organization:carnegie mellon

A new route for plant nutrient delivery - College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University
▻https://engineering.cmu.edu/news-events/news/2019/06/12-lowry-acs-nano.html

https://engineering.cmu.edu/_files/images/news/2019/0612-hd-lowry-acs-nano.png

With current practices, up to 95% of applied micronutrients and 99.9% of applied #pesticides never reach their destinations and are wasted. They accumulate in the soil or run off into the ground water and cause collateral environmental damage, degrade soil, and waste the water and energy used in their production and application.

If growers could apply something to the leaf that could travel directly to the root, it could be a game-changer for delivering nutrients, antibiotics, and pesticides in a nearly 100% efficient way. Greg Lowry, post-doctoral researcher Astrid Avellan, and a team of researchers have successfully discovered a way to apply nanoparticles to plant leaves so that they travel through the plant all the way to the root. Their results are published in a recent ACS Nano paper.

Les nouvelles #technologies au service de l’#agriculture
▻https://siecledigital.fr/2019/06/25/les-nouvelles-technologies-au-service-de-lagriculture

#nanoparticules

Founder Interviews: Todd Olson of Pendo
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-todd-olson-of-pendo-4d0f1030d4ca?source=rss----3a8144

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/877/1*RXBhFwA5VB-G4UJG-NqXEA.png

Learn how Todd Olson created Pendo, a product experience platform that helps software product teams deliver software users love.What’s your background?Before I started Pendo in 2013, I had a long career building companies and products. I had a passion for programming and entrepreneurship from the beginning. I was writing code as an intern at a large commercial bank when I was 14, and in my senior year at Carnegie Mellon, I became a part-time student in order to start a software company with a friend. It was called Cerebellum Software, and we raised more than $20 million in venture capital. I went on to found another company called 6th Sense Analytics which was acquired by Rally, where I became VP of product and contributed to a successful IPO.At Rally, I experienced the need that would (...)

#founder-interview #founders #davis-baer #founder-stories #founder-advice

Google employees are lining up to trash Google’s AI ethics council - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613253/googles-ai-council-faces-blowback-over-a-conservative-member

https://cdn.technologyreview.com/i/images/gettyimages-828896290.jpg?cx=200&cy=113&cw=1600&ch=900&sw=1200

un élément intéressant et à prendre en compte : les deux personnes visées sont également les deux seules femmes de ce comité d’experts. Choisies stratégiquement par Google pour faire jouer l’avantage genre, ou cibles plus évidentes des protestataires parce que femmes ?

En tout cas, la place que la Heritage Foundation (droite dure et néo-management) prend dans l’espace mental des Etats-Unis, notamment dans le domaine technologique, est à suivre de près.

Almost a thousand Google staff, academic researchers, and other tech industry figures have signed a letter protesting the makeup of an independent council that Google created to guide the ethics of its AI projects.
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The search giant announced the creation of the council last week at EmTech Digital, MIT Technology Review’s event in San Francisco. Known as the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), it has eight members including economists, philosophers, policymakers, and technologists with expertise in issues like algorithmic bias. It is meant to hold four meetings a year, starting this month, and write reports designed to provide feedback on projects at the company that use artificial intelligence.

But two of those members proved controversial. One, Dyan Gibbens, is CEO of Trumbull, a company that develops autonomous systems for the defense industry—a contentious choice given that thousands of Google employees protested the company’s decision to supply the US Air Force with AI for drone imaging. The greatest outrage, though, has come over the inclusion of Kay Coles James, president of the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that opposes regulating carbon emissions, takes a hard line on immigration, and has argued against the protection of LGBTQ rights.

One member of the council, Alessandro Acquisti, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in digital privacy issues, announced on March 30th that he wouldn’t be taking up the role. “While I’m devoted to research grappling with key ethical issues of fairness, rights & inclusion in AI, I don’t believe this is the right forum for me to engage in this important work," he tweeted.

The creation of ATEAC—and the inclusion of Gibbens and James—may in fact have been designed to appease Google’s right-wing critics. At roughly the same time the council was announced, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, was meeting with President Donald Trump. Trump later tweeted: “He stated strongly that he is totally committed to the U.S. Military, not the Chinese Military. [We] also discussed political fairness and various things that Google can do for our Country. Meeting ended very well!”

But one Google employee involved with drafting the protest letter, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that James is more than just a conservative voice on the council. “She is a reactionary who denies trans people exist, who endorses radically anti-immigrant positions, and endorses anti-climate-change, anti-science positions.”

