Scientists use AI in the fight against mosquito-borne diseases
At the University of South Florida, researchers are developing a mosquito trap that uses artificial intelligence to quickly identify the disease-carrying insects. Arrthy Thayaparan reports.
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Telegraph
34 minutes ago
- Telegraph
The tech arms race to beat fare-dodgers
A technological arms race has broken out to combat the fare-dodging crisis plaguing Britain's railways. Faced with the prospect of £500m in lost ticket sales, rail operators are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) and so-called machine learning to crack down on freeloaders. Evasion tactics that once went little further than hiding in a train lavatory to avoid the guard have changed radically since ticket barriers – first trialled on the Tube in 1964 – were introduced at major stations and across commuter networks. Miscreants are often seen forcing their way through the barriers to avoid paying, a trend recently highlighted by Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, as he issued a call to arms. However, evasion tactics span well beyond brute force. The digitisation of ticketing in particular, with the bulk of payments made by bank card, travel card or mobile phone, has opened up whole new avenues for fare abuse and forced operators to respond with tougher safeguards. Transport for London (TfL), which puts its annual losses from fare-dodging at £130m, says that 4.7pc of Tube passengers – almost one in every 20 – skipped paying or stumped up the incorrect fare in the last financial year alone. Yet, across its wider network of the Tube, Overground, buses, Docklands Light Railway and Elizabeth Line, the rate of offending fell from 3.8pc to 3.4pc after fines were raised to £100. TfL aims to bring it down to 1.5pc by 2030 through an intelligence-led approach combined with new technologies and more proactive enforcement. While offending in London is well short of New York's 13pc evasion rate, Siwan Hayward, TfL's director of security, says that fare-dodging 'is not a victimless crime'. She says: 'It robs Londoners of vital investment in a safe and reliable transport network. The overwhelming majority of customers pay the correct fare, and it's unfair to those who do that a minority avoid paying.' The main weapon in TfL's armoury is its Irregular Travel Analysis Platform (ITAP), which uses ticketing and journey data, passenger information and CCTV to identify repeat offenders. The tool is integral for a TfL investigations team that seeks to identify 'high-impact offenders', some of whom cost the network up to thousands of pounds a year in lost revenue. After studying data, the team liaises with 500 uniformed enforcement officers and plain-clothes inspectors, who can demand proof of a ticket or travel card while staging sting operations in stations, sometimes supported by the British Transport Police. This crackdown led to TfL securing fines of £400,000 last year after prosecuting 360 of the most prolific offenders. Among the offences deployed by fare evaders are techniques known as zonal avoidance and re-tokenisation. The former, colloquially dubbed 'doughnutting', involves travel through zones that have not been paid for. In re-tokenisation, or 'card tumbling,' the fraudster deletes a virtual card from a digital wallet on a mobile device after a journey to prevent authorisation of the transaction overnight. The card is then reloaded, at which point it is allocated a new tokenised number, preventing it from being blacklisted. A similar con involves the use of a bank card with insufficient funds to pay for a ticket. Tube gates identify the card as genuine and will let the holder in and out, only for the payment to bounce when requested. One offender last year used a contactless card to avoid paying the correct fare on 202 journeys, resulting in £1,427 in fines. Other scams include the abuse of Freedom Passes, which offer free travel in London for the disabled and those aged 66 and over. Meanwhile, outside of the biggest cities, at least 2,000 of Britain's 2,500 or so stations still lack barriers. Therefore, bosses are required to rely on traditional checks to ensure passengers are paying. Graham Sutherland, chief executive of FirstGroup, which runs express trains on the West Coast and Great Western main lines, said on-train ticket checks remained vital to prevent 'revenue leakage'. But there is no doubt that technology has been a game-changer. LNER, which runs trains between London King's Cross and Edinburgh, has led the way among long-distance operators in deploying AI to uncover unusual ticket-purchase patterns and identify fraudsters, setting up a 'machine learning team' to work alongside its risk experts. A pilot project that began in 2023 immediately identified a customer who had failed to pay for £10,000 worth of travel. Using information uncovered by the new technology, the team then built a case, which resulted in the customer repaying the full loss to LNER. Paul Larder, at LNER, said the application of machine learning had been revolutionary. He said: 'Previously, we've relied on our revenue protection team to identify customers who deliberately purchase incorrect tickets for travelling on our services. 'By using AI, we can accurately analyse large amounts of information quickly and identify patterns that our team can investigate further.' While companies are ramping up efforts to catch offenders, a report from the Office of Rail and Road this month identified 'significant inconsistency' in how operators target fare-dodgers, which has led to unnecessary and unfair prosecutions. Lord Hendy, the rail minister, who put the cost of fare evasion in England outside London at £400m a year, said a planned new ticketing system as part of the nationalisation programme should reduce instances of people mistakenly buying the wrong tickets. However, for the thugs who push through – known as bumpers, jumpers and tailgaters – sturdier barriers are being created. Developed by Cubic Transportation Systems, the barriers stretch from the floor to shoulder height and use AI-aided scanning software to detect instances of fare-dodging. Cubic says the gates 'can accurately detect, record and flag fare evasion as it's happening, distinguishing between different types of fare evasion, such as pushing through and climbing under the paddles or tailgating'. Sir Sadiq Khan's TfL has not yet said if it will order the equipment. However, if they do, they may finally offer some solace to law-abiding passengers confronted by petty criminals cheating the system while regular staff, who are forbidden from staging physical interventions, look on.
