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EU seeks ‘clear criteria’ for use of biometric AI on mass scale – EURACTIV.com
by Alberto Cammozzo Feb. 3, 2020

Feb. 3, 2020

<https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/eu-seeks-clear-criteria-for-u…> The document, an update on an earlier leaked version, has also scrapped the idea of a temporary ban on facial recognition technologies in public spaces. The document notes that the lack of information about the use of biometric identification systems prohibits the Commission from making a broad analysis of the implications of this technology, which analyses a person’s physical features for computational purposes. “This assessment will depend on the purpose for which the technology is used and on the safeguards in place to protect individuals,” the document states. “In case biometric data are used for mass surveillance, there must be clear criteria about which individuals should be identified.” In addition, the new draft states that ‘key elements’ of a future regulatory framework for artificial intelligence in Europe should be built on an ‘ecosystem of trust.’ [...]

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Evento sulla prevenzione del Bullismo e Cyberbullismo | 7 - 8 Febbraio 2020 | Ragazzi, Docenti, Genitori
by Nexa Media Feb. 3, 2020

Feb. 3, 2020

Gentilissimi, vi segnalo un'iniziativa interdisciplinare che avrà luogo il 7 e l'8 febbraio presso l'Università degli Studi di Torino in occasione della giornata nazionale contro il bullismo e il cyberbullismo. L'evento, "Per non perdersi nel mare della comunicazione", si strutturerà in un convegno formativo rivolto ad insegnanti, educatori, famiglie ed operatori del settore e in workshop formativi per allievi dell'ultimo anno di scuola primaria, e di scuole secondarie di primo grado, e per insegnanti e adulti. Per maggiori informazioni riguardo all'evento potete visitare questa pagina <https://mediamentebullo.org/per-non-perdersi-nel-mare-della-comunicazione/>. Cordiali saluti, -- Anita Botta Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino – DAUIN Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino _web:_ https://nexa.polito.it/ _mail:_anita.botta@polito.it <mailto:anita.botta@polito.it> tel: 011 090 7219

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Berlin artist uses 99 phones to trick Google into traffic jam alert | Technology | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Feb. 3, 2020

Feb. 3, 2020

<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/03/berlin-artist-uses-99-ph…> A Berlin-based artist managed to create a traffic jam on one of the main bridges across the Spree with nothing but a handcart and 99 second-hand phones. But one other thing was unusual about the jam: it only existed on Google Maps. Simon Weckert’s artwork Google Maps Hacks involved the artist pulling a small red cart at walking pace down some of the main thoroughfares of Berlin. The 99 phones in the cart, all reporting their locations and movement back to Google’s servers, gave the search company the impression of a huge cluster of slow-moving traffic, which was duly reported on the company’s maps. “Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red, which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic,” Weckert wrote. [...]

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Stuart Russell e i "tre principi delle macchine benevoli"
by Federico Bo Feb. 3, 2020

Feb. 3, 2020

Salve. Primo invio, mi presento: Federico Bo, ingegnere informatico. Interessato, tra l'altro, a tecnologie blockchain e AI. Mentre leggo Rebooting AI (di Gary Marcus, Ernest Davis, Pantheon, 2019) segnalo questo articolo. https://www.quantamagazine.org/artificial-intelligence-will-do-what-we-ask-… Le AI dovrebbero porsi obbiettivi a breve, medio e lungo termine, esplorando le contraddittorie e volubili intenzioni umane per capire le nostre preferenze. O meglio ciò che Russell chiama le nostre meta-preferenze: "le preferenze su quali tipi di processi di modifica delle preferenze potrebbero essere accettabili o inaccettabili". Federico -- Ing. Federico Bo /federicobo.eu <https://www.federicobo.eu/>/

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How Cashless Restaurants Reinforce Systemic Racism
by J.C. DE MARTIN Feb. 3, 2020

Feb. 3, 2020

https://www.gq.com/story/cashless-restaurants-reinforce-systemic-racism (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Why cancer-spotting AI needs to be handled with care - The Verge
by J.C. DE MARTIN Feb. 2, 2020

