Scientist Develop Anti-Faking PC

Scientists have developed a computer system with sophisticated pattern recognition abilities that performed more impressively than humans in differentiating between people experiencing genuine pain and people who were just pretending.

In a study published in the journal Current Biology, human subjects did no better than chance – about 50 percent – in correctly judging if a person was feigning pain after seeing videos in which some people were and some were not.

The computer was right 85 percent of the time. Why? The researchers say its pattern-recognition abilities successfully spotted distinctive aspects of facial expressions, particularly involving mouth movements, that people generally missed.

“We all know that computers are good at logic processes and they’ve long out-performed humans on things like playing chess,” said Marian Bartlett of the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California-San Diego, one of the researchers.

“But in perceptual processes, computers lag far behind humans and have a lot of trouble with perceptual processes that humans tend to find easy, including speech recognition and visual recognition. Here’s an example of a perceptual process that the computer is able to do better than human observers,” Bartlett said in a telephone interview.

For the experiment, 25 volunteers each recorded two videos.

In the first, each of the volunteers immersed an arm in lukewarm water for a minute and were told to try to fool an expert into thinking they were in pain. In the second, the volunteers immersed an arm in a bucket of frigid ice water for a minute, a genuinely painful experience, and were given no instructions on what to do with their facial expressions.

The researchers asked 170 other volunteers to assess which people were in real discomfort and which were faking it.

After they registered a 50 percent accuracy rate, which is no better than a coin flip, the researchers gave the volunteers training in recognizing when someone was faking pain. Even after this, the volunteers managed an accuracy rate of only 55 percent.

The computer’s vision system included a video camera that took images of a person’s facial expressions and decoded them. The computer had been programmed to recognize that one kind of facial movement combinations suggested true pain and another kind suggested faked pain.

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ID Theft Projected To Cost $21B

A new audit of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has discovered that the agency paid refunds to criminals who filed fraudalent tax returns, in some cases on behalf of people who had died, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), which is part of the U.S. Treasury.

The IRS stands to lose as much as US$21 billion in revenue over the next five years due to identity theft, according to TIGTA’s audit, dated July 19 but publicized on Thursday.

TIGTA noted that the IRS did not agree with the $21 billion figure, but wrote that the figure does include estimated savings from new fraud control filters. Without new controls, TIGTA estimated losses of $26 billion.

Part of problem is that the IRS is not gathering enough data about fraud trends, such as how a return was filed, income information from W-2 forms, the amount of refunds and where those refunds were sent, TIGTA said.

“We found that $8.1 million in potentially fraudulent tax refunds involved tax returns filed from one of five addresses,” the audit said.

The IRS said it detected 938,664 fake tax returns during the 2011 processing year, which would have cost $6.5 billion. While TIGTA said the figure was “substantial,” it believes the IRS doesn’t know how many identity thieves are filing bogus returns and how much money is lost.

The IRS has implemented new fraud detection measures, but TIGTA found that institutional procedures were undermining those efforts. For example, taxpayers can begin filing returns in mid-January, but third parties that have information linked to those tax returns do not have to file until March 31.

The IRS is contacting some taxpayers to verify their identity. That simple measure stopped the issuance of $1.3 billion in potentially fraudulent tax returns as of April 19, TIGTA said.

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Apple’s iCloud Could Have A Secret Objective?

Many analysts have come to the conclusion that Apple’s iCloud may not be designed to appeal to new customers.  Apple’s iClouds service true objective is to keep existing customers locked into Apple’s iOS environment. Forester’s Charles Golvin went on to say that for people who own one or more iOS devices, they’re going to discover an even better experience.

Charles Govin also said Apple’s iCloud will keep customers because once they’ve used the service; they will hesitate to leave the Apple ecosystem because they will lose all the data they have stored. Since they do not have to worry about where their content is stored, it will make them feel that much more satisfied with their smartphone or tablet, and means that the next time they go to buy one, they’re more likely to buy from Apple.

Furthermore, Carolina Milanesi of Gartner told Computerworld, “The most important thing is that it is a complete cloud package.  It shows the benefit of living in the Apple ‘house. It will be a way for Apple to retain customers in the face of a rising tide of Android-based smartphones, and growing competition from media tablets that run Google’s operating system.”

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