Tesla Co-Founder Marc Tarpenning Visits ELPP


Photo by Ariana Ling

On June 5th, the University of California, Berkeley’s Engineering Leadership Professional Program (ELPP) had the pleasure of hearing from Marc Tarpenning — the co-founder of Tesla, a car company which recently surpassed Ford in market value as investors bet on its continued growth in the industry. In his talk, Marc discussed the development of Tesla’s famous electric cars and highlighted distinctions from other companies that allowed Tesla to be the leader in the new field of electric vehicles.

Before founding Tesla, Marc and his co-founder Martin Eberhard founded an e-book company, in which they learned how to write effective business plans and build financial models. For them, Tesla has always needed to make financial sense, and being able to build really good spreadsheets for the financials was a significant advantage.

Compared to gasoline-powered vehicles, electric cars have a much less complex motor system and use energy much more efficiently. According to Marc, there are really only two main parts to electric cars — the drive train and motor. The motor, which is an AC induction motor, was originally invented by Nikola Tesla, the inspiration for company’s name.

While crediting Martin with having the great idea to use 1000’s of standard off-the-shelf small lithium-ion batteries to power the vehicle, Marc stated that using all those batteries together was one of the most challenging and risky parts of pulling off an all-electric car.

Some of their goals included a decent range and 0 to 60 mph in less than 4 seconds. They calculated using simple high school physics that, with an electric car, all of this would be possible due to the very high efficiency of an all-electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries.

Marc highlighted that there was something very different about their approach to the Tesla car compared to traditional manufacturers. In contrast to, for instance, Daimler Motors that makes Mercedes, who in their advertisements actually highlight “it takes us 10 years to conceive, build and then ship a new car”, Tesla was in SV and it did it much faster.

When asked to describe his leadership style, Marc said “I’ve been told that I don’t panic.” He reflected on how a fighter pilot told him that the crew is trained to check with everyone in the cockpit before taking emergency steps in a flight emergency, and Marc’s style was one that asked “do we need to react right away?”, “is this really a crisis?” and “should we get more data?”.

In his talk, Marc also credited Elon Musk — the charismatic CEO and face of Tesla — for being an “early believer” in the company and investor, while most VCs believed that they were crazy to think they could launch a new car company when the last successful American car startup, Ford, was founded over 100 years ago. Elon continued his support throughout the long development cycle, and Marc said that eventually it made sense for him to come on as CEO.

Great idea, execution of an idea, solid business plans, great leadership, and strong beliefs all combined to allow what seemed too crazy — an all electric vehicle — to be possible and lead Tesla to become a significant leader in the car industry.

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37 Student Innovators from UC Berkeley Gear-Up for Clinton Global Initiative University


UC Berkeley student Connor Gallaher presents his innovation, PlasMachine, to President Bill Clinton.

By Francesca Munsayac  

In October the Blum Center will send 37 UC Berkeley students to the 2017 Clinton Global Initiative University, an annual meeting sponsored by the Clinton Foundation. This year CGI U will bring together 1,100 students from across the country to develop innovative solutions to address challenges in the fields of education, environment, climate change, peace, human rights, poverty alleviation, and public health. CGI U provides support, mentorship, and resources to emerging student innovators, including $750,000 in prize money that is available to winning students through CGI U network members. Over 350 UC Berkeley students have partaken in CGI U over the event’s 10-year history, and have gone on to raise millions of dollars in investment to launch impactful social ventures.

This year’s CGI U attendees include nine participants from Big IDeas@Berkeley; UC Berkeley’s acclaimed student innovation contest. Like CGI U, Big Ideas@Berkeley brings together students from multidisciplinary backgrounds who collaborate to develop innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing social and development challenges. According to CGI U organizers, UC Berkeley has maintained a reputation for consistently sending large cohort of students who produce high-caliber projects every year.

Student Innovator Spotlights

The following UC Berkeley teams are among those that will present at the CGI U annual meeting in October. Check back on the Blum Center News’ section for updates and to track their progress as the competition unfolds.