Some noted AI algorithms can reinforce biases already seen in society; some have been shown to misidentify transgender people, for example. In that context, “the fact that [James] was included is pretty shocking,” the employee said. “These technologies are shaping our social institutions, our lives, and access to resources. When AI fails, it doesn’t fail for rich white men working at tech companies. It fails for exactly the populations that the Heritage Foundation’s policies are already aiming to harm.”

Messages posted to a Google internal communications platform criticized the appointment of James especially. According to one post, earlier reported by the Verge and confirmed by the employee, James “doesn’t deserve a Google-legitimized platform, and certainly doesn’t belong in any conversation about how Google tech should be applied to the world.”

As of 5:30 pm US Eastern time today the public letter, posted to Medium, had been signed by 855 Google employees and 143 other people, including a number of prominent academics. “Not only are James’ views counter to Google’s stated values,” the letter states, “but they are directly counter to the project of ensuring that the development and application of AI prioritizes justice over profit. Such a project should instead place representatives from vulnerable communities at the center of decision-making.”

#Google #Intelligence_artificielle #Ethique #Politique_USA

Capitalizing on the Digital Attention Economy: The Brave Browser
▻https://hackernoon.com/capitalizing-on-the-digital-attention-economy-the-brave-browser-c975b7b9

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*ahmvmYDyocfLwLhPSp9-tw.jpeg

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: …the attention of its recipients.” (Herbert A. Simon, Professor Carnegie Mellon University, 1971)There’s a new, better way to browse the #internet: the Brave Browser.Image taken from the Brave homepage.The Brave Browser operates on a principle I’m calling the Digital Attention Economy. As Professor Simon pointed out in 1971, the world is flooded with information, but human attention is a finite resource. Capitalizing on that resource has been every corporation’s objective, and we’re all familiar with the advertisement deluge that ensues. It’s overwhelming. Now, there’s a better way.With attention, security, and privacy in mind, CEO Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla) and CTO Brian (...)

#cryptocurrency #advertising #basic-attention-token #brave-browser

A bug in cell phone tracking firm’s website leaked millions of Americans’ real-time locations
▻https://www.zdnet.com/article/cell-phone-tracking-firm-exposed-millions-of-americans-real-time-locations

The bug allowed one Carnegie Mellon researcher to track anyone’s cell phone in real time.

A company that collects the real-time location data on millions of cell phone customers across North America had a bug in its website that allowed anyone to see where a person is located — without obtaining their consent. Earlier this week, we reported that four of the largest cell giants in the US are selling your real-time location data to a company that you’ve probably never heard about before. The (...)

#LocationSmart #T-Mobile #Verizon #Sprint #smartphone #géolocalisation #hacking #AT&T

##AT&T

An Overview of #hashgraph
▻https://hackernoon.com/an-overview-of-hashgraph-b0900a1fd7bf?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*SL6_XYbZit4fvIntQtnxoA.png

An Overview Of HashgraphSimple Overview of the Hashgraph ProtocolA distributed ledger technology (DLT) is a system where we share information and we don’t trust each other individually, but we trust the group as a whole. DLTs allow us to come up with a consensus on the order of transactions and timestamps.Introducing HashgraphHashgraph was developed by Swirlds. The cofounder and CTO of Swirlds is Leemon Baird, who obtained his bachelor’s degree at the U.S. Air Force Academy and obtained a PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.Hashgraph is a DLT. However, hashgraph is not a #blockchain in the sense that it’s not built on a chain of blocks. Hashgraph would be best characterized as a DAG — Directed Acyclic Graph.Other DLT solutions might be secure, but they’re not particularly (...)

#security #hashgraph-overview #distributed-ledgers

Database Tracks History Of U.S. Meddling In Foreign #Elections : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=506625913

Article de décembre 2016,

Sans même compter les #coup-d'état dont ils sont les instigateurs, les Etats-Unis se sont mêlés d’élections étrangères plus de 80 fois entre 1946 et 2000.

This is hardly the first time a country has tried to influence the outcome of another country’s election. The U.S. has done it, too, by one expert’s count, more than 80 times worldwide between 1946 and 2000. That expert is Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University. I asked him to tell me about one election where U.S. intervention likely made a difference in the outcome.

DOV LEVIN: One example of that was our intervention in Serbia, Yugoslavia in the 2000 election there. Slobodan Milosevic was running for re-election, and we didn’t want him to stay in power there due to his tendency, you know, to disrupts the Balkans and his human rights violations.

So we intervened in various ways for the opposition candidate, Vojislav Kostunica. And we gave funding to the opposition, and we gave them training and campaigning aide. And according to my estimate, that assistance was crucial in enabling the opposition to win.

