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Ai-Da Jubilee portrait fails Turing test

In a unexpected public demonstration of rare AI expertise by the art world,  a recent review by the Guardian art critic opined that a portrait of HM Queen Elizabeth II by AI artist Ai-Da "fails to meet the Turing test" (sic) though we are unclear what version of the...

Early NFT investor embarrassed by no resale interest

The recent surge in NFT coverage in tyhe technology and financial press was typified by the story of an early NFT auction in which an investor paid $2.9m for an NFT linked to Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey's first ever Tweet on the platform. This, it was claimed, was an...

Whack-a-Mole at Cent NFT exchange and piracy on the OpenSea

The US-based NFT trading platform, Cent, which stunned an unsuspecting public by selling an NFT of Jack Dorsey's first ever tweet on Twitter for £2.1 million has recently suspended trading of (most) NFT assets because "people were selling tokens of content that did...

Free Speech – American Style

by Kieron O’Harakmoh@soton.ac.uk 25th Jan, 2021The dust is settling on the chaotic aftermath of the American election, and debate is opening up about free speech: in particular, was Twitter right to deny President Trump, as he then was, access, and was the tech world...

Robot vacuum cleaners can spy on private conversations

Asst Prof Jun Han (left) and doctoral student Mr Sriram Sami (right) from NUS Computing with a robot vacuum cleaner, a monitor showing recovered sound waves, and common household items made from materials that can reflect sound. When your robot vacuum cleaner does its...

“Data are” or “data is”? A pedant writes

by Kieron O’Hara It is one of the divisive questions of our times. Is the word ‘data’ singular or plural? Some say “this data is …”, “the data doesn’t tell us …”; others “these data are …”, “the data don’t tell us …”. The singular use, often heard in computer science...

Recent perspectives on VC

As video conferencing (VC) has become the new normal, businesses, government services and academia are starting to confront what it means if VC (Zoom, Skype, FaceTime et al) become the default method (and in some cases currenty the only method) to allow "live"...

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