artificial intelligence just made guessing your password a whole lot easier | Science | AAAS

Last week, the credit reporting agency Equifax announced that malicious hackers had leaked the personal information of 143 million people in their system. That’s reason for concern, of course, but if a hacker wants to access your online data by simply guessing your password, you’re probably toast in less than an hour. Now, there’s more bad news: Scientists have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to create a program that, combined with existing tools, figured more than a quarter of the passwords from a set of more than 43 million LinkedIn profiles. Yet the researchers say the technology may also be used to beat baddies at their own game.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/artificial-intelligence-just-made-guessing-your-password-whole-lot-easier

How We Won Gold in the Cyborg Olympics’ Brain Race

In October 2016, inside a sold-out arena in Zurich, a man named Numa Poujouly steered his wheelchair up to the central podium. As the Swiss national anthem played, organizers of the world’s first cyborg Olympics hung a gold medal around Poujouly’s neck. The 30-year-old, who became paralyzed after a bicycle accident in his teens, had triumphed in the tournament’s most futuristic event: a video-game-like race in which the competitors controlled their speeding avatars with just their minds.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/how-we-won-gold-in-the-cyborg-olympics-brain-race?utm_source=TechAlert&bt_alias=eyJ1c2VySWQiOiAiZjY3YTc2MjEtZTY0MS00N2M3LThmMTgtMzBkNDQ4NjAxMzhmIn0%3D&utm_medium=BTtrigger&utm_campaign=TAWinback&utm_content=blast1

Artificial intelligence pioneer says we need to start over – Axios

In 1986, Geoffrey Hinton co-authored a paper that, four decades later, is central to the explosion of artificial intelligence. But Hinton says his breakthrough method should be dispensed with, and a new path to AI found.

Speaking with Axios on the sidelines of an AI conference in Toronto on Wednesday, Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and a Google researcher, said he is now “deeply suspicious” of back-propagation, the workhorse method that underlies most of the advances we are seeing in the AI field today, including the capacity to sort through photos and talk to Siri. “My view is throw it all away and start again,” he said.

https://www.axios.com/ai-pioneer-advocates-starting-over-2485537027.html