580 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2021
    1. Turing was an exceptional mathematician with a peculiar and fascinating personality and yet he remains largely unknown. In fact, he might be considered the father of the von Neumann architecture computer and the pioneer of Artificial Intelligence. And all thanks to his machines; both those that Church called “Turing machines” and the a-, c-, o-, unorganized- and p-machines, which gave rise to evolutionary computations and genetic programming as well as connectionism and learning. This paper looks at all of these and at why he is such an often overlooked and misunderstood figure.
  2. Apr 2021
    1. There is a tendency in short luck-heavy games to require you to play multiple rounds in one sitting, to balance the scores. This is one such game. This multiple-rounds "mechanic" feels like an artificial fix for the problem of luck. Saboteur 1 and 2 advise the same thing because the different roles in the game are not balanced. ("Oh, well. I had the bad luck to draw the Profiteer character this time. Maybe I'll I'll draw a more useful character in round 2.") This doesn't change the fact that you are really playing a series of short unbalanced games. Scores will probably even out... statistically speaking. The Lost Cities card game tries to deal with the luck-problem in the same way.

      possibly rename: games: luck: managing/mitigating the luck to games: luck: dealing with/mitigating the luck problem

    1. The insertion of an algorithm’s predictions into the patient-physician relationship also introduces a third party, turning the relationship into one between the patient and the health care system. It also means significant changes in terms of a patient’s expectation of confidentiality. “Once machine-learning-based decision support is integrated into clinical care, withholding information from electronic records will become increasingly difficult, since patients whose data aren’t recorded can’t benefit from machine-learning analyses,” the authors wrote.

      There is some work being done on federated learning, where the algorithm works on decentralised data that stays in place with the patient and the ML model is brought to the patient so that their data remains private.

  3. Mar 2021
    1. In this respect, we join Fitzpatrick (2011) in exploring “the extent to which the means of media production and distribution are undergoing a process of radical democratization in the Web 2.0 era, and a desire to test the limits of that democratization”

      Something about this is reminiscent of WordPress' mission to democratize publishing. We can also compare it to Facebook whose (stated) mission is to connect people, while it's actual mission is to make money by seemingly radicalizing people to the extremes of our political spectrum.

      This highlights the fact that while many may look at content moderation on platforms like Facebook as removing their voices or deplatforming them in the case of people like Donald J. Trump or Alex Jones as an anti-democratic move. In fact it is not. Because of Facebooks active move to accelerate extreme ideas by pushing them algorithmically, they are actively be un-democratic. Democratic behavior on Facebook would look like one voice, one account and reach only commensurate with that person's standing in real life. Instead, the algorithmic timeline gives far outsized influence and reach to some of the most extreme voices on the platform. This is patently un-democratic.

    1. Meanwhile, the algorithms that recommend this content still work to maximize engagement. This means every toxic post that escapes the content-moderation filters will continue to be pushed higher up the news feed and promoted to reach a larger audience.

      This and the prior note are also underpinned by the fact that only 10% of people are going to be responsible for the majority of posts, so if you can filter out the velocity that accrues to these people, you can effectively dampen down the crazy.

    2. In his New York Times profile, Schroepfer named these limitations of the company’s content-moderation strategy. “Every time Mr. Schroepfer and his more than 150 engineering specialists create A.I. solutions that flag and squelch noxious material, new and dubious posts that the A.I. systems have never seen before pop up—and are thus not caught,” wrote the Times. “It’s never going to go to zero,” Schroepfer told the publication.

      The one thing many of these types of noxious content WILL have in common are the people at the fringes who are regularly promoting it. Why not latch onto that as a means of filtering?

    3. But anything that reduced engagement, even for reasons such as not exacerbating someone’s depression, led to a lot of hemming and hawing among leadership. With their performance reviews and salaries tied to the successful completion of projects, employees quickly learned to drop those that received pushback and continue working on those dictated from the top down.

      If the company can't help regulate itself using some sort of moral compass, it's imperative that government or other outside regulators should.

