Artificial intelligence is likely to transform the public sector by automating many government tasks—including making combat decisions. But, according to experts at a recent symposium held  at Harvard University, this “over-the-horizon” technology can only guide and inform government leaders. There will always be a need for human decision making—and for clear ethical standards to prevent harmful intentions.

At the September 20 conference, “AI-Government and AI Arms Races and Norms,” organized by the Michael Dukakis Institute (MDI), Professor Marc Rotenberg underscored the growing gap between informed government decision-making and the reality of our technology-driven world. “Governments may ultimately lose control of these systems if they don’t take action,” he told some 60 attendees.

Rosenberg, who teaches at Georgetown University Law School, is President of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and a member of the AI World Society Standards and Practice Committee,

Prof. Matthias Scheutz, Director of the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory at Tufts University, said the greatest risk caused by AI and robotics technologies is when unconstrained machine learning is out of control. This can happen when AI systems acquire knowledge and start to pursue goals that were not intended by their human designers, he said. For example, “If an AI program operating the power grid decides to cut off energy in certain areas for better power utilization overall, it will leave millions of people without electricity, which consequently turns out to be an AI accidental failure.”

Scheutz also said that common preventive solutions inside and outside the system are largely insufficient to safeguard AI and robotics technologies. Even with “emergency buttons,” the system itself might finally set its own goal to prevent a shutdown previously set up by humans.

The best way to safeguard AI systems is to build ethical provisions directly into the learning, reasoning, recognition and other algorithms. In his presentation, he demonstrated “ethical testing” to catch and handle ethical violations.

Here’s a link to video of Scheutz’s talk. https://youtu.be/66EeYzkTxwA

Prof. Joseph Nye, emeritus of Harvard University, who created the concept of “Soft Power” diplomacy, focused on the expansion of Chinese firms in the US market and their ambition to surpass the US in AI. Nye said the notion of an AI arms race and geopolitical competition in AI can have profound effects on our society. However, he added, predictions that China will overtake the US in AI by 2030 are “uncertain” and “indeterminate” because China’s only advantage is having more data and little concern about privacy.

Nye also point out that as people unleash AI, which is leading to warfare and autonomous offensives, we should have treaties in place to control the technology, managed perhaps by international institutions that will monitor AI programs in various countries.

During the symposium, Tuan Nguyen and Michael Dukakis, cofounders of the Michael Dukakis Institute (MDI), announced MDI’s cooperation with AI World–the industry’s largest conference and expo covering the business and technology of enterprise AI, to be held in Boston December 3-5, 2018.

Nguyen said, “Our cooperation marks the determination between two organizations toward achieving the goal of developing, measuring, and tracking the progress of ethical AI policy-making and solution adoption by governments and corporations.” Nguyen also introduced Eliot Weinman – Chairman of AI World Conference and Expo as a new member of AIWS Standards and Practice Committee.

Conference details are published in the current issue of AIWS Weekly.
–Dick Pirozzolo

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, a PR, content and digital marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.

Dick Pirozzolo is a member of the Group; the Michael Dukakis Institute, formed by Boston Global Forum, is his client. 

Harold Simansky and Skeletom at Cambridge Innovation Center

Pleased to report that, after a stressful month, Harold Simansky’s Kickstarter campaign reached its goal of $25,000. The kickstarter will help fund BTW, a magazine devoted to beautiful, sustainable living.
Here’s a picture of Harold at the Cambridge Innovation Center—sweating it out near my favorite deskmate, SkeleTom (SkeleTom is QUIET!)  With my own Kickstarter (to help fund my forthcoming book, Ithaca Diaries,) still underway, I know that you can  feel like you’re turning into a skeleTom, waiting for contributions to roll in. Congrats to Harold and the BTW team.
–Anita M. Harris
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning marketing and PR firm based at the Cambridge Innovation Center, in Kendall Square.

Butterly-from Ariana Pharma Website

Our Cambridge Innovation Center colleague Ariana Pharma reports that it has joined the WIN consortium as an official technology partner. Congrats! Here’s the release. 

