• Magical thinking about machine learning won’t bring the reality of AI any closer | John Naughton | Opinion | The Guardian

  ” Critics have pointed out that the old computing adage “garbage in, garbage out” also applies to ML. If the data from which a machine “learns” is biased, then the outputs will reflect those biases. And this could become generalised: we may have created a technology that – however good it is at recommending films you might like – may actually morph into a powerful amplifier of social, economic and cultural inequalities.”

  Tags: reliability, ITGS, machine learning, ai, GIGO

  • – By dr tech

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• The Tech Industry’s Psychological War on Kids – Richard Freed – Medium

  Tags: ITGS, social media, persuasive technology, smartphone, psychology, addiction, people and machines

• AI system looks at faces and rates them for responsibility, happiness, aggression, attractiveness, weirdness, and emotional stability / Boing Boing

  Tags: ITGS, facial recognition, authenticity, system, peopleandmachines, anonymity, reliability

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• You Don’t Understand Bitcoin Because You Think Money Is Real

  “The bitcoin blockchain was created, in part, to address this historical weakness. After the 21 millionth bitcoin is mined, in around 2140, the system will produce no more.”

  Tags: ITGS, bitcoin, security, authenticity, people and machines

  • – By dr tech

• Singapore healthcare provider breached, personal records of 1.5m people – including the Prime Minister – stolen / Boing Boing

  “FROM THE BOING BOING SHOP
   

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  Singhealth, a Singaporean public health service, suffered the worst breach in Singaporean history, losing control of 1.5 million peoples’ data; included in the breach was prescription data on 160,000 people, including Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong.”

  Tags: ITGS, privacy and anonymity, singapore, healthcare, people and machines

  • – By dr tech

• Google attempting to redefine truth through its biased algorithm — Society’s Child — Sott.net

  “They’ve moved “authoritative sources” to the top search results. The question we need to ask is: “How does this play out in the Real World?” In the real world it means that the worldview, the political bias, the social preferences, the positions taken in various ideological and scientific controversies – as decided by top Google Executives – have been virtually hard-coded into Google’s search algorithms. No longer is Google returning “unbiased and objective results”.”

  Tags: ITGS, algorithm, society, google, truth, authenticity

  • – By dr tech

• The ACLU showed that Amazon’s facial recognition system thinks members of Congress are felons, so now Congress is taking action / Boing Boing

  “Rekognition indicated high confidence that 28 members of the current Congress were known arrestees. It was wrong in every case. The false positives disproportionately targeted racialized members of Congress.

  This, finally, has Congress’s attention: members of Congress have sent some pointed questions to Amazon about its Rekognition tool and given them a deadline of Aug 20 to respond. They’ve also requested an immediate meeting with Jeff Bezos to discuss the topic in depth.”

  Tags: ITGS, facial recognition, authenticity, amazon, peopleandmachines

  • – By dr tech

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• Our phones and gadgets are now endangering the planet | John Harris | Opinion | The Guardian

  “About 70% of the world’s online traffic is reckoned to pass through Loudoun County.
  But there is a big problem, centred on a power company called Dominion, which supplies the vast majority of Loudoun County’s electricity. According to a 2017 Greenpeace report, only 1% of Dominion’s total electricity comes from credibly renewable sources:”

  Tags: ITGS, data centre, power, global warming, electricity, internet

  • – By dr tech

• Leading voting machine company admits it lied, reveals that its voting machines ship backdoored, with pre-installed remote access software / Boing Boing

  “Kim Zetter asked them, on behalf of the New York Times, if their products shipped with backdoors allowing remote parties to access and alter them over the internet, they told her unequivocally that they did not engage in this practice.

  But now, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden [D-OR], they admit that they lied, and that they “provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006.””

  Tags: ITGS, evoting, security, backdoor, access, peopleandmachines

  • – By dr tech

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• Hacker fakes German minister’s fingerprints using photos of her hands | Technology | The Guardian

  “It’s an old cliché of security researchers: fingerprints might appear more secure than passwords. But if your password gets stolen, you can change it to a new one; what happens when your fingerprint gets copied?”

  Tags: ITGS, security, biometrics, system

  • – By dr tech

• A.I. recreates periodic table of elements from scratch – Futurity

  “A new artificial intelligence (AI) program recreated the periodic table of elements in just a few hours.

  It took nearly a century of trial and error for human scientists to organize the periodic table of elements, arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements in chemistry, into its current form.”

  Tags: ITGS, ai, peopleandmachines, machine learning

  • – By dr tech

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• The GPS app that can find anyone anywhere | Technology | The Guardian

  “The algorithm behind what3words took six months to write. Sheldrick worked on it with two friends he had grown up with. Mohan Ganesalingham, a maths fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Jack Waley-Cohen, a full-time quiz obsessive and question-setter for Only Connect. After the initial mapping was complete, they incorporated an error-correction algorithm, which places similar-sounding combinations a very long way apart.”

