15 Oct, 2018

Votre obsession pour les technologies embarquées dans vos smartphones pourraient bientôt aider à traiter des maladies mentales

C’est dans le MIT review que j’ai décelé ceci –

Analyzing the way you type and scroll can reveal as much as a psychological test.

There are about 45 million people in the US alone with a mental illness, and those illnesses and their courses of treatment can vary tremendously. But there is something most of those people have in common: a smartphone. A startup founded in Palo Alto, California, by a trio of doctors, including the former director of the US National Institute of Mental Health, is trying to prove that our obsession with the technology in our pockets can help treat some of today’s most intractable medical problems: depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse.

Mindstrong Health is using a smartphone app to collect measures of people’s cognition and emotional health as indicated by how they use their phones. Once a patient installs Mindstrong’s app, it monitors things like the way the person types, taps, and scrolls while using other apps. This data is encrypted and analyzed remotely using machine learning, and the results are shared with the patient and the patient’s medical provider. The assessment included classic neuropsychological tests that have been used for decades, like a so-called timed trail-tracing test.

The seemingly mundane minutiae of how you interact with your phone offers surprisingly important clues to your mental health, according to Mindstrong’s research—revealing, for example, a relapse of depression. With details gleaned from the app, Mindstrong says, a patient’s doctor or other care manager gets an alert when something may be amiss and can then check in with the patient by sending a message through the app (patients, too, can use it to message their care provider).

For years now, countless companies have offered everything from app-based therapy to games that help with mood and anxiety to efforts to track smartphone activities or voice and speech for signs of depression. But Mindstrong is different, because it’s considering how users’ physical interactions with the phones—not what they do, but how they do it—can point to signs of mental illness. That may lead to far more accurate ways to track these problems over time. If Mindstrong’s method works, it could be the first that manages to turn the technology in your pocket into the key to helping patients with a wide range of chronic brain disorders—and may even lead to ways to diagnose them before they start.

Digital fingerprints
Before starting Mindstrong, Paul Dagum, its founder and CEO, paid for two Bay Area–based studies to figure out whether there might be a systemic measure of cognitive ability—or disability—hidden in how we use our phones. One hundred and fifty research subjects came into a clinic and underwent a standardized neurocognitive assessment that tested things like episodic memory (how you remember events) and executive function (mental skills that include the ability to control impulses, manage time, and focus on a task)—the kinds of high-order brain functions that are weakened in people with mental illnesses.

1 Août, 2018

Du coté de la robotisation

An AI-driven robot hand spent a hundred years teaching itself to rotate a cub

AI researchers have demonstrated a self-teaching algorithm that gives a robot hand remarkable new dexterity.
The creation: The robotic system, dubbed Dactyl, was developed by researchers at OpenAI. It taught itself to manipulate a cube with uncanny skill by practicing for the equivalent of a hundred years inside a computer simulation (though only a few days in real time).
How it works: It uses an off-the-shelf robotic hand from a UK company called Shadow, an ordinary camera, and an algorithm that’s already mastered multiplayer video game, DotA, using the same self-teaching approach.
Why it matters: As our own Will Knight explains, the robotic hand is still nowhere near as agile as a human one, and too clumsy to be deployed in a factory or warehouse. Even so, the research shows the potential for machine learning to unlock new robotic capabilities and suggests that some day robots might teach themselves new skills inside virtual worlds.

Source MIT technology Review

11 Avr, 2018

Data YouTube Is Improperly Collecting Children’s Data, Consumer Groups Says

Une action en justice est intentée contre Youtube et Google aux Etats-Unis pour violation de la vie privée des enfants. A coalition of more than 20 consumer advocacy groups is expected to file a complaint with federal officials on Monday claiming that YouTube has been violating a children’s privacy law. The complaint contends that YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, has been collecting and profiting from the personal information of young children on its main site, although the company says the platform is meant only for users 13 and older. The coalition of consumer groups said YouTube failed to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law that requires companies to obtain consent from parents before collecting data on children younger than 13. The groups are asking for an investigation and penalties from the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces the law.

“Google has been continually growing its child-directed service in the United States and all over the world without any kind of acknowledgment of this law and its responsibilities,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, one of the groups leading the coalition. “It’s living in a world of online fiction and denied that it’s serving children.”

YouTube defines its main site and app as destinations for viewers 13 and older. It directs younger children to the stand-alone YouTube Kids app, which contains a filtered set of videos from the main site. The article

23 Jan, 2018

État des lieux de la cybercriminalité: 172 milliards volés en 2017

Hackers stole $172 billion from people in 2017

Source:

Image credit:

  • Bruno Fontes | Flickr
7 Jan, 2018

Alerte : multiples vulnérabilités dans des processeurs

L’existence de plusieurs vulnérabilités sur des processeurs couramment utilisés a été rendue publique. Il n’y a pas à ce jour d’exploitation avérée de ces failles de sécurité appelées Meltdown et Spectre. Pour autant, le CERT-FR* recommande d’appliquer l’ensemble des mises à jour proposées. Voici quelques clés de compréhension.
cybervigilant_hashtag

Qu’est-ce qu’un processeur ?

Un processeur est un composant indispensable au fonctionnement des ordinateurs, ordiphones, tablettes (etc.) et des programmes qui y sont installés. Ces processeurs sont construits par plusieurs industriels, notamment INTEL, AMD et ARM et couvrent à eux seuls la grande majorité de nos outils électroniques quotidiens. La couche intermédiaire entre les logiciels et le processeur s’appelle le système d’exploitation (par exemple : Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, etc.).

Que se passe-t-il ?

Liées à des défauts de conception de ces processeurs, les failles de sécurité Spectre et Meltdown pourraient, une fois exploitées, accorder un accès non autorisé à de l’information protégée (mot de passe, identifiants…).

  • Ce défaut de conception rend vulnérable tout système d’exploitation utilisant ces processeurs.
    Ces failles ne permettent cependant pas de modifier les informations et aucune exploitation malveillante de ces vulnérabilités n’a été à ce jour avérée.
  • Les hébergeurs d’informatique en nuage (cloud).
    Ces prestataires hébergent régulièrement sur un seul serveur physique, utilisant un processeur, les données de plusieurs clients.
    En exploitant la faille, un attaquant peut donc avoir accès à l’intégralité des données en mémoire.

Que dois-je faire ?

 

*Au sein de l’ANSSI, le CERT-FR est le centre gouvernemental de veille, d’alerte et de réponse aux attaque informatique.