Category Archives: Writing

Phil 10.4.18

7:00 – 5:30 ASRC MKT

  • Join PCA! Write classified! Done
  • There are 56 work days until Jan 1. My 400 hours is 50 days. So I go full time on research around the 22nd.
  • Got a note from Wayne saying that there were 25 blue sky papers and 3 slots. THat might me expanded to 6 slots
  • Write up notes on “At Home in the Universe” – started
  • Finish speaking notes for BAA – Done
  • Matt found a couple of things that might be good. One is due on October 16th, which is waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy too tight.
  • Looked at the Health.mil Connected Health clearinghouse effort and website. It sounds a lot like a military version of PubMed, with the ability to request reports on demand, plus some standardized reports as well. These reports seem to source back to other agencies like the CDC, with external SMEs.

Phil 10.2.18

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC Research

  • Graph laplacian dissertation
    • The spectrum of the normalized graph Laplacian can reveal structural properties of a network and can be an important tool to help solve the structural identification problem. From the spectrum, we attempt to develop a tool that helps us to understand the network structure on a deep level and to identify the source of the network to a greater extent. The information about different topological properties of a graph carried by the complete spectrum of the normalized graph Laplacian is explored. We investigate how and why structural properties are reflected by the spectrum and how the spectrum changes when compairing different networks from different sources.
  • Universality classes in nonequilibrium lattice systems
    • This article reviews our present knowledge of universality classes in nonequilibrium systems defined on regular lattices. The first section presents the most important critical exponents and relations, as well as the field-theoretical formalism used in the text. The second section briefly addresses the question of scaling behavior at first-order phase transitions. In Sec. III the author looks at dynamical extensions of basic static classes, showing the effects of mixing dynamics and of percolation. The main body of the review begins in Sec. IV, where genuine, dynamical universality classes specific to nonequilibrium systems are introduced. Section V considers such nonequilibrium classes in coupled, multicomponent systems. Most of the known nonequilibrium transition classes are explored in low dimensions between active and absorbing states of reaction-diffusion-type systems. However, by mapping they can be related to the universal behavior of interface growth models, which are treated in Sec. VI. The review ends with a summary of the classes of absorbing-state and mean-field systems and discusses some possible directions for future research.
  • “The Government Spies Using Our Webcams:” The Language of Conspiracy Theories in Online Discussions
    • Conspiracy theories are omnipresent in online discussions—whether to explain a late-breaking event that still lacks official report or to give voice to political dissent. Conspiracy theories evolve, multiply, and interconnect, further complicating efforts to limit their propagation. It is therefore crucial to develop scalable methods to examine the nature of conspiratorial discussions in online communities. What do users talk about when they discuss conspiracy theories online? What are the recurring elements in their discussions? What do these elements tell us about the way users think? This work answers these questions by analyzing over ten years of discussions in r/conspiracy—an online community on Reddit dedicated to conspiratorial discussions. We focus on the key elements of a conspiracy theory: the conspiratorial agents, the actions they perform, and their targets. By computationally detecting agent–action–target triplets in conspiratorial statements, and grouping them into semantically coherent clusters, we develop a notion of narrative-motif to detect recurring patterns of triplets. For example, a narrative-motif such as “governmental agency–controls–communications” appears in diverse conspiratorial statements alleging that governmental agencies control information to nefarious ends. Thus, narrative-motifs expose commonalities between multiple conspiracy theories even when they refer to different events or circumstances. In the process, these representations help us understand how users talk about conspiracy theories and offer us a means to interpret what they talk about. Our approach enables a population-scale study of conspiracy theories in alternative news and social media with implications for understanding their adoption and combating their spread
  • Need to upload to ArXiv (try multiple tex files) – done!Arxiv
  • If I’m charging my 400 hours today, then start putting together text prediction. I’d like to try the Google prediction series to see what happens. Otherwise, there are two things I’d like to try with LSTMs, since they take 2 coordinates as inputs
    • Use a 2D embedding space
    • Use NLP to get a parts-of-speech (PoS) analysis of the text so that there can be a (PoS, Word) coordinate.
    • Evaluate the 2 approaches on their ability to converge?
  • Coordinating with Antonio about workshops. It’s the 2019 version of this: International Workshop on Massively Multi-Agent Systems (MMAS2018) in conjunction with IJCAI/ECAI/AAMAS/ICML 2018

Phil 10.1.18

7:00 – 8:30 ASRC MKT?

  • Last Friday, Aaron was told by division leadership (Mike M) that R&D is being terminated as of Jan 1st and to get on billable projects. This is going against our impression of how things were going, so it’s unclear what will actually happen. So I’m not looking for a job just yet… Personally, I blame putting a deposit down on this: Tesla3
  • This looks interesting:
    • Launched in October 2015 by founding editor Robert Kadar with support from Joe Brewer, David Sloan Wilson, The Evolution Institute, and Steve Roth — who now serves as publisher — Evonomics has emerged as a powerful voice for the sea change that is sweeping through economics.
  • Working my way through At Home in the Universe
    • Fontana Lab
      • Molecular biology offers breathtaking views of the parts and processes that undergird life and its evolution. It is vexing, then, that we seem unable to analytically grasp the principles that would make the nature of cellular phenotypes more intelligible and their control more deliberate. One can always blame insufficient knowledge, but we also entertain the idea that physics and chemistry need formal and conceptual enrichment from computer science to become an appropriate foundation for systems biology. This view arises from the belief that computation is a natural phenomenon, like gravity or boiling water. We need adequate formalisms and models to reason about computation in the wild.This view guides many of our lab’s interests, which span the development and application of rule-based formalisms for modeling complex systems of molecular interaction, causality in concurrent systems, the interplay between network growth and network dynamics, phenotypic plasticity and evolvability, learning, and aging. Our approach is computational and theoretical. In the past we also conducted experimental work using C. elegans as a model system. Outside collaborations are essential to our group. The size of our team can fluctuate considerably, as we chase grants in pursuit of our passions, not opportunistically. Read more about our research.
  • Due date for the iConference Paper. Submitted last night just to be safe, but I expect to tweak today.
    • incorporating Wayne’s changes
    • Final push with Wayne on campus
    • Done! Submitted
    • Need to upload to ArXive (try multiple tex files)
  • From The Atlantic – stampede end condition:
    • It is impossible at this moment to envisage the Republican Party coming back. Like a brontosaurus with some brain-eating disorder it might lumber forward in the direction dictated by its past, favoring deregulation of businesses here and standing up to a rising China there, but there will be no higher mental functioning at work. And so it will plod into a future in which it is detested in a general way by women, African Americans, recent immigrants, and the educated young as well as progressives pure and simple. It might stumble into a political tar pit and cease to exist or it might survive as a curious, decaying relic of more savage times and more primitive instincts, lashing out and crushing things but incapable of much else.

