Four short links: 20 November 2018
East African ML Needs, Autonomy Corrections, Information Security, and UIs from Doodles
- Some Requests for Machine Learning Research from the East African Tech Scene — Based on 46 in–depth interviews […] a list of concrete machine learning research problems, progress on which would directly benefit tech ventures in East Africa. Example: Priors for autocorrect and low-literacy SMS use—SMS text contains many language misuses due to a combination of autocorrection and low literacy. E.g., “poultry farmer” becoming “poetry farmer.” Such mistakes are bound to occur in any written language corpus, but engineers working with rural populations in East Africa report that this is a prevalent issue for them, confounding the use of pretrained language models. This problem also exists to some degree in voice data with respect to English spoken in different accents. Priors over autocorrect substitution rules, or custom, per–dialect confusion matrices between phonetically similar words could potentially help. Expect much more work like this as AI/ML moves into non-WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) nations.
- How the Media Gets Tesla Wrong — a reminder that our convenient shorthand and once-over-lightly reading of the news gives a false and rosy picture of what’s possible.
- Why Information Security is Hard: An Economic Perspective — fascinating arguments! I particularly like the statistical argument: a lone attacker might find 10 bugs a year, a well-prepared defender might find 1,000 bugs a year, but if there are 100,000 available bugs for exploitation, then there’s very low probability that the defender found and patched the same bugs that the attacker found…
- DoodleMaster — sketches->UI via a CNN, a proof-of-concept.
