David Sumpter

Outnumbered (eBook, ePUB)

From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-bubbles - The Algorithms That Control Our Lives

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

'Fascinating' - Financial Times

Algorithms are running our society, and as the Cambridge Analytica story has revealed, we don't really know what they are up to.

Our increasing reliance on technology and the internet has opened a window for mathematicians and data researchers to gaze through into our lives. Using the data they are constantly collecting about where we travel, where we shop, what we buy and what interests us, they can begin to predict our daily habits. But how reliable is this data? Without understanding what mathematics can and can't do, it is impossible to get a handle on how it is changing our lives.

In this book, David Sumpter takes an algorithm-strewn journey to the dark side of mathematics. He investigates the equations that analyse us, influence us and will (maybe) become like us, answering questions such as:

- Who are Cambridge Analytica? And what are they doing with our data?
- How does Facebook build a 100-dimensional picture of your personality?
- Are Google algorithms racist and sexist?
- Why do election predictions fail so drastically?
- Are algorithms that are designed to find criminals making terrible mistakes?
- What does the future hold as we relinquish our decision-making to machines?

Featuring interviews with those working at the cutting edge of algorithm research, including Alex Kogan from the Cambridge Analytica story, along with a healthy dose of mathematical self-experiment, Outnumbered explains how mathematics and statistics work in the real world, and what we should and shouldn't worry about.

A lot of people feel outnumbered by algorithms - don't be one of them.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. April 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781472947420
• Artikelnr.: 52435743

Autorenporträt

David Sumpter is professor of applied mathematics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, where he runs the Collective Behaviour Research Group. Originally from London, he studied his PhD in Mathematics at Manchester and held academic research positions at both Oxford and Cambridge before heading to Sweden, where he lives with his wife and two children. In his spare time, he trains a successful 9-year old boys' football team, Uppsala IF 2005.

An incomplete list of the applied maths research projects on which David has worked includes pigeons flying in pairs over Oxford; clapping undergraduate students in the north of England; the traffic of Cuban leaf-cutter ants; fish swimming between coral in the Great Barrier Reef; swarms of locusts traveling across the Sahara; disease-spread in Ugandan villages; the gaze of London commuters; dancing honey bees from Sydney; and the tubular structures built by Japanese slime moulds. His research has appeared in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Proceedings of the Royal Society, among many others.

@soccermatics / www.david-sumpter.com

Inhaltsangabe

PART 1: ANALYSING US Chapter 1: Finding Banksy Chapter 2: Make Some Noise
Chapter 3: The Principal Components of Friendship Chapter 4: One Hundred
Dimensions of You Chapter 5: Cambridge Hyperbolytica Chapter 6: Impossibly
Unbiased Chapter 7: The Data Alchemists PART 2: INFLUENCING US Chapter 8:
Nate Silver vs the Rest of Us Chapter 9: We 'Also Liked ' the Internet
Chapter 10: The Popularity Contest Chapter 11: Bubbling Up Chapter 12:
Football Matters Chapter 13: Who Reads Fake News? PART 3: BECOMING US
Chapter 14: Learning to be Sexist Chapter 15: The Only Thought Between the
Decimal Chapter 16: Kick Your Ass at Space Invaders Chapter 17: The
Bacterial Brain Chapter 18: Back to Reality Notes Acknowledgements Index