Paris, France, and Cambridge, Massachusetts USA, 29 October 2014 – Ariana Pharma, developer of innovative clinical data analysis and diagnostic solutions for the healthcare sector, today announced it has joined the WIN Consortium as an official technology partner. The Consortium (Worldwide Innovative Networking in personalized cancer medicine) is a global collaboration of 40 leading organizations whose aim is to develop more effective cancer diagnostics and therapeutics, shorten clinical trial timelines and reduce the overall cost of cancer care.

The new WIN/Ariana partnership is expected to accelerate the translation of personalized medicine discoveries into widely available new standards of care for all cancer patients, leading to significantly improved clinical outcomes and a higher quality of life for cancer patients.

As a technology partner of the WIN Consortium, Ariana will have early access to the latest research, key opinion leaders, leading academic groups and personalized medicine clinical trials. Ariana uses OncoKEM^®, a proprietary clinical decision support platform for personalized medicine, to transform big data into better therapeutic decisions for cancer patients.

Ariana Pharma Founder and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Mohammad Afshar said: “We are delighted to be an official technology partner of the WIN Consortium where we can continue to leverage our expertise in patient stratification, multi-marker diagnostic optimization and data mining to transform complex clinical data into actionable information. Our expanded access to the leading global stakeholders in personalized medicine will allow us to test new hypotheses, to enhance interaction to yield valuable feedback and thus accelerate the development process and commercialisation of these critical new services for the global cancer community.”

“We are delighted to welcome Ariana Pharma in our consortium. Ariana Pharma provides outstanding computational skills enabling the translation of academic projects into commercial tools to support the therapeutic decision for cancer patients,” said Dr. John Mendelsohn, Chairman of the WIN Consortium.

WIN is recognized for pioneering the evolution of next-generation clinical trials, which test personalized treatment selection strategies rather than single drugs. These strategies are driven by algorithms that match targeted therapies or combination therapies to individual tumor biological profiles based on diagnostic analysis of genomic data and other information.

In 2013 the WIN Consortium chose Ariana Pharma to develop and globally commercialize ground-breaking decision support software in WIN’s WINTHER trial, the first state of the art clinical trial in personalized cancer medicine to help clinicians choose the best therapies for cancer patients. Ariana retains exclusive global rights to commercialize software and algorithms validated by the WINTHER clinical trial through Ariana’s OncoKEM^® platform.

About Ariana Pharma

Ariana Pharma develops innovative clinical data analysis and diagnostic testing solutions to help the healthcare sector better adapt patient treatments to individual biological characteristics. Ariana Pharma’s KEM^® technology enables personalization of therapies, improves the efficacy and safety of patient treatment, reduces risks and drug development costs, and accelerates time to market. KEM^® is the only FDA tested technology that systematically explores combinations of biomarkers, producing more effective biomarker signatures for personalized medicine. Founded in 2003 as a spin-off of the Institut Pasteur, Paris, France, the company opened a subsidiary in the United States in 2012.For more information, please visit www.arianapharma.com

About the WIN Consortium

Founded in 2010, WIN is an initiative from the Institut Gustave Roussy (France) and University of Texas MD Anderson cancer center (USA). WIN is unique structurally in that it brings together organizations from academia, business and not-for-profits to focus on translating the latest advances in personalized cancer medicine into the standard of care. WIN is built on the recognition that all stakeholders in personalized cancer therapy must collaborate and share information, in order to effectively bring the latest innovations in personalized cancer care to the patient. WIN is a non-profit organization formed by 40 renowned members: Academic cancer centres (25 centres in 16 countries), companies (Blue Cross Blue Shield, Agilent Technologies, GE Healthcare, Oracle Health Services, Foundation Medicine, Millennium Takeda, AstraZeneca and Pfizer), non-profit organizations such as EORTC, Fondation ARC and Sage Bionetworks. WIN organizes an annual symposium in Paris dedicated to personalized medicine. For further information, please visit www.winconsortium.org  and www.winsymposium.org.

–Anita M Harris
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning pr and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA. {Ariana is not our client]. AMH.

