AI agents have improved rapidly and demonstrate remarkable capabilities in areas such as communication and software programming. In this interview, MPI-SWS director Krishna Gummadi clarifies the characteristics of AI agents and discusses the benefits they offer people and the risks they pose to society.
MPI-SWS faculty member Elissa Redmiles, along with collaborators Samuel Dooley and Professor John Dickerson from the University of Maryland as well as Professor Dana Turjeman from Reichman University, helped the Louisiana Department of Health advertise their COVID19 contact tracing app. As part of this work, the researchers conducted a randomized, controlled field experiment to provide guidance to other jurisdictions on how to most effectively and ethically advertise these public health tools.The Linux Public Health Foundation has featured their findings as guidance for other jurisdictions looking to advertise their contact tracing apps.
...MPI-SWS faculty member Elissa Redmiles, along with collaborators Samuel Dooley and Professor John Dickerson from the University of Maryland as well as Professor Dana Turjeman from Reichman University, helped the Louisiana Department of Health advertise their COVID19 contact tracing app. As part of this work, the researchers conducted a randomized, controlled field experiment to provide guidance to other jurisdictions on how to most effectively and ethically advertise these public health tools.The Linux Public Health Foundation has featured their findings as guidance for other jurisdictions looking to advertise their contact tracing apps. This work is part of a larger project Redmiles leads on ethical adoption of COVID 19 apps: https://covidadoptionproject.mpi-sws.org/.
MPI-SWS faculty member Elissa Redmiles was quoted in Rolling Stone, El Pais -- Spain's largest newspaper -- and in NetzPolitik regarding ongoing research in collaboration with MPI-SWS group member Vaughn Hamilton and MPI-SWS Intern Hanna Barakat (also at Brown University) on the shift toward digital sex work as a result of COVID19, as well as her work with collaborators Catherine Barwulor (Clemson University), Allison McDonald (University of Michigan),
...MPI-SWS faculty member Elissa Redmiles was quoted in Rolling Stone, El Pais -- Spain's largest newspaper -- and in NetzPolitik regarding ongoing research in collaboration with MPI-SWS group member Vaughn Hamilton and MPI-SWS Intern Hanna Barakat (also at Brown University) on the shift toward digital sex work as a result of COVID19, as well as her work with collaborators Catherine Barwulor (Clemson University), Allison McDonald (University of Michigan), and Eszter Hargittai (University of Zurich) on digital discrimination against European sex workers, originally published in ACM CHI.
On January 9, 2020, MPI-SWS faculty member Paul Francis published the article Dear Differential Privacy: Put Up or Shut Up, on Medium. The article, which has now reached 1000 views, describes the failure of Differential Privacy as the basis for data protection in the Facebook / Social Sciences One project.
The Facebook / Social Sciences One project is an attempt to release Facebook data on URL sharing to researchers so as to better understand the role of Facebook in influencing elections.
...On January 9, 2020, MPI-SWS faculty member Paul Francis published the article Dear Differential Privacy: Put Up or Shut Up, on Medium. The article, which has now reached 1000 views, describes the failure of Differential Privacy as the basis for data protection in the Facebook / Social Sciences One project.
The Facebook / Social Sciences One project is an attempt to release Facebook data on URL sharing to researchers so as to better understand the role of Facebook in influencing elections. The project raised 11 million dollars from private funders, and research grants were awarded to twelve research teams around the world. Facebook decided to use Differential Privacy as the means of anonymizing the data. After one year, however, Facebook had not supplied the data. When the funders threatened to pull the funding, Facebook did release a dataset, but the quality of the data was so poor that the proposed research could not be done.
Francis' article describes how and why the data release failed, discusses the shortcomings of Differential Privacy, and calls on the privacy research community to expand the scope of what passes for valid data anonymity research.
An article in the career guide of Nature titled "How Germany is winning at turning its research to commercial application" mentions the work of Paul Francis' group on anonymization and the spinoff Aircloak.
