Related papers: Risk and Scientific Reputation: Lessons from Cold …
In the past several years, scientists have issued a series of warnings about the threats of climate change and other forms of environmental disruption. Here, we provide a scientists' warning on how technology affects these issues.…
Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such…
It is difficult to neutrally evaluate the risks posed by large-scale leading-edge science experiments. Traditional risk assessment is problematic in this context for multiple reasons. Also, such experiments can be insulated from challenge…
From smart sensors that infringe on our privacy to neural nets that portray realistic imposter deepfakes, our society increasingly bears the burden of negative, if unintended, consequences of computing innovations. As the experts in the…
Academic research projects receive hundreds of billions of dollars of government investment each year. They complement business research projects by focusing on the generation of new foundational knowledge and addressing societal…
A lot of theoretical ideas have been floated to explain the so called cold fusion phenomenon. I look at a large subset of these and study further physical implications of the concepts involved. I suggest that these can be tested by other…
Computer science research has led to many breakthrough innovations but has also been scrutinized for enabling technology that has negative, unintended consequences for society. Given the increasing discussions of ethics in the news and…
In this thorough study, we took a closer look at the skepticism that has arisen with respect to potential dangers associated with artificial intelligence, denoted as AI Risk Skepticism. Our study takes into account different points of view…
Scientific and technological progress has historically been very beneficial to humanity but this does not always need to be true. Going forward, science may enable bad actors to cause genetically engineered pandemics that are more frequent…
How can we best address the dangerous impact that deep learning-generated fake audios, photographs, and videos (a.k.a. deepfakes) may have in personal and societal life? We foresee that the availability of cheap deepfake technology will…
Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to develop a scientific understanding of…
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science suggests that this choice is shaped by an "essential tension" between the professional demand for…
Counterfactual explanations indicate the smallest change in input that can translate to a different outcome for a machine learning model. Counterfactuals have generated immense interest in high-stakes applications such as finance,…
Data science is creating very exciting trends as well as significant controversy. A critical matter for the healthy development of data science in its early stages is to deeply understand the nature of data and data science, and to discuss…
Journalists, public policy analysts, and economists have called attention to the growing importance that high-performance and scientific computing have to national security and industrial leadership. As computing continues to power…
Machine learning systems require representations of the real world for training and testing - they require data, and lots of it. Collecting data at scale has logistical and ethical challenges, and synthetic data promises a solution to these…
This article develops multiple novel climate risk measures (or variables) based on the television news coverage by Bloomberg, CNBC, and Fox Business, and examines how they affect the systematic and idiosyncratic risks of clean energy firms…
Adversarial examples crafted by an explicit adversary have attracted significant attention in machine learning. However, the security risk posed by a potential false friend has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we unveil the threat of…
Deepfake videos are defined as a resulting media from the synthesis of different persons images and videos, mostly faces, replacing a real one. The easy spread of such videos leads to elevated misinformation and represents a threat to…
Numerical simulations underpin much fluid dynamics research today. Such simulations often rely on large scale high performance computing (HPC) systems, and have a significant carbon footprint. Increasing the efficiency of data centers or…