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Judement Day Update: IBM Watson’s Hard Questions

https://i0.wp.com/d.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/imagecache/1280/poster/2014/08/3034948-poster-p-1-now-ibms-watson-tackles-questions-that-have-no-answers.jpgWhen IBM’s artificial intelligence program – named Watson – won Jeopardy in 2011, it was a major boon for the industry. However, far from showing that it was Turing-compatible, Watson was merely processing information that it had been programmed to know. But now, IBM is pushing the software forward in the hopes that the machine will be able to answer the really tough questions – i.e. the ones that have no answer and require educated guesses.

This is part of IBMs attempts to turn Watson into a new line of business and make it useful in a wide range of industries that are dealing lately with an overwhelming amount of data. At an event in New York at the end of August, IBM showed off the ways some of its early customers are using the Watson “Discovery Advisor” in research, development, and innovation, especially in the realm of biotech and life sciences.

IBM_Watson1Watson’s aim is to speed up discoveries by teams of researchers by, for example, scanning and interpreting millions of scientific books, articles, and data points–far more than any person’s brain could analyze–and generating new hypothesis or leads that might be fruitful to investigate. As John Gordon, the vice-president of IBM’s Watson group, put it, it’s all about giving researchers “smarter hunches”:

It’s not giving answers that people know anymore, it’s pointing people in directions that they should investigate. We’re talking about a computing system that inspires people.

Scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine and IBM Research have already used Watson to discover new pathways to cancer therapies, which they reported in a study presented at an academic conference late last month. Watson looked closely at 70,000 scientific articles on a protein, called p53, that’s involved in more than half of all cancers, and picked out 6 different proteins that it felt were good candidates for new drugs and therapies.

IBM_watsonDrug companies, too, which are struggling today to develop new commercial drugs, are some of the earliest users of Watsons predictive capabilities. Sanofi is using Watson to look through the research literature and its own data to find new uses for its existing drugs on the market. And Johnson & Johnson has developed a system that analyzes clinical studies to compare the efficacy and safety of different treatments.

Soledad Cepeda, Johnson & Johnson’s director of epidemiology, used the example of back pain, for which there are 27 treatments studied in more than 3,000 clinical trials. As she explained:

[Analyzing this] is slow, it’s tedious, it’s expensive, and it’s prone to errors. Now imagine we can teach Watson to do that for us. So instead of six months, Watson can do it in minutes.

biomedicineJohnson & Johnson has been working to train Watson to read each study, put it in context, and pick out how many patients dropped out of the study or trial due to side effects or ineffective results. If Watson can give researchers all of this comparative data, rather than them combing through thousands of papers, it would allow researchers to come up with better questions to ask and directions to explore.

But of course, this is not always an easy things for Watson to do and requires setup and new skills for it to learn. For example, in Johnson & Johnson’s work, in the studies Watson was analyzing, authors often reported the key data in the form of flow diagrams. So Soledad and her team had to first teach Watson to correctly read flow diagrams of varying levels of complexity and design.

metadataSo far, Watson’s earliest discovery applications have been in the field of biomedical research. But the company hopes it will prove useful in a wide array of fields where the data available to analyze is growing faster than even the world’s top experts are capable of comprehending – such as law enforcement and finance. Whether it’s determining whodunnit, or predicting market trends in the next quarter, Watson could prove very helpful in tackling the task of big-data crunching.

To illustrate the potential for law enforcement, Roberto Villasenor, chief of police for the city of Tucson, Arizona, spoke at the event and detailed an open case of a young child who went missing from her home. Over two years of investigating, the police have generated 15,000 pages of lab reports, records, and warrants, 25,00 pages of interviews, 4,000 pages of transcribed wiretaps, and much other data.

artificial-intelligenceHis department has already worked with IBM on software that integrates different police databases to make it easier for investigators to make connections between disparate data sources. But he hopes systems like Watson will eventually go further and be capable of aiding investigators in combing through data, making subtle connections, and generating new leads in difficult cases.

