Artificial Olfactory Camouflage, Deep Forensics and Other Fake News

Scientists used 'fake news' to stop predators from killing endangered birds—and the result was remarkable

Mar 2021, phys.org

https://sciencex.com/news/2021-03-scientists-fake-news-predators-endangered.html

There's visual fakes and auditory imposters, but rarely do we get to hear about artificial olfactory camouflage: 

Odors emanating from the shorebirds' feathers and eggs attract these scent-hunting mammals, which easily find the nests.

Five weeks before the shorebirds arrived for their breeding season in 2016, we mixed the odors with Vaseline and smeared the concoction on hundreds of rocks over two 1,000-hectare study sites. We did this every three days, for three months.

The predators were initially attracted to the odors. But within days, after realizing the scent would not lead to food, they lost interest and stopped visiting the site.

via: Grant L. Norbury et al. Misinformation tactics protect rare birds from problem predators, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe4164

Image credit: Hard to believe, but this is a picture of Jezero Crater on Mars, taken by the robot named Perseverance, 2021.

How to spot deepfakes? Look at light reflection in the eyes

Mar 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-deepfakes-eyes.html

From the researchers who brought you the blinkrate solution to deepfake video (the fakes give it away because they blink funny).

This one is similar, and it's because both eyes are supposed to have the same image being reflected. And it happens that way every time, no matter what, because our eyeballs are always symmetrical, something about bilateria or binocular vision.

Whereas deepfake generators are good at picking out the idiosyncrasies, the imperfections, it's the perfect part that are their weakness. And I guess this is one of the few things we have that are perfect. Another one? Blowing spit bubbles out of your mouth, it's the only geometrically perfect thing the human body can create.   

The "Deepfake-o-meter," by the way.

via University at Buffalo: Exposing GAN-generated Faces Using Inconsistent Corneal Specular Highlights. arXiv:2009.11924v2 [cs.CV] arxiv.org/abs/2009.11924

Lawyers used sheepskin as anti-fraud device for hundreds of years to stop fraudsters pulling the wool

Mar 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-lawyers-sheepskin-anti-fraud-device-hundreds.html

Just like modern quantum cryptography:

Legal documents dating from the 13th to 20th century, and have discovered they were almost always written on sheepskin, rather than goatskin or calfskin vellum. This may have been because the structure of sheepskin made attempts to remove or modify text obvious. Attempts to scrape off the ink would result in these layers detaching—known as delamination—leaving a visible blemish highlighting any attempts to change any writing.

via University of Exeter:  Scratching the surface: the use of sheepskin parchment to deter textual erasure in early modern legal deeds, Doherty et al. Heritage Science 2021, DOI: 10.1186/s40494-021-00503-6

MyHeritage offers 'creepy' deepfake tool to reanimate dead

Mar 2021, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56210053

Dead people brought back to life, just like you've always wanted. 

A growing problem of 'deepfake geography' - How AI falsifies satellite images

Apr 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-04-problem-deepfake-geography-ai-falsifies.html

Let's say you wanted to make it look like the rainforest wasn't on fire -- you can take out the smoke plumes. Or maybe you want to create a story about a fake explosion somewhere, you put in some smoke plumes. Advanced technology can help you make really believable forgeries. 

The study's goal was not to show that geospatial data can be falsified, Zhao said. Rather, the authors hope to learn how to detect fake images so that geographers can begin to develop the data literacy tools, similar to today's fact-checking services, for public benefit.

via University of Washington: Cartography and Geographic Information Science, DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2021.1910075

Post Script: 

Don't forget that fake maps have been a thing forever. The mapmakers themselves would put fake towns or streets in their maps to stop people from making copies. Even dictionary-makers employ this security measure with fake words. It's called a copyright trap, and if you copied the trap and didn't know it, the real mapmaker could identify your copy as their original.

And Paper Street was where Tyler Durden lived in Fight Club, but we don't talk about that.

