Hi-Tech Crime CRIM30375

The next great leap forward? Combining robots with the Internet of Things ‘At your service’. Zapp2Photo Mauro Dragone , Heriot-Watt University The Internet of Things is a popular vision of objects with internet connections sending information back and forth to make our lives easier and more comfortable. It’s emerging in our homes , through everything from voice-controlled speakers to smart temperature sensors. To improve our fitness, smart watches and Fitbits are telling online apps how much we’re moving around. And across entire cities, interconnected devices are doing everything from increasing the efficiency of transport to flood detection . In parallel, robots are steadily moving outside the confines of factory lines. They’re starting to appear as guides in shopping malls and cruise ships, for instance. As prices fall and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mechanical technology continues to improve, we will get more and more u...

Memes are taking the alt-right's message of hate mainstream Alt-right forums are turning the heads of mainstream social networks. Antonio Guillem/Shutterstock Emiliano De Cristofaro , UCL Think of an internet meme and you’ll probably smile. The most memorable viral images are usually funny, from Distracted Boyfriend to classics like Grumpy Cat . But some memes have a much more sinister meaning. They might look as innocuous as a frog , but are in fact symbols of hate . And as memes have become more political, these hateful examples have increasingly found their way onto mainstream social media platforms. My colleagues and I recently carried out the largest scientific study of memes to date, using a dataset of 160m images from various social networks. We showed how “fringe” web communities associated with the alt-right movement, such as 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” board (/pol/) and Reddit’s “ The_Donald ” are generating a wide ...