One Pixel

So we have the multi-million dollar security breaches. And the worry about losing our personal information. But the cherry on top in this era of artificial intelligence has to do with one more thing. A pixel.

You can sometimes tell when photos are changed. Get that red eye out, crop that hair that is out of place. But with an image, a bad actor can make infinitesimal changes that the naked eye can not detect.

One pixel, in fact.

You don’t need to care if a pixel is off in your vacation photos.

But what happens if a pixel is hacked in an image that is used in an AI vision classification workload. And suddenly your pet dog is classified as a pet cat.

Now it may not be a big deal if your chihuahua is classified as a tabby.

But what if a medical image ends up being classified as a different type of cancer from what it is? What if the self-driving vehicle sees a clear road when there’s really a truck there? What if a dangerous weather pattern appears as nothing to worry about?

Yes, we need to worry about $ and PI. And now there’s life and death.

And the threat may not be from halfway around the world. It could come from your own backyard. Or even from inside.

That is why we need to be so vigilant on ensuring that data is encrypted – at rest and in flight, end-to-end. And focused on creating tools that do things like generating low-cost adversarial attacks against neural networks — for evaluating robustness against these very attacks.

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