Big Pinocchio

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Presented at SuitsAndSpooks 2015 by

A while ago I contacted my favorite living Constitutional lawyer and an under-the-radar AI researcher. I wrote: “With data analytic advances [corroborated today by the massive US intel gathering leaks], it is now straightforward to identify criteria that mediately & predominantly target any given cohort in the US. This means that any type of discrimination (good, bad, be it Affirmative Action, economic stimulus, health care allocations etc) can be surreptitiously encoded in innocuous measures that rely on seemingly neutral, objective criteria. The intended discrimination and decision ‘unwrapping’ is hidden in the correlations of the stipulated criteria and can not be easily ascertained by end result inspection or even black box algorithm inspection. This was of course tried manually before, but now we have the data and the analysis power to do this at scale, systematically and 1, 2, 3 etc orders removed.” This talk will give an accessible overview of possible next generation adversarial thrusts: Crafted poisoning attacks against Big Data and associated machine learning algorithms. I will give examples of real-world examples and implications for US citizens. I may discuss potential countermeasures.