US THEM STUPID EVIL axis filled in with the different AI types

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On 22 November I presented at BSides Aberystwyth – my title was “AI powered scammers: Looking at four some new-ish types of threat” and the talk was a summary of my thinking about cybersecurity and AI. I teach cybersecurity and I have spent most of my adult life working in AI so I have a few opinions about both. This blog post is a summary of the arguments in my talk, in case anyone’s interested. Firstly, I think it’s important to set out some ‘ground rules’ when discussing this kind of thing and I am very cautious about attributing agency where there may be none.Read More →

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The 11th BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was held just before Easter, at the University of Sheffield with support from Sheffield Hallam University. Regular followers of this blog will know that the day has a well-defined format, with student posters, speakers, a panel on computing careers, and a social at the end of the day. We also have a cake sponsor, so we also have too much cake. This was the first colloquium since I started the conference in 2008 where I wasn’t in some sense the conference chair. Cardiff, in 2010, was chaired by Miki Burgess (and I didn’t even make it to the event), butRead More →

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My friend Cate Huston has written a post about tech conferences, and the thorny question of who pays for speakers to attend. You can find it here: Uncomfortable Conversations About Money. I was going to write a comment on it, but then realised I had a bit more to say, so here’s a post instead. I’ve only spoken at a couple of “mainstream” tech conferences, and they’ve either been local (so travel wasn’t an issue) or they’ve paid my travel. Which is nice. It is also a very unusual experience for me — very very rarely do academic computing conferences pay your travel, fee, orRead More →

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In 2015, an IEEE sponsored conference is going to have an ex-playboy centrefold as their guest star. Yes, you read that right. The committee of ICIP – coincidentally, almost entirely made up of guys – think it’s a good idea to have Lena do the prizegiving. Who’s Lena? In a nutshell: Back in 1973, some people wanted a test image One of them had bought some porn to work (wat?) So they said (hur hur) let’s scan that (wat?) And then released it to the “vision community” who’ve been using it ever since… (If you want to find out more about the background to Lena,Read More →