Category: Artificial Intelligence, Data Science & Society
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What the Assessments Say About the Swiss E-voting System
(Part 4 of a 5-part series starting here) In 2021 the Swiss government commissioned several in-depth technical studies of the Swiss Post E-voting system, by independent experts from academia and private consulting firms. They sought to assess, does the protocol as documented guarantee the security called for by Swiss law (the “ordinance on electronic voting”,…
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How the Swiss Post E-voting system addresses client-side vulnerabilities
(Part 3 of a 5-part series starting here) In Part 1, I described how Switzerland decided to assess the security and accuracy of its e-voting system. Swiss Post is the “vendor” developing the system, the Swiss cantons are the “customer” deploying it in their elections, and the Swiss Parliament and Federal Chancellery are the “regulators,” …
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How NOT to Assess an E-voting System
by Vanessa Teague, an Australian computer scientist, cryptographer, and security/privacy expert. (Part 2 of a 5-part series starting here) Australian elections are known for the secret ballot and a long history of being peaceful, transparent and well run. So it may surprise you to learn that the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) is…
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How to Assess an E-voting System
Part 1 of a 5-part series If I can shop and bank online, why can’t I vote online? David Jefferson explained in 2011 why internet voting is so difficult to make secure, I summarized again in 2021 why internet voting is still inherently insecure, and many other experts have explained it too. Still, several…
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National AI Research Infrastructure Needs to Support Independent Evaluation of Performance Claims
By Sayash Kapoor, Mihir Kshirsagar, and Arvind Narayanan Our response to the National AI Research Resource RFI highlights the significance of supporting a research infrastructure that is designed to independently test the validity of the claims of AI performance. In particular, we draw attention to the widespread phenomenon of the industry peddling what we call…
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GPT-3 Raises Complex Questions for Philosophy and Policy
GPT-3, a powerful, 175 billion parameter language model developed recently by OpenAI, has been galvanizing public debate and controversy. As the MIT Technology Review puts it: “OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good—and completely mindless”. Parts of the technology community hope (and fear) that GPT-3 could brings us one step closer to the hypothetical…
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NJ agrees No Internet voting in July, vague about November
A formal settlement agreement has been submitted to the NJ Superior Court regarding online ballot access in the 2020 elections. On May 4, 2020, New Jersey’s Division of Elections was caught trying to adopt vote-by-Internet on the stealth, even though the law forbids it. That is, not only is Internet voting inherently insecurable, there’s a…
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AI Ethics: Seven Traps
By Annette Zimmermann and Bendert Zevenbergen The question of how to ensure that technological innovation in machine learning and artificial intelligence leads to ethically desirable—or, more minimally, ethically defensible—impacts on society has generated much public debate in recent years. Most of these discussions have been accompanied by a strong sense of urgency: as more…
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Bridging Tech-Military AI Divides in an Era of Tech Ethics: Sharif Calfee at CITP
In a time when U.S. tech employees are organizing against corporate-military collaborations on AI, how can the ethics and incentives of military, corporate, and academic research be more closely aligned on AI and lethal autonomous weapons? Speaking today at CITP was Captain Sharif Calfee, a U.S. Naval Officer who serves as a surface warfare officer.…
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What Are Machine Learning Models Hiding?
Machine learning is eating the world. The abundance of training data has helped ML achieve amazing results for object recognition, natural language processing, predictive analytics, and all manner of other tasks. Much of this training data is very sensitive, including personal photos, search queries, location traces, and health-care records. In a recent series of papers,…