However, the most public demonstration of Watson’s new abilities thus far has been in the form of “Chef Watson”. IBM has put Watson to the task of learning how to cook and then creating creative tasty and unexpected new recipes. It debuted this capability at a food truck at SxSW this year, but has also been working with the Institute of Culinary Education and Bon Appetit magazine to refine and stretch Watson’s cooking skills.

ibm-watsonBon Appetit is now beta testing a consumer app that allows readers to input an ingredient and desires and have Watson generate suggested recipes. It held a Watson recipe contest this summer–the winner of the “best use of Watson as a creative discovery tool” was a “Roasted tomato and mozzarella tart” recipe. Cooking isn’t like curing cancer or solving crimes, but to IBM it’s most about getting the public excited about its advances.

As IBM senior vice president Mike Rhodin said:

Much the same way that Jeopardy helped people understand systems that can answer questions using natural language, Chef Watson is a way for us to understand how these new systems can be used in our everyday lives.

And that’s the real aim here, long-term, which is adapting computer-learning into our daily lives. And given time, we may have access to AIs that can do the difficult and mind-numbing task of sifting through gigabytes, terabytes and even petabytes of information in order to find answers to tough questions, discern the patterns, and come up with solutions. One can only hope they don’t use that information for evil and try to destroy us!

Knowledge is power, after all…

Sources: fastcoexist.com, bcm.edu

Down with Big Brother: Supreme Court Rules Against Cell Phone Taps

wire_tappingIn another landmark decision, the Supreme Court issued a far-reaching defense of digital privacy by declaring that law enforcement officials are henceforth forbidden from searching cell phones without a warrant at the scene of an arrest or after. The decision was based on two cases in which police searches of mobile devices led to long prison sentences. This decision is just the latest nail in the coffin of warrantless surveillance, a battle that began over a decade ago and has persisted despite promises for change.

The ruling opinion notes that cell phones have in fact become tiny computers in Americans’ pockets teeming with highly private data, and that gaining access to them is now fundamentally different from rifling through someone’s pockets or purse. This contradicts the argument from U.S. prosecutors that a search of a cell phone should instead be treated “as materially indistinguishable” from a search of any other box or bag found on an arrestee’s body.

U.S. Supreme Court Hands Down Major Decisions On Last Day Of SessionThe Court ruling takes this into consideration, and asserted the counter-argument in the ruling opinion:

That is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon. Modern cell phones, as a category, implicate privacy concerns far beyond those implicated by a cigarette pack, a wallet or a purse… A decade ago officers might have occasionally stumbled across a highly personal item such as a diary, but today many of the more than 90% of American adults who own cell phones keep on their person a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives.

In one of the two cases at issue, a California man was charged with assault and attempted murder in relation to a street gang in which he was allegedly a member. The connection between his actions and gang activity were made when police searched his smartphone without a warrant and found videos and photos that prosecutors claimed demonstrated that he was associated with the “Bloods” gang. In short, the contents of his phone were used to put his crime into a context that carried with it a stiffer penalty.

warrantless_phonesearchesIn the second case, a Boston man had his cell phone searched when he was arrested after an apparent drug sale. By finding his home address on his flip phone, police were able search his home and find a larger stash of drugs. Both defendants argued that the warrantless searches violated the fourth amendment. The Supreme Court’s Wednesday ruling sided with both defendants and declared that the searches were unconstitutional.

Privacy groups celebrated the ruling, with Hanni Fakhoury of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) calling it a “bright line, uniform, pro-privacy standard.” The American Civil Liberties Union, the long-time champion of privacy rights and an opponent to all forms of warrantless surveillance, declared the decision “revolutionary.” As Steven R. Shapiro, the ACLU’s national legal director, said in a statement:

By recognizing that the digital revolution has transformed our expectations of privacy, today’s decision…will help to protect the privacy rights of all Americans. We have entered a new world but, as the court today recognized, our old values still apply and limit the government’s ability to rummage through the intimate details of our private lives.

domestic_surveillanceIn its ruling, the court also rejected prosecutors’ notion that the ability to remotely wipe or lock a phone required police to search the devices immediately upon arrest before evidence could be destroyed. The court responded that police can easily prevent evidence from being remotely destroyed by turning the phone off or removing its battery, or putting it into a Faraday cage that blocks radio waves until a search warrant can be obtained.

