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Scientists use big data to sway elections and predict riots -- welcome to the 1960s

Nature

Ignorance of history is a badge of honour in Silicon Valley. "The only thing that matters is the future," self-driving-car engineer Anthony Levandowski told The New Yorker in 20181. Levandowski, formerly of Google, Uber and Google's autonomous-vehicle subsidiary Waymo (and recently sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets), is no outlier. The gospel of'disruptive innovation' depends on the abnegation of history2. 'Move fast and break things' was Facebook's motto. Another word for this is heedlessness. And here are a few more: negligence, foolishness and blindness.


In China, facial recognition, public shaming and control go hand in hand - CNET

CNET - News

A screen shows a demonstration of SenseTime Group's SenseVideo pedestrian and vehicle recognition system at the company's showroom in Beijing. Facial recognition supporters in the US often argue that the surveillance technology is reserved for the greatest risks -- to help deal with violent crimes, terrorist threats and human trafficking. And while it's still often used for petty crimes like shoplifting, stealing $12 worth of goods or selling $50 worth of drugs, its use in the US still looks tame compared with how widely deployed facial recognition has been in China. A database leak in 2019 gave a glimpse of how pervasive China's surveillance tools are -- with more than 6.8 million records from a single day, taken from cameras positioned around hotels, parks, tourism spots and mosques, logging details on people as young as 9 days old. The Chinese government is accused of using facial recognition to commit atrocities against Uyghur Muslims, relying on the technology to carry out "the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today."


Artificial intelligence doesn't require burdensome regulation

#artificialintelligence

One of the most important issues that Congress will face in 2018 is how and when to regulate our growing dependence on artificial intelligence (AI). During the U.S. National Governors Association summer meetings, Elon Musk urged the group to push forward with regulation "before it's too late," stati...


Justice Dept. scrambles to jam prison cellphones, stop drone deliveries to inmates

General News Tweet Watch

The Justice Department will soon start trying to jam cellphones smuggled into federal prisons and used for criminal activity, part of a broader safety initiative that is also focused on preventing drones from airdropping contraband to inmates. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein told the American Correctional Association's conference in Orlando on Monday that, while the law prohibits cellphone use by federal inmates, the Bureau of Prisons confiscated 5,116 such phones in 2016, and preliminary numbers for 2017 indicate a 28 percent increase. "That is a major safety issue," he said in his speech. "Cellphones are used to run criminal enterprises, facilitate the commission of violent crimes and thwart law enforcement." When he was the U.S. attorney in Maryland, Rosenstein prosecuted an inmate who used a smuggled cellphone to order the murder of a witness.


Christopher Chemiak

AI Magazine

The Ipecac College Committee on Human Experimentation is mailing each faculty member the enclosed review of developments in the recent PortraitPrograms controversy. While the committee deplores the atmosphere of crisis, not to say hysteria, that now envelops the issue, the committee welcomes constructive comment: Damage control continues. Behavioral Taxidermy The PortraitPrograms Project grew out of hyperinterdisciplinarianism of the famed Gigabase Sculpture Group,l in turn stimulated by recent cutbacks in government support for the arts. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation had jointly funded the Gigabase Sculpture Project to foster the literary/musical genre of composing genetic codes for novel organisms. Later, artists trained in recombinant DNA technology designed massive Brancusi-esque statues of living cytoplasmic jelly.


PROTECT -- A Deployed Game-Theoretic System for Strategic Security Allocation for the United States Coast Guard

AI Magazine

Toward that end, this article presents PROTECT, a game-theoretic system deployed by the United States Coast Guard (USCG) in the Port of Boston for scheduling its patrols. USCG has termed the deployment of PROTECT in Boston a success; PROTECT is currently being tested in the Port of New York, with the potential for nationwide deployment. PROTECT is premised on an attackerdefender Stackelberg game model and offers five key innovations. First, this system is a departure from the assumption of perfect adversary rationality noted in previous work, relying instead on a quantal response (QR) model of the adversary's behavior -- to the best of our knowledge, this is the first real-world deployment of the QR model. Second, to improve PROTECT's efficiency, we generate a compact representation of the defender's strategy space, exploiting equivalence and dominance.


