Will we understand how to control this technology by 2022?
https://www.pogowasright.org/new-york-bans-facial-recognition-in-schools-until-at-least-2022/
New York bans facial recognition in schools until at least 2022
Colin Wood reports:
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation on Tuesday making his state the first to ban the use of facial recognition technology and other biometric technology in both public and private K-12 schools.
The new law places a moratorium on schools purchasing or using biometric technology until at least July 1, 2022 or until a study is conducted determining acceptable use of the technology, whichever comes later.
Read more on EdScoop.
Privacy in the presence of Alexa.
Eavesdropping on Phone Taps from Voice Assistants
The microphones on voice assistants are very sensitive, and can snoop on all sorts of data:
In Hey Alexa what did I just type? we show that when sitting up to half a meter away, a voice assistant can still hear the taps you make on your phone, even in presence of noise. Modern voice assistants have two to seven microphones, so they can do directional localisation, just as human ears do, but with greater sensitivity. We assess the risk and show that a lot more work is needed to understand the privacy implications of the always-on microphones that are increasingly infesting our work spaces and our homes.
From the paper:
Abstract: Voice assistants are now ubiquitous and listen in on our everyday lives. Ever since they became commercially available, privacy advocates worried that the data they collect can be abused: might private conversations be extracted by third parties? In this paper we show that privacy threats go beyond spoken conversations and include sensitive data typed on nearby smartphones. Using two different smartphones and a tablet we demonstrate that the attacker can extract PIN codes and text messages from recordings collected by a voice assistant located up to half a meter away. This shows that remote keyboard-inference attacks are not limited to physical keyboards but extend to virtual keyboards too. As our homes become full of always-on microphones, we need to work through the implications.
An extension to my Excel class? (Not in my local library, yet.)
https://bdtechtalks.com/2020/12/22/excel-data-science-machine-learning/
An introduction to data science and machine learning with Microsoft Excel
… mastering machine learning is a difficult process. You need to start with a solid knowledge of linear algebra and calculus, master a programming language such as Python, and become proficient with data science and machine learning libraries such as Numpy, Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, and PyTorch.
And if you want to create machine learning systems that integrate and scale, you’ll have to learn cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
… While I’ve been using Excel’s mathematical tools for years, I didn’t come to appreciate its use for learning and applying data science and machine learning until I picked up Learn Data Mining Through Excel: A Step-by-Step Approach for Understanding Machine Learning Methods by Hong Zhou.
Learn Data Mining Through Excel takes you through the basics of machine learning step by step and shows how you can implement many algorithms using basic Excel functions and a few of the application’s advanced tools.
While Excel will in no way replace Python machine learning, it is a great window to learn the basics of AI and solve many basic problems without writing a line of code.
Will others follow?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03611-8
Prestigious AI meeting takes steps to improve ethics of research
For the first time, the organizers of NeurIPS required speakers to consider the societal impact of their work.
For the truly bored.
https://syncedreview.com/2020/12/22/2020-in-review-10-ai-podcasts-you-need-to-know/
2020 in Review: 10 AI Podcasts You Need to Know
… In a year plagued by shutdowns, “being home has actually opened up a new opportunity to discover this format.”
Synced has selected 10 AI-related podcasts for readers to check out over the holiday season.
Not sure this provides and insight to Google’s response to all the anti-trust kerfuffle, but still interesting.
https://www.ft.com/content/9debcf65-7556-4247-8abb-1d165391343f
‘Regulation can get it wrong’: Google’s Sundar Pichai on AI and antitrust
For Google, the Techlash arrived with a vengeance last week. After years of mounting angst about the power of Big Tech, two state-level antitrust suits against the search giant in the US landed on consecutive days, adding to a Federal case launched in October.
The European Commission, which has fought a running battle with Google over a series of competition complaints for the past decade, also upped the ante by proposing sweeping new laws aimed at curbing the power of a handful of dominant tech platforms.
For Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive officer since 2015, defending the company against the multiplying legal and legislative threats has become almost a full-time job.
(Related)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/technology/google-antitrust-lawsuit.html
Google Denies Antitrust Claims in Early Response to U.S. Lawsuit
The company said people use its services because they choose to, not because they lack alternatives.
Google said on Monday that it had not used its multibillion-dollar deals with other large tech firms to protect its position as the dominant online search engine, in the company’s first formal rebuttal to the Justice Department’s accusations that those deals violated antitrust laws.
The filing, a 42-page document, is a paragraph-by-paragraph — and sometimes sentence-by-sentence — denial of the claims made by the government and a group of states that have joined its lawsuit.
… In its filing on Monday, Google did admit that some of the government’s claims held up: It is true, the company said, that some dictionaries do classify “Google" as a verb. It admitted that “it was founded in a Menlo Park garage 22 years ago and that it created an innovative way to search the internet.”
And it acknowledged that its parent company, Alphabet, has a roughly $1 trillion value — but denied that such a claim could be made about Google itself.
[Google’s reply is here: https://www.axios.com/google-denies-dojs-antitrust-claims-in-filing-bbe8d1b6-ea6d-4814-92fa-2ac2223b8e2e.html
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