But perhaps the most remarkable portion of the ruling was its recognition of the unique nature of modern smartphones as personal objects. Even calling them mere “cell phones” is a misnomer. As the ruling reads:

The term ‘cell phone’ is itself misleading shorthand. Many of these devices are in fact minicomputers that also have the capacity to be used as a telephone. They could just as easily be called cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps or newspapers.

warrantless_phonesearches1The EFF’s Fakhoury pointed to language in the ruling about how the sheer volume of data stored on cell phones makes them fundamentally different from other personal objects that might contain private information. This statement that the quantity of information searched matters – rather than merely the kind of information – might influence other privacy cases. As Fakhoury stated, this could have implications for other NSA data-collection programs:

The court recognizes that two pictures reveal something limited but a thousand reveals something very different. Does it mean something different when you’re collecting one person’s phone calls versus collecting everyone’s phone calls over five years? Technology allows the government to see things in quantities they couldn’t see otherwise.

Granted, the court did provide for some exceptions, but only in cases of extraordinary and specific danger – like child abduction or the threat of a terrorist attack. But such specifications require that police establish that an emergency exists before taking drastic action. Occurring on the heels of the Supreme Court decision that outlawed the use of cell phones to track people’s movements, this latest decision is another victory in the battle of privacy versus state security.

And given the precedent it has set, perhaps we can look forward to some meaningful ruling against everything the NSA has been doing in Fort Meade for the past few years. One can always hope, can’t one?

Sources: cnet.com, wired.com, time.com

Little Brother is Watching Back: The NSA Under Fire

11thCCAEarlier this month, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals finished deliberations with the case of United States v. Davis. And the ruling made there is sure to has long-reaching implications for the future of domestic surveillance. In short, the court determined that the NSA’s practice of tracking people’s movements using data from their cell phone without a warrant was unconstitutional. This decision was important for two reasons.

Not only does it provides substantive and procedural protections against abuse of an increasingly common and highly invasive surveillance method, it also also likely to provide support for other cases where security needs trumping privacy is concerned. The Davis decision, in effect, suggests that the U.S. government’s collection of all kinds of business records and transactional data – aka. “metadata” – for law enforcement and national security purposes may also be unconstitutional.

nsa_aerialThe Davis case brought this issue to the fore because the tracking was used to make an arrest. Basically, mobile phones send signals to the nearest cell towers so that the communications network system knows where to route a call should one come in. Many providers collect and store the location of towers a customer connects to at the beginning and end of the call for billing purposes. In this case, FBI agentsobtained these records without a search warrant and used them to place the defendant, Quartavious Davis, near the scene of a number of robberies.

The prosecution argued that cell tracking without a warrant is constitutional per the 1979 case Smith v. Maryland, where the Supreme Court said that phone users have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the phone numbers they dial, and therefore they aren’t protected under the Fourth Amendment. Key to the Smith case was the Court’s view that the suspect had knowingly disclosed the phone numbers to the phone company and therefore had no protection with regard to them.

government-surveillanceAdditionally, Smith built on the 1976 case of United States v. Miller, which held that a person does not have Fourth Amendment rights in their bank records because they are the bank’s business records and not the customer’s private data. Together the cases are known as the “third-party doctrine,” which says that you have no Fourth Amendment interest in a third party’s business records because you have voluntarily disclosed information to the business and assumed the risk of that information being further disclosed to the government.