Phil 9.28.18

7:30 – 4:00 ASRC MKT

  • Stumbled on this podcast this morning: How Small Problems Snowball Into Big Disasters
  • How to Prepare for a Crisis You Couldn’t Possibly Predict
  • I’m trying to think about how this should be applied to human/machine ecologies. I think that simulation is really important because it lets one model patch compare itself against another model without real-world impacts. This has something to do with a shared, multi-instance environment simulation as well. The environment provides one level of transparent interaction, but there also needs to be some level of inadvertent social information that shows some insight into how a particular system is working.
    • When the simulation and the real world start to diverge for a system, that needs to be signaled
    • Systems need to be able to “look into” other simulations and compare like with like. So a tagged item (bicycle) in one sim is the same in another.
    • Is there an OS that hands out environments?
    • How does a decentralized system coordinate? Is there an answer in MMOGs?
  • Kate Starbird’s presentation was interesting as always. We had a chance to talk afterwards, and she’d like to see our work, so I’ve sent her links to the last two papers.
    I also met Bill Braniff, who is the director of the UMD Study of Terrorism and responses to Terrorism. He got papers too, with a brief description about how mapping could aid in the detection of radicalization patterns
    Then at lunch, I had a chance to meet with Roger Bostelman from NIST. He’s interested in writing standards for fleet and swarm vehicles, and is interested in making sure that standards mitigate the chance of stampeding autonomous vehicles, so I sent him the Blue Sky draft.
    And lastly, I got a phone call from Aaron who says that our project will be terminated December 31, after which there will be no more IR&D at ASRC. It was a nice run while it lasted. And they may change their minds, but I doubt it.

Phil 9.27.18

7:00 – 6:00 ASRC MKT

  • Writing your own LaTex class
  • Multiple facets of biodiversity drive the diversity–stability relationship
    • A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated that biodiversity stabilizes ecosystem functioning over time in grassland ecosystems. However, the relative importance of different facets of biodiversity underlying the diversity–stability relationship remains unclear. Here we use data from 39 grassland biodiversity experiments and structural equation modelling to investigate the roles of species richness, phylogenetic diversity and both the diversity and community-weighted mean of functional traits representing the ‘fast–slow’ leaf economics spectrum in driving the diversity–stability relationship. We found that high species richness and phylogenetic diversity stabilize biomass production via enhanced asynchrony in the performance of co-occurring species. Contrary to expectations, low phylogenetic diversity enhances ecosystem stability directly, albeit weakly. While the diversity of fast–slow functional traits has a weak effect on ecosystem stability, communities dominated by slow species enhance ecosystem stability by increasing mean biomass production relative to the standard deviation of biomass over time. Our in-depth, integrative assessment of factors influencing the diversity–stability relationship demonstrates a more multicausal relationship than has been previously acknowledged.
  • Computer Algorithms, Market Manipulation and the Institutionalization of High Frequency Trading (adversarial herding?)
    • The article discusses the use of algorithmic models in finance (algo or high frequency trading). Algo trading is widespread but also somewhat controversial in modern financial markets. It is a form of automated trading technology, which critics claim can, among other things, lead to market manipulation. Drawing on three cases, this article shows that manipulation also can happen in the reverse way, meaning that human traders attempt to make algorithms ‘make mistakes’ by ‘misleading’ them. These attempts to manipulate are very simple and immediately transparent to humans. Nevertheless, financial regulators increasingly penalize such attempts to manipulate algos. The article explains this as an institutionalization of algo trading, a trading practice which is vulnerable enough to need regulatory protection.
  • Karin Knorr Cetina is interested in financial markets, knowledge and information, as well as in globalization, theory and culture. Her current projects include a book on global foreign exchange markets and on post-social knowledge societies. She continues to do research on the information architecture of financial markets, on their “global microstructures” (the global social and cultural form these markets take) and on trader markets in contrast to producer markets. She also studies globalization from a microsociological perspective, using an ethnographic approach, and she continues to be interested in “laboratory studies,” the study of science, technology and information at the site of knowledge production – particularly in the life sciences and in particle physics.
  • Reading A Sociology of Algorithms: High-Frequency Trading and the Shaping of Markets
    • “Markets are politics,” (pg 8). I’d reverse that and say that politics are a market for power/influence, though that may be too glib.
    • three main types of algorithm discussed here (trading venues’ matching engines, which consummate trades; execution algorithms used by institutional investors to buy or sell large blocks of shares; and HFT algorithms), (pg 11)
    • a “lit” venue is one in which the electronic order book is visible to the humans and algorithms that trade on the venue; in a “dark” venue it is not visible.  (pg 11)
  • Meeting with USPTO folks. I went over their heads, but Aaron found the right level.

