Technology

A 28-year-old man in South Korea faces a year in prison for hacking Overwatch . The sentence, reported by South KoreaSBS News and Dot Esports, handed the hacker one year in prison and two years of probation for illicit activity related to the hit online multiplayer game. The particularly steep sentence is a result of both the ongoing nature of the activity and the fact that the individual generated 200 million Korean won (almost $180,000 USD) from Overwatch-related hacks.

The hackercharges stem from the violation of two Korean laws: the Game Industry Promotion Act and the Information and Communication Technology Protection Law. In the last year, Overwatch developer Blizzard Entertainment has worked withthe Seoul National Police Agencycybersecurity department to crack down on hacks that compromise the integrity of the high-profile game, particularly due to its prominence in the esports world.

&Cheating on the Asian Overwatch server is endemic and widespread,& Kotaku reported in a story on Overwatch hacking last year. &On the Battle.net forums and Reddit, complaints about hacking South Korean players& too-accurate headshots, immediate gun-downs and even DDOS attacks against winners in competitive mode are widespread.&

Hacks for a game like Overwatch can take many forms, including scripts that enable perfect aim, match-fixing and a rank manipulation practice known as boosting.

&Doing anything to manipulate your internal MMR or Skill Rating (i.e. Boosting or Throwing) is not fine,& Overwatch Creative Director Jeff Kaplan wrote in a forum post last year. &Penalties for boosting and throwing are about to increase dramatically.&

The new sentence isn&t the first to be handed down by the Korean government for game-related hacking, but given the fact that sentencing usually results in large fines, it is notably harsh. Laws meant to deter gaming hacks went into effect in the country last year and stipulate that violators may face up to $43,000 in fines and up to five years in prison.

Artificially intelligent systems taking on human competitors is a grand tradition of computer science; thankfully, we&re still in the cute stages that don&t feel quite like War Games yet. For its part, OpenAI has been trying its hand at Dota 2 competitive play, and its bots are starting to win against some skilled opponents under certain conditions.

The Elon Musk co-founded venture is aiming to raise awareness for where AI technologies are now and how the tech industry can promote safe advances that benefit everyone in the future. While playing an unabashedly nerdy video game better than human opponents may seem to be a weird place to expend extensive resources, itall the continuation of where AlphaGo and Deep Blue have taken us before: building machines that can beat humans in seemingly simple games.

Unlike decidedly more turn-based games like chess or Go, Dota 2 is a title that requires plenty of real-time decision-making. While GoogleAlphaGo sometimes took minutes to decide how to respond to a particularly well-crafted move, OpenAI Five, as itcalled, does not have that luxury, as its opponent would be making moves in the meantime. These games are operating at 30 frames per second for an average of 45 minutes, OpenAI says, resulting in about 80,000 frames, of which the system analyzes one-quarter.

Thisblog post has plenty of the nitty-gritty technical details if you&re interested.

This is plenty resource-intensive — OpenAI Five is running on 124,000 cores on Google Cloud — and while this isn&t OpenAIfirst public experimentation playing Dota 2, what makes this interesting is that, compared to its previous efforts in 1v1 matches, this is a team of five distinct neural nets working together to best human opponents.

For its part, OpenAI gave some interesting data points about OpenAI Five, particularly how it learns by playing 180 years& worth of Dota 2 games against itself every day.

OpenAI is understandably still tackling the parameters of the full game and is struggling in some aspects; as a result, there are certain rules by which both OpenAI and its human opponents must operate during matches, including not using certain characters, items and strategies. Even with these current restrictions, which the group fully outlines on the blog post, the team is aiming to compete at a Dota 2 esports world championship in August, where it will be fully tested.

OpenAI will be hosting a Twitch-streamed Dota 2 tourney next month to showcase what it has built as it competes against top players.

At the end of the day, a lot of this &Human versus AI& excitement is a bit over-exalted; these are games being approached by insanely powerful computer programs that can do one thing and only one thing. A lot of the media narrative around how artificial intelligence is already beating human experts is valid in a certain light, but kind of undermines the complex work being done by the people building these programs. This all probably plays into OpenAIinterests, however, which seem to be focused quite a bit on driving home how quickly we&re progressing toward artificial general intelligence.

Itgoing to probably be a bit before an AI-controlled system starts trouncing opponents in Fortnite, but for a fixed-perspective strategy game like Dota 2, there is room for boundary-pushing hyper-focused AI programs to bulk up on gameplay knowledge and perhaps deliver some wins.

At MBC Biolabs, an incubator for biotech startups in San FranciscoDogpatch neighborhood, a team of scientists and interns working for the small startup Prellis Biologics have just taken a big step on the path toward developing viable 3D-printed organs for humans.

The company, which was founded in 2016 by research scientists Melanie Matheu and Noelle Mullin, staked its future (and a small $3 million investment) on a new technology to manufacture capillaries, the one-cell-thick blood vessels that are the pathways which oxygen and nutrients move through to nourish tissues in the body.

Without functioning capillary structures, it is impossible to make organs, according to Matheu. They&re the most vital piece of the puzzle in the quest to print viable hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs, she said.

&Microvasculature is the fundamental architectural unit that supports advanced multicellular life and it therefore represents a crucial target for bottom-up human tissue engineering and regenerative medicine,& said Jordan Miller, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice University and an expert in 3D-printed implantable biomaterial structures, in a statement.

