Privacy

  • Humans, cover your mouths: Lip reading bots in the wild.

    In the movie "2001" I found the scariest moment was when astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole met in the EVA pod to discuss the artificially intelligent HAL 9000 computer's behavior -- and HAL reads their lips. Science fiction? Not anymore!

    In the paper Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild, researchers Joon Son Chung, of Oxford University, Andrew Senior, Oriol Vinyals, and Andrew Zisserman, of Google, tested an algorithm that bested professional human lip readers. Soon, surveillance videos may not only show your actions, but the content of your speech.

Tech

  • A.I. ‘Bias’ Doesn’t Mean What Journalists Say it Means.

    To a statistician, bias is defined as the difference between an AI’s “typical” output and reality. Bias has a magnitude and a direction, and is a systematic tendency to get the same kind of wrong answers.

    Very importantly, “wrong” is defined as being relative to reality.

    One problem with reality is that it often fails to live up to our desires and expectations. There is often a very large gap between the two.

    When a journalist discusses bias, they typically do not mean it in the same manner that statisticians do. As described in the examples above, a journalist typically uses the term “bias” when an algorithm’s output fails to live up to the journalist’s ideal reality.

Visualizations


Data Links is a periodic blog post published on Sundays (specific time may vary) which contains interesting links about data science, machine learning and related topics. You can subscribe to it using the general blog RSS feed or this one, which only contains these articles, if you are not interested in other things I might publish.

Have you read an article you liked and would you like to suggest it for the next issue? Just contact me!

There is no comment system. If you want to tell me something about this article, you can do so via e-mail or Mastodon.