Phil 9.25.18

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC MKT

  • Wayne’s notes from yesterday:
    • Part of the wrapper for this will be why these issues might matter for the iSchool’s research future. I can help with the framing there.
      Yikes, 4 pages in this format? That is nothing!
      Will really have to shave this down to the absolute minimum.
      To that end I think the scenarios get fleshed out in their fullest now to capture all of the ideas and then hacked brutally into 1-2 paragraphs.
      The abstract probably goes to 4 sentences.
      Images stay, but no larger.
      We’ll work this out, but, man, that is barely 1500 words. Who was thinking when they put this together? 😉
  • Want to redo the designed system chart so that the complexity zone is concave – done.
  • More writing. Figured out that cars would be crashing at a rate of 3-4/sec based on 2016 data. Yikes!
  • Worked with Aaron on response to Antonio’s proposal. IEEE Software is a “production” magazine. And a nice marker for production is what kind of libraries are available, because then articles can be written on how to use them.
  • Kate Starbird this Friday! 10:00am – 12:00pm 2119 Hornbake Library South Wing
  • There is a world nomad games

Phil 9.24.18

7:00 – 6:00 ASRC MKT

  • It’s fall and dark in the morning
  • Change the “Designed systems” diagram to be more of a bathtub curve, reflecting that there is very little activity in the complex regime – done
  • Working on the “Second middle part” (discussion? results?).
  • This from the New Yorker book review of Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics
    • The Clinton orgy-island story met a very different fate in the right-wing media, which pushed versions of it over the course of the campaign. (Fox News initially ran several segments that raised the topic of the “Lolita Express.”) The dynamic on the right, the authors found, “rewards the most popular and widely viewed channels at the very top of the media ecosystem for delivering stories, whether true or false, that protect the team, reinforce its beliefs, attack opponents, and refute any claims that might threaten ‘our’ team from outsiders.” Referring to the orgy-island story, the authors note that “not one right-wing outlet came out to criticize and expose this blatant lie for what it was. In the grip of the propaganda feedback loop, the right-wing media ecosystem had no mechanism for self-correction, and instead exhibited dynamics of self-reinforcement, confirmation, and repetition so that readers, viewers and listeners encountered multiple versions of the same story, over months, to the point that both recall and credibility were enhanced.”
  • Transdisciplinary PhD Journeys: Reflecting on the challenge of the ‘transdisciplinary triple jump’
    • Responding to calls to ‘be transdisciplinary4’, we have committed to applying and critically reflecting on the principles of TD in our PhD research. However, in current institutional structures and cultures of academia, this adds an additional challenge to the existing demands of PhD research5,6. Not only are we expected to navigate the terrain of interdisciplinarity described as an ‘undisciplinary journey’6 which requires ‘epistemological agility’, but we are also confronted with the task of engaging meaningfully with societal actors beyond our academic comfort zones. All of this means we are constantly trying to ‘be everything to everyone’ and risk burning ourselves out in the process.

Fika – Sy’s talk. Better this time

Meeting with Wayne

  • Went over SASO, which we all agree went very well
  • Talked about ASRC funding conferences. Will try to see if we can do iConf if accepted
  • Went over the rough form of the iConf paper. First review pass by COB tomorrow
  • And hung the SASO poster 🙂 IMG_5490

Phil 9.21.18

7:00 – 4:00 ASRC MKT

  • “Who’s idea was it to connect every idiot on the internet with every other idiot” PJ O’Rourke, Commonwealth Club, 2018
  • “Running Programs In Reverse for Deeper A.I.” by Zenna Tavares
    • In this talk I show that inverse simulation, i.e., running programs in reverse from output to input, lies at the heart of the hardest problems in both human cognition and artificial intelligence. How humans are able to reconstruct the rich 3D structure of the world from 2D images; how we predict that it is safe to cross a street just by watching others walk, and even how we play, and sometimes win at Jenga, are all solvable by running programs backwards. The idea of program inversion is old, but I will present one of the first approaches to take it literally. Our tool ReverseFlow combines deep-learning and our theory of parametric inversion to compile the source code of a program (e.g., a TensorFlow graph) into its inverse, even when it is not conventionally invertible. This framework offers a unified and practical approach to both understand and solve the aforementioned problems in vision, planning and inference for both humans and machines.
  • Bot-ivistm: Assessing Information Manipulation in Social Media Using Network Analytics
    • Matthew Benigni 
    • Kenneth Joseph
    • Kathleen M. Carley (Scholar)
    • Social influence bot networks are used to effect discussions in social media. While traditional social network methods have been used in assessing social media data, they are insufficient to identify and characterize social influence bots, the networks in which they reside and their behavior. However, these bots can be identified, their prevalence assessed, and their impact on groups assessed using high dimensional network analytics. This is illustrated using data from three different activist communities on Twitter—the “alt-right,” ISIS sympathizers in the Syrian revolution, and activists of the Euromaidan movement. We observe a new kind of behavior that social influence bots engage in—repetitive @mentions of each other. This behavior is used to manipulate complex network metrics, artificially inflating the influence of particular users and specific agendas. We show that this bot behavior can affect network measures by as much as 60% for accounts that are promoted by these bots. This requires a new method to differentiate “promoted accounts” from actual influencers. We present this method. We also present a method to identify social influence bot “sub-communities.” We show how an array of sub-communities across our datasets are used to promote different agendas, from more traditional foci (e.g., influence marketing) to more nefarious goals (e.g., promoting particular political ideologies).
  • Pinged Aaron M. about writing an article
  • More iConf paper. Got a first draft on everything but the discussion section

