… For a long time, mass deportations were a small-data affair, driven by tips, one-off investigations, or animus-driven hunches. But beginning under George W. Bush, and expanding under Barack Obama, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) leadership started to reap the benefits of Big Data. … This is a new era of immigrant surveillance: ICE has transformed from an agency that tracks some people sometimes to an agency that can track anyone at any time. Read More
#surveillanceDaily Archives: September 24, 2020
The Next Big Breakthrough in AI Will Be Around Language
Most companies recognize that aggressive adoption of digital technologies is increasingly critical to being competitive. Our research shows that the top 10% of early adopters of digital technologies have grown at twice the rate of the bottom 25%, and that they are using cloud systems — not legacy systems — to enable adoption, a trend we expect to accelerate among industry leaders over the coming five years. Many laggard and middle-of-the-pack companies, by comparison, are dramatically underestimating the cloud resources they will need in order to access, power, or train a new generation of intelligent applications presaged by breakthroughs like GPT-3, a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) tool. Read More
This know-it-all AI learns by reading the entire web nonstop
Diffbot is building the biggest-ever knowledge graph by applying image recognition and natural-language processing to billions of web pages. … It is building an AI that reads every page on the entire public web, in multiple languages, and extracts as many facts from those pages as it can. Read More
#nlpYouTube’s Plot to Silence Conspiracy Theories
From flat-earthers to QAnon to Covid quackery, the video giant is awash in misinformation. Can AI keep the lunatic fringe from going viral?
Mark Sargent saw instantly that his situation had changed for the worse. A voluble, white-haired 52-year-old, Sargent is a flat-earth evangelist who lives on Whidbey Island in Washington state and drives a Chrysler with the vanity plate “ITSFLAT.” But he’s well known around the globe, at least among those who don’t believe they are living on one. That’s thanks to YouTube, which was the on-ramp both to his flat-earth ideas and to his subsequent international stardom.
… Crucial to his success, he says, was YouTube’s recommendation system. …For four years, Sargent’s flat-earth videos got a steady stream of traffic from YouTube’s algorithms. Then, in January 2019, the flow of new viewers suddenly slowed to a trickle. Read More
Chinese propaganda network on Facebook used AI-generated faces
Facebook removed two networks of fake accounts spreading government propaganda on the platform Tuesday, one originating in China and one in the Philippines.
In its latest report on this kind of coordinated campaign, the company says it took down 155 Facebook accounts, 11 pages, nine groups and seven Instagram accounts connected to the Chinese activity and 57 accounts, 31 Pages and 20 Instagram accounts for the activity in the Philippines. Both operations broke Facebook’s rules against “coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign or government entity.” Read More
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