Information, culture, and belief
Folks who want to use AI/ML for good generally think of things like building predictive models, but smart methods for extracting data from forms would do more for journalism, climate science, medicine, democracy etc. than almost any other application. Since March, I ve been working with a small team on applying deep learning to a gnarly Continue reading To apply AI for good, think form extraction
What types of defenses against disinformation are possible? And which of these would we actually want to use in a democracy, where approaches like censorship can impinge on important freedoms? To try to answer these questions, I looked at what three counter-disinformation organizations are actually doing today, and categorized their tactics. The EU East StratCom Task Force is Continue reading What…
There are many kinds of questions about discrimination fairness or bias where data is relevant. Who gets stopped on the road by the police? Who gets admitted to college? Who gets approved for a loan, and who doesn t? The data-driven analysis of fairness has become even more important as we start to deploy algorithmic decision Continue reading An Introduction to Algorithmic Bias and Quantitative…
Update, Oct 2020: we ve done a lot more since this post! If you want to try working on this problem, Weights and Biases is very kindly hosting a public benchmark. I ve just completed an experiment to extract information from TV station political advertising disclosure forms using deep learning. In the process I ve produced a challenging Continue reading Extracting campaign finance data from gnarly…
There is now, at long last, wide concern over the negative effects of technology, along with calls to teach ethics to engineers. But critique is not enough. What tools are available to the working engineer to identify and mitigate the potential harms of their work? I ve been teaching the effects of technology on society for some time, and we cover a lot of Continue reading Ethical Software…
Some of you may have heard about by new data journalism project The Computational Journalism Workbench. This is an integrated platform for data journalism, combining scraping, analysis, and visualization in one easy tool. It works by assembling simple modules into a “workflow,” a repeatable, sharable, automatically updating pipeline that produces a publishable chart or Continue reading Introducing…
In honor of MisinfoCon this weekend, it s time for a brain dump on propaganda that is, getting large numbers of people to believe something for political gain. Many of my journalist and technologist colleagues have started to think about propaganda in the wake of the US election, and related issues like fake news and organized trolling. My goal here is to connect Continue reading Defense Against…
Many people have realized that natural language processing (NLP) techniques could be extraordinarily helpful to journalists who need to deal with large volumes of documents or other text data. But although there have been many experiments and much speculation, almost no one has built NLP tools that journalists actually use. In part, this is because computer scientists haven t Continue reading What…
I feel we re on the precipice of some delightfully weird and possibly very alarming developments at the intersection of code and money. There is something deep in the rules that is getting rewritten, only we can t quite see how yet. I ve had this feeling before, as a self-described Cypherpunk in the 1990s. We knew or hoped Continue reading The Dark Clouds of Financial Cryptography
There is a just-so story that explains the existence of money. Before money, the story goes, we all had to barter for the goods we wanted. If I wanted wheat and had chickens, I needed to find someone who wanted chickens and had extra wheat. Money solves this “double coincidence” problem by letting me sell Continue reading The Origin of Banking