scholarly journals Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance

Author(s):  
Robert Gorwa ◽  
Reuben Binns ◽  
Christian Katzenbach

As government pressure on major technology companies builds, both firms and legislators are searching for technical solutions to difficult platform governance puzzles such as hate speech and misinformation. Automated hash-matching and predictive machine learning tools – what we define here as algorithmic moderation systems – are increasingly being deployed to conduct content moderation at scale by major platforms for user-generated content such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. This article provides an accessible technical primer on how algorithmic moderation works; examines some of the existing automated tools used by major platforms to handle copyright infringement, terrorism and toxic speech; and identifies key political and ethical issues for these systems as the reliance on them grows. Recent events suggest that algorithmic moderation has become necessary to manage growing public expectations for increased platform responsibility, safety and security on the global stage; however, as we demonstrate, these systems remain opaque, unaccountable and poorly understood. Despite the potential promise of algorithms or ‘AI’, we show that even ‘well optimized’ moderation systems could exacerbate, rather than relieve, many existing problems with content policy as enacted by platforms for three main reasons: automated moderation threatens to (a) further increase opacity, making a famously non-transparent set of practices even more difficult to understand or audit, (b) further complicate outstand- ing issues of fairness and justice in large-scale sociotechnical systems and (c) re-obscure the fundamentally political nature of speech decisions being executed at scale.

Author(s):  
Angela Dranishnikova

In the article, the author reflects the existing problems of the fight against corruption in the Russian Federation. He focuses on the opacity of the work of state bodies, leading to an increase in bribery and corruption. The topic we have chosen is socially exciting in our days, since its significance is growing on a large scale at all levels of the investigated aspect of our modern life. Democratic institutions are being jeopardized, the difference in the position of social strata of society in society’s access to material goods is growing, and the state of society is suffering from the moral point of view, citizens are losing confidence in the government, and in the top officials of the state.


1996 ◽  
Vol 33 (9) ◽  
pp. 237-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ghassan Chebbo ◽  
Dominique Laplace ◽  
André Bachoc ◽  
Yves Sanchez ◽  
Benoit Le Guennec

Solids in combined sewer networks represent two important technical questions: - the clogging of man-entry sewers, and - pollution in urban wet weather discharges, whose main vectors are generally suspended solids. In this paper, we shall present first, curative technical solutions which avoid or remove deposits in man-entry sewers. We shall discuss the partial extraction of the largest solids; selective trapping of bed load solids, which form deposits; and the displacement of deposits using dry weather flow flushing waves. We shall then examine technical solutions to control pollution in urban wet weather discharges. This will show that decantation is an efficient means of fighting pollution. However, it is not always feasible because it involves large scale investments. Complementary methods should, therefore, be developed and used at different points in the water's passage through an urban drainage area.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 1332
Author(s):  
Hong Fan ◽  
Wu Du ◽  
Abdelghani Dahou ◽  
Ahmed A. Ewees ◽  
Dalia Yousri ◽  
...  

Social media has become an essential facet of modern society, wherein people share their opinions on a wide variety of topics. Social media is quickly becoming indispensable for a majority of people, and many cases of social media addiction have been documented. Social media platforms such as Twitter have demonstrated over the years the value they provide, such as connecting people from all over the world with different backgrounds. However, they have also shown harmful side effects that can have serious consequences. One such harmful side effect of social media is the immense toxicity that can be found in various discussions. The word toxic has become synonymous with online hate speech, internet trolling, and sometimes outrage culture. In this study, we build an efficient model to detect and classify toxicity in social media from user-generated content using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The BERT pre-trained model and three of its variants has been fine-tuned on a well-known labeled toxic comment dataset, Kaggle public dataset (Toxic Comment Classification Challenge). Moreover, we test the proposed models with two datasets collected from Twitter from two different periods to detect toxicity in user-generated content (tweets) using hashtages belonging to the UK Brexit. The results showed that the proposed model can efficiently classify and analyze toxic tweets.


1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 547-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Pratt ◽  
Shirley M. Pratt ◽  
Paul T. Barham ◽  
Randall E. Barker ◽  
Marianne S. Waldrop ◽  
...  

This paper examines the representation of humans in large-scale, networked virtual environments. Previous work done in this field is summarized, and existing problems with rendering, articulating, and networking numerous human figures in real time are explained. We have developed a system that integrates together some well-known solutions along with new ideas. Models with multiple level of details, body-tracking technology and animation libraries to specify joint angles, efficient group representations to describe multiple humans, and hierarchical network protocols have been successfully employed to increase the number of humans represented, system performance, and user interactivity. The resulting system immerses participants effectively and has numerous useful applications.


Author(s):  
Annu Reetha Thomas

Discharging of wastes and toxic pollutants produced by the industrial activities into the natural environment which consist of air, water and land implies the term Industrial Pollution. It has serious consequences on human life and its health along with several ways of negative impacts on the environment and nature. As far as our nation is concerned most of the major cities are filled with these large-scale industries which place a crucial role financial development of a country. Strictly hindering the development of industries cannot be done as it is vital for the Socio-Economic progress of a country. Yet it is our duty to protect our natural environment by limiting the pollution due to industries. This Study consist of the issues occurred in Eloor- Kadungalloor region as result of the industrial pollution followed by policies for a development plan to enhance the natural and environmental conditions with a planning approach at micro study level. As far as the Kerala context is considered, the major spot which is mostly affected by the industrial pollution is the ‘Edayar Industrial belt’ which is the largest industrial belt in Kerala. This became one of most noted spot because of the continuous dumping of dangerous chemical pollutants from adjacent industries (pesticide and fertilizer manufacturing). It has also resulted in health issues for the inhabitants of the site. Though many complaints have been filed against the companies, there has no proper laws or schemes for taking measures for reduction of pollution have come up so far. Hence this paper deals with the application of technical solutions and strategies for an Environment Improvement plan development for an industrial as well as studying on the issues of sire and its inhabitants.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanling Zhao ◽  
Huanqing Zhang