Post Post Script:

Recognizing liars from the sound of their voice

Feb 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-liars-voice.html

AI can tell us all the things we already know but couldn't prove with science until now (Maybe like fractals?). We know when people are lying. Lying is a two way street; it requires a kind of social permission that we give to each other for some reason. 

Catch a Bot

Study reveals behavioral differences between bots and humans that could inform new machine learning algorithms

Apr 2020, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-04-reveals-behavioral-differences-bots-humans.html

AKA I'm not a bot but I play one on the internet

The researchers found, among humans, trends that were not present among bots: Humans showed an increase in the amount of social interaction over the course of a session, illustrated by an increase in the fraction of retweets, replies and number of mentions contained in a tweet.

Humans also showed a decrease in the amount of content produced, illustrated by a decreasing trend in average tweet length.

These trends are thought to be due to the fact that as sessions progress, human users grow tired and are less likely to undertake complex activities, such as composing original content. Another possible explanation may be given by the fact that as time goes by, users are exposed to more posts, therefore increasing their probability to react and interact with content. In both cases, bots were shown to not be affected by such considerations and no behavioral change was observed from them.

image credit: Long Exposure Photo of Budapest Tram Lit Up with 30,000 LED Lights by Birimyi Krisztian

Precipitating the Noosphere

How conspiracy theories emerge—and how their storylines fall apart

Jun 2020, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2020-06-conspiracy-theories-emergeand-storylines-fall.html

^Came for the image: "Researchers produced a graphic representation of the narratives they analyzed, with layers for major subplots of each story, and lines connecting the key people, places and institutions within and among those layers." Credit: UCLA College, UCLA Samueli School of Engineering

Stay for the story: They studied Bridgegate NJ (real conspiracy) and Pizzagate DC (fake conspiracy). And the AI can figure out which is which.

All stories are a narrative network, the elements being the characters, places and things in the story, and the network emerging from the relationships between these elements.

If you tell the AI enough stories, it will detect patterns in the networks.

"One of the characteristics of a conspiracy theory narrative framework is that it is easily 'disconnected,'" said Timothy Tangherlini, one of the paper's lead authors, a professor in the UCLA Scandinavian section whose scholarship focuses on folklore, legend and popular culture. "If you take out one of the characters or story elements of a conspiracy theory, the connections between the other elements of the story fall apart."

-link

Real stories can still make sense even if you remove one of the elements. Something about the myriad connections between the elements, because they're real people and places, all connected in other ways not intrinsic to the story. Robustness you might call it when talking about telecommunications networks; or redundancy.

Pizzagate? You remove Wikileaks from the network and it falls apart. (People used this massive data dump to link all kinds of elements in creative ways, building vast and complex stories. But the data was too big, and had no connection to each other beyond their being in the same repository. 

Also the timeframe, and for similar reasons, is a good point of contrast. Real stories build over time, because again, all the elements are connected in myriad ways with each other for reasons that have nothing to do with any one particular story. Fake stories appear out of nowhere, and tend to evaporate just as quickly. 

Timothy R. Tangherlini et al. An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy and conspiracy theory narrative frameworks: Bridgegate, Pizzagate and storytelling on the web, PLOS ONE (2020). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0233879. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0233879

Same article but from The Conversation, Nov 2020.

Coronavirus - Harmful lies spread easily due to lack of UK law

Jul 2020, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53480226

I won't even bother to link here the other recent report about how malicious social interference dramatically (and wholly undetected?) altered public opinion in the Brexit election. I think that's general public knowledge by now.

From the article: Despite investing in measures, the UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee says tech firms can not be left to self-regulate. They also said that social media firms' advertising-focused business models had encouraged the spread of misinformation and allowed "bad actors" to make money from emotional content, regardless of the truth. By bad actors, their report identifies state actors, including Russia, China and Iran; the Islamic State group; far-right groups in the US and the UK; and scammers.

Tracking misinformation campaigns in real-time is possible, study shows

Aug 2020, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-07-tracking-misinformation-campaigns-real-time.html

Metadata is key. 

