Friday, July 9, 2021

Your Data is My Data

AKA Big Datty

Facebook demands academics disable ad-targeting data tool
Jan 2021, phys.org
Academics, journalists and First Amendment lawyers are rallying behind New York University researchers in a showdown with Facebook over its demand that they halt the collection of data showing who is being micro-targeted by political ads on the world's dominant social media platform.

The researchers say the disputed tool is vital to understanding how Facebook has been used as a conduit for disinformation and manipulation.

"Ad Observer"....special plug-in for Chrome and Firefox browsers used by 6,500 volunteers across the United States...lets researchers see which ads are shown to each volunteer...the tool violates Facebook rules prohibiting automated bulk collection of data from the Facebook website

The NYU Ad Observatory lets researchers see how some Facebook advertisers use data gathered by the company to profile citizens "and send them misinformation about candidates and policies that are designed to influence or even suppress their vote... .

Brave browser adds peer-to-peer IPFS protocol to combat censorship
Jan 2021, phys.org

Bitcoin for websites: The InterPlanetary File System
In what might be the first salvo against the decades-long dominance of the HTTP protocol for internet data retrieval, an open source web browser devoted to privacy has introduced an option that allows for direct peer-to-peer transfers. This means that instead of relying on a massive network in which data are stored on dedicated servers, information can now rest on and be accessed from numerous nodes dispersed globally.
Experian - Credit agency told to stop sharing data without consent
Oct 2020, BBC News
The two-year investigation was prompted by a complaint from the campaign group Privacy International.

It found that Experian and two other credit reference agencies - Equifax and TransUnion - did a significant amount of "invisible" processing of data, meaning that people did not know it was happening.

The report found that the agencies had access to the data of almost every adult in the UK, which was then "screened, traded, profiled, enriched, or enhanced to provide direct marketing services".

This processing resulted in "products that were used by commercial organisations, political parties and charities to find new customers and build profiles about people", the investigation stated.

"The data broking sector is a complex eco-system where information appears to be traded widely without consideration for transparency, giving millions of adults in the UK little of no choice or control over their personal data," said Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.
Digital ad industry accused of huge data breach
Jun 2021, BBC News

If you momentarily see empty advertising spaces before they are filled on a web page or an app, you are essentially watching yourself being auctioned in that moment...

FYI: Largest Data Breaches in History (Yahoo at #1 with 3 billion in 2013

Post Script:
Ford announces infotainment screens to show ads from local billboards
May 2021, phys.org

Public service reminder - the first step is admitting you have a problem.

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Thursday, July 8, 2021

The Eigenmeme

 Lactose Resistance, The Royal Society
Milk has humans written all over it. We're the only mammals that drink milk into adulthood. And that's because we genetically re-engineered ourselves to do it. 

For other mammals, and for lots of humans still, our body stops producing the enzyme that breaks lactose into usable nutrients once we're no longer kids. Without the enzyme (lactase), lactose stays a big glob of gunk that gives us indigestion. 

Apparently, we liked milk so much that we just kept drinking it, and eventually we kept producing lactase for longer and longer into adulthood. We genetically modified ourselves through dairying practices, and it's the first example, or at least the best-documented, of cultural evolution. (Although the cultural evolution of seeing colors might be more interesting.)

Here's some more news on cultural transmission:

Study reveals lactose tolerance happened quickly in Europe
Sep 2020, phys.org

Some 3,000-year-old bones were found to NOT have the milk-drinking mutation. Medieval remains had the mutation in 60%, and modern people (from Northern and Central Europe) have it in 70-90%. This mutation happened way faster than anyone thought. 

via Stony Brook University: Current Biology (2020). dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.033

Why some humans developed a taste for milk and some didn't
Sep 2020, phys.org

The trait of lactase persistence actually emerged independently at least three times; in northern Europeans, emanating from what is now Denmark, and in two geographically distinct African populations...involved different genetic changes, but to the same gene, lactose dehydrogenase, required for metabolising lactose into glucose.