Aiding the Refugee Effort in Greece

Thanh Mai Bercher, UC Berkeley’s 2017 Activist of the Year, and Holly Wertman, Chair of the City of Berkeley’s Community Health Commission, joined forces to support The Melissa Networka Blum Center partner organization that provides critical services to female refugees in Greece. Bercher and Wertman are supporting the Melissa Network to develop a long-term women’s health program, which will be widely publicized through UN-based and local agencies, filling the information gap of where and how female refugees can seek health services.

Maximizing Social Relationships to Improve Women’s Health

Osman Shokoor, former Vice President of UC Berkeley’s Afghan Student Association, is building a comprehensive community-based program that connects Afghan refugee mothers, and uses modeling of positive peer behavior to demonstrate how to achieve positive health outcomes.

Shokoor will coordinate an interactive weekly women’s exercise program that includes reflection sessions, and group seminars that provide a platform for Afghan women to discuss issues related to mental health, PTSD, intergenerational trauma, and common health concernssuch as Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease. To recruit participants and volunteers, Shokoor will partner with the Afghan Coalition, the oldest and most recognized Afghan community organization in the Bay Area.



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Global Venture Lab 2017


On behalf of the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, we would like to invite you to the 8th Global Venture Lab at UC Berkeley.

The Global Venture Lab (GVL) is an international summit of academics, entrepreneurs, and innovators sharing common research and educational programs to spur new industry and economic growth. Since our first event in 2009, GVL continues to be an extraordinary opportunity to network, learn, and share best practices among entrepreneurship centers around the world.

 

Dates: Monday and Tuesday, August 21 and 22, 2017

Location: Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, California Memorial Stadium at the UC Berkeley Campus.

Program 

Click here to see the program agenda.

Registration: In order to guarantee your spot please register by August 13th through the EventBrite link.

For questions contact Susan Giesecke: sgiesecke@berkeley.edu and Danielle Vivo: d.vivo@berkeley.edu.

We look forward to hosting you at UC Berkeley!

Leadership Team


Ikhlaq Sidhu,
Faculty Director and Founder


Ken Singer, Managing Director


Susan Giesecke, Director of Global Engagement


Danielle Vivo, Program Manager


Charlotta Johnsson, Co-Chair


Ricardo San Martin, Co-Chair

Entrepreneurship Best Practices Crossing Borders

The goal of the Global Venture Network is to share best practices to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in a university environment with the intent to help create new companies and industries. GVL strives to develop an entrepreneurial ecosystem that supports venture creation and innovation between Berkeley and global partners. Industry-changing innovation and leadership stretch well beyond geographical boundaries at GVL.

Recommended for: Academic Institutions interested in developing and sharing best practices for entrepreneurship instruction.


The January 2016 GVL Summit in Berkeley

The Global Venture Lab Report

  • This brief of the “Report from the Global Venture Lab Network Inaugural Summit” summarizes the discussion of best practices and next steps from the November 19, 2009 meeting of engineering entrepreneurship educators from 18 universities. Click here to read more.

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Big Ideas Winners Increase Access to Extension Services in Rural Uganda


m-omulimisa

By Francesca Munsayac and April You

In rural Uganda, extension services help farmers apply cutting edge technologies and best practices that promote agricultural productivity and improve rural livelihoods. While most African countries have extension programs that arm local farmers with the  agricultural information they need to succeed, limited resources often prevent extension workers from visiting more remote areas. Furthermore, the vast majority of technological solutions for agriculture are only offered English, limiting the reach of other IT innovations. To address this challenge, Big Ideas Contest winners, Linlin Liang and  Daniel Ninsiima, developed “m-Omulimisa”, a phone-based platform that increases access to extension services for rural Ugandan farmers by providing critical agricultural information via SMS messaging in a local language. Through m-Omulimisa, any farmer in Uganda, regardless of location, can ask agricultural questions in any language via text message, and receive answers from a trained extension officer.

According to Liang, m-Omulimisa, which means “mobile extension officer” in native Luganda, bridges the access and information gap left behind by existing agricultural extension programs. The m-Omulimisa team teaches extension officers how to use the platform, and in turn, these officers train farmers how to submit their questions. The platform currently has over 100 registered extension officers and is being used by nonprofit organizations like World Vision, Sasakawa Global 2000, VEDCO, as well as local district governments, to reach underserved farmers.

