California just passed a slew of laws meant to direct development of generative AI tools towards the greater good. Once again, California is taking the lead in belling the cat where ideally we would want legislation to come at the federal level. In this article, I will look at the rationale behind two of these […]
Category: Technically Speaking
AI Security Work Is Best Done In Academia or Industry? (2/2)
We left off the last part with arguments for why industry has become the place for major leaps in AI, though with several notable exceptions, both historical and ongoing. In this part, we will consider the counter points that make it attractive for doing AI security work in academic lanes and bylanes. Doubtless, a best-of-both-worlds […]
AI Security Work Is Best Done In Academia or Industry? (1/2)
A question that has been asked in our circles for a few years is what is the best place to do AI research, academia or industry. An insightful Science article from 2023 by Neil Thompson and colleagues at MIT shed light on part of this question in their article “The growing influence of industry in […]
The Gift that Keeps on Giving to Apple and Google
That gift is the mobile app stores, respectively, the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store [I will use the lower case letters “app stores” to refer to the generic portals, while capital case refers to the specific one from Apple.]. They generate revenue for the duopoly of Google and Apple through the fee […]
Short Take: EVM: An Unheralded Technology Powering Democracy
EVMs or Electronic Voting Machines are not much in the news. But quietly, this technology is enabling world’s democracies to elect their leaders in an efficient and secure manner. This includes prominently in India, proudly world’s largest democracy, which completed its multi-round election spread over 6 weeks earlier this summer, an election that reached out […]
A Walled Apple Garden: A Technologist’s Perspective
Apple has been in the news due to the lawsuit by the US Department of Justice alleging monopolistic practices in its smartphone business, and the surrounding ecosystem of App Store and others. Apple has rebutted saying its walled garden is loved by its users for its ease of use and it ensures the security of […]
Generative AI and Cybersecurity: Anything to Look Here?
We have all been startled by the power of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its ilk of Generative AI tools, like Google’s Gemini or Meta’s Llama. One crucial question is can these be weaponized to make our cyberspace more insecure? I will reflect on three primary aspects of this question. First, there is some evidence that these […]
Learning from the Dog that Didn’t Bark
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” Holmes: “That was the curious incident.” Arthur Conan Doyle “The Silver Blaze” from “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” I […]
Why We Need to See Inside AI’s Black Box
This article was originally written by me for The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It appeared there on May 26, 2023. For some people, the term “black box” brings to mind the recording devices in airplanes that are valuable for postmortem analyses if the unthinkable happens. For others it evokes small, minimally […]
What Tech Stories to Expect in 2023
It is of course notoriously hard to make predictions in the field of technology and many wise men have been made to look silly through their failed tech predictions. Nevertheless, I sat down to look at my crystal ball to predict what stories are likely to dominate the news in 2023. The crystal ball is […]
Distant Whispers from an Academic Engineer's World 