May 2019 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

FT: “Facebook held talks with Winklevoss twins over new currency”
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 29, 2019

May 29, 2019

https://www.ft.com/content/0207778c-7d62-11e9-81d2-f785092ab560 Facebook held talks with Winklevoss twins over new currency Social media giant wants to create ‘big, open’ global digital coin May 24, 2019 3:00 am by Hannah Murphy in San Francisco and Philip Stafford in London Facebook’s vaulting ambition to create a new global digital currency has led it to hold talks with some of America’s largest trading houses and cryptocurrency exchanges, including one founded by Mark Zuckerberg’s sworn enemies — the Winklevoss twins. (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Miliardario di Hong Kong fa causa al robot che ha perso la sua fortuna in Borsa
by don Luca Peyron May 28, 2019

May 28, 2019

Il titolo è un po' acchiappaclick ma la notizia comunque interessante. Buona giornata Dl https://www.lastampa.it/2019/05/26/tecnologia/miliardario-di-hong-kong-fa-c…

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'I'd Have These Extremely Graphic Dreams': What It's Like To Work On Ultra-Violent Games Like Mortal Kombat 11
by Giacomo Tesio May 27, 2019

May 27, 2019

Interessante prospettiva su un software di grande successo commerciale. Due punti sono particolarmente interessanti: - la dissociazione cognitiva che permetta agli sviluppatori di sostenere che ciò che danneggia la loro percezione della realtà e i loro sogni possa essere ininfluente sulla mente dei giocatori cui, by design, causa dipendenza - la tesi di Hutchinson (ex Ubisoft, Creative Director di Assassin’s Creed 3 e Far Cry 4) per la quale coloro che non giocano a questi giochi violenti ma li osservano dall'esterno hanno una percezione esagerata della violenza rappresentata che diventa "abstract in nature" In altri termini chi non è dipendente dal gioco non è assuefatto alla violenza che vi viene rappresentato. Ma che scoperta sensazionale! E la cosa divertente (tragica) è che questi argomenti fanno presa su chi (NON) vieta la commercializzazione di queste armi. Insieme ad altri incentivi... suppongo. https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/05/id-have-these-extremely-graphic-dreams-wh… Here’s one such story, about a developer who worked with the cinematics team for Mortal Kombat 11 and requested anonymity in order to protect their employment prospects. They told Kotaku that they had worked on the game throughout 2018, and spent their days reviewing violent animation work, discussing it with leads, sharing feedback with animators, and generally being surrounded by the kind of bloody real-life research material that creators reference in order to animate video game gore. Within a month, they started feeling the effects. “I’d have these extremely graphic dreams, very violent,” they told Kotaku in a call. “I kinds of just stopped wanting to go to sleep, so I’d just keep myself awake for days at a time, to avoid sleeping.” Eventually, the developer says they saw a therapist, who diagnosed them with PTSD. They attribute this to their work on MK11 - not just the content of the game and having to process and discuss its violent cinematics frame by frame, but also being surrounded by the reference materials artists used for research. “You’d walk around the office and one guy would be watching hangings on YouTube, another guy would be looking at pictures of murder victims, someone else would be watching a video of a cow being slaughtered,” they said. “The scary part was always the point at which new people on the project got used to it. And I definitely hit that point.” [...] On the one hand, it’s disconcertingly nonchalant. “We do a lot of testing of, like, how liquid will land on carpet, how it’ll react on dirt,” he said. “And we do tests and talk about them like ‘Does that look how you’d think it would look?’... If I get blood on my shirt, it’s gonna get dark, so it needs to react appropriately. Our tech artists dig into that and make it look very real.” On the other, there’s a level of remove: “I hate to keep saying this, but I think it’s more just the beats to me,” he said. “It’s not so much what’s happening. It’s more just the animations.” [...] “As a mechanic, it’s basically perfect,” said Alex Hutchinson when asked about violence in video games. Hutchinson is a game director whose work spans the entire spectrum of video game violence, from the potentially pacifistic Spore to the far bloodier Assassin’s Creed 3 and Far Cry 4. “You have a clear goal. It’s exciting because there’s a risk/reward — you win, they die. You lose, you die. So you’re afraid, and you can lose things. It’s usually spectacular because you’re shooting a gun or swinging swords, you get great feedback. You can even see this in pseudo-gun combat mechanics, like camera mechanics. Because that has everything that guns have—that’s why Pokémon Snap is so satisfying.” Hutchinson said he spends a lot of time thinking about how those who don’t game might perceive violence, arguing that the sensory feedback you get from interacting with the game — the thrill of winning, and fear of losing — does a lot of work to make graphic violence abstract in nature. Observers can’t quite understand that in the same way, and might therefore be more repelled by the bloody images they’re seeing on screen, Hutchinson said. But he’s not insensitive to the occupational hazards of having to depict violence. “I think as realism improves, it’s more of a danger,” Hutchinson said. “The fidelity of the assets you deal with, and the world you’re building—it’s more likely. We had some friends out here working on Outlast. I don’t think he was upset, but the character artist was joking that he’d spent a lot of time modelling dead babies, and it wasn’t his favourite moment, you know?” “Mortal Kombat is....it’s Mortal Kombat,” the anonymous cinematics developer who had graphic dreams told me. “You start to feel like an idiot for thinking about what the impact of working on that game has been on yourself. Other people I’ve talked to have been like, ‘I know what I’m working on, I know what I’ve gotten myself into here.’ And you start to blame yourself for being shitty or weak or spineless.” The developer felt that management’s top-level perspective made it seem like they were less immersed in the details of the violent content than the animators that reported to them. Bosses would joke about and compliment well-done scenes of violence, the developer said — a desirable outcome in most environments, but when working on violence is starting to affect you, the dynamic gets complicated. Meetings with this developer’s boss involved discussing “how this spine extraction scene is going, and making sure you can feel the pop when the spine is ripped out from the rest of the body,” they said. [...] One coworker, for example, told them that the toll of working on Mortal Kombat 11 was eliciting horrible images in real life. “When he looks at his dog, he just sees the guts inside of it, and he couldn’t look at his dog without imagining all of the viscera.”