This third-party doctrine is what the NSA has been using up until now to justify its practice of collecting bulk information on phone-call records as well as its past collection of internet activities and financial information. The details of this warrantless metadata collection was revealed in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, which led to the current round of legal challenges. As we speak, the ones dealing with the phone records bulk-collection program are currently wending their way through the federal courts.

metadataLast December, a District of Columbia judge held that the bulk collection of phone records violates the Fourth Amendment – regardless of Smith – and called the program “almost Orwellian.” Shortly thereafter, a different district court judge relied on Smith to give the program his stamp of approval. This month, a third federal judge was obligated to allow the warrantless collection of records to continue, but opined that the Supreme Court should overturn Smith v. Maryland. 

Relying on the Jones concurrences, the Eleventh Circuit concluded that under the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test, cell phone location data is also protected under the Fourth Amendment, since this data can reveal a range of private matters. The appellate judges also dismissed the argument used in Smith that people lose their right to data submitted to businesses, rejecting the idea that people know in any meaningful way that in using their cell phone they are sending their location information to a provider.

wire_tappingThe appellate judges in Davis, by refusing to apply Smith and Miller to a case involving stored records, have taken a giant step toward undermining the legal justification propping up many of the government’s metadata collection practices. The information that the NSA currently collects include far more detailed data than the simple information at issue in Smith and are far more revealing of private conduct, social networks, and thought processes.

This is especially true because the records are collected in bulk. In Jones, Justice Sotomayor opined that it may be time to rethink the third-party doctrine. The Eleventh Circuit has taken a step in that direction, writing an appellate-level opinion that rejects the extension of those 1970s-era cases to modern communication networks and data. Given the sheer amount of information that is now shared, transferred and processed today, compared to thirty-five years ago, this should come as no surprise.

This is great privacy news for anyone who uses a cell phone. But as a legal precedent, it may also be indicative of what’s coming. In the coming months and years, when the appellate courts finally get hold of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection programs, these programs may very well be knocked down. And if so, one of the last vestiges of the so-called “War on Terror” – a historical episode filled with tragedies, vagaries and abuses of power – may finally be over.

Sources: wired.com

February 11th – The Day We Fight Back

government-surveillanceGood morning all! For those who are unaware, as I was until very recently, this February 11th marks a special day, one which may become a regular thing for people in this day and age. It’s known as “The Day We Fight Back”, an international movement that embraces 360 organizations in 70 countries that are dedicated to ending mass surveillance, like that conducted by the NSA.

At the heart of this cause is the Thirteen Principles, a series of human rights obligations designed to compel all states to stop the mass spying, be it through direct observation with cameras and drones, to digital surveillance involving metadata-mining algorithms. The Principles are already being used in national campaigns and international pressure to reign in organizations like the NSA.

nsasecurity_primary-100041064-largeThese principles include:

1. Legality: In the absence of legislation, no violation of privacy should be considered permissible and this legislative process must meet a standard of clarity and precision that is sufficient to ensure that individuals have advance notice of and can foresee its application. Also, these laws should be subject to period review.

2. Legitimate Aim: No security measures or surveillance should be conducted on the basis of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

3. Necessity: Laws which permit surveillance should be limited to that which can be shown to be permissible by, and consistent with, a legitimate security aim. It should also only be permitted when no other means exist.

4. Adequacy: Any instance of communications surveillance authorized by law must be appropriate to fulfill the specific legitimate aim identified.

gavel5. Proportionality: Decisions about communications surveillance must be made by weighing the benefit of that surveillance against the potential for harm that would be caused to the individual’s or others rights, and then demonstrating the benefit-cost ratio is favorable and justifiable.

6. Competent Judicial Authority: Decisions relating to the authorization of communication surveillance must be made by an independent and impartial judicial authority.

7. Due Process: The State must ensure that lawful procedures that govern any interference with human rights are properly enumerated in law. This means that, except in cases of emergency, every individual is entitled to legislative process by an independent judiciary.

8. User Notification: With few exceptions, individuals should be notified of a decision authorizing communications surveillance with enough time and information to enable them to appeal the decision, and should have access to the materials presented in support of the application for authorization.

