Artificial Intelligence “Jolted by Success”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steven Aftergood in SecrecyNews: “Since 2010, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has been “jolted” by the “broad and unforeseen successes” of one of its component technologies, known as multi-layer neural networks, leading to rapid developments and new applications, according to a new study from the JASON scientific advisory panel.

The JASON panel reviewed the current state of AI research and its potential use by the Department of Defense. See Perspectives on Research in Artificial Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence Relevant to DoD, JSR-16-Task-003, January 2017….

The JASON report distinguishes between artificial intelligence — referring to the ability of computers to perform particular tasks that humans do with their brains — and artificial general intelligence (AGI) — meaning a human-like ability to pursue long-term goals and exercise purposive behavior.

“Where AI is oriented around specific tasks, AGI seeks general cognitive abilities.” Recent progress in AI has not been matched by comparable advances in AGI. Sentient machines, let alone a revolt of robots against their creators, are still somewhere far over the horizon, and may be permanently in the realm of fiction.

While many existing DoD weapon systems “have some degree of ‘autonomy’ relying on the technologies of AI, they are in no sense a step–not even a small step–towards ‘autonomy’ in the sense of AGI, that is, the ability to set independent goals or intent,” the JASONs said.

“Indeed, the word ‘autonomy’ conflates two quite different meanings, one relating to ‘freedom of will or action’ (like humans, or as in AGI), and the other the much more prosaic ability to act in accordance with a possibly complex rule set based on possibly complex sensor input, as in the word ‘automatic’. In using a terminology like ‘autonomous weapons’, the DoD may, as an unintended consequence, enhance the public’s confusion on this point.”…

This week the Department of Defense announced the demonstration of swarms of “autonomous” micro-drones. “The micro-drones demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation flying, and self-healing,” according to a January 9 news release.

A journalistic account of recent breakthroughs in the use of artificial intelligence for machine translation appeared in the New York Times Magazine last month. See “The Great A.I. Awakening” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, December 14, 2016…(More)”

Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science, and Data-sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sapien Labs: “The future of human neuroscience lies in crowdsourcing, citizen science and data sharing but it is not without its minefields.

A recent Scientific American article by Daniel Goodwin, “Why Neuroscience Needs Hackers,” makes the case that neuroscience, like many fields today, is drowning in data, begging for application of advances in computer science like machine learning. Neuroscientists are able to gather realms of neural data, but often without big data mechanisms and frameworks to synthesize them.

The SA article describes the work of Sebastian Seung, a Princeton neuroscientist, who recently mapped the neural connections of the human retina from an “overwhelming mass” of electron microscopy data using state of the art A.I. and massive crowd-sourcing. Seung incorporated the A.I. into a game called “Eyewire” where 1,000s of volunteers scored points while improving the neural map.   Although the article’s title emphasizes advanced A.I., Dr. Seung’s experiment points even more to crowdsourcing and open science, avenues for improving research that have suddenly become easy and powerful with today’s internet. Eyewire perhaps epitomizes successful crowdsourcing — using an application that gathers, represents, and analyzes data uniformly according to researchers’ needs.

Crowdsourcing is seductive in its potential but risky for those who aren’t sure how to control it to get what they want. For researchers who don’t want to become hackers themselves, trying to turn the diversity of data produced by a crowd into conclusive results might seem too much of a headache to make it worthwhile. This is probably why the SA article title says we need hackers. The crowd is there but using it depends on innovative software engineering. A lot of researchers could really use software designed to flexibly support a diversity of crowdsourcing, some AI to enable things like crowd validation and big data tools.

The Potential

The SA article also points to Open BCI (brain-computer interface), mentioned here in other posts, as an example of how traditional divisions between institutional and amateur (or “citizen”) science are now crumbling; Open BCI is a community of professional and citizen scientists doing principled research with cheap, portable EEG-headsets producing professional research quality data. In communities of “neuro-hackers,” like NeurotechX, professional researchers, entrepreneurs, and citizen scientists are coming together to develop all kinds of applications, such as “telepathic” machine control, prostheses, and art. Other companies, like Neurosky sell EEG headsets and biosensors for bio-/neuro-feedback training and health-monitoring at consumer affordable pricing. (Read more in Citizen Science and EEG)

