Palantir and Anduril: Best Buds for Sure
March 12, 2021
I read “Anduril Industries Joins Palantir Technologies’ TITAN Industry Team.” In the good old days I would have been zipping from conference to conference outputting my ideas. Now I sit in rural Kentucky and fire blog posts into the datasphere.
This post calls attention to an explicit tie up between two Peter Thiel-associated entities: Palantir Technologies and Anduril. The latter is an interesting company with some nifty smart technology, including a drone which has the cheerful name “Anvil.”
For details about the new US Army project and the relationship between these two companies, the blog post was online as of March 8, 2021. (Some information may be removed, and I can’t do much about what other outfits do.)
Information about Anduril is available at their Web site. Palantir is everywhere and famous in the intelware business and among some legal eagles. No, I don’t have a Lord of the Rings fetish, but some forever young folks do.
Stephen E Arnold, March 12, 2021
Amazon and Personnel Wizardry?
March 11, 2021
Amazon likes to say it successfully promotes diversity and inclusion in its company, and some of the numbers it touts do represent a measure of success. However, there appears to be a lot of work left to do and not enough will to do it from the powerful “S Team.” Recode discusses “Bias, Disrespect and Demotions: Black Employees Say Amazon Has a Race Problem.” The extensive article begins with the story of former employee Chanin Kelly-Rae, a former global manager of diversity for AWS. She began the position with high hopes, but quit in dismay 10 months later. Reporter Meron Menghistab writes:
“Kelly-Rae, who is Black, is one of more than a dozen former and current Amazon corporate employees — 10 of whom are Black — who told Recode in interviews over the past few months that they felt the company has failed to create a corporate-wide environment where all Black employees feel welcomed and respected. Instead, they told Recode that, in their experience, Black employees at the company often face both direct and insidious bias that harms their careers and personal lives. All of the current and former employees, other than Kelly-Rae, spoke on condition of anonymity either because of the terms of their employment with Amazon or because they fear retribution from Amazon for speaking out about their experiences. Current and former Amazon diversity and inclusion professionals — employees whose work focuses on helping Amazon create and maintain an equitable workplace and products — told Recode that internal data shows that Amazon’s review and promotion systems have created an unlevel playing field. Black employees receive ‘least effective’ marks more often than all other colleagues and are promoted at a lower rate than non-Black peers. Recode reviewed some of this data for the Amazon Web Services division of the company, and it shows large disparities in performance review ratings between Black and white employees.”
Amazon, of course, disagrees with this characterization, but it is difficult to argue with all the points Menghistab considers: the many unsettling comments made to and about Black employees by higher-ups; the reluctance of management to embrace best practices suggested by their own diversity experts; the fact that diversity goals do not extend to top management positions; the rampant “down-leveling” of employees of color, its long-term effects on each worker, and the low chances of promotion; a hesitation to hire from historically Black colleges; and the problematic “Earns Trust” evaluation metric. We suggest interested readers navigate to the article to learn more about each of these and other factors.
Some minority employees say they have reason to hope. For one thing, the problems do not pervade the entire company—many teams happily hum along without any of these problems. The company is making a few small steps in the right direction, like requiring workers undergo diversity and inclusion training, participating in the Management Leadership of Tomorrow’s Black Equity at Work Certification, and holding a virtual career-enrichment summit for Black, Latinx, and Native American prospective employees. There will never be a quick and easy fix for the tech behemoth, but as Kelly-Rae observes:
“Amazon is really good at things it wants to be good at, and if Amazon decided it really wanted to be good at this, I have no doubt it can be.”
Time to step it up, Amazon.