  4. Feb 2021
    1. The result was a mother, soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available twenty-four hours a day, a mother that never scolded her infant and never struck or bit her baby in anger. Furthermore, we designed a mother-machine with maximal maintenance efficiency since failure of any system or function could be resolved by the simple substitution of black boxes and new component parts. It is our opinion that we engineered a very superior monkey mother, although this position is not held universally by the monkey fathers.

      Finding the importance the monkeys senses were to thriving the development of this surrogate mother figure was able to demonstrate that it was more than just the need for milk that the infant monkeys craved.

  5. Jan 2021
  6. Dec 2020
  7. Nov 2020
    1. The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.

      Bush emphasises the importance of retrieval in the storage of information. He talks about technical limitations, but in this paragraph he stresses that retrieval is made more difficult by the "artificiality of systems of indexing", in other words, our default file-cabinet metaphor for storing information.

      Information in such a hierarchical architecture is found by descending down into the hierarchy, and back up again. Moreover, the information we're looking for can only be in one place at a time (unless we introduce duplicates).

      Having found our item of interest, we need to ascend back up the hierarchy to make our next descent.

    1. I'm still calling this v1.00 as this is what will be included in the first print run.

      There seems to be an artificial pressure and a false assumption that the version that gets printed and included in the box be the "magic number" 1.00.

      But I think there is absolutely nothing bad or to be ashamed of to have the version number printed in the rule book be 1.47 or even 2.0. (Or, of course, you could just not print it at all.) It's just being transparent/honest about how many versions/revisions you've made. 

  8. Oct 2020
    1. What if you could use AI to control the content in your feed? Dialing up or down whatever is most useful to you. If I’m on a budget, maybe I don’t want to see photos of friends on extravagant vacations. Or, if I’m trying to pay more attention to my health, encourage me with lots of salads and exercise photos. If I recently broke up with somebody, happy couple photos probably aren’t going to help in the healing process. Why can’t I have control over it all, without having to unfollow anyone. Or, opening endless accounts to separate feeds by topic. And if I want to risk seeing everything, or spend a week replacing my usual feed with images from a different culture, country, or belief system, couldn’t I do that, too? 

      Some great blue sky ideas here.

  9. Sep 2020
    1. synthesize

      To synthesize in definition is create something chemically. This means that if out of 118 elements, 20 of those are man-made via a nuclear reactor and/or a particle accelerator. These elements are unstable because they are built upon fusing an Atom's nucleus with more proton's than it may usually have which causes the stability to become dangerously chaotic as it is not natural for the element. This is the building block for the Atomic Bombs creation.

  10. Aug 2020
  11. Jul 2020
  12. Jun 2020
    1. it seems that word-level models work better than character-level models

      Interesting, if you think about it, both when we as humans read and write, we think in terms of words or even phrases, rather than characters. Unless we're unsure how to spell something, the characters are a secondary thought. I wonder if this is at all related to the fact that word-level models seem to work better than character-level models.

  13. May 2020
    1. Mei, X., Lee, H.-C., Diao, K., Huang, M., Lin, B., Liu, C., Xie, Z., Ma, Y., Robson, P. M., Chung, M., Bernheim, A., Mani, V., Calcagno, C., Li, K., Li, S., Shan, H., Lv, J., Zhao, T., Xia, J., … Yang, Y. (2020). Artificial intelligence for rapid identification of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). MedRxiv, 2020.04.12.20062661. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.12.20062661

    1. Results reveal a significant shift in the gut microbiome and metabolome within one day following morphine treatment compared to that observed after placebo. Morphine-induced gut microbial dysbiosis exhibited distinct characteristic signatures, including significant increase in communities associated with pathogenic function, decrease in communities associated with stress tolerance and significant impairment in bile acids and morphine-3-glucuronide/morphine biotransformation in the gut.

      Unsurprisingly, various substances appear to disrupt the microbiome; artificial sweeteners are not unique. Given that I don't worry about opioids, I probably shouldn't worry about sweeteners.