Phil 9.20.18

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC MKT

  • Submit pre-approval for school – done!
  • Call bank – done!
  • Tried to do stuff on the Lufthansa site but couldn’t log in
  • Read through the USPTO RFI and realized it was a good fit for the Research Browser. Sent the RB white paper to those in the decision loop.
  • Updated the JuryRoom white paper to include an appendix on self-governance and handling hate speech, etc.
  • Introducing Cloud Inference API: uncover insights from large scale, typed time-series data
    • Today, we’re announcing the Cloud Inference API to address this need. Cloud Inference API is a simple, highly efficient and scalable system that makes it easier for businesses and developers to quickly gather insights from typed time series datasets. It’s fully integrated with Google Cloud Storage and can handle datasets as large as tens of billions of event records. If you store any time series data in Cloud Storage, you can use the Cloud Inference API to begin generating predictions.
    • Thread by Jeff Dean
  • Realized that there are additional matrices that can post-multiply the Laplacian. That way we can break down the individual components that contribute to “stiffness”. The reason for this is that only identical oscillators will synchronize. Similarity is a type of implicit coordination
    • Leave the Master matrix [M]: as degree on the diagonal, with “1” for a connection, “0” for no connection
    • =Bandwidth matrix [B]: has a value (0, 1) for each connection
    • Alignment matrix [A]: calculates the direction cosine between each connected node. Completely aligned nodes get an edge value of 1.0
    • There can also be a Weight vector W: which contains the “mass” of the node. A high mass node will be more influential in the network.
  • Had a few thoughts about JuryRoom self governance. The major social networks seem to be a mess with respect to what rights users have, and what constitutes a violation of terms of service. The solutions seem pretty brittle (Radiolab podcast on facebook rule making). JuryRoom has built in a mechanism for deliberation. Can that be used to create an online legal framework for crowdsourcing the rules and the interpretation? Roughly, I think that this requires the following:
    • A constitution – a simple document that lays out how JuryRoom will be goverened.
    • A bill of rights. What are users entitled to?
    • The concept of petition, trial, binding decisions, and precedent.
    • Is there a concept of testifying under oath?
    • The addition of “evidence” attachments that can be linked to posts. This could be existing documents, commissioned expert opinion, etc.
    • A special location for the “legal decisions”. These will become the basis for the precedent in future deliberations. Links to these prior decisions are done as attachments? Or as something else?
    • Localization. Since what is acceptable (within the bounds of the constitution and the bill of rights) changes as a function of culture, there needs to be a way that groups can split off from the main group to construct and use their own legal history. Voting/membership may need to be a part of this.
      • What is visible to non-members?
      • What are the requirements to be a member?
      • How are legal decisions implemented in software?
      • What are the duties of a “citizen”?
  • More iConf paper
  • I wanted to make figures align on the bottom. Turns out that the way that you do this is to set top alignment [t] for each minipage. Here’s my example: 
    \begin{figure}[h]
	\centering
	\begin{minipage}[t]{.5\textwidth}
		\centering
		\fbox{\includegraphics[width=20em]{Nomad-Flocking-Stampede2.png}}
		\caption{\label{fig:N-F-S} Evolved systems}
	\end{minipage}%
	\begin{minipage}[t]{.5\textwidth}
		\centering
		\fbox{\includegraphics[width=20em]{Nomad-Stampede.png}}
		\caption{\label{fig:Monolithic_complex_nomad} Designed systems}
	\end{minipage}%
\end{figure}

     

Phil 9.19.18

7:00 – 5:30 ASRC MKT

  • More iConf paper
  • GSS Meeting?
  • Meeting with Wayne? No, he’s out till Thursday
  • Pinged Don about Aaron Mannes. He’s OOO as well
  • Understanding the interplay between social and spatial behaviour
    • Laura Alessandretti
    • Sune Lehmann
    • Andrea Baronchelli
    • According to personality psychology, personality traits determine many aspects of human behaviour. However, validating this insight in large groups has been challenging so far, due to the scarcity of multi-channel data. Here, we focus on the relationship between mobility and social behaviour by analysing trajectories and mobile phone interactions of ∼1000 individuals from two high-resolution longitudinal datasets. We identify a connection between the way in which individuals explore new resources and exploit known assets in the social and spatial spheres. We show that different individuals balance the exploration-exploitation trade-off in different ways and we explain part of the variability in the data by the big five personality traits. We point out that, in both realms, extraversion correlates with the attitude towards exploration and routine diversity, while neuroticism and openness account for the tendency to evolve routine over long time-scales. We find no evidence for the existence of classes of individuals across the spatio-social domains. Our results bridge the fields of human geography, sociology and personality psychology and can help improve current models of mobility and tie formation.
    • This looks to be a missing link paper that I can use to connect animal behavior in physical space and human behavior in belief space
  • A Sociology of Algorithms: High-Frequency Trading and the Shaping of Markets
    • Donald MacKenzie
      • My current research is on the sociology of markets, focusing on automated trading. I’ve worked in the past on topics ranging from the sociology of nuclear weapons to the meaning of proof in the context of computer systems critical to safety or security.
    • Computer algorithms are playing an ever more important role in financial markets. This paper proposes and exemplifies a sociology of algorithms that is (i) historical, in that it demonstrates path-dependence in the development of automated markets; (ii) ecological (in Abbott’s sense), in that it shows how automated high-frequency trading (HFT) is both itself an ecology and also is shaped by other linked ecologies (especially those of trading venues and of regulation); and (iii) “Zelizerian,” in that it highlights the importance of boundary work, especially of efforts to distinguish between (in effect) “good” and “bad” actors and algorithms. Empirically, the paper draws on interviews with 43 practitioners of HFT, and on a wider historical-sociology study (including interviews with a further 44 people) of the development of trading venues. The paper investigates the practices of HFT and analyses (in historical, ecological, and “Zelizerian” terms) how these differ in three different contexts (two types of share trading and foreign exchange).
  • A2P marketing meeting in Greenbelt
  • Long discussion on networks and the stiffness of links