“Our product utilizes SMS services as a vehicle to communicate between officers and farmers. We made our decision to use text messaging based on what was available and affordable for farmers. Over 65% of Ugandans own mobile phones, and most of these are basic phones which can be used only for calls and text messaging. Only about 5% of Ugandans own smartphones. Additionally, the cost of text messaging in Uganda is a fraction of the cost of calling or data for the Internet. ” Liang said.

While developing their platform, the team confronted various challenges, including mobile illiteracy in rural areas, lack of motivation on behalf of the officers to answer the farmer’s questions, and limitations in the last-mile distribution of agricultural inputs.

The team tackled the issue of mobile illiteracy by working with extensions services partners to integrate mobile phone literacy into every aspect of farmer training and, in the future, they plan on developing videos in local languages that will instruct users on the basic functions of a mobile phone. Next, they will create a reward system that incentivizes and increases extension officer engagement. Lastly, they plan on building a network of community based “agripreneurs” (agricultural entrepreneurs) that will help farmers get access to products by increasing distribution channels in rural communities.  

When asked how Big Ideas contest helped the team translate their ideas into further action, Liang responded, “Before the contest, all we had were ideas, but no resources to change our ideas into action. The Big Ideas award made it possible for us to use our education, passion, and skills to start creating a tangible product to make a positive impact in the lives of smallholder farmers in Uganda. Even during the proposal stage, the training and mentorship from Big Ideas were phenomenal. We had a great mentor, Sean Krepp, who was connected through Big Ideas and helped us to rethink and reimagine the business model, partnership strategy, and product development. His guidance was vital in developing our winning proposal and starting a promising social enterprise.”

When asked if they had any advice for future students participating in Big Ideas, the m-Omulimisa team suggested the following:

(1) Identify the unique positioning of your product or service and how it adds value to prospective partners. In their case, many organizations are already providing agricultural extension services through the traditional face-to-face (in-person) approach, but there are not enough extension officers to serve every farmer.  Their platform makes it possible to help more farmers in a timely manner at minimal cost.

(2) Human capital is critical in the early stages of developing your innovation. It is very helpful to have a team member who has extensive connections or experience with stakeholders in the industry or field where operations are taking place. Exploring potential partnerships with other existing products and services is also significantly helpful.

(3) Communicate with your team as regularly as possible. Fluid internal communication is a critical prerequisite for early-stage decision-making. If you are working with team members overseas, take advantage of both formal and informal communication tools (e.g., emails and Facebook).
Liang and Ninsiima are currently in the registration process of becoming a social enterprise. According to Liang, they will continue refining their business model to better reach underserved communities. In addition, they are looking to partner with university-based and agricultural researchers  in order to build a coalition of experts who can respond to farmer’s questions. With this support,  m-Omulimisa believes farmers will become vital actors in the movement to alleviate hunger and poverty in the developing world.



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Students Pitch Transnational Security Tools in Washington D.C.


Students after presenting to the Department of Treasury

Eight weeks of ideation, prototyping, and pitches led 17 UC Berkeley students to Washington D.C. where they presented their hard work to Treasury Department officials as well as the defense and intelligence communities. Reflecting on this amazing experience, the Collider participants want other students to know that they all have the power to break free of their rigid, controlled environment to bring about change.

One year ago, UC Berkeley students were studying in Nice, France when the tragic Bastille Day terrorist attack killed one of their own. Just two weeks prior, another Berkeley student lost her life in a Bangladesh terrorist attack. Inspired by the death of their friends and frustrated by their lack of agency in these situations, 22 students came together to apply their skills to tackle problems important to them and the world.

Working with the Sutardja Center and Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), they formed the first student-led Collider Project. The Data Science and Transnational Security Collider served as a collaborative community enabling students, with the help of mentors and sponsors, to create data science tools that help counter-terrorism experts better anticipate future terrorist attacks.

Students sightseeing at the Washington Monument

Instead of following the traditional Silicon Valley path of helping startups and tech companies, these students recognized a larger need for their skills in Washington D.C., where major policy makers and enforcers lack sophisticated data science tools. At the C4ADS office in D.C., the students met analysts and researchers who conduct investigations on topics related to the environment, terrorism, political corruption, sanction evasion, and human trafficking. Seeing the real people whose work would be improved reminded these students that they could not afford to stop their endeavors.

