Tag Archive for: Faster

Jet stream will get faster as climate change continues, study finds


Jet stream will get faster as climate change continues, study finds
Jet streams circulate around the world. A new study finds fast jet stream winds (those in dark red) will get even faster over time as climate change accelerates. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

A new study in Nature Climate Change takes one of the first deep dives into how climate change will affect the fastest jet streams—the powerful, narrow winds in the upper atmosphere that steer much of the Earth’s weather systems and are connected to outbreaks of severe weather.

The research, by UChicago Prof. Tiffany Shaw and National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist Osamu Miyawaki, suggests that as the world warms, the fastest upper-level jet stream winds will get faster and faster—by about 2% for every degree Celsius the world warms. Furthermore, the fastest winds will speed up 2.5 times faster than the average wind.

“Based on these results and our current understanding, we expect record-breaking winds,” said Shaw, “and it’s likely that they will feed into decreased flight times, increased clear-air turbulence and a potential increase in severe weather occurrence.”

Wind, weather and warming

Partly prompted by recent news reports of speed-record-breaking flights over the Atlantic, Shaw and Miyawaki began to investigate and realized there had been very little exploration of how the very fastest jet stream winds would respond to climate change.

To fill this gap, they combined climate change models with what we know about the physics of jet streams.

Jet streams usually move from west to east around the globe in the upper atmosphere, about six miles (10 kilometers) above us. We know that jet streams strongly influence the weather we experience on the ground—especially air temperature, winds and weather patterns, and storms. They also influence the occurrence of severe storms, tornadoes, hail and severe wind.

Jet streams form because of the contrast between the cold, dense air at the poles and the warm, light air in the tropics, in combination with the rotation of the Earth. (This was first shown in…

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V7 raises a $33m Series A to help teams build robust AI, faster –


  • V7, the data engine for AI, announces a $33m Series A funding round, co-led by Radical Ventures and Temasek, joined by Air Street Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, and Partech. 
  • V7’s client base of Fortune 500 companies, scaleups, and startups rely on V7’s platform to build sophisticated AI models that learn and improve from unstructured data including medical records, paper documents, and video.
  • This funding round includes the participation of machine learning pioneers including Francois Chollet (Keras creator), Oriol Vinyals (DeepMind), Jose Valim (Elixir creator), Ashish Vaswani (Google Brain / inventor of Transformers) and leadership figures at OpenAI, Twitter, and Amazon.

LONDON, November 28, 2022 – Today V7, the data engine to build and improve AI for computer vision, announced its $33m Series A financing co-led by AI-focused Radical Ventures and Temasek, with participation from existing investors Air Street Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, and Partech. This represents the largest Series A funding round in its category by more than double, and will allow V7’s further expansion into the US market, growing its team in its biggest market.

Machine learning-powered computer vision models are helping tackle a range of challenges facing society today, from spotting cancers to robotic farming. But when building an ML system, 80% of a team’s time is spent managing training data. This is a slow process that helps refine and augment the “knowledge” that models have learned by having humans perform laborious, manual labeling tasks.

V7 automates the labeling process, allowing companies to solve data labeling tasks ten times more quickly. The company’s unique “programmatic labeling” workflows use AI models and minimal human steering to apply labels to data at scale. The product comes with general-purpose AI models built in, which automatically segments objects in images and video, acting as a co-pilot for human annotators. After about 100 human-guided examples, V7’s platform can start identifying objects at scale on “autopilot”, routing edge-cases it doesn’t yet understand to human reviewers. 

V7’s growth trajectory is unabated despite a macroeconomic…

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Finding Bugs Faster Than Hackers – USC Viterbi


binary code with an error

Photo credit: andriano_cz/Getty Images

Malware, viruses, spyware, bots and more! Hackers have many tools at their disposal to ruin your day through your vulnerable technology. As we become increasingly dependent on internet-driven products (ie, phone, computer, smart home), and everything from toasters to toothbrushes can be connected to the internet, we must be ever vigilant against malicious attacks. 

Preventing such attacks is the goal of a group of researchers in the Binary Analysis and Systems Security (BASS) group at USC Viterbi’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI). They will be presenting their new paper, written in collaboration with Arizona State University, at the upcoming 35th Annual USENIX Security Symposium, one of the premier conferences in the cybersecurity space, held August 10-12 in Boston, Mass. 

“This paper is about vulnerability discovery, which is finding security bugs in software that attackers or hackers could exploit to get control of remote systems, leak information, or any number of bad things,” said co-author and co-advisor Christophe Hauser, a research computer scientist at ISI and research lead. 

Co-author Nicolaas Weideman adds that, in particular, it’s about automated vulnerability discovery. “Because computer programs are so large and complicated these days, we’d like to automatically detect these vulnerabilities instead of having a human expert analyzing the program to find them.” 

Searching for bugs in the zeros and ones 

The paper proposes a novel technique for automated vulnerability discovery at the binary level. Hauser explains, “One of the specificities of this research is that we analyzed software not at the source code level, but we actually analyzed it at the binary level, the executable code. These are instructions that talk directly to the machine, they’re not instructions meant for humans to understand.” 

Current state-of-the-art binary program analysis approaches are limited by inherent trade-offs between accuracy and scalability. Static vulnerability detection techniques – the analysis of a program without actually running it – are limited in how accurate they can be. While dynamic vulnerability detection…

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Let us mine cryptocurrency faster or we release your stolen data


Here’s something you don’t see everyday: A ransomware group that hacked graphics card marker NVIDIA has a very specific demand. Make NVIDIA graphics cards mine cryptocurrency faster or we will release your stolen, private data.

The hackers, known as Lapsus$, say that they have stolen over 1TB of data after hacking into Nvidia’s private network. The data includes email addresses and login credentials for more than 71,000 of NVIDIA’s employees. Some of this private data has already been released by the hackers.

However, Lapsus$ is issuing a ransom for the most valuable of NVIDIA’s data: the company’s source code and trade secrets.

“We decided to help mining and gaming community,” reads a message on Telegram attributed to Lapsus$ members. “We want nvidia to push an update for all 30 series firmware that remove every lhr limitations otherwise we will leak hw folder. If they remove the lhr we will forget about hw folder (it’s a big folder). We both know lhr impact mining and gaming.”

In early 2021, amid a graphics cards shortage due to an uptick in cryptocurrency mining, NVIDIA adopted a new feature called Lite Hash Rate (LHR). LHR was designed specifically to limit Ethereum mining so that more graphics cards would be available for its intended purposes, like gaming.

LHR seems to have angered these hackers and the result is the ultimatum. Either NVIDIA removes LHR or, according to Lapsus$, they will “release the entire silicon chip files so that everyone not only knows your driver’s secrets, but also your most closely-guarded trade secrets for graphics and computer chipsets too!”

NVIDIA released the following public statement on the matter:

On February 23, 2022, NVIDIA became aware of a cybersecurity incident which impacted IT resources. Shortly after discovering the incident, we further hardened our network, engaged cybersecurity incident response experts, and notified law enforcement. 

We have no evidence of ransomware being deployed on the NVIDIA environment or that this is related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. However, we are aware that the threat actor took employee credentials and some NVIDIA…

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