In today’s world, much of what we do, from exercising to texting, is measured and tracked. This data is constantly harvested by data brokers and social media to create behavioral profiles, later used by artificial intelligence (AI) powered services. The overwhelming abundance of data has ushered in an age of analytics, and the rise of AI has enabled big-data decision making. However, the training of AI models is often challenging due to a supervised training strategy that requires a large amount of labelled data. Synthetic data is a possible solution to various challenges, including data labelling and, more importantly, data privacy problems. Synthetic data can be generated by using advances in rendering pipelines, generative adversarial models, and fusion models. It is predicted that most online-generated content will be AI created.
2. “Micro-Influencers” Are Embracing Their Smaller, Engaged Audiences (BuzzFeed)
Anna Jane Wisniewski is one of the many longtime content creators embracing their smaller but engaged audience — despite an industry that, she says, can place pressure on them to grow, grow, grow.
3. Human-Centered AI (Book by Ben Shneiderman)
In Human-Centered AI, Professor Ben Shneiderman offers an optimistic realist’s guide to how artificial intelligence can be used to augment and enhance humans’ lives. This project bridges the gap between ethical considerations and practical realities to offer a road map for successful, reliable systems. Digital cameras, communications services, and navigation apps are just the beginning. Shneiderman shows how future applications will support health and wellness, improve education, accelerate business, and connect people in reliable, safe, and trustworthy ways that respect human values, rights, justice, and dignity.
The reach of illiberal international propaganda outlets rests on citizens in democratic countries as recipients and potential disseminators. However, little research has scrutinised the audiences for such platforms. Why do audiences in democratic states consume content from such outlets, and how far do they actually align with it ideologically? The present research seeks to address this gap.
5. How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis (The New Your Times)
A Chinese app conquered the planet — and now the U.S. is threatening to shut it down. Can the world’s biggest virality machine survive?
6. (Sandvine)
Get insights into:
- Which big-tech brands are generating more Internet traffic than “everyone else” and what that can mean for app QoE.
- Why apps matter more than ever, and how work-from-home, gaming, and the industrial IoT will make 1TB-per-month and even 3TB-per-month “power users” a more common phenomenon.
- Growing app complexity due to the explosion of video, and increase in QUIC, iCloud Private Relay, encryption, and more.
- Real-world impact of recent high-profile Internet and cloud outages on related and unrelated apps.
- The hottest trends in Mobile, 5G, and fast-growing apps.
7. How to Encrypt any File, Folder, or Drive on Your System (Wired)
Encrypting files, folders, and drives on your computer means that no one else can make sense of the data they contain without a particular decryption key—which in most cases is a password known only to you.
8. Does Gen Z spend too much time on social media? (The Economist)
“It’s the job of old people to disapprove of everything young people do,” wrote Mark Mills in his novel “The Savage Garden”. A perennial grumble is about the amount of time the young stare at screens. Do teenagers spend too much time online? Are they addicted to social media? A new report by Pew Research Centre, a think-tank, sheds light on how often kids use the internet and social media.
9. What Happened to All of Science’s Big Breakthroughs? (The New York Times)
A new study finds a steady drop since 1945 in disruptive feats as a share of the world’s booming enterprise in scientific and technological advancement.
10. The Unbearable Weight of Misinformation (Diplomatic Courier)
Social media is the new de facto “town square.” Unfortunately, today’s digital town square has become a global playground for the rampant spread of unreliable and unmoderated information, largely due to a business model that rewards clickbait, writes Pixstory founder Appu Suresh.