Q&A: Facebook’s CTO Is at War With Bad Content, and AI Is His Best Weapon

Photo: Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer leads the company’s AI and integrity efforts. Facebook’s challenge is huge. Billions of pieces of content—short and long posts, images, and combinations of the two—are uploaded to the site daily from around the world. And any tiny piece of that—any phrase, image, or video—could contain so-called bad content. In its early days, Facebook relied on simple computer filters to identify potentially problematic posts by their words, such as those containing profanity. These automatically filtered posts, as well as posts flagged by users as offensive, went to humans for adjudication. In 2015, Facebook started using artificial intelligence to cull images that contained nudity, illegal goods, and other prohibited content; those images identified as possibly problematic were sent to humans for further review. By 2016, more offensive photos were reported by Facebook’s AI systems than by Facebook users (and that Continue reading Q&A: Facebook’s CTO Is at War With Bad Content, and AI Is His Best Weapon

How Political Campaigns Weaponize Social Media Bots

Analysis of computational propaganda in the 2016 U.S. presidential election reveals the reach of bots Illustration: Jude Buffum In the summer of 2017, a group of young political activists in the United Kingdom figured out how to use the popular dating app Tinder to attract new supporters. They understood how Tinder’s social networking platform worked, how its users tended to use the app, and how its algorithms distributed content, and so they built a bot to automate flirty exchanges with real people. Over time, those flirty conversations would turn to politics—and to the strengths of the U.K.’s Labour Party. To send its messages, the bot would take over a Tinder profile owned by a Labour-friendly user who’d agreed to the temporary repurposing of his or her account. Eventually, the bot sent somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 messages, targeting 18- to 25-year-olds in constituencies where the Labour candidates were running in tight Continue reading How Political Campaigns Weaponize Social Media Bots

Coding for Catastrophe: Contest Seeks Apps to Mitigate Effects of Natural Disasters

Got a great idea for an app to help people deal with a natural disaster? Call for Code wants to hear from you Illustrations: iStockphoto and Shutterstock The United Nations’ Human Rights Office, the American Red Cross, the David Clark Cause, and IBM today announced Call for Code, a contest seeking applications that address natural disasters—aiding either prevention, response, or recovery.  The disasters of 2017—fires, floods, earthquakes, and storms—stretched the capacity of traditional response methods, and sparked the United Nations to look for innovative ways to improve the situation, a press release from IBM indicated. The contest’s application window opens 18 June; the last day for submissions is 31 August. Every entrant will, during the contest period, receive access to a number of IBM’s technologies, including its Cloud, Blockchain, Watson, PowerAI, and Z mainframe platforms. The winner of the Call for Code Global Prize, to be announced in October, will Continue reading Coding for Catastrophe: Contest Seeks Apps to Mitigate Effects of Natural Disasters

Hiding Information in Plain Text

Subtle changes to letter shapes can embed messages Image: Columbia University Computer scientists have now invented a way to hide secret messages in ordinary text by imperceptibly changing the shapes of letters. The new technique, named FontCode , works with common font families such as Times Roman and Helvetica. It is compatible with most word-processing software, including Microsoft Word, as well as image-editing and drawing programs, such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Although there are obvious applications for espionage with FontCode, its inventors suggest it has more practical uses in terms of embedding metadata into texts, much like watermarking. “You can imagine that it would be used to provide extra information, such as authors, copyright and so on, about a document,” says study senior author Changxi Zheng, a computer scientist at Columbia University. “Another application is to protect legal documents: Our technique can be used to detect if a document, even Continue reading Hiding Information in Plain Text