Author: The Conversation

Hashtags are a pervasive feature of social media posts and used widely in search engines. Anything with the intent of attracting a wide audience usually comes with a memorable hashtag — #MeToo, #FreeHongKong, #LoveWins, #BlackLivesMatter, #COVID19 and #SupremeCourt are just some examples. First conceived in 2007 by blogger and open source advocate Chris Messina on Twitter, hashtags are now also escaping from social media contexts and appearing regularly in advertising and protest signs, and even in spoken language. But are hashtags words? If there is one thing linguists ought to know, it’s words. But when it comes to hashtags, the definition is not straightforward. In…

There has been increasing interest in using health “big data” for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As such, it is important to understand which uses of health data are supported by the public and which are not. Previous studies have shown that members of the public see health data as an asset that should be used for research provided there is a public benefit and concerns about privacy, commercial motives and other risks are addressed. However, this general support may not extend to health AI research because of concerns about the potential for AI-related job losses and other negative impacts. Our research team conducted six…

In the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “The Measure of a Man,” Data, an android crew member of the Enterprise, is to be dismantled for research purposes unless Captain Picard can argue that Data deserves the same rights as a human being. Naturally the question arises: What is the basis upon which something has rights? What gives an entity moral standing? The philosopher Peter Singer argues that creatures that can feel pain or suffer have a claim to moral standing. He argues that nonhuman animals have moral standing, since they can feel pain and suffer. Limiting it to people would be a form of speciesism, something akin…

On September 9 2020, a woman died during a cyber-attack on a hospital in Düsseldorf, Germany. The woman was in a critical condition and about to be treated when hackers disabled the computer systems of the hospital. Unable to avert the attack, medical staff had to transfer the woman to another hospital, but the help came too late and the woman died. This incident was the first reported case of death after a cyber-attack and shows that such attacks are not just a threat to our data anymore, but also to our lives. In fact, the situation is urgent. We know…

Twitter over the weekend “tagged” as manipulated a video showing US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden supposedly forgetting which state he’s in while addressing a crowd. Biden’s “hello Minnesota” greeting contrasted with prominent signage reading “Tampa, Florida” and “Text FL to 30330”. The Associated Press’s fact check confirmed the signs were added digitally and the original footage was indeed from a Minnesota rally. But by the time the misleading video was removed it already had more than one million views, The Guardian reports. https://twitter.com/donie/status/1323048954662182913? If you use social media, the chances are you see (and forward) some of the more than 3.2 billion images and 720,000…

The world of computing is full of buzzwords: AI, supercomputers, machine learning, the cloud, quantum computing and more. One word in particular is used throughout computing – algorithm. In the most general sense, an algorithm is a series of instructions telling a computer how to transform a set of facts about the world into useful information. The facts are data, and the useful information is knowledge for people, instructions for machines or input for yet another algorithm. There are many common examples of algorithms, from sorting sets of numbers to finding routes through maps to displaying information on a screen.…

November 2 marks 20 years since the first residents arrived on the International Space Station (ISS). The orbiting habitat has been continuously occupied ever since. Twenty straight years of life in space makes the ISS the ideal “natural laboratory” to understand how societies function beyond Earth. The ISS is a collaboration between 25 space agencies and organisations. It has hosted 241 crew and a few tourists from 19 countries. This is 43% of all the people who have ever travelled in space. As future missions to the Moon and Mars are planned, it’s important to know what people need to thrive in…

The Trump administration’s move to ban the popular video app TikTok has stoked fears about the Chinese government collecting personal information of people who use the app. These fears underscore growing concerns Americans have about digital privacy generally. Debates around privacy might seem simple: Something is private or it’s not. However, the technology that provides digital privacy is anything but simple. Our data privacy research shows that people’s hesitancy to share their data stems in part from not knowing who would have access to it and how organizations that collect data keep it private. We’ve also found that when people are aware of data…

From the mid-2000s onwards, the digital revolution raised hopes of democratic transformation and strengthening in Africa. But it hasn’t quite turned out like that. Now, almost a decade after the “Arab Spring”, techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism. African leaders have proved able to blunt the transformative potential of smart phones through censorship and internet shutdowns. When the internet is on, social media attracts more attention for spreading fake news than preventing election rigging. What was once thought of as “liberation technology” has turned out to be remarkably compatible with the maintenance of the status quo. Or has it? Does this more pessimistic reading…

As COVID-19 continues to force many schools to operate remotely, cities throughout the nation are stepping up to provide free internet service to public school students from families of lesser means. Washington, D.C., plans to provide free internet access to K-12 students in 25,000 low-income households for the 2020-2021 school year. In Philadelphia, any family with a public school student lacking internet service can get it free through June of 2022. In Chicago, a similar effort will provide free high-speed internet service to 100,000 public school students over the next four years. Since research consistently shows that students with internet access tend to do better academically than those without, the…