There's so much good information just in this summary alone, so I copying much of it:

Using data from past misinformation (troll) campaigns from China, Russia, and Venezuela waged against the United States before and after the 2016 election, combined with posts to Twitter and Reddit and the hyperlinks or URLs they included, using a "postURL pair," which is simply a post with a hyperlink.

8,000 accounts and 7.2 million posts from late 2015 through 2019.

They reinforced their model with a baseline of a rich dataset of politically engaged and average user posts collected over many years by NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP).

They teased out data for timing, word count, whether the mentioned URL domain is a news website, and most importantly "metacontent," for example, whether a URL was in the top 25 political domains shared by other trolls.

Trolls referring to other trolls and not new sources: "Both trolls and normal people often include local news URLs in their posts, but the trolls tended to mention different users in such posts, probably because they are trying to draw their audience's attention in a new direction. Metacontent lets the algorithm find such anomalies."

-Jacob N. Shapiro, professor of politics and international affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

Across almost all of the 463 different tests, it was clear which posts were and were not part of an influence operation, meaning that content-based features can indeed help find coordinated influence campaigns on social media.

Venezuelan trolls only retweeted certain people and topics, making them easy to detect. Russian and Chinese trolls were better at making their content look organic, but they, too, could be found. In early 2016, for example, Russian trolls quite often linked to far-right URLs, which was unusual given the other aspects of their posts, and, in early 2017, they linked to political websites in odd ways. Overall, Russian troll activity became harder to find as time went on. It is possible that investigative groups or others caught on to the false information, flagging the posts and forcing trolls to change their tactics or approach, though Russians also appear to have produced less in 2018 than in previous years.

via Princeton University, New York University and New Jersey Institute of Technology: M. Alizadeh el al., "Content-based features predict social media influence operations," Science Advances (2020). doi:10.1126/sciadv.abb5824. https://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abb5824

Nikon Small World 2020 - Single Neuron - Nadia Efimova

A novel strategy for quickly identifying twitter trolls

Aug 2020, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-08-strategy-quickly-twitter-trolls.html

50 tweets is all it takes. 

Using sociolinguistic "troll-specific restrictions" on words and word pairs, the signal in the noise becomes clear. Granted, they would have to update their restrictions depending on what cultural phenomena they're using in their campaigns, but it works in real time. 

Also, they checked their model using a library of Russian troll tweets; because this exists.

Monakhov S (2020) Early detection of internet trolls: Introducing an algorithm based on word pairs / single words multiple repetition ratio. PLoS ONE 15(8): e0236832. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236832

Calls to city 311 lines can predict opioid overdose hotspots

Nov 2020, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-city-lines-opioid-overdose-hotspots.html

This is just old school predictive analytics.

"Complaints to the city about issues like streetlight repair, abandoned vehicles and code violations reflect disorder and distress that are also linked to opioid use," said Yuchen Li, lead author of the study and doctoral candidate in geography at The Ohio State University.

via Ohio State: Scientific Reports (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-76685-z

New algorithm signals a possible disease resurgence

Sep 2020, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-09-algorithm-disease-resurgence.html

The algorithm monitors public health data to detect statistical patterns associated with impending outbreaks to predict the reemergence of existing infectious diseases.

Changes in vaccination rates, or even changes in climate, can predict the emergence of an epidemic.

They used 10,000 sets of simulated case reports covering a period of 10 years. When tested on a 2004-5 Mumps outbreak, the model predicted it four years on advance. Looking at Pertussis, it could predict 100% at the state level 1990-2000. It works for vector-borne disease as well (ticks, mosquitoes).

Tobias S. Brett et al. Dynamical footprints enable detection of disease emergence, PLOS Biology (2020). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000697

How Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit are handling the election

Nov 2020, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/how-facebook-twitter-youtube-and-reddit-are-handling-the-election/

"In addition to its stated policies, Facebook is reportedly standing ready to implement a slew of policies it has used in the past for managing election content in "at-risk" countries such as Sri Lanka and Myanmar. These tools would include limiting the rate at which content beginning to go viral can travel, as well as tweaking the newsfeed to change what type of content users see."

So we can stop the virus from spreading all along.