Paul Francis was featured in an interview by CNIL, the French national data protection authority. The interview discusses the innovative way in which MPI-SWS is tackling the data anonymity problem. The interview follows Paul's visit to CNIL in May 2018, where he presented the first-ever bounty program for anonymity. The bounty program, designed by MPI-SWS and implemented by the startup Aircloak, is one of the innovative ways in which MPI-SWS develops practical data anonymity techniques.
...Paul Francis was featured in an interview by CNIL, the French national data protection authority. The interview discusses the innovative way in which MPI-SWS is tackling the data anonymity problem. The interview follows Paul's visit to CNIL in May 2018, where he presented the first-ever bounty program for anonymity. The bounty program, designed by MPI-SWS and implemented by the startup Aircloak, is one of the innovative ways in which MPI-SWS develops practical data anonymity techniques.
MPI-SWS projects Aqua and Herd were discussed in an ArsTechnica article describing next generation anonymity networks.
MPI-SWS faculty Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil's work on linguistic change was mentioned in The New York Times. This is joint work with Robert West, Dan Jurafsky, Jure Leskovec, Christopher Potts.
MPI-SWS faculty Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil has had his work on conversational threads in social media mentioned in The New York Times. This is joint work with Lars Backstrom, Jon Kleinberg and Lillian Lee.
MPI-SWS faculty member Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil has had his work on how to ask for a favor featured on various media outlets including the Huffington Post, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Slate's Future Tense blog, ABC News and Süddeutsche Zeitung. Links to all the articles can be found here. This is joint work with Tim Althoff and Dan Jurafsky.
MPI-SWS postdoc Stevens Le Blond's work on network anonymity was recently covered in an MIT Tech Review article about vulnerabilities in the Tor network anonymization service.
MPI-SWS faculty member Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil was quoted in a recent ABC News article about social bias effects in social media.
MPI-SWS faculty member Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil's work on the memorability of language was recently covered in a New York Times article about the computational analysis of cultural texts. This work was conducted at Cornell University with Justin Cheng, Jon Kleinberg and Lillian Lee.
A recent WWW 2012 paper by Krishna Gummadi, Bimal Viswanath, and their coauthors was covered by GigaOM, a popular technology news blog, in an article titled Who's to blame for Twitter spam? Obama, Gaga, and you.
Steven le Blond's work on security flaws in Skype and other peer-to-peer applications has been receiving global media attention: WSJ, Le Monde (French), die Zeit (German),
...A recent WWW 2012 paper by Krishna Gummadi, Bimal Viswanath, and their coauthors was covered by GigaOM, a popular technology news blog, in an article titled Who's to blame for Twitter spam? Obama, Gaga, and you.
Steven le Blond's work on security flaws in Skype and other peer-to-peer applications has been receiving global media attention: WSJ, Le Monde (French), die Zeit (German), Daily Mail, New Scientist, Slashdot, Wired, and the New Scientist "One Percent" blog.
A study by MPI-SWS researchers Saikat Guha (now at Microsoft Research), Bin Cheng, and Paul Francis has been highlighted on CNN, NPR, The Washington Post, Fox News, and other major media outlets.
The study, which will be presented at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in November, looks at the targeting behavior of Google and Facebook. While the goal of the study was to understand targeting in general,
...A study by MPI-SWS researchers Saikat Guha (now at Microsoft Research), Bin Cheng, and Paul Francis has been highlighted on CNN, NPR, The Washington Post, Fox News, and other major media outlets.
The study, which will be presented at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in November, looks at the targeting behavior of Google and Facebook. While the goal of the study was to understand targeting in general, the researchers discovered that gay Facebook users can unknowingly reveal to advertisers that they are gay simply by clicking on an ad targeted to gay men. The ads appear innocuous in that they make no mention of targeting gay users (for instance, an ad for a nursing degree). A user's sexual orientation can be leaked even if the user made his sexual orientation private using Facebook's privacy settings.
This study was done as part of a broader research project to design techniques for making advertising more private.
Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabricio Benevenuto, and Krishna Gummadi's work on measuring user influence in the Twitter network has received media coverage from the New York Times and popular technology blogs.
Alan Mislove, Bimal Viswanath, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Peter Druschel's work on inferring user profiles in online social networks has received media coverage from Slashdot.