via the University Of Cambridge: Yuval Itan et al. The Origins of Lactase Persistence in Europe, PLoS Computational Biology (2009). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000491

Ancient proteins help track early milk drinking in Africa
Jan 2021, phys.org
In Europeans, there is one main mutation linked to lactase persistence, but in different populations across Africa, there are as many as four. How did this come to be? The question has fascinated researchers for decades. How dairying and human biology co-evolved has remained largely mysterious despite decades of research.
via the Max Planck Society: Madeleine Bleasdale et al. Ancient proteins provide evidence of dairy consumption in eastern Africa, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20682-3

Also:

Post Script:
Greater than the sum of our parts: The evolution of collective intelligence
Jun 2021, phys.org

All Brains Equal:
Dr. Taylor continued: "For example, a form of cognition currently viewed as a disorder, dyslexia, is shown to be a neurocognitive specialization whose nature in turn predicts that our species evolved in a highly variable environment. This concurs with the conclusions of many other disciplines including palaeoarchaeological evidence confirming that the crucible of our species' evolution was highly variable." -link

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Advances in Public Tolerance of Destructive Art

As the art world dematerializes into URLs and NFTs, the art itself is lashing out by defacing its own gallery walls and even by destroying itself.

Spot - Boston Dynamics condemns robot paintball rampage plan
Feb 2021, BBC News

Graphobots:
A US art installation that will let people control a paintballing robot in a mock art gallery has been condemned by the firm that made the robo-dog.

Boston Dynamics criticised the project, calling it a "provocative use" of its quadruped robot, Spot.

It warned that if the "spectacle" goes ahead, Spot's warranty might be voided, meaning it could not be updated.

The group behind it, MSCHF, argues that Spot or robots like it will probably be used for military applications.
Banksy art burned, destroyed and sold as token in 'money-making stunt'
Mar 2021, BBC News
"Banksy's own work has toyed with this idea that it is non-permanent," Mr Ward said. "Once those works are on the walls, he doesn't authenticate them.

Initially, NFT has been a popular format for selling internet memes, with the Nyan Cat - depicting a cartoon cat with a Pop-tart body flying with a trail of rainbows - selling for $600,000.

On NFT's in general: "With NFT technology, digital art can finally assume a strong commercial value given that we are now able to track provenance scarcity," he told the BBC.
This Self-Destructing Website Is Impossible to Sell As an NFT
Apr 2021, VICE News
The web page containing the image disappears when its owner tries to share or upload it. NFTs often simply reference images elsewhere on the web, so if an image is taken down at the source then the NFT will appear broken: Tokenize This, by Ben Grosser
Post Script: This guy also made The Endless Doomscroller, which keeps only the context-independent parts of headlines, like "Collapse Imminent" or "Everything Shut Down", or my favorite, "Today is Worse Than Yesterday".

Post Post Script, For Posterity:
Beeple's NFT digital art nets £50m at Christie's auction
Mar 2021, BBC News

Jack Dorsey's first ever tweet sells for $2.9m
Mar 2021, BBC News
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Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Just the Facts

Using math to study paintings to learn more about the evolution of art history
Oct 2020, phys.org

Here's a great description of how the program works:
The work involved digitally scanning 14,912 paintings—all of which (except for two) were painted by Western artists. The data for each of the paintings was then sent through a mathematical algorithm that drew partitions on the digital images based on contrasting colors. The researchers ran the algorithm on each painting multiple times, each time creating more partitions. As an example, the first run of the algorithm might have simply created two partitions on a painting—everything on land, and everything in the sky. The second might have split the land into buildings in one partition and farmland in another.
Conclusions? The horizon line has gone up since the 17th century (from halfway to one-third), and using two horizon lines became more common over time, and abstract art isn't compositionally biased to either the horizontal or the vertical. They also have less large-scale partitions. Think Pollock's drip-paintings and allover De Koonings). They call it lack of macroscopic structure. Also, all this transcends nationality. Doesn't matter where you're from, we're all sipping the same juice.