With three days to go, the kickstarter campaign for BTW (Behind the Walls)  –a multi-platform media company devoted to beautiful, healthy, energy efficient and sustainable home, .is 85% funded.  Led by our friend and Cambridge Innovation Center colleague Harold Simansky, BTW needs $3K to get to $25K tor will take in nothing at all. I hope you’ll support the project. Here’s a link to the kickstarter site:

Harold writes:

Environmentally sound, healthy homes can be as stylish as they are sustainable; as beautifully designed as they are responsible; as glam as they are green… and a lot less expensive than you might think.

Now that eco-awareness is (finally and thankfully) skyrocketing, the country has exploded with new ideas for the home—everything from innovative, energy-saving technologies and home automation systems to products, decors, and furnishings that are toxin-free, sustainable and beautiful. Now you can live a green life at home without having to choose between what’s eco-friendly and what’s style-friendly, what’s efficient and what’s expensive.

BTW is here to keep homeowners on the cutting edge, building a community that shares our vision of healthy, energy-efficient and sustainable building and renovation practices, met with beautiful design. We’re also here to educate the community about service providers and funding—in the form of thousands of rebates and incentive programs—to make that possibility a reality. We want to make it clear that living a healthy, energy-efficient, and happy green lifestyle is within reach… and it all begins in the home.

What We Do

We’re creating a vibrant community of forward-thinking homeowners with BTW: Behind the Walls, a multi-platform media company that combines a magazine (both print and online), a website, social media, videos, blog posts, creative events, and—soon to come—podcasts and ecommerce, to help consumers envision and create a new kind of home and lifestyle.

Our goal is to help all homeowners understand, as they undertake some 20 million home improvement projects every year, how to do it more efficiently, more stylishly, greener, and healthier, using the best products, services and funding.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/959029715/btw-the-magazine-of-beautiful-healthy-and-sustaina?ref=home_featured

–Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is a writer and communications consultant in Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and digital marketing firm based at the Cambridge Innovation Center, in Cambridge, MA.

Hi! I’m thrilled with the outpouring of support for Ithaca Diaries– including that of current students and recent grads.

Alex Tomasi, a 2014 Boston University communications grad (and race car driver!)  has offered a beautiful, whimsical poster as a new reward–(shown below the cover photo).

You can meet Alex and other 20-something supporters– Erin Euler, Eric Morris (Cornell 2012),  Grant Randall  and Ben Whiting  via their brief You Tube videos….and I hope at the launch party in January.

Any and all contributions welcome–including $1 and $5.  Every little bit helps–and also raises projects in the kickstarter rankings and attracts more views. It would also be great if you’d’ share this email and the kickstarter link on social media.

Here’s the kickstarter link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639099206/ithaca-diaries-coming-of-age-in-the-1960s.

It does look like we’ll reach the goal soon…which means that Ithaca  Diaries will be available for holiday gift giving. Additional $$ will allow a Kirkus review to let bookstores and libraries know it’s available–and still more will go toward an interactive Web site.

Many many thanks,
Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris is a writer and communications consultant in Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and marketing firm, based in Kendall Square, Cambridge.

When I checked out Yuvee, Inc.’s newly launched “map of the Web” for visual arts in the greater Boston area, I was pleased to find links to the various museums and galleries laid out on a single page that showed museums’ geographic relationship to one another–and leading to brief summaries of each museum’s collection, its Twitter, Pinterest, and other social sites, as well as its address and phone number.

But I was more than pleased–actually, I was  amazed to find a section devoted to public art –including small galleries and installations– some of which are in quite out-of the way places. For example, one link, to the City of Cambridge’s public art tour,   took me to a mesmorizing video installation I’d first discovered after attending a Yoga class at the youth center  on Huron Avenue.

The video, by The Cantabridgians”, by Michael Oatman, includes 23 1-minute portraits of Cambridge Residents posed with objects in locations of their choice, designed to provide a sense of them in their particular neighborhoods.

Other links from  Web Hub’s map of the “public”  visual arts go to the City of Boston Public Art sites and the Rose Kennedy Greenway.