Phil 8.31.18

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC MKT

  • The lightning round slides are in!
  • Get Speaker – done
  • Get posters – done
  • Haircut – done
  • drop off DME/KLR – done
  • Under Pressure response – done, I think?
  • upload ML excel files (done) to play around with graph laplacians some more – done
  • Print out two travel packets – done
  • create shared itinerary document – started. Aaron needs to finish his part
  • From KQED Silicon Valley Conversations The Future of Music: Computer or Composer
    • Ge Wang is an Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He specializes in the art of computer music design — researching programming languages and interactive software design for music, interaction design, expressive mobile music, new performance ensembles (laptop orchestra and mobile phone orchestra), human-computer interaction, visualization (sndpeek), music game design, aesthetics of technology-mediated design, and methodologies for education at the intersection of art, engineering, and design.
    • Doug Eck is a research scientist working on Magenta, a research project exploring the role of machine learning in the process of creating art and music. Primarily this involves developing new deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms for generating songs, images, drawings, and other materials. But it’s also an exploration in building smart tools and interfaces that allow artists and musicians to extend (not replace!) their processes using these models. Started by me in 2016, Magenta now involves several researchers and engineers from the Google Brain team as well as many others collaborating via open source. Aside from Magenta, I’m working on sequence learning models for summarization and text generation as well new ways to improve AI-generated content based on user feedback.
    • Amy X Newburg has been developing her own brand of irreverently genre-crossing works for voice, live electronics and chamber ensembles for over 25 years, known for her innovative use of live looping technology with electronic percussion, her 4-octave vocal range and her colorful — often humorous — lyrics. One of the earliest performers to work with live digital looping, Amy has presented her solo “avant-cabaret” songs at such diverse venues as the Other Minds and Bang on a Can new music festivals, the Berlin International Poetry Festival, the Wellington and Christchurch Jazz Festivals (New Zealand), the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall, electronic music festivals, colleges, rock clubs and concert halls throughout the U.S. and abroad.
  • Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018
    • YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are the most popular online platforms among teens. Fully 95% of teens have access to a smartphone, and 45% say they are online ‘almost constantly’
  • Aaron found this: Density-functional fluctuation theory of crowds
    • A primary goal of collective population behavior studies is to determine the rules governing crowd distributions in order to predict future behaviors in new environments. Current top-down modeling approaches describe, instead of predict, specific emergent behaviors, whereas bottom-up approaches must postulate, instead of directly determine, rules for individual behaviors. Here, we employ classical density functional theory (DFT) to quantify, directly from observations of local crowd density, the rules that predict mass behaviors under new circumstances. To demonstrate our theory-based, data-driven approach, we use a model crowd consisting of walking fruit flies and extract two functions that separately describe spatial and social preferences. The resulting theory accurately predicts experimental fly distributions in new environments and provides quantification of the crowd “mood”. Should this approach generalize beyond milling crowds, it may find powerful applications in fields ranging from spatial ecology and active matter to demography and economics.
    • Here’s an interesting part: The DFFT analysis that we present is particularly powerful because it separates the influence of the environment on agents from interactions among those agents. 
      • This implies that it should (could? might?) be possible to calculate a social/environmental ratio for individual agents. High environmental are nomadic. High social are stampede-prone. Need to dig in further.
  • Mechanical Vibrations and Waves » Lecture 4: Coupled Oscillators, Normal Modes
    Lecture 4: Coupled Oscillators, Normal Modes (MIT opencourseware)

    • Prof. Lee analyzes a highly symmetric system which contains multiple objects. By physics intuition, one could identify a special kind of motion – the normal modes. He shows that there is a general strategy for solving the normal modes.
      • Every part of the system is oscillating at the same frequency and the same phase
      • Stopped at 42:07 to take a break. I think this is the right track though. Download this for the plane?
  • Chapter on normal modes

