Geoffrey Everest Hinton (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, cognitive psychologist and Nobel Prize laureate known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title "the Godfather of AI". He is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google Brain and the University of Toronto before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023, citing concerns about the many risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In 2017, he co-founded and became the chief scientific advisor of the Vector Institute in Toronto. With David Rumelhart and Ronald J. Williams, Hinton was co-author of a highly cited paper published in 1986 that popularised the backpropagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks, although they were not the first to propose the approach. Hinton is viewed as a leading figure in the deep learning community. The image-recognition milestone of the AlexNet designed in collaboration with his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever for the ImageNet challenge 2012 was a breakthrough in the field of computer vision. Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award, together with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for their work on deep learning. They are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of Deep Learning" and have continued to give public talks together. He was also awarded, along with John Hopfield, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for "foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks". In May 2023, Hinton announced his resignation from Google to be able to "freely speak out about the risks of AI". He has voiced concerns about deliberate misuse by malicious actors, technological unemployment, and existential risk from artificial general intelligence. He noted that establishing safety guidelines will require cooperation among those competing in use of AI in order to avoid the worst outcomes. After receiving the Nobel Prize, he called for urgent research into AI safety to figure out how to control AI systems smarter than humans. == Education == Hinton was born on 6 December 1947 in Wimbledon in the United Kingdom and was educated at Clifton College in Bristol. In 1967, he matriculated as an undergraduate student at King's College, Cambridge and, after switching between different fields such as natural sciences, history of art, and philosophy, eventually graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology in 1970. He spent a year apprenticing carpentry before returning to academic studies. From 1972 to 1975, he continued his study at the University of Edinburgh, where he was awarded a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1978 for research supervised by Christopher Longuet-Higgins, who favored the symbolic AI approach over the neural network approach. == Career == After his PhD, Hinton initially worked at the University of Sussex and at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit. After having difficulty getting funding in Britain, he worked in the US at the University of California, San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon University. He was the founding director of the Gatsby Charitable Foundation Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London. He is currently University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he has been affiliated since 1987. Upon arrival in Canada, Geoffrey Hinton was appointed at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in 1987 as a Fellow in CIFAR's first research program, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics & Society. In 2004, Hinton and collaborators successfully proposed the launch of a new program at CIFAR, "Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception" (NCAP), which today is named "Learning in Machines & Brains". Hinton would go on to lead NCAP for ten years. Among the members of the program are Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, with whom Hinton would go on to win the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 2018. All three Turing winners continue to be members of the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program. Hinton taught a free online course on Neural Networks on the education platform Coursera in 2012. He co-founded DNNresearch Inc. in 2012 with his two graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, at the University of Toronto's department of computer science. In March 2013, Google acquired DNNresearch Inc. for $44 million, and Hinton planned to "divide his time between his university research and his work at Google". In May 2023, Hinton publicly announced his resignation from Google. He explained his decision, saying he wanted to "freely speak out about the risks of AI" and added that part of him now regrets his life's work. Notable former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from his group include Peter Dayan, Sam Roweis, Max Welling, Richard Zemel, Brendan Frey, Radford M. Neal, Yee Whye Teh, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun, Alex Graves, Zoubin Ghahramani, and Peter Fitzhugh Brown. == Research == Hinton's research concerns the use of neural networks for machine learning, memory, perception, and symbol processing. He has written or co-written more than 200 peer-reviewed publications. In the 1980s, Hinton was part of the "Parallel Distributed Processing" group at Carnegie Mellon University, which included notable scientists like Terrence Sejnowski, Francis Crick, David Rumelhart, and James McClelland. This group favoured the connectionist approach during the AI winter. Their findings were published in a two-volume set. The connectionist