Researchers Using AI and Machine Learning to Detect Cyber-Bullying
To find less-obvious forms of abuse, Dinakar built software that compares online posts to an open-source database called ConceptNet. This is a network of phrases and words and the relationships between them that lets computers understand what humans are talking about. This way the system can work out what might be a bullying comment, even though it contains no abusive words.
For example, it would know that: “Put on a wig and lipstick and be who you really are” aimed at a boy might be a negative comment on his sexuality, because ConceptNet knows that girls usually wear make-up, while boys do not.
The idea is that software like this could be integrated into a social network. If it spots patterns of bullying behaviour, it may either flash up a box warning the bully, ban offending posts, or offer help and advice to the victim. Dinakar wants to combine his two projects to create a detector that can pick up even the subtlest of attacks, such as “liking” a negative Facebook status to make a nasty point, for example. The research is due to appear in the journal ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems in July.
(via AI systems could fight cyberbullying - tech - 03 July 2012 - New Scientist)
Forty Years in The Uncanny Valley
More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, then a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay on how he envisioned people’s reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person’s response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley. The essay appeared in an obscure Japanese journal called Energy in 1970, and in subsequent years it received almost no attention.
A Network Model for Societal Evolution
Networks and complexity. Organizations and societies evolved from tribes to institutions to markets to networks, each stage triggered by major societal changes in communications. The written word enabled institutions, the printed word fostered regional and global markets, and the digital word is empowering worldwide networks.
(Via ibmsocialbiz)
Vice Interviews a “Cyborg Anthropologist”
Amber Case is like the Socrates of digital natives. She calls herself a cyborg anthropologist, which in human talk means she studies the relationship between man and machine.
Most of us walk around with small computers in our pockets. We’re able to access emails, talk to friends, and make with the mega-lulz whenever we wish. Because of this, Case considers us low-tech cyborgs, emotionally tied to our technology and digital networks whether we like to think so or not.
Our modern lives take place interacting with the human and non-human, using one as an interface to connect with the other. We’re able to instantly access entertainment or friends via our smartphones and other devices. Just try spending a day not looking at Twitter or Facebook or going online. It’s bloody hard. Case calls this phenomenon the “technosocial womb.” Her work concerns understanding this relationship, it’s evolution, and how it defines us and our culture.Continue Talking to the Future Humans
(via vicemag)
Study Suggests “Wisdom of the Crowd” May be BS
think of the repercussions of social influence on group judgments and opinions – and consider in how many contexts, be they business (stock markets, board rooms, business planning), political (on all levels of government), or purely social these repercussions are likely to have played and to continue playing a part. And consider this: the diversity on which the wisdom of crowds is predicated might be a misleading fact to begin with. For, in the real world, actually independent opinion might not exist – and the closer our social network ties are, the more that interdependence of thought might matter.
(via The Wisdom of Crowds, Revisited: When The Crowd Goes From Wise to Wrong | Artful Choice | Big Think)