They also note however that the trends they see could also be a curatorial thing, where the dataset they're using, large as it is, was chosen by someone to be in each book they used, hence their collective bias.

Image credit: My favorite horizon line of all time -- Piet Mondrian, Dune Landscape, 1911

Notes:
Byunghwee Lee et al. Dissecting landscape art history with information theory, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2011927117



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Empathic Catfish Avatars

An AI painter that creates portraits based on the traits of human subjects
Jun 2020, phys.org

Embodied Conversation Agents (ECA) - First it talks to you, and then it paints your portrait based on who you are, because it knows who you are, better than you do.

They call it their "empathetic ECA avatar" and I call it an intelligentity. Eventually it will be called a semibot, for half computer, half human. OKCupid will buy the rights, and the next time you think you're getting catfished, it might actually be you catfishing yourself via one of these. 

Post Script:
I'm imagining a future where we need a self-insurance policy to protect ourselves from other instantiations of ourselves who might try to sabotage us for their own benefit. If you think this sounds a bit much, then you need to read Ted Chiang's "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" (2019).

Notes:
Empathic AI painter: A computational creativity system with embodied conversational interaction. arXiv:2005.14223 [cs.AI]. arxiv.org/abs/2005.14223

Jeremy Owen Turner et al. Integrating Cognitive Architectures into Virtual Character Design, (2016). DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0454-2

iViz Lab at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada

DiPaola Portfolio

AI Research on Empathetic Painter

AI Affective Virtual Human
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Job Transfer


AKA Vocational Mimicry

Google's Art Transfer allows users to transform photos as if they were painted by famous artists
Apr 2020, phys.org

"Art Transfer" is a new Google Deep Mind project - users can have their photographs reinterpreted as if they had been painted by a famous artist. They used to do this on the boardwalk; you throw a dollar into the machine, it takes your picture, and then you watch it "draw" you like Michelangelo. Things are a bit different now, as you can see. 

As an art history major in college, and an art teacher in adulthood, Style Transfer was pretty much the craziest thing I had ever seen when it came out a few years ago. But like the early days of computing, if you wanted to smash together an American Post-Modernist with a Prehistoric Cave Painting, you had to first assemble your database of examples, and then rent someone else's neural network for a day so it could "learn" those two styles.

Now it takes only seconds, and there are entire server farms dedicated to deep learning (and bitcoin mining, can't forget bitcoin). It's been a convergence of cloud computing, artificial intelligence and graphics processing units (and a little bit of botnet perhaps). 

Image Credit: Harmonographs of All Sorts by Thomas B Greenslade, 2018

A system that automatically generates comic books from movies and other videos
Feb 2021, phys.org
Researchers at Dalian University of Technology in China and City University of Hong Kong have recently created an innovative framework that can automatically generate manga comic books, which are typically designed by highly skilled professional artists and require extensive work: Automatic comic generation with stylistic multi-page layouts and emotion-driven text balloon generation. arXiv:2101.11111 [cs.CV]. 

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Monday, July 5, 2021

On Engineering Artificial Eyeballs

Enhanced vision -- seeing the invisible, zooming-in past the limits of microscopy, making artificial eyeballs from scratch to give sight to the blind -- nothing says welcome to the future like advances in vision technology. 

Image credit: Sorry I can't find the source for this, but you can call it face-rec camo-tech. It makes you invisible. 

New method could democratize deep learning-enhanced microscopy
Mar 2021, phys.org
Deep learning is a potential tool for scientists to glean more detail from low-resolution images in microscopy, but it's often difficult to gather enough baseline data to train computers in the process. Now, a new method developed by scientists at the Salk Institute could make the technology more accessible—by taking high-resolution images, and artificially degrading them.