9. Transparency: Where applied, the State – and those service providers involved – should provide individuals with sufficient information to enable them to fully comprehend the scope, nature and application of the laws permitting communications surveillance.

cyber_security10. Public Oversight: States should establish independent oversight mechanisms to ensure transparency and accountability and these mechanisms should have the authority to access all potentially relevant information about actions taken in order to assess their legitimacy.

11. Integrity of communications and systems: States should not compel service providers, hardware or software vendors to build surveillance or monitoring capability into their systems, or to collect or retain particular information purely for State surveillance purposes.

12. Safeguards for international cooperation: The mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs) and other agreements entered into by states should ensure that, where the laws of more than one state could apply to communications surveillance, the available standard with the higher level of protection for individual rights is applied.

13. Safeguards against illegitimate access: States should enact legislation that provides significant civil and criminal penalties for public and private organizations that conduct illegal communications surveillance, as well as legal protection for whistle blowers, and avenues for redress by affected individuals.

hackers_securityAll of these principles speak directly to the recent revelations made about domestic and online surveillance by the NSA and other security agencies in the past decade or so. They also embrace numerous suggestions that have been made since the issue first broke in the mid 2000’s about way it could be redressed. These have only become more relevant since, thanks to the expansions that have taken place.

Already, many of them are being seriously considered by the Obama administration as a means of making PRISM and other NSA surveillance programs acceptable. By spelling them out to this degree, the public has the opportunity to make it clear that any surveillance is conditional, and until such time as these conditions are met, the issue will not be closed. I have signed on, and hope that others will as well.

If there’s one thing I have learned in the course of Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance, and the nature of what Keith Alexander and his minions do over at Fort Meade, it is that cyber surveillance is this age is an evolving thing. If the law is expected to evolve with it, and we are to avoid passive acceptance of these intrusions in our lives, then we must play an active role in how that law is written and implemented.

Click on the image below to find out more about this campaign, or to sign on:

TDWFB2

The Future of Security: Privacy Clothing and Drone Shields

surveillanceWith the recent developments being made in the fields of domestic surveillance, unmanned aerial vehicles, and metadata-mining algorithms, it’s quite understandable how many people are afraid for their privacy and their freedom. And with things expected to get worse, thanks in part to mind-machine interfacing and brain scanning, it was only a matter of time before some began to develop countermeasures.

Not too long ago, I came upon a drone art campaign over at DeviantART that addressed the issue of a surveillance-society. In addition to some wonderful artwork, the campaign also showcased a new fashion line known as “Stealth Wear”. Created by Adam Harvey, these “anti-drone garments” were a form of metalized fabric that protect against thermal imaging surveillance, a technology used widely by UAVs/drones.

Stealth-Wear5As it turns out, Harvey and his associates are hardly alone in this venture. Predicting the rise of mind-reading surveillance machinery, a group of designers in Italy began working on a series of thought-blocking accessories designed to maintaining private thoughts in an era when national security agencies and marketers want to get inside our heads.

Designers Lisa Kori Chung and Caitlin Morris, both researchers at Fabrica, started work on the project after they began thinking about the relationship between clothing and privacy – how it both protects and conceals. They researched current surveillance techniques, including facial recognition software, as well as brain scanning technology that’s beginning to accurately recognize emotions and thoughts.

anti-surveillance_wear2Chung and Morris explained the conclusions they reached after extensive researcher, as well as their concept for a fashion-based solution, in a recent interview:

We imagined what it would be like for these things to converge, if clothing played a role in intellectual and emotional privacy as well as the physical privacy it’s always been associated with.