Tan Le, whose company Emotiv Lifesciences, also produces portable EEG head-sets, says, in an article in National Geographic, that neuroscience needs “as much data as possible on as many brains as possible” to advance diagnosis of conditions such as epilepsy and Alzheimer’s. Human neuroscience studies have typically consisted of 20 to 50 participants, an incredibly small sampling of a 7 billion strong humanity. For a single lab to collect larger datasets is difficult but with diverse populations across the planet real understanding may require data not even from thousands of brains but millions. With cheap mobile EEG-headsets, open-source software, and online collaboration, the potential for anyone can participate in such data collection is immense; the potential for crowdsourcing unprecedented. There are, however, significant hurdles to overcome….(More)”

Data capitalism is cashing in on our privacy . . . for now

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Thornhill in the Financial Times: “The buzz at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was all about connectivity and machine learning. …The primary effect of these consumer tech products seems limited — but we will need to pay increasing attention to the secondary consequences of these connected devices. They are just the most visible manifestation of a fundamental transformation that is likely to shape our societies far more than Brexit, Donald Trump or squabbles over the South China Sea. It concerns who collects, owns and uses data. The subject of data is so antiseptic that it seldom generates excitement. To make it sound sexy, some have described data as the “new oil”, fuelling our digital economies. In reality, it is likely to prove far more significant than that. Data are increasingly determining economic value, reshaping the practice of power and intruding into the innermost areas of our lives. Some commentators have suggested that this transformation is so profound that we are moving from an era of financial capitalism into one of data capitalism. The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari even argues that Dataism, as he calls it, can be compared with the birth of a religion, given the claims of its most fervent disciples to provide universal solutions. …

Sir Nigel Shadbolt, co-founder of the Open Data Institute, argues in a recent FT TechTonic podcast that it is too early to give up on privacy…The next impending revolution, he argues, will be about giving consumers control over their data. Considering the increasing processing power and memory capacity of smartphones, he believes new models of data collection and more localised use may soon gain traction. One example is the Blue Button service used by US veterans, which allows individuals to maintain and update their medical records. “That has turned out to be a really revolutionary step,” he says. “I think we are going to see a lot more of that kind of re-empowering.” According to this view, we can use data to create a far smarter world without sacrificing precious rights. If we truly believe in such a benign future, we had better hurry up and invent it….(More)”

Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A science fiction and tech-vision anthology “about the coming era of transparency in the information age” edited by David Brin & Stephen W. Potts: “Young people log their lives with hourly True Confessions. Cops wear lapel-cams and spy agencies peer at us — and face defections and whistle blowers. Bank records leak and “uncrackable” firewalls topple. As we debate internet privacy, revenge porn, the NSA, and Edward Snowden, cameras get smaller, faster, and more numerous.

Has Orwell’s Big Brother finally come to pass? Or have we become a global society of thousands of Little Brothers — watching, judging, and reporting on one another?

Partnering with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, and inspired by Brin’s nonfiction book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, noted author and futurist David Brin and scholar Stephen W. Potts have compiled essays and short stories from writers such as Robert J. Sawyer, James Morrow, William Gibson, Damon Knight, Jack McDevitt, and many others to examine the benefits and pitfalls of technological transparency in all its permutations.

Among the many questions…

  • Do we answer surveillance with sousveillance, shining accountability upward?
  • Will we spiral into busybody judgmentalism? Or might people choose to leave each other alone?
  • Will empathy increase or decrease in a more transparent world?
  • What if we could own our information, and buy and sell it in a web bazaar?…(More)”

Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2016

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel J. Solove at Technology, Academics, Policy: “Here are some notable books on privacy and security from 2016….

Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy

From my blurb: “Chris Hoofnagle has written the definitive book about the FTC’s involvement in privacy and security. This is a deep, thorough, erudite, clear, and insightful work – one of the very best books on privacy and security.”

My interview with Hoofnagle about his book: The 5 Things Every Privacy Lawyer Needs to Know about the FTC: An Interview with Chris Hoofnagle

My further thoughts on the book in my interview post above: “This is a book that all privacy and cybersecurity lawyers should have on their shelves. The book is the most comprehensive scholarly discussion of the FTC’s activities in these areas, and it also delves deep in the FTC’s history and activities in other areas to provide much-needed context to understand how it functions and reasons in privacy and security cases. There is simply no better resource on the FTC and privacy. This is a great book and a must-read. It is filled with countless fascinating things that will surprise you about the FTC, which has quite a rich and storied history. And it is an accessible and lively read too – Chris really makes the issues come alive.”

