Category Physics

University at Buffalo computer scientist and deepfake expert Siwei Lyu created a photo collage out of the hundreds of faces that his detection algorithms had incorrectly classified as fake—and the new composition clearly had a predominantly) darker skin tone.

“A detection algorithm’s accuracy should be statistically independent from factors like race,” Lyu says, “but obviously many existing algorithms, including our own, inherit a bias.”

Lyu, Ph.D...

A Northwestern University-led team of researchers has developed a new fuel cell that harvests energy from microbes living in dirt.

About the size of a standard paperback book, the completely soil-powered technology could fuel underground sensors used in precision agriculture and green infrastructure. This potentially could offer a sustainable, renewable alternative to batteries, which hold toxic, flammable chemicals that leach into the ground, are fraught with conflict-filled supply chains and contribute to the ever-growing problem of electronic waste.

To test the new fuel cell, the researchers used it to power sensors measuring soil moisture and detecting touch, a capability that could be valuable for track...

A new, potentially revolutionary artificial intelligence framework called “Blackout Diffusion” generates images from a completely empty picture, meaning that, unlike other generative diffusion models, the machine-learning algorithm does not require initiating a “random seed” to get started.

Blackout Diffusion, presented at the recent International Conference on Machine Learning, generates samples that are comparable to the current diffusion models, such as DALL-E or Midjourney but require fewer computational resources than these models.

“Generative modeling is bringing in the next industrial revolution with its capability to assist many tasks, such as generation of software code, legal documents, and even art,” said Javier Santos, an AI researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory a...

From “Law and Order” to “CSI,” not to mention real life, investigators have used fingerprints as the gold standard for linking criminals to a crime. But if a perpetrator leaves prints from different fingers in two different crime scenes, these scenes are very difficult to link, and the trace can go cold.

It’s a well-accepted fact in the forensics community that fingerprints of different fingers of the same person—”intra-person fingerprints”—are unique and, therefore, unmatchable.

A team led by Columbia Engineering undergraduate senior Gabe Guo challenged this widely held presumption...