approach adopted by Hinton suggests that capabilities in areas like logic and grammar can be encoded into the parameters of neural networks, and that neural networks can learn them from data. Symbolists on the other side advocated for explicitly programming knowledge and rules into AI systems. In 1985, Hinton co-invented Boltzmann machines with David Ackley and Terry Sejnowski. His other contributions to neural network research include distributed representations, time delay neural network, mixtures of experts, Helmholtz machines and product of experts. An accessible introduction to Geoffrey Hinton's research can be found in his articles in Scientific American in September 1992 and October 1993. In 1995, Hinton and colleagues proposed the wake-sleep algorithm, involving a neural network with separate pathways for recognition and generation, being trained with alternating "wake" and "sleep" phases. In 2007, Hinton coauthored an unsupervised learning paper titled Unsupervised learning of image transformations. In 2008, he developed the visualization method t-SNE with Laurens van der Maaten.While Hinton was a postdoc at UC San Diego, David Rumelhart, Hinton and Ronald J. Williams applied the backpropagation algorithm to multi-layer neural networks. Their experiments showed that such networks can learn useful internal representations of data. In a 2018 interview, Hinton said that "David Rumelhart came up with the basic idea of backpropagation, so it's his invention." Although this work was important in popularising backpropagation, it was not the first to suggest the approach. Reverse-mode automatic differentiation, of which backpropagation is a special case, was proposed by Seppo Linnainmaa in 1970, and Paul Werbos proposed to use it to train neural networks in 1974. In 2017, Hinton co-authored two open-access research papers about capsule neural networks, extending the concept of "capsule" introduced by Hinton in 2011. The architecture aims to better model part-whole relationships within objects in visual data. In 2021, Hinton presented GLOM, a speculative architecture idea also aiming to improve image understanding by modeling part-whole relationships in neural networks. In 2021, Hinton co-authored a widely cited paper proposing a framework for contrastive learning in computer vision. The technique involves pulling together representations of augmented versions of the same image, and pushing apart dissimilar representations. At the 2022 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Hinton introduced a new learning algorithm for neural networks that he calls the "Forward-Forward" algorithm. The idea is to replace the traditional forward-backwards passes of backpropagation with two forward passes, one with positive (i.e. real) data and the other with negative data that could be generated solely by the network. The Forward-Forward algorithm is well-suited for what Hinton calls "mortal computation", where the knowledge learned is not transferable to other systems and thus dies with the hardware, as can be the case for certain analog computers used for machine learning. == Honours and awards == Hinton is a Fellow of the US Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (FAAAI) since 1990. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) in 1996, and then a
Kdan Mobile
Kdan Mobile Software Limited is a software application development company based in Tainan City, Taiwan. Kdan also has branches in Taipei, Changsha, Irvine, California, Japan, and South Korea. The company was founded in 2009 by Kenny Su, the company's CEO. == History == Kdan Mobile was founded in 2009 by Kenny Su (蘇柏州) and develops an application for PDF documents. Su previously worked at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) . In 2018, the company completed its Series B round of fundraising, in which it raised 16 million USD in total. Four global firms, Dattoz Partners (South Korea), WI Harper Group (U.S.), Taiwania Capital (Taiwan), and Golden Asia Fund Mitsubishi UFJ Capital (Japan), made up the Series B investment. Kdan previously raised 5 million USD in its Series A round in 2018.
Cypherpunks (book)
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet is a 2012 book by Julian Assange, in discussion with Internet activists and cypherpunks Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann. Its primary topic is society's relationship with information security. In the book, the authors warn that the Internet has become a tool of the police state, and that the world is inadvertently heading toward a form of totalitarianism. They promote the use of cryptography to protect against state surveillance. In the introduction, Assange says that the book is "not a manifesto [...] [but] a warning". He told Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead: A well-defined mathematical algorithm can encrypt something quickly, but to decrypt it would take billions of years – or trillions of dollars' worth of electricity to drive the computer. So cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the Internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another. There is no other way for our intellectual life to gain proper independence from the security guards of the world, the people who control physical reality. Assange later wrote in The Guardian: "Strong cryptography is a vital tool in fighting state oppression." saying that was the message of his book, Cypherpunks. Cypherpunks is published by OR Books. It is primarily a transcript of World Tomorrow episode eight, a two-part interview between Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. In the foreword, Assange said, "the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen".