      However, opioids are known for causing constipation. That is to say, they have a clear effect on digestion. Perhaps I should worry about opioids rather than not worry about sweeteners.

  14. Apr 2020
    1. Although it has been proposed that NNS do not affect glycemia (3), data from several recent studies suggest that NNS are not physiologically inert. First, it has been demonstrated that the gastrointestinal tract (4,5) and the pancreas (6,7) can detect sugars through taste receptors and transduction mechanisms that are similar to those indentified in taste cells in the mouth. Second, NNS-induced activation of gut sweet taste receptors in isolated duodenal L cells and pancreatic β-cells triggers the secretion of glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) (4,5) and insulin (6–9), respectively. Third, data from studies conducted in animal models demonstrate that NNS interact with sweet taste receptors expressed in enteroendocrine cells to increase both active and passive intestinal glucose absorption by upregulating the expression of sodium-dependent glucose transporter isoform 1 (5,10,11) and increasing the translocation of GLUT2 to the apical membrane of intestinal epithelia (12).

      This supports my previous assertion that the effects of artificial sweeteners on the microbiome are taste-mediated. However, I did not predict the intestinal taste receptors. That means that my previous way to falsify the claim, such as delivery by oral gavage, is no longer adequate. Nonetheless, interesting things could be learned from such tests.

    1. These variations were related to inflammation in the host

      In which direction? This statement makes me wonder if inflammation caused the changes in the microbiome.

      It seems possible that the sweetness itself is the ultimate cause. To test this, a study using oral gavage. It's easily plausible that the flavor alerts dietary patterns (I believe humans eat more calories in response to sweeteners, will need to check on source). Alternatively, direct effects on the brain, and downstream effects on the body, is also not out of the question.

      The reason I suspect taste-mediated effects is that it seems unlikely that so many completely unrelated sweeteners would have such similar effects. However, one might might expect more similar results than those found if it were the case (or the dose is so high that the taste changes for some, e.g. saccharin).

    1. Abdulla, A., Wang, B., Qian, F., Kee, T., Blasiak, A., Ong, Y. H., Hooi, L., Parekh, F., Soriano, R., Olinger, G. G., Keppo, J., Hardesty, C. L., Chow, E. K., Ho, D., & Ding, X. (n.d.). Project IDentif.AI: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Rapidly Optimize Combination Therapy Development for Infectious Disease Intervention. Advanced Therapeutics, n/a(n/a), 2000034. https://doi.org/10.1002/adtp.202000034

  15. Dec 2019
    1. Alexander Samuel reflects on tagging and its origins as a backbone to the social web. Along with RSS, tags allowed users to connect and collate content using such tools as feed readers. This all changed with the advent of social media and the algorithmically curated news feed.

      Tags were used for discovery of specific types of content. Who needs that now that our new overlords of artificial intelligence and algorithmic feeds can tell us what we want to see?!

      Of course we still need tags!!! How are you going to know serendipitously that you need more poetry in your life until you run into the tag on a service like IndieWeb.xyz? An algorithmic feed is unlikely to notice--or at least in my decade of living with them I've yet to run into poetry in one.

  16. Aug 2019
    1. Em 2015, o serviço de streaming de música Spotify criou a playlist chamada Descobertas da Semana, que funciona como uma curadoria digital. O algoritmo responsável por esta playlist utiliza técnicas de Filtragem Colaborativa, Processamento de Linguagem Natural e Processamento de Sinais de Áudio através de Redes Neurais Convolucionais para compor a playlist semanalmente.[33]
    1. A notable by-product of a move of clinical as well as research data to the cloud would be the erosion of market power of EMR providers.

      But we have to be careful not to inadvertently favour the big tech companies in trying to stop favouring the big EMR providers.

    2. cloud computing is provided by a small number of large technology companies who have both significant market power and strong commercial interests outside of healthcare for which healthcare data might potentially be beneficial

      AI is controlled by these external forces. In what direction will this lead it?

