Teaching machines to understand – and summarize – text

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 and  in The Conversation: “We humans are swamped with text. It’s not just news and other timely information: Regular people are drowning in legal documents. The problem is so bad we mostly ignore it. Every time a person uses a store’s loyalty rewards card or connects to an online service, his or her activities are governed by the equivalent of hundreds of pages of legalese. Most people pay no attention to these massive documents, often labeled “terms of service,” “user agreement” or “privacy policy.”

These are just part of a much wider societal problem of information overload. There is so much data stored – exabytes of it, as much stored as has ever been spoken by people in all of human history – that it’s humanly impossible to read and interpret everything. Often, we narrow down our pool of information by choosing particular topics or issues to pay attention to. But it’s important to actually know the meaning and contents of the legal documents that govern how our data is stored and who can see it.

As computer science researchers, we are working on ways artificial intelligence algorithms could digest these massive texts and extract their meaning, presenting it in terms regular people can understand….

Examining privacy policies

A modern internet-enabled life today more or less requires trusting for-profit companies with private information (like physical and email addresses, credit card numbers and bank account details) and personal data (photos and videos, email messages and location information).

These companies’ cloud-based systems typically keep multiple copies of users’ data as part of backup plans to prevent service outages. That means there are more potential targets – each data center must be securely protected both physically and electronically. Of course, internet companies recognize customers’ concerns and employ security teams to protect users’ data. But the specific and detailed legal obligations they undertake to do that are found in their impenetrable privacy policies. No regular human – and perhaps even no single attorney – can truly understand them.

In our study, we ask computers to summarize the terms and conditions regular users say they agree to when they click “Accept” or “Agree” buttons for online services. We downloaded the publicly available privacy policies of various internet companies, including Amazon AWS, Facebook, Google, HP, Oracle, PayPal, Salesforce, Snapchat, Twitter and WhatsApp….

Our software examines the text and uses information extraction techniques to identify key information specifying the legal rights, obligations and prohibitions identified in the document. It also uses linguistic analysis to identify whether each rule applies to the service provider, the user or a third-party entity, such as advertisers and marketing companies. Then it presents that information in clear, direct, human-readable statements….(More)”

Artificial intelligence can predict which congressional bills will pass

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Hutson at Science: “The health care bill winding its way through the U.S. Senate is just one of thousands of pieces of legislation Congress will consider this year, most doomed to failure. Indeed, only about 4% of these bills become law. So which ones are worth paying attention to? A new artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm could help. Using just the text of a bill plus about a dozen other variables, it can determine the chance that a bill will become law with great precision.

Other algorithms have predicted whether a bill will survive a congressional committee, or whether the Senate or House of Representatives will vote to approve it—all with varying degrees of success. But John Nay, a computer scientist and co-founder of Skopos Labs, a Nashville-based AI company focused on studying policymaking, wanted to take things one step further. He wanted to predict whether an introduced bill would make it all the way through both chambers—and precisely what its chances were.

Nay started with data on the 103rd Congress (1993–1995) through the 113th Congress (2013–2015), downloaded from a legislation-tracking website call GovTrack. This included the full text of the bills, plus a set of variables, including the number of co-sponsors, the month the bill was introduced, and whether the sponsor was in the majority party of their chamber. Using data on Congresses 103 through 106, he trained machine-learning algorithms—programs that find patterns on their own—to associate bills’ text and contextual variables with their outcomes. He then predicted how each bill would do in the 107th Congress. Then, he trained his algorithms on Congresses 103 through 107 to predict the 108th Congress, and so on.

Nay’s most complex machine-learning algorithm combined several parts. The first part analyzed the language in the bill. It interpreted the meaning of words by how they were embedded in surrounding words. For example, it might see the phrase “obtain a loan for education” and assume “loan” has something to do with “obtain” and “education.” A word’s meaning was then represented as a string of numbers describing its relation to other words. The algorithm combined these numbers to assign each sentence a meaning. Then, it found links between the meanings of sentences and the success of bills that contained them. Three other algorithms found connections between contextual data and bill success. Finally, an umbrella algorithm used the results from those four algorithms to predict what would happen…. his program scored about 65% better than simply guessing that a bill wouldn’t pass, Nay reported last month in PLOS ONE…(More).

LSE launches crowdsourcing project inspiring millennials to shape Brexit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

LSE Press Release: “A crowdsourcing project inspiring millennials in Britain and the EU to help shape the upcoming Brexit negotiations is being launched by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) this week.

The social media-based project, which hopes to engage 3000 millennials aged 35 and under, kicks off on 23 June, the first anniversary of the life-changing vote to take Britain out of the EU.

One of the Generation Brexit project leaders, Dr Jennifer Jackson-Preece from LSE’s European Institute, said the online platform would give a voice to British and European millennials on the future of Europe in the Brexit negotiations and beyond.