Feb. 2, 2020

Why cancer-spotting AI needs to be handled with care Accelerating cancer diagnoses could hurt more than it helps By James Vincent on January 27, 2020 8:00 am https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/27/21080253/ai-cancer-diagnosis-dangers-mam… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Etica delle tecnologie moderne
by don Luca Peyron Feb. 2, 2020

Feb. 2, 2020

Cosa vuol dire "fare esperienza" in un tempo in cui tutte le nuove generazioni fanno esperienza, appunto, a partire dalle modalità tecnologiche quindi attraverso un processo molto diverso da quello esercitato fino a qualche decennio fa. Con *Felice Cimatti* discutono sull'argomento, *Barbara Volpi*, docente presso il Dipartimento di Piscologia dinamica de "La Sapienza" di Roma, e *Paolo Benanti* francescano del Terzo Ordine Regolare che insegna Etica e Bioetica delle Comunicazioni alla Pontificia Università Gregoriana di Roma. Buon ascolto e buona domenica dl https://www.raiplayradio.it/audio/2020/01/-quotEtica-delle-tecnologie-moder… _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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What Statistics Can and Can’t Tell Us About Ourselves | The New Yorker
by Antonio Vetro' Feb. 1, 2020

Feb. 1, 2020

Articolo dello scorso settembre, su un tema già commentato più volte in questa lista, soprattutto dagli accademici https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/09/what-statistics-can-and-cant-… "In the era of Big Data, we’ve come to believe that, with enough information, human behavior is predictable. But number crunching can lead us perilously wrong.” By Hannah Fry *Hannah Fry is a professor at University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. Her latest book is “Hello World.”

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Facebook privacy issue settled for $550 million - Vox
by Alberto Cammozzo Jan. 31, 2020

