So many previous awardees have spoken of the magic sauce of the Internet. The opposite of secret sauce, I guess, because they all use the word “open.” Open standards, open architecture, open source. They said this openness is what made the Internet the Internet. Which sounds mostly right, although not much like how we experience the Internet today.
Archive
I decided I wanted to do some accountability studies about algorithms in our lives. And it’s hard to study the newsfeed in a quantitative way, and I also wanted something with higher stakes. So I started with an algorithm that is used in the criminal justice system to predict whether a person is likely to commit a future crime.
Lo and behold humanity is fairly consistent. We would mention mornings in the mornings. We get tired sort of towards the evenings. Talk about coffee more frequently in the morning. These are the sort of normal diurnal patterns that we see on Twitter, right. As expected. But when interesting events happen and events that are out of the ordinary happen it’s very clear that they happen.
The big concerns that I have about artificial intelligence are really not about the Singularity, which frankly computer scientists say is…if it’s possible at all it’s hundreds of years away. I’m actually much more interested in the effects that we are seeing of AI now.
One of the most important insights that I’ve gotten in working with biologists and ecologists is that today it’s actually not really known on a scientific basis how well different conservation interventions will work. And it’s because we just don’t have a lot of data.
During this year that I have been off I’ve been thinking about how to teach both people who are trained in technical parts of data science, and also policymakers, how we could have a common language. And then that way we could have these conversations so we could talk together.
The reason that I am interested in behavioral contagions is that I firmly believe that if we can understand how behaviors spread in a social network and thus in a population from person to person to person to person, that we could potentially promote behaviors like…condom use, or tolerance.
Hacking science and space exploration isn’t just about getting excited and making things. But it’s about getting excited and making disruptively accessible things. Things that really disrupt the current state of science and a lot of the elitism around it, and truly make it accessible for everyone.
[We’re] working on a project called Foxy Doxxing, which is inspired by this interesting case that came out a couple of weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago, about how a woman who had been attacked on Twitter by you know, “the trolls” decided to take forensic analysis into her own hands in order to find out who was attacking her online.