SHAPIRO: How often are these interventions public versus covert?

LEVIN: Well, it’s - basically there’s about - one-third of them are public, and two-third of them are covert. In other words, they’re not known to the voters in the target before the election.

SHAPIRO: Your count does not include coups, attempts at regime change. It sounds like depending on the definitions, the tally could actually be much higher.

LEVIN: Well, you’re right. I don’t count and discount covert coup d’etats like the United States did in Iran in 1953 or in Guatemala in 1954. I only took when the United States is trying directly to influence an election for one of the sides. Other types of interventions - I don’t discuss. But if we would include those, then of course the number could be larger, yeah.

#Etats-Unis

Elizabeth Catlett - Wikipedia
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Catlett

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/20/Elizabeth_Catlett.jpg

#Elizabeth_Catlett (April 15, 1915[2] – April 2, 2012)[3] was an African-American graphic artist and sculptor best known for her depictions of the African-American experience in the 20th century, which often had the female experience as their focus. She was born and raised in Washington, D.C. to parents working in education, and was the grandchild of freed slaves. It was difficult for a black woman in this time to pursue a career as a working artist. Catlett devoted much of her career to teaching. However, a fellowship, awarded to her in 1946, allowed her to travel to Mexico City, where she would work with the Taller de Gráfica Popular for twenty years and become the head of the sculpture department for the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. In the 1950s, her main means of artistic expression shifted from print to sculpture, though she would never give up the former.

Her work is a mixture of abstract and figurative in the Modernist tradition, with influence from African and Mexican art traditions. According to the artist, the main purpose of her work is to convey social messages rather than pure aesthetics. While not very well known to the general public, her work is heavily studied by art students looking to depict race, gender and class issues. During her lifetime, Catlett received many awards and recognitions including membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, the Art Institute of Chicago Legends and Legacy Award, honorary doctorates from Pace University and Carnegie Mellon and the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award in contemporary sculpture.

#art #femmes #historisation

Teaching artificial intelligence and humanity, February 2018, par Jennifer Keating and Illah Nourbakhsh
▻https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/2/224630-teaching-artificial-intelligence-and-humanity/fulltext

Deux lignes de réflexion M,ont intrigués à la lecture de cet article :
- enseigner les humanities dans le cursus général de l’enseignement informatique et plus précisément l’IA.
- la maladresse (inconscience ?) de se permettre de comparer l’abolition de l’esclavage et la libération de l’IA

La première :

In a time of accelerating technological disruption, the next generation of leaders and innovators are ill-equipped to navigate this boundary chapter in human-machine relationships. Perhaps our students can learn from how humans have treated humans to determine viable roadmaps for this challenging moment in our economic, social, and political history, as we mindfully navigate human-machine interactions.

Our society is locked in a stance of both anxiety and ambition in regard to the future of AI. We believe it is crucial that students embarking on undergraduate studies, as budding technologists, writers, policymakers, and a myriad of other future leadership roles, should be better equipped and better practiced in engaging these difficult questions.

Notably, corporations were historically granted limited personhood to shield individual humans from responsibility and blame; personhood ascribed to AI similarly shields both corporations and engineers. Personification trades accountability with convenience for tort and liability, and further with product marketing.

Rapid progress in AI/machine learning and its central role in our social, economic, and political culture signals its salience to the next generation of students entering universities. Building next-generation AI is currently a hot topic. At Carnegie Mellon, we have no trouble filling such classes. And yet, a nuanced understanding of the contributions that technologists are currently making to the world, an indication of how the next generation of computer scientists, engineers, and roboticists might shape the world that humanists and social scientists study, is not at the forefront of our undergraduates’ minds. So, how might we ensure this is something they consider throughout their undergraduate career? And that, instead, societal consideration shapes their undergraduate studies from their first year onward?
[...]
[The students] will be taught each class by a team of faculty with an intertwined pedagogical approach: a roboticist and a humanist.

Le deuxième point me questionne sur la pertinence de partager cet article. Cet extrait par exemple, me donne l’impression que les auteurs envisagent l’hypothèse que les esclaves ne faisaient pas partie de l’humanité, qu’ils leurs fallait savoir lire (et écrire) pour y accéder.

Reading, however, marks agency for Douglass. Reading, in the context of an AI system, suggests anthropomorphic undertones and perhaps humanity.

Les auteurs tentent de se dédouaner d’une telle vision :

In the context of Douglass’ narrative, the prospect of literacy suggests the slave as worth more than his or her labor. Instead, the slave’s capacity to learn, to engage in civilized discourse by joining what Benedict Anderson calls “an imagined community,” suggests his equal position with other members of the society in contrast to the juridical category of slave as property.

