Overview: Science&Technology

"“Policymakers seem to need answers yesterday,” reflected the young scientist from Italy. “That’s the direct opposite of how science works.”" - first report from the K4P audience research.The key finding from me was that scientists want to see their work taken up by policy, but seem at a loss on how. A platform which was explicitly built around ma…

The metric our intuition tells us we should maximize is known in statistics as recall... number of true positives divided by the number of true positives plus the number of false negatives. ... true positives are correctly identified terrorists, and false negatives ... labels as not terrorists that actually were terrorists... a model’s ability to …

algorithmic accountability bill... a task force that will monitor the fairness and validity of algorithms used by municipal agencies... include groups and individuals that are affected by algorithms, technology ethicists, city department heads using AI, technology companies as well as legal experts... law enforcement and ... technology companies…

The record is incorruptible... this sort of recordkeeping is valuable for journalism: it allows us to maintain archives that can’t be censored or altered after the fact... an ad-free publishing economy on Civil’s Ethereum-based platform... Popula is accountable to its readers alone, and is impervious to the interests and agendas of advertisers or…

Po.et is a shared, open-source universal ledger designed to track ownership, attribution and the marketplace flow of the world’s creative assets through a never-before-imagined chain of value... a better model for the media ecosystem... where creators are paid for what they can do instead of what is required of them by an old and broken paradigm..…

the solution to both crises facing journalism may come from the same technological root: blockchain... An ecosystem of micropayments... as the holy grail for online journalism... Blockchain technology can create both chains of authenticity and a level of security... Sludge is one of the “first fleet” of around 20 newsrooms ... on a new blockchai…

“We are so screwed it's beyond what most of us can imagine... And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse.”... a slew of slick, easy-to-use, and eventually seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying reality... They’re running war game–style disaster scenarios based on technologies that have begun …

STEEM’s Smart Media Tokens allow any website powered by curation (Likes, Up-votes, add-to-favourites, etc.) to reward users for creating and curating content.

Blockchain ... creating alternatives to the current corporation owned second layer of the internet... to make quality content truly democratic... Medium ... made itself decentralized... a blockchain with a dedicated token underlying all of the content ... reward content creators... governed only by the rules... But this token would also create an…

it’s leaps-and-bounds more useful to prototype your UX with a user’s real content than it is to test with real ML models... By re-orienting the conventional AI paradigm from finding ways to make the machine smarter, to exploring ways to augment human capability, we can unlock far greater potential in machine learning... we have a tremendous opp…

a test case where AI assisted high school students in their transition to college, helping them to navigate the many twists and turns along the way... students ... who received Pounce outreach completed their required pre-matriculation tasks and enrolled on-time at significantly higher rates ... Pounce reduced GSU’s summer melt by 21%... the wor…

Deep learning’s advances are the product of pattern recognition: neural networks memorize classes of things ... But almost all the interesting problems in cognition aren’t classification problems at all... The systems are greedy because they demand huge sets of training data. Brittle because when... confronted with scenarios that differ from the …

We made a fake news detector with above a 95% accuracy (on a validation set) that uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing that you can download here. In the real world, the accuracy might be lower... we decided to just try and scrape domains that were known fake, real, satire, etc. and see if we could build a data set quickly... Th…

The News Quality Scoring (NQS) will combine quality journalism content with new machine learning algorithms... as batch of stories enter the platform, they are scored on a 1-5 scale ... quality ... automatically and in real time.... Quantifiable Signals ... look at structure and patterns of the HTML page, advertising density, use of visual eleme…

a new pathway that can lead away from the abstract depiction of objects and toward a more visceral sense of real-life scale and physicality

“death by PowerPoint,”... sucks the life and energy out of ... meetings... spreadsheets rife with errors and macro miscalculations. Email and chat facilitate ... inbox overload ... So what makes artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) champions confident that their technologies will be immune to comparably counterproductive outcomes? ... …

algorithmic systems don’t simply cost money to implement. They cost money to maintain. They cost money to audit. They cost money to evolve ... divert taxpayer money from direct services, to lining the pockets of for-profit entities under the illusion of helping people....a diversion of liability ... those in powerful positions blame the algorithms…

“data is the new oil” ... your company can consider itself lucky. You collected all this data, and then it turned out you were sitting on an oil reserve ... when you have that sort of luck, it is probably a good idea to ask “Are we really that lucky?”... the data you are sitting on now... accumulated over time, is the type of data used to build t…

regulation needn’t be such a compliance burden... an opportunity - how can we sustain a sophisticated and modern regulatory system, and at the same time manage complexity for end users?... re-imagining regulation as an open platform, based on digital logic... supports a future ecosystem of digital regulation tools and services... working with gov…

Over the coming years, we’ll see the BBC develop and roll-out more and more machine learning algorithms for storing, retrieving, tagging and possibly even creating content.... What if we lock our audiences in to what they just want to hear, never challenging them? ... Should the algorithms we use be open to public scrutiny?... inform our own thin…

GDS does have a clear function and is learning from its experiences ... struggled to demonstrate the value of flagship initiatives... or to set out key priorities.... Another criticism ... not sustained its framework of standards and guidance, with some being removed and web links broken... leave scope for interpretation and disagreement... somet…

Progress has been sporadic, but... plenty of observers wouldn’t have expected this much of GDS when it was set up in 2011... It made its mark largely because it had Maude, the senior minister in the Cabinet Office and a heavyweight in the Conservative Party, fully engaged and ready to back GDS chief Mike Bracken in inter-departmental tussles... i…

Any real-world solution consists of these core algorithms and a non-AI shell to prepare and process data ... this non-AI part is oftentimes the real value proposition of AI-driven companies. It’s their secret sauce.... f you build your business in the path of the AI mainstream train, nothing can save you.... there are a few scenarios that are imp…

Artificial intelligence has been hailed as the last invention human beings will ever create. Universal basic income... is now being discussed openly .... Design thinking has entered mainstream business lexicon ... These three unique concepts will have a powerful impact on work in the coming decades... If some people do not have to work to surviv…

The things that you can change (depth of the network, the activation function, the learning rate, etc.) are called hyperparameters. So by clicking around in the playground, you are "modifying the hyperparameters of a feedforward multilayer neural network".

a four-factor definition of what I consider to be a vertical AI startup:... full-stack fully-integrated solution to the end customer problem from the interface ... down the stack to the functionality, models, and data;... deep subject matter expertise... trust, respect, and relationships within the industry.... combine the subject matter and tec…

startups today need to build systems of intelligence™ — AI powered applications — “the new moats.”... SaaS and cloud services can have strong economies of scale; ... your product or service has “network effects” if each additional user ... accrues more value to every other user;... Proprietary software or methods is where most technology compan…

Here’s a discussion of the way machine learning-first startups are built, which ones are pushing the ecosystem forward, and why they look so different than the SaaS startups that came before them... you can do very interesting things with IBM Watson... if you spend a few months and a significant amount of money training it... their marketing claim…

big data has transformed AI, to an almost unreasonable level. Blockchain technology could transform AI too... Some applications ... mundane... Some appear almost unreasonable, like AI that can own itself ... This article will explore these applications... blockchains introduced three new characteristics: decentralized / shared control, immutable …

Deep Learning systems will most likely not be programmed in the manner that we do today. Rather, it will be more like working with a biological system where we purposely condition the system to achieve our objectives.