Jan. 31, 2020

<https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/30/21115260/facebook-facial-recognition-s…> Facebook has agreed to pay a $550 million settlement over its use of facial recognition technology nearly a decade ago. This comes just days after a relatively unknown startup selling facial recognition systems to police departments caught the attention of Congress. It seems, after years of civil liberties advocates worrying, facial recognition technology is more powerful and more prevalent than ever. Neither a mammoth new settlement nor the piecemeal legislation nationwide seem suited to stop the takeover. As it announced in the company’s quarterly earnings report on Wednesday, Facebook will shell out half a billion dollars to settle a 2015 class action lawsuit over its facial recognition software that suggested tags for people it identified in users’ photos. What may have been a helpful feature for some also happened to be a possible violation of Illinois’ 2008 Biometric Information Privacy Act. The law — which happens to be the strongest biometric privacy law in the country — said that businesses must get permission before collecting biometric data. That essentially includes anything on your body that could be used to uniquely identify you, including scans of fingerprints, eyes, and faces. The class action suit claimed that Facebook’s photo-tagging feature, which it rolled out in 2010, did not do this. Facebook claimed for years that it did nothing wrong. But after an attempt to throw the suit out was rejected by a federal appeals court in August 2019, Facebook discontinued the photo tag suggestions tool. Facebook’s appeal to the US Supreme Court was denied last week. Rather than risk a civil trial and a potential billion-dollar judgment, Facebook decided a $550 million settlement (which still has to be approved by a judge) was its best bet. “We decided to pursue a settlement as it was in the best interest of our community and our shareholders to move past this matter,” a Facebook spokesperson told Recode. Half a billion dollars is an incredible sum, but that quantity of money might amount to a mere inconvenience for Facebook. Given the company’s $21 billion revenue in its most recent quarterly earnings release, $550 million is pocket change. If, as our Peter Kafka has argued, the recent $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for privacy failures won’t fundamentally change Facebook’s business model, a settlement worth a tenth of that won’t make a dent, either. Of course, there are many other companies with much less money than Facebook doing much more with facial recognition technology. Clearview AI, as the New York Times and BuzzFeed News recently reported, claims to have scraped billions of photos from across the internet in order to build facial recognition technology that law enforcement agencies could use to identify suspected criminals. While Clearview claims to be working with dozens of police departments across the United States, the extent to which its technology is actually being used to fight crime remains unclear. Nevertheless, the company has brazenly pushed facial recognition technology out into the open in a way that bigger tech companies like Facebook have so far eschewed. As a result, Clearview is facing its own class action lawsuit in Illinois, questions from a senator, and cease-and-desist letters from both Twitter and New Jersey’s attorney general. However, it’s naive to assume that new, more aggressive forms of facial recognition technology will go away. China, Russia, and the United Kingdom use facial recognition for law enforcement on a massive scale. Just this week, Moscow rolled out a facial recognition system that’s been described as the world’s largest. A recent Recode investigation showed that the use of facial recognition technology is also increasingly prevalent in the United States. It’s not just used to find suspected criminals and friends. Google and Amazon have their own facial recognition initiatives, and the technology has also been used for better, for worse, and for weird in recruiting, for unlocking phones, in dating apps, in retail, to get on trains, to find investors for your facial recognition company (a sort of facial recognition-ception), and for keeping track of pigs. This is despite public concerns over its implementation (as the reaction to Clearview AI shows) and data that shows it doesn’t work as well on non-white faces. For what it’s worth, lawmakers are trying to regulate the use of facial recognition tech. Canada and the European Union have restrictions; in the United States, federal legislation has been proposed. In the absence of federal legislation, states like Texas and Illinois have issued bans on facial recognition. Many other states have considered similar laws, and several cities including San Francisco and Oakland outlaw its use by the government. Evan Selinger, a professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology who has written extensively about the dangers of facial recognition technology and has advocated for its ban, thinks such regulations are possible. “The conversation has changed dramatically and political will is growing to stop the most dangerous surveillance technology ever invented,” Selinger told Recode. “Given the paper-thin divide between industry and the government and exposés like the one on Clearview, it is entirely possible that companies like Facebook will wind up restricted by bans, too.” While Facebook did end the tag suggestions tool at the center of the class action lawsuit, the company didn’t stop its use facial recognition. In 2017, it introduced a new “Face Recognition” feature with “the same technology we’ve used to suggest friends you may want to tag in photos or videos.” That tool replaced the beleaguered tag suggestions feature entirely two years later. At this point, Facebook has been using facial recognition on our photos for almost a decade. Perhaps Selinger’s optimism is not misplaced. Or perhaps, in spite of Facebook’s very large but relatively insignificant fine, halting facial recognition’s use in the public or private sector is tantamount to putting the horse back in the barn (although facial recognition could probably make it easier to locate said horse).

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Bando Intelligenza Artificiale, uomo e società
by don Luca Peyron Jan. 31, 2020

Jan. 31, 2020

La Compagnia di San Paolo promuove il bando “Intelligenza Artificiale, uomo e società” con l’obiettivo di sostenere progetti di ricerca innovativi finalizzati all’avanzamento della conoscenza scientifica nell’ambito dell’intelligenza artificiale e con una ricaduta concreta sul territorio in termini economici e sociali. La rapida crescita delle tecnologie e soluzioni basate sull’Intelligenza Artificiale e/o Machine Learning (AI), dell’Internet delle cose (IoT) e dei relativi metodi per la valorizzazione dei dati rappresentano un’opportunità per l’uomo e la società. Promettono infatti di modificare in profondità le modalità di lavoro, d’istruzione, di gestione delle attività economiche e culturali, di relazione personale e sociale. Il bando intende indagare tali opportunità in tre ambiti di particolare interesse per la Fondazione e il territorio: *• Educazione e Formazione;* *• Industria;* *• Arte e Cultura.* I progetti dovranno mostrarsi in grado di sviluppare analisi e testare sul territorio soluzioni innovative, integrare e soddisfare bisogni, dati/competenze dei tre ambiti suddetti e al contempo favorire la collaborazione tra università, enti di ricerca, imprese e terzo settore. Soldini spesi bene, sperabilmente! Buon bando dl https://www.compagniadisanpaolo.it/ita/Bandi-e-scadenze/Bando-Intelligenza-… _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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