Originally published in Vulture, April 28, 2021. Ten years ago, Netflix got the idea that its app should work more like regular TV. This was early on in its transition from DVD delivery to streaming on demand, and product engineers at the company were still figuring out how the platform’s user interface would work. Instead
Originally published in MARTIN FLEISCHMANN, April 27, 2021. When we want to do some cluster analysis to identify groups in our data, we often use algorithms like K-Means, which require the specification of a number of clusters....
Originally published in FTC, April 19, 2021: Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology promise to revolutionize our approach to medicine, finance, business operations, media, and more. But research has highlighted how apparently “neutral” technology can produce troubling...
Originally published in Patterns, April 9, 2021. A surprisingly sticky belief is that a machine learning model merely reflects existing algorithmic bias in the dataset and does not itself contribute to harm. Why, despite clear evidence to the...
Originally published in Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2021. Sonoma County is adding artificial intelligence to its wildfire-fighting arsenal. The county has entered into an agreement with the South Korean firm Alchera to outfit its network of...
Originally published in Blogboard Journal, Jan 7, 2021. In this article we’ll look at several case studies of data science being used to optimize marketing efforts at companies like Lyft, Airbnb, Netflix, Doordash, Wolt, Rovio Entertainment. In...
Originally published in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 8, 2021. Method builds on gaming techniques to help autonomous vehicles navigate in the real world, where signals may be imperfect. In a perfect world, what you see is...
Originally published in MIT Technology Review, March 11, 2021. The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem. Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a...
Originally published in MIT Technology Review, Feb 26, 2021. Counselors volunteering at the Trevor Project need to be prepared for their first conversation with an LGBTQ teen who may be thinking about suicide. So first, they practice....
Originally published in Protocol, Feb 18, 2021. This is the story of Li An, a pseudonymous former employee at ByteDance, as told to Protocol’s Shen Lu. I wasn’t proud of it, and neither were my coworkers. But...
