Data Science newsletter – April 20, 2021

A unifying theme motivating the programs appeared to be the notion that providing some basic digital skills training for Black and brown Americans, and thereby preparing them for entry-level jobs in the tech industry, would be a way to give them an “advantage.” In the words of many of the program organizers, and the ACM itself, these Black and brown Americans were “disadvantaged.” One scholar who has studied these programs, Arvid Nelsen, explained that most of the programs were established by white volunteers, and they—like many others at the time and since—conflated communities of color with people experiencing poverty, and both of those with urban neighborhoods. Indeed, those white 1960s-era volunteers, who were computing professionals themselves, exhibited a strange mix of motivations. On one hand, they thought that digital skills would provide a path out of poverty and toward stability, in the myopic way that those who are privileged by race and gender (in this case, white men) imagine that others can easily re-create their privilege and success. On the other hand, they feared the instability, protests, and uprisings for Black lives that continued in the U.S. during those years, and they imagined that preparing Black and Latino Americans for entry-level jobs would quell those crises. They lacked an understanding of what comprehensive economic and social justice looked like, to say the least.

The University Libraries has launched the UNC Story Archive as a way to gather and preserve authentic voices from the Carolina community. The University Archives at the Wilson Special Collections Library created and oversees the project.

“We were interested in new ways of documenting campus life, especially the student experience,” says University Archivist Nicholas Graham. “We wanted to create a simple way for students, alumni and others to share their experiences and thoughts in their own voice.”

Tar Heels can take part by signing up for a virtual recording session and then using a computer, phone or other device to capture their story. The archivists offer prompts, but these are just suggestions to get started.

During its March 22 meeting, the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors approved the resolution to establish a scholarly articles open access policy, a revision to the university’s Policy on Intellectual Property 13000. As a result, Virginia Tech authors grant the university nonexclusive license to their scholarly articles in order to make them openly available through the university’s repository, VTechWorks, housed and maintained by the University Libraries at Virginia Tech.

VTechWorks is an open repository, which means that anyone around the world with an internet connection can access and download journal articles, presentations, theses, dissertations, and other documents that are hosted on the site. Openly available research is cited 18 percent more, on average, than research that is only available behind publisher paywalls. Open access facilitates the advancement of knowledge and makes a greater impact on society, including economic benefits.

Lowe’s and UNC Charlotte jointly announced a $1.5 million gift for the school’s College of Computing and Informatics. The donation will establish an endowed faculty position at UNCC, filled by someone whose research will focus on AI and machine learning.

And the gift will support student research in high-demand technology applications — strengthening an existing pipeline for graduates going to work in a variety of fields.

Authorities in Texas say two people were killed when a Tesla with no one in the driver’s seat crashed into a tree and burst into flames, Houston television station KPRC 2 reported.

The cause of the crash, which happened at about 9PM local time in Spring, Texas (near Houston), is under investigation. According to KHOU in Houston, first responders had to use 30,000 gallons of water over four hours to put out the fire, as the Tesla’s battery kept reigniting. Authorities tried to contact Tesla for advice on putting out the fire; it’s not clear whether they received any response.

The ASU-Starbucks Center for the Future of People and the Planet will focus on initiatives aimed to deliver scalable impact towards Starbucks aspirational 2030 goals and beyond. Nine licensed Starbucks stores on campus will test and evaluate customer response to center innovations, according to Starbucks.

Building on a long-standing partnership, Starbucks and Arizona State University are joining forces to create the ASU-Starbucks Center for the Future of People and the Planet – a new research and rapid innovation facility created to find new ways to design, build and operate Starbucks stores.

The architecture, engineering and construction industry is well-versed in the concrete design principles needed to optimize productivity. However, the advanced technologies that could take that productivity to the next level are less mature. Structural engineering researchers have explored machine learning applications in the field for decades. But only within the past five years has the community of researchers and practitioners begun to seriously explore ways in which machine learning can improve the efficiency and accuracy of specific tasks or solve previously intractable problems, says Henry Burton, an associate professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. The same can be said for concrete 3D printing, which has the potential to transform the industry through customized structural shapes, reduced formwork and lower construction time and cost. The American Concrete Institute’s 2021 Virtual Concrete Convention offered a peek inside the latest research into the potential and challenges of these technologies.

Concerns about potential misuse or unintended consequences of AI, however, have prompted efforts to examine and develop standards, such as the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) initiative involving workshops and discussions with the public and private sectors around the development of federal standards to create building blocks for reliable, robust, and trustworthy AI systems.

State lawmakers also are considering AI’s benefits and challenges—a growing number of measures are being introduced to study the impact of AI and the potential roles for policymakers.

This web page covers key legislation related to AI issues generally. Legislation related to specific AI technologies, such as facial recognition or autonomous cars, is being tracked separately.

PDF version

During the pandemic, technology companies have been pitching their emotion-recognition software for monitoring workers and even children remotely. Take, for example, a system named 4 Little Trees. Developed in Hong Kong, the program claims to assess children’s emotions while they do classwork. It maps facial features to assign each pupil’s emotional state into a category such as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise and fear. It also gauges ‘motivation’ and forecasts grades. Similar tools have been marketed to provide surveillance for remote workers. By one estimate, the emotion-recognition industry will grow to US$37 billion by 2026.

