Entry 5: To Remake a World Facebook Helped Create

Facebook


When people hear the name Mark Zuckerberg it is immediately associated with Facebook. Facebook is the largest social network accross the globe. About 85% of of Facebook's 1.86 billion members live outside of the U.S. and Canada. The California based company has offices everywhere from Amsterdam to Jakarta, Indonesia, to Tel Aviv. On Thursday February 16, Zuckerberg released a 5,800-word manifesto that apears closer to utopian social guide than business plan. He described his desired to remake Facebook in a way that counters isolationism, promotes global connections and addresses social ills while also cementing Facebook's central role as a builder of online “community” for its nearly 2 billion users.

Zuckerberg wrote, “our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community — for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.” One method of implementation to develop this safe social infrastructure is through using artificial intelligence to start making the sorts of judgments that Facebook sometimes bobbles. AI systems could also comb through the vast amount of material users post on Facebook to detect everything from bullying to the early signs of suicidal thinking to extremist recruiting.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is simply intelligence exhibited by machines where research looks any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Currently artificial machines are able to successfully understand human speech, compete at a high level in strategic game systems, self-drive cars, intelligently route content delivery networks, and interpret complex data. A neural network is an interconnected group of nodes, akin to the vast network of neurons in the human brain. Today, neural networks are often trained by the backpropagation algorithm in which the algorithm repeats a two phase cycle, propagation and weight update. When an input is presented to the network, it is propagated forward through the network until it reaches the output layer. The output of the network is then compared to the desired output, using a loss function which is a function that maps an event or values of one or more variables onto a real number intuitively representing some "cost" associated with the event, and an error value is calculated for each of the neurons in the output layer. The error values are then propagated backwards, starting from the output, until each neuron has an associated error value which roughly represents its contribution to the original output.

References

• http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-zuckerberg-vision-20170217-story.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_function

Entry 4: Defense Against Code Copycats

Snap Inc.

As social media becomes a more relevant aspect in the lives of humans around the world, companies like Snap Inc. which owns the popular application, Snapchat, and Facebook which owns Instagram are constantly competing to come up with the next best feature. This past year, Snap Inc. filed for public offering and hired Swiss engineer to help defend their products against copycats. Laurent Balmelli helped to co-found the startup Strong.Codes, a maker of tools that obscures software code and makes it harder for competitors to reverse engineer or take a part and copy the code. The startup was founded by a team of academics with expertise in cryptography and software protection. The company says on its website, “our goal is to make software piracy much more expensive and complicated.” The main feature of that Snap Inc. is trying to protect is their ability to create stories and the facial recognition features associated with taking photographs. Instagram has recently produced stories quite similar to Snapchat's feature.

Strong.Codes
Strong codes offers software protection against reverse-engineering through jailbreak detection, complex obfuscation techniques, improved tamper-proofing, and Multi-IDE, file-based configuration of protections settings  based on the latest LLVM 3.9 which is information on the compiler infrastructure. Jailbreaking is the modification of a smartphone or other electronic device to remove restrictions imposed by the manufacturer or operator, e.g. to allow the installation of unauthorized software. Obfuscation is the action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible. The code used by Strong.Codes is universal meaning that their solution works on all major software platforms, such as Windows, OS X, GNU/Linux, iOS, Android and others. It supports C/C++ and Objective-C, among other programming languages.

Using software like strong.codes to protect companies unique programs is necessary in today's technological world. As technology continues to advance, those with knowledge of computer science are going to be highly sought out to work to protect public social media companies.

Resources

• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-08/snap-linked-to-swiss-startup-that-fights-product-copycats
• https://strong.codes/#home
• https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=jailbreak+
• http://releases.llvm.org/3.9.1/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

Entry 3: Using Big Data to Combat Human Trafficking

Orphan Secure 

Partnered with NGOs, law enforcement agencies, corporations, and private citizens across the globe, Orphan Secure which was founded in 2013 works to extract intelligence and insight from large and complex collections of data sets to identify and rescue victims of trafficking by targeting those organizations and bringing them to justice.  As part of an effort to combat child sex trafficking around the globe, Orphan Secure launched the "FREEDOM!" app, an anti-human trafficking mobile application available in 10 languages. The team at Orphan Secure is taking a direct action by consulting and training international orphanages threatened by civil unrest, war, or criminal activity and conducting security and vulnerability assessments in order to provide solutions. Additionally, they collect and disseminate big data to which is leading to the identification and rescue of victims of human and child sex trafficking.

What is Big Data?

Big data is a term for a data set that is so large or complex that they are unable to be dealt with by traditional data processing applications. Due to the size and complexity of such data sets processing challenges include analysis, capture, data curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, querying, updating and information privacy. The size of big data sets are constantly changing ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data making it intolerable to capture, curate, manage, and process data within a reasonable amount of time. In 2000, a C++-based distributed file-sharing framework for data storage and query was developed in order to deal with big data sets. In 2004, Google produced a process called MapReduce which uses a similar architecture to the C++ framework created in 2000. Google's concept provides a parallel processing model where queries are split and distributed across parallel nodes and processed in parallel.

Resources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data