Global Fishing Watch And The Power Of Data To Understand Our Natural World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kalev Leetaru at Forbes: “A year and a half ago I wrote about the public debut of the Global Fishing Watch project as a showcase of what becomes possible when massive datasets are made accessible to the general public through easy-to-use interfaces that allow them to explore the planet they inhabit. At the time I noted how the project drove home the divide between the “glittering technological innovation of Silicon Valley and the technological dark ages of the development community” and what becomes possible when technologists and development organizations come together to apply incredible technology not for commercial gain, but rather to save the world itself. Continuing those efforts, last week Global Fishing Watch launched what it describes as the “the first ever dataset of global industrial fishing activities (all countries, all gears),” making the entire dataset freely accessible to seed new scientific, activist, governmental, journalistic and citizen understanding of the state of global fishing.

The Global Fishing Watch project stands as a powerful model for data-driven development work done right and hopefully, the rise of notable efforts like it will eventually catalyze the broader development community to emerge from the stone age of technology and more openly embrace the technological revolution. While it has a very long way to go, there are signs of hope for the development community as pockets of innovation begin to infuse the power of data-driven decision making and situational awareness into everything from disaster response to proactive planning to shaping legislative action.

Bringing technologists and development organizations together is not always that easy and the most creative solutions aren’t always to be found among the “usual suspects.” Open data and open challenges built upon them offer the potential for organizations to reach beyond the usual communities they interact with and identify innovative new approaches to the grand challenges of their fields. Just last month a collaboration of the World Bank, WeRobotics and OpenAerialMap launched a data challenge to apply deep learning to assess aerial imagery in the immediate aftermath of disasters to determine the impact to food producing trees and to road networks. By launching the effort as an open AI challenge, the goal is to reach the broader AI and open development communities at the forefront of creative and novel algorithmic approaches….(More)”.

The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Miles Brundage et al: “Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities are growing at an unprecedented rate. These technologies have many widely beneficial applications, ranging from machine translation to medical image analysis. Countless more such applications are being developed and can be expected over the long term. Less attention has historically been paid to the ways in which artificial intelligence can be used maliciously. This report surveys the landscape of potential security threats from malicious uses of artificial intelligence technologies, and proposes ways to better forecast, prevent, and mitigate these threats. We analyze, but do not conclusively resolve, the question of what the long-term equilibrium between attackers and defenders will be. We focus instead on what sorts of attacks we are likely to see soon if adequate defenses are not developed.

In response to the changing threat landscape we make four high-level recommendations:

1. Policymakers should collaborate closely with technical researchers to investigate, prevent, and mitigate potential malicious uses of AI.

2. Researchers and engineers in artificial intelligence should take the dual-use nature of their work seriously, allowing misuserelated considerations to influence research priorities and norms, and proactively reaching out to relevant actors when harmful applications are foreseeable.

3. Best practices should be identified in research areas with more mature methods for addressing dual-use concerns, such as computer security, and imported where applicable to the case of AI.

4. Actively seek to expand the range of stakeholders and domain experts involved in discussions of these challenges….(More)”.

How AI-Driven Insurance Could Reduce Gun Violence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Pontin at WIRED: “As a political issue, guns have become part of America’s endless, arid culture wars, where Red and Blue tribes skirmish for political and cultural advantage. But what if there were a compromise? Economics and machine learning suggest an answer, potentially acceptable to Americans in both camps.

Economists sometimes talk about “negative externalities,” market failures where the full costs of transactions are borne by third parties. Pollution is an externality, because society bears the costs of environmental degradation. The 20th-century British economist Arthur Pigou, who formally described externalities, also proposed their solution: so-called “Pigovian taxes,” where governments charge producers or customers, reducing the quantity of the offending products and sometimes paying for ameliorative measures. Pigovian taxes have been used to fight cigarette smoking or improve air quality, and are the favorite prescription of economists for reducing greenhouse gases. But they don’t work perfectly, because it’s hard for governments to estimate the costs of externalities.

Gun violence is a negative externality too. The choices of millions of Americans to buy guns overflow into uncaptured costs for society in the form of crimes, suicides, murders, and mass shootings. A flat gun tax would be a blunt instrument: It could only reduce gun violence by raising the costs of gun ownership so high that almost no one could legally own a gun, which would swell the black market for guns and probably increase crime. But insurers are very good at estimating the risks and liabilities of individual choices; insurance could capture the externalities of gun violence in a smarter, more responsive fashion.

