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 

Entry 2: Amazon's Alexa

Who is Alexa?

As technology continues to advance, companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon are continuing to compete to come out with the next best thing to improve our daily lives. This past year, Amazon came out with the first sophisticated home based virtual assistant, called "Alexa." While smart phones are the most convenient personal assistant while on the go, they are not convenient when someone is working at home. The Amazon Echo and now the Amazon Dot house the Internet-connected, Alexa-powered speaker that answers questions and runs apps.  When prompted through voice commands Alexa can play music through multiple different applications, check the weather in your set location, check for traffic, set timers, and even order goods off of your Amazon.com account. These are just a few of the countless functions that Alexa can perform. Through this technology, Amazon is building an invisible operating system for running a broad range of aspects of daily life. Once of main advantage's of Amazon's Alexa over other products put out by Google or Apple is that, "Amazon isn't partial to any particular platform the way Google may be with Android or Apple with iOS, allowing Alexa to offer the same experience with little influence based on the other devices a user may own."


How Alexa Works

What makes this product unique is that the Echo and Alexa are not one in the same. Alexa is the voice assistant while Echo is simply Alexa's "first customer." Amazon is using a typical operating system to control the home. First, the company created a simple “Skills” framework that allowed smart devices to connect to Alexa and be controlled through a relatively strict verbal framework.

While I do not see the absolute necessity for owning an Amazon Echo, I have used the tool in multiple situations and can attest that it is a highly intelligent piece of technology and is pretty fun to use.

References 

• http://time.com/4624067/amazon-echo-alexa-ces-2017/
• https://stratechery.com/2017/amazons-operating-system/

Entry 1: Biometric Security

Human Biometrics

Biometrics are the measurable parameters related to human characteristics that make each human being unique. These metrics include finger prints, palm prints, retinal scans, facial recognition and DNA. The analysis and comparison of these metrics are now being used by computer scientists for security purposes.  Because biometric identifiers are unique to each individual it tightens security by making identity verification more reliable than a passport or drivers license that can easily be forged. The most common form of Biometric Security that we see today is Apple's use of the fingerprint to unlock the latest models of the iPhone. Each person has a unique fingerprint that they input into the iPhone's memory and when the correct fingerprint is scanned and recognized, the iPhone becomes unlocked. Due to the uniqueness of biometric identifiers they are difficult to forge, but if forged a person's entire identity is compromised.

Woodrow Hartzog, an Associate Professor of Law at Samford University stated, "[Biometrics] can be great because they are really secure. It’s hard to fake someone’s ear, eye, gait, or other things that make an individual uniquely identifiable. But if a biometric is compromised, you’re done. You can’t get another ear.”

Biometric Security and Computer Science

Computer science is crucial for the success of biometric identification. "Biometric identification refers to any technology that does one of two things: identifies you or authenticates your identity. For identification, an image is run against a database of images. For authentication, an image has to be accessed from the device to confirm a match. The latter is typically used for unlocking computers, phones, and applications." In this case the data are a human's unique biometric characteristics. While this technology has rapidly expanded since Apple's introduction of the fingerprint scanner in 2013,  police have been using fingerprints to identify suspects since the 1980s.

References

• https://www.wired.com/2016/03/biometrics-coming-along-serious-security-concerns/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometrics
• http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/biometrics.html
• http://www.inquisitr.com/846786/thermal-imaging-next-big-thing-in-biometric-security/
• http://www.sgssystems.com/security-systems-west-midlands/biometric-security-systems/