Predicting how the technology might continue to evolve, they created three accessories – a hat transmits sound through bone conduction, a collar that sends a tiny electric shock, and a mask that flashes bright lights. As they explain it, the accessories do not block scanners, but allow a person to distract a surveying machine from seeing whatever it is they want to keep private from it:

Aside from the realistic constraints of long-distance scanning, the premise of detecting people’s general thoughts and moods based on a low-resolution brain scan is a possibility that’s already proving very realistic. We looked into recent studies where researchers were able to detect precise emotions in subjects, and that data is already being used for information on brand recognition and advertising.

anti-surveillance_wear1Each object has a detailed, almost Baroque design inspired by other protective objects. Each one is designed to draw attention away from telltale indicators like the person’s facial structure towards the art itself, along with its special, surveillance-busting features. As they explain, the merger came from existing security concepts, but was altered to look artistic:

We were fascinated by examples of devices intended for security, but designed to look ornamental–such as window bars, fences, the printing inside security envelopes. We wanted to build on this, and to design these technology-heavy pieces as beautifully crafted accessories. It’s an aesthetic that’s missing in a lot of future-wear, but the awareness of craft and textile is an important part of our connection to objects, especially objects that are increasingly technical.

In addition, new technologies are emerging that are designed to counter unmanned aerial drones – something which is expected to become far more common – by alerting people to their presence. It’s known as the Drone Shield, a project that started out in May as an Indiegogo lark, but has since morphed into a serious business affair intended to protect people and businesses from unwanted intrusion.

drone_shieldWith the growing popularity of hobbyist and commercial-grade drones, privacy and security are becoming much more than an abstract concern for a wide-range of interests. Many believe it’s only a matter of time before these kinds of simple drones are engaged for corporate espionage – like taking photos or landing on a roof and hacking into a Wi-Fi network. Or even a physical attack.

Designed by two engineers – Brian Hearing and John Franklin, both of whom spent most of their careers working in the defense and intelligence industry – the UAV detector is a small portable or mountable box that listens for drone noise and sounds an alert if one is close. Using a microphone tuned to pick up background noise, the box analyzes noise and identifies the characteristic acoustic signatures of different kinds of UAVs.

drone_shield1The company has sold about 130 devices for $100, and recently begun distributing a smaller $59 portable version. But according to Brian Hearing, the co-inventor, this is just the beginning:

The goal is to give you enough warning time to either go inside and shut your blinds … or for commercial uses, it’s to call the cops or alert your security… Our longer-term plan is to improve the product so it’s ready for enterprise sales; turn some of our pilot installations into long-term customers, and expand overseas. We’re envisioning installing one of our devices every place you have a security camera.

While the device isn’t sensitive enough to detect military-grade drones high overhead, Hearing claimed it can catch hobbyist devices and (with the help of more expensive and sensitive microphones) commercial drones as well. Another company has tried to detect radio frequency communications of UAVs with a person on the ground, but these signals are easy to mask and as drones grow more autonomous, they will be fewer.

drone_commercialBut as Hearing explained, acoustics are another animal entirely because they are unique and difficult to fake or hide:

Acoustics are good because it’s very difficult to hide them. They sound really unique. There’s really not much else out there that sounds like it–it can tune out leaf blowers, weed whackers, and hair dryers.

Right now, Hearing and his co-founder John Franklin are improving the product to use higher-quality hardware and microphones and sell at a higher price than $100. Having raised the seed money they need through their Indiegogo campaign, they plan to grow their business and expand their current customer base to include major companies.

So in addition to major advances in the fields of biomedicine, nanotechnology and fabrication, the world of tomorrow may also be a place where surveillance wars are a constant, with companies and mischievous individuals constantly trying to get one-up on their competitors. And the rest of us, as usual, will be caught in the middle, looking to protect ourselves.

Sources: fastcoexist, (2), shprojects.com, droneshield

Judgement Day Update: Deep Learning and AIs

brain_chip2Moore’s Law, a sort of general law of computing that was coined by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, states that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. In accordance with this observation, which was made back in 1965, computers have evolved to the point where they are over 650 times faster than they were in the early 1970’s.

