Despite their limitations, off-the-shelf models are still quite widely used by computational social science researchers for measuring various properties of text, including both lexicons, like LIWC, and cloud-based APIs, like Perspective API. The approach of using an off-the-shelf model has some definite advantages, including standardization and reproducibility, but such models…

In the last post, I discussed the possible broader implications of Google’s recent foray into making an AI dermatology tool. In this follow up post, I want to focus on the research behind the product announcement, bringing a slightly critical eye. The main scientific paper associated with the proposed tool…

Midway through last year Google announced a new foray into the medical technology space, sharing that it was developing an “AI-powered dermatology assist tool” — a phone-based app that would allow users to take photos of skin lesions and retrieve information about relevant medical conditions from the web. …

In a video that was widely shared last Friday, a representative from Stanford Medical Center spoke to residents protesting how the hospital chose to allocate its first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines. The hospital had around 5,000 initial doses to distribute (and expects to have tens of thousands more within the…

In many areas of science, there is an increasingly urgent unmet need, a role that could be simultaneously fascinating, rewarding, and potential remunerative. It is a role that already exists in various forms, but which could be made into something much more potent, especially if forces converged to make it…

Although it isn’t normally thought of in these terms, taking a photograph involves recording a four-dimensional block of space-time and projecting it down to a two-dimensional representation. With sufficiently sensitive material (and a fast enough shutter), one can produce images more or less instantaneously, but longer exposures reveal the inherent…

For anyone who has been paying attention, it will not have gone unnoticed that the past year has seen a dramatic expansion in the use of face recognition technology, including at schools, border crossing, and interactions with the police. Most recently, Delta announced that some passengers in Atlanta will be…

In a new paper to appear at the ACM conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* 2019), we present a method called deep weighted averaging classifiers (DWACs), which can transform any deep learning architecture into one that is more transparent, interpretable, and robust to out-of-domain data. Although deep learning models…

Framing Internet Safety, by Nathan W. Fisk, is a fascinating study of the surveillance and governance of youth online. According to Fisk, the rhetoric of “protecting the children” has been a key part of most attempts at regulating the internet, such as the Communications Decency Act, whether targeted at offensive…