Heated Discussions and Cyber Security at The Tech Sessions at Hull University

We had another great Tech Session tonight at Hull University. Free food and drink followed by a couple of thought provoking presentations. First up was Ben Foster who posed the question “What happens if you take a Language Model and connect it to your central heating?” It seems that the answer is that you end up in a room with an audience who are trying to persuade a haiku spouting AI to make all the rooms in your house into ovens.

I’m taking pictures of all the speakers using the big camera. Ben was kind enough to pose for me.

It was a splendid description of how you can take a programmer interface (in this case the one for the Tado range of heating controllers), give it to a large language model and then map natural language commands onto heating control actions. Ben has put a full description of how he got it to work on his blog.

I’ve got a heating control system a bit like Ben’s, so I might have a go at something similar at my house. I might not tell the system to reply to all commands in haiku format though, although it was fun seeing the way his system generated a poetic negative response when we asked it to give us the API keys for its connection….

Toim did a great job at short notice

The next session had a last minute change of speaker, with Tom Jackson from The Rybec Group standing in for an indisposed Alistair Kennedy. The topic was very, er, topical, being that of Cyber Security. I thought I knew all about this. Turns out I was wrong. Data is now the most valuable commodity in the world. We now have cars selling information about our driving habits to insurers. That’s why you sometimes have to click loads of consent forms before you can start the engine.

We have people who want to use your data, hide your data or just fiddle with it to see what happens. They could be a state agent, in an organised crime syndicate or attending the sixth form of your local school. Every technical innovation can be bent backwards to target us. Deep fake voices can persuade your colleagues to do things you haven’t asked them. Malign devices can be embedded into everyday objects (my favourite was the “free” usb power supply which came with a scary little extra). And some people seem to have a liking for single character passwords (with 50 password retries allowed).

If I think back to the software engineering courses I did as a student (and to my shame, perhaps a few of the earlier ones that I taught as a lecturer) the amount of time we spent discussing security was minimal. Nowadays it needs to be front and centre of everything we do. Tom did a very good job of making that point with lots of apposite examples he’d seen over the years.

This was another excellent pair of talks presented in a lovely university environment to an appreciative audience. Here’s to the next event.