Reuters
42 minutes ago
- Reuters
Webb telescope spots infant planets in different stages of development
WASHINGTON, June 12 (Reuters) - The James Webb Space Telescope has observed two large planets at different stages of infancy - one with an atmosphere brimming with dusty clouds and the other encircled by a disk of material - orbiting a young sun-like star in a discovery that illustrates the complex nature of how planetary systems develop. The two gas giant planets, both more massive than our solar system's largest planet Jupiter, were directly imaged by Webb in a planetary system located in the Milky Way galaxy about 310 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Musca. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). Astronomers have detected more than 5,900 planets beyond our solar system - called exoplanets - since the 1990s, with less than 2% of these directly imaged like these two. It is rare to find exoplanets in their early developmental stages. The birth of a planetary system begins with a large cloud of gas and dust - called a molecular cloud - that collapses under its own gravity to form a central star. Leftover material spinning around the star in what is called a protoplanetary disk forms planets. This planetary system was observed by Webb very early in its developmental history. The star, named YSES-1, is about the same mass as the sun. The two planets orbit a long distance from the star, each probably needing thousands of years to complete a single orbit. While the sun is roughly 4.5 billion years old, this star is approximately 16 million years old, a veritable newborn. The researchers were surprised to find that the two neonatal planets observed by Webb appeared to be at different stages of development. The innermost of the two has a mass about 14 times greater than Jupiter and orbits the star at a distance 160 times greater than Earth orbits the sun and more than five times as far as our solar system's outermost planet Neptune. The planet is surrounded by a disk of small-grained dust, a state one might expect in a very early stage of formation when it is still coalescing, or perhaps if there has been a collision of some kind or a moon is in the process of taking shape. Webb spotted water and carbon monoxide in its atmosphere. The outermost planet has a mass about six times greater than that of Jupiter and orbits the star at 320 times the distance of Earth to the sun. Its atmosphere is loaded with silicate clouds, differing from our solar system's gas giants. Webb also detected methane, water, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It has no disk of material around it. The puzzling combination of traits presented by these two planets in the same system illustrates "the complex landscape that is planet formation and shows how much we truly don't know about how planetary systems came to be, including our own," said astrophysicist Kielan Hoch of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who led the study published this week in the journal Nature, opens new tab. "Theoretically, the planets should be forming around the same time, as planet formation happens fairly quickly, within about one million years," Hoch said. A real mystery is the location where the planets formed, Hoch added, noting that their orbital distance from the host star is greater than would be expected if they formed in the protoplanetary disk. "Furthermore, why one planet still retains material around it and one has distinct silicate clouds remains a big question. Do we expect all giant planets to form the same way and look the same if they formed in the same environment? These are questions we have been investigating for ages to place the formation of our own solar system into context," Hoch said. In addition to amassing a trove of discoveries about the early universe since becoming operational in 2022, Webb has made a major contribution to the study of exoplanets with its observations at near- and mid-infrared wavelengths. "Webb is revealing all sorts of atmospheric physics and chemistry happening in exoplanets that we didn't know before, and is currently challenging every atmospheric model we used pre-Webb," Hoch said.
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Telus offers to fully own digital unit for greater control of AI capabilities
June 12 (Reuters) - Telus ( opens new tab said on Thursday it intends to acquire the shares in its listed digital services subsidiary it does not currently own, as the Canadian telecom firm seeks greater control of the unit's artificial intelligence capabilities. The company has offered $3.40 per share to acquire the shares it does not own in Telus Digital ( opens new tab, valuing the unit at $946.8 million, according to Reuters' calculation. Telus currently holds about 57% of the digital unit's outstanding shares directly and through its other units. This is a 15% premium to the last closing price of the subsidiary's U.S.-listed stock. U.S.-listed shares of the digital unit are down more than 24% this year, severely lagging the parent company whose U.S. listing is up nearly 19% this year. The move underscores Telus' push for more control of the digital unit, which helps businesses adopt AI and develop data strategies amid a worldwide push to harness the technology. "Our proposal to fully acquire Telus Digital reflects our belief that closer operational proximity... will enable enhanced AI capabilities and SaaS transformation across all lines of our business," Telus CEO Darren Entwistle said. Telus said last month it is investing more than C$70 billion ($51.40 billion) in Canada over the next five years to expand its network infrastructure in the country, which would be focused around launching two new AI data centers. Barclays is serving as Telus' financial advisor. ($1 = 1.3619 Canadian dollars)