The UC Berkeley students shared their work at the Booz Allen Hamilton Innovation Center in Washington D.C. The program opened with comments by Varun Vira, COO of C4ADs; Yaya Fanusie, Berkeley Alum and Director of Analysis at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; and David Law, Director of the SCET Innovation Collider Program. The students were also welcomed by Juan Zarate, deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisors for combatting terrorism from 2005 to 2009. Members of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, Counter Extremism Project, and Palantir also joined the students.

Many of these students will now continue and expand their work as a nonprofit organization. Soon after pitching in Washington D.C., they began meeting with individuals who want to help this great effort. Next semester the students will continue to build data science tools and solutions relevant to transnational security. Furthermore, they will begin analyzing data using these tools. Not only will this provide immediate validation, but it will hopefully allow for actionable insights. Dedicated to information transparency, these students findings will be easily accessible through journalistic publishing.

 

The students who worked on this Collider: Ali Ahmed, Alice Ma, Angelina Wang, Anjali Banerjee, Ashwin Ajit Vasvani, Caitlin Andersen, Daryus Medora, Franklin Rice, George Moore, Hannah Frankl, Ishaan Madan, Jarry Xiao, Louie, Nicholas Lee, Michael Murphy, Rachael E Boyle, Revekka Kostoeva, Ryan Hayes, Samuel Pringle, Siddharth Gupta, Tyler Heintz, Vaibhav Srikaran, Varsha Venkat

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Bay Area Node Goes To Washington, DC


Eric Munsing (technical lead for National I-Corps team eCal Charge) and Rhonda Shrader (Bay Area Node Executive Director) represented the Node during two days of Coalition for National Science Funding (CNSF) activities.

The pair met with 20+ Members of Congress (Zoe Lofgren, D-CA pictured here) to brief them on how the investment in NSF I-Corps is creating jobs and bringing economic growth to the region.

Lean more from this UC Berkeley news piece!

 



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Free Ventures Demo Day: From Seed to Startup


On May 2nd, 2017, Free Ventures hosted its semi-annual Demo Day showcasing six startups at The House near UC Berkeley. Unlike past semesters, this year’s Demo Day was closed to the general public to allow Berkeley students, investors, mentors and leaders of Silicon Valley to network in a more private setting.

Free Ventures incubates startups in various industries, each whom will continue to move forward with their companies in the summer.  Managing Director, Blake Lafayette, opened the night with a brief introduction of what Free Ventures does and what each startup has accomplished this past semester. Greylock Partners, Early Growth Financial Services, The House Fund and Pear VC sponsored Free Ventures this semester and accelerators like Y Combinator has invested in a few of their startups as well.

 

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About Free Ventures

Free Ventures is UC Berkeley’s student run startup incubator that allocates resources and mentorship to help student translate an idea into a company. Founded in 2013, Free Ventures has helped over forty teams and has successfully created a student run accelerator within the UC Berkeley community. Free Ventures continues to invite new teams and startups into incubation every semester to help diversify the types of companies it hosts. Meetings are held on bi-weekly and sometimes more frequently where each team gets to develop their companies with the help from VC mentors.

 

jermey2

 

Teams

PeerEditr

peereditr-logo

 

PeerEditr is a feedback and collaboration tool that is the quickest way for someone to receive feedback. It is designed for any documents like resumes or marketing presentations that allows the user to get feedback with one click. It creates a feedback room with annotation tools that can be shared with anyone allowing for edits to be made quick and easy. PeerEditr will be working with Pear VC for the summer.

 

Free Ventures has provided access to our team from the beginning through sponsorship and mentorship and has also taught us what it takes for someone to invest in our company.

– PeerEditr

 

Memory

Memory-logo

Memory is an Alexa-based voice assistant for individuals with Alzheimer’s. It uses information given by the patient’s family members and caretakers to collect data on the best way to respond to a patient’s question or concern. Memory’s goal is to lower the difficulty on caretakers and to allow physicians to provide customized treatments to each and every patient. Memory will be working with Lightspeed Venture Partners for the summer.

