Scientists have developed an algorithm that scans online ads for escorts to identify human traffickers and their victims. The algorithm, called InfoShield, searches for escort ads with strong similarities, which can be a sign of trafficking. Per thestudy paper: The majority of ads suspected of HT [human trafficking] are written by one person, who is controlling ads for four-six different victims at a time. By looking for small clusters of ads that contain similar phrasing, rather than analyzing standalone ads, we’re finding the groups of ads that are most likely to be organized activity, which is a strong signal of HT....

Fascinating research from Microsoft’s Johannes Kopf and Dani Lischinski of The Hebrew University has produced an algorithm that is remarkably good at turning 8-bit pixel art into shaded, smooth vector art,Popular Science reports. The “depixelizing” algorithm, as detailed in thisresearch paper, has shown a great deal of promise. It’s capable of determining the curve lines from single diagonally connected pixels, and the shading is quite natural and effective. Here’s one image from the report with the algorithm’s output on top and the original pixel art at the bottom:...

Weeks after astudy revealedthat Amazon warehouse workers are injured at higher rates than staff at rival firms, the company has revealed it’s testing new robots designed to improve employee safety. The e-commerce giant has ingratiatingly named two of the bots afterSesame Street’sBert and Ernie. Bert is an Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) that’s built to navigate through Amazon facilities. In the future, the company envisions the bot carrying large and heavy items or carts across a site, reducing the strain on its human coworkers....

People usingFacebookin work is a huge problem for employers and some go as far as banning it completely for all their employees in a fruitless bid to increase productivity. Well anew app from Dieselis seeking to solve that problem and allow you to access Facebook all day long without anybody being the wiser that you are social networking instead of working on tiresome documents. The app hooks up to your Facebook account using Facebook connect and you can start updating your status, liking content and chatting with your friends all from what looks like an excel spreadsheet to the outside world....

New Apple hardware might drop next week — here’s what we think it’ll be TIME TO GET EXCITED So what could this new Apple hardware be? And here we come to the most interesting question. It seems likely that it’s going to be hardware, rather than software, as the leaked memo was sent to providers of AppleCare+. Now, there are a few things Apple (reportedly) has in the pipeline, includinga new Apple TV,AirTags, and itsover-ear AirPods....