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When hearing “drones”, most of us think of amazing drone photography or videos showing us how spectacular places look from above – or even surveillance drones. But this is just a tiny part of what drones can actually do.

In the first episode of our new web series Young Bright Minds, we talk with the experts from Voliro Airborne Robotics who use drones as hands in the sky to eliminate human risk in hard to reach places, and that also can spray on walls – please don’t try it on your neighbor’s walls!

For many people, art is something very human, as it is creating deep connections and emotions. One of my favorite movie quotes is from “I, Robot”:

Detective Del Spooner (Human): Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
Sonny (Robot): Can you?

We always thought, that no machine could ever create a piece of art that has an impact on us, but as artificial intelligence gets more and more advanced, art does not seem to be something only a real person can create. As a matter of fact, AI is already able to create impressive pieces of art. So, let’s dive into the AI age of art with some intriguing artificial creatives.

Becoming the Muse

Are you a fan of renaissance art? Then behold as AI Gahaku turns your face into a beautiful renaissance painting. We at Tomorrow Unlocked had a real blast trying it out with the faces of our favorite colleagues. Share your portraits on Instagram and tag @tomorrowunlocked to show us your renaissance portraits!

Finishing the unfinished

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Mahler, Beethoven, Schubert, or Bruckner: Each of those composers have symphonies they did not finish in their lifetime. But an international team of experts created an AI that analyzed Beethoven’s unfinished tenth symphony and finalized it. Listen to the AI’s compositions here. Can you spot which part is from Beethoven and which is from the AI?

Artificial Song

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Researchers at Zhejiang University in China teamed up with experts from Microsoft and created an AI that generates voices singing in English and Chinese. If you listen to the voices extracted, they do sound quite artificial, but as soon as DeepSinger synthesizes them and puts them into music, one cannot tell that the songs are artificially created – at least I could not.

Scary Humane

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In our age of rapidly spreading fake news, we can usually rely on our reason to understand who the author is, where the information comes from, and whether the source is trustworthy. But in 2019 OpenAI published a text generating AI which creates terrifyingly human texts. Also, a study by Karlstad University in Sweden shows that most people cannot tell whether an article is written by a journalist or a machine. That may make it harder to sort out fake news in the future, and would need online platforms to curate information more closely. THE VERGE collected some examples of AI writing – they may not be perfect, but also not too bad.

Creating Emotions out of Data

Last but not least we want to present to you artist Refik Anadol. By using large collections of data and artificial intelligence he creates fascinating installations where spectators can experience data sculptures created out of millions of pictures from different points of view. When people step into the installation they step into an alternate reality: into the dreams of the AI. And though the machine may not have emotions, it portraits it and by that impacts our emotions.

If you are one of the lucky people who own a robotic vacuum cleaner, you may have wondered, about how easy they float around your living room without falling off the stairs or getting stuck somewhere inconvenient. For the second episode of our latest web series Young Bright Minds we spoke to the experts from Swiss company Sevensense Robotics about the challenges of making robots not just see their surroundings, but also understand them, and how humanity may benefit from intelligent robotic helpers in the future.

Ever “hacked” into someone’s network and sent them weird messages to their printers? When I started university there were too many people not securing their internet, which meant a lot of fun for me and my friends, but not for the ones whose printers started coughing up 100 pages of “Set a password, i****!” at 1 am in the morning.

But nowadays we secure everything with all kinds of complicated passwords, and then we share our Netflix, Spotify or Amazon accounts with everybody. Which is nice, and if you trust the person there is no harm. In fact, 46% of people feel comfortable sharing their streaming services with their housemates according to a recent study by Kaspersky. On the other hand, 32% are sharing their accounts, although they are unsure about their safety, as they do not know about their friends’ digital habits.

But how can you still keep your things private and your digital comfort zone secure?

Private versus public network

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Which a lot of my past dorm mates did wrong, was to connect to the dorm’s internet and not set it as a public network. A computer is only as intelligent as the person sitting in front of it, and if you set the network as a private network, it won’t restrict people from accessing your information or devices.

Passwords for everything!

Yes, we all hate passwords and still they save us not just from nosy siblings, but also from insecure connections, and cybercriminals. If you tend to forget your passwords, then you may want to try out a password manager. They can be a real help, especially when it comes to sensitive information.

Educate yourself

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Treating yourself is great, but you have to educate yourself before that: check the security settings on your devices, and if you have no idea what you could do ask a friend or search Google. Especially when it comes to smart devices you have to make sure, nobody but you can access them, as they hold a lot of information about you.

Say “No!”