Given this trend, scientists and futurists have long suspected that it is only a matter of time before computers surpass human beings in terms of raw intelligence. Already, supercomputers like IBM’s Watson, University of Illinois’ “Blue Waters”, and MIT’s ConceptNet 4 have demonstrated that they are superior in terms of raw knowledge and retention. But when it comes to actual thinking – i.e. independent reasoning and common sense – they are seriously lacking.

IBM_Blue_Gene_P_supercomputerYes, despite all the progress made in the field of computing in the past 40 years, bridging that gap between computational power and artificial intelligence has remained elusive. And at this point, no one is quite sure what it will take to make that leap happen. However, a number of developers and designers are coming up with breakthroughs that may constitute a small jump.

One such breakthrough comes from Standford University, where computer engineers have come up with a new algorithm that could give computers the power to more reliably interpret language. Called Neural Analysis of Sentiment – or NaSent for short – the algorithm seeks to improve on current methods of written language analysis by drawing inspiration from the human brain.

AI_picNaSent is part of a movement in computer science known as deep learning, a new field that seeks to build programs that can process data in much the same way the brain does. According to Richard Socher, the Stanford University grad student who helped develop NaSent:

In the past, sentiment analysis has largely focused on models that ignore word order or rely on human experts. While this works for really simple examples, it will never reach human-level understanding because word meaning changes in context and even experts cannot accurately define all the subtleties of how sentiment works. Our deep learning model solves both problems.

Socher was joined by artificial-intelligence researchers Chris Manning, a Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics at Standford, and Andrew Ng, one of the engineers behind Google’s deep learning project and who is working on creating the “Google Brain”.  Their aim is to develop algorithms that can operate without continued help from humans.

word_cloudWhat sets this algorithm apart is its ability to identify the meaning of words in the context of phrases and sentences. This is a big change from previous methods of sentiment analysis which have been limited to parsing through a collection of words and ranking them as either positive or negative without taking word order into account.

To create NaSent, Socher and his team used 12,000 sentences taken from the movie reviews website Rotten Tomatoes. They split these sentences into roughly 214,000 phrases that were labeled as very negative, negative, neutral, positive, or very positive, and then they fed this labeled data into the system, which NaSent then used to predict whether sentences were positive, neutral or negative on its own.

metadataAccording to the researchers, NaSent is about 85 percent accurate, a 5% improvement over previous models. However, Socher and his team are working on increasing that rate of success by feeding the system more data from Twitter and the Internet Movie Database, and have also set up a live demo where people can type in their own sentences.

And whereas the field of deep learning began in the academic world, it has since spread to web giants such as Google and Facebook. In both cases, the companies have taken to hiring people familiar with the field to help them sort through the growing mountains of data they are indexing to help them improve their products, particularly those that already rely on machine learning.

In Google’s case, these include voice recognition technology, as well as their ongoing work in neural networks. In the case of Facebook, they are looking to deep learning to help them improve Graph Search, a search engine that allows people to search activity on their network. This presents a challenge, mainly because machines have a hard time interpreting the nuances of human language. Just ask Watson, IBM’s own supercomputer!

Sources: wired, (2), (3), engineering.stanford.edu

Cyberwars: America’s Secret Cyber Command

Cyber-WarRecent revelations provided by Edward Snowden have set many people’s teeth on edge. After years of controversy surrounding the use of domestic, warrantless surveillance, things have only gotten worse with the revelation of PRISM and the NSA’s collection of metadata. But as with all things relating to espionage and government secrets, plumbing the depths only seems to reveal greater depths and bigger secrets.

Case in point: the life and times of General Keith Alexander, the undisputed master of America’s cyberwars and intelligence gathering operations. A four-star Army general with active units under his command, he is also a member of the National Security Agency, chief of the Central Security Service, and commander of the US Cyber Command.