  Tags: ITGS, gps, algorithm, simplicity, people and machines

  • – By dr tech

• Being human: how realistic do we want robots to be? | Technology | The Guardian

  “Anouk van Maris, a robot cognition specialist who is researching ethical human-robot interaction, has found that comfort levels with robots vary greatly depending on location and culture. “It depends on what you expect from it. Some people love it, others want to run away as soon as it starts moving,” she says. “The advantage of a robot that looks human-like is that people feel more comfortable with it being close to them, and it is easier to communicate with it. The big disadvantage is that you expect it to be able to do human things and it often can’t.””

  Tags: ITGS, robots, technology, people and machines

  • – By dr tech

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• Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control? | Books | The Guardian

  “In October 2016, algorithms reacted to negative news headlines about Brexit negotiations by sending the pound down 6% against the dollar in under two minutes, before recovering almost immediately. Knowing which particular headline, or which particular algorithm, caused the crash is next to impossible. When one haywire algorithm started placing and cancelling orders that ate up 4% of all traffic in US stocks in October 2012, one commentator was moved to comment wryly that “the motive of the algorithm is still unclear”.”

  Tags: ITGS, ai, machine learning, technology, people and machines

  • – By dr tech

• How China censors the net: by making sure there’s too much information | John Naughton | Opinion | The Guardian

  “Flooding involves deluging the citizen with a torrent of information – some accurate, some phoney, some biased – with the aim of making people overwhelmed. In a digital world, flooding is child’s play: it’s cheap, effective and won’t generate backlash. (En passant, it’s what Russia – and Trump – do.)

  In her book, Roberts provides abundant evidence of how the Chinese authorities deploy these three techniques.”

  Tags: ITGS, flooding, censorship, china

  • – By dr tech

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• The Matchmaking Algorithm That Lets Zoos Swipe Right on Animals

  “The animal matchmaking program isn’t just for gorillas, and it takes some things into consideration that probably aren’t on Tinder’s radar. It scores every animal on a variety of traits (and when we say “every” animal, we mean there’s an entry for each flamingo in each American zoo), including social skills, age, experience, family history, and interpersonal relationships. Oh, and genetic diversity. Animals with rare genes are more valuable to breeding programs because their offspring will introduce more genetic diversity into the dating pool.”

  Tags: ITGS, algorithm, animals, big data

  • – By dr tech

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• ‘Forget the Facebook leak’: China is mining data directly from workers’ brains on an industrial scale | South China Morning Post

  “Hangzhou Zhongheng Electric is just one example of the large-scale application of brain surveillance devices to monitor people’s emotions and other mental activities in the workplace, according to scientists and companies involved in the government-backed projects.

  Concealed in regular safety helmets or uniform hats, these lightweight, wireless sensors constantly monitor the wearer’s brainwaves and stream the data to computers that use artificial intelligence algorithms to detect emotional spikes such as depression, anxiety or rage.”

  Tags: ITGS, privacy and anonymity, surveillance, brain interface, people and machines, control

  • – By dr tech

• This school scans classrooms every 30 seconds through facial recognition technology

  “The system is called as“Intelligent Classroom Behavior Management System” and it is being used at Hangzhou No. 11 High School. With scanning facial expressions the system has the ability to even analysis six types of behaviors by the students such as standing up, reading, writing, hand raising, listening to the teacher, and leaning on the desk.”

  Tags: ITGS, facila recognition, ai, reliability, anonymity, control, people and machines

  • – By dr tech

• Congressional Democrats Demand Answers About Amazon’s Facial Recognition Technology

  ““The disproportionally high arrest rates for members of the black community make the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement problematic,” the letter reads, “because it could serve to reinforce this trend.”

  Tags: ITGS, privacy, anonymity, policiesandstandards, facial recognition

  • – By dr tech

• Chinese schools are testing AI that grades papers almost as well as teachers | VentureBeat

  “It is also self-improving. The 10-year-old grading software leverages deep learning algorithms to “compare notes” with human teachers’ scores, suggestions, and comments. An engineer involved in the project compared its capabilities to those of AlphaGo, the record-breaking AI Go player developed by Google subsidiary DeepMind.”

  Tags: ITGS, ai, machine learning, chinese, schools, testing, papers, algorithm, reliability, teachers

  • – By dr tech

• Police trial AI software to help process mobile phone evidence | UK news | The Guardian

  “Cellebrite, the Israeli-founded and now Japanese-owned company behind some of the software, claims a wider rollout would solve problems over failures to disclose crucial digital evidence that have led to the collapse of a series of rape trials and other prosecutions in the past year. However, the move by police has prompted concerns over privacy and the potential for software to introduce bias into processing of criminal evidence.”

