Social Issue in Computing

Lecture # - March 31st, 2017

Who Owns the Internet?

No one really owns the internet.

Net Neutrality

Should Internet providers have the right to slow certain kinds of web traffic?
Should Internet providers have the right to deny access to certain websites?

Access to the Internet

Internet access is assumed to be available to everyone, but it is not
The poor, and thus often people of color and first nations populations, often have less access to internet.

Access to Computer Science

The ability to program a computer changes the kind of problems you solve.
- You don't have to wait for someone to build the program you want to use - you can do it yourself!
But programming is not taught to all grade school students
- BC has taken steps to change that
Again, the poor have limited access to these programs

Privacy

Your data says a lot about you
Who owns your data?
Why should you care?
- Perhaps you can be manipulated by those who have access to your data

Facebook Likes

Can determine a lot about you.

Ads can be micro-targeted

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/big-data-cambridge-analytica-brexit-trump

So what? My Facebook likes are private
- Many apps and online quizzes today require access to private data as a precondition for taking personality tests
Privacy protection is vital for some groups
- Religious groups
- Victims of domestic abuse
- Whistle blowers

Bias in Machine Learning

Garbage in, Garbage out
Bias in, Bias out

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Model of word meaning

Process a large dataset of text gathered from the internet.
How we use words gives us hints about word meaning.
Use statistics about how words are used to infer word meaning.

Word Analogy tasks

These word usage models are really effective at some work meaning tasks
Man is to king as woman is to?
- queen
Man is to programmer as woman is to?
- homemaker

The model is racist

If we build a word model just using tweets from alt-right twitter accounts.

What does it mean?

Take home message