The Boston Art Map, accessible at maps.webhub.mobi/boston-art, is one of the first sites brought to “life” by newly launched “Yuvee, Inc.,” under the auspices of “WebHub” and “A Social Atlas of the Web.”   According to Yuvee founder Tim Higginson, WebHub is focused on enabling the next generation of Web experience for the “cross device”‘ lifestyle in which individuals use smartphones to access the web.

“An atlas is a collection of geographic maps, which help people find their way from A to B, learn and explore what is in an area and see connections between places, Higginson explains.  “Maps” of the Web do the same thing for people who are using the Internet. They give people an Instant, organized way to find and explore a whole of resources and the ability to switch easily among maps on different topics. At http://WebHub. mobi, “anyone can make a map of the Web on any topic,  and share the map with others.

According to Higginson, the map concept is ” a vast improvement” over traditional search engines, which deliver long, linear lists with items separated from the others, and require individual searches and sifting through pages of results. Such lists do not convey interrelationships and structure among items. Other resources, such as Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook and Youtube tend to focus on single types of information. In contrast, he explains , “maps” of the Web can pull all these relevant items together in a structure, organized and annotated way, in a single URL that is always available from anyone’s smartphone, tablet, laptop, pc or other Web-enabled device.

The maps are independent of browser and OS, do not require downloads, syncing, re-doing searches, typing urls, or even knowing a  know a URL on a topic covered by a map to get an in-depth experience of the Web on that topic. What is more, Higginson says, “WebHub is free and respects its users’ privacy. “We hope this Boston Art ‘map of the Web’ gives people a richer, faster, easier way to learn about and enjoy all the incredible things that are going on in the visual arts in and around Boston..and that people enjoy all the other maps available at www..webhub.mobi.”

I note that it’s possible to advertise on WebHub, which, Higginson says, is its business model.

–Anita M. Harris New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.

As an author, I’m having trouble getting my head around an email I received this morning from Amazon Kindle Direct publishing–charging Hachette Publishing Company with illegal collusion and asking me (and all authors) to demand that Hachette lower its ebook prices. Evidently, due to anti-trust settlement, Amazon can’t undercut Hachette e-book prices and is trying to renegotiate.  I ask you (and Amazon and Hachette): Are books a commodity? An art form? Something in-between? Does Hachette, with high-ish book prices, value the written word or is the company just out for high margins, of which most authors receive little?  Now, the New York Times reports, Amazon is calling on readers to pressure Hachette,  some best-selling authors are fighting Amazon,  and, as the following email shows, Amazon wants other authors to fight back.  I feel caught in the crossfire. Are we pawns in a battle between publishing giants? What is a  (literally) poor author to do? –Anita Harris, author, Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity  and Ithaca Diaries.   Here’s this morning’s email from Amazon Kindle: Dear KDP Author,

Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.

With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. 

Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.

Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.

The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.

Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.

Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We’ve quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

But when a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books – he was wrong about that.

And despite what some would have you believe, authors are not united on this issue. When the Authors Guild recently wrote on this, they titled their post: “Amazon-Hachette Debate Yields Diverse Opinions Among Authors” (the comments to this post are worth a read).  A petition started by another group of authors and aimed at Hachette, titled “Stop Fighting Low Prices and Fair Wages,” garnered over 7,600 signatures.  And there are myriad articles and posts, by authors and readers alike, supporting us in our effort to keep prices low and build a healthy reading culture. Author David Gaughran’s recent interview is another piece worth reading.

We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we “just talk.” We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100% of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and their parent company Lagardere, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1% of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.

We will never give up our fight for reasonable e-book prices. We know making books more affordable is good for book culture. We’d like your help. Please email Hachette and copy us.

Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch: Michael.Pietsch@hbgusa.com

Copy us at: readers-united@amazon.com

Please consider including these points:

– We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
– Lowering e-book prices will help – not hurt – the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
– Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon’s offers to take them out of the middle.
– Especially if you’re an author yourself: Remind them that authors are not united on this issue.

Thanks for your support.
 
The Amazon Books Team

P.S. You can also find this letter at www.readersunited.com   New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and Marketing firm located in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.