How do you feel about the end of privacy on public places? In public transport? When you can identfy every stranger that passes by? When every stranger can indentify you without your knowledge? While this might be still a bit away, the NY Times reports that a start-up called Clearview AI is using a massive […]
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The case for … ‘dumb’ cities instead of ‘smart’ ones
We’ve participated in SCEWC in Barcelona last year. The amount of technology that is supposed to makes a city smart is staggering. For monitoring ever movement in the city millions of sensors are positioned in cities. Some of them look like from some dystopian future. What’s missing are actuators that physically enforce some desired behavior […]
Personal Data Is Valuable. Give Pricing Power to the People | WIRED
Wired article by Olaf Groth, Tobias Straube and Dan Zehr discussing a market that establishes a price for privacy-assured data and returns a fair share of that value to the people: Today, people fuel the digital economy with vast streams of data but have virtually no power to demand fair compensation for it. The companies […]
Opinion | How to Track President Trump – The New York Times
Shocking article how easy it is to track anybody, including Donald Trump. A dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans was used by NY Times. It contained the traces of a Secret Service agent that accompanied Donald Trump. The agent’s home was also clearly identifiable […]
Three People-Centered Design Principles for Deep Learning
Algorithms gain more and more control over our daily lives. We need to build in principles into AI systems that work in the favor of people: Transparency. Wherever possible, make the high-level implementation details of your AI project available for all of those involved. In this case of a deep learning initiative, people should understand […]
A Sobering Message About the Future at AI’s Biggest Party | WIRED
The key message from this years leading AI conference NeurIPS is a sobering one. In a nutshell: it looks like AI has hit a wall or will soon hit one, unless AI research starts to embrace alternative techniques. Read more: A Sobering Message About the Future at AI’s Biggest Party | WIRED Photo by Pixabay […]
On the potential Impact of banning Political Ads on Social Media
Worth reading: this Wired article that discusses the potential impact of banning political ads on social media. Political Ads serve as entry point to phony astroturf communities. For example, the now infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA for short) purchased only 3400 Facebook and Instagram ads. Compare this to the over 61500 Facebook posts, 116000 Instagram […]
Converging Solutions: Artificial Networks Shed Light on Human Face Recognition
Humans are almost hardwired to recognize faces. It’s important for us to tell people apart and we barely think about it. But the recognition process is far from being understood. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have compared how deep neural networks recognize faces and compared this with activation pattern data from […]
Chatbots on Smartphones: It’s not a love story, but it’s worth trying
It’s easy, you might say. In fact, there are several ways to use chatbots on messenger platforms (WhatsApp, FB Messenger, etc.) or to integrate them on the mobile website or apps via widget. However, these methods have several problems: 1. Mix of business and private. If you use a messenger platform for your business, you […]
Why News-Pull is no Solution for WhatsApp Newsletters
With the approaching end of WhatsApp newsletters, companies are looking for alternatives to prevent the loss of their WhatsApp newsletter audience. One solution is the switch to News-Pull. Here the subscriber must open WhatsApp, switch to the newsletter channel and send a message (for example, a letter). Only then will the subscriber receive the newsletter […]