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Indagine sui veicoli autonomi
by Antonio Vetro' May 27, 2019

May 27, 2019

Diffondo la seguente indagine sulla percezione dei veicoli autonomi promossa da alcuni colleghi al Politecnico di Torino (durata: circa 15’). Descrizione: Siamo interessati al confronto interculturale in merito alla previsione del comportamento grazie all’utilizzo di teorie psicologiche, pertanto la diffusione “world-wide”del questionario è auspicabile e perseguibile anche grazie al vostro aiuto. A tale proposito il questionario è stato già tradotto in diverse lingue ed è disponibile in italiano, francese, inglese, spagnolo, cinese e polacco (coming soon). Si può compilare cliccando sui link riportati sotto e, comunque, da ogni link è possibile scegliere la lingua (in alto nella schermata). English: http://survey.polito.it/ng/index.php/683668?lang=en <http://survey.polito.it/ng/index.php/683668?lang=en> French: http://survey.polito.it/ng/index.php/683668?lang=fr <http://survey.polito.it/ng/index.php/683668?lang=fr> Italian: http://survey.polito.it/ng/index.php/683668?lang=it <http://survey.polito.it/ng/index.php/683668?lang=it> Spanish: http://survey.polito.it/ng/index.php/683668?lang=es <http://survey.polito.it/ng/index.php/683668?lang=es> Chinese: http://survey.polito.it/ng/index.php/683668?lang=zh-Hans <http://survey.polito.it/ng/index.php/683668?lang=zh-Hans> Polish: http://survey.polito.it/ng/index.php/683668?lang=pl <http://survey.polito.it/ng/index.php/683668?lang=pl> (COOMING SOON)

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Who to Sue When a Robot Loses Your Fortune - Bloomberg
by Alberto Cammozzo May 26, 2019