Background: Bearing testing machine is the key equipment for bearing design, theoretical research and improvement, and it plays an important role in the performance of bearing life, fatigue, vibration and working temperature. With the requirements of aerospace, military equipment, automobile manufacturing and other industrial fields of the bearing are becoming higher and higher. There is an urgent need for high-precision and high-efficiency bearing testing machines to monitor and analyze the performance of bearings. Objective: By analyzing the recent patents, the characteristics and existing problems of the current bearing testing machine are summarized to provide references for the development of bearing test equipment in the future. Methods: This paper reviews various representative patents related to the third generation bearing testing machines. Results: Although the structure of bearing testing machines is different, the main problems in the structure and design principle of bearing testing machine have been summarized and analyzed, and the development of trend and direction of the future bearing testing machine have been discussed. Conclusion: Bearing testing machines for health monitoring of bearing life cycle is of great significance. The current bearing testing machine has basically achieved the monitoring and analysis However, due to the emergence of new types of bearings, further improvement is still needed. With the development of testing technology towards intelligent and big data-driven direction, bearing testing machine is moving towards the type of cloud computing and large-scale testing.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2076 (1) ◽  
pp. 012060
Author(s):  
Xiaoyu Yang ◽  
Ling Tong ◽  
Lin Wu ◽  
Baoguo Zhang ◽  
Zhiyuan Liao ◽  
...  

Abstract Silicon nanostructures are attracting growing attention due to their properties and promising application prospects in solar energy conversion and storage devices, thermoelectric devices, lithium-ion batteries, and biosensing technologies. The large-scale and low-cost preparation of silicon nanostructures is critical for silicon-based advanced functional devices commercialization. In this paper, the feasibility and mechanism of silicon nanostructure fabricated by non-metallic carbon catalytic etching, as well as the currently existing problems and future development trend are reviewed.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaofeng pan ◽  
Mohamed-Slim Alouini

In order to fulfill transportation demands, people have well-explored ground, waterborne, and high-altitude spaces (HAS) for transportation purposes, as well as the underground space under cities (namely, subway systems). However, due to the increased burdens of population and urbanization in recent decades, huge pressures on public transportation and freight traffic are introduced to cities, plaguing the governors and constraining the development of economics. By observing the fact that near-ground space (NGS) has rarely been utilized, researchers and practitioners started to re-examine, propose and develop flying cars, which are not a totally novel idea, aiming at solving the traffic congestion problem and releasing the strains of cities. Flying cars completely differ from traditional grounded transportation systems, where automobiles/trains are suffering track limitations and are also different from the air flights in HAS for long-distance transfer. Therefore, while observing the lack of specific literature on flying cars and flying car transportation systems (FCTS), this paper is motivated to study the advances, techniques, and challenges of FCTS imposed by the inherent nature of NGS transportation and to devise useful proposals for facilitating the construction and commercialization of FCTS, as well as to facilitate the readers understanding of the incoming FCTS. We first introduce the increased requirements for transportation and address the advantages of flying cars. Next, a brief overview of the developing history of flying cars is presented in view of both timeline and technique categories. Then, we discuss and compare the state of the art in the design of flying cars, including take-off \& landing (TOL) modes, pilot modes, operation modes, and power types, which are respectively related to the adaptability, flexibility & comfort, stability & complexity, environmental friendliness of flying cars. Additionally, since large-scale operations of flying cars can improve the aforementioned transportation problem, we also introduce the designs of FCTS, including path and trajectory planning, supporting facilities and commercial designs. Finally, we discuss the challenges which might be faced while developing and commercializing FCTS from three aspects: safety issues, commercial issues, and ethical issues.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Bandrowski ◽  
Jeffrey S. Grethe ◽  
Anna Pilko ◽  
Tom Gillespie ◽  
Gabi Pine ◽  
...  

AbstractThe NIH Common Fund’s Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) initiative is a large-scale program that seeks to accelerate the development of therapeutic devices that modulate electrical activity in nerves to improve organ function. Integral to the SPARC program are the rich anatomical and functional datasets produced by investigators across the SPARC consortium that provide key details about organ-specific circuitry, including structural and functional connectivity, mapping of cell types and molecular profiling. These datasets are provided to the research community through an open data platform, the SPARC Portal. To ensure SPARC datasets are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR), they are all submitted to the SPARC portal following a standard scheme established by the SPARC Curation Team, called the SPARC Data Structure (SDS). Inspired by the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS), the SDS has been designed to capture the large variety of data generated by SPARC investigators who are coming from all fields of biomedical research. Here we present the rationale and design of the SDS, including a description of the SPARC curation process and the automated tools for complying with the SDS, including the SDS validator and Software to Organize Data Automatically (SODA) for SPARC. The objective is to provide detailed guidelines for anyone desiring to comply with the SDS. Since the SDS are suitable for any type of biomedical research data, it can be adopted by any group desiring to follow the FAIR data principles for managing their data, even outside of the SPARC consortium. Finally, this manuscript provides a foundational framework that can be used by any organization desiring to either adapt the SDS to suit the specific needs of their data or simply desiring to design their own FAIR data sharing scheme from scratch.


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