Tuesday, October 08, 2019


A topic of great interest to my students.
TALK AT THE DEF CON CRYPTO & PRIVACY VILLAGE
I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the Crypto & Privacy Village, which is part of the massive DEF CON computer security conference (and which I help organize ). My talk was about a topic that basically everyone seems to be interested in: Can you invoke your Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when the police demand that you unlock your smartphone? The answer, unsurprisingly, is: It depends. I'm still waiting for video of the talk to go up on DEF CON's YouTube channel, and it'll be posted here on the CIS website once it does. But in the meantime, some folks have asked for my slides, so I'm attaching them here. (N.B. I should clarify something about the slide that mentions full-disk encryption: lately Android is moving from FDE to file-based encryption. This doesn't change the legal analysis.)




This will happen sooner than later.
DEEPFAKES ARTICLE IN THE WASHINGTON STATE BAR ASSOCIATION MAGAZINE
I'm pleased to have written the cover story for the latest issue of NWLawyer, the magazine of the Washington State Bar Association. The article, available here, discusses the impact that so-called "deepfake" videos may have in the context of the courtroom. Are existing authentication standards for admission of evidence sufficient, or should the rules be changed? What ethical challenges will deepfakes pose for attorneys? How will deepfakes affect juries? These and other questions may come into play for courts and litigators in the near future, so they would be well-advised to get ready while there is still time.




Resources quoted by experts.
How to operationalize AI ethics
Sobhani’s urging echoes calls for a broader definition of AI teams this year from groups like OpenAI, whose researchers earlier this year penned a paper titled “AI Safety Needs Social Scientists."
One of Thomas’ favorite AI ethics resources comes from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University: a toolkit that recommends a number of processes to implement.
To root out bias, Sobhani recommends the What-If visualization tool from Google’s People + AI Research (PAIR) initiative as well as FairTest, a tool for “discovering unwarranted association within data-driven applications” from academic institutions like EPFL and Columbia University. She also endorses privacy-preserving AI techniques like federated learning to ensure better user privacy.
In addition to resources recommended by panelists, Algorithm Watch maintains a running list of AI ethics guidelines.
The notion of a checklist like the kind Microsoft introduced this spring has drawn criticism from some in the AI ethics community who feel that a step-by-step document can lead to a lack of thoughtful thinking or analysis for specific use cases.
Thomas says checklists can be one part in a larger, ongoing process, and pointed to a data ethics checklist released earlier this year by former White House chief data scientist DJ Patil and Cloudera general manager of machine learning Hilary Mason.




A slideshow for my geeks.
The best open source software of 2019



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