She said: “We’re going to invite millennials from across the UK and Europe to debate, decide and draft policy proposals that will be sent to parliaments in Westminster and Strasbourg during the negotiations.”

Another project leader, Dr Roch Dunin-Wąsowicz, said the pan-European project would seek views from a whole cross section of millennials, including Leavers, Remainers, left and right-wingers, European federalists and nationalists.

“We want to come up with millennial proposals for a mutually beneficial relationship, reflecting the diverse political, cultural, religious and economic backgrounds in the UK and EU.

“We are especially keen to engage the forgotten, the apolitical and the apathetic – for whom Brexit has become a moment of political awakening,” he said.

Generation Brexit follows on the heels of LSE’s Constitution UK crowdsourcing project in 2015, which broke new ground in galvanising people around the country to help shape Britain’s first constitution. The 10-week internet project signed up 1500 people from all corners of the UK to debate how the country should be governed.

Dr Manmit Bhambra, also working on the project, said the success of the Constitution UK platform had laid the foundation for Generation Brexit, with LSE hoping to double the numbers and sign up 3000 participants, split equally between Britain and Europe.

The project can be accessed at www.generationbrexit.org and all updates will be available on Twitter @genbrexit & @lsebrexitvote with the hashtag #GenBrexit, and on facebook.com/GenBrexit… (More)”.

Big Data, Data Science, and Civil Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Solon Barocas, Elizabeth Bradley, Vasant Honavar, and Foster Provost:  “Advances in data analytics bring with them civil rights implications. Data-driven and algorithmic decision making increasingly determine how businesses target advertisements to consumers, how police departments monitor individuals or groups, how banks decide who gets a loan and who does not, how employers hire, how colleges and universities make admissions and financial aid decisions, and much more. As data-driven decisions increasingly affect every corner of our lives, there is an urgent need to ensure they do not become instruments of discrimination, barriers to equality, threats to social justice, and sources of unfairness. In this paper, we argue for a concrete research agenda aimed at addressing these concerns, comprising five areas of emphasis: (i) Determining if models and modeling procedures exhibit objectionable bias; (ii) Building awareness of fairness into machine learning methods; (iii) Improving the transparency and control of data- and model-driven decision making; (iv) Looking beyond the algorithm(s) for sources of bias and unfairness—in the myriad human decisions made during the problem formulation and modeling process; and (v) Supporting the cross-disciplinary scholarship necessary to do all of that well…(More)”.

Introducing Test+Build – a new tool to help you run your own randomised controlled trial.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Sanders, Miranda Jackman and Martin Sweeney at Behavioural Insights Team: “Work in fraud, error, and debt, and especially tax compliance and collection, has always been a core part of what the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) does. One of our favourite pieces of work is still that first HMRC trial that told taxpayers with outstanding debts that ‘nine out of ten people pay their tax on time.’ That trial significantly increased the rate at which people paid their taxes, bringing forward £3 million in tax debt. It’s a result that has since been replicated worldwide….

Though all these trials have been in very different contexts and situations, they all employ similar insights and involve running trials to test which letter is most effective. And this got us thinking. Could we build a tool that would enable us to automate lots of the process, while also helping organisations to build their own capabilities? We are pleased to say that the answer is, yes.

 

Our new tool is called Test+Build, and it aims to hugely increase the use of behavioural science in tax collection by helping people design and run their own randomised controlled trials. Test+Build does this by guiding users through the four stages of BIT’s TEST methodology – Target, Explore, Solution and Trial – and provides them with guides, case studies and videos developed by the team that relate to compliance and enforcement. Test+Build also brings in support from BIT researchers to offer advice, conduct randomisations, and analyse and interpret the results. It provides organisations with the tools to run their own trials, and in doing so, increases the organisation’s level of expertise for implementing them in the future.

By letting users work through the process themselves, with support from BIT researchers at key points along the way, we’ve significantly reduced the cost to organisations of running a BIT trial – by about 50 per cent. Of course, the all-important question for us is – as always – does it work?…(More)

Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Geoff Mulgan: “A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This “bigger mind”—human and machine capabilities working together—has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy, computer science, and biology, Big Mind reveals how collective intelligence can guide corporations, governments, universities, and societies to make the most of human brains and digital technologies.

Geoff Mulgan explores how collective intelligence has to be consciously organized and orchestrated in order to harness its powers. He looks at recent experiments mobilizing millions of people to solve problems, and at groundbreaking technology like Google Maps and Dove satellites. He also considers why organizations full of smart people and machines can make foolish mistakes—from investment banks losing billions to intelligence agencies misjudging geopolitical events—and shows how to avoid them.

Highlighting differences between environments that stimulate intelligence and those that blunt it, Mulgan shows how human and machine intelligence could solve challenges in business, climate change, democracy, and public health. But for that to happen we’ll need radically new professions, institutions, and ways of thinking.