This real-time video shows tiny fluorescent particles & 5 microns in diameter (the same size as a red blood cell) & moving through an array of 105 capillaries printed in parallel, inside a 700 micron diameter tube. Each capillary is 250 microns long.

Now, Prellis has published findings indicating that it can manufacture those capillaries at a size and speed that would deliver 3D-printed organs to the market within the next five years.

Prellis uses holographic printing technology that creates three-dimensional layers deposited by a light-induced chemical reaction that happens in five milliseconds.

This feature, according to the company, is critical for building tissues like kidneys or lungs. Prellis achieves this by combining a light-sensitive photo-initiator with traditional bioinksthat allows the cellular material to undergo a reaction when blasted with infrared light, which catalyzes the polymerization of the bioink.

Prellis didn&t invent holographic printing technology. Several researchers are looking to apply this new approach to 3D printing across a number of industries, but the company is applying the technology to biofabrication in a way that seems promising.

The speed is important because it means that cell death doesn&t occur and the tissue being printed remains viable, while the ability to print within structures means that Prellis& technology can generate the internal scaffolding to support and sustain the organic material that surrounds it, according to the company.

The video above, courtesy of Prellis Biologics, shows real-time printing of a cell encapsulation device that is useful for producing small human cells containing organoids. The structure is designed to be permeable and the size is 200 microns in diameter and can contain up to 2000 cells.

Prellis isn&t the first company to develop three-dimensional organ printing. There have been decades of research into the technology, and companies like BioBots (which made its debut on the TechCrunch stage) are already driving down the cost of printing living tissue.

Now called Allevi, the company formerly known as BioBots has seen its founders part ways and its business strategy shift (itnow focusing on developing software to make its bioprinters easier to use), according to a report in Inc. Allevi has slashed the cost of bioprinting with devices that sell for less than $10,000, but Prellis contends that the limitations of extrusion printing mean that technology is too low resolution and too slow to create capillaries and keep cells alive.

Prellis& organs will also need to be placed in a bioreactor to sustain them before they&re transplanted into an animal, but the difference is that the company aims to produce complete organs rather than sample tissue or a small cell sample, according to a statement. The bioreactors can simulate the biomechanical pressures that ensure an organ functions properly, Matheu said.

&Vasculature is a key feature of complex tissues and is essential for engineering tissue with therapeutic value,& said Todd Huffman, the chief executive officer of 3Scan, an advanced digital tissue imaging and data analysis company (and a Prellis advisor). &Prellis& advancement represents a key milestone in the quest to engineer organs.&

Matheu estimates that it will take two-and-a-half years and $15 million to bring implantable organs through their first animal trials. &That will get a test kidney into an animal,& she said.

The goal is to print a quarter-sized kidney that could be transplanted into rats. &We want something that would be able to handle a kidney that we would transplant into a human,& Matheu said.

One frame of a 3D map of animal tissue from 3Scan .

Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Manchester href="https://newatlas.com/working-kidney-cells-grown-mice/53354/"> grew functional human kidney tissue from stem cells for the first time. The scientists implanted small clusters of capillaries that filter waste products from the blood that had been grown in a Petri dish into genetically engineered mice. After 12 weeks, the capillaries had grown nephrons — the elements that make up a functional human kidney.

Ultimately, the vision is to export cells from patients by taking a skin graft or blood, stem cell or bone marrow harvest — and then use those samples to create the cellular material that will grow organs. &Tissue rejection was the first thing I was thinking about in how I was designing the process and how we could do it,& says Matheu.

While Prellis is spending its time working to perfect a technique for printing kidneys, the company is looking for partners to take its manufacturing technology and work on processes to develop other organs.

&We&ll be doing collaborative work with other groups,& Matheu said. &Our technology will come to market in many other ways prior to the full kidney.&

Last year, the company outlined a go-to-market strategy that included developing lab-grown tissues to produce antibodies for therapeutics and drug development. The companyfirst targeted human tissue printed for clinical development were cells called &islets of Langerhans,& which are the units within a pancreas that produce insulin.

&Type 1 diabetics lose insulin-producing islets of Langerhans at a young age. If we can replace these, we can offer diabetes patients a life free of daily insulin shots and glucose monitoring,& said Matheu in a statement at the time.

Matheu sees the technology she and her co-founder developed as much about a fundamental shift in manufacturing biomaterials as a novel process to print kidneys, specifically.

&Imagine if you want to build a tumor for testing… In the lab it would take you five hours to print one… With our system it would take you three and a half seconds,& said Matheu. &That is our baseline optical system… The speed is such a shift in how you can build cells and fundamental structures we are going to be working to license this out.&

Meanwhile, the need for some solution to the shortage in organ donations keeps growing. Matheu said that one in seven adults in the U.S. have some sort of kidney ailment, and she estimates that 90 million people will need a kidney at some point in their lives.

Roughly 330 people die every day from organ failure, and if there were a fast way to manufacture those organs, thereno reason for those fatalities, says Matheu. Prellis estimates that because of the need for human tissue and organ replacement alternatives, as well as human tissue for drug discovery and toxicology testing, the global tissue engineering market will reach $94 billion by 2024, up from $23 billion in 2015.

&We need to help people faster,& says Matheu.