Wow: How are algorithms distributing power between people?

The 21 (and Counting) Biggest Facebook Scandals of 2018 - Wired: “Every January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces a personal challenge he will undertake in the year ahead. In 2016, he committed to running 365 miles before the year was up. In 2017, he milked cows and rode tractors as part of his resolution to meet more people outside the Silicon Valley bubble. Last January, he took a different tack. After a year in which Facebook was accused of amplifying fake news and allowing Russian trolls to deceive American voters in the run-up to the 2016 election, Zuckerberg decided that for his personal challenge in 2018, he would go ahead and fix Facebook. He just might not have realized how much he’d be asked to fix.

• As the months progressed, Facebook turned into a hydra, with new scandals sprouting almost weekly. Its stock price tanked, and internal morale plummeted. Twelve months later, Facebook has certainly changed, but it’s hardly fixed. In 2018, the social giant juggled so many crises, you probably forgot half of them. Here’s a refresher…”

Why Cold River and Other Books Matter in the Long Long Term: “Book publishing is a business and increasingly a technical one, but at its heart it is an art, writes Peter J. Dougherty in this opinion piece. He is the editor-at-large at Princeton University Press, for which he was the director from 2005 until his retirement in 2017, and currently sits as the Fox Family Pavilion Scholar and distinguished senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Why have Eric Schmidt, Meg Whitman, Reid Hoffman, John Doerr and other leading technologists resorted to the venerable (some would say backward) practice of book-writing to communicate their visions? Why did Mark Zuckerberg introduce a quaint book-of-the-month feature onto the runaway train of Facebook? Why does Bill Gates regularly pen long, thoughtful book reviews in a whirlwind communications culture fueled by texts and tweets? How have books survived the information tsunami, and what will authors and publishers have to do to leverage the success of books for the long run?

The answer resides in a seemingly incongruous combination of traits: First, in the time-honored authority of influence books hold among readers; and second, in the ways in which disruptive technological change can strengthen rather than weaken that influence…”

Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University: “Why Computer Scientists Need Philosophers, According to a Mathematician – “Lily Hu is a 3rd year PhD candidate in Applied Mathematics at Harvard University, where she studies algorithmic fairness with special interest in its interaction with various philosophical notions of justice. Currently, she is an intern at Microsoft Research New York City and a member of the Mechanism Design for Social Good research group (co-founded by Berkman affiliateRediet Abebe). She is also passionate about education equity; she has taught subjects such as physics, biology, chemistry, English, and Spanish History/Geography in San Francisco, Cambridge, and Madrid. Note: Lily Hu was Julia’s high school calculus tutor. At that time, neither of them knew they were interested in machine learning ethics. The Berkman Klein Center has unwittingly brought them together again, where Julia and Nikhil were assigned to interview Lily, three years later.

How are algorithms distributing power between people? What kind of questions are they enabling us to ask, what kind of questions are they enabling us to solve, and not only that, but what kind of questions are they preventing us from answering? JULIA: Can you elaborate on the work you’re doing at the Berkman Klein Center — an overview of the project, where you’re at right now, and where you hope to be at the end of the 1-year fellowship?

I work in algorithmic fairness; in particular, I’m interested in thinking about algorithmic systems as explicitly resource distribution mechanisms. I’m not interested in necessarily how the particulars of the sorting happens; I’m interested in the final outcomes that are issued, and I am interested in the distributional outcomes that are deemed to be appropriate or inappropriate under our various fairness notions. How are algorithms distributing power between people? What kind of questions are they enabling us to ask, what kind of questions are they enabling us to solve, and not only that, but what kind of questions are they preventing us from answering? That’s kind of my big research agenda…”