Describing the types of work involved in making AI systems function, extending beyond AI itself to things like data collection and lexical resources which enable AI without being generally considered part of the field.
I’ve previously written about whether the law is useful at stopping spam and how AI fights cybercrime. This post discusses how each of these approaches is critical, and why the problem can only be solved when they are used together. Laws strictly defining a class of abuse will fail At present, cybercrime is running rampant, virtually unchecked by...
On average, every Internet user has been the victim of multiple cybercrimes. It’s an enormous problem, and cybercriminals are rarely prosecuted. Artificial intelligence is the most important tool we have to fight cybercrime. The threats are always changing. Today we have Russian bots influencing US presidential elections, credit cards stolen in...
Cybercrime and abuse are massive problems on the Internet, and on social media in particular. While many of these problems are yet to be solved, we can learn from the example of the fight against spam, which is by far the most mature of these battles. Spam filtering was the first widespread success for artificial intelligence, and illustrates both...
Big tech firms face intense scrutiny about how much data they collect and how they respect user privacy when using the data. Data drives much of the value of the services we use. There are important trade-offs involved in how companies can best provide valuable services while respecting privacy. Within artificial intelligence, the machine learning...
Disclaimer: While I previously led a data science team at Facebook and led the AI efforts to identify fake and hacked accounts at Microsoft, I am not representing these companies and speak only for myself. Facebook’s Transparency Report reveals that Facebook takes down billions of fake accounts each quarter. In the first quarter of 2019, Facebook...
Big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others all have liberal data collection practices. Most of the popular discussions of this are major concerns about privacy and concern about these companies for using personal data for ad targeting. I want to talk about how collecting personal data is critical for keeping you safe online. That...
Artificial intelligence algorithms, which are based on statistics, make mistakes. Since they accomplish things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, we tolerate these errors. Most people wouldn’t want a human being reviewing every email sent to Gmail to determine whether or not it’s spam. That would be pretty creepy. But even if having a perfect...
Microsoft detects Apple as spam? Imagine yourself working at Microsoft 15 years ago, where Windows is the dominant platform and Apple’s computer marketshare is miniscule. Now imagine you’re working on a spam filter with the best of intentions, and yet your spam filter starts detecting as spam any email sent from a well-known email program on Mac...
A recent blog post, Google’s Monopoly is Stifling Free Software, made the front page of techmeme yesterday. The post raises important issues, though the message in the headline is wrong. The “Uncommon download” warning reported in that post presumably originates from Google’s Download Protection feature in Chrome. I don’t know Google’s internal...