Phil 8.30.18

7:00 – 5:00  ASRC MKT

  • Target Blue Sky paper for iSchool/iConference 2019: The chairs are particularly looking for “Blue Sky Ideas” that are open-ended, possibly even “outrageous” or “wacky,” and present new problems, new application domains, or new methodologies that are likely to stimulate significant new research. 
  • I’m thinking that a paper that works through the ramifications of this diagram as it relates to people and machines. With humans that are slow responding with spongy, switched networks the flocking area is large. With a monolithic densely connected system it’s going to be a straight line from nomadic to stampede. Nomad-Flocking-Stampede2
    • Length: Up to 4 pages (excluding references)
    • Submission deadline: October 1, 2018
    • Notification date: mid-November, 2018
    • Final versions due: December 14, 2018
    • First versions will be submitted using .pdf. Final versions must be submitted in .doc, .docx or La Tex.
  • More good stuff on BBC Business Daily Trolling for Cash
    • Anger and animosity is prevalent online, with some people even seeking it out. It’s present on social media of course as well as many online forums. But now outrage has spread to mainstream media outlets and even the advertising industry. So why is it so lucrative? Bonny Brooks, a writer and researcher at Newcastle University explains who is making money from outrage. Neuroscientist Dr Dean Burnett describes what happens to our brains when we see a comment designed to provoke us. And Curtis Silver, a tech writer for KnowTechie and ForbesTech, gives his thoughts on what we need to do to defend ourselves from this onslaught of outrage.
  • Exposure to Opposing Views can Increase Political Polarization: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment on Social Media
    • Christopher Bail (Scholar)
    • There is mounting concern that social media sites contribute to political polarization by creating “echo chambers” that insulate people from opposing views about current events. We surveyed a large sample of Democrats and Republicans who visit Twitter at least three times each week about a range of social policy issues. One week later, we randomly assigned respondents to a treatment condition in which they were offered financial incentives to follow a Twitter bot for one month that exposed them to messages produced by elected officials, organizations, and other opinion leaders with opposing political ideologies. Respondents were re-surveyed at the end of the month to measure the effect of this treatment, and at regular intervals throughout the study period to monitor treatment compliance. We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative post-treatment, and Democrats who followed a conservative Twitter bot became slightly more liberal post-treatment. These findings have important implications for the interdisciplinary literature on political polarization as well as the emerging field of computational social science.
  • Setup gcloud tools on laptop – done
  • Setup Tensorflow on laptop. Gave up un using CUDA 9.1, but got tf doing ‘hello, tensorflow’
  • Marcom meeting – 2:00
  • Get the concept of behaviors being a more scalable, dependable way of vetting information.
    • Eg Watching the DISI of outrage as manifested in trolling
      • “Uh. . . . not to be nitpicky,,,,,but…the past tense of drag is dragged, not drug.”: An overview of trolling strategies
        • Dr Claire Hardaker (Scholar) (Blog)
          • I primarily research aggression, deception, and manipulation in computer-mediated communication (CMC), including phenomena such as flaming, trolling, cyberbullying, and online grooming. I tend to take a forensic linguistic approach, based on a corpus linguistic methodology, but due to the multidisciplinary nature of my research, I also inevitably branch out into areas such as psychology, law, and computer science.
        • This paper investigates the phenomenon known as trolling — the behaviour of being deliberately antagonistic or offensive via computer-mediated communication (CMC), typically for amusement’s sake. Having previously started to answer the question, what is trolling? (Hardaker 2010), this paper seeks to answer the next question, how is trolling carried out? To do this, I use software to extract 3,727 examples of user discussions and accusations of trolling from an eighty-six million word Usenet corpus. Initial findings suggest that trolling is perceived to broadly fall across a cline with covert strategies and overt strategies at each pole. I create a working taxonomy of perceived strategies that occur at different points along this cline, and conclude by refining my trolling definition.
        • Citing papers
  • FireAnt (Filter, Identify, Report, and Export Analysis Toolkit) is a freeware social media and data analysis toolkit with built-in visualization tools including time-series, geo-position (map), and network (graph) plotting.
  • Fix marquee – done
  • Export to ppt – done!
    • include videos – done
    • Center title in ppt:
      • model considerations – done
      • diversity injection – done
  • Got the laptop running Python and Tensorflow. Had a stupid problem where I accidentally made a virtual environment and keras wouldn’t work. Removed, re-connected and restarted IntelliJ and everything is working!

Phil 8.29.18

7:00 – 4:30 ASRC MKT

  • This Is How Russian Propaganda Actually Works In The 21st Century (plus Kate Starbird’s twitter thoughts)
    • The Russian government discreetly funded a group of seemingly independent news websites in Eastern Europe to pump out stories dictated to them by the Kremlin, BuzzFeed News and its reporting partners can reveal.
  • How Right Wing is Right Wing Populism? Using multilingual CNNs on party manifestos.
    • Right wing populist parties in Europe are clearly different from other right wing parties in their rhetoric and electoral appeal. Some observers see substantive differences between right wing populists and other right wing parties, with populists supporting the welfare state and gender equality more than other right wing parties, often as part of an anti-immigration and anti-Muslim agenda. We test this claim using novel data produced by a multilingual convolutional neural net on political party platforms for the years 1990 to 2015 from the Manifesto Corpus. We find no systematic differences between right wing populists and non-populists on support for welfare and gender equality, though there is some evidence that more successful populists are more centrist.
  • Need to write up a 4 page blue sky paper for the 2019 iConference in DC
  • Realized that the poster had two herding DTW charts on the poster. Fixed and sent back. Hopefully it will get reprinted in time…
  • Uploaded the edited version and added them to the online presentation. Also saved out the mp4 files to use in the ppt version
  • Back to working on speech recognition. I’ve done a bunch of things that I’m documenting before I see if anything helped.
  • TL;DR – after much flailing, I found a page that actually helped. It’s a how-to (rather than quickstart) guide that includes a variety of interfaces including gcloud, Java and Python. And the gcloud command worked like a charm! All the flailing below is just for documentation on what NOT to do. Here’s what worked: 
    PS D:\Development\Sandboxes\MapsFromPodcasts> gcloud ml speech recognize D:\Development\Sandboxes\MapsFromPodcasts\brook
lyn.flac --language-code='en-US'
{
  "results": [
    {
      "alternatives": [
        {
          "confidence": 0.98360395,
          "transcript": "how old is the Brooklyn Bridge"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

    Note that the audio file is the same as the one in the examples and is available from Google here: storage.googleapis.com/cloud-samples-tests/speech/brooklyn.flac

