Immediately before I sat down to write this blog, I was attending a lecture on Social Influence Analysis and Social Prediction by Dr Jie Tang, Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is an associate professor of computer science. Naturally, I was fascinated by his insights into the dynamics of social networks, such as how an individual user can influence others’ behaviours.
His study shows that about 90% of the human emotions are predictable, through social network mining, text mining, statistical learning, and semantic web searching. How scary is that?
Such research is right on the cusp of the field of human communication, where science and art collide.
What I didn’t anticipate was the need to recall my own early science degree to follow Jie Tang’s explanation of his factor graph model for creating mathematical formulae that could learn by themselves. But it is that very connection between maths and psychology that enables researchers to quantify social influence and the correlation between influence and social actions.
So I sat there fascinated by the creation of algorithms, which we so blithely talk about, but don’t always fully appreciate. The equations on the screen looked like the chemistry of a nuclear bomb, and offered a glimpse of their potential to provide a similarly massive explosion in our analysis of mobile social networks to predict human emotion.
While AUT University is part of this marvellous open dialogue in the field of creative technology, social media are still being restricted in China itself. Google has been displaced by the Chinese search engine "Baidu" which seeks to emulate Bing or Google inside China’s physical borders. Firstly, the Chinese government set out to control Google: Now they have a search site which they can control.
Also in China, Youtube has effectively been replaced by Youku, which has 1,500 license holders, including television and film companies in that country regularly uploading content.
Youku's video library includes many full length, popular films and TV episodes from the West, which can be viewed outside China only on Youku, since copyright restrictions prevent Youtube and others from broadcasting them. Ironically, while thumbing its nose at western copyright law, Youku has its own strict rules on pornography and for content that the Chinese government finds politically objectionable.
Furthermore, Youku has implemented a digital fingerprinting technology which is says is intended to eliminate copyright infringing content on the site. It also sounds like a way of keeping a close eye on users.
Meanwhile, in the West, computer scientists at the University of Washington are reversing the “eye of God” on the internet. They have created a way to put expiration dates on ea-mail, chat messages and Facebook postings, according to Futurist, Nov-Dec 2009: p.2.
Their software, called “Vanish”, encrypts the messages and spreads the data among different computers on the file-sharing network. As people use the network, the portions of encryption are spread around to untraceable users making the original message indecipherable.
One of the benefits of Vanish will be for the artists among us who may express our emotions impulsively only to discover that they remain as an eternal record of our immoderation. We should thank our scientific peers for this offer of a future where we can expunge our digital trails. Of course, art in its other forms can and should remain preserved for ever.
Indeed, art provides the postscript to this blog, as Wikipedia tells us the delightful origin of the name “Baidu” is from an 800-year-old Chinese poem which says: “Having searched for him hundreds and thousands of times in the crowd, suddenly turning back by chance, I find him there in the dimmest candlelight”…. beautiful.
His study shows that about 90% of the human emotions are predictable, through social network mining, text mining, statistical learning, and semantic web searching. How scary is that?
Such research is right on the cusp of the field of human communication, where science and art collide.
What I didn’t anticipate was the need to recall my own early science degree to follow Jie Tang’s explanation of his factor graph model for creating mathematical formulae that could learn by themselves. But it is that very connection between maths and psychology that enables researchers to quantify social influence and the correlation between influence and social actions.
So I sat there fascinated by the creation of algorithms, which we so blithely talk about, but don’t always fully appreciate. The equations on the screen looked like the chemistry of a nuclear bomb, and offered a glimpse of their potential to provide a similarly massive explosion in our analysis of mobile social networks to predict human emotion.
While AUT University is part of this marvellous open dialogue in the field of creative technology, social media are still being restricted in China itself. Google has been displaced by the Chinese search engine "Baidu" which seeks to emulate Bing or Google inside China’s physical borders. Firstly, the Chinese government set out to control Google: Now they have a search site which they can control.
Also in China, Youtube has effectively been replaced by Youku, which has 1,500 license holders, including television and film companies in that country regularly uploading content.
Youku's video library includes many full length, popular films and TV episodes from the West, which can be viewed outside China only on Youku, since copyright restrictions prevent Youtube and others from broadcasting them. Ironically, while thumbing its nose at western copyright law, Youku has its own strict rules on pornography and for content that the Chinese government finds politically objectionable.
Furthermore, Youku has implemented a digital fingerprinting technology which is says is intended to eliminate copyright infringing content on the site. It also sounds like a way of keeping a close eye on users.
Meanwhile, in the West, computer scientists at the University of Washington are reversing the “eye of God” on the internet. They have created a way to put expiration dates on ea-mail, chat messages and Facebook postings, according to Futurist, Nov-Dec 2009: p.2.
Their software, called “Vanish”, encrypts the messages and spreads the data among different computers on the file-sharing network. As people use the network, the portions of encryption are spread around to untraceable users making the original message indecipherable.
One of the benefits of Vanish will be for the artists among us who may express our emotions impulsively only to discover that they remain as an eternal record of our immoderation. We should thank our scientific peers for this offer of a future where we can expunge our digital trails. Of course, art in its other forms can and should remain preserved for ever.
Indeed, art provides the postscript to this blog, as Wikipedia tells us the delightful origin of the name “Baidu” is from an 800-year-old Chinese poem which says: “Having searched for him hundreds and thousands of times in the crowd, suddenly turning back by chance, I find him there in the dimmest candlelight”…. beautiful.
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