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There is no shame in rejecting your friends or housemates when they want you to share your services with them. Especially if they do not know the difference between a firewall and antivirus software or if they think Sunshine258 is a strong password. If you do want to help them out, you can set up their devices for them, and explain to them how important it is to stay safe and alert online.

While From Kurils with Love was getting airtime at various festivals during the first half of 2020, the overwhelming feedback seemed to be: how can we see more of the Kurils? How can we learn more about the Kurils? How can we understand the challenges that Vladimir Burkanov is facing on his mission to protect the Kurils?

The other week, my car was at a technical check. It is a hybrid and they wanted to analyze the exhaust fumes. Yet, the car doesn’t start the combustion engine before it reaches a certain speed – the software says so. It was quite entertaining watching them get more and more upset with my car – yet after 10 minutes they found what they had to do to let the software know that it needs to start the “dirty engine”.

On September 9, in a hospital in Dusseldorf, Germany, a patient died from a virus. It wasn’t what you might think: the hospital was hit by ransomware, infecting 30 servers before causing a total system shutdown, leading to the loss of her life. Yet this was a random act of chaos: the hackers misfired, they intended to infiltrate a nearby university.

This attack was fatal, but not unexpected. Attacks on hospitals and other health organizations have dramatically increased during the pandemic. When they hit, they can cost lives. Hospitals often have limited cybersecurity, making them vulnerable to attacks. In March, the University Hospital Brno, Czech Republic, faced a similar attack, fortunately, with no casualties.

For the latest hacker episode:HUNTER, we spoke to hospital staff to understand how ransomware attacks could harm patients.

Where there’s panic, there’s cybercrime

During the peak of pandemic information overload, COVID-19-themed cyberattacks spiked to a million a day in early March. Attacks targeting people access systems remotely – such as phishing, malicious websites, and malware – increased by a staggering 300 times during 2020.

Craig Jones, Director of Cybercrime at Interpol, explains: “Since March, the levels of work have ramped up. I’ve never known a period like it, not just at Interpol but also during my law enforcement experience.” Check out Interpol’s advice to protect yourself against Covid-19 cyberthreats.

So what can we do in a world where cybercriminals seem to be one step ahead of us? Hunting down the hackers is no easy task, but as the heroes in the second season of hacker:HUNTER shows, we can protect everyone by taking a stand against cybercrime.

The inflation in Venezuela is increasing day by day. This means that doing your basic grocery shopping could lead to people overdrawing their bank account. A man who had plans to give the people their financial freedom back is Gabriel Jiménez. He is the entrepreneurial brain behind Venezuela’s Petro, the system that sought to make history as the first state-backed cryptocurrency. He wanted to change the world, but instead, he had to flee his country.

Parents and educators have long been asking to more actively digitize schools and education in general. The Covid-19 pandemic pushed analogue classrooms into remote schools from one day to another, thus showing how many schools are way behind the expectations of modern learning. But to get students through the year, teachers had to rely on collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom. Listen to our feature at the Transatlantic Cable Podcast and unlock how the education of tomorrow may look like, with our very own David Jacoby.

Remote schooling

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Facing the pandemic, a lot of schools had to rely on remote education to be able to get students through the school year. Some parents experienced that their children had more time to dive deeper into topics, and catch up with subjects they missed at school – others had to make sure their children are actively following the remote class of their teachers and not finding something more “interesting” to waste their time on. For some children the new way of learning empowered them to schedule their learning sessions more flexible, giving them a taste of self-organization.

In Switzerland some schools started real-life projects, where children were able decide which one they wanted to be a part of. “I spoke with a mother saying: My kid is working and learning at least twelve hours, it’s difficult to stop them”, says Filip Dochy, “This raises a key question, as how to change education so that there is a mixture between the technology being used by children and making children curious again. Because if there is one thing schools nowadays are unlearning from children, it is curiosity.”

Photo by Santi Vedrí on Unsplash

But not all countries have the same privileges when it comes to using technologies: “In Colombia we have different realities and that is the main challenge the government is facing right now: trying to give access to people who live outside the cities, and don’t have computers, smartphones or internet.” (Daniela Alvarez de Lugo)

But even though “schools were not really prepared for it, they actually, to my surprise, reacted very well. At least in my experience.” (Riccardo de Rinaldini)

The future of education

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To understand more about what educators and parents can learn from the current situation, and how school systems have to change going forward in order to bring relevance and joy back to education, David Jacoby invited Filip Dochy, an expert on education at the European Academy of Science (AE), and two parents Daniela Alvarez De Lugo and Riccardo de Rinaldini to walk us through their experiences during lockdown and talk about the future of education.