Social media intelligence
Social media intelligence (SMI or SOCMINT) comprises the collective tools and solutions that allow organizations to analyze conversations, respond to synchronize social signals, and synthesize social data points into meaningful trends and analysis, based on the user's needs. Social media intelligence allows one to utilize intelligence gathering from social media sites, using both intrusive or non-intrusive means, from open and closed social networks. This type of intelligence gathering is one element of OSINT (Open- Source Intelligence). To support both the sensing and seizing of social signals at scale, organisations increasingly rely on dedicated audience intelligence platforms which combine data aggregation, NLP-driven analysis, and cross-platform monitoring. The term 'Social Media Intelligence' was coined in a 2012 paper written by Sir David Omand, Jamie Bartlett and Carl Miller for the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, at the London-based think tank, Demos. The authors argued that social media is now an important part of intelligence and security work, but that technological, analytical, and regulatory changes are needed before it can be considered a powerful new form of intelligence, including amendments to the United Kingdom Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. Given the dynamic evolution of social media and social media monitoring, our current understanding of how social media monitoring can help organizations create business value is inadequate. As a result, there is a need to study how organizations can (a) extract and analyze social media data related to their business (Sensing), and (b) utilize external intelligence gained from social media monitoring for specific business initiatives (Seizing). == Governmental use == In Thailand, the Technology Crime Suppression Division not only employs a 30-person team to scrutinize social media for content deemed disrespectful to the monarchy, known as lèse-majesté but also encourages citizens to report such content. Particularly targeting the youth, they run a "Cyber Scout" program where participants are rewarded for reporting individuals posting material perceived as detrimental to the monarchy. Instances in Israel involve the arrest of Palestinians by the police for their social media posts. An example includes a 15-year-old girl who posted a Facebook status with the words "forgive me," raising suspicions among Israeli authorities that she might be planning an attack. In Egypt, a leaked 2014 call for tender from the Ministry of Interior reveals efforts to procure a social media monitoring system to identify leading figures and prevent protests before they occur. In the United States, ZeroFOX faced criticism for sharing a report with Baltimore officials showcasing how their social media monitoring tool could track riots following Freddie Gray's funeral. The report labeled 19 individuals, including two prominent figures from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, as "threat actors." In the UK, the Association of Chief Police Officers of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland emphasized the significance of social media in intelligence gathering during anti-fracking protests in 2011. Social media analysis closely monitored protests against the badger cull in 2013, with a 2013 report revealing a team of 17 officers in the National Domestic Extremism Unit scanning public tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook profiles, and other online content from UK citizens. == Effects on political opinion == During the 2016 United States presidential election, the Senate Intelligence Committee released reports containing information about Russia’s use of troll farms to mislead black voters about voting. Also, German researchers in 2010 analyzed Twitter messages regarding the German federal election concluding that Twitter played a role in leading users to a specific political opinion. In a broad sense, social media refers to a conversational, distributed mode of content generation, dissemination, and communication among communities. Different from broadcast-based traditional and industrial media, social media has torn down the boundaries between authorship and readership, while the information consumption and dissemination process is becoming intrinsically intertwined with the process of generating and sharing information. An example of how SOCMINT is used to affect political opinions is the Cambridge Analytica Scandal. Cambridge Analytica was a company that purchased data from Facebook about its users without the consent or knowledge of Americans. They used this data to build a "psychological warfare tool" to persuade US voters to elect Donald Trump as president in the 2016 election. Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower, reported that personal information was taken in early 2014, and used to build a system that could target US voters with personalized pollical advertisements. More than 50 million individuals' data was exploited and manipulated. == Law enforcement == In September of 2023, the Philadelphia Police Department began using social media to track and stay one step ahead of criminal activity to stop meetups and potential robberies. This new approach has made officers utilize another tool in their field by being able to find new information as quickly as possible. Law enforcement agencies worldwide are increasingly employing social media intelligence to enhance their capabilities in both crime prevention and investigation. By analyzing publicly available data from social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, police can track criminal activities, identify suspects, and even prevent potential crimes before they occur. For instance, the FBI utilizes SOCMINT to monitor threats and investigate criminal activities, including analyzing posts, images, and videos that might signal illegal activities or security concerns. == Marketing == SOCMINT collects data from both organizations and people on an individual level. It has a variety of different purposes, and though its main goal is to improve national security advancements, there are several other benefits as well. This intelligence can identify patterns, predict trends, gather information in current time, etc. In addition, these aspects have allowed for both improvement within businesses and help for law enforcement. Artificial Social Networking Intelligence (ASNI) refers to the application of artificial intelligence within social networking services and social media platforms. It encompasses various technologies and techniques used to automate, personalize, enhance, improve, and synchronize user's interactions and experiences within social networks. ASNI is expected to evolve rapidly, influencing how we interact online and shaping their digital experiences. Transparency, ethical considerations, media influence bias, and user control over data will be crucial to ensure responsible development and positive impact. Google provides many free services and has built an entire media brand with its vast variety of products. Along with data collection, Google also owns two advertising services, Google Ads, and Google AdSense. Surprisingly, most of its revenue comes from advertising, not direct sales of its services or products. Google makes money by selling advertising services to advertisers. They provide ad space to websites on Google, and target ads to consumers of Google services and products. Google can market ads using SOCMINT to collect data from its users and generate revenue. Research shows that various social media platforms on the Internet such as Twitter, Tumblr (micro-blogging websites), Facebook (a popular social networking website), YouTube (largest video sharing and hosting website), Blogs and discussion forums are being misused by extremist groups for spreading their beliefs and ideologies, promoting radicalization, recruiting members and creating online virtual communities sharing a common agenda. Popular microblogging websites such as Twitter are being used as a real-time platform for information sharing and communication during the planning and mobilization of civil unrest-related events.
