Patrick Buckley How IoT technology is helping candy producers make sweet profits! From chocolate bars to lollipops, gumdrops to Haribos, the confectionary industry is now worth an estimated 210$ billion worldwide. With the industry experiencing strong growth, it is no surprise...
Olivia Brookhouse When will Robots find a place in the Smart Home? With the mass introduction of smart speakers, smart doorbells, smart fridges and even smart toilets there is a world of possibilities when it comes to innovating our homes. Whilst...
Richard Benjamins. Towards a new Big Data ecosystem to mitigate Climate Change Big Data can be used to help fight Climate Change [1],[2],[3]. Several projects have analysed huge amounts of satellite, weather and climate data to come up with ways to...
Olivia Brookhouse Telemedicine, the new age of Healthcare Healthcare always seems to lag behind other consumer technology, lacking innovation and remaining inefficient. This is partially due to regulatory restriction but also an unwillingness to adapt and innovate...
LUCA Deep Learning and satellite images to estimate the impact of COVID19 Motivated by the fact that the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic has caused worldwide turmoil in a short period of time since December 2019, we estimate the negative impact of...
LUCA Success Story: LUCA Transit and Highways England The transport industry is very receptive to the application of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence strategies, as there are clear use cases that can maximize a companies’ efficiency and...
LUCA Can Big Data and IOT prevent motorcycle crashes? Most of us are familiar with the dangers involved in driving motorbikes, with motorcyclists being 27 times more likely than passenger car occupants to die in a crash per...
LUCA LUCA Tourism at the Mexico Balloon Festival Each year, the Festival Internacional del Globo (FIG), brings together over 200 hot air balloons that fill the sky above the ‘Parque Metropolitano in León, Guanajuato, in what is an...
Fake News : how should we be fighting it?Olivia Brookhouse 28 February, 2020 55% of people in Spain use social media to get their daily news fix instead of traditional newspapers meaning these platforms have become very influential in the last few years in reporting and spreading major stories. However, with the rise of Fake News and Deep Fakes, we must question whether what we are reading is actually true. We are at war — an information war Claire Wardle, executive chair of First Draft The difference between Fake News and Deep Fakes Fakenews refers to a pulications or propoganda which aim to misinform or spread hoaxes via traditional news media or online social media, which has become the easiest platform to share fake news. Deep fakes refer to fake videos which have been edited using sophisticated digital video manipulation. The technology used to manipulate these videos is called GANs technology. Ian Goodfellow invented a machine learning technique called a General adversarial network which can generate new data from the data provided. For example, from 100 pictures of a cat, the network can produce a new realistic version that is completely unique. The technology can also generate new audio clips and text. However, the threat of the technology did not become clear until 2017 when a Reddit user used the technology to superimpose celebrities’ faces on actors in pornography. Celebrities and Politicians are often those targeted by deep fakes, manipulating what they have said, where they are or what they are doing which often results in something controversial and untrue. Who has been targeted? Facebook has actively removed 3.3 billion fake accounts which it believes to be accounts run by bots, publishing damaging content. Facebook has been an extremely influential platform in recent elections and therefore a hub for fake news and deep fakes. Even Zuckerberg himself became a victim of a deep fake where he seemed to say that he had “control over billions of people’s stolen data”. Twitter, like Facebook said it removed nearly 6,000 fake accounts created by the Saudi government. Donald Trump, the master of the phrase “fake news” was targeted by a Belgium political party who made a deep fake video of Mr. Trump trying to persuade countries to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The party responsible had created the video as a joke to attract people to their petition calling for more radical climate change policies. However, the video caused hysteria and showed how powerful the technology could be, especially in the political arena. Buzzfeed has also been criticized for the amount of fake news circulating on its site. A network of social media accounts connected to Russia used the Buzzfeed community to publish a forged MI6 agent interview, conspiracy theories about David Cameron’s stance on Brexit and another about the sale of the NHS. All the stories aimed to “create divisions between western countries”. How can we stop fake news? Every time we passively accept information without double-checking, or share a post, image or video before we’ve verified it, we’re adding to the noise and confusion Wardle, a former research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. As consumers of online content we must be conscious of what we share, particularly if you have many followers. Ensure you are not sharing content without verifying the source. This may mean triple checking information and using more reliable sources to spot fake news.Watch controversial videos closely to see if the mouth and sound move together naturally to spot deep fakes. Paste photos into the google image search engine to see if a picture has been modified from an original. The free service TinEye tracks where images appear onlineCheck the metadata behind images and videos to show date, time and sometimes location To stay up to date with LUCA, visit our Webpage, subscribe to LUCA Data Speaks and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn o YouTube. Edge Computing and Machine learning, a strategic partnershipBig Data and IoT in tennis, serving up new insights
Patrick Buckley How AI and Machine Learning help to develop vaccines As Christmas approaches this year, we have all been gifted the great news that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has shown to be both safe and effective in creating an immune...
Patrick Buckley Is AI key to successful Real Estate investment? As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to shape the world around us, in today’s post we explore the impact of AI on commercial Real Estate investment. To what extent is...
LUCA Deep Learning and satellite images to estimate the impact of COVID19 Motivated by the fact that the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic has caused worldwide turmoil in a short period of time since December 2019, we estimate the negative impact of...
Patrick Buckley How should you speak to children about Artificial Intelligence? In previous years, people’s relationship with technology in general, and with artificial intelligence in particular, was based on “text”, usually using specialised programming languages. Today, however, artificial intelligence has...
Patrick Buckley The Smart Train – The key to future sustainable mobility Governments know that a functional and efficient transport system is key to economic growth and social development. Well run transport infrastructure unlocks the productive potential of an economy. Naturally,...
Patrick Buckley COVID-19 Shines a light on the huge possibilities of AI in Education In 2020 remote learning platforms have become essential for students around the world as a result the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these platforms incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology which continues to...