When discussing his reasons for going public, Snowden indicated that he was appalled by:

[The] hypocrisy of the U.S. government when it claims that it does not target civilian infrastructure, unlike its adversaries.

cyberwarfare2What he was referring to was ongoing accusations by the US government that sources within China – particularly Unit 61398, a hacking force within the PLA that is located in Shanghai – had been stealing terabytes from data from the US since 2006. As it turns out, the US has its own super-secret cyberwarfare division, one which exists as nominally independent from the NSA.

Located inside Fort Meade, Maryland, this top-secret installation is more of a self-contained city. Tens of thousands of people live here, a city of 50 buildings with its own post office, fire department, and police force and is surrounded by electrified fences and heavily armed guards, protected by antitank barriers, monitored by sensitive motion detectors, and watched by rotating cameras.

To block any telltale electromagnetic signals from escaping, the inner walls of the buildings are wrapped in protective copper shielding and the one-way windows are embedded with a fine copper mesh. Keith Alexander is responsible for building this place up for the past eight years, insisting that the US’s inherent vulnerability to digital attacks required that he and those like him assume more authority over the data zipping around the globe.

NSA_fort_meadeTo hear him tell it, the threat is so paramount that it only makes sense that all power to control the flow of information should be concentrated in as few hands as possible, namely his. In a recent security conference held in Canada, Alexander expressed the threat in the following, cryptic way:

What we see is an increasing level of activity on the networks. I am concerned that this is going to break a threshold where the private sector can no longer handle it and the government is going to have to step in.

If this alone were not reason enough to put people on edge, there are also voices within the NSA who view Alexander as a quintessential larger-than-life personality. One former senior CIA official who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, claimed:

We jokingly referred to him as Emperor Alexander—with good cause, because whatever Keith wants, Keith gets. We would sit back literally in awe of what he was able to get from Congress, from the White House, and at the expense of everybody else.

In this respect, he is not unlike Herbert Hoover, the overbearing bureaucrat who established the FBI and maintained a stranglehold over the nation’s law enforcement for years, even go so far as to blackmail multiple presidents.

cyberwarfareIn its tightly-controlled PR, the NSA has focused attention on the threat of cyberattack against the US, particularly against critical infrastructure like power plants and water systems, the susceptibility of the military’s command and control structure, the dependence of the economy on the internet. Defense against these threats is cited as the very reason for the NSA’s ongoing efforts and everything they do towards that end.

But there is a flip side to this equation that is rarely mentioned: which is the offensive capabilities the US military has been developing offensive capabilities. Using so-called cyber-kinetic attacks, Alexander and his forces now have the capability to physically destroy an adversary’s equipment and infrastructure, measures which he claims are crucial to 21st-century warfare as nuclear arms were in the 20th.

Their first attack was launched in the mid-2000s under the name of Stuxnet, a piece of malware that was created by the NSA, CIA and Israeli intelligence. According to Snowden, this virus – the first ever to be designed to destroy physical equipment – was aimed at Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz. Once unleashed, this worm was able to damage about a thousand centrifuges used to enrich nuclear material.

stuxnet.schemeThe success of this sabotage came to light only in June 2010, when the malware spread to outside computers and spotted by independent security researchers. Despite headlines around the globe, officials in Washington have never openly acknowledged that the US was behind the attack. It wasn’t until 2012 that anonymous sources within the Obama administration took credit for it in interviews with The New York Times.

But of course, Stuxnet was only the beginning. Alexander’s agency has recruited thousands of computer experts, hackers, and engineering PhDs to expand US offensive capabilities in the digital realm over the years. And at a time when the CIA and other intelligence agencies are dealing with up to $4.4 billion in budget cuts, the Pentagon has requested $4.7 billion for “cyberspace operations”. In short, more attacks are likely in the works.

As Chris Cooper said in the seminal movie Syriana: “You dig a 6-foot hole, you’ll find three bodies. But you dig 12, and maybe you’ll find 40.” Eventually, you have to wonder if its time to ditch the shovel. The truth is so often an ugly, frightful, shocking and disturbing thing. And personally, I’ve always felt that rather than turn away, we should hold the people who make it so in strong contempt.

Source: wired.com