Here’s the proposed compromise: States should require gun owners to be licensed and pay insurance, just as car owners must be licensed and insured today….

The actuaries who research risk have always considered a wide variety of factors when helping insurers price the cost of a policy. Car, home, and life insurance can vary according to a policy holder’s age, health, criminal record, employment, residence, and many other variables. But in recent years, machine learning and data analytics have provided actuaries with new predictive powers. According to Yann LeCun, the director of artificial intelligence at Facebook and the primary inventor of an important technique in deep learning called convolution, “Deep learning systems provide better statistical models with enough data. They can be advantageously applied to risk evaluation, and convolutional neural nets can be very good at prediction, because they can take into account a long window of past values.”

State Farm, Liberty Mutual, Allstate, and Progressive Insurance have all used algorithms to improve their predictive analysis and to more accurately distribute risk among their policy holders. For instance, in late 2015, Progressive created a telematics app called Snapshot that individual drivers used to collect information on their driving. In the subsequent two years, 14 billion miles of driving data were collected all over the country and analyzed on Progressive’s machine learning platform, H20.ai, resulting in discounts of $600 million for their policy holders. On average, machine learning produced a $130 discount for Progressive customers.

When the financial writer John Wasik popularized gun insurance in a series of posts in Forbes in 2012 and 2013, the NRA’s argument about prior constraints was a reasonable objection. Wasik proposed charging different rates to different types of gun owners, but there were too many factors that would have to be tracked over too long a period to drive down costs for low-risk policy holders. Today, using deep learning, the idea is more practical: Insurers could measure the interaction of dozens or hundreds of factors, predicting the risks of gun ownership and controlling costs for low-risk gun owners. Other, more risky bets might pay more. Some very risky would-be gun owners might be unable to find insurance at all. Gun insurance could even be dynamically priced, changing as the conditions of the policy holders’ lives altered, and the gun owners proved themselves better or worse risks.

Requiring gun owners to buy insurance wouldn’t eliminate gun violence in America. But a political solution to the problem of gun violence is chimerical….(More)”.

Data-Driven Regulation and Governance in Smart Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Sofia Ranchordas and Abram Klop in Berlee, V. Mak, E. Tjong Tjin Tai (Eds), Research Handbook on Data Science and Law (Edward Elgar, 2018): “This paper discusses the concept of data-driven regulation and governance in the context of smart cities by describing how these urban centres harness these technologies to collect and process information about citizens, traffic, urban planning or waste production. It describes how several smart cities throughout the world currently employ data science, big data, AI, Internet of Things (‘IoT’), and predictive analytics to improve the efficiency of their services and decision-making.

Furthermore, this paper analyses the legal challenges of employing these technologies to influence or determine the content of local regulation and governance. It explores in particular three specific challenges: the disconnect between traditional administrative law frameworks and data-driven regulation and governance, the effects of the privatization of public services and citizen needs due to the growing outsourcing of smart cities technologies to private companies; and the limited transparency and accountability that characterizes data-driven administrative processes. This paper draws on a review of interdisciplinary literature on smart cities and offers illustrations of data-driven regulation and governance practices from different jurisdictions….(More)”.

Prediction, Judgment and Complexity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

NBER Working Paper by Agrawal, Ajay and Gans, Joshua S. and Goldfarb, Avi: “We interpret recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) as improvements in prediction technology. In this paper, we explore the consequences of improved prediction in decision-making. To do so, we adapt existing models of decision-making under uncertainty to account for the process of determining payoffs. We label this process of determining the payoffs ‘judgment.’ There is a risky action, whose payoff depends on the state, and a safe action with the same payoff in every state. Judgment is costly; for each potential state, it requires thought on what the payoff might be. Prediction and judgment are complements as long as judgment is not too difficult. We show that in complex environments with a large number of potential states, the effect of improvements in prediction on the importance of judgment depend a great deal on whether the improvements in prediction enable automated decision-making. We discuss the implications of improved prediction in the face of complexity for automation, contracts, and firm boundaries….(More)”.

The future of statistics and data science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sofia C. Olhede and Patrick J. Wolfe in Statistics & Probability Letters: “The Danish physicist Niels Bohr is said to have remarked: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. Predicting the future of statistics in the era of big data is not so very different from prediction about anything else. Ever since we started to collect data to predict cycles of the moon, seasons, and hence future agriculture yields, humankind has worked to infer information from indirect observations for the purpose of making predictions.