Cynthia Murrell, March 11, 2021
Who Should Watch Over Smart Software? No One. Self Regulation Is the Answer
March 11, 2021
I read an amusing academic paper article called “Someone to Watch Over AI and Keep It Honest – and t’s Not the Public!.” The idea is that self regulation works. Full stop. Ignoring the 737 Max event and Facebook’s legal move to get anti-trust litigation dumped, the write up reports:
Dr Bran Knowles, a senior lecturer in data science at Lancaster University, says: “I’m certain that the public are incapable of determining the trustworthiness of individual AIs… but we don’t need them to do this. It’s not their responsibility to keep AI honest.”
And what’s the smart software entity figuring prominently in the write up? Amazon, the Google, or Twitter?
Nope.
IBM.
The idea, at least in the construct of the cited article, is that trust is important. And whom does one trust?
IBM.
How do I know there’s an element of trust required to accept this fine scholarly article?
Here’s a clue:
The paper is co-authored by John T. Richards, of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York.
Yep, the home of the game shown winner and arguably one of the few smart software systems to be put on a gurney and rolled out the door of a Houston, Texas medical facility.
But just in case the self regulation thing doesn’t work, the scholarly experts’ findings point to “a regulatory ecosystem.”
Yep, regulations. How’s that been working out in the last 20 years?
Why not ask IBM Watson?
Stephen E Arnold, March 11, 2021
What Can Be Like a Bee? A Drone
March 11, 2021
Drones are mainly associated with aerial photography, eventual package deliveries, and unmanned attacks. None of these, however, drive drone scientists to improve the robot technology. What really moves them forward is the desire to replicate bees’ graceful movements and fully seeing flowers’ ultimate beauty says Science Daily in the article, “Appreciating A Flower’s Texture, Color, And Shapes Leads To Better Drone Landings.”
Technically it should be impossible for bees to fly, but reality proves that idea wrong. Bees are amazing navigators who use optical flow, perceiving an object’s speed in their view field. Robotics researchers designed an algorithm based off the optical view concept to allow robots to judge distances by visual cues (colors, shapes, and textures).
Drones will learn from the optical flow AI, but the concept has limitations:
“Optical flow has two fundamental limitations that have been widely described in the growing literature on bio-inspired robotics. The first is that optical flow only provides mixed information on distances and velocities — and not on distance or velocity separately. To illustrate, if there are two landing drones and one of them flies twice as high and twice as fast as the other drone, then they experience exactly the same optical flow. However, for good control these two drones should actually react differently to deviations in the optical flow divergence. If a drone does not adapt its reactions to the height when landing, it will never arrive and start to oscillate above the landing surface. Second, for obstacle avoidance it is very unfortunate that in the direction in which a robot is moving, the optical flow is very small. This means that in that direction, optical flow measurements are noisy and hence provide very little information on the presence of obstacles. Hence, the most important obstacles — the ones that the robot is moving towards — are actually the hardest ones to detect!
The limitations can be fixed if robots can interpret optical flow and visual appearances of objects in their field. Seeing some distance by visual appearances resulted in better landings for drones.
Learning how to land the drones leads to better understanding of insects’ intelligence. Biology and robotics do not often mesh outside of science fiction, but tiny bees could leads to advances in robotic navigation.
Whitney Grace, March 11, 2021
Search and Privacy: Those Log Files Are Tempting However
March 11, 2021
Search has been a basic Internet function since its inception, but when it was first invented protecting users’ privacy was not a concern. Nowadays a simple search reveals users’ interests, locations, and much more information that can be sold or stolen. TechRadar explains why search needs to be redesigned with privacy as the top priority: “Why We Need To Rebuild Internet Search, Putting User Privacy First.”
Early Internet developers wanted to make money from their new invention in order to build new technology. Investors and developers were happy, because there was a profit. Early Internet advertising, however, transformed into a big privacy problem today:
“Problems later emerged because what started out as a quick fix to a short-term problem turned into a central part of the internet’s architecture. Like anything else in tech, engineers quickly went to work optimizing advertising to be as efficient as possible, stumbling into a situation where the world’s biggest and most powerful companies were suddenly incentivized to gather more and more personal data on users to sell advertising. This resulted in algorithms to maximize engagement on content sites that prioritized instinctive and emotional decisions – or “fast thinking” as the Nobel Prize winner in behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman calls it.”