[Douglass is the author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and former slave, dont les essais ont largement participé à l’abolition de l’esclavage.]

Mais tout de même.. une maxime bouddhiste (pour ce qu’elle doit avoir de philosophique) me hante toujours et me titille à la lecture de cet article.

Les comparaisons sont odieuses.

[edit : ajout de « les auteurs envisagent l’hypothèse »]

Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance — Quartz
►https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveill
►https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/rts18wdq-e1502123358903.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=1600

Le titre est un peu « clickbait », mais les infos sont intéressantes, quoique parfois elliptiques.

C’est écrit par : Jeff Nesbit, Former director of legislative and public affairs, National Science Foundation
Quelqu’un qui doit savoir de quoi il cause.

In the mid 1990s, the intelligence community in America began to realize that they had an opportunity. The supercomputing community was just beginning to migrate from university settings into the private sector, led by investments from a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley.

The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s efforts at their inception so they would be useful for homeland security purposes. A digital revolution was underway: one that would transform the world of data gathering and how we make sense of massive amounts of information. The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s supercomputing efforts at their inception so they would be useful for both military and homeland security purposes. Could this supercomputing network, which would become capable of storing terabytes of information, make intelligent sense of the digital trail that human beings leave behind?

Intelligence-gathering may have been their world, but the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) had come to realize that their future was likely to be profoundly shaped outside the government. It was at a time when military and intelligence budgets within the Clinton administration were in jeopardy, and the private sector had vast resources at their disposal. If the intelligence community wanted to conduct mass surveillance for national security purposes, it would require cooperation between the government and the emerging supercomputing companies.

Silicon Valley was no different. By the mid 1990s, the intelligence community was seeding funding to the most promising supercomputing efforts across academia, guiding the creation of efforts to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector as well as the intelligence community.

They funded these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program that was managed for the CIA and the NSA by large military and intelligence contractors. It was called the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project.
The Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project

MDDS was introduced to several dozen leading computer scientists at Stanford, CalTech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and others in a white paper that described what the CIA, NSA, DARPA, and other agencies hoped to achieve. The research would largely be funded and managed by unclassified science agencies like NSF, which would allow the architecture to be scaled up in the private sector if it managed to achieve what the intelligence community hoped for.

“Not only are activities becoming more complex, but changing demands require that the IC [Intelligence Community] process different types as well as larger volumes of data,” the intelligence community said in its 1993 MDDS white paper. “Consequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products. Because the challenges are not unique to any one agency, the Community Management Staff (CMS) has commissioned a Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] Working Group to address the needs and to identify and evaluate possible solutions.”

In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?

The grants allowed Brin and Page to do their work and contributed to their breakthroughs in web-page ranking and tracking user queries. Brin didn’t work for the intelligence community—or for anyone else. Google had not yet been incorporated. He was just a Stanford researcher taking advantage of the grant provided by the NSA and CIA through the unclassified MDDS program.
Left out of Google’s story

The MDDS research effort has never been part of Google’s origin story, even though the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,” he wrote. In a published research paper that includes some of Brin’s pivotal work, the authors also reference the NSF grant that was created by the MDDS program.

Instead, every Google creation story only mentions just one federal grant: the NSF/DARPA “digital libraries” grant, which was designed to allow Stanford researchers to search the entire World Wide Web stored on the university’s servers at the time. “The development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford,” Stanford’s Infolab says of its origin, for example. NSF likewise only references the digital libraries grant, not the MDDS grant as well, in its own history of Google’s origin. In the famous research paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which describes the creation of Google, Brin and Page thanked the NSF and DARPA for its digital library grant to Stanford. But the grant from the intelligence community’s MDDS program—specifically designed for the breakthrough that Google was built upon—has faded into obscurity.

Google has said in the past that it was not funded or created by the CIA. For instance, when stories circulated in 2006 that Google had received funding from the intelligence community for years to assist in counter-terrorism efforts, the company told Wired magazine founder John Battelle, “The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”

Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.

In this way, the collaboration between the intelligence community and big, commercial science and tech companies has been wildly successful. When national security agencies need to identify and track people and groups, they know where to turn – and do so frequently. That was the goal in the beginning. It has succeeded perhaps more than anyone could have imagined at the time.

Is #Facebook bad for you? Facebook says it is, and the company has a solution : more Facebook
▻https://qz.com/1158984/is-facebook-fb-bad-for-you-facebook-says-it-is-and-the-company-has-a-solution

Yesterday (Dec. 15), a strange post went up on Facebook’s corporate blog. It was strange because it suggested that Facebook might, in fact, be bad for you.