  • For historical documentation of my flailing
    • First I opened a new Powershell window and re-ran the commands. Yup: Capture
    • Then I stumbled on the SDK support page and found this link to what may be the answer to the question on stackoverflow. CaptureIt says to run 
      gcloud auth application-default login --scopes=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email
    • Which I did, which caused a lot of things to happen Capture
    • First, I’m really wondering about this: To generate an access token for other uses, run: gcloud auth application-default print-access-token. This is used in both commands, si I’m wondering what it’s actually doing. What’s happening to this generated  token? is it being stored on my machine?
    • Second, it looks like I need to point at the [C:\Users\philip.feldman\AppData\Roaming\gcloud\application_default_credentials.json] file rather than the one in the project. That or copy to the dev location. I’m trying the former Capture
    • Then, I got this again (https://cloud.google.com/sdk/auth_success): Capture
    • Lastly, I upgraded because it said I could. Nothing works yet, so why not? Capture
    • That brought up a window with all this info: 
      Your current Cloud SDK version is: 213.0.0
You will be upgraded to version: 214.0.0

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│        These components will be updated.        │
├──────────────────────────┬────────────┬─────────┤
│           Name           │  Version   │   Size  │
├──────────────────────────┼────────────┼─────────┤
│ Cloud SDK Core Libraries │ 2018.08.24 │ 8.3 MiB │
│ gcloud cli dependencies  │ 2018.08.24 │ 2.4 MiB │
└──────────────────────────┴────────────┴─────────┘
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                 These components will be installed.                 │
├────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────┬──────────────────┤
│            Name            │       Version       │       Size       │
├────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────────────────┤
│ Bundled Python             │                     │                  │
└────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────┴──────────────────┘

The following release notes are new in this upgrade.
Please read carefully for information about new features, breaking changes,
and bugs fixed.  The latest full release notes can be viewed at:
  https://cloud.google.com/sdk/release_notes

214.0.0 (2018-08-28)
  Breaking Changes
      ■ **(Cloud Bigtable)** Modified the arguments accepted by cbt
        createappprofile and cbt updateappprofile in the following ways:
        ≡ Removed etag argument from createappprofile.
        ≡ Renamed allow-transactional-writes option as transactional-writes.
        ≡ Added a force option to ignore warnings.
      ■ **(Cloud Bigtable)** Modified the specification for routing policies.
        A routing policy can be either "route-any" (previously of
        "multi_cluster_routing_use_any") or "route-to=".
      ■ **(Compute Engine)** Deprecated gcloud compute interconnects
        attachments create. Please use gcloud compute interconnects attachments
        dedicated create instead.
      ■ **(Compute Engine)** Removed deprecated --mode flag from gcloud
        compute networks create. Use --subnet-mode instead.
      ■ **(Compute Engine)** Removed deprecated gcloud compute networks
        switch-mode command. Use gcloud compute networks update
        --switch-to-custom-mode instead.
      ■ **(Compute Engine)** Removed deprecated gcloud compute xpn command
        group. Use gcloud compute shared-vpc instead.

  Cloud Bigtable
      ■ Restored the output of the cbt count command that was inadvertently
        removed in the previous release.

  Cloud Datalab
      ■ Updated the datalab component to the 20180820 release. Released
        changes are documented in its tracking issue at
        https://github.com/googledatalab/datalab/issues/2064
        (https://github.com/googledatalab/datalab/issues/2064).

  Cloud Dataproc
      ■ Added SCHEDULED_DELETE column to gcloud beta dataproc clusters list
        command output.

  Cloud Datastore Emulator
      ■ Released Cloud Datastore Emulator version 2.0.2.
        ≡ Improved backward compatibility with App Engine local development
          by keeping auto generated indexes in index file generated from
          previous runs.

  Cloud Functions
      ■ Promoted --runtime flag of gcloud functions deploy to GA.

  Compute Engine
      ■ Promoted the following flags to GA:
        ≡ --network-tier of gcloud compute <addresses|forwarding-rules>
          create
        ≡ --default-network-tier of gcloud compute project-info update
        ≡ --network-tier of gcloud compute instances
          <add-access-config|create>
        ≡ --network-tier of gcloud compute instance-templates create
      ■ Promoted gcloud compute instances simulate-maintenance-event to GA.
      ■ Promoted <get|set>-iam-policy and <add|remove>-iam-policy-bindings to
        beta in the following commands groups:
        ≡ gcloud compute sole-tenancy node-groups
        ≡ gcloud compute sole-tenancy node-templates

  Kubernetes Engine
      ■ Promoted --disk-type flag of gcloud container <clusters|node-pools>
        create to GA.
      ■ Promoted --default-max-pods-per-node flag of gcloud container
        clusters create to beta.
      ■ Promoted --max-pods-per-node flag of gcloud container node-pools
        create to beta.
      ■ Modified --monitoring-service flag of gcloud containers clusters
        update to enable Google Cloud Monitoring service with Kubernetes-native
        resource model.
      ■ Modified --logging-service flag of gcloud containers clusters update
        to enable Google Cloud Logging service with Kubernetes-native resource
        model.
      ■ Modified output of gcloud beta container clusters list for DEGRADED
        clusters to include reason for degradation.
      ■ Added --enable-private-nodes and --enable-private-endpoint to gcloud
        beta container clusters create.
      ■ Deprecated --private-cluster flag of gcloud beta container clusters
        create; use --enable-private-nodes instead.

    Subscribe to these release notes at
    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/google-cloud-sdk-announce
    (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/google-cloud-sdk-announce).

Do you want to continue (Y/n)?  Y

╔════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
╠═ Creating update staging area                             ═╣
╠════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
╠═ Uninstalling: Cloud SDK Core Libraries                   ═╣
╠════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
╠═ Uninstalling: gcloud cli dependencies                    ═╣
╠════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
╠═ Installing: Bundled Python                               ═╣
╠════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
╠═ Installing: Cloud SDK Core Libraries                     ═╣
╠════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
╠═ Installing: gcloud cli dependencies                      ═╣
╠════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
╠═ Creating backup and activating new installation          ═╣
╚════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

Performing post processing steps...done.