The new tool, which the researchers call a "crappifier," could make it significantly easier for scientists to get detailed images of cells or cellular structures that have previously been difficult to observe because they require low-light conditions, such as mitochondria, which can divide when stressed by the lasers used to illuminate them. 
Yes, the crappifier. If you have any idea how neural network machine learning works, you will immediately get why this is some sneaky shit.

They take good microphotographs (example: Nikon Small World Gallery) and intentionally make them crappy and hard to see. They degrade the photo artificially, but then train the network backwards to learn how to make a good photo out of a bad one. Once it's trained, they start giving it "naturally" bad photos of things we can't get good pictures of with current microscopic technology, and let it apply what it learned about bad photos. 

via Salk Institute: Deep learning-based point-scanning super-resolution imaging, Nature Methods (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41592-021-01080-z

Smartphone camera used to diagnose viral infections
Dec 2020, phys.org

Full circle, we will soon be tossing coffee grinds on the table to predict the future. Here's an exapmle of how we can now see things we didn't even know we were looking for, like how the bubbles in your body-fluid broth have written in them your viral exposome. 
Body fluid samples are placed into a channel on the catalytic microchip device, which is then doused with a small amount of hydrogen peroxide. The resulting reaction leads to the formation of bubbles. The bubbles develop in unique patterns based in part on viruses in the fluid sample. The user points their smartphone camera at the bubbling sample and launches the deep-learning algorithm that has already been trained to identify the patterns and thereby recognize the presence of viruses.

Mohamed S. Draz et al. Virus detection using nanoparticles and deep neural network–enabled smartphone system, Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd5354
Zoom hack reveals text contents by viewing shoulder movement
Nov 2020, phys.org

Jesus make it stop:
"They focused on the movement of their shoulders and arms to extrapolate the actions of their fingers as they typed."

"In a controlled setting, with specific chairs, keyboards and webcam, Jadiwala said he achieved an accuracy rate of 75 percent. However, in uncontrolled environments, accuracy dropped to only one out of every five words being correctly identified."

via the University of Texas: Zoom on the Keystrokes: Exploiting Video Calls for Keystroke Inference Attacks, Murtuza Jadiwala et al. arXiv:2010.12078 [cs.CR] arxiv.org/abs/2010.12078

Discovery makes the invisible visible
Jan 2021, phys.org

The nano-revolution comes to phase contrast microscopy. Sub-surface Nanoaperture Arrays.

via La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science: Eugeniu Balaur et al. Plasmon-induced enhancement of ptychographic phase microscopy via sub-surface nanoaperture arrays, Nature Photonics (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-020-00752-0

Mantis shrimp inspires new breed of light sensors
Mar 2021, phys.org

The mantis shrimp strikes again, patron saint of all superhuman vision technology. Hyperspectral. 

via North Carolina State University: "Mantis shrimp-inspired organic photodetector for simultaneous hyperspectral and polarimetric imaging" Science Advances (2021).


For those artificial retinas you've been waiting for:
Color-sensitive inkjet-printed pixelated artificial retina based on semiconducting polymers
Jan 2021, phys.org

Manuela Ciocca et al. Colour-sensitive conjugated polymer inkjet-printed pixelated artificial retina model studied via a bio-hybrid photovoltaic device, Scientific Reports (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-77819-z

Retinal implants can give artificial vision to the blind
Mar 2021, phys.org

via Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne: Naïg Aurelia Ludmilla Chenais et al. Photovoltaic retinal prosthesis restores high-resolution responses to single-pixel stimulation in blind retinas, Communications Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s43246-021-00133-2

Color blindness-correcting contact lenses
Mar 2021, phys.org

via American Chemical Society: Ahmed E. Salih et al. Gold Nanocomposite Contact Lenses for Color Blindness Management, ACS Nano (2021). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.0c09657

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