Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for April 16, 2020

A Steem essay argues that the oil industry will be a coming driver for AI advances; A Harvard working paper finds that consumers are less likely to buy when greeted with privacy notices; An essay describes the history of artificial intelligence from ancient Greece to today; Telepresence robots that make life safer and easier for hospital staff; and a report of more than 40 papers retracted or flagged for human rights concerns

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First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak^*, SteemSTEM.

1. Steem @carlos84: Analytical prediction: artificial intelligence may be led by the oil industry in the future - In this post, the author argues that the oil industry has an important need for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, and because of this need it is likely to be a driving force in the ongoing development of AI. The need for AI in the oil industry arises from the need to process massive data sets and process it with algorithms for petrophysics and exploration that make use of machine learning (ML). The author says that he is led to believe that the oil industry will drive AI creation by his experience in the industry working on drilling wells. He foresees that AI will be most useful in the industry in places where it can be used to increase safety and reduce risks, for example, on the drilling platforms. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @carlos84.)


2. The Bulletproof Glass Effect: When Privacy Notices Backfire - Harvard's Leslie K. John and coauthors argue in a working paper that private notices, meant to inspire trust in a web site or company, can actually have the opposite effect. After conducting one field experiment and five lab experiments the team observed that customers react to privacy notices as if they were warnings, and that privacy notices are linked to decreases in purchasing decisions. The abstract suggests that this reduction is probably not due to a consumer aversion to privacy notices, but rather because the privacy notice raises a reminder to nascent concerns about privacy.


3. THE ORIGINS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - A general notion of artificial intelligence can be traced back as far as 380 BC, when the concept appeared in Greek mythology's "golden robots of Hephaestus and Pygmalion's Galatea". Since then, the ideas were explored by a number of mathematicians, philosophers, theologians, professors, and authors, including "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift and "Erewhon" by Samuel Butler. In the early 20th century, Makoto Nishimura built the first robot in Japan, and John Vincent Atanasoff & Clifford Berry built a digital computer that could solve up to 29 linear equations in parallel. The modern origins of the field, however, date to the 1950s. At the time, intellectual heavy weights like Alan Turing, Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and others made foundational contributions to the field, including the creation of the "Turing Test" to identify artificial intelligence, theories about computation complexity, the creation of the LISP programming language, and more. After a so-called "AI winter, the field expanded briefly again in 1980s, but suffered a second AI winter until the mid-1990s. In 1997, when chess Grandmaster, Gary Kasparov lost a match to IBM's "Deep Blue", the field grew legs again. Now, with the wide availability of data and the continued advances in algorithms, AI is establishing a pervasive foothold throughout our society. This article closes by anticipating continuing expansion in areas ranging from language processing to autonomous driving. -h/t Communications of the ACM


4. Telepresence Robots Are Helping Take Pressure Off Hospital Staff - As hospitals continue to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, they are using robots for tasks from sterilizing rooms to delivering medicines and supplies. This article tells of another use where Ava telepresence robots are enabling doctors to see patients safely without being exposed to the virus. Ava Robotics is a 2016 spin-off from iRobot and they make a robot with fully autonomous navigation, a high quality teleconferencing platform, and a HIPAA-certified communications platform from Cisco. After describing the robotic technology, this article follows by providing the transcript from an interview with the company's CEO, Youssef Saleh.
   
   Here is a 2018 video of the AVA telepresence robot:
   


5. Journals have retracted or flagged more than 40 papers from China that appear to have used organ transplants from executed prisoners - The first issues with Chinese papers began with retractions in 2016 and 2017, but in February, 2019, Wendy Rogers called for retractions of more than 400 papers that may have human rights concerns. Since then, there have been 28 retractions and another 13 papers have received letters of concern. Of the retractions, 21 came from the open access journal, PLOS ONE, all in 2019.

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