Author: N/A; Publisher: The Economist; Publication Year: 2017. The following article discusses how bankers and insurers are using big data to better target customers and offering more personalized service. However, regulation and ethic code should be applied to them. Also, critics fear too much data-crunching could actually increase financial exclusion. The riskiest customers, and those offline, might be…
Author: Stefaan Verhulst; Publisher: TEDx Talks; Publication Year: 2017. The following talk opens with a story on how big data collected by corporations have been essential in disaster relief, and how this could be just the beginning. He ultimately argues that we need a new kind of data responsibility, advocating for 3 pillars in this new paradigm: a duty to share, a duty to protect, and a responsiveness to actually act upon the…
Author: Hetan Shah; Publisher: National Library of Medicine; Publication Year: 2017. The following article reviews ways in which researchers can improve trustworthiness. The authors argue that transparency alone cannot lead to accountability. Additionally, legislation for equitable machine learning algorithms may be useless because of the rise of social media networks collecting data. Certain countries are guilty of “digital…
Author: Sapna Maheshwari; Publisher: The New York Times; Publication Year: 2017. The following article takes a look at specific ads from Netflix and Spotify that poked fun at unusual behaviors from specific users on their respective platforms. For instance, Spotify pointed out that one user listened to Bieber’s “Sorry” over 40 times on Valentine’s Day, and asked what they had done to warrant such behavior. While funny, the ad…
Author: Sam Levin; Publisher: The Guardian; Publication Year: 2017. The following article discusses how an artificial intelligence, developed by Stanford University, was used to guess people’s sexualities based on photos of their faces. The algorithm was 81% accurate with men and 74% with women. As many LGBTQ people face discrimination and harassment, the algorithm had a dangerous potential to violate…
Author: Roxana Willis; Publisher: SAGE Journals; Publication Year: 2017. The following article examines the difficulties of obtaining informed consent online through a Facebook case study. It is proposed that there are at least 2 ways informed consent could be waived in research: first, if the data are public, and second, if the data are textual…
Author: Peter Haas; Publisher: TEDx Talks; Publication Year: 2017. The following article features Peter Haas, who actually works in robotics at Brown University, who is afraid of robots. The example of how to train a model to classify wolf and Husky illustrates that there exists bias in the data set that was fed to the algorithm. This example proved the importance of researchers/developers who working on artificial…
Author: Matthew Hutson; Publisher: Science; Publication Year: 2017. The following article discusses how artificial intelligence (AI) is just an extension of our existing culture. There is a common misconception that since artificial intelligence is automated and programmed, it is immune from biases because it makes decisions without the added factor of human emotions. However, these AI systems are taking in loads of…
Author: Madhumita Murgia; Publisher: TED; Publication Year: 2017. In the following talk, Madhumita discusses how data privacy is still a huge issue. Even though data is anonymized there are still key identifying information such as gender, zip code, etc. that can narrow down the potential people it could be. When this data is shared and analyzed it can be sold to third parties and used to target your feeds. Many large…
Author: Leanne Townsend, Claire Wallace; Publisher: Emerald Insight; Publication Year: 2017. The following book chapter talks about how over the past decade, the number of people engaging with social media has grown rapidly. This means that social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are potentially good sources of rich, naturally occurring data. As a result, a growing number of researchers are utilizing these platforms for…