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Don’t ask if artificial intelligence is good or fair, ask how it shifts power - 11 juillet 2020
Law enforcement, marketers, hospitals and other bodies apply artificial intelligence (AI) to decide on matters such as who is profiled as a criminal, who is likely to buy what product at what price, who gets medical treatment and who gets hired. These entities increasingly monitor and predict our behaviour, often (...)
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Ethical guidelines for COVID-19 tracing apps - 26 juin 2020
Protect privacy, equality and fairness in digital contact tracing with these key questions.
Technologies to rapidly alert people when they have been in contact with someone carrying the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 are part of a strategy to bring the pandemic under control. Currently, at least 47 contact-tracing apps (...)
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Show evidence that apps for COVID-19 contact-tracing are secure and effective - 1er mai 2020
Governments see coronavirus apps as key to releasing lockdowns. In exchange for people’s health data, they must promise to work together to develop the highest standards of safety and efficacy.
In the toolkit of strategies to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2, more countries are reaching for smartphone apps. When (...)
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A mountable toilet system for personalized health monitoring via the analysis of excreta | Nature Biomedical Engineering - 7 avril 2020
Technologies for the longitudinal monitoring of a person’s health are poorly integrated with clinical workflows, and have rarely produced actionable biometric data for healthcare providers. Here, we describe easily deployable hardware and software for the long-term analysis of a user’s excreta through data (...)
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Time for the Human Screenome Project - 5 février 2020
To understand how people use digital media, researchers need to move beyond screen time and capture everything we do and see on our screens.
There has never been more anxiety about the effects of our love of screens — which now bombard us with social-media updates, news (real and fake), advertising and (...)
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Halt the use of facial-recognition technology until it is regulated - 30 septembre 2019
Until appropriate safeguards are in place, we need a moratorium on biometric technology that identifies individuals, says Kate Crawford.
Earlier this month, Ohio became the latest of several state and local governments in the United States to stop law-enforcement officers from using facial-recognition databases. (...)
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The Moral Machine experiment - 25 octobre 2018
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence have come concerns about how machines will make moral decisions, and the major challenge of quantifying societal expectations about the ethical principles that should guide machine behaviour. To address this challenge, we deployed the Moral Machine, an online (...)
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Bias detectives : the researchers striving to make algorithms fair - 29 août 2018
As machine learning infiltrates society, scientists are trying to help ward off injustice.
In 2015, a worried father asked Rhema Vaithianathan a question that still weighs on her mind. A small crowd had gathered in a basement room in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to hear her explain how software might tackle child (...)
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AI can be sexist and racist "” it’s time to make it fair - 15 août 2018
When Google Translate converts news articles written in Spanish into English, phrases referring to women often become "˜he said’ or "˜he wrote’. Software designed to warn people using Nikon cameras when the person they are photographing seems to be blinking tends to interpret Asians as always blinking. Word embedding, (...)
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The ethics of catching criminals using their family’s DNA - 25 mai 2018
A high-profile arrest in California shows how the long arm of the law can now extend into DNA databases to check for relatives.
Last week’s arrest of a suspect in the Golden State Killer case in California has highlighted how DNA samples that have been volunteered for one purpose "” in this case, genealogy "” can (...)
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Uncovering Offshore Financial Centers : Conduits and Sinks in the Global Corporate Ownership Network - 26 juillet 2017
Multinational corporations use highly complex structures of parents and subsidiaries to organize their operations and ownership. Offshore Financial Centers (OFCs) facilitate these structures through low taxation and lenient regulation, but are increasingly under scrutiny, for instance for enabling tax avoidance. (...)
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Unique in the Crowd : The privacy bounds of human mobility - 26 octobre 2015
We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier’s antennas, four (...)
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Image software spots links in tattoo ink - 14 juin 2015
Computer scientists develop automated methods to recognize tattoos in images, aiding law enforcement.
In an unusual twist on biometrics research, US computer scientists have joined with law-enforcement officials to find new ways to automatically detect tattoos on people in photographs. The work aims to replace (...)
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A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization - 4 janvier 2015
Human behaviour is thought to spread through face-to-face social networks, but it is difficult to identify social influence effects in observational studies 9"“13, and it is unknown whether online social networks operate in the same way 14"“19. Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political (...)
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Hydrochromic conjugated polymers for human sweat pore mapping - 9 mai 2014
Hydrochromic materials have been actively investigated in the context of humidity sensing and measuring water contents in organic solvents. Here we report a sensor system that undergoes a brilliant blue-to-red colour transition as well as "˜Turn-On’ fluorescence upon exposure to water. Introduction of a hygroscopic (...)
