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Privacy, Ethics, and Future Uses of the Social Web "Prepared for Owen Graduate School of Management (Vanderbilt University)!April 3, 2014!Matthew A. Russell (Chief Technology Officer @ Digital Reasoning)!Twitter: @ptwobrussell & @dreasoning!! !

Overview!

•  Intro (5 mins)

•  Mining the Social Web (5 mins)

•  "Know thy data..." (10 mins)

•  "...and know thyself" (15 mins)

•  Wrap Up/Final Q&A (15 mins)

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INTRO!

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Hello, My Name Is ... Matthew!

•  Background in Computer Science •  Data mining, AI, machine learning, etc.

•  CTO @ Digital Reasoning Systems •  Moving toward cognitive computing

•  Author •  5 published books on technology (just for fun)

•  CrossFit, triathlon, Bikram hot yoga •  Stress management

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The only easy day was yesterday.

-- Motto of the U.S. Navy SEALs

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It pays to be a winner.

-- Motto of the U.S. Navy SEALs

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Mining the Social Web!

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Data Exhaust => Digital Fingerprints!

•  World population: ~7B people •  Facebook: 1.15B users •  Twitter: 500M users •  Google+ 343M users •  LinkedIn: 238M users •  ~200M+ blogs (conservative estimate)

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•  An open source software (OSS) project •  http://bit.ly/MiningTheSocialWeb2E

•  A (rewritten) book •  http://bit.ly/135dHfs

•  Accessible to (virtually) everyone •  Virtual machine with turn-key coding templates for

data science experiments •  Think of the book as "premium" support for the OSS

project

Transforming Curiosity Into Insight!

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Table of Contents (1/2)!•  Chapter 1 - Mining Twitter: Exploring Trending Topics,

Discovering What People Are Talking About, and More •  Chapter 2 - Mining Facebook: Analyzing Fan Pages,

Examining Friendships, and More •  Chapter 3 - Mining LinkedIn: Faceting Job Titles,

Clustering Colleagues, and More •  Chapter 4 - Mining Google+: Computing Document

Similarity, Extracting Collocations, and More •  Chapter 5 - Mining Web Pages: Using Natural Language

Processing to Understand Human Language, Summarize Blog Posts, and More

•  Chapter 6 - Mining Mailboxes: Analyzing Who's Talking to Whom About What, How Often, and More

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Table of Contents (2/2)!•  Chapter 7 - Mining GitHub: Inspecting Software

Collaboration Habits, Building Interest Graphs, and More •  Chapter 8 - Mining the Semantically Marked-Up Web:

Extracting Microformats, Inferencing over RDF, and More •  Chapter 9 - Twitter Cookbook •  Appendix A - Information About This Machine's Virtual

Machine Experience •  Appendix B - OAuth Primer •  Appendix C - Python and IPython Notebook Tips & Tricks

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Anatomy of Each Chapter!

•  Brief Intro •  Objectives •  API Primer •  Analysis Technique(s) •  Data Visualization •  Recap •  Suggested Exercises •  Recommended Resources

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Why You Should Use IPython Notebook!

•  Because it's great for hacking •  And hacking is usually the first step

•  Because it's great for collaboration •  Sharing/publishing results is trivial

•  Because the UX is as easy as working in a notepad •  Think of it as "executable paper"

•  In short, it's a terrific learning platform for novices and experts alike

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"Know thy data..."!

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If we have data, let’s look at data. If we have opinions, let’s go with mine.

--Jim Barksdale

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In God we trust. All others must bring data.

--W. Edwards Deming

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Communication => Data!

•  Communication •  Senders

•  humans & machines

•  Messages •  natural language, images, videos, etc.

•  Recipients •  humans & machines

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Data Alchemy!

•  Data: Documents & document fragments (text

messages, etc.)

•  Information: "Assertions", summaries, tags, etc.

•  Knowledge: Aggregated, query-able information

•  Wisdom: “Compressed” knowledge

•  Gold: Money

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Data Mining = Curiosity + Stats!

•  Curiosity •  Interests, desires, and intuitions

•  Statistics •  Counting •  Comparing •  Filtering •  Ranking

•  Hypothesis testing; knowledge discovery

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Machine Learning!•  A program that learns (improves)

from experience (data) according to some objective •  Supervised learning •  Unsupervised learning •  Reinforcement learning

•  How to do it •  Program mathematical

models and hope for the best...

•  How to do it well •  Program state-of-the-art

mathematical models with sufficient representative data

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Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

--Martin Fischer

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

--Arthur C. Clarke

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"...and know thyself"!

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Is Privacy Already an Illusion?!

•  Digital happenings circa 2014 •  The Cloud •  Social Media •  Deep Learning •  The Internet of Things •  Internet.org

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Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.

--Ayn Rand

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If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know,

maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

-- Eric Schmidt, (former) CEO of Google

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Influences on Ethics!•  Capitalism, economics, & marketing

•  A for-profit corporation's fiduciary duty: To maximize the common stock's value

•  How to do it? By transacting commerce •  How do it well? By advertising more effectively

than competitors •  How to do it really well? With highly relevant

personalized ads (recommenders) •  Terms of Service (ToS) - The legal extent of

ethical obligations?

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If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

-- Savvy consumers everywhere one day (?)

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For the wisdom of this world is foolishness...

-- Saint Paul

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The Future of the Web...!•  The Blue Pill: All of your precious data housed remotely

and controlled by a few of the world's most powerful international corporations

•  The Red Pill: A distributed cloud controlled by no one with decentralized data and anonymity online as the status quo

•  The Purple Pill: Meet somewhere in the middle (?) •  Significant legislative reforms concerning consumer

data (?) •  Consumer education with more transparency (?) •  Resurgence of local/offline storage and anonymity

online (?)

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The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation,

integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems,

each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable.

-- Anonymous (U. S. Privacy Study Commission, 1977)

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There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist,

or accept the responsibility for changing them.

-- Dennis Waitley

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WRAP-UP / Q&A!

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