    3. it has long been argued that patients themselves should be the owners and guardians of their health data and subsequently consent to their data being used to develop AI solutions.

      Mere consent isn't enough. We consent to give away all sorts of data for phone apps that we don't even really consider. We need much stronger awareness, or better defaults so that people aren't sharing things without proper consideration.

    4. To realize this vision and to realize the potential of AI across health systems, more fundamental issues have to be addressed: who owns health data, who is responsible for it, and who can use it? Cloud computing alone will not answer these questions—public discourse and policy intervention will be needed.

      This is part of the habit and culture of data use. And it's very different in health than in other sectors, given the sensitivity of the data, among other things.

    5. In spite of the widely touted benefits of “data liberation”,15 a sufficiently compelling use case has not been presented to overcome the vested interests maintaining the status quo and justify the significant upfront investment necessary to build data infrastructure.

      Advancing AI requires more than just AI stuff. It requires infrastructure and changes in human habit and culture.

    6. However, clinician satisfaction with EMRs remains low, resulting in variable completeness and quality of data entry, and interoperability between different providers remains elusive.11

      Another issue with complex systems: the data can be volumous but poor individual quality, relying on domain knowledge to be able to properly interpret (eg. that doctor didn't really prescribe 10x the recommended dose. It was probably an error.).

    7. Second, most healthcare organizations lack the data infrastructure required to collect the data needed to optimally train algorithms to (a) “fit” the local population and/or the local practice patterns, a requirement prior to deployment that is rarely highlighted by current AI publications, and (b) interrogate them for bias to guarantee that the algorithms perform consistently across patient cohorts, especially those who may not have been adequately represented in the training cohort.9

      AI depends on:

      • static processes - if the population you are predicting changes relative to the one used to train the model, all bets are off. It remains to be seen how similar they need to be given the brittleness of AI algorithms.
      • homogeneous population - beyond race, what else is important? If we don't have a good theory of health, we don't know.
    1. Both artists, through annotation, have produced new forms of public dialogue in response to other people (like Harvey Weinstein), texts (The New York Times), and ideas (sexual assault and racial bias) that are of broad social and political consequence.

      What about examples of future sorts of annotations/redactions like these with emerging technologies? Stories about deepfakes (like Obama calling Trump a "dipshit" or the Youtube Channel Bad Lip Reading redubbing the words of Senator Ted Cruz) are becoming more prevalent and these are versions of this sort of redaction taken to greater lengths. At present, these examples are obviously fake and facetious, but in short order they will be indistinguishable and more commonplace.

  17. Jun 2019
    1. The term first appeared in 1984 as the topic of a public debate at the annual meeting of AAAI (then called the "American Association of Artificial Intelligence"). It is a chain reaction that begins with pessimism in the AI community, followed by pessimism in the press, followed by a severe cutback in funding, followed by the end of serious research.[2] At the meeting, Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky—two leading AI researchers who had survived the "winter" of the 1970s—warned the business community that enthusiasm for AI had spiraled out of control in the 1980s and that disappointment would certainly follow. Three years later, the billion-dollar AI industry began to collapse.
  18. May 2019
    1. Deepmachinelearning,whichisusingalgorithmstoreplicatehumanthinking,ispredicatedonspecificvaluesfromspecifickindsofpeople—namely,themostpowerfulinstitutionsinsocietyandthosewhocontrolthem.

      This reminds me of this Reddit page

      The page takes pictures and texts from other Reddit pages and uses it to create computer generated posts and comments. It is interesting to see the intelligence and quality of understanding grow as it gathers more and more information.

  19. Apr 2019
    1. Ashley Norris is the Chief Academic Officer at ProctorU, an organization that provides online exam proctoring for schools. This article has an interesting overview of the negative side of technology advancements and what that has meant for student's ability to cheat. While the article does culminate as an ad, of sorts, for ProctorU, it is an interesting read and sparks thoughts on ProctorU's use of both human monitors for testing but also their integration of Artificial Intelligence into the process.

      Rating: 9/10.

  20. Mar 2019
    1. If you do not like the price you’re being offered when you shop, do not take it personally: many of the prices we see online are being set by algorithms that respond to demand and may also try to guess your personal willingness to pay. What’s next? A logical next step is that computers will start conspiring against us. That may sound paranoid, but a new study by four economists at the University of Bologna shows how this can happen.
    1. Worse still, even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that produced it. This is perhaps the most egregious way in which the IP metaphor has distorted our thinking about human functioning.

      Again, this doesn't conflict with a machine-learning or deep-learning or neural-net way of seeing IP.

    2. No ‘copy’ of the story is ever made

      Or, the copy initially made is changed over time since human "memory" is interdependent and interactive with other brain changes, whereas each bit in computer memory is independent of all other bits.

      However, machine learning probably results in interactions between bits as the learning algorithm is exposed to more training data. The values in a deep neural network interact in ways that are not so obvious. So this machine-human analogy might be getting new life with machine learning.

    3. The IP perspective requires the player to formulate an estimate of various initial conditions of the ball’s flight

      I don't see how this is true. The IP perspective depends on algorithms. There are many different algorithms to perform various tasks. Some perform reverse-kinematic calculations, but others conduct simpler, repeated steps. In computer science, this might be dynamic programming, recursive algorithms, or optimization. It seems that the IP metaphor still fits: it's just that those using the metaphor may not have updated their model of IP to be more modern.

    1. we provide him as much help as possible in making a plan of action. Then we give him as much help as we can in carrying it out. But we also have to allow him to change his mind at almost any point, and to want to modify his plans.

      I'm thinking about the role of AI tutors/advisors here. How often do they operate in the kind of flexible way described here. I wonder if they can without actual human intervention.

  21. Feb 2019
    1. Nearly half of FBI rap sheets failed to include information on the outcome of a case after an arrest—for example, whether a charge was dismissed or otherwise disposed of without a conviction, or if a record was expunged

      This explains my personal experience here: https://hyp.is/EIfMfivUEem7SFcAiWxUpA/epic.org/privacy/global_entry/default.html (Why someone who had Global Entry was flagged for a police incident before he applied for Global Entry).

    2. Applicants also agree to have their fingerprints entered into DHS’ Automatic Biometric Identification System (IDENT) “for recurrent immigration, law enforcement, and intelligence checks, including checks against latent prints associated with unsolved crimes.

      Intelligence checks is very concerning here as it suggests pretty much what has already been leaked, that the US is running complex autonomous screening of all of this data all the time. This also opens up the possibility for discriminatory algorithms since most of these are probably rooted in machine learning techniques and the criminal justice system in the US today tends to be fairly biased towards certain groups of people to begin with.

    3. It cited research, including some authored by the FBI, indicating that “some of the biometrics at the core of NGI, like facial recognition, may misidentify African Americans, young people, and women at higher rates than whites, older people, and men, respectively.

      This re-affirms the previous annotation that the set of training data for the intelligence checks the US runs on global entry data is biased towards certain groups of people.

  22. Jan 2019
    1. CTP synthesizes critical reflection with technology production as a way of highlighting and altering unconsciously-held assumptions that are hindering progress in a technical field.

      Definition of critical technical practice.

      This approach is grounded in AI rather than HCI

      (verbatim from the paper) "CTP consists of the following moves:

      • identifying the core metaphors of the field

      • noticing what, when working with those metaphors, remains marginalized

      • inverting the dominant metaphors to bring that margin to the center

      • embodying the alternative as a new technology

  23. Dec 2018
    1. Our under-standing of the gap is driven by technological exploration through artifact cre-ation and deployment, but HCI and CSCW systems need to have at their corea fundamental understanding of how people really work and live in groups, or-ganizations, communities, and other forms of collective life. Otherwise, wewill produce unusable systems, badly mechanizing and distorting collabora-tion and other social activity.

      The risk of CSCW not driving toward a more scientific pursuit of social theory, understanding, and ethnomethodology and instead simply building "cool toys"

    2. Nonetheless, several guiding questions are required based on thesocial–technical gap and its role in any CSCW science of the artificial:• When can a computational system successfully ignore the need fornuance and context?• When can a computational system augment human activity withcomputer technologies suitably to make up for the loss in nuance andcontext, as argued in the approximation section earlier?• Can these benefits be systematized so that we know when we are add-ing benefit rather than creating loss?• What types of future research will solve some of the gaps betweentechnical capabilities and what people expect in their full range of so-cial and collaborative activities?

      Questions to consider in moving CSCW toward a science of the artificial

    3. First-order approximations, to adopt a metaphor from fluid dynamics, aretractable solutions that partially solve specific problems with knowntrade-offs.

      Definition of first-order approximations.

      Ackerman argues that CSCW needs a set of approximations that drive the development of initial work-arounds for the socio-technical gaps.

      Essentially, how to satisfy some social requirements and then approximate the trade-offs. Doesn't consider the product a solution in full but something to iterate and improve

      This may have been new/radical thinking 20 years ago but seems to have been largely adopted by the CSCW community

    4. CSCW’s science, however, must centralize the necessary gap between whatwe would prefer to construct and what we can construct. To do this as a practi-cal program of action requires several steps—palliatives to ameliorate the cur-rent social conditions, first-order approximations to explore the design space,and fundamental lines of inquiry to create the science. These steps should de-velop into a new science of the artificial. In any case, the steps are necessary tomove forward intellectually within CSCW, given the nature of the social–tech-nical gap.

      Ackerman sets up the steps necessary for CSCW to become a science of the artificial and to try to resolve the socio-technical gap:

      Palliatives to ameliorate social conditions

      Approximations to explore the design space

      Lines of scientific inquiry

    5. Simon’s (1969/1981) book does not address the inevitable gaps betweenthe desired outcome and the means of producing that outcome for anylarge-scale design process, but CSCW researchers see these gaps as unavoid-able. The social–technical gap should not have been ignored by Simon.Yet, CSCW is exactly the type of science Simon envisioned, and CSCW couldserve as a reconstruction and renewal of Simon’s viewpoint, suitably revised. Asmuch as was AI, CSCW is inherently a science of the artificial,

      How Ackerman sees CSCW as a science of the artificial:

      "CSCW is at once an engineering discipline attempting to construct suitable systems for groups, organizations, and other collectivities, and at the same time, CSCW is a social science attempting to understand the basis for that construction in the social world (or everyday experience)."

    6. At a simple level,CSCW’s intellectual context is framed by social constructionism andethnomethodology (e.g., Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Garfinkel, 1967), systemstheories (e.g., Hutchins, 1995a), and many large-scale system experiences (e.g.,American urban renewal, nuclear power, and Vietnam). All of these pointed tothe complexities underlying any social activity, even those felt to be straightfor-ward.

      Succinct description of CSCW as social constructionism, ethnomethodlogy, system theory and large-scale system implementation.

    7. Yet,The Sciences of the Artificialbecame an an-them call for artificial intelligence and computer science. In the book he ar-gued for a path between the idea for a new science (such as economics orartificial intelligence) and the construction of that new science (perhaps withsome backtracking in the creation process). This argument was both charac-teristically logical and psychologically appealing for the time.

      Simon defines "Sciences of the Artificial" as new sciences/disciplines that synthesize knowledge that is technically or socially constructed or "created and maintained through human design and agency" as opposed to the natural sciences

    8. The HCI and CSCW research communitiesneed to ask what one might do to ameliorate the effects of the gap and to fur-ther understand the gap. I believe an answer—and a future HCI challenge—is toreconceptualize CSCW as a science of the artificial. This echoes Simon (1981)but properly updates his work for CSCW’s time and intellectual task.2

      Ackerman describes "CSCW as a science of the artificial" as a potential approach to reduce the socio-technical gap

  24. Nov 2018
  25. Sep 2018
    1. And its very likely that IA is a much easier road to the achievement of superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the hardest development problems have already been solved. Building up from within ourselves ought to be easier than figuring out what we really are and then building machines that are all of that.

      The authors of the text are proposing a radically different approach to the inevitable "singularity" event. They propose the research and development IA, or Intelligence Amplification, is developing computers with a symbiosis with humans. Noting that IA could be easier to develop than AI algorithms, since humanity had to probe what their true weaknesses and strengths are. In turn, developing an IA system that could cover humanities' weaknesses. This would summarily prevent an IA algorithm from getting over itself, which could potentially slow a point when we reach singularity.

  26. Jul 2018
  27. Jun 2018
    1. In “Getting Real,” Barad proposes that “reality is sedimented out of the process ofmaking the world intelligible through certain practices and not others ...” (1998: 105). If,as Barad and other feminist researchers suggest, we are responsible for what exists, what isthe reality that current discourses and practices regarding new technologies makeintelligible, and what is excluded? To answer this question Barad argues that we need asimultaneous account of the relations of humans and nonhumansandof their asymmetriesand differences. This requires remembering that boundaries between humans and machinesare not naturally given but constructed, in particular historical ways and with particularsocial and material consequences. As Barad points out, boundaries are necessary for thecreation of meaning, and, for that very reason, are never innocent. Because the cuts impliedin boundary making are always agentially positioned rather than naturally occurring, andbecause boundaries have real consequences, she argues, “accountability is mandatory”(187). :We are responsible for the world in which we live not because it is an arbitraryconstruction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practicesthat we have a role in shaping (1998: 102).The accountability involved is not, however, a matter of identifying authorship in anysimple sense, but rather a problem of understanding the effects of particular assemblages,and assessing the distributions, for better and worse, that they engender.
    2. Figured as servants,she points out, technologies reinscribe the difference between ‘us’ and those who serve us,while eliding the difference between the latter and machines: "The servanttroubles thedistinction between we-human-subjects-inventors with a lot to do (on the onehand) andthem-object-things that make it easier for us (on the other)" (1995: 73)
  28. Apr 2018
  29. Mar 2018
    1. The concentration of skills in certain countries and global companies could lead to a situation where other (native) companies are crowded out.

      Riesgo de la falta de desarrollo de capacidades informacionales, pero o por lo mínimo, sino por lo máximo: No se trata de gente que no sabe usar un computador y debe aprenderlo, sino de aquellos que desarrollan inteligencia artificial y no tienen la capacidad de llegar hasta lo más alto en esta escala.

  30. Feb 2018
  31. Jan 2018
    1. ante la destructividad naturalizada que ha acompañado el Antropoceno y ante la aparición de lo artificial como el modo ineluctable de la vida humana, necesitamos oponer el cultivo de modos de devenir cualitativamente nuevos a través del potencial futurizante ofrecido por lo artificial. En este caso ‘posibilidad’ significa “la negociación con la realidad y no una escalada de lo que es”
  32. Dec 2017
    1. Most of the recent advances in AI depend on deep learning, which is the use of backpropagation to train neural nets with multiple layers ("deep" neural nets).

      Neural nets consist of layers of nodes, with edges from each node to the nodes in the next layer. The first and last layers are input and output. The output layer might only have two nodes, representing true or false. Each node holds a value representing how excited it is. Each edge has a value representing strength of connection, which determines how much of the excitement passes through.

      The edges in an untrained neural net start with random values. The training data consists of a series of samples that are already labeled. If the output is wrong, the edges are adjusted according to how much they contributed to the error. It's called backpropagation because it starts with the output nodes and works toward the input nodes.

      Deep neural nets can be effective, but only for single specific tasks. And they need huge sets of training data. They can also be tricked rather easily. Worse, someone who has access to the net can discover ways of adding noise to images that will make the net "see" things that obviously aren't there.

  33. Aug 2017
    1. So this transforms how we do design. The human engineer now says what the design should achieve, and the machine says, "Here's the possibilities." Now in her job, the engineer's job is to pick the one that best meets the goals of the design, which she knows as a human better than anyone else, using human judgment and expertise.

      A post on the Keras blog was talking about eventually using AI to generate computer programs to match certain specifications. Gruber is saying something very similar.

  34. Jun 2017
  35. Apr 2017
  36. Mar 2017
  37. Feb 2017
  38. Jan 2017
    1. According to a 2015 report by Incapsula, 48.5% of all web traffic are by bots.

      ...

      The majority of bots are "bad bots" - scrapers that are harvesting emails and looking for content to steal, DDoS bots, hacking tools that are scanning websites for security vulnerabilities, spammers trying to sell the latest diet pill, ad bots that are clicking on your advertisements, etc.

      ...

      Content on websites such as dev.to are reposted elsewhere, word-for-word, by scrapers programmed by Black Hat SEO specialists.

      ...

      However, a new breed of scrapers exist - intelligent scrapers. They can search websites for sentences containing certain keywords, and then rewrite those sentences using "article spinning" techniques.

  39. Dec 2016
  40. Sep 2016
  41. Jun 2016
  42. May 2016
  43. Apr 2016
    1. We should have control of the algorithms and data that guide our experiences online, and increasingly offline. Under our guidance, they can be powerful personal assistants.

      Big business has been very militant about protecting their "intellectual property". Yet they regard every detail of our personal lives as theirs to collect and sell at whim. What a bunch of little darlings they are.

  44. Jan 2016
  45. Dec 2015
  46. Nov 2015
    1. TPOT is a Python tool that automatically creates and optimizes machine learning pipelines using genetic programming. Think of TPOT as your “Data Science Assistant”: TPOT will automate the most tedious part of machine learning by intelligently exploring thousands of possible pipelines, then recommending the pipelines that work best for your data.

      https://github.com/rhiever/tpot TPOT (Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool) Built on numpy, scipy, pandas, scikit-learn, and deap.

  47. Jul 2015
  48. May 2015
    1. In this work, Lee and Brunskill fit a separate Knowledge Tracing model to each student’s data. This involv ed fitting four parameters: initial probability o f mastery, probability of transitioning from unmastered to mastered, probability of giving an incorrect answer if the student has mastered the skill, and probability of giving a correct answer if the student has not mastered the skill. Each student’s model is fit using a combination of Expectation Maximization (EM) combined with a brute force search

      First comment

  49. Nov 2014
  50. Feb 2014
    1. Point 3 is almost certainly the one that still bugs Doug. All sorts of mechanisms and utilities are around and used (source code control, registries, WWW search engines, and on and on), but the problem of indexing and finding relevant information is tougher today than ever before, even on one's own hard disk, let alone the WWW.

      I would agree that "the problem of indexing and finding relevant information is tougher today than ever before" ... and especially "on one's own hard disk".

      Vannevar Bush recognized the problem of artificial systems of indexing long before McIlroy pulled this page from his typewriter in 1964, and here we are 50 years later using the same kind of filesystem indexing systems and wondering why it's harder than ever to find information on our own hard drives.

    1. The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

      With the advent of Google Docs we're finally moving away from the archaic indexing mentioned here. The filesystem metaphor was simple and dominated how everyone manages their data-- which extended into how we developed web content, as well.

      The declaration that Hierarchical File Systems are Dead has led to better systems of tagging and search, but we're still far from where we need to be since there is still a heavy focus on the document as a whole instead of also the content within the document.

      The linearity of printed books is even more treacherously entrenched in our minds than the classification systems used by libraries to store those books.

      One day maybe we'll liberate every piece of content from every layer of its concentric cages: artificial systems of indexing, books, web pages, paragraphs, even sentences and words themselves. Only then will we be able to re-dress those thoughts automatically into those familiar and comforting forms that keep our thoughts caged.