Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1465278
Alexiei Dingli Prof Alexiei Dingli is a Professor of AI at the University of Malta and has been conducting research and working in the field of AI for more than two decades, assisting different companies to implement AI solutions. He forms part of the Malta.AI task-force, set up by the Maltese government, aimed at making Malta one of the top AI countries in the world T he sudden invasion of Ukraine came like a bolt from the blue. Various intelligence departments worldwide have warned the world about Russia's imminent invasion of Ukraine. However, aer almost eight decades of peace since the last world war, few be- lieved that the continent would move down that path again. However, in con- trast to previous wars, there's a new play- er on the battlefield; Artificial Intelligence (AI). Ironically, humanity achieved vari- ous technological advancements due to wars. AI is no different, and the first concepts too were conceived during the second world war. At the time, the allies needed to decipher enemy messages. ey gathered the most famous Brit- ish mathematicians to Bletchley Park (a small estate close to London) and in- structed them to decode enemy conver- sations. One of them was Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, who built a large calculator called Colossus to perform fast calculations. e war was shorted by two years as a direct re- sult of their work, thus saving millions of lives! Of course, this was only the inception, but that tiny seed led to the creation (a decade later) of the field of study we call AI. Fast forward to today, and we'll notice that AI is an essential element in the Ukrainian war. One of the technologies used is facial recognition technology, which can determine a person's identity just from a photo. e company pro- viding the system trained the AI on 2 billion images obtained from social me- dia services. rough it, the Ukrainian arm can identify persons of interest at checkpoints, thus restricting the move- ment of Russian operatives on the ter- ritory. Another use of such a technolo- gy is to identify the dead. Rather than going through the laborious process of collecting fingerprints from dead bod- ies, facial recognition can simplify the arduous process. Finally, since many families, including numerous children, have been dispersed, the system can help to reunite refugees. Another technology is AI transcrip- tion, which can examine streams of speech data and change it into text for further analyses. When soldiers are on the battlefield, their primary source of communication is via radio transmis- sions. Some of these are encrypted, but many others are open, so anyone with the right equipment can listen in. e Ukrainian military uses this technolo- gy to surveil the Russian army at scale. e past decade has seen significant advances in AI's capabilities around speech thanks to massive algorithms that learn from vast tranches of train- ing data. e AI primarily handles four tasks; gather audio captured from radio receiver hardware; remove noise, in- cluding background chatter and music; transcribe, translate Russian speech, and highlight critical statements rele- vant to the battlefield. On the other hand, Russia is no less than Ukraine when it comes to AI. Vladimir Putin declared in 2017 that Russia aspires to become the world leader in AI. Notwithstanding this, Rus- sia still lags behind the US and China in AI defence capabilities. One of the tech- nologies used in Ukraine is the analysis of battlefield data, including drone sur- veillance footage. is technology was already battle-tested in the Syrian war, proving effective for intelligence gath- ering. Another area that Russia is looking at involves autonomous weapons. ey already have "kamikaze" drones with autonomous capabilities called the Lan- test. Syria was their first testing ground. eir function was to loiter in an area and attack tanks, vehicle columns, or troop concentrations. Once launched, it circles a predesignated geographic area until detecting a preselected target type. It then crashes itself into the target, det- onating the warhead it carries. But the Ukrainian war is not just on the ground. e web is the next battle- ground, and AI is used to gather intel- ligence. All sorts of social media post- ed by troops and attacks uploaded by average Ukrainians allow civil society groups to fact-check the claims made by both sides in the conflict. It also provides necessary documentation of potential atrocities and human rights violations. at could be vital for future war crimes prosecutions. On the infowar front, the war on disin- formation is at its peak. Russia already took the first steps to isolate their Inter- net from the rest of the world through RuNet. is network allows the Inter- net to continue working as expected but redirects all the internet traffic through national servers managed by the state. Practically, the state controls the web- sites that Russians can view and those they can't. us it is unsurprising that companies offering proxy services have become increasingly popular in Russia. ese companies allow users to create secure tunnels through RuNet and, in so doing, see censored content. Anonymous, the movement of hack- tivists, too declared a cyberwar on Rus- sia. ey monitor what's happening in Ukraine and hack into Russian servers for payback. As part of this operation, they leaked the personal information of 120,000 Russian soldiers and 35,000 files from the central bank of Russia. Television stations, too, were targetted by broad- casting streams showing citizens the devastation of the Russian invasion. e activists have also hacked a censorship agency, government, corporate, and news websites. As the war in Ukraine lingers on, the battle is raging on many fronts. Unlike previous conflicts, technology, particu- larly AI, is playing a significant role. In the past, technology was instrumental in bringing a world conflict to an end. Let's hope this time around; it will have the same effect of restoring peace to the war-torn country and avoiding further escalations on the European continent. Ukraine: The Artificial Intelligence war OPINION 21.4.2022