There is deep scientific disagreement about whether AI can detect emotions. A 2019 review found no reliable evidence for it. “Tech companies may well be asking a question that is fundamentally wrong,” the study concluded (L. F. Barrett et al. Psychol. Sci. Public Interest 20, 1–68; 2019).

And there is growing scientific concern about the use and misuse of these technologies.

When researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) published a study last year on its discovery of 11 new colonies of emperor penguins, they acknowledged an unusual source of assistance – students at Stirling High School in Scotland. Inspired by a David Attenborough program on the plight of the iconic bird, the teens and their teacher used satellite mapping imagery from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2, developed an algorithm, and found traces of unknown and unconfirmed colonies. They then passed on their findings to the BAS.

The notion that schoolkids are as capable of accessing Earth Observation data as scientists and government ministers is an indication of how satellite technology has revolutionized scientific research across the globe, and especially of the environment.

Satellites “change everything,” says Nathalie Pettorelli, a senior research fellow at the Zoological Society of London and author of the book Satellite Remote Sensing and the Management of Natural Resources. Monitoring extraordinarily large territories, providing access through visibility to remote areas, and boosting transparency of countries’ environmental standards are some of the benefits she cites. “They provide you with the opportunity to monitor the Earth globally and monitor aspects of biodiversity that were very much neglected before.”

We have witnessed multiple digital health inequities in the past year, from disparities in access to health care video visits to challenges in scheduling COVID-19 vaccination online. It is clear that we need digital health transformation that is focused on reducing these gaps.

During the past 18 months, we—health care researchers with expertise in health technology and implementation science—launched a digital health incubator at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Called UCSF S.O.L.V.E. Health Tech, the incubator is focused explicitly on health equity; it connects public health and medical expertise with digital health companies to adapt, test, and evaluate products to better reach and meet the needs of diverse populations.

The incubator is rooted in our work in the public health care delivery system in San Francisco. Specifically, UCSF S.O.L.V.E. Health Tech focuses on ensuring that digital health tools work better for individuals with high medical and social needs who face structural barriers to health and health care, such as individuals from racial/ethnic minority groups and those facing poverty or other socioeconomic challenges in the US.

Mirriad’s chief executive Stephan Beringer expects such digital product placement to become widespread. His firm came up with the process after previously making movie special effects.

“We started out working in movies,” he says. “Our chief scientist Philip McLauchlan, with his team, came up with the technology that won an Academy Award for the film Black Swan.

“The technology can ‘read’ an image, it understands the depth, the motion, the fabric, anything. So you can introduce new images that basically the human eye does not realise has been done after the fact, after the production.”

Dangers posed by facial recognition like mass surveillance and mistaken identity have been widely discussed in recent years. But digital rights groups say an equally insidious use case is currently sneaking under the radar: using the same technology to predict someone’s gender and sexual orientation. Now, a new campaign has launched to ban these applications in the EU.

Trying to predict someone’s gender or sexuality from digitized clues is fundamentally flawed, says Os Keyes, a researcher who’s written extensively on the topic. This technology tends to reduce gender to a simplistic binary and, as a result, is often harmful to individuals like trans and nonbinary people who might not fit into these narrow categories. When the resulting systems are used for things like gating entry for physical spaces or verifying someone’s identity for an online service, it leads to discrimination.

“Identifying someone’s gender by looking at them and not talking to them is sort of like asking what does the smell of blue taste like,” Keyes tells The Verge. “The issue is not so much that your answer is wrong as your question doesn’t make any sense.”

Under U.S. law, it is crucial to properly name the correct inventive entity or entities for a particular patent application. Incorrectly listing an individual as an inventor on a U.S. patent application can result in criminal penalties. But what is required to be considered an inventor? Generally, an inventor is anyone who contributes to the conception of an invention. An inventor is also considered to be an individual. While this requirement is typically not an issue, Dr. Stephen Thaler is currently suing the USPTO after it denied a patent application for failing to list a human being as an inventor.

Dr. Thaler filed U.S. Patent Application No. 16/524,350 entitled “Devices and Methods for Attracting Enhanced Attention.” The invention relates to a neural flame, which could help in emergency situations like search and rescue. However, Dr. Thaler is listed only as the assignee and not the inventor. Instead, DABUS, or Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, is listed as the sole inventor. The Application Data Sheet also states that the invention was “generated by artificial intelligence.”

The USTPO issued a Notice of Missing Parts and denied a petition to allow DABUS to be the sole inventor because the application failed to list the name of a human inventor.

Online May 5, starting at 10 a.m. Eastern. [$$]

Online May 10-13. “The event will be a forum for education, collaboration and networking, through keynote speakers, panel discussions, brief talks, and a showcase floor that will allow companies to demonstrate the extent of their unique AI advancements.” [free, registration required]

Online April 29, starting at 10 a.m. Pacific.

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