Headline September 12, 2018/ '' 'ÁLGORITHM GO ALMIGHTY' ''

'' 'ÁLGORITHM GO ALMIGHTY' ''

RIGOROUS OVERSIGHT AND an engaged students and citizenry will be very, very essential to keep a check on police activity.

Accoustic sensors trained to recognise the sound of gunfire and send alerts to officers mobile phones to telling them when and where the shots were fired.

Glasses that recognise faces and record everything.

Drones equipped with high-definition video cameras. GPS  readers ANPRS, allowing for constant surveillance of entire swathes of a city.CCTV systems with embedded facial recognition that lets authorities track people in real time.

All of these new technological possibilities are upending a wide ranging of activities and all the customs associated with them.

But Students and citizens do not like how their doctor or hairdresser, or a social-media site, uses their data or tracks their purchases, they can go somewhere else.

The state wields a monopoly on punishment through law enforcement. Police can arrest, and even kill, their fellow citizens.

Judges have the power to imprison people. That makes transparency and public consent in the   justice system essential.

This raises privacy concerns, but it could cause other problems, too for instance, a veteran who has visited a doctor and taken medicine prescribed PTSD, who also receives gun catalogues in the post, could be deemed high risk.

Police might then approach his house with guns drawn, and is not hard to imagine that kind of encounter ending badly.

If they use social-media postings, they also raise free expression concerns. Will police treat people differently because of their political opinions?

QUESTIONS of bias also surround place-based policing. Using arrests or drug convictions will almost certainly produce racially biased results.

Arrests reflect police presence more than a crime. Using drug convictions is suspect, too.

Black and white Americans use marijuana at roughly similar rates, with the rate for 18  to - 25 year-olds higher for whites than blacks.

But blacks are arrested for marijuana possession at nearly three times the rates of white across America - and even more often than that in some districts.

Black people in Washington D.C., and Iowa are eight times likelier than whites to face arrest for marijuana.

Charges for possession of that one drug comprises half of all drug arrests. Small wonder that a study by Kristian Lum of Human Rights Data Analysis Group and William Issac found that when a predictive algorithm was trained on-

Historical drug-crime data in Oakland, California, it targeted black areas twice the rate of white ones, and low-income neighbourhoods at twice the rate of high-income ones.

Police based prediction also raises questions about reasonable suspicion. If police are on a residential block algorithmically predicted to be at risk of theft, and they drive past a man carrying a heavy satchel-

Just that justify stopping and searching him - especially when they might not do the same on another block?

Some accept that algorithms may replicate racial biases, but say they at least do not aggravate them.

''It's not a perfect world,'' says one advocate of algorithm-based bail reform.

You need to compare risk-based assessments with this status quo, he says. If a black and white defendant came before a judge with the exact same record , the judge might treat  black defendant worse.

''At least with the risk-assessment they'll get the same score. But this is a depressingly low bar to set.''

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all  ''register'' on : www.wssciw.blogspot.com - The World Students Society, for every subject in the world and...................... Twitter-!E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:

'' Big- Students-  Data '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless