Cheap AI “video scraping” can now extract data from any screen recording

Recently, AI researcher Simon Willison wanted to add up his charges from using a cloud service, but the payment values and dates he needed were scattered among a dozen separate emails. Inputting them manually would have been tedious, so he turned to a technique he calls "video scraping," which involves feeding a screen recording video into an AI model, similar to ChatGPT, for data extraction purposes.

What he discovered seems simple on its surface, but the quality of the result has deeper implications for the future of AI assistants, which may soon be able to see and interact with what we're doing on our computer screens.

"The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails," Willison wrote in a detailed post on his blog. He recorded a 35-second video scrolling through the relevant emails, then fed that video into Google's AI Studio tool, which allows people to experiment with several versions of Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash AI models.

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Peek into the Future of A&D with Ansys

Across industries, autonomous technology is driving innovation at a rapid pace. This is especially true in the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry, where autonomous technology can potentially be used for everything from conducting search and rescue missions in dangerous conditions via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to transporting passengers in busy urban areas with electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles.

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• What the future of the autonomous technology market may look like

Download the e-book to get an overview of autonomous technology in the A&D industry and discover how autonomous technology will rapidly push boundaries in the coming years

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A Patent Engineer’s Advice For First-time Inventors

Lesley-Ann Knee credits her father for introducing her to the world of patents. He’s an engineer who specializes in application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and holds several patents on technologies he developed while working for Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.

“I would hear stories of his experiences through the patent prosecution processes,” Knee says, which taught her about different kinds of patents, the importance of documentation, and using detailed language. She remembers one litigation battle over a patent that went on for years, which her father’s company lost because someone forgot to delete information in a patent claim.

Lesley-Ann Knee

Employer:

Husch Blackwell

Occupation:

Patent Engineer

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, Colorado State University, in Fort Collins

Knee, an electrical engineer, now works as a patent engineer in the patent prosecution department at the law office of Husch Blackwell, headquartered in Chicago. Under the supervision of patent attorneys, Knee helps with writing, filing, and managing patent applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

She is currently studying for the patent bar exam, which would qualify her to be a licensed patent agent, registered with the USPTO to help prepare and prosecute patent applications. Assuming she passes, she then intends to go to law school to become a patent attorney.

How to Become a Patent Engineer

Knee initially didn’t know what she wanted to study in college. Eventually she decided that an engineering degree offered diverse career opportunities, so she enrolled at Colorado State University, in her hometown of Fort Collins. She followed in her father’s footsteps, specializing in ASIC design, but also studied power systems and semiconductor physics and minored in mathematics. In 2022 she worked as an intern in the engine research division of Honda Research and Development, in Raymond, Ohio, where she developed a data analysis tool to help with testing heat distribution in vehicles.

After graduating from Colorado State in 2022, she decided to get a job related to patents. From January to May, she worked part-time as a patent technical intern at the law firm of Dorsey & Whitney, in Denver. “After learning about patents from the other side, I fell in love with the industry,” she says. Knee joined Husch Blackwell in June 2023.

She found that patent law has its quirky sides. One day her supervisor walked into one of the partner’s offices and saw the attorney “ripping apart a stuffed animal, guts everywhere,” she says. “[My] boss asked if the partner was okay. She explained that she had been pulled into a litigation case that depended entirely on the type of stitching used inside the stuffed animals.”

What Can Be Patented?

Here is Knee’s primer on U.S. patents and her advice for first-time inventors filing patents with the USPTO. This information isn’t intended to provide legal advice, she notes, and every country has its own patent system, with different rules and regulations. For specifics or guidance about legal matters, she recommends contacting a patent practitioner.

Knee’s first piece of advice? Don’t be afraid of filing a patent application. Two out of three patents get approved by the USPTO, she says.

“If you disclose your invention publicly and do not file an application within one year, you could be barred from receiving a patent on that exact invention.”

To receive a patent, an invention must have utility—that is, it has to be useful for some purpose—and novelty, meaning that it’s not an obvious variation of what already exists, she says. It could be a machine, a manufacturing process, or a composition of matter (that is, a novel combination of natural elements that are mixed mechanically or chemically).

Some things that can’t be patented, she says, are atomic weapons, devices for illegal pursuits, methods of administering business, mathematical discoveries, and scientific principles—with the exception of devices and methods that make use of those principles.

The USPTO has recognized a growing interest in artificial intelligence over the past few years, and in 2024 it released examples of AI patentability to give inventors guidance on the patentability of AI.“From my understanding, AI itself is not patentable,” Knee says. But using AI to invent something doesn’t necessarily make the invention unpatentable, she says.

An Overview of the Patent Process

The USPTO uses the “first to file” system for patent applications. “Whoever files an application first will have the best chance to patent an invention. Otherwise, you’re out of luck,” she says.

The patent filing process can vary widely in terms of cost and complexity, she says. Costs include filing fees and attorney fees. Smaller companies and individual inventors may qualify for discounts on USPTO fees. Costs may be higher for patent filings that require extensive modifications and lengthy communication with the patent office. Complexity depends on how much research USPTO examiners must do to determine the difference between existing inventions and the one in the filing.

For inventors interested in pursuing a patent for the first time, “I would highly recommend seeking out a patent practitioner—a patent attorney or patent agent—who offers free consultations to determine patentability, a possible action plan, cost, and a timeline for filing,” Knee says. Also, some universities have intellectual property legal offices that can advise professors and students on the patent process.

For someone who wants to file a patent themselves, here are some general steps:

1. File a provisional application when you have a proof of concept or prototype. This type of application doesn’t go through the USPTO but instead holds a place in line for your patent. Provisional applications expire after one year.
   
2. To follow up, file a nonprovisional application within one year of the first filing. This application is examined by the patent office and receives the filing date of the provisional application.
3. Promptly answer and respond to any USPTO rejections (called office actions), which explain the reasons your invention can’t be patented. Knee says it’s quite common to get a rejection. You can typically respond within three months at no cost or pay a fee for an extension of up to six months. If you don’t respond, the application will be considered abandoned.
4. If you receive a notice of allowance (NOA), celebrate! Your application is eligible to become a patent. Upon payment of some fees, you’ll receive an issue notification document showing the date when the patent will be officially granted, giving you the right to exclude others from using or selling your invention in the United States.
5. If you receive a notice called a final office action, you have two options. You can abandon the application, or you can file a request for continued examination, which requires you to pay for another round of prosecution and explain further why your invention deserves a patent.

The Value of Intellectual Property

Be careful disclosing information about your invention or selling it before filing a patent application, Knee says.“If you disclose your invention publicly and do not file an application within one year, you could be barred from receiving a patent on that exact invention,” she says. “Because of the ‘first to file’ system, if someone steals your idea by filing first, this can be hard and very expensive to reverse.” She also advises people to be careful about disclosing their inventions through social-media platforms or other communication methods.

In today’s intellectual property market, patents are currency. Knee has seen companies use patents as collateral for a loan, even when the patent application hasn’t been approved yet.

And other inventors use patents to launch their dream startup. “I have seen people use patents for help securing investors,” Knee says. But it’s not a one-and-done situation, she says. “The key is having one patent and filing additional applications that piggyback off of it. This process can be pricey but has a huge impact on stopping competitors from manufacturing similar products in a new field and protecting inventors in litigation battles.”

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Crop Parasites Can Be Deterred By "Electric Fences"

Imagine you’re a baby cocoa plant, just unfurling your first tentative roots into the fertile, welcoming soil.

Somewhere nearby, a predator stirs. It has no ears to hear you, no eyes to see you. But it knows where you are, thanks in part to the weak electric field emitted by your roots.

It is microscopic, but it’s not alone. By the thousands, the creatures converge, slithering through the waterlogged soil, propelled by their flagella. If they reach you, they will use fungal-like hyphae to penetrate and devour you from the inside. They’re getting closer. You’re a plant. You have no legs. There’s no escape.

But just before they fall upon you, they hesitate. They seem confused. Then, en masse, they swarm off in a different direction, lured by a more attractive electric field. You are safe. And they will soon be dead.

If Eleonora Moratto and Giovanni Sena get their way, this is the future of crop pathogen control.

Many variables are involved in the global food crisis, but among the worst are the pests that devastate food crops, ruining up to 40 percent of their yield before they can be harvested. One of these—the little protist in the example above, an oomycete formally known as Phytophthora palmivora—has a US $1 billion appetite for economic staples like cocoa, palm, and rubber.

There is currently no chemical defense that can vanquish these creatures without poisoning the rest of the (often beneficial) organisms living in the soil. So Moratto, Sena, and their colleagues at Sena’s group at Imperial College London settled on a non-traditional approach: They exploited P. palmivora’s electric sense, which can be spoofed.

All plant roots that have been measured to date generate external ion flux, which translates into a very weak electric field. Decades of evidence suggests that this signal is an important target for predators’ navigation systems. However, it remains a matter of some debate how much their predators rely on plants’ electrical signatures to locate them, as opposed to chemical or mechanical information. Last year, Moratto and Sena’s group found that P. palmivora spores are attracted to the positive electrode of a cell generating current densities of 1 ampere per square meter. “The spores followed the electric field,” says Sena, suggesting that a similar mechanism helps them find natural bioelectric fields emitted by roots in the soil.

That got the researchers wondering: Might such an artificial electric field override the protists’ other sensory inputs, and scramble their compasses as they tried to use plant roots’ much weaker electrical output?

To test the idea, the researchers developed two ways to protect plant roots using a constant vertical electric field. They cultivated two common snacks for P. palmivora—a flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard, and a legume often used as a livestock feed plant—in tubes in a hydroponic solution.

Two electric field configurations were tested: A “global” vertical field (left) and a field generated by two small, nearby electrodes. The global field proved to be slightly more effective.Eleonora Moratto

In the first assay, the researchers sandwiched the plant roots between rows of electrodes above and below, which completely engulfed them in a “global” vertical field. For the second set, the field was generated using two small electrodes a short distance away from the plant, creating current densities on the order of 10 A/m². Then they unleashed the protists.

With respect to the control group, both methods successfully diverted a significant portion of the predators away from the plant roots. They swarmed the positive electrode, where—since zoospores can’t survive for longer than about 2 to 3 hours without a host—they presumably starved to death. Or worse. Neil Gow, whose research presented some of the first evidence for zoospore electrosensing, has other theories about their fate. “Applied electrical fields generate toxic products and steep pH gradients near and around the electrodes due to the electrolysis of water,” he says. “The tropism towards the electrode might be followed by killing or immobilization due to the induced pH gradients.”

Not only did the technique prevent infestation, but some evidence indicates that it may also mitigate existing infections. The researchers published their results in August in Scientific Reports.

The global electric field was marginally more successful than the local. However, it would be harder to translate from lab conditions into a (literal) field trial in soil. The local electric field setup would be easy to replicate: “All you have to do is stick the little plug into the soil next to the crop you want to protect,” says Sena.

Moratto and Sena say this is a proof-of-concept that demonstrates a basis for a new, pesticide-free way to protect food crops. (Sena likens the technique to the decoys used by fighter jets to draw away incoming missiles by mimicking the signals of the original target.) They are now looking for funding to expand the project. The first step is testing the local setup in soil; the next is to test the approach on Phytophthora infestans, a meaner, scarier cousin of P. palmivora.

P. infestans attacks a more varied diet of crops—you may be familiar with its work during the Irish potato famine. The close genetic similarities imply another promising candidate for electrical pest control. This investigation, however, may require more funding. P. infestans research can only be undertaken under more stringent laboratory security protocols.

The work at Imperial ties into the broader—and somewhat charged—debate around electrostatic ecology; that is, the extent to which creatures including ticks make use of heretofore poorly understood electrical mechanisms to orient themselves and in other ways enhance their survival. “Most people still aren’t aware that naturally occurring electricity can play an ecological role,” says Sam England, a behavioural ecologist with Berlin’s Natural History Museum. “So I suspect that once these electrical phenomena become more well known and understood, they will inspire a greater number of practical applications like this one.”

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Men accused of DDoSing some of the world’s biggest tech companies

Federal authorities have charged two Sudanese nationals with running an operation that performed tens of thousands of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against some of the world’s biggest technology companies, as well as critical infrastructure and government agencies.

The service, branded as Anonymous Sudan, directed powerful and sustained DDoSes against Big Tech companies, including Microsoft, OpenAI, Riot Games, PayPal, Steam, Hulu, Netflix, Reddit, GitHub, and Cloudflare. Other targets included CNN.com, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, the US departments of Justice, Defense and State, the FBI, and government websites for the state of Alabama. Other attacks targeted sites or servers located in Europe.

Two brothers, Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer, 22, and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer, 27, were both charged with one count of conspiracy to damage protected computers. Ahmed Salah was also charged with three counts of damaging protected computers. Among the allegations is that one of the brothers attempted to “knowingly and recklessly cause death.” If convicted on all charges, Ahmed Salah would face a maximum of life in federal prison, and Alaa Salah would face a maximum of five years in federal prison.

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Deepfake lovers swindle victims out of $46M in Hong Kong AI scam

On Monday, Hong Kong police announced the arrest of 27 people involved in a romance scam operation that used AI face-swapping techniques to defraud victims of $46 million through fake cryptocurrency investments, reports the South China Morning Post. The scam ring created attractive female personas for online dating, using unspecified tools to transform their appearances and voices.

Those arrested included six recent university graduates allegedly recruited to set up fake cryptocurrency trading platforms. An unnamed source told the South China Morning Post that five of the arrested people carry suspected ties to Sun Yee On, a large organized crime group (often called a "triad") in Hong Kong and China.

"The syndicate presented fabricated profit transaction records to victims, claiming substantial returns on their investments," said Fang Chi-kin, head of the New Territories South regional crime unit.

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Dean Kamen Says Inventing Is Easy, but Innovating Is Hard

Over the past 20 years, technological advances have enabled inventors to go from strength to strength. And yet, according to the legendary inventor Dean Kamen, innovation has stalled. Kamen made a name for himself with inventions including the first portable insulin pump for diabetics, an advanced wheelchair that can climb steps, and the Segway mobility device. Here, he talks about his plan for enabling innovators.

How has inventing changed since you started in the 1990s?

Dean Kamen: Kids all over the world can now be inventing in the world of synthetic biology the way we played with Tinkertoys and Erector Sets and Lego. I used to put pins and smelly formaldehyde in frogs in high school. Today in high school, kids will do experiments that would have won you the Nobel Prize in Medicine 40 years ago. But none of those kids are likely in any short time to be on the market with a pharmaceutical that will have global impact. Today, while invention is getting easier and easier, I think there are some aspects of innovation that have gotten much more difficult.

Can you explain the difference?

Kamen: Most people think those two words mean the same thing. Invention is coming up with an idea or a thing or a process that has never been done that way before. [Thanks to] more access to technology and 3D printers and simulation programs and virtual ways to make things, the threshold to be able to create something new and different has dramatically lowered.

Historically, inventions were only the starting point to get to innovation. And I’ll define an innovation as something that reached a scale where it impacted a piece of the world, or transformed it: the wheel, steam, electricity, Internet. Getting an invention to the scale it needs to be to become an innovation has gotten easier—if it’s software. But if it’s sophisticated technology that requires mechanical or physical structure in a very competitive world? It’s getting harder and harder to do due to competition, due to global regulatory environments.

[For example,] in proteomics [the study of proteins] and genomics and biomedical engineering, the invention part is, believe it or not, getting a little easier because we know so much, because there are development platforms now to do it. But getting a biotech product cleared by the Food and Drug Administration is getting more expensive and time consuming, and the risks involved are making the investment community much more likely to invest in the next version of Angry Birds than curing cancer.

A lot of ink has been spilled about how AI is changing inventing. Why hasn’t that helped?

Kamen: AI is an incredibly valuable tool. As long as the value you’re looking for is to be able to collect massive amounts of data and being able to process that data effectively. That’s very different than what a lot of people believe, which is that AI is inventing and creating from whole cloth new and different ideas.

How are you using AI to help with innovation?

Kamen: Every medical school has incredibly brilliant professors and grad students with petri dishes. “Look, I can make nephrons. We can grow people a new kidney. They won’t need dialysis.” But they only have petri dishes full of the stuff. And the scale they need is hundreds and hundreds of liters.

I started a not-for-profit called ARMI—the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute—to help make it practical to manufacture human cells, tissues, and organs. We are using artificial intelligence to speed up our development processes and eliminate going down frustratingly long and expensive [dead-end] paths. We figure out how to bring tissue manufacturing to scale. We build the bioreactors, sensor technologies, robotics, and controls. We’re going to put them together and create an industry that can manufacture hundreds of thousands of replacement kidneys, livers, pancreases, lungs, blood, bone, you name it.

So ARMI’s purpose is to help would-be innovators?

Kamen: We are not going to make a product. We’re not even going to make a whole company. We’re going to create baseline core technologies that will enable all sorts of products and companies to emerge to create an entire new industry. It will be an innovation in health care that will lower costs because cures are much cheaper than chronic treatments. We have to break down the barriers so that these fantastic inventions can become global innovations.

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