brave new worlds

The 23 Feb issue of Nature has several “political” articles, if not the title, which refers to the James Webb space telescope bringing in a wealth of information on exoplanets (through five Nature papers!). Beyond the usual editorial (on the need to help rebuilding Ukraine’s research infrastructure as an introduction to the main article on the way Ukrainian researchers coped with one year of war and destruction) and an opinion piece on the ongoing Nigerian elections and the lack of attention to science and technology), a criticism of (recently released) “disgraced scientist” He Jiankui and his (virtual) invitation at the University of Kent, the impact of the new Twitter on social scientists using its data, an attack on the American Geophysical Union for expelling two members who had held up a banner calling for action during an AGU conference talk, and a lengthy opinion piece on banning AI weapons that starts with a rather unwelcome perspective on the “us versus them” Western attitude about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a conclusion calling for the UN ban of autonomous weapons that is likely to have the same impact as a ban on nuclear weapons…

thanks from CIRM

and it only gets worse [verbatim]

“A basic principle of the law — and of everyday fairness — is that we apply rules with consistency, and not based on what’s convenient or advantageous in the moment. The rule of law, the legitimacy of our courts, the fundamental workings of our democracy all depend on that basic principle.” Barack Obama [on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement], 18 September

“I don’t know that [Ruth Bader Ginsberg] said that, or if that was written out by Adam Schiff, and Schumer and Pelosi,” DT, 21 September

“I don’t wear a mask like [Joe Biden]. Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from them and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.” DT, 29 September

“With time it goes away. And you’ll develop like a herd mentality [sic]. It’s going to be herd developed, and that’s going to happen. That will all happen.” DT, 16 September

“If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anyone in the world would be at,” DT, 17 September

“It will start getting cooler, just you watch.” DT, 14 September

“I don’t think science knows, actually.” DT, 14 September

“Because of the new and unprecedented massive amount of unsolicited ballots which will be sent to ‘voters,’ or wherever, this year, the Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED, which is what some want.” DT, 17 September

“There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.” “DT, 26 May

“I can tell you there’s [no race problem] with me. Because I have great respect for all races, everybody.” DT, 15 September

“America is fundamentally good, and has much to offer the world, because our founders recognized the existence of God-given unalienable rights and designed a durable system to protect them” M. Pompeo, July 2020

crowdsourcing, data science & machine learning to measure violence & abuse against women on twitter

Amnesty International just released on December 18 a study on abuse and harassment on twitter account of female politicians and journalists in the US and the UK. Realised through the collaboration of thousands of crowdsourced volunteers labeling  tweets from the database and the machine-learning expertise of the London branch of ElementAI, branch driven by my friend Julien Cornebise with the main purpose of producing AI for good (as he explained at the recent Bayes for good workshop). Including the development of an ML tool to detect abusive tweets, called Troll Patrol [which pun side is clear in French!]. The amount of abuse exposed by this study and the possibility to train AIs to spot [some of the] abuse on line are both arguments that support Amnesty International call for the accountability of social media companies like twitter on abuse and violence propagated through their platform. (Methodology is also made available there.)

Bayes for good

A very special weekend workshop on Bayesian techniques used for social good in many different sense (and talks) that we organised with Kerrie Mengersen and Pierre Pudlo at CiRM, Luminy, Marseilles. It started with Rebecca (Beka) Steorts (Duke) explaining [by video from Duke] how the Syrian war deaths were processed to eliminate duplicates, to be continued on Monday at the “Big” conference, Alex Volfonsky (Duke) on a Twitter experiment on the impact of being exposed to adverse opinions as depolarising (not!) or further polarising (yes), turning into network causal analysis. And then Kerrie Mengersen (QUT) on the use of Bayesian networks in ecology, through observational studies she conducted. And the role of neutral statisticians in case of adversarial experts!

Next day, the first talk of David Corlis (Peace-Work), who writes the Stats for Good column in CHANCE and here gave a recruiting spiel for volunteering in good initiatives. Quoting Florence Nightingale as the “first” volunteer. And presenting a broad collection of projects as supports to his recommendations for “doing good”. We then heard [by video] Julien Cornebise from Element AI in London telling of his move out of DeepMind towards investing in social impacting projects through this new startup. Including working with Amnesty International on Darfour village destructions, building evidence from satellite imaging. And crowdsourcing. With an incoming report on the year activities (still under embargo). A most exciting and enthusiastic talk!