AI ethics in May 2016

Algorithms have come to shape our daily lives and realities. They change the perception of the world, affect our behavior by influencing our choices, and are an important source of social order. Algorithms on the Internet have significant economic implications in newly emerging markets and for existing markets in various sectors. A wide range of our daily activities in general and our media consumption in particular are increasingly shaped by algorithms operating behind the scenes. This chapter

Functional connectivity (FC), obtained from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), brings insights into the functional organization of the brain. Recently, rich and complex behaviour of brain has been revealed by the dynamic fluctuation of FC, which had previously been regarded as confounding 'noise'. While the dynamics of long-distance, inter-regional FC has been extensively studied, the dynamics of local FC within a few millimetres in space remains largely unexplored. In this study, the

In the current highly interconnected modern world, the role of consumers has changed substantially due to their active collaboration with companies in product and process innovation. Specifically, consumer participation has become key to the development of successful products and services, as companies have come to rely more and more on consumers' opinion as a source of innovative ideas and brand value. However, whereas existing research has focused on identifying the different elements involved

It is widely assumed that the use of medical care will lead to improvements in health, yet questions remain about the medical system's contributions to health disparities. In this review, we examine these issues with a specific focus on how health care systems may actually generate or exacerbate health disparities. We review current knowledge about inequality and bias in the health care system, including the epidemiology of such patterns and their underlying mechanisms. Over the past three decad

OBJECTIVE: Consumers are living longer, creating more pressure on the health system and increasing their requirement for self-care of chronic conditions. Despite rapidly-increasing numbers of mobile health applications ('apps') for consumers' self-care, there is a paucity of research into consumer engagement with electronic self-monitoring. This paper presents a qualitative exploration of how health consumers use apps for health monitoring, their perceived benefits from use of health apps, and s

Stress remains a significant social problem for individuals in modern societies. This paper presents a machine learning approach for the automatic detection of stress of people in a social situation by combining two sensor systems that capture physiological and social responses. We compare the performance using different classifiers including support vector machine, AdaBoost, and [Formula: see text]-nearest neighbor. Our experimental results show that by combining the measurements from both sens

Frequency effects are pervasive in studies of language, with higher frequency words being recognized faster than lower frequency words. However, the exact nature of frequency effects has recently been questioned, with some studies finding that contextual information provides a better fit to lexical decision and naming data than word frequency (Adelman et al., 2006). Recent work has cemented the importance of these results by demonstrating that a measure of the semantic diversity of the contexts

In recent years, there has been a revival of concerns that automation and digitalisation might after all result in a jobless future. The debate has been fuelled by studies for the US and Europe arguing that a substantial share of jobs is at “risk of computerisation”. These studies follow an occupation-based approach proposed by Frey and Osborne (2013), i.e. they assume that whole occupations rather than single job-tasks are automated by technology. As we argue, this might lead to an overestimati

Abstract This article argues that some core tenets of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) can serve as heuristics for a better understanding of what the stakes of cyber-security are, how it operates, and how it fails. Despite the centrality of cyber-incidents in the cyber-security discourse, researchers have yet to understand their link to, and affects on politics. We close this gap by combining ANT insights with an empirical examination of a prominent cyber-incident (Stuxnet). We demonstrate that the di

This paper examines the question of "values in repair" -- the distinct forms of meaning and care that may be built into human-technology interactions through individual and collective acts of repair. Our work draws on research in HCI and the social sciences and findings from ethnographic studies in four sites -- two amateur "fixers" collectives' in Brooklyn and Seattle, USA and two mobile phone repair communities in Uganda and Bangladesh -- to advance two arguments. First, studies of repair acco

What are the limits of automated Twitter sentiment classification? We analyze a large set of manually labeled tweets in different languages, use them as training data, and construct automated classification models. It turns out that the quality of classification models depends much more on the quality and size of training data than on the type of the model trained. Experimental results indicate that there is no statistically significant difference between the performance of the top classificatio

BACKGROUND: Despite the growing prominence of professional (non-technical) competencies in veterinary education, the evidence to support their importance to veterinary graduates is unclear. AIM: To summarize current evidence within the veterinary literature for the importance of professional competencies to graduate success. METHODS: A systematic search of electronic databases was conducted (CAB Abstracts, Web of Science, PubMed, PsycINFO, ERIC, Australian and British Education Index, Dissertati

BACKGROUND: Recent advances in single-cell techniques have provided the opportunity to finely dissect cellular heterogeneity within populations previously defined by "bulk" assays and to uncover rare cell types. In human hematopoiesis, megakaryocytes and erythroid cells differentiate from a shared precursor, the megakaryocyte-erythroid progenitor (MEP), which remains poorly defined. RESULTS: To clarify the cellular pathway in erythro-megakaryocyte differentiation, we correlate the surface immuno

Conspiracy theories are typically thought to be examples of irrational beliefs, and thus unlikely to be warranted. However, recent work in Philosophy has challenged the claim that belief in conspiracy theories is irrational, showing that in a range of cases, belief in conspiracy theories is warranted. However, it is still often said that conspiracy theories are unlikely relative to non-conspiratorial explanations which account for the same phenomena. However, such arguments turn out to rest upon