Beacon
Lecture I: Governing the Algorithmic City
A century ago, John Dewey observed that '[s]team and electricity have done more to alter the conditions under which men associate together than all the agencies which affected human relationships before our time'. In the last few decades, computing technologies have had a similar effect. Political philosophy's central task is to help us decide how to live together, by analysing our social relations, diagnosing their failings, and articulating ideals to guide their revision. But these profound social changes have left scarcely a dent in the model of social relations that (analytical) political philosophers assume. This essay aims to reverse that trend. It first builds a model of our novel social relations as they are now, and as they are likely to evolved, and then explores how those differences affect our theories of how to live together. I introduce the 'Algorithmic City', the network of algorithmically-mediated social relations, then characterise the intermediary power by which it is governed. I show how algorithmic governance raises new challenges for political philosophy concerning the justification of authority, the foundations of procedural legitimacy, and the possibility of justificatory neutrality.
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Lecture II: Communicative Justice and the Distribution of Attention
Algorithmic intermediaries govern the digital public sphere through their architectures, amplification algorithms, and moderation practices. In doing so, they shape public communication and distribute attention in ways that were previously infeasible with such subtlety, speed and scale. From misinformation and affective polarisation to hate speech and radicalisation, the many pathologies of the digital public sphere attest that they could do so better. But what ideals should they aim at? Political philosophy should be able to help, but existing theories typically assume that a healthy public sphere will spontaneously emerge if only we get the boundaries of free expression right. They offer little guidance on how to intentionally constitute the digital public sphere. In addition to these theories focused on expression, we need a further theory of communicative justice, targeted specifically at the algorithmic intermediaries that shape communication and distribute attention. This lecture argues that political philosophy urgently owes an account of how to govern communication in the digital public sphere, and introduces and defends a democratic egalitarian theory of communicative justice.
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Applying Association Rules Mining to Investigate Pedestrian Fatal and Injury Crash Patterns Under Different Lighting Conditions
Hossain, Ahmed, Sun, Xiaoduan, Thapa, Raju, Codjoe, Julius
The pattern of pedestrian crashes varies greatly depending on lighting circumstances, emphasizing the need of examining pedestrian crashes in various lighting conditions. Using Louisiana pedestrian fatal and injury crash data (2010-2019), this study applied Association Rules Mining (ARM) to identify the hidden pattern of crash risk factors according to three different lighting conditions (daylight, dark-with-streetlight, and dark-no-streetlight). Based on the generated rules, the results show that daylight pedestrian crashes are associated with children (less than 15 years), senior pedestrians (greater than 64 years), older drivers (>64 years), and other driving behaviors such as failure to yield, inattentive/distracted, illness/fatigue/asleep. Additionally, young drivers (15-24 years) are involved in severe pedestrian crashes in daylight conditions. This study also found pedestrian alcohol/drug involvement as the most frequent item in the dark-with-streetlight condition. This crash type is particularly associated with pedestrian action (crossing intersection/midblock), driver age (55-64 years), speed limit (30-35 mph), and specific area type (business with mixed residential area). Fatal pedestrian crashes are found to be associated with roadways with high-speed limits (>50 mph) during the dark without streetlight condition. Some other risk factors linked with high-speed limit related crashes are pedestrians walking with/against the traffic, presence of pedestrian dark clothing, pedestrian alcohol/drug involvement. The research findings are expected to provide an improved understanding of the underlying relationships between pedestrian crash risk factors and specific lighting conditions. Highway safety experts can utilize these findings to conduct a decision-making process for selecting effective countermeasures to reduce pedestrian crashes strategically.
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Hotel2vec: Learning Attribute-Aware Hotel Embeddings with Self-Supervision
Sadeghian, Ali, Minaee, Shervin, Partalas, Ioannis, Li, Xinxin, Wang, Daisy Zhe, Cowan, Brooke
We propose a neural network architecture for learning vector representations of hotels. Unlike previous works, which typically only use user click information for learning item embeddings, we propose a framework that combines several sources of data, including user clicks, hotel attributes (e.g., property type, star rating, average user rating), amenity information (e.g., the hotel has free Wi-Fi or free breakfast), and geographic information. During model training, a joint embedding is learned from all of the above information. We show that including structured attributes about hotels enables us to make better predictions in a downstream task than when we rely exclusively on click data. We train our embedding model on more than 40 million user click sessions from a leading online travel platform and learn embeddings for more than one million hotels. Our final learned embeddings integrate distinct sub-embeddings for user clicks, hotel attributes, and geographic information, providing an interpretable representation that can be used flexibly depending on the application. We show empirically that our model generates high-quality representations that boost the performance of a hotel recommendation system in addition to other applications. An important advantage of the proposed neural model is that it addresses the cold-start problem for hotels with insufficient historical click information by incorporating additional hotel attributes which are available for all hotels.
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Letters to the Editor
Berman, A., Rich, Robert, Meehan, D. N., Sussna, Michael
In fact, such a pattern can itself be considered a frame, where the position of each pixel is a slot, and the shade or A recent article by Ronald Brachman (Brachman, color at each pixel is then the attached value. It should 1985) points out some philosophical or semantic problems then be possible to represent this pattern as I have just in using the notion of a prototype, which is described by described it-z.e., by a frame representing the background, using default properties. The problem arises since default partially obscured or covered by a frame representing the properties can be overridden or cancelled in representing object of interest, partially obscured or covered by some particular instances, and therefore lack definitional power: other objects. The fact that some part of the object of interest is obscured does not mean that it is no longer there, nor As an example, Brachman presents an elephant joke: that it is not intrinsic to the object's definition. Q: What's big and gray, has a trunk, and lives in the trees?
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