Four short links: 2 March 2017
Data Brokers, Robo(mall)Cop, VR IDE, and Causal Inference
- Why Build a Muslim Registry When You Can Buy One? — what data brokers sell and what the government can do with that. “When I talk about digital footprint, people usually think of it like this: if you regularly visit a Muslim website, we might guess that you are Muslim. But that is not what I am talking about. Nowadays, we can go to your Spotify playlist and make a highly accurate prediction that you’re Muslim based on which songs you listen to. You don’t have to have online associations with a political party for the algorithm to infer if you are a Republican or Democrat. By training an algorithm on a large enough data set, we can tell from the patterns in your Facebook likes.”
- Mobile Security Robot (IEEE) — autonomous(ish) security robot that can navigate around pre-mapped areas in buildings, it can recognize people and read badges, and it has a pile of sensors (day-night cameras, lidar, microphone array, RFID and badge readers, and even smoke and CO2 detectors) that helps it to recognize potential security issues (unauthorized people, open doors and windows) and hazards (suspicious items, moved items, water leaks) and flag them for review.
- nunuStudio — a JS-based IDE for 3D and VR applications that run directly on the browser.
- Inferring Causal Impact — An R package for causal inference using Bayesian structural time-series models by Google.