Informed by the latest work on data, web platforms, and artificial intelligence, Big Mind shows how collective intelligence could help us survive and thrive….(More)”

Should Governments Invest More in Nudging?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Shlomo Benartzi, John Beshears, Katherine L. Milkman et al in Psychological Science: “Governments are increasingly adopting behavioral science techniques for changing individual behavior in pursuit of policy objectives. The types of “nudge” interventions that governments are now adopting alter people’s decisions without coercion or significant changes to economic incentives. We calculated ratios of impact to cost for nudge interventions and for traditional policy tools, such as tax incentives and other financial inducements, and we found that nudge interventions often compare favorably with traditional interventions. We conclude that nudging is a valuable approach that should be used more often in conjunction with traditional policies, but more calculations are needed to determine the relative effectiveness of nudging….(More)”.

Smart Cities: Foundations, Principles and Applications

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Houbing Song, Ravi Srinivasan, Tamim Sookoor, Sabina Jeschke: “Smart cities are emerging as a priority for research and development across the world. They open up significant opportunities in several areas, such as economic growth, health, wellness, energy efficiency, and transportation, to promote the sustainable development of cities. This book provides the basics of smart cities, and it examines the possible future trends of this technology. Smart Cities: Foundations, Principles, and Applications provides a systems science perspective in presenting the foundations and principles that span multiple disciplines for the development of smart cities.

Divided into three parts—foundations, principles, and applications—Smart Cities addresses the various challenges and opportunities of creating smart cities and all that they have to offer. It also covers smart city theory modeling and simulation, and examines case studies of existing smart cities from all around the world. In addition, the book:

  • Addresses how to develop a smart city and how to present the state of the art and practice of them all over the world
  • Focuses on the foundations and principles needed for advancing the science, engineering, and technology of smart cities—including system design, system verification, real-time control and adaptation, Internet of Things, and test beds
  • Covers applications of smart cities as they relate to smart transportation/connected vehicle (CV) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for improved mobility, safety, and environmental protection…(More)”

Handbook of Cyber-Development, Cyber-Democracy, and Cyber-Defense

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Living Reference Work” edited by Elias G. Carayannis, David F. J. Campbell, and Marios Panagiotis Efthymiopoulos: “This volume covers a wide spectrum of issues relating to economic and political development enabled by information and communication technology (ICT). Showcasing contributions from researchers, industry leaders and policymakers, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges and opportunities created by technological innovations that are profoundly affecting the dynamics of economic growth, promotion of democratic principles, and the protection of individual, national, and regional rights. Of particular interest is the influence of ICT on the generation and dissemination of knowledge, which, in turn, empowers citizens and accelerates change across all strata of society. Each essay features literature reviews and key references; definition of critical terms and concepts, case examples; implications for practice, policy and theory; and discussion of future directions. Representing such fields as management, political science, economics, law, psychology and education, the authors cover such timely topics as health care, energy and environmental policy, banking and finance, disaster recovery, investment in research and development, homeland security and diplomacy in the context of ICT and its economic, political and social impact…(More)”

Crowdsourcing the fight against mosquitos

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

YahooFinance: “That smartphone in your pocket could hold the cure for malaria, dengue and the Zika virus, a noted Stanford University scientist says.

Manu Prakash has a history of using oddball materials for medical research. His latest project, Abuzz, uses sound. Specifically, he asks regular citizens to capture and record mosquitoes. There are 30 unique species, and each has a different wingbeat pattern.

The big idea is to use algorithms to match sample recordings with disease-carrying species, and then recommend strategies to control the population.

Weird science, sure, but don’t knock it. In this age of massive amounts of compute and abundant sensors, dreamers are doing what should be impossible. They are replicating expensive research tools with inexpensive, makeshift solutions. Solutions that can, in many cases, save lives.

In this case, citizen-scientists capture a mosquito in a plastic bottle, poke a hole in the cap and record the buzzing with their phone. Then they send the digital file off to Prakash and his team.

It’s not the first time the Indian-born professor of bioengineering has made something from almost nothing.

In 2013, he saw a centrifuge being used as a doorstop at a Ugandan clinic. The expensive medical device had been donated by well-meaning researchers. But the village had no electricity.

So, Prakash put on his problem-solving hat. He later developed the Paperfuge.

Inspired by a toy whirligig, the paper-and-string device can separate blood cells from plasma. At a cost of 20 cents, the instrument is perfect for “diagnosis in the field,” Prakash told a TED conference audience.

And that’s just one example of how a little innovation can go a long way, for not a lot of money.

While visiting remote clinics in India and Thailand, he noticed expensive microscopes were collecting dust on shelves. They were too bulky to carry into the field. In 2014, his team showed off Foldscope, an inexpensive, lightweight microscope inspired by origami….(More)”.