What solution can the social network provide? The same answer it gives to every question: namely, more Facebook.

▻https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/hard-questions-is-spending-time-on-social-media-bad-for-us

The post was the latest in Facebook’s somewhat new series, “Hard Questions.” This set of blog posts aims to address concerns that social media broadly, and Facebook specifically, might be having a negative impact on society. Topics include “Hate Speech,” “How We Counter Terrorism,” and the latest one, “Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad for Us?”

The structure of these posts is usually the same. Step one: identify some ill in society. Step two: admit that people think technology, and Facebook, might be contributing to that ill. Step three: assert that more Facebook, not less, is the cure for said ill.

In the new post on the potential downside of social media, the authors, who are researchers at Facebook, begin by correctly saying that people are worried about the effect social media has on relationships and mental health. They then point to research that suggests scrolling through Facebook, and blindly hitting the “like” button, makes people feel like crap. “In general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information—reading but not interacting with people—they report feeling worse afterward,” they write.

The key phrase is “passively consuming.” The authors’ solution to this problem is not, as you might think, using Facebook less. It is using it more, and more actively. Instead of just liking things, and scrolling through our feeds, they suggest that we should be all-in. Send more messages, post more updates, leave more comments, click more reaction buttons. “A study we conducted with Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon University found that people who sent or received more messages, comments and Timeline posts reported improvements in social support, depression and loneliness,” they cheerily note.

They then adds a caveat that “simply broadcasting status updates wasn’t enough; people had to interact one-on-one with others in their network.” But wait. Isn’t Facebook a social network, connecting me to hundreds or thousands of other people? I don’t need Facebook to interact one-on-one, over text, email, or coffee.

Facebook might admit it has some negative effects, but it is unwilling to face up to the fact that the solution might be using it less. This latest post mentions Facebook’s “take a break” feature. This will hide your ex-partner’s profile updates for you after a break-up, to help in “emotional recovery.” Because, sure, that seems healthier than just not using Facebook at all for a little while.

Pretty much every Facebook post about the ill effects of the platform follows this formula. Hate speech on Facebook is a problem. The solution? Use Facebook more to tag hate speech, so we can get rid of it. Kids are on Facebook, and it might not be good for them. The solution? Give them Facebook Messenger Kids, a new app made just for them. Facebook is causing political divisiveness in America. The solution? Use Facebook to build digital “communities.”

Turns out Facebook’s “hard questions” are actually pretty easy. The answer, after all, is always the same.

#tmi #fomo #déconnexion

Nombre de Dunbar
▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nombre_de_Dunbar

Le nombre de Dunbar est le nombre maximum d’individus avec lesquels une personne peut entretenir simultanément une relation humaine stable. Cette limite est inhérente à la taille de notre cerveau impliqué dans les fonctions cognitives dites supérieures, le néocortex.

Ce nombre est estimé par l’anthropologue britannique Robin Dunbar entre 100 et 230 personnes et a une valeur admise en pratique de 150 personnes.

Ce nombre provient d’une étude publiée en 1992 par le chercheur Robin Dunbar. Dans cette étude, il analyse la taille du néocortex de différents primates et la compare au nombre d’individus de leurs groupes respectifs. Il a ainsi extrapolé ses résultats afin de déterminer un nombre maximum pour la taille d’un groupe d’humains. Ce nombre ne devrait donc théoriquement pas dépasser 150 individus. Au-dessus de ce nombre, la confiance mutuelle et la communication ne suffisent plus à assurer le fonctionnement du groupe. Il faut ensuite passer à une hiérarchie plus importante, avec une structure et des règles importantes (on le voit par exemple à l’échelle d’un pays et de son gouvernement).

Dunbar indique par ailleurs que le langage que nous avons collectivement développé joue un rôle important dans notre capacité à entretenir des relations sociales avec environ 150 personnes. En effet, le fait de pouvoir parler à plusieurs individus simultanément permet d’établir des rapports efficaces et durables entre nous tous. En l’absence d’un tel outil de communication collective, chacun d’entre nous passerait la moitié de son temps à entretenir individuellement chacun de ses liens sociaux.

Différentes études ont retrouvé des résultats proches du nombre de Dunbar dans le comportement des utilisateurs de réseaux sociaux sur Internet, en particulier sur Twitter ou Facebook.

