In this paper, Mélanie Kolbe-Guyot, Head of Data Governance and Compliance at Statistisches Amt Basel-Stadt, and formerly C4DT’s Head of Policy, examines the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in Swiss public administration and provides recommendations for its responsible, trustworthy and effective use.
Last month’s outage of Amazon’s AWS US-East-1 barely became yesterday’s news when another outage, this time chez Cloudflare, took down major parts of the internet again. Not only do these incidents show just how brittle the Internet’s underlying infrastructure is becoming, they also serve as a stark reminder of how much it relies on only (…)
Cet article d’AlgorithmWatch/CH est très intéressant non seulement parce qu’il détaille la consommation de ressources des centres de données, mais aussi parce qu’il essaie de présenter le thématique sous tous ses angles. La conclusion est cependant explicite: dans ce secteur aussi, la politique ne s’intéresse qu’aux développements, et par conséquent la population doit se défendre (…)
Are LLMs helping discover new bugs, or are they merely making the life of Open Source developers more difficult? Currently it looks more like the latter, with many Open Source projects being overwhelmed by bad quality bug reports created automatically by LLMs. This is a problem that won’t go away quickly, and adding a fix (…)
The number of AI-generated images of child sex abuses is rapidly increasing. But thanks to a new UK law, tech companies and child safety agencies are joining forces and being given legal testing permission, allowing experts or audit models to proactively screen for CSAM risk rather than wait for illegal content to appear. The law (…)
A love letter to the craft, this article is a reminder that it is by combining human expertise and GenAI that we can truly harness the potential of these tools.
Although written from the point of view of the U.S. healthcare system, quite a few of the issues raised in this essay are universal. I appreciated this in-depth discussion of the impact of AI on the healthcare system because it not only points out the detrimental consequences these technologies have, but also puts these consequences (…)
From supermarket checkouts to Olympic stadiums, video surveillance is becoming smarter, more pervasive, and increasingly controversial.
Anthropology, cultural policy, resistance and innovation in urban space
I really appreciate Jimmy Wales’s insistence that sticking to Wikipedia’s core principals of neutrality, factuality and fostering a diverse community around the globe will eventually prevail in today’s polarized digital landscape. As a nerd myself I also relate very strongly to his enthusiasm of working on Wikipedia for the sake of doing something interesting over (…)
I found Simon Willison’s blog post interesting because he self-critically builds on his lethal trifecta concept. He clearly explains why prompt injection remains an unsolved risk for AI agents and highlights the practical “Rule of Two” for safer design (proposed by Meta AI). He also discusses new research showing that technical defenses consistently fail. His (…)
I do not agree with the article’s conclusion that the “days of the know-nothing consumer are well and truly over”. The article does discuss potential shortfalls, such as both sides of a negotiation relying on specialised chatbots to conduct it, but fails to point out the root issue, namely the reliability of the information. As (…)
EPFL researchers have developed and tested Votegral a complete e-voting pipeline, demonstrating for the first time that there is a plausible and practical approach to coercion-resistant electronic voting in elections.
If real-life applications of quantum computing emerge, it could revolutionize chemistry, physics, computer sciences and more. Despite the apparent progress achieved by Google here, I am cautious about placing full trust in the advances claimed by commercial companies, as their competitive approach may prioritize hype or market value. Given the extent to which scientific research (…)
Here is another post-quantum implementation of a popular protocol: Signal announced the addition of a quantum-safe algorithm to increase the protection of the messages sent between two Signal users. Like other quantum-safe algorithms, it doesn’t replace the currently used cryptographic base, but rather enhances it. Interestingly, the biggest hurdle was the size of the new (…)
State-of-the-art architectures in many software applications and critical infrastructures are based on deep learning models. These models have been shown to be quite vulnerable to very small and carefully crafted perturbations, which pose fundamental questions in terms of safety, security, or performance guarantees at large. Several defense mechanisms have been developed in the last years (…)
Die Kampagne der Bahnhofsmission in Essen um die Privatsphäre von Obdachlosen zu schützen, ist eine wichtige Erinnerung daran, dass auch im sogenannten ‘öffentlichen’ Raum Personen durchaus ein Recht auf Privatsphäre haben. Aber um dieses Problem tatsächlich zu lösen, müssten die Plattformen auf denen Content, der von Voyeurismus lebt, publiziert wird, diesem Geschäftsmodell den Hahn abdrehen.
The author provides a timely perspective on how “sovereign AI”—the ability of countries to control and customize foundational AI—has become central to global strategy. I particularly appreciated the argument that genuine sovereignty can only be achieved through truly open, transparent, and adaptable models. Switzerland’s Apertus exemplifies this approach, and it remains to be seen how (…)
With our conference on “Assessing the Disruptions by AI Agents” in mind, I found this article compelling because it documents the alarming acceleration of cyberattack capabilities thanks to AI agents. This raises the critical question of whether we are approaching a tipping point at which defence becomes structurally impossible. However, the authors offer cautious optimism, (…)
Suite au récent refus de l’Allemagne d’adopter la loi européenne dite « Chat Control », et à l’approche de son vote au niveau européen, cet article — accompagné d’une courte vidéo — propose une synthèse claire et accessible des points de vue divergents entre législateurs et experts scientifiques.
Many countries are investing in “sovereign” AI to compensate for the linguistic, cultural, and security shortcomings of American and Chinese models. Examples include SEA-LION in Singapore, ILMUchat in Malaysia, and Apertus in Switzerland, which are designed for local uses and characteristics. However, these initiatives face major obstacles: very high costs, massive computing power and talent (…)
An important part of digital trust is being in charge of your own data. Unfortunately, nowadays this is not at all the case. Some of your data resides in the cloud, e.g., with cloud-drives like Google Drive, directly accessible to you. But most of your data is hidden from you, saved on the servers of (…)
This long portrait of one of the leading authorities in the world on AI touches only lightly on concepts that those focused on safe and trustworthy AI prioritize, like explainability. But I think the key take-away from this article is that ‘it is hard, in the current AI race, to separate out purely intellectual inquiry (…)
I liked this primer on GenAI-powered fraud so much that I forwarded it to my family members. A thorough overview of the current landscape of tech-based fraud, it analyses the subject from a technical, social and economical perspective, yet remains accessible to a broader public.