The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network AI System (F

AI Magazine

A key data source available to FINCEN is reports of large cash transactions made to the Treasury according to terms of the Bank Secrecy Act. FAIS's unique analytic power arises primarily The most common motivation for criminal behavior is profit. The larger the criminal organization is, the greater the profit. By disrupting the ability to profit, law enforcement can focus on a vulnerable aspect of large criminal organizations. Money laundering is a complex process of placing the profit, usually cash, from illicit activity into the legitimate financial system, with the intent of obscuring the source, ownership, or use of the funds.


Using Case-Based Reasoning to Support Health and Safety Compliance in the Chemical Industry

AI Magazine

Implementation of the case-based reasoner in rules and objects using a commercial knowledge-based system shell is described. Although some refinements remain, the performance of the case-based reasoner has met its design goals. The chemical industry is heavily regulated. Every hazardous chemical product must have a set of shipping descriptions that conform to strict regulations issued by the Department of Transportation (DOT), the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Shipping descriptions provide a concise characterization of the hazards a chemical can present during transportation (figure 1). Failing to comply with transport regulations can result in penalties ranging from delayed shipments to heavy fines or even incarceration of corporate officials. In addition, each chemical product has a material safety data sheet (MSDS) that conforms to Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standards. Unlike shipping descriptions, MSDSs are lengthy documents of 8 to 10 pages that provide a detailed description of the health hazards a product can pose in the workplace (figure 2). They also contain information on procedures for storing, handling, and disposing of a chemical. Inadequately prepared MSDSs can lead to substantial product-liability lawsuits against the company if the product is involved in an industrial accident. The ultimate goal of these regulations is to ensure proper communication of health and safety information for the protection of the public. Air Products is committed to the initiative of the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) known as Responsible Care. This initiative focuses on the safe manufacturing, distribution, use, recycling, and disposal of chemicals. Proper communication through accurate shipping descriptions and full disclosure of hazard information in the MSDS plays a key role in fulfilling obligations under Responsible Care. Maintaining shipping descriptions and MSDSs requires a major effort. Most corporate systems are intensely manual.


Artificial Intelligence, Employment and Income

AI Magazine

Artificial intelligence (AI) will have many profound societal effects It promises potential benefits (and may also pose risks) in education, defense, business, law, and science In this article we explore how AI is likely to affect employment and the distribution of income. I am grateful for the helpful comments provided by many people Specifically I would like to acknowledge the advice teceived from Sandra Cook and Victor Walling of SRI, Wassily Leontief and Faye Duchin of the New York University Institute for Economic Analysis, Margaret Boden of The University of Sussex, Henry Levin and Charles Holloway of Stanford University, James Albus of the National Bureau of Standards, and Peter Hart of Syntelligence Herbert Simon, of Carnegie-Mellon Univetsity, wrote me extensive criticisms and rebuttals of my arguments Robert Solow of MIT was quite skeptical of my premises, but conceded nevertheless that my conclusions could possibly follow from them if certain other economic conditions were satisfied. There are two opposing views in response to this question Some claim that AI is not really very different from other technologies that have supported automation and increased productivity-technologies such as mechanical engineering, ele&onics, control engineering, and operations rcsearch. Like them, AI may also lead ultimately to an expanding economy with a concomitant expansion of employment opportunities. At worst, according to this view, thcrc will be some, perhaps even substantial shifts in the types of jobs, but certainly no overall reduction in the total number of jobs.


Artificial intelligence doesn't require burdensome regulation

#artificialintelligence

One of the most important issues that Congress will face in 2018 is how and when to regulate our growing dependence on artificial intelligence (AI). During the U.S. National Governors Association summer meetings, Elon Musk urged the group to push forward with regulation "before it's too late," stating that AI was an "existential threat to humanity." Hyperbole aside, there are legitimate concerns about the technology and its use. But a rush to regulation could exacerbate current issues, or create new issues that we're not prepared to deal with along the way. To begin with, one of the biggest issues in the world of AI is the lack of clear definition for what the technology is -- and is not.