Gary T. Marx, Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology

From Peter Grabosky: “The first word that came to mind while reading this book was cornucopia. After decades of research on surveillance, Gary Marx has delivered an abundant harvest indeed. The book is much more than a straightforward treatise. It borders on the encyclopedic, and is literally overflowing with ideas, observations, and analyses. Windows into the Soul commands the attention of anyone interested in surveillance, past, present, and future. The book’s website contains a rich abundance of complementary material. An additional chapter consists of an intellectual autobiography discussing the author’s interest in, and personal experience with, surveillance over the course of his career. Because of its extraordinary breadth, the book should appeal to a wide readership…. it will be of interest to scholars of deviance and social control, cultural studies, criminal justice and criminology. But the book should be read well beyond the towers of academe. The security industry, broadly defined to include private security and intelligence companies as well as state law enforcement and intelligence agencies, would benefit from the book’s insights. So too should it be read by those in the information technology industries, including the manufacturers of the devices and applications which are central to contemporary surveillance, and which are shaping our future.”

Susan C. Lawrence, Privacy and the Past: Research, Law, Archives, Ethics

From the book blurb: “When the new HIPAA privacy rules regarding the release of health information took effect, medical historians suddenly faced a raft of new ethical and legal challenges—even in cases where their subjects had died years, or even a century, earlier. In Privacy and the Past, medical historian Susan C. Lawrence explores the impact of these new privacy rules, offering insight into what historians should do when they research, write about, and name real people in their work.”

Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Privacy Revisited: A Global Perspective on the Right to Be Left Alone

From Mark Tushnet: “Professor Krotoszynski provides a valuable overview of how several constitutional systems accommodate competing interests in privacy, speech, and democracy. He shows how scholarship in comparative law can help one think about one’s own legal system while remaining sensitive to the different cultural and institutional settings of each nation’s law. A very useful contribution.”

Laura K. Donohue, The Future of Foreign Intelligence: Privacy and Surveillance in a Digital Age…

Gordon Corera, Cyberspies: The Secret History of Surveillance, Hacking, and Digital Espionage…

J. Macgregor Wise, Surveillance and Film…(More; See also Nonfiction Privacy + Security Books).

Cancer Research Orgs Release Big Data for Precision Medicine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at HealthITAnalytics: “The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is releasing more than 19,000 de-identified genomic records to further the international research community’s explorations into precision medicine.

The big data dump, which includes information on 59 major types of cancer, including breast, colorectal, and lung cancer, is a result of the AACR Project Genomics Evidence Neoplasia Information Exchange (GENIE) initiative, and includes both genomic and some clinical data on consenting patients….

“These data were generated as part of routine patient care and without AACR Project GENIE they would likely never have been shared with the global cancer research community.”

Eight cancer research institutions, including five based in the United States, have contributed to the first phase of the GENIE project.  Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston are among the collaborators.

Alongside institutions in Paris, the Netherlands, Toronto, Nashville, and Baltimore, these organizations aim to expand the research community’s knowledge of cancer and its potential treatments by continuing to make the exchange of high-grade clinical data a top priority.

“We are committed to sharing not only the real-world data within the AACR Project GENIE registry but also our best practices, from tips about assembling an international consortium to the best variant analysis pipeline, because only by working together will information flow freely and patients benefit rapidly,” Sawyers added…

Large-scale initiatives like the AACR Project GENIE, alongside separate data collection efforts like the VA’s Million Veterans Project, the CancerLinQ platform, Geisinger Health System’s MyCode databank, and the nascent PMI Cohort, will continue to make critical genomic and clinical data available to investigators across the country and around the world…(More)”.