May 26, 2019

<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/who-to-sue-when-a-robot-…> Robots are getting more humanoid every day, but they still can’t be sued. So a Hong Kong tycoon is doing the next best thing. He’s going after the salesman who persuaded him to entrust a chunk of his fortune to the supercomputer whose trades cost him more than $20 million. The case pits Samathur Li Kin-kan, whose father is a major investor in Shaftesbury Plc, which owns much of London’s Chinatown, Covent Garden and Carnaby Street, against Raffaele Costa, who has spent much of his career selling investment funds for the likes of Man Group Plc and GLG Partners Inc. It’s the first-known instance of humans going to court over investment losses triggered by autonomous machines and throws the spotlight on the “black box” problem: If people don’t know how the computer is making decisions, who’s responsible when things go wrong? [...]

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"Perhaps the best/only way to explain neural networks to a five-year-old"
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 25, 2019

May 25, 2019

HT all'account twitter MIT CSAIL, che ha anche coniato il subject di questo email. jc https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7buzbs/eli5_what_are_ne… "The little league team you coach just won the big game, and you ask them if they want to go out for pizza or for burgers. Each kid starts screaming their preference, and you go with whatever was the loudest. This is basically how a neural net works but on multiple levels. The top-level nodes get some input, each detects a certain property and screams when it sees it...the more intense the property, the louder they scream. Now you have a bunch of nodes screaming "it's dark!", "it's has red!", "it's roundish!" as various volumes. The next level listens and based on what they hear they start screaming about more complex features. "It has a face!", "It has fur", until finally get to a level where it is screaming "It's a kitty!". The magic part is no one tells them when to scream, it is based on feedback. Your little league team went for burgers, and some of them got sick. Next week, they might not scream for burgers, or might not scream as loudly. They have collectively learned that burgers might not have been a great choice, and are more likely to lean away from the option. A neural net gets training in much the same way. You feed it a bunch of kitty and non-kitty pictures. If the net gets it right, the nodes are reinforced so they are more likely to do the same thing in similar situations. If it is wrong, they get disincentivized. Initially, its results will be near random, but if you have designed it correctly, it will get better and better as the nodes adjust. You often have neural nets that work without any human understanding exactly how."

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Platform capitalism and the future of international education | Discover Society
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 25, 2019

May 25, 2019

“Governments are beginning to realise that platforms cannot be allowed to grow exponentially unwatched and unregulated. Rather they should insist that workers’ rights are protected and people’s data safeguarded” https://discoversociety.org/2019/05/01/platform-capitalism-and-the-future-o… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Data Violence and How Bad Engineering Choices Can Damage Society
by J.C. DE MARTIN May 25, 2019

May 25, 2019

Data Violence and How Bad Engineering Choices Can Damage Society Cultural harms can go well beyond search results — which can be bad news for vulnerable communities Anna Lauren Hoffmann https://medium.com/s/story/data-violence-and-how-bad-engineering-choices-ca… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Who or what is to blame when you’re harmed by an algorithm
by Enrico Poli May 24, 2019