  Tags: ITGS, ai, privacy, machine learning, facial recognition, false positive, reliability, algorithm, bias

  • – By dr tech

• This AI Knows Who You Are by the Way You Walk

  “Neural networks can find telltale patterns in a person’s gait that can be used to recognize and identify them with almost perfect accuracy, according to new research published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. The new system, called SfootBD, is nearly 380 times more accurate than previous methods, and it doesn’t require a person to go barefoot in order to work. It’s less invasive than other behavioral biometric verification systems, such as retinal scanners or fingerprinting, but its passive nature could make it a bigger privacy concern, since it could be used covertly.”

  Tags: ITGS, gait analysis, machine learning, neuralnetwork, reliability, privacy and anonymity

  • – By dr tech

• Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier – review | Books | The Guardian

  ” If your consumption of content is tailored by near limitless observations harvested about people like you, how could your universe not collapse into the partial depiction of reality that people like you also enjoy? How could empathy and respect for difference thrive in this environment? Where’s the incentive to stamp out fake accounts, fake news, paid troll armies, dyspeptic bots?”

  Tags: ITGS, system, social media, technology, lanier

  • – By dr tech

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• Tech firms can’t keep our data forever: we need a Digital Expiry Date | Opinion | The Guardian

  “This Digital Expiry Date offers companies the benefits of getting your data, personalizing results and still making profits, while putting some control in the user’s hands. You will not have to worry about governments or companies in the future mishandling years’ worth of information – which would limit the damage they could do. A Digital Expiry Date would maintain online innovation and profitability, while helping to prevent any future privacy disasters.”

  Tags: ITGS, data, privacy, anonymity, digital expiry, policiesandstandards

  • – By dr tech

• Most GDPR emails unnecessary and some illegal, say experts | Technology | The Guardian

  “The vast majority of emails flooding inboxes across Europe from companies asking for consent to keep recipients on their mailing list are unnecessary and some may be illegal, privacy experts have said, as new rules over data privacy come into force at the end of this week.”

  Tags: ITGS, policiesandstandards, privacy, data

  • – By dr tech

• Here’s How Scientists Are Using Machine Learning to Predict the Unpredictable

  “More than just a poetic metaphor, the butterfly effect says that there are some things that even the most advanced science can never predict. Well, that list of things just got a lot shorter. Scientists from the University of Maryland have used machine learning to predict chaos.”

  Tags: ITGS, machine learning, ai, prediction

  • – By dr tech

• Efail: can email be saved? / Boing Boing

  “The revelation that encrypted email is vulnerable to a variety of devastating attacks (collectively known as “Efail”) has set off a round of soul-searching by internet security researchers and other technical people — can we save email?

  One way to think about Efail is that it was caused by a lack of central coordination and control over email-reading programs — the underlying protocols are strong and robust, but they can be implemented in ways that create real problems. In particular, the ability to show HTML inside a message makes email very hard to secure:”

  Tags: ITGS, email, security, protocols, efail, html

  • – By dr tech

• MIT trains self-driving cars to change lanes like human drivers do

  “MIT researcher’s at CSAIL have developed a lane-changing algorithm for self-driving cars. the algorithm allows for aggressive lane changes much like the kind only real drivers would be capable of.

   

  it works by computing ‘buffer zones’ around autonomous vehicles and reassessing them on the fly. MIT uses a mathematically efficient approach which calculates new buffer zones if the default buffer zones lead to performance that’s far worse than a human’s driver.”

  Tags: ITGS, drivers, human, protocols, algorithms, ai

  • – By dr tech

• Tastemakers: can a robot really know what we’ll want to eat? | Life and style | The Guardian

  “An algorithm has no tastebuds; a neural net never gets the munchies. So can a robot brain really tell us what we’ll want to eat? The question is whether AI systems will be able to excel in the sensual, creative work of tasting and developing new foods – and what we stand to gain or lose by inventing foods that really have our number.”

  Tags: ITGS, algorithms, ai, taste, peopleandmachines

  • – By dr tech

• Couple’s Amazon Device Recorded Private Conversation, Sent To Friend « CBS Boston

  ““The person on the other line said, ‘unplug your Alexa devices right now,’” Danielle told KIRO. “‘You’re being hacked.’” The couple had reportedly placed Amazon devices in every room of their house to control the heat, lights, and security system. All of the gadgets were pulled out after their colleague proved they had received the unauthorized recording.”

  Tags: ITGS, alex, amazon, ai, privacy and anonymity

  • – By dr tech

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