Big Idea 5.3 Computing Bias

Discussion 1:

Google “What age groups use Facebook” vs “… TikTok”? What does the data say? Is there purposeful exclusion in these platforms? Is it harmful? Should it be corrected? Is it good business?

There is a clear distinction between the age gap of Tiktok versus facebook users. The age gap shows that a majority of face book users are above the age of 25, while the majority of tiktok useres are below the age of twentity-five. Although there isn’t purposeful exclusion within these platforms, it’s obvious that both platforms advertise and appeal to a different set of the population. I do not believe that this is inherently harmful to society as both demographics still are able to acquire the platform that they wish to speak on. On the otherhand, having such an approach is certainly one viable business model, as it allows for better targeting and curation of a particular group’s demands.

Discussion 2:

Why do virtual assistants have female voices? Amazon, Alexa Google, Apple Siri. Was this purposeful? Is it harmful? Should it be corrected? Is it good business?

I feel like most virtual assistants have female voices because of a trend that started out with the first few assistents, such as Apple siri or amazon Alexa. However, although one can argue that such a decision could result in the perpetuation of the idea that women should be in a subservient position, (such as acting as secretary figures), I do not believe that it is as large as a problem now, especially as many companies are producing more assistants with different voices (some including male ones)

Discussion 3:

Talk about an algorithm that influences your decisions, think about these companies (ie FAANG - Facebook, Amazon, Apple,Netflix, Google)

One large algorithm that influences my decisions is the google search engine. The search engine relies on a complicated network of big data and machine learning algorithms in order to quickly and effectively return a set of website links for a certain query that I enter. Thus, depending on the output of this algorithm, it could very well change the information that I consume or learn on the internet. Moreover, such algorithms could also impact our experience of internet entertainment. For example, the netflix platform, which is commonly used for streaming movies and TV shows, uses a similar idea where it implements are reccomendation engine or something of the sort to reccomend shows to users based on the current trends or the watch history of the user themselves.

As pairs

Come up with some thoughts on the video and be ready to discuss them as I call on you. Here are some ideas…

  1. Does the owner of the computer think this was intentional?
    I do not believe that the owner of the computer thought that this was intentional.
  2. If yes or no, justify you conclusion.
    The overall video had a pretty humourous tone, and it didn’t seem like the owner was really agitated in any way. However, had he been more concerned with the quality of the product, he likely would’ve brought it up in a more official way, by filling out a ticket or sending an email to customer support directly.
  3. How do you think this happened?
    I think that this likely happened because of a lack of training data for the computer to work with, as if the computer is only trained to recognize people or lighter skin tones, it might not necessarily work as well for people of other skin tones.
  4. Is this harmful? Was it intended to be harmful or exclude?
    Such mistakes are certainly harmful, althought their might not be intended to be harmful or to exclude. These mistakes allow for an entire demographic to miss out on a particular technology or trend.
  5. Should it be corrected?
    Yes, I believe that this issue should be corrected in order to incoporate and embrace a much larger group of consumers
  6. What would you or should you do to produce a better outcome?
    I believe that if the company could use more training data (i.e. getting more people from different races and skin tones to test out the computer), performance would gradually increase to include other people as well.

Summary:

Computing Bias could have great implications in our world, weather it be in our day to day lives, or in the commercial/business realm. For instance, the Hewlett-Packard motion assisted camera demonstrated how a narrowed minded training set could neglect other forms of data and consumers, such as those with different skin tones or clothing. This is why testing our algorithms are so important, because it allows us to identify for possible biases in our programs to detect wether or not a particular type of people are being excluded from using the application. Thus, I should be careful to test my algorithms in the CPT project such that it treats all users fairly and equally.

Big Idea 5.4 Crowdsourcing

Discusssion 1:

CompSci has 150 ish principles students. Describe a crowdsource idea and how you might initiate it in our environment?

One example of a crowdsource idea that I can use is to have people enter data on a website frontend that I create, and eventually store the data in the backend. An example of this could be a program used to compare the school schedules of two users, which would be impossible without user input, but extremely efficient for students to compare with other students. Thus, if everyone can contribute their schedule to such a program, it would become an incredibly effective and efficient tool for all students.

Discussion 2:

What about Del Norte crowdsourcing? Could your project be better with crowdsourcing?

The project can certainly be improved with a a more direct approach to Del Norte crowdsourcing. For example, instead of only focusing on the AP CSP class, we can add in other classes from around campus too, this would overall open our project up to a greater range of people and ultimately imrpove the overall quality of the pgoram as users now can have access to a greater amount of information as to who is in their classes.