Dans le @mdiplo, voir :

· Le prix de la déconnexion, par Evgeny Morozov (23 février 2017) ►https://blog.mondediplo.net/2017-02-23-Le-prix-de-la-deconnexion

· Le malade virtuel, par Virginie Bueno (juin 2015) ►https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2015/06/BUENO/53095

· Twitter jusqu’au vertige, par @Mona Chollet (octobre 2011) ►https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2011/10/CHOLLET/21103

I asked #Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets | Technology | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/26/tinder-personal-data-dating-app-messages-hacked-sold

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/77ba5bfb6e31d1441c7e7cb94aa3e147dc31b538/1148_0_3758_2255/master/3758.jpg?w=1200&h=630&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=crop&crop=faces%2Centropy&bm=normal&ba=bottom%2Cleft&blend64=aHR0cHM6Ly91cGxvYWRzLmd1aW0uY28udWsvMjAxNi8wNS8yNS9vdmVybGF5LWxvZ28tMTIwMC05MF9vcHQucG5n&s=ebcb7759de6a8da26230d6cdf69f0927

At 9.24pm (and one second) on the night of Wednesday 18 December 2013, from the second arrondissement of Paris, I wrote “Hello!” to my first ever Tinder match. Since that day I’ve fired up the app 920 times and matched with 870 different people. I recall a few of them very well: the ones who either became lovers, friends or terrible first dates. I’ve forgotten all the others. But Tinder has not.

The dating app has 800 pages of information on me, and probably on you too if you are also one of its 50 million users. In March I asked Tinder to grant me access to my personal data. Every European citizen is allowed to do so under EU data protection law, yet very few actually do, according to Tinder.

#réseaux_soxciaux #privacy #big_brother #contrôle #surveillance

L’IRM pour lire des pensées complexes
▻http://www.internetactu.net/a-lire-ailleurs/lirm-pour-lire-des-pensees-complexes

En 2008, nous présentions les travaux de l’équipe de Marcel Just et Tom Mitchell, du Centre d’imagerie cognitive du #cerveau de l’université de Carnegie Mellon, qui avait réussi à démontrer la capacité de l’IRM à lire des pensées simples en analysant les zones cérébrales activées lorsqu’on pense, par exemple, à (...)

#A_lire_ailleurs #Recherches #neuroscience

Mesmerizing maps show the global flow of refugees over the last 15 years

Global security expert and research director at the think tank Igarapé Institute Robert Muggah knows. Earth TimeLapse, an interactive platform created by Muggah and Carnegie Mellon University, details over a 16-year span from 2000 to 2015 where migrants are leaving and arriving.

▻http://static1.uk.businessinsider.com/image/5919cbbddd0895f7598b4a98-1200/2001-saw-roughly-500000-refugees-fleeing-primarily-middl
►http://www.businessinsider.fr/uk/maps-flow-refugees-last-15-years-2017-5

#cartographie #visualisation #afflux #invasion #réfugiés #migrations #asile #rouge #préjugés
cc @fil @reka

Marissa Mayer , CEO de Yahoo !, sa carrière résumée en une page. (c’est comme ça que je perçois l’article).
Mon partage n’est pas une ode au capitalisme, plus, un intérêt pour une personne déconsidérée en plein cœur de l’économie de marché. Elle n’est sûrement pas à plaindre.
En plus, un article du monde, d’habitude, je partage avec des pincettes (sur le nez). Mais la rubrique Pixel semble mieux travaillée.

http://s2.lemde.fr/image/2017/04/28/534x0/5119597_6_3b62_marissa-mayer-la-pdg-de-yahoo-en-2013_0739ebe78ce5567a44dcff099e7f73ed.jpg

Elle a étudié la psychologie cognitive. Elle arrive chez Google en 1999 comme la vingtième employée de l’entreprise, nommée responsable de la page d’accueil. Marissa Mayer participe à de très nombreux projets-clefs, dont la création d’AdWords, Gmail, Google Maps.
À partir de 2010, lorsque Larry Page reprend le poste de PDG, Marissa Mayer, perd une partie de son pouvoir et est partiellement écartée des grandes décisions stratégiques.
En juillet 2012, elle quitte Google pour diriger Yahoo ! dans une situation catastrophique. Elle met en place une vaste réorganisation. Alors que les actionnaires la pressent de licencier des milliers d’employés pour redresser les comptes, elle les convainc de lancer plutôt de nouveaux projets.
Elle met en place un nouveau système d’évaluation des performances des salariés, censé les rendre plus productifs et pousser vers la sortie les moins impliqués, baptisé « Quarterly Performance Reviews ». Structurellement injuste, le système bloque l’avancement et les augmentations des employés, est critiqué à la fois par les salariés du bas de l’échelle et par les managers.
Les révélations d’Edward Snowden sur l’espionnage de masse de la NSA révèlent que l’agence américaine espionne les données des utilisateurs de Yahoo !
Le magazine Fortune, qui l’a placée plusieurs années dans son classement des plus puissants patrons au monde, la fait passer en 2016 dans sa liste des chefs d’entreprise les plus décevants.
Les départs de personnes clefs se multiplient chez Yahoo !
Elle part avec un parachute doré de 190 millions de dollars.