 

Acuity for Moms

acuity-logo

 

Acuity for Moms is an online program that gives the opportunity for moms to re-enter the workforce by providing various resources and skill training. The platforms creates a customized path in order for each client to have their own unique experience depending on their skill set, time availability, interests etc.

 

 

Genetic Foresight

Genetic+Foresight-LogoGenetic Foresight provides a genetic test that will be able to determine how an individual will react after taking a certain kind of medication depending on their genetic code. Doctors will then be able to make safer and more effective prescriptions to each patient preventing the risk of any medical interference with the patient’s genetics. Each report will be evaluated biannually from new research, new drugs and new medications so that the individual is always kept up to date.

 

 

Paladin Drones

paladin-logo

 

Paladin Drones are drones that provide safety to the public, which decreases the response time by two minutes by providing situational awareness before first responders arrive at a scene. Paladin Drones is now a finalist for Berkeley Big Ideas.

 

 

 

Layer Six

LayersixlogoLayer Six is the only research backed cognitive solution to help solve the problem of information overload and reduction of high performance. It brings data-driven diagnostics, software on how our brain already works through cognitive assessments and personalized VR therapeutics to its consumers.

 

 

After hearing from all six startups, the audience was able to interact with the teams, investors and Free Ventures Team to learn more about the programs, development processes, and companies.

To learn more about Free Ventures please visit their website.

For questions please feel free to email Blake Lafayette, Jeffrey Feng, or Pranav Gulati!

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Why You Should Learn Data-X


This semester, The Sutardja Center created a new course, Data-X, which allowed students to team up to tackle technically complex problems. In the course, students identified real-world problems, collected data, and created applications to find solutions.

Click on the picture below to check out this year’s Data-X course!

Screen Shot 2017-05-16 at 8.58.02 PM

 

Data-X was taught by Ikhlaq Sidhu and student instructors Kevin Bozhe Li, Alexander Fred Ojala, Nathan Cheng and Sam Choi. Teams used what they learned throughout the course to present their Final Project Demo on May 11th, which ranged from topics such as estimating stock prices to automated thickness detection for 2D materials.

 

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The course model was outlined for students to:

  • Brainstorm a problem
  • Propose a low tech solution
  • Execute and Iterate BMoE (Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship) Reflections- To help students get in the right mindset of incorporating innovation with technology
  • Present Final Presentation

 

After just these fourteen weeks, students used their understanding of concepts such as filtering, prediction, classification, decision making and much more to demonstrate their team-based data application project.

 

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During the Final Demo, all teams first posed a problem that could be solved using Data-X analysis. Following this, they showcased what their research and collection of data led them to and how they were able to then find a solution. Whether the approach was a one-step or two-step problem, the teams each recorded their project outcomes and what they intended to use as a user interface.

The teams were then able to set up an architecture for their solution by compiling and scraping data, processing it, and finding a regression model that tested their outcomes. As a result, each team summarized what their results were and some even evaluated future predictions of how their solution can be used in a more effective way.

Several teams expressed that there was a learning curve while taking the course. Because each team was trying to solve computationally intensive problems, they had to find other ways of using what they learned in the class to move forward with their data collection.

 

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All in all, each student was able to grasp an understanding of what Data-X is and how it can be used within a short time frame of only three months. On the May 11th Final Demo, students successfully applied the frameworks they learned throughout the course.

 

“Sidhu’s class is great because he shows you all the cool things that people are doing with data science and the goal is not really for you to understand a 100% of the material like we traditionally do in Berkeley classes, but to understand as much as you can and try to contextualize it. You don’t have to be an expert to take this class but you will learn a lot of it” 

– Rohan Punamia

 

To learn more about Data-X please see:

https://data-x.blog/

http://scet.berkeley.edu/data-x-course/

http://scet.berkeley.edu/data-strategy-working-hard-enough/

 

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Engineered Influence: Weak Data, Machine Learning & Behavioral Economics


This article is will be published in the 2017 Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology’s annual journal AIR (Applied Innovation Review) in June 2017. You can see the 2016 version here.

Shomit Ghose is a UC Berkeley alum and mentor, venture capitalist, and partner at ONSET ventures.


Cognitive Irredentists Arise!