Beyond IRBs: Designing Ethical Review Processes for Big Data Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Conference Proceedings by Future of Privacy Forum: “The ethical framework applying to human subject research in the biomedical and behavioral research fields dates back to the Belmont Report.Drafted in 1976 and adopted by the United States government in 1991 as the Common Rule, the Belmont principles were geared towards a paradigmatic controlled scientific experiment with a limited population of human subjects interacting directly with researchers and manifesting their informed consent. These days, researchers in academic institutions as well as private sector businesses not subject to the Common Rule, conduct analysis of a wide array of data sources, from massive commercial or government databases to individual tweets or Facebook postings publicly available online, with little or no opportunity to directly engage human subjects to obtain their consent or even inform them of research activities.

Data analysis is now used in multiple contexts, such as combatting fraud in the payment card industry, reducing the time commuters spend on the road, detecting harmful drug interactions, improving marketing mechanisms, personalizing the delivery of education in K-12 schools, encouraging exercise and weight loss, and much more. And companies deploy data research not only to maximize economic gain but also to test new products and services to ensure they are safe and effective. These data uses promise tremendous societal benefits but at the same time create new risks to privacy, fairness, due process and other civil liberties.

Increasingly, corporate officers find themselves struggling to navigate unsettled social norms and make ethical choices that are more befitting of philosophers than business managers or even lawyers. The ethical dilemmas arising from data analysis transcend privacy and trigger concerns about stigmatization, discrimination, human subject research, algorithmic decision making and filter bubbles.

The challenge of fitting the round peg of data-focused research into the square hole of existing ethical and legal frameworks will determine whether society can reap the tremendous opportunities hidden in the data exhaust of governments and cities, health care institutions and schools, social networks and search engines, while at the same time protecting privacy, fairness, equality and the integrity of the scientific process. One commentator called this “the biggest civil rights issue of our time.”…(More)”

Data Collaboratives as a New Frontier of Cross-Sector Partnerships in the Age of Open Data: Taxonomy Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Iryna Susha, Marijn Janssen and Stefaan Verhulst: “Data collaboratives present a new form of cross-sector and public-private partnership to leverage (often corporate) data for addressing a societal challenge. They can be seen as the latest attempt to make data accessible to solve public problems. Although an increasing number of initiatives can be found, there is hardly any analysis of these emerging practices. This paper seeks to develop a taxonomy of forms of data collaboratives. The taxonomy consists of six dimensions related to data sharing and eight dimensions related to data use. Our analysis shows that data collaboratives exist in a variety of models. The taxonomy can help organizations to find a suitable form when shaping their efforts to create public value from corporate and other data. The use of data is not only dependent on the organizational arrangement, but also on aspects like the type of policy problem, incentives for use, and the expected outcome of data collaborative….(More)”

Group Privacy: New Challenges of Data Technologies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Linnet Taylor, Luciano Floridi,, and Bart van der Sloot: “The goal of the book is to present the latest research on the new challenges of data technologies. It will offer an overview of the social, ethical and legal problems posed by group profiling, big data and predictive analysis and of the different approaches and methods that can be used to address them. In doing so, it will help the reader to gain a better grasp of the ethical and legal conundrums posed by group profiling. The volume first maps the current and emerging uses of new data technologies and clarifies the promises and dangers of group profiling in real life situations. It then balances this with an analysis of how far the current legal paradigm grants group rights to privacy and data protection, and discusses possible routes to addressing these problems. Finally, an afterword gathers the conclusions reached by the different authors and discuss future perspectives on regulating new data technologies….(More and Table of Contents)

Montreal monitoring city traffic via drivers’ Bluetooth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Rather than rely on once-yearly spot checks of traffic throughout the city, Montreal, Canada, decided to build a more comprehensive picture of what was working well, and what wasn’t working very well, around the city. Working with traffic management company Orange Traffic, the city installed more than 100 sensors along the busiest vehicular routes. The sensors pick up mobile phone Bluetooth signals, making the system inexpensive to use and install as no additional hardware or devices are needed.

Once the sensors pick up a Bluetooth signal, they track it through several measurement points to get an idea of how fast or slow traffic is moving. The data is sent to the city’s Urban Mobility Management Center. City officials are keen to emphasize that no personal data is recorded as Bluetooth signals cannot be linked to individuals. Traffic management and urban planning teams will be able to use the data to redesign problematic intersections and improve the overall mobility of the city’s streets and transport facilities.

Smart cities are those making safety and efficiency a priority, from providing digital driver licenses in India to crowdsourcing a map of cars in bike lanes in New York City….(More)”