Content format
A content format is an encoded format for converting a specific type of data to displayable information. Content formats are used in recording and transmission to prepare data for observation or interpretation. This includes both analog and digitized content. Content formats may be recorded and read by either natural or manufactured tools and mechanisms. In addition to converting data to information, a content format may include the encryption and/or scrambling of that information. Multiple content formats may be contained within a single section of a storage medium (e.g. track, disk sector, computer file, document, page, column) or transmitted via a single channel (e.g. wire, carrier wave) of a transmission medium. With multimedia, multiple tracks containing multiple content formats are presented simultaneously. Content formats may either be recorded in secondary signal processing methods such as a software container format (e.g. digital audio, digital video) or recorded in the primary format (e.g. spectrogram, pictogram). Observable data is often known as raw data, or raw content. A primary raw content format may be directly observable (e.g. image, sound, motion, smell, sensation) or physical data which only requires hardware to display it, such as a phonographic needle and diaphragm or a projector lamp and magnifying glass. The following are examples of some common content formats and content format categories (covering: sensory experience, model, and language used for encoding information):
Scenery generator
A scenery generator (or terrain generator) is a software used to create landscape images, 3D models, and animations. These programs often use procedural generation to generate the landscapes, or sometimes created and rendered by a 3D artist. These programs are often used in video games or movies. Basic elements of landscapes created by scenery generators include terrain, water, foliage, and clouds. The process for basic random generation uses a diamond square algorithm. == Common features == Most scenery generators can create basic heightmaps to simulate the variation of elevation in basic terrain. Common techniques include Simplex noise, fractals, or the diamond-square algorithm, which can generate 2-dimensional heightmaps. A version of scenery generator can be very simplistic. Using a diamond-square algorithm with some extra steps involving fractals, an algorithm for random generation of terrain can be made with only 120 lines of code. The program in example takes a grid and then divides the grid repeatedly. Each smaller grid is then split into squares and diamonds and the algorithm then makes the randomized terrain for each square and diamond. Most programs for creating landscapes also allow for adjustment and editing of the landscape. For example, World Creator allows for terrain sculpting, which uses a similar brush system as Photoshop, and allows for additional terrain enhancement with its procedural techniques such as erosion, sediments, and more. Other tools in the World Creator program include terrain stamping, which allows you to import elevation maps and use them as a base. The programs tend to also allow for additional placement of rocks, trees, etc. These can be done procedurally or by hand depending on the program. Typically the models used for the placement objects are the same as to lessen the amount of work that would be done if the user was to create a multitude of different trees. The terrain generated the computer does a generation of multifractals then integrates them until finally rendering them onto the screen. These techniques are typically done “on-the-fly” which typically for a 128 × 128 resolution terrain would mean 1.5 seconds on a CPU from the early 1990s. == Applications == Scenery generators are commonly used in movies, animations, 3D rendering, and video games. For example, Industrial Light & Magic used E-on Vue to create the fictional environments for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. In such live-action cases, a 3D model of the generated environment is rendered and blended with live-action footage. Scenery generated by the software may also be used to create completely computer-generated scenes. In the case of animated movies such as Kung Fu Panda, the raw generation is assisted by hand-painting to accentuate subtle details. Environmental elements not commonly associated with landscapes, such as ocean waves, have also been handled by the software. Scenery generation is used in most 3D based video-games. These typically use either custom or purchased engines that contain their own scenery generators. For some games they tend to use a procedurally generated terrain. These typically use a form of height mapping and use of Perlin noise. This will create a grid that with one point in a 2D coordinate will create the same heightmap