May 24, 2019

Non mi sembra di averlo visto passare il lista, e credo risuoni con alcune discussioni che ho letto qui: https://go.technologyreview.com/who-or-what-is-to-blame-when-youre-harmed-b… «A Hong Kong tycoon lost more than $20 million dollars after entrusting part of his fortune to an automated platform. Without a legal framework to sue the technology, he placed the blame on the nearest human instead: the man who sold it to him. It’s the first known case over automated investment losses, but not the first involving the liability of algorithms. In March of 2018, a self-driving Uber struck and killed <https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17174636/uber-self-driving-crash-fatal-a…> a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, sending another case to court. A year later, Uber was exonerated <https://qz.com/1566048/uber-not-criminally-liable-in-tempe-self-driving-car…> from all criminal liability, but the safety driver could face charges of vehicular manslaughter instead. […] In other case studies, Elish found the same pattern to hold true: even in a highly automated system where humans have limited control of its behavior, they still bear the brunt of its failures. Elish calls this phenomenon a “moral crumple zone.” “While the crumple zone in a car is meant to protect the human driver,” she writes in her paper, “the moral crumple zone protects the integrity of the technological system, at the expense of the nearest human operator.” Humans act like a “liability sponge,” she says, absorbing all legal and moral responsibility in algorithmic accidents no matter how little or unintentionally they are involved. This pattern offers important insight into the troubling way we speak about the liability of modern AI systems. In the immediate aftermath of the Uber accident, headlines pointed fingers at Uber, but less than a few days later, the narrative shifted <https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17174636/uber-self-driving-crash-fatal-a…> to focus on the distraction of the driver. “We need to start asking who bears the risk of [tech companies’] technological experiments,” says Elish. Safety drivers and other human operators often have little power or influence over the design of the technology platforms they interface with. Yet, in the current regulatory vacuum, they will continue to pay the steepest cost.»

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Yes but who are the persons who micro-work to make France's AI possible?
by Antonio Casilli May 24, 2019

May 24, 2019

Dear all, In February I shared with you our preliminary study estimating the number of persons micro-working in France, based on the first results of our research projet DiPLab. Today, we published the complete results, featured in the report Micro-work in France. Behind Automation, New Forms of Precarious Labour? ( Le Micro-Travail en France. Derrière l’automatisation, de nouvelles précarités au travail ? , 73 pages, available in French here [ http://diplab.eu/ | http://diplab.eu/ ] , with an executive summary in English). Micro-work is accessible in France through at least 23 digital platforms which sport 15,000 'very active' workers and more than 250,000 'casual' ones. While not all of them micro-work every day, they constitute a large reservoir from which the industry can draw according to its needs. Their activity consists in highly fragmented online or mobile-based micro-tasks, generally paid by the piece. Most often, these tasks require low qualification and are equally poorly paid (sometimes just a few cents. The socio-demographic profile of micro-workers in France DiPLab researchers analyzed native web data, administered an online survey to nearly 1000 micro-workers, and conducted more than 90 interviews with workers, business and platform owners. According to the report: ➡️56% of the respondents identify as women; ➡️63% are 25-44 years old; ➡️43.5% of micro-workers hold at least a bachelor’s degree. The geographical distribution of micro-work follows the distribution of the working population and national income. While micro-work is neither exclusively urban nor concentrated in Paris, it does not seem to constitute an opportunity to access the labor market and to increase the purchasing power for rural populations or residents in low-income regions. The average monthly income of micro-work in France, is very unevenly distributed and bears on average 21€euros per month. This income is sometimes complementary to a main one. Yet it is very often a necessary source of financial support, especially for over 22% of the micro-workers who live below the poverty threshold. Micro-work plays a key role in the development of French (and European) AI Micro-work plays a major role in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) by French companies. By performing repetitive tasks, micro-workers annotate, label, enrich the data used for the deployment of algorithms, connected speakers, virtual assistants. DiPLab respondent perform three main types of micro-tasks: ➡️AI preparation: micro-workers generate or annotate large training datasets used to calibrate machine learning solutions; ➡️AI verification: micro-workers oversee existing AI technologies, by correcting and checking their results; ➡️AI impersonation: micro-workers performe human tasks which are successively repackaged and branded as “artificial” intelligence. Micro-work has a huge impact on present day's technology and economy, as it modifies both employment relationships and market structures. This is why it is paramount to assess the societal consequences of this new form of work. How can we regulate this new labor force and strengthen its social protection? Above all, given the predominant place of micro-work in the development and commercialization of artificial intelligence solutions, how can we ensure that micro-workers' contributions to technological innovation are recognized at their actual value? Hope you find this interesting. Please feel free to share. Antonio -- Antonio A. Casilli Associate Professor (HDR), Telecom ParisTech Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (i3 UMR 9217 CNRS) Associate Member, LACI-IIAC (EHESS) Faculty Fellow, Nexa Center for Internet & Society

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