Year: 2018
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How Data Science and Open Science are Transforming Research Ethics: Edward Freeland at CITP
How are data science and open science movement transforming how researchers manage research ethics? And how are these changes influencing public trust in social research? I’m here at the Center for IT Policy to hear a talk by Edward P. Freeland. Edward is the associate director of the Princeton University Survey Research Center and a…
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Why Everyone in Tech Should Visit the American Museum of Tort Law
This Monday, Nikki Bourassa and I organized a van from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society to visit the American Museum of Tort Law, which I have decided to call the American Museum of Exploding Cars and Toys that Kill You. While at the museum, I came to see another way that research can…
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Workshop on Technical Applications of Contextual Integrity
The theory of contextual integrity (CI) has inspired work across the legal, privacy, computer science and HCI research communities. Recognizing common interests and common challenges, the time seemed ripe for a meeting to discuss what we have learned from the projects using CI and how to move forward to leverage CI for enhancing privacy preserving…
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Automating Inequality: Virginia Eubanks Book Launch at Data & Society
What does it mean for public sector actors to implement algorithms to make public services to be more efficient? How are these systems experienced by the families and people who face the consequences? Speaking at the Data and Society Institute today is Virginia Eubanks, author of the new book Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile,…
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Website operators are in the dark about privacy violations by third-party scripts
by Steven Englehardt, Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan. Recently we revealed that “session replay” scripts on websites record everything you do, like someone looking over your shoulder, and send it to third-party servers. This en-masse data exfiltration inevitably scoops up sensitive, personal information — in real time, as you type it. We released the data…
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Roundup: My First Semester as a Post-Doc at Princeton
As Princeton thaws from under last week’s snow hurricane, I’m taking a moment to reflect on my first four months in the place I now call home. This roundup post shares highlights from my first semester as a post-doc in Psychology, CITP, and Sociology. So far, I have had an amazing experience: The Paluck Lab…
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Singularity Skepticism 4: The Value of Avoiding Errors
[This is the fourth in a series of posts. The other posts in the series are here: 1 2 3.] In the previous post, we did a deep dive into chess ratings, as an example of a system to measure a certain type of intelligence. One of the takeaways was that the process of numerically…
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Singularity Skepticism 3: How to Measure AI Performance
[This is the third post in a series. The other posts are here: 1 2 4] On Thursday I wrote about progress in computer chess, and how a graph of Elo rating (which I called the natural measure of playing skill) versus time showed remarkably consistent linear improvement over several decades. I used this to argue…
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Singularity Skepticism 2: Why Self-Improvement Isn’t Enough
[This is the second post in a series. The other posts are here: 1 3 4] Yesterday, I wrote about the AI Singularity, and why it won’t be a literal singularity, that is, why the growth rate won’t literally become infinite. So if the Singularity won’t be a literal singularity, what will it be? Recall that…
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Why the Singularity is Not a Singularity
This is the first in a series of posts about the Singularity, that notional future time when machine intelligence explodes in capability, changing human life forever. Like many computer scientists, I’m a Singularity skeptic. In this series I’ll be trying to express the reasons for my skepticism–and workshopping ideas for an essay on the topic…