A dystopian world: sentient machines manipulating human consciousness to harvest our energy.  All while we humans remain docile, unwitting and oblivious.  This was the world depicted in the 1999 Hollywood blockbuster, The Matrix1.  How far in the future might such a world be?  Er, perhaps not so distant.  Precursors of The Matrix may already be upon us.

Human beings today carry with them a loosely-attached (so far2) second brain, also known as your mobile phone.  This second brain serves as a quiet collector of all manner of 60x60x24x7 information about us, passes that information to vast banks of computers in the cloud which process it in opaque ways, and our subsequent actions – whether it’s to forgo that chocolate croissant, read a specific piece of content, buy a specific product, turn left at the intersection, or mete out a jail sentence3 – are governed by the results of that processing.  In effect, computer algorithms that a small group of humans have programmed are now subtly directing and “programming” the actions of the broader human population.

Is this a concern?  It should be.  Today, for the first time, the mobile Internet makes it possible for individual actions to be tracked and assessed in real-time, at population scale, and for data-driven algorithms to be deployed to influence our future actions.  All of this is made possible by the track-your-every-move4 nature of the Internet, smart phone ubiquity, the ability to use machine learning to build statistical correlations on huge volumes of “weak” data, an “asymmetricity of information” advantage in favor of those who collect the data, and the science of behavioral economics.

 

Data Signals Everywhere

Until recently, due to the limitations of our computing infrastructure, data-driven applications were based principally on “strong” data.  I.e., data that was fairly finite in volume, very specific, and fit neatly into a relational database: your electronic medical record indexed by your name and birthdate; your driving record indexed by your driver’s license number; your salary and tax records indexed by your social security number; your purchase history indexed by your credit card number; etc.  By and large, strong data has been (relatively) well regulated from a privacy perspective and been (somewhat) well protected.

Weak data, by comparison, is data that is vast in volume, and by itself is very fuzzy and ambiguous; historically, it’s been next to impossible to make any sense of weak data because it’s, well, so weak.  Strong data, for example your birthdate and the make of your car, will be predictive of your future auto insurance claims.  But what do we make of weak data that tells us that you like to eat meat and drink milk other than you’re probably not a vegan?  While strong data could be used to understand you individually, weak data could not.

But enter limitless amounts of cheap storage and computing in the cloud, fold in machine learning algorithms of the unsupervised variety, and weak data can now be statistically correlated and stitched together to yield individualized results that may be just as predictive as those from strong data.

Want to find a college educated professional who’s likely a Republican?  Talk to a surgeon or anesthesiologist5.  Psychiatrist or infectious disease physician?  Likely a Democrat.  Do you eat lots of red meat and drink lots of milk?  Without seeing your driving record we now have a good idea about your auto insurance risk6.  Properly harnessed and correlated, weak data can yield all manner7 of intimate insights8 about individuals.  Are you an extrovert9 or an introvert?  Can your browsing behavior be used to gain insights on your specific personality10 traits or your age and gender11?  Ethnicity12?  Are you gay13?  What does your streaming music14 playlist say about your cognitive abilities?  Suffering from depression15?  Psychopathic16 tendencies?  And is your Echo or Alexa17 device currently listening to the conversations18 in your home?

 

The Ghost in the Machine

As insightful – and more importantly, as intrusive – as these individualized conclusions may be, weak data has not been regulated, nor is it well protected for privacy.  Weak data conveys a powerful advantage from a business point of view because companies and organizations can utilize unsupervised machine learning techniques to comb through huge, heretofore intractable amounts of data and find correlations and insights that would otherwise be unperceivable and unknown to the human mind.  From a competitive standpoint, data sources and machine learning algorithms have been weaponized by companies at business’ leading-edge.

An obvious weakness of the data-driven model is that machines learn from the underlying data – e.g., girls become teachers, boys become engineers – and the underlying data may already contain biases19, thereby perpetuating inequity, or can be mis-trained20 by social engineering attacks.  How can we trust the accuracy of a machine’s decisions if we cannot vouch for the validity and balance of the data on which it was trained?  Furthermore, the companies that control the data apply their own proprietary algorithms to their data asset for one purpose only: to maximize their profit.  This is the rightful goal of any business, of course.  But the consumer must be aware that if there are a large number of product pages, or news articles, or routes to a physical destination available, a data-driven business will not be curating/selecting the choices presented to you based on what optimizes your benefit but on what optimizes the business’ profit21.

