New data analysis competitions

How-to

Privacy

Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation is publishing an open letter to the world's leading camera manufacturers—including Nikon, Sony, Canon, Olympus, and Fuji—urging them to build encryption into their still photo and video cameras to help protect the filmmakers and photojournalists who use them.

This subject has sparked some great discussion at this cryptography mailing list, so be sure to pass by if you are interested.

According to a coalition of consumer-interest organizations, the makers of two “smart” kids toys — the My Friend Cayla doll and the i-Que Intelligent Robot — are allegedly violating laws in the U.S. and overseas by collecting this sort of voice data without obtaining consent.

Tech

Richard Craib is a 29-year-old South African who runs a hedge fund in San Francisco. Or rather, he doesn't run it. He leaves that to an artificially intelligent system built by several thousand data scientists whose names he doesn't know.

One way to handle big data is to shrink it. If you can identify a small subset of your data set that preserves its salient mathematical relationships, you may be able to perform useful analyses on it that would be prohibitively time consuming on the full set.

The methods for creating such "coresets" vary according to application, however. Last week, at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the University of Haifa in Israel presented a new coreset-generation technique that's tailored to a whole family of data analysis tools with applications in natural-language processing, computer vision, signal processing, recommendation systems, weather prediction, finance, and neuroscience, among many others.

On May 19, 2017, Data & Society will host a workshop in NYC on the ways in which technology and algorithmic practices have altered dynamics of propaganda and media manipulation. The purpose of the D&S Workshop series is to enable deep dives with a broad community of interdisciplinary researchers into topics at the core of Data & Society's concerns.

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