Discussion 3:

What kind of data could you capture at N@tM to make evening interesting? Perhaps use this data to impress Teachers during finals week.

At N@TM, I can capture specific data related to the individual schedules of each student in order to gradually build up the userbase of the program. By storing these data into a backend database, we can keep it persistently running at all times, so that more and more people could eventually add to and contribute to the program functionality as a whole. This would improve the overall quality of hte pgoram as it would then have a broader range of an audience, as well as more potential data to display.

Types of Licences

There are two main types of Licenses that one can choose to use:

  1. Open Source Licences: Allow for other people to view, access, and download the source code for a program. permissions may vary amongst some licenses but overalll idea would be the same. Some Open source licenses allow for closed source distribution, others do not.
  2. Closed Source Licences: Does not allow for other people to access a project or program’s source code. Typically the marketer of such a program will release a closed version to the public, and keep the source code for their own development.

Examples of Licenses

  1. Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal: Grants most unrestricted usage and rights, for the public domain and the author waives all copyrights to the product.
  2. Open Source MIT License: Allows other consumers to freely use the code produced and also release closed source versions. However, in these products, people commonly would be required by the License to give credit to the original author.
  3. Open Source GPL License: Allows for viewing and access and most other rights to a project, with the exception of releasing or distributing a closed sourced version of it

Personal Summary:

  • As an individual, I believe that protecting a user’s intellectual rights to something that they’ve made is highly important in ensuring that the right people receive credit for their works. Thus, licenses are really important tools to outline the rights of the creator, as well as the rights of the user to use and access code made by someone else.
  • Because of our projected-based learning curriculum, I feel like students should be able to make their projects open-sourced so that other students can view and see what particular edits or changes may be added to address a specfic issue. Moreover, these licenses should also restrict the usage rights of other students, such that they can still view the source code, but not copy it directly and release it for their own work.
  • Because many large companies distribute their products amongst a userbase, it is important to create a license to outline the consumer rights of their product, such that they can stil protect their patent rights and earn money.

Team Selection:

As a team, we decided to pick the GNU GPLv3 License for our project. This is because the license not only allows other students to access our project if they need help, but it also prevents them from directly copying or stealing the code for themselves. We determined that this would thus be the best license type to use for such a school based project.

Describe PII you have seen on project in CompSci Principles.

Some notable Personal Identifiable Information that I’ve seen in the class are forms gathering data about name and email. Typically, such information isn’t too sensitive, as there can be many people with the same name, and the email address is meant to be shared publically for communication. However, there are more sensitive forms of data stored, such as address and date of birth on some other projects.

What are your feelings about PII and your personal exposure?

I believe that PII’s are an important aspect of our internet activities. Most of our web services rely on such PII’s for providing us with the best quality and experience. However, we should also be careful with what we do with PII on the internet. Because some of these data can be identifiable and are highly private to an individual, it would be problematic if such details leaked out into the hands of an attacker.

Describe good and bad passwords? What is another step that is used to assist in authentication.

A good password typically has met certain criterias that make it harder to brute force, such as a set minimum password length (typically 15), a mix of numbers and letters, mixed-cases for alphabetical characters, as well as other special symbols. A bad password would be one that is easily brute-forced or dictionary cracked, because of how commonly used it is or because of the lack of rules imposed on it. There are other certain methdos to help with autneitcation, one being encryption, which could help us to mask and store passwords safely, and the other can be 2FA (Two Factor Authentication), which would require users to verify using another device before granting access.

Try to describe Symmetric and Asymmetric encryption.

In Symmetric encryption, only one secret key is used to encryot and decrypt encrypted content. However, asymmetric encryption may utilize a pair of related keys, known as public and private keys, in order to encrypt and decrypt a given piece of information. Thus by virtue, asymmetric encryptio is commonly more secure than symmetric encryption.

Provide an example of encryption we used in AWS deployment.

An example of an encruption that we used in AWS deployment is SSL encryption, which uses a mix of both symmetric and asymmetric encryption methods. We have also previously generated RSA keys too for our SSH deployment keys when we set up the project.

Describe a phishing scheme you have learned about the hard way. Describe some other phishing techniques.

While I personally haven’t been phished or scammed before on the internet, there are a multitude of other methods that people may use to phish others. For instance, a common way of phishing is to send an email disguised to look like an official email from a company, asking for money or a fee for a service or other business related task. For such instances, the emails are typically misspelled, carrying many other mistkaes within it’s subject and body that could be noticed amongst closer inspection. These emails often link to other sites and such that can eventually track and store user inputted data such as paswords and card info, to ultimately scam the user.