as it is pseudorandom, meaning it will result in the same output with the same input. This can then easily be translated into the product 3D image. These can then be changed from the editor tools in most engines if the terrain will be custom built. With recent developments neural networks can be built to create or texture the terrain based on previously suggested artwork or heightmap data. These would be generated using algorithms that have been able to identify images and similarities between them. With the info the machine can take other heightmaps and render a very similar looking image to the style image. This can be used to create similar images in example a Studio Ghibli or Van Gogh art-style. == Software == Most game engines, whether custom or proprietary, will have terrain generation built in. Some terrain generator programs include, Terragen, which can create terrain, water, atmosphere and lighting; L3DT, which provides similar functions to Terragen, and has a 2048 × 2048 resolution limit; and World Creator, which can create terrain, and is fully GPU powered. === List of 3D terrain generation software ===
Honey encryption
Honey encryption is a type of data encryption that "produces a ciphertext, which, when decrypted with an incorrect key as guessed by the attacker, presents a plausible-looking yet incorrect plaintext." == Creators == Ari Juels and Thomas Ristenpart of the University of Wisconsin, the developers of the encryption system, presented a paper on honey encryption at the 2014 Eurocrypt cryptography conference. == Method of protection == A brute-force attack involves repeated decryption with random keys; this is equivalent to picking random plaintexts from the space of all possible plaintexts with a uniform distribution. This is effective because even though the attacker is equally likely to see any given plaintext, most plaintexts are extremely unlikely to be legitimate i.e. the distribution of legitimate plaintexts is non-uniform. Honey encryption defeats such attacks by first transforming the plaintext into a space such that the distribution of legitimate plaintexts is uniform. Thus an attacker guessing keys will see legitimate-looking plaintexts frequently and random-looking plaintexts infrequently. This makes it difficult to determine when the correct key has been guessed. In effect, honey encryption "[serves] up fake data in response to every incorrect guess of the password or encryption key." The security of honey encryption relies on the fact that the probability of an attacker judging a plaintext to be legitimate can be calculated (by the encrypting party) at the time of encryption. This makes honey encryption difficult to apply in certain applications e.g. where the space of plaintexts is very large or the distribution of plaintexts is unknown. It also means that honey encryption can be vulnerable to brute-force attacks if this probability is miscalculated. For example, it is vulnerable to known-plaintext attacks: if the attacker has a crib that a plaintext must match to be legitimate, they will be able to brute-force even Honey Encrypted data if the encryption did not take the crib into account. == Example == An encrypted credit card number is susceptible to brute-force attacks because not every string of digits is equally likely. The number of digits can range from 13 to 19, though 16 is the most common. Additionally, it must have a valid IIN and the last digit must match the checksum. An attacker can also take into account the popularity of various services: an IIN from MasterCard is probably more likely than an IIN from Diners Club Carte Blanche. Honey encryption can protect against these attacks by first mapping credit card numbers to a larger space where they match their likelihood of legitimacy. Numbers with invalid IINs and checksums are not mapped at all (i.e. have probability 0 of legitimacy). Numbers from large brands like MasterCard and Visa map to large regions of this space, while less popular brands map to smaller regions, etc. An attacker brute-forcing such an encryption scheme would only see legitimate-looking credit card numbers when they brute-force, and the numbers would appear with the frequency the attacker would expect from the real world. == Application == Juels and Ristenpart aim to use honey encryption to protect data stored on password manager services. Juels stated that "password managers are a tasty target for criminals," and worries that "if criminals get a hold of a large collection of encrypted password vaults they could probably unlock many of them without too much trouble." Hristo Bojinov, CEO and founder of Anfacto, noted that "Honey Encryption could help reduce their vulnerability. But he notes that not every type of data will be easy to protect this way. … Not all authentication or encryption system yield themselves to being honeyed."