The information superhighway has turned into a giant consumerism tool that spreads fake news, radicalization, pushes unneeded products and services, and feeds on peoples’ insecurities. Driving sales to stir the economy is one thing, but the spread of misinformation and radicalization leads to dangerous situations, including the recent coup attempt on Washington D.C. and constant backfires against science.
User-experience drives technology design and development, so any new search protocols must have today’s ease of use. Currently multi-party computation (MPC) replicates blockchain-like technology so it protects users’ privacy. Selected computers directly access encrypted data without knowing anything about the data, dubbed zero-knowledge computation.
Zero-knowledge computation is a good solution to protecting user privacy, but there is a big problem preventing more development: money. Advertisers and businesses love the current search system, because it feeds their bottom line. Most users do not protect their data, but if they demanded more privacy protections then organizations would invest more money in that area.
Whitney Grace, March 11, 2021
Changes in Social Media To Go Beyond the Feed
March 11, 2021
Social media platforms are, perhaps regrettably, not going anywhere. They are evolving, however, according to “The New Era of Social Media Isn’t About Feeds” at OneZero. We have grown used to scrolling through our social media feeds, and advertisers have grown used to meeting us there. Writer Will Oremus observes:
“But while these feeds may be addictive, they’re also exhausting and numbing. When every post in your feed has been selected from a huge pool of possible posts for its attention-grabbing qualities, you can start to feel shouted at, manipulated, pandered to, and overwhelmed. Over time, it might dawn on you that the feed’s value to your life is less than the sum of its posts. Not to mention, the value to society of bombarding everyone with attention bait from all sides is, let’s say, mixed at best. I think that’s part of why we’re starting to see a new crop of platforms that operate according to a different logic — a logic of loyalty, intentionality, and deliberate payment (whether of attention or money). The Pattern: New digital media products are focusing on low-volume, high-attention relationships rather than high-volume, low-attention feeds.”
Oremus takes a look at some new and upcoming products and features that point in this new direction. For example, Twitter plans to launch Communities, which will form groups around common interests. There is also Super Follows, also from Twitter, which suggests a monetization alternative to advertising—the feature will allow users to charge for “premium” tweets or other content. We agree with Oremus that this might be a profitable avenue for celebrities, less so for journalists. See the write-up for more examples.
Whatever specific ideas sink or swim, this tinkering indicates a new direction for social media—more deliberate user choices and less aimless scrolling through whatever an algorithm sends our way. This sounds like a welcome shift, but will it be enough to combat filter bubbles and fake news?
Cynthia Murrell, March 11, 2021
Business Process Management: Buzzy Again
March 10, 2021
If you never heard about business process management (BPM) it means the practice of discovering and controlling an organization’s processes so they will align with business goals as the company evolves. BPM software is the next phase of business intelligence software for enterprises. CIO explains what to expect from BPM software in the article: “What Is Business Process Management? The Key To Enterprise Agility.”
BPM software maps definitions to existing processes, defines steps to carry out tasks, and tips for streamlining/improving practices. Organizations are constantly shifting to meet their goals and BPM is software is advertised as the best way to refine and control changing environments. All good BPM software should have the following: alignment of the firm’s resources, increase discipline in daily operations, and clarify on strategic direction. While most organizations want flexibility they lack it:
“A company can only be as flexible, efficient, and agile as the interaction of its business processes allow. Here’s the problem: Many companies develop business processes in isolation from other processes they interact with, or worse, they don’t “develop” business processes at all. In many cases, processes simply come into existence as “the way things have always been done,” or because software systems dictate them. As a result, many companies are hampered by their processes, and will continue to be so until those processes are optimized.”
When selecting a BPM software it should be capable of integrations, analytics, collaboration, form generation, have a business rules engine, and workflow managements.
