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News on Algorithms and Automation
Team AI4Dignity is organizing a two-day collaborative coding event with fact checkers, AI developers and academic researchers to improve machine learning models to flag and label online extreme speech with Public plenary and panels How can AI assisted systems contribute to online extreme speech moderation? How do we envision collaborative endeavors in AI assisted moderation […]
Ashli Babbit, the woman shot and killed January 6 by Capitol police officers, “did not look particularly radical,” according to Tucker Carlson, who covered the event on his Fox News show the following day. “She bore no resemblance to the angry children we have seen wrecking our cities. Pasty, entitled, nihilists dressed in black, setting […]
By Cindy MaThe fourth annual Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) conference will take place virtually August 9 – 13 between 11 am – 3 pm EDT. Register now at http://pacss.eventbrite.com. The registration fee of $20 will help us cover conference expenses. We are dedicated to keeping this conference open and accessible and we ask that you […]
The Facebook engineer was itching to know why his date hadn’t responded to his messages. Perhaps there was a simple explanation—maybe she was sick or on vacation. So at 10 p.m. one night in the company’s Menlo Park headquarters, he brought up her Facebook profile on the company’s internal systems and began looking at her […]
By Karen HaoAs digitization increasingly shapes the scope of U.S. international trade, regulations and policies regarding cross-border data transfers carry significant economic implications. Yet—as the recent invalidation of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) demonstrates—trade, economic competitiveness, and free flows of data can come into tension with privacy and […]
Governments are using Pegasus, the military-grade spyware sold by the Israeli firm NSO Group, to hack telephones belonging to journalists and dissidents around the world, according to research and reporting by a consortium of newsrooms and human rights organizations. Pegasus was used in the attempted or successful hacking of 37 phones, including devices belonging to […]
By Caitlyn ThompsonThe Chinese leadership has put artificial intelligence front and center in China’s industrial development. As part of this strategy, they have established: 1. Industry alliances—collaboration platforms involving local governments, academic institutions, and companies; and 2. Government guidance funds—public-private investment vehicles that mobilize massive amounts of capital in support of strategic and emerging technologies. CSET’s Ngor […]
How is social media changing democracy? How are computer algorithms employed to tailor messaging for narrow groups of voters? What are the effects of disinformation campaigns? This session examines ways in which media is manipulated to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. […]
I (Devries) recently reached out to someone important in my life whose politics have been slipping further toward harmful, far-right politics. Our conversations had become increasingly strained because of our shared commitment to opposing politics. This person’s unshakable evangelicalism functions in tandem with their faith in Donald Trump’s political and moral virtue, reflective of Trump’s […]
By Melody Devries and Noel BrettTwitter says it has permanently suspended a “small number” of fake accounts it mistakenly verified just weeks after re-launching its public verification program, the Daily Dot reports. The blunder came to light after data scientist Conspirador Norteño discovered six verified accounts which had been created recently on June 16th. None of them had posted a […]
By Jon PorterThe School of Information at the University of Michigan is offering a postdoctoral fellow position in the multidisciplinary area of “Health Informatics and Global Health Equity Research” to work on a portfolio of collaborative projects. The area of health informatics and global health equity research focuses on realizing the potential of sociotechnical interventions to enhance […]
By University of Michigan