missing bit?

Nature of 7 December 2020 has a Nature Index (a supplement made of a series of articles, more journalistic than scientific, with corporate backup, which “have no influence over the content”) on Artificial Intelligence, including the above graph representing “the top 200 collaborations among 146 institutions based between 2015 and 2019, sized according to each institution’s share in artificial intelligence”, with only the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Italy identified for Europe… Missing e.g. the output from France and from its major computer science institute, INRIA. Maybe because “the articles picked up by [their] database search concern specific applications of AI in the life sciences, physical sciences, chemistry, and Earth and environmental sciences”.  Or maybe because of the identification of INRIA as such.

“Access to massive data sets on which to train machine-learning systems is one advantage that both the US and China have. Europe, on the other hand, has stringent data laws, which protect people’s privacy, but limit its resources for training AI algorithms. So, it seems unlikely that Europe will produce very sophisticated AI as a consequence”

This comment is sort of contradictory for the attached articles calling for a more ethical AI. Like making AI more transparent and robust. While having unrestricted access to personal is helping with social engineering and control favoured by dictatures and corporate behemoths, a culture of data privacy may (and should) lead to develop new methodology to work with protected data (as in an Alan Turing Institute project) and to infuse more trust from the public. Working with less data does not mean less sophistication in handling it but on the opposite! Another clash of events appears in one of the six trailblazers portrayed in the special supplement being Timnit Gebru, “former co-lead of the Ethical AI Team at Google”, who parted way with Google at the time the issue was published. (See Andrew’s blog for Jessica Hullman discussion of her firing. And the MIT Technology Review for an analysis of the paper potentially at the source of it.)

congrats!

Two items of news that reached my mailbox at about the same time: my friends and CMU coauthors Rebecca (Beka) Steorts and Steve Fienberg both received a major award in the past few days. Congrats to both of them!!! At JSM 2015, Steve got the 2015 Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research “for a remarkable career devoted to the development and application of statistical methodology to solve problems for the benefit of society, including aspects of human rights, privacy and confidentiality, forensics, survey and census-taking, and more; and for exceptional leadership in a variety of professional and governmental organizations, including in the founding of NISS.” The Award is delivered by the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) in honour of Jerry Sacks. And Beka has been selected as one of the 35 innovators under 35 for 2015, a list published yearly by the MIT Technology Review. In particular for her record-linkage work on estimating the number of casualties in the Syrian civil war. (Which led the Review to classify her as a humanitarian rather than a visionary, which list includes two other machine learners.) Great!