ukraine

Vikings star Katheryn Winnick made her character Lagertha — a shield maiden, or female warrior — as tough and determined as any of the male warriors fighting in bloody battles on the popular history drama. And she’s a a kick-ass woman in real life, having earned her first black belt at 13 and opened three martial arts studios in her native Toronto by age 21. But Winnick says her onscreen bravado in Vikings is nothing compared to the fighting spirit she has seen among the Ukrainian people as they defend…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Until the early morning of February 24, 2022, Ukrainian scientist Olena Iarmosh did not believe there would be a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Iarmosh grew up and had settled in Kharkiv, her beloved city in Eastern Ukraine and only 40 km away from the Russian border, where she worked for more than 16 years as a lecturer in higher education before fleeing to Switzerland. At approximately 5 a.m.,…

Internet propagandists aligned with Russia have duped at least seven Western celebrities, including Elijah Wood and Priscilla Presley, into recording short videos to support its online information war against Ukraine, according to new security research by Microsoft.The celebrities look like they were asked to offer words of encouragement—apparently via the Cameo app—to someone named “Vladimir” who appears to be struggling with substance abuse, Microsoft said. Instead, these messages were edited, sometimes dressed up with…

After Palmer Luckey founded Anduril in 2017, he promised it would be a new kind of defense contractor, inspired by hacker ingenuity and Silicon Valley speed.The company’s latest product, a jet-powered, AI-controlled combat drone called Roadrunner, is inspired by the grim reality of modern conflict, especially in Ukraine, where large numbers of cheap, agile suicide drones have proven highly deadly over the past year.“The problem we saw emerging was this very low-cost, very high-quantity, increasingly sophisticated and…

Bernard Sumner of New Order, Joy Division is featured on the cover of Angelic Upstarts' "Solidarity" Gogol Bordello‘s Eugene Hütz is launching his new label, Casa Gogol Records, with a single benefitting Ukraine. Hütz recruited Bernard Sumner (New Order, Joy Division) for a cover of Angelic Upstarts’ “Solidarity.” The pair’s take on the punk song comes in two forms, remixed by each artist respectively. Both Gogol Bordello’s “Unity” mix and Sumner’s “Right to Freedom” mix match their distinct…

On 24 February 2022, Russian tanks entered Ukraine from Belarus. Their goal was to seize Kyiv. Armoured columns moved openly, trundling through a landscape of forest and swamp. The Kremlin assumed a quick victory. The plan came dramatically unstuck in Bucha, a pleasant commuter town 15 miles from the Ukrainian capital.A group of volunteers took to the barricades. They included a musician from an academic orchestra, a family therapist who taught Argentine tango, a recreational hunter and a gas station attendant. Over four…

 Artificial intelligence employed by the U.S. military has piloted pint-sized surveillance drones in special operations forces' missions and helped Ukraine in its war against Russia. It tracks soldiers' fitness, predicts when Air Force planes need maintenance, and helps keep tabs on rivals in space.Now, the Pentagon is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China. The ambitious initiative — dubbed Replicator — seeks to…

December 1, 20232min readAn AI model could speed up laborious and dangerous demining effortsBy Lori YoumshajekianSignage indicates the presence of landmines at the position of a Ukrainian volunteer unit in a suburb of Kyiv on February 28, 2023. Finding and removing land mines is an excruciatingly slow process. Human deminers scour contaminated ground inch by inch with handheld metal detectors, waiting for the telltale beep of a magnetic anomaly. Although trained dogs are sometimes used, metal detectors have remained the…

Today, November 24, governments took center stage in making major artificial intelligence-related announcements. IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that the government of India has launched a crackdown on deepfakes, particularly their usage in videos. In other news, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the West should not be allowed to develop a monopoly in the sphere of AI at an AI conference in Moscow. This and more in today's AI roundup. Let us take a closer look.Govt to crackdown on deepfakesIT minister…

A graph showing the Google Perspective API results. Author provided As the war between Israel and Hamas has intensified in Gaza, disinformation and conspiracy theories about the conflict have been increasingly circulating on social media. At least that's what I found in my analysis of some 12,000 comments posted on Telegram…