BPM sounds like the next phase of big data, where hidden insights are uncovered in unstructured data. BPM takes these insights, then merges them with an organization’s goals. Business intelligence improves business processes, big data discovers insights, and BPM organizes all of it.
Whitney Grace, March 10, 2021
IA Scholar: A Reminder That Existing Online Resources Are Not Comprehensive
March 10, 2021
We spotted this announcement from the Internet Archive in “Search Scholarly Materials Preserved in the Internet Archive.”
IA Scholar is a simple, access-oriented interface to content identified across several Internet Archive collections, including web archives, archive.org files, and digitized print materials. The full text of articles is searchable for users that are hunting for particular phrases or keywords. This complements our existing full-text search index of millions of digitized books and other documents on archive.org. The service builds on Fatcat, an open catalog we have developed to identify at-risk and web-published open scholarly outputs that can benefit from long-term preservation, additional metadata, and perpetual access. Fatcat includes resources that may be useful to librarians and archivists, such as bulk metadata dumps, a read/write API, command-line tool, and file-level archival metadata. If you are interested in collaborating with us, or are a researcher interested in text analysis applications, we have a public chat channel or can be contacted by email at info@archive.org.
I ran several queries. The system is set up to respond to a conference name, but free text entries worked find; for example, NLP. Here are the results:
Worth checking out. In my experience people who are “experts” in online often forget that no online service is up to date, comprehensive, and set up to deliver full text. One other point: Corrections to online content are rarely, if ever made. Business Dateline, produced by the Courier Journal and Louisville Times in the early 1980s was one of the first commercial databases to include corrections. Thumbtypers may not care, but that’s the zippy modern world.
Stephen E Arnold, March 10, 2021
Cyprus: Illuminating Some Interesting Organizations
March 10, 2021
Cyprus, a fine island, can be baffling to first time visitors. Some of the confusion may be reduced if the information in “Cyprus to Life Veil of Secrecy with Register of Company Owners.” Some firms in the specialized services game have offices in Nicosia. Some are housed in what look like fancy villas or zippy apartment buildings. The listing of company owners is not available, but allegedly the list will become available in the near future. Why is this a big deal? Some bad actors use Cyprus as a headquarters and financial resource center. Why not part a super yacht and take care of business in above average anonymity. The list may be called the “Ultimate Beneficial Owner” register. Among the individuals concerned about this new sunlight are quite interesting individuals allied with certain powerful Eastern European leaders and “organizations.” Who is in charge of this project? Cyprus’s Ministry of Energy, Commerce, and Industry. Will that individual exercise some additional caution? We will know and maybe get a chance to learn about the UBO people. Maybe.
Stephen E Arnold, March 11, 2021
Sweden: Herring and Privacy
March 10, 2021
Considering all the privacy-related charges European authorities have made against tech companies, we are surprised to learn that “Swedish Authorities Pass On Personal Data of Web Visitors to Google” from the Big News Network. It sounds like the transgressions may not have been intentional. We are told:
“A number of government agencies in Sweden pass on personal data belonging to individuals who visit their websites to Google despite guaranteeing anonymity, local media reported on Thursday. More than 80 government agencies and over 150 authorities pass on personal data in the form of IP addresses belonging to those using their websites without informing them, according to Radio Sweden News. The European Court of Justice has ruled that IP addresses can be used to identify individuals, according to the report. The information is then stored on servers in the United States, making the issue more sensitive as personal data protection is not as strong as within the European Union.”
We are given the example of Statistics Sweden, which had more than 10 million visits last year alone. The agency’s communications director seemed surprised to learn the site has been forwarding IP addresses to Google for over two years. Since Radio Sweden News broke the story, several Swedish agencies and authorities have removed Google Analytics from their websites. Better late than never, we suppose, just like herring nine ways.
Cynthia Murrell, March 10, 2021
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