Al Franken Quotes

It's time to wake up to the fact that you're just another avatar in someone else's MMO. Worse: From where they stand, all-powerful Big Data analysts that they are, you look an awful lot like a bot.

The ability to identify someone at a moment's notice by snapping a photo of him or her, to trigger an immediate influx of data about the person behind the face, will forever change the world.

The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier, and the ability of computers to track us doubles every eighteen months.

Venture capitalists are pouring billions of dollars into commercial surveillance satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles, social media analytics, biometric technologies, and cyberdefenses to meet surging market demand. Heavy competition is driving down the cost of and improving the information available to individuals, businesses, and governments.

You could go crazy thinking of how unprivate our lives really are - the omnipresent security cameras, the tracking data on our very smart phones, the porous state of our Internet selves, the trail of electronic crumbs we leave every day.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.

Facial recognition, completely unmonitored, can be used for very bad things. It can be used for stalking, for example.

Big data is mostly about taking numbers and using those numbers to make predictions about the future. The bigger the data set you have, the more accurate the predictions about the future will be.

In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.

The nature of the internet is that you don't know who is behind the screen.

Facial recognition software is already quite accurate in measuring unchanging and unique ratios between facial features that identify you as you. It's like a fingerprint.

In the past, Google has used teams of humans to 'read' its street address images - in essence, to render images into actionable data. But using neural network technology, the company has trained computers to extract that data automatically - and with a level of accuracy that meets or beats human operators.

Remember the movie 'The Matrix,' where virtual information popped up to help inform physical day-to-day reality? Such things won't always be the stuff of Hollywood. If the Internet is accessible via contact lenses, biographies will appear next to the faces of the people we talk to, and we will see subtitles if they speak a foreign language.

Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'

And I'm sure after Facebook it will be the little cameras that we have implanted into the palms of our hands and we'll be debating whether we should get them, and then we'll all get them.

Reddit names are unconnected to real-world identities and it's commonplace for users to create 'throwaway' accounts to reveal sensitive information.

On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next.

A lot of the future of search is going to be about pictures instead of keywords. Computer vision technology is going to be a big deal.

In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of startups using computer vision for agriculture or shopping - there are a lot for clothes shopping. At Baidu, for example, if you find a picture of a movie star, we actually use facial recognition to identify that movie star and then tell you things like their age and hobbies.

Every corporation worth its salt is throwing money at Deep Web research, not least Google. The company that unlocks the mysteries of the Deep Web will obtain power of an enormous magnitude.

Artificial intelligence is one of 50 things that Watson does. There is also machine learning, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and different analytical engines - they're like little Lego bricks. You can put intelligence in any product or any process you have.

When I was a graduate student in computer science in the early 2000s, computers were barely able to detect sharp edges in photographs, let alone recognize something as loosely defined as a human face.

Any child can tell you what Google does - Google gives you the answers. But Google doesn't, not really.

Digital surveillance programs require concrete data centres; intelligence agencies are based in real buildings. Surveillance systems ultimately consist of technologies, people, and the vast network of material resources that supports them.

Emotion AI uses massive amounts of data. In fact, Affectiva has built the world's largest emotion data repository.