Abstract: As authoritarian governments around the world develop sophisticated technologies for controlling information, many observers have predicted that these controls would be ineffective because they are easily thwarted and evaded by savvy Internet users. In Censored, Margaret Roberts demonstrates that even censorship that is easy to circumvent can still be enormously effective. Taking advantage of digital data harvested from the Chinese Internet and leaks from China's Propaganda Department, this book sheds light on how and when censorship influences the Chinese…

Abstract: Local geometric analysis is a method to define a coordinate system in a small neighborhood in the space of distributions over a given alphabet. It is a powerful technique since the notions of distance, projection, and inner product defined this way are useful in the optimization problems involving distributions, such as regressions. It has been used in many places in the literature such as correlation analysis, correspondence analysis. In this talk, we will go through some of the basic…

Social scientists are increasingly turning to computer-assisted text analysis as a way of understanding the digital footprints left by communities and individuals. Much of the technology that powers these approaches is borrowed from the fields of computer science and statistics; yet, social scientists have substantially different goals. We focus on the development of methods that support three core tasks: discovery, measurement and causal inference with text. We introduce the Structural Topic Model (STM), a bayesian generative model of text which…

Abstract: We propose an alternative paradigm for the Internet of Things (IoT) where machine learning algorithms run locally on severely resource-constrained edge and endpoint devices without necessarily needing cloud connectivity. This enables many scenarios beyond the pale of the traditional paradigm including low-latency brain implants, precision agriculture on disconnected farms, privacy-preserving smart spectacles, etc. Towards this end, we develop novel tree and kNN based algorithm, called Bonsai and ProtoNN, for efficient prediction on IoT devices — such as those based…