In this way, those that control the data enjoy an advantage in asymmetry of information: we consumers don’t know on what basis a decision is made on our behalf.  We know neither the body of the underlying data – the full range of our democratically available choices – nor have any understanding of the opaque algorithms being used to process that data.  And all of this data is increasingly concentrated in just a few hands: Google, Facebook, Amazon.  Facebook famously experimented22, through selective content exposure, with manipulating the emotions of almost 700,000 of its users to show

“…that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. [Facebook provided] experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people…”

Matrix-like, information asymmetricity enables our actions to be programmed and manipulated by a handful of organizations23 that have access to, and an understanding of, data and correlations that we individuals do not.

 

Who Gets to Choose?

Behavioral economics is what finally ties weak (and strong) data, machine learning, and information asymmetry into a neat little cybernetic loop: data is collected, data is analyzed, and the “correct” (from the business’ point of view, at least) set of actions are fed back to us to inform our ongoing behavior, which will then also be collected and analyzed.

Behavioral economics is a potent tool for those holding an information asymmetry advantage because the Internet presents a seemingly infinite set of choices to individuals.  But humans dislike choosing from large sets of choices.  We much prefer choosing from finite sets24.  Whether it’s the forward-decisioning of the “Keep watching” default25 that keeps you bingeing on a streaming video service, or presenting what brand of drug26 a physician might prescribe, we humans like the range of our possible decisions to be defined or limited.  Too much choice is seen as being a “tyranny of choice27”.

So if you’re a large company, sitting on a massive trove of data, with highly-predictive machine learning algorithms whirring away, and hundreds of possible news stories or products or promotions to present to an individual consumer (information asymmetry in action), which half-dozen options do you choose to show?  The half-dozen that would be of maximum benefit to the individual, or the half-dozen that would most benefit your profits?  It’s likely that the company’s “choice architecture28”, indeed its duty to its shareholders, is to optimize for profit, even at the explicit expense of the benefit to the individual consumer.  Through choice architecture the actions of the individual become programmed29 by the data and the algorithms.

 

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

Needless to say, all human inventions, Big Data included, can be used for beneficent or maleficent purposes: you can use a brick to build a house or you can throw it at someone’s head; you can cut your food with a knife or stab your fellow diner; etc.  The same is true of data and algorithms; and Pandora’s Box will yawn ever wider with the volumes and sources30 of data continuing to skyrocket.  But just as we should not outlaw bricks, or butter knives, or cars for that matter, neither should we proscribe Big Data.

Data and algorithms can be – and are –  used today to level the playing field and bring benefit, at scale, to underserved31 or under-resourced segments across the human population.  Everything from financial services32, to education33, to medical care34 can be delivered at low cost, scalably, and across geographic boundaries by harnessing data, machine learning, and even behavioral economics.  In this way, data and algorithms can provide a “status hack” to improve access to the resources people need.  In no way should such uses of data and algorithms be fettered or circumscribed.

What does need to happen is to bring awareness of the opportunities for light and risks of darkness inherent in our (inescapable) data-driven future; we must not resign35 ourselves to the latter fate.  There must instead be an awareness of the many dangers — to privacy at a minimum, and to our ability to freely choose at a maximum — posed by the mass collection and analysis of what seems to be even the most trivial shreds of data.  We must therefore always be acutely aware of the privacy implications of our intentional and unintentional data trails, and we must demand transparency from those who control and act on our data sources.  We must always have an awareness and skepticism of opaque algorithms deployed by the few for the “benefit” of the many.  We must swallow Morpheus’ red pill.

 

 

  1. “The Matrix”.  2017.  Online.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix
  2. Constine, Josh.  “Facebook is building brain-computer interfaces for typing and skin-hearing”.  TechCrunch.  April 2017.  Online.  https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/19/facebook-brain-interface/
  3. Angwin, Julia.  “Machine Bias”.  ProPublica.  May 2016.  Online.  https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing
  4. Englehardt, S., Narayanan A.  “Online Tracking:  A 1-million-site Measurement and Analysis”.  http://randomwalker.info/publications/OpenWPM_1_million_site_tracking_measurement.pdf
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