#people #femmes #historicisation #silicon_valley

Which World Cities Have the Best Universities ? - CityLab
▻http://www.citylab.com/work/2017/01/mapping-the-worlds-knowledge-hubs/505748

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/10/1-3/ccbd8c88f.png

The global economy is increasingly powered by innovation and knowledge, and great universities are a key source of those, functioning as catalysts of the knowledge economy. Leading-edge universities form the axis of tech hubs like the Bay Area (Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the University of California at San Francisco), the Cambridge-Boston region (MIT and Harvard), and a regenerating Pittsburgh (Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh).

But what are the world’s leading centers for university knowledge?

#savoir #université #connaissance #cartographie #classement #rating - tentative de nouveau mot clé dans lequel on pourrait bien intégrer le minable #decodex

A Computer Just Clobbered Four Pros At Poker | FiveThirtyEight
▻https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-computer-just-clobbered-four-pros-at-poker
▻https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/roeder-poker-update-1.png?quality=90&strip=all&

About three weeks ago, I was in a Pittsburgh casino for the beginning of a 20-day man-versus-machine poker battle. Four top human pros were beginning to take on a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence program running on a brand new supercomputer in a game called heads-up no-limit Texas Hold ’em. The humans’ spirits were high as they played during the day and dissected the bot’s strategy over short ribs and glasses of wine late into the evening.

On Monday evening, however, the match ended and the human pros were in the hole about $1.8 million. For some context, the players (four men and the machine, named Libratus) began each of the 120,000 hands with $20,000 in play money, and posted blinds of $50 and $100.

...

Tuomas Sandholm, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who created the program with his Ph.D. student Noam Brown, was giddy last week on the match’s livestream, at one point cheering for his bot as it turned over a full house versus human pro Jason Les’s flush in a huge pot, and proudly comparing Libratus’s triumph to Deep Blue’s monumental win over Garry Kasparov in chess.

And, indeed, some robot can now etch heads-up no-limit Texas Hold ‘em (2017) alongside checkers (1995), chess (1997), Othello (1997), Scrabble (c. 2006), limit Hold ‘em (2008), Jeopardy! (2011) and Go (2016) into the marble cenotaph of human-dominated intellectual pursuits.

Brown told me that he was keen to tackle other versions of poker with his A.I. algorithms. What happens when a bot like this sits down at a table with many other players, rather than just a one-on-one foe, for example? Sandholm, on the other hand, is quick to say that this isn’t really about poker at all. “The AI’s algorithms are not for poker: they are game independent,” his daily email updates read. The other “games” the algorithms may be applied to in the future: “negotiation, cybersecurity, military setting, auctions, finance, strategic pricing, as well as steering evolution and biological adaptation.”

#transhumanisme #singularité #jeux

#Made_in_america (compilation uniquement à partir de sources MSM)

The world’s best cyber army doesn’t belong to Russia
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/515937

The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/532933

#Perturbateurs_endocriniens : halte à la manipulation de la science
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2016/11/29/halte-a-la-manipulation-de-la-science_5039860_3232.html

Près de cent scientifiques dénoncent la #fabrication_du_doute par les industriels, déjà à l’œuvre dans la lutte contre le changement climatique.
[…]
Une lutte comparable fait actuellement rage autour de la nécessaire réduction de l’exposition aux perturbateurs endocriniens. La Commission européenne s’apprête à mettre en place la première réglementation au monde sur le sujet. Bien que de nombreux pays aient également manifesté leur inquiétude à l’égard de ces produits chimiques, aucun n’a instauré de réglementation qui les encadrerait globalement.

#paywall

Reconnaissance faciale : Facebook rachète la start-up FacioMetrics
▻http://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/hightech/0211504197670-reconnaissance-faciale-facebook-rachete-la-start-up-faciometr

Dans un effort supplémentaire pour rivaliser avec l’appli préférée des jeunes, Snapchat , Facebook a fait l’acquisition de la start-up FacioMetrics. La jeune pousse, spécialisée dans l’intelligence artificielle et en particulier la reconnaissance faciale, a confirmé ce rachat sur son site officiel . Le montant de la transaction n’a toutefois pas été révélé. Née de travaux de recherche à l’université de Carnegie Mellon, FacioMetrics a déjà développé des technologies intégrées à des applications mobiles. (...)

