How does AI work: A brief overview

The past year 2017 has been great. But as we move forward in the technology world, the word we hear more and more often in our everyday lives is AI or Artificial Intelligence. Surely giving intellect to an inanimate object seems to be a bit bizarre but it is exciting nonetheless. AI has given us a simpler way to carry out our jobs and will hopefully continue to do so in at least the next five years. It has given us our personal assistants built right into our smartphones and cars that can drive themselves at a price point that people can actually buy. But the uses are obviously much much greater than smartphones and building a car in which you can both text and drive, the goal is to make all kinds of efficient systems. For example an Astronomical centre where complex operations are carried out in the fastest way possible or an AI guided electrical power grid that can provide maximum power at minimum wastage. The possibilities here, are endless.

So how does AI actually work?

Here are the basic steps in which an AI system is built…

STEP 1. Neural Framework

If this topic has interested you, you’ve probably heard about the term “Neural Network”. A neural network refers to the architectural blueprint in which the the “brain cells” or “neurons” which will be placed in the body of the system. We have public projects like Google’s TensorFlow which is a proven architectural neural network model which can be optimized to do a variety of different tasks. It’s more like the DNA structure in an intelligent system.

STEP 2. Modification

So of course, in order to carry out different tasks, we need to optimize how the system works to get the maximum benefit. For example, we will never put powerful GPUs in a server computer, and will not put powerful processors in a computer for mining cryptocurrencies.

STEP 3. Training

Now comes the most interesting and the most difficult part of AI programming. AI utilizes machine learning. Just like a baby child, at this point, the computer has a brain but the computer doesn’t know what to do with it. It now needs training and guidance to successfully carry out the tasks it was meant to do. For example, if you ask the system what is 2+3 at this point, it won’t be able to answer. But, if you say manipulate 2 and 3 in such a way using mathematical operations such as plus, minus, multiplication and division so that the result is 5, it might be able to figure it out that addition is the answer after several reruns and optimizations for the first time. At this time, the system has gained IQ because it knows the result as well as the procedure from which it came. With more tasks and optimizations for hundreds of days, the AI is finally ready for practical use. And like living beings, it is based on learning experiences. It learns from its previous mistakes and improves upon it each time, acquiring greater and greater efficiency after each use.

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Want a strong password? Follow these

Every now and then whenever you want to create a new account on a website, you are asked to create a strong password for your account to keep it safe from hackers. Here are some of those things that you need to do and not to do when creating a password.

Use passphrases, not passwords

When you are told to create a password, don’t create a password, rather create a random passphrase and concatenate the words together. For example, “iamtheonewhoknocks”. Using passphrases means that you will have to try more number of letters and the hacker would take more time to crack your password through permutations and combinations and also it is going to be more expensive for the hacker.

Try to corrupt letters in your password

Corrupting letters and replacing them with symbols are apparently better passwords than you might think. But don’t make obvious changes like changing “house” to “h0use”. These are obvious changes that people make to remember passwords more easily and it makes that easier for the hacker to get in. However, you can change your password from “house” to “h9o9u9s9e“. This strengthens your password without making it difficult to remember.

Making your passwords as unrelated to you as possible.

Making your password as unrelated to you is better in terms of security. Something that you’ll never do in real life, or something that never occurred to you earlier. Something that you never googled. Because it makes easier to predict your password from your search history. Make it as random as possible and use the tips above to strengthen it even more.

Don’t have to use uppercase, lowercase and symbols

We’re constantly being told that our passwords need to have uppercase, lowercase and symbols to make it strong when the fact of the matter is that it just has to be a nonsense string of letters.

Don’t use a password manager

The easiest way to remember your password is to not remember it all and using password managers but it requires giving away all your passwords to a company which can now use your passwords and IDs in whichever way they like. Otherwise, why would they be free? If you’re not the buyer, you’re the commodity. That’s how it works. But even if your password manager completely keeps your credentials safe, there is still a possibility that your master password can be hacked and will reveal all your other passwords.

Use different passwords for different accounts

We often tend to use the same password for every account that we ever logged in to. But, we should actually change this habit and keep things in memory as much as possible. Keep different passwords for different accounts obviously makes the hacker’s job much more difficult and time consuming.

 

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Strengthening your Internet: VPN

Majority of the internet users today might have heard about this but never bothered to find out what a VPN or a Virtual Private Network could do. To be responsible and conscious internet users, we all should use this. Essentially what a VPN service does is that it routes your data through a remote server which then provides the data which you want to access over the internet.

VPN services gives us a number of advantages over regular internet sessions. Here are a few.

Online safety and privacy

All internet activities are handled by your ISP or the Internet Service Provider. They know every single website you’ve ever visited. Every profile you’ve visited on facebook and  every online payment you have made. Also, you can be potentially under government eyes for surveillance of the general public. All these can be stopped if you just use a VPN service. This will encrypt your data and make your online sessions much more secure and private.

Remote access

The VPN gives a you a virtual IP address. IP addresses are used by servers to determine where you’re using your device from to decide what content you’ll receive or whether you’ll receive any content at all. Some countries’ governments block websites that they don’t want their citizens to visit or by the host itself due to some legal or financial issues. But since the IP addresses provided by the VPN are not real, you can browse the internet as if you’re on a different location to unblock any site or content that you wish to view or use. This also increases productivity in among employees of a company by being able to access files and data that a person serving in that company could not have accessed otherwise due to location restrictions.

Anonymity

VPN services allow users to access websites and files over the internet without giving out their actual IP addresses. Hence the identity of the user remains secure and unknown. Your VPN provider however, will know your actual IP address.

Better traffic management

Whenever you want to access a content over the internet, it is always routed through the nearest server to your device (which is good under normal circumstances) but if hundreds of people access the same data at the same time, it might be a problem. Your connection will slow down significantly and might not even load up anything at all. To avoid this issue, VPN helps us again. As I said, data is routed through the nearest server form the accessing device but whenever you’re on VPN, your data always first goes to the VPN router. This will result in the routing through the nearest server to the location of where the VPN router is present. Hence bypassing the heavy traffic of the traditional data channel and providing as much as upto 25% faster internet.

Here are some of my favourite VPN service providers, click on them to know more

1. TunnelBear
2. Betternet
3. OpenVPN

 

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