Update done!

To revert your SDK to the previously installed version, you may run:
  $ gcloud components update --version 213.0.0

Press any key to continue . . .
    • So now lets see what happens with a restarted PowerShell
    • Nope, same problem. I also tried deleting the environment variable completely and the behavior is the same. So I don’t think that the file with the data is being sent? Capture
    • Interesting, the app-roaming file is not the same as the file that google had me generate for the text recognition getting started page: Capture

Phil 8.29.18

7:00 – 4:30 ASRC MKT

  • Editing videos
  • Need to think about short CHI paper about designing for culture/robot interactions. The trolly problem at scale? How would the sim be set up? The amount of randomness at the initial condition? Stiffness vs. connectivity? Beleif space is still important and is actually used as a concept in path planning
  • Visual Exploration and Comparison of Word Embeddings
    • Word embeddings are distributed representations for natural language words, and have been wildly used in many natural language processing tasks. The word embedding space contains local clusters with semantically similar words and meaningful directions, such as the analogy. However, there are different training algorithms and text corpora, which both have a different impact on the generated word embeddings. In this paper, we propose a visual analytics system to visually explore and compare word embeddings trained by different algorithms and corpora. The word embedding spaces are compared from three aspects, i.e., local clusters, semantic directions and diachronic changes, to understand the similarity and differences between word embeddings.
  • Much work on slides
  • Can’t get Google to recognise my account? 
    curl.exe -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer "$(gcloud auth application-default print-access-token) https://speech.google
apis.com/v1/speech:recognize -d @sync-request.json
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: ya29.c.EloHBu32-0nBAqimi1Zumlot6rjGtGpUk27qTTESRLW4vtd1LY4ihxBIesU3ga-kmwCaM7YZS-JRo_KNjaC_bj13dWazBcKr4YtAEQYFzSpSBx3DwdS46DTt0bg
{
  "error": {
    "code": 403,
    "message": "The request is missing a valid API key.",
    "status": "PERMISSION_DENIED"
  }
}

    No idea what host: ya29.c.EloHBu32-0nBAqimi1Zumlot6rjGtGpUk27qTTESRLW4vtd1LY4ihxBIesU3ga-kmwCaM7YZS-JRo_KNjaC_bj13dWazBcKr4YtAEQYFzSpSBx3DwdS46DTt0bg is

  • Found a problem with the poster. There are two herding DTW charts. Must be reprinted

Phil 8.27.18

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC MKT

  • Good chat with Barbara yesterday. She suggests horse racing podcasts, since the question is always the same “who’s going to win today” and the information to discuss is much more constrained. Additionally, there is the wagering information that could be used to determine the level of consensus?
  • Found an idiom translator! “Swing of the pendulum” occurs at least in French, German and Italian
  • Downloaded the new videos Need to put them in the ppt when the slides stabilize
  • Pinged Wayne about getting together today
  • Changed the questions page to have English, Italian, French and German terms for belief space
  • Another example of diversity injection (twitter)
  • Working on podcast text handling
      • Created the MapsFromPodcasts project in Development
      • Created an new key and downloaded the key json file
      • Installed Google Cloud Tools (213.0.0), following the directions of this page. Wow. Lots of stuff! 
        Output folder: D:\Programs\GoogleCloudAPI
Downloading Google Cloud SDK core.
Extracting Google Cloud SDK core.
Create Google Cloud SDK bat file: D:\Programs\GoogleCloudAPI\cloud_env.bat
Installing components.
Welcome to the Google Cloud SDK!
Your current Cloud SDK version is: 213.0.0
Installing components from version: 213.0.0
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| These components will be installed. |
+-----------------------------------------------------+------------+----------+
| Name | Version | Size |
+-----------------------------------------------------+------------+----------+
| BigQuery Command Line Tool | 2.0.34 | < 1 MiB |
| BigQuery Command Line Tool (Platform Specific) | 2.0.34 | < 1 MiB |
| Cloud SDK Core Libraries (Platform Specific) | 2018.06.18 | < 1 MiB |
| Cloud Storage Command Line Tool | 4.33 | 3.6 MiB |
| Cloud Storage Command Line Tool (Platform Specific) | 4.32 | < 1 MiB |
| Cloud Tools for PowerShell | | |
| Cloud Tools for PowerShell | 1.0.1.8 | 17.9 MiB |
| Default set of gcloud commands | | |
| Windows command line ssh tools | | |
| Windows command line ssh tools | 2017.09.15 | 1.8 MiB |
| gcloud cli dependencies | 2018.08.03 | 1.3 MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------+------------+----------+
For the latest full release notes, please visit:
https://cloud.google.com/sdk/release_notes
#============================================================#
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#= Installing: Cloud SDK Core Libraries (Platform Specific) =#
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#= Installing: Cloud Storage Command Line Tool =#
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#= Installing: Cloud Tools for PowerShell =#
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#= Installing: Cloud Tools for PowerShell =#
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#= Installing: Default set of gcloud commands =#
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#= Installing: Windows command line ssh tools =#
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#= Installing: Windows command line ssh tools =#
#============================================================#
#= Installing: gcloud cli dependencies =#
#============================================================#
#= Creating backup and activating new installation =#
#============================================================#
Performing post processing steps...
..............................................................................................................................................................done.
Update done!
This will install all the core command line tools necessary for working with
the Google Cloud Platform.
For more information on how to get started, please visit:
https://cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/quickstarts
Google Cloud SDK has been installed!

         

     

    • Google is sooooooooooooooooooooo Unix/Linux
  • Meeting with Wayne
    • Fix slides some more
    • Email about demo and poster – done