Even while acknowledging the momentous difficulty in making predictions about the future, a few topics stand out clearly as lying at the current and future intersection of statistics and data science. Not all of these topics are of a strictly technical nature, but all have technical repercussions for our field. How might these repercussions shape the still relatively young field of statistics? And what can sound statistical theory and methods bring to our understanding of the foundations of data science? In this article we discuss these issues and explore how new open questions motivated by data science may in turn necessitate new statistical theory and methods now and in the future.

Together, the ubiquity of sensing devices, the low cost of data storage, and the commoditization of computing have led to a volume and variety of modern data sets that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. We see four important implications for statistics.

First, many modern data sets are related in some way to human behavior. Data might have been collected by interacting with human beings, or personal or private information traceable back to a given set of individuals might have been handled at some stage. Mathematical or theoretical statistics traditionally does not concern itself with the finer points of human behavior, and indeed many of us have only had limited training in the rules and regulations that pertain to data derived from human subjects. Yet inevitably in a data-rich world, our technical developments cannot be divorced from the types of data sets we can collect and analyze, and how we can handle and store them.

Second, the importance of data to our economies and civil societies means that the future of regulation will look not only to protect our privacy, and how we store information about ourselves, but also to include what we are allowed to do with that data. For example, as we collect high-dimensional vectors about many family units across time and space in a given region or country, privacy will be limited by that high-dimensional space, but our wish to control what we do with data will go beyond that….

Third, the growing complexity of algorithms is matched by an increasing variety and complexity of data. Data sets now come in a variety of forms that can be highly unstructured, including images, text, sound, and various other new forms. These different types of observations have to be understood together, resulting in multimodal data, in which a single phenomenon or event is observed through different types of measurement devices. Rather than having one phenomenon corresponding to single scalar values, a much more complex object is typically recorded. This could be a three-dimensional shape, for example in medical imaging, or multiple types of recordings such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and simultaneous electroencephalography in neuroscience. Data science therefore challenges us to describe these more complex structures, modeling them in terms of their intrinsic patterns.

Finally, the types of data sets we now face are far from satisfying the classical statistical assumptions of identically distributed and independent observations. Observations are often “found” or repurposed from other sampling mechanisms, rather than necessarily resulting from designed experiments….

 Our field will either meet these challenges and become increasingly ubiquitous, or risk rapidly becoming irrelevant to the future of data science and artificial intelligence….(More)”.

What if technology could help improve conversations online?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to “Perspective”: “Discussing things you care about can be difficult. The threat of abuse and harassment online means that many people stop expressing themselves and give up on seeking different opinions….Perspective is an API that makes it easier to host better conversations. The API uses machine learning models to score the perceived impact a comment might have on a conversation. Developers and publishers can use this score to give realtime feedback to commenters or help moderators do their job, or allow readers to more easily find relevant information, as illustrated in two experiments below. We’ll be releasing more machine learning models later in the year, but our first model identifies whether a comment could be perceived as “toxic” to a discussion….(More)”.

Can Crowdsourcing and Collaboration Improve the Future of Human Health?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Wiegand at Scientific American: “The process of medical research has been likened to searching for a needle in a haystack. With the continued acceleration of novel science and health care technologies in areas like artificial intelligence, digital therapeutics and the human microbiome we have tremendous opportunity to search the haystack in new and exciting ways. Applying these high-tech advances to today’s most pressing health issues increases our ability to address the root cause of disease, intervene earlier and change the trajectory of human health.

Global crowdsourcing forums, like the Johnson & Johnson Innovation QuickFire Challenges, can be incredibly valuable tools for searching the “haystack.” An initiative of JLABS—the no-strings-attached incubators of Johnson & Johnson Innovation—these contests spur scientific diversity through crowdsourcing, inspiring and attracting fresh thinking. They seek to stimulate the global innovation ecosystem through funding, mentorship and access to resources that can kick-start breakthrough ideas.

Our most recent challenge, the Next-Gen Baby Box QuickFire Challenge, focused on updating the 80-year-old “Finnish baby box,” a free, government-issued maternity supply kit for new parents containing such essentials as baby clothing, bath and sleep supplies packaged in a sleep-safe cardboard box. Since it first launched, the baby box has, together with increased use of maternal healthcare services early in pregnancy, helped to significantly reduce the Finnish infant mortality rate from 65 in every 1,000 live births in the 1930s to 2.5 per 1,000 today—one of the lowest rates in the world.

