Data Science
In OneZero. More on Medium.
Metrics are key to how product teams at tech companies function
After the 2020 election, a Twitter dashboard that I first prototyped four years before started going wild. It estimates misinformation prevalence by monitoring “the percent of retweets and likes pointing toward domains that had made a habit of sharing misinformation.” This metric had been going up throughout the election cycle from a low around 10% up to almost 20% on November 3rd. And then it jumped wildly to 30% over the next week and stayed there for almost a month. Something was likely very wrong.
Tracking this sort of change is a valuable step toward understanding the platform’s impact. It…
Reflections on the transformative potential of refusal as a method in the design of technology
Last year at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), one of the most well-respected computer science conferences in the world, the opening panel discussion on A.I. for social good didn’t go quite as people might have expected.
“I’m not usually in spaces like this, and I’m not entirely convinced that I haven’t surreptitiously walked into a terrorist den,” began Sarah T. Hamid, a community organizer based in Los Angeles and one of the core members of the Carceral Tech Resistance Network. As Hamid explained, “like terrorists, technologists in spaces like this have a concept of what social good…
The data set’s ripple effects are immeasurable
Night after night, Fien de Meulder sat in front of her Linux computer flagging names of people, places, and organizations in sentences pulled from Reuters newswire articles. De Meulder and her colleague, Erik Tjong Kim Sang, worked in language technology at the University of Antwerp. It was 2003, and a 60-hour workweek was typical in academic circles. She chugged Coke to stay awake.
The goal: develop an open source dataset to help machine learning (ML) models learn to identify and categorize entities in text. At the time, the field of named-entity recognition (NER), a subset of natural language processing, was…
A perfect demonstration of why mass adoption is a while away
On what appeared to be an otherwise regular quarantine Friday night with a few Old-Fashioneds, J.K. Rowling opened the floodgates to Crypto Twitter with a single tweet:
Rowling was quickly engulfed with the full force of Crypto Twitter — literally thousands of replies, including every significant person in the cryptocurrency space. Seemingly everyone even vaguely interested in crypto chipped in, from Elon Musk to the @Bitcoin Twitter account. The result was predictable:
It only took a few hours for Rowling to conclude that bitcoin and cryptocurrency were too confusing for her to understand. The responses were so intense…
A new movement is pushing for A.I.’s future to be in the hands of the people
Something curious is happening in Finland. Though much of the global debate around artificial intelligence (A.I.) has become concerned with unaccountable, proprietary systems that could control our lives, the Finnish government has instead decided to embrace the opportunity by rolling out a nationwide educational campaign.
Conceived in 2017, shortly after Finland’s A.I. strategy was announced, the government wants to rebuild the country’s economy around the high-end opportunities of artificial intelligence, and has launched a national program to train 1 percent of the population — that’s 55,000 people — in the basics of A.I. “We’ll never have so much money that…
The fight over Huawei was just the prelude to a global battle for artificial intelligence supremacy
The Sino-American relationship has been quite a roller coaster this year, courtesy of the belligerent occupant of the White House.
With its technical and operational superiority in 5G mobile networks (the vital infrastructure for technologies like A.I. and the Internet of Things), Huawei might be an avatar for China itself: ambitious, future-focused, and a serious threat to U.S. exceptionalism. …
What a map to a Garfield-themed restaurant can teach us about A.I.
When we talk about the weather, we often don’t stop to consider that we’re leaving out a lot of information. If I asked someone how hot it was outside, and they started listing positions and velocities for various air particles, I would walk away in alarm and confusion (or try to learn how they obtained such knowledge). The reality is that we, as humans, have a fairly innate grasp of the distinction between informative and useful. Telling someone it’s “real hot” outside rather than saying it’s 38.94 degrees Celsius is less informative, but also less cumbersome. This act of discarding…
And more strange tales from the Wild West of data
Anyone who has ever visited Jones Beach on Long Island, New York, will have driven under a series of bridges on their way to the ocean. These bridges, primarily built to filter people on and off the highway, have an unusual feature. As they gently arc over the traffic, they hang extraordinarily low, sometimes leaving as few as nine feet of clearance from the tarmac.
There’s a reason for this strange design. In the 1920s, Robert Moses, a powerful urban planner in New York, was keen to keep his newly finished, award-winning state park at Jones Beach the preserve of…
OneZero
The undercurrents of the future. A publication from Medium about technology and people.
