Katyanna Quach

America's border cops are considering adding facial-recognition technology to body cameras worn by agents. In a request-for-information document [PDF] – sent to equipment makers, and obtained by The Register on Thursday – the US government's Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) stated it wanted to “obtain information and, or …

Pixel 4 owners can unlock their smartphones with their faces even if they have their eyes closed. That's not good. Google’s Face Unlock feature in the new smartphone uses machine-learning algorithms to recognize your face and grant access to the device's apps and data. The biometric system is designed to ensure that only you …

Google has quietly removed Google Clips, an unsettling AI camera, from its Play Store, along with some other kit. Also missing from the souk is Daydream, a virtual-reality headset, and the first-generation Pixel Buds headphones which were this week superseded by second-gen mini-cans. These vanished items will now join the …

NASA has unveiled two new space suit designs for future astronauts on its Artemis program, a mission to send “the first woman and the next man" to the surface of the Moon by 2024. The main suit worn by the explorers living on a lunar shuttle will be the Orion Crew Survival System. Built with safety in mind, it’s made out of a …

Netizens are scrambling to find or build alternatives to Meetup.com – after the event-organizing app maker indicated it would charge people $2 per-RSVP. Previously, it didn’t cost a single cent to click the tick mark to confirm that you’d like to attend a particular free event organized via Meetup. Earlier this month, Meetup …

Microsoft is rolling out a new feature that, it hopes, will filter out rude words in messages sent from Xbox Live users in a bid to make the gaming platform “a place where everyone can have fun.” “We are introducing a new customizable feature that can automatically filter out offensive language to give you more control over …

Internet celeb Siraj Raval’s reputation continues spiraling downward – after he admitted plagiarizing real scientists' work to produce a paper on neural qubits. Raval – who has 700,000 YouTube subscribers and 70,000 Twitter followers – was last month accused of scamming hundreds of students, who subscribed to his online …

RoundupIt's another Reg summary of recent AI news. UK gov launched a facial recognition system that didn’t work on darker skin: The British government knowingly rolled out a facial detection system that scans passport photos even though it was less accurate on people with darker skin. The Home Office, a department responsible for …

The internet is filled with trolls spewing hate speech, but machine learning algorithms can’t help us clean up the mess. A paper from computer scientists from the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, found that machines were more likely to flag tweets from …

If humans are to go beyond the Moon, they must rely less on ground control and more on AI systems to perform operations such as flying, and conduct scientific experiments more autonomously, according to a NASA paper [PDF] out this week. "Future missions to Mars will require crew and ground to operate independently from Earth- …

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three pioneers in the field of lithium ion batteries, which form the power storage unit of most modern technology. At 97-years-old, John Goodenough, an engineering professor at The University of Texas, is the oldest person to win the Nobel Prize yet. Goodenough is joined by M. …

The US government has blacklisted 28 Chinese companies, including some of the world’s most valuable AI startups, for being complicit in China’s effort to brutally crack down on its Uyghur Muslim population. The majority of China’s Muslim population live in Xinjiang, a Northwestern region in between Kazakhstan and Mongolia. …

Three scientists have won the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of how the early universe evolved after the Big Bang and finding the first exoplanet orbiting a faraway star. One half of the prize, a sweet 4.5 million Swedish krona - about $453k or £370k - goes to James Peebles, 84, a Canadian-born retired cosmology …

Deepfakes - counterfeit content generated by AI algorithms - are on the rise, staining the internet with doctored pornography, fake videos of political leaders, and bot accounts. There are now 14,678 deepfake videos plastered on the net, according to a report [PDF] written by Deeptrace, a startup focused on building software …

Astronomers have discovered 20 new moons orbiting Saturn, meaning the gas giant now has a total of 82 satellites, overtaking Jupiter which has 79 currently identified. The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, the authority on deciding official names and objects in space, announced the findings on Monday. …

RoundupWelcome to this week's machine learning musings. Google has upset city officials by trying to improve its facial recognition technology, and the new TensorFlow 2.0 has been released. Google offered $5 gift vouchers to black homeless people and Atlanta city isn’t happy: Facial recognition datasets are unfairly dominated with …

A neuroprosthetic robotic suit controlled by brain signals has allowed a paralysed man walk again for the first time, according to new research published in The Lancet Neurology. The 28-year-old patient has tetraplegia resulting from a spinal cord injury that stops the nervous system from moving all four limbs. Doctors and …

Andromeda, a massive spiral galaxy, has swallowed several galaxies within the last few billion years before setting its sights on the Milky Way. "The Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda in about four billion years,” said Dougal Mackey, co-author of a new study published in Nature and a research fellow at the …

UpdatedGoogle hired a temp agency to record people’s faces, especially those with darker skin, to collect data for a facial recognition system and offered them $5 gift vouchers in return. The contractors, hired by Randstad, a recruitment agency based in Atlanta, were reportedly asked to target black people. Many of these ended up …

Hydrothermal vents on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, are blasting out organic compounds that could provide the right ingredients to make amino acids, the building blocks of life as we know it. Amino acids, considered an essential for life, are used to form proteins in all known living organisms. They contain carbon, oxygen …

Neural networks have helped scientists monitor the Sun’s extreme ultraviolet outbursts after an instrument on NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory suffered an electrical malfunction, making it difficult for scientists to monitor a portion of extreme ultraviolet energy (EUV) being spewed by our star. EUV rays ejected from solar …

UpdatedAs if the internet isn’t already a complicated cesspool full of trolls, AI engineers have gone one step further to build a machine learning model that can generate fake comments for news articles. The eyebrow-raising creation, known as DeepCom, was developed by a group of engineers at Beihang University and Microsoft, China. “ …

NASA has released audio clips of marsquake recordings taken by its InSight lander currently resident about on the Red Planet. The seismometer, known as the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure or SEIS for short, sniffs out marsquakes and uses the rumblings to reveal the planet’s inner structure. InSight has detected over …

The world’s fastest deep learning supercomputer is being used to develop algorithms that can help researchers automatically design neural networks for cancer research, according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2025, the number of diagnosed new cases of cancer will reach 21. …

RoundupLet's catch you up on recent AI news happenings. Facial recognition at music festivals, yay or nay? Musicians and festival organizers are freaking out over the use facial recognition cameras being used during live performances. Several artists have joined a campaign organised by the non-profit activist group Fight for Our …