Partnering with Finnish innovation and government groups, we set out to see if updating this popular early parenting tool with the power of personalized health technology might one day impact Finland’s unparalleled high rate of type 1 diabetes. We issued the call globally to help create “the Baby Box of the future” as part of the Janssen and Johnson & Johnson Innovation vision to create a world without disease by accelerating science and delivering novel solutions to prevent, intercept and cure disease. The contest brought together entrepreneurs, researchers and innovators to focus on ideas with the potential to promote child health, detect childhood disease earlier and facilitate healthy parenting.

Incentive challenges like this award participants who have most effectively met a predefined objective or task. It’s a concept that emerged well before our time—as far back as the 18th century—from Napoleon’s Food Preservation Prize, meant to find a way to keep troops fed during battle, to the Longitude Prize for improved marine navigation.

Research shows that prize-based challenges that attract talent across a wide range of disciplines can generate greater risk-taking and yield more dramatic solutions….(More)”.

An AI That Reads Privacy Policies So That You Don’t Have To

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andy Greenberg at Wired: “…Today, researchers at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL), the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan announced the release of Polisis—short for “privacy policy analysis”—a new website and browser extension that uses their machine-learning-trained app to automatically read and make sense of any online service’s privacy policy, so you don’t have to.

In about 30 seconds, Polisis can read a privacy policy it’s never seen before and extract a readable summary, displayed in a graphic flow chart, of what kind of data a service collects, where that data could be sent, and whether a user can opt out of that collection or sharing. Polisis’ creators have also built a chat interface they call Pribot that’s designed to answer questions about any privacy policy, intended as a sort of privacy-focused paralegal advisor. Together, the researchers hope those tools can unlock the secrets of how tech firms use your data that have long been hidden in plain sight….

Polisis isn’t actually the first attempt to use machine learning to pull human-readable information out of privacy policies. Both Carnegie Mellon University and Columbia have made their own attempts at similar projects in recent years, points out NYU Law Professor Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, who has focused her own research on user interactions with terms of service contracts online. (One of her own studies showed that only .07 percent of users actually click on a terms of service link before clicking “agree.”) The Usable Privacy Policy Project, a collaboration that includes both Columbia and CMU, released its own automated tool to annotate privacy policies just last month. But Marotta-Wurgler notes that Polisis’ visual and chat-bot interfaces haven’t been tried before, and says the latest project is also more detailed in how it defines different kinds of data. “The granularity is really nice,” Marotta-Wurgler says. “It’s a way of communicating this information that’s more interactive.”…(More)”.

Artificial Intelligence and Foreign Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ben Scott, Stefan Heumann and Philppe Lorenz: “The plot-lines of the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are debated and contested. But it is safe to predict that it will become one of the central technologies of the 21st century. It is fashionable these days to speak about data as the new oil. But if we want to “refine” the vast quantities of data we are collecting today and make sense of it, we will need potent AI. The consequences of the AI revolution could not be more far reaching. Value chains will be turned upside down, labor markets will get disrupted and economic power will shift to those who control this new technology. And as AI is deeply embedded in the connectivity of the Internet, the challenge of AI is global in nature. Therefore it is striking that AI is almost absent from the foreign policy agenda.

This paper seeks to provide a foundation for planning a foreign policy strategy that responds effectively to the emerging power of AI in international affairs. The developments in AI are so dynamic and the implications so wide-ranging that ministries need to begin engaging immediately. That means starting with the assets and resources at hand while planning for more significant changes in the future. Many of the tools of traditional diplomacy can be adapted to this new field. While the existing toolkit can get us started, this pragmatic approach does not preclude thinking about more drastic changes that the technological changes might require for our foreign policy institutions and instruments.

The paper approaches this challenge, drawing on the existing foreign policy toolbox and reflecting on the past lessons of adapting this toolbox to the Internet revolution. The paper goes on to make suggestions on how the tools could be applied to the international challenges that the AI revolution will bring about. The toolbox includes policy making, public diplomacy, bilateral and multilateral engagement, actions through international and treaty organizations, convenings and partnerships, grant-making and information-gathering and analysis. The analysis of the international challenges of the AI transformation are divided into three topical areas. Each of the three sections includes concrete suggestions how instruments from the tool box could be applied to address the challenges AI will bring about in international affairs….(More)“.