#Facebook #biométrie #facial #FacioMetrics

The Unexpected Humanity of Robot Soccer - Issue 39: Sport
▻http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/the-unexpected-humanity-of-robot-soccer

http://static.nautil.us/10217_8bc56cf0bafb2650146f3e48cb85d257.jpg

When Google’s AlphaGo computer program triumphed over a Go expert earlier this year, a human member of the Google team had to physically move the pieces. Manuela Veloso, the head of Carnegie Mellon’s machine learning department, would have done it differently. “I’d require the machine to move the pieces like I do,” she says. “That’s the world in which I live, which is a physical world.” It sounds simple enough. If Google can make cars that drive themselves, surely it could add robotic arms to a Go match. Even in 1997, I.B.M. could have given Deep Blue robotic arms in its match against Garry Kasparov. To Veloso, though, the challenge is not in building a robot to play on a given board in given conditions, but rather to build one able to play on any board. “Imagine all the different types of (...)

A Visual Search Engine for the Aerial Patterns of Cities

▻http://hyperallergic.com/301858/a-visual-search-engine-for-the-aerial-patterns-of-cities

Terrapattern, developed at the Carnegie Mellon Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, is the first open-access visual search tool for satellite imagery. It is currently available for Pittsburgh, San Francisco, New York City, Detroit, Austin, Miami, and Berlin. This means you may scan these cities’ landscapes for common forms of your particular interest that are not conventionally labelled on a map: circular backyard pools or cul-de-sacs, perhaps, or even dilapidated nautical wrecks. All you have to do is find the tile of topography that intrigues you, and dozens of search results of similar views will arrive courtesy of machine learning algorithms trained to sift through images from OpenStreetMap. You can then export these images as a geographic text file.

http://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/pools-in-pittsburgh.png http://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/tennis.jpg http://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/detroit-768x512.jpg http://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/waves.jpg http://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/culdesacs.jpg

Not All Practice Makes Perfect - Issue 35: Boundaries
▻http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/not-all-practice-makes-perfect

http://static.nautil.us/9011_840c3eda3ea42ecd90aeb3434f3510b7.jpg

In just our fourth session together, Steve was already beginning to sound discouraged. It was Thursday of the first week of an experiment that I had expected to last for two or three months, but from what Steve was telling me, it might not make much sense to go on. “There appears to be a limit for me somewhere around eight or nine digits,” he told me, his words captured by the tape recorder that ran throughout each of our sessions. “With nine digits especially, it’s very difficult to get regardless of what pattern I use—you know, my own kind of strategies. It really doesn’t matter what I use—it seems very difficult to get.” Steve, an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was teaching at the time, had been hired to come in several times a week and work on a simple task: (...)

Vers la #robotique douce - The Atlantic
▻http://alireailleurs.tumblr.com/post/142339524526

Nos robots de métal ne sont pas très chaleureux, par nature. Pour qu’ils interagissent avec nous, nous avons besoin qu’ils soient aussi doux que nous, estime Christopher Atkeson, roboticien à la Carnegie Mellon et conseiller de Disney pour la réinvention de Baymax dans l’adaptation de Big Hero 6 (dans le manga original, Baymax n’était pas du tout un robot gonflable). En fait, explique The Atlantic, l’inspiration est venue d’un bras robotique gonflable imaginé par un de ses étudiants, Siddharth Sanan. Les robots souples et gonflables peuvent faire des choses que les robots durs ne peuvent pas faire. D’où l’émergence d’un nouveau champ de recherche, la robotique douce… où la forme permet d’envisager de nouvelles (...)

Curiosity Depends on What You Already Know - Issue 33: Attraction
▻http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/curiosity-depends-on-what-you-already-know

http://static.nautil.us/8459_251d52afeb09449719aa7ba0b842c755.png

Humans have a drive to eat. We have a drive to drink. We have a drive to reproduce. Curiosity is no different, says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Our insatiable drive to learn—to invent, explore, and study ceaselessly—“deserves to have the same status as those other drives.” What’s curious about curiosity, though, is that it doesn’t seem to be tied to any specific reward. “The theoretical puzzle posed by curiosity is why people are so strongly attracted to information that, by the definition of curiosity, confers no extrinsic benefit,” Loewenstein once wrote. It makes sense for organisms to seek food, water, sex, shelter, rest, wealth, or any of the other myriad nourishing and pleasant things in life. But what is the good of (...)