Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 13
Posts 1 - 10

A Hunt for Ways to Combat Online Radicalization

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 23.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | Google, research/study, social media, threat, YouTube
Summary | Social media companies have only recently begun waking up to the fact that their unpoliced platforms are safe spaces for all kinds of extremism. Studies show that extremists nowadays get radicalized online, whether they be islamists or white supremacists. While these two movements may differ in ideologies, they resemble each otehr very strongly in their internet strategies of recruitment and organization of offline events. A research group at Google has now come up with a diversion strategy to combat the radicalization of individuals online. They target people who watch extremist recruitment videos on YouTube with video suggestions that present differing arguments and the downsides of that ideology. So far, there can be no knowing whether this strategy is helping but the redirection videos are being watched.
Image Description | GIF with mouse cursor arrows: black arrows surrounding a white arrow.
Image Tags | gifs

Teaching A.I. Systems to Behave Themselves

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 13.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, Google, threat
Summary | Artificial intelligence systems have made huge development leaps in recent times but there is still a lot of learning to do. The image recognition AI assistants of Facebook and Google demonstrate how, on the one hand, they can recognize a lot of images correctly if they have had enough data to learn from and, on the other hand, how it still makes bold mistakes. It suffices to manipulate a few pixels and the AI system gets confused. Developing AI systems not only takes a lot of data but also trial and error phases which are monitored and taught by human teachers.
Image Description | Programmers working on computers.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)

Farhad's and Mike's Week in Tech: A Snap and Google Tie-Up?

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 5.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, Google, Instagram, marketing, Snapchat
Summary | There is a rumor that Google might be interested in acquiring Snapchat. Instagram copies all features of Snapchat. Facebook has built a huge marketing company with Facebook itself and Instagram. Facebook is also working on improving its artificially intelligent chatbots so that they get better at understanding natural speech.
Image Description | Google and Snapchat logo.
Image Tags | Google, logo, Snapchat

YouTube Sets Policies To Restrict Extremism

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 18.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google, marketing, threat, YouTube
Summary | Google has been using artificial intelligence to weed out offensive videos from YouTube and take them down. It is quite good at detecting nudity, graphic violence, and copyright violations. However, other less straightforward offensive material remains on the platform such as cultish sermons by extremist muslims. These are however not being monetized by displaying advertising next to them.
Image Description | An image of the London Tower and a portrait of a man.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

Daily Report: The Limits of A.I.

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 16.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, Google, YouTube
Summary | Facebook wants to use artificial intelligence to remove offensive content from their platform. It is however not easy to teach a computer the nuances of offence. Google has tried to do the same thing on YouTube and they have definitely required human employees to double-check the content the artificial intelligence program has flagged.
Image Description | N/A

In Europe’s Election Season, Tech Vies to Fight Fake News

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 1.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, Facebook, fake news, Google, law, politics
Summary | In light of recent elections, many people are eager to combat misinformation online. Major tech companies like Facebook and Google are being pressured to purdue solutions to stop the spread of fake news on their platforms. Germany even demands fines from Facebook for not complying with federal laws targeted at keeping hate speech and fake news controled. Competitions with rewards of several thousand dollars are asking for programmers to come up with fact-checking software which can weed out false news.
Image Description | Image of a computer programmer working on solutions to flag fake news and a Reuters image of election posters from France.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

Google’s Calendar Now Finds Spare Time and Fills It Up

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 13.4.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google
Summary | The Google calendar now lets users enter personal goals like exercising, skill building, and me time which the artificial intelligence algorithm then feeds into the blanks in our calendar. Users can then check whether they have completed the goal at the time the calender suggested and based on that, the calender can learn which times are likely to work out for that particular user and which are not. Users can also connect their calender to a friend's calender to figure out when they both have a gap in their schedule to meet up.
Image Description | GIFs showing a smartphone showing the Google calendar at work.
Image Tags | gifs, Google, smartphone

Uncle Sam Wants Your Deep Neural Networks

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 22.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, artificial intelligence, brain, Facebook, Google
Summary | Image recognition softwares are being developed with artificial intelligence technologies. Programs are fed information that they are supposed to learn from much like a human brain. Google and Facebook have been using such an approach for a while to enable the recognition of faces in images. The field of medicine is also using artificial intelligence softwares to augment doctors' analytic abilities in detecting lung cancer for instance and airport security is using such technology for their body scanners.
Image Description | A woman standing in an airport body scanner with a male officer in the background.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

Surfing With a New Keyboard

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 8.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, GIFs, Google, smartphone, texting, translation, word/writing
Summary | Third party keyboards are now available to download to your smartphone. One of them is Gboard, it is very good at translating your texts in real-time. Some keyboards also offer a search function for emojis or GIFs. The swipe-typing feature is also very popular which allows users to swipe across the letters to enter words rather than type each individual letter.
Image Description | N/A

Planning a Trip With the Help of Google Home

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 31.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google, misunderstanding, smartphone, translation
Summary | Google's artificial intelligence assistant is getting better every day. It is available on all Android smartphones and on the home speaker. It can find out web search queries, translate phrases, and help book a flight by keeping one updated about changing flight fares. Sometimes one however has to adjust one's syntax so that the AI assistant will correctly decode one's request.
Image Description | The Google home personal (AI) assistant speaker.
Image Tags | Google

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