December 26, 2024

This international surveillance project aims to protect wheat from deadly diseases

When Dave Hodson walked through wheat fields in Ethiopia in 2010, it seemed as if everything had been painted yellow. A rust fungus was in the process of infecting about one-third of the country’s wheat, and winds had carried its spores far and wide, coating everything in their path. “The fields were completely yellow. You’d…

The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI

November 13, 2024
Ben Zhao remembers well the moment he officially jumped into the fight between artists and generative AI: when one artist asked for AI bananas.  A computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, Zhao had made a name for himself by building tools to protect images from facial recognition technology. It was this work that…