Extraordinary group of computer scientists and my research in all that time has always been in the Computer Science literature but what im most interested in is number one how to help policymakers to make good decisions about Technology Policy and involves understanding the details of how Computer Systems and Network Systems work and probably more important they i am interested in how to evolve our Computing Technology so that its more responsive to Public Policy needs. Ive been able to do that because ive worked with and continue to work with an Extraordinary Group of computer scientists and other researchers at mit and around the world. Host can you give one example of how you influence policy . Guest people are probably well aware as an example that there is a big debate about the use of Encryption Technology and we need encryption to protect our email exchanges, our financial transactions, political speech that goes on we hope privately online when it needs to end government for decades have been concerned that the use of strong Encryption Technology would thwart the ability of Law Enforcement to conduct electronic surveillance so from a technical perspective we looked at that question and while acknowledging that encryption can pose barriers for the police we have shown through Technical Research that if you try to force all encryption systems to be hack a bowl or have backdoors as they are sometimes called then youll end up harming the security of all the billions of people around the world who use the internet and computer technology. And so, while this is an ongoing debate even the governments that are trying to control encryption have acknowledged that they shouldnt do so in a way that introduces systemic weaknesses. That is one area where i think we had a real effect. Host to help us explore some of those other areas and other policy initiatives that are involved with Technology Today kyle daly who is the Technology Editor with axials is joining us. Thank you, peter and professor. I always want to stick on encryption because as you alluded to there is an appetite in washington with cnet from bill barton weve seen it from someone the hill to impose backdoors on companies and are you concerned about that . Guest i am certainly concerned that government make decisions that really get the balance right and that really look at all the interests on all sides of this debate and make sure to make the right decisions. I certainly understand the frustration that lawenforcement has and they are, in many ways, digitally behind but that is a problem that goes far beyond Encryption Technology and they certainly need help and better training and better equipment to do investigation in the Digital World and i think we should be providing Law Enforcement the help to be able to function in this environment but the problem is that trying to regulate encryption is kind of a quick fix and it might feel good but it wont really help because the concerted criminal activity is always going to find ways to hide their medications one way or the other and this leaves all the rest of us in a more vulnerable state and im concerned that policymakers really should look at the whole picture when they are making this choice. You mention policymakers are playing catch up and are a little behind and do see any remedy for that . Guest well, hopefully the program i teach in an mit is part of the remedy where they constantly are trying to understand how to educate our Computer Science students and they are more aware of Public Policy and we spent time working with policymakers all around the world to try to understand the challenges they face and to help them to be smart about how to approach them and to help where possible to make sure that the systems we are building meet the needs that society has so yes, i think we have treated a lot of technology as a kind of fixed quantity that there was some absolute wall between the Public Policy world and the technical world and we very much want to bring that wall down both because we think we can do better job of designing systems and because we think policymakers can do a better job of making policy if they are well informed. What does that look like from washington side . s are you better educated couldnt peter science on policy but how do you educate people and policy makers on Computer Science . Guest i will give you an example. We are doing a lot of research right now on Election Security and a group of my students have looked very carefully at some of the mobile voting apps that are out there and some of the internet, online voting apps that are out there and what weve learned is that in some cases the apps that some election jurisdictions are choosing have very sniffing and flaws and we have been glad to see that dhs, as an example, has worked hard to try to bring information about those vulnerabilities to election jurisdictions all around the country and in looking at some of the Internet Voting Services where the there are different choices about how those systems are designed and whether they are used to actually enable people to submit ballots electronically or perhaps just get copies of ballots that they can then mail in on paper and weve been able to show that one is a pretty safe approach and that is the electronic ballot delivery with mail and return and one is really dangerous approach where there could be hundreds of thousands or millions of ballots sitting on unprotected servers so you know sometimes the policy world misses the nuance and a certain way and once the internet voting is good or bad and what our researchers has shown is that there is technologies that can be used that can be productive and expand access to the ballot for people who needed and wanted and they say but there is some things that shouldnt be done. As we Pay Attention to the details in the Technical Details and policy details we can make progress on these things. There has been a lot of talk about a number of tech policy issues and whether Election Security, privacy ai, facial recognition and while we are not seeing a lot of firm action do you think there is a lack of leadership in washington on some of these issues . Guest face recognition is a great example. A lot of the concern about recognition arose from research that was done by another student of ours at mit who found that the widely used face recognition system from some of our leading Technology Companies are dramatically less accurate if you are a person of color or a woman. The results of this has been a deep investigation into just what it takes to build more accurate Face Recognition Technology and i think there are parts of the government that it worked really hard to try to support that and the National Institute of technology is doing more and more testing in this area and trying to establish benchmarks about how you have good face recognition system and one that is not good and so i think there is morning for policy leadership in this area and we will be relying on all kinds of Artificial Intelligence based technology so really critical decisions for everything from whether you will get arrested or not to whether you are going to get a loan or not or hard for a job or not and the fact is right now as we saw with face recognition we often lack the ability to make solid Technical Assessments of whether those systems are Accurate Enough with the purpose they are using. You know, there will always be companies that could have different technologies and they hear, try this or try that and that is fine when they are for low stake usage but for these higher stake usage when peoples liberty or lives or economic livelihood is on the line i think the government really does have to step in and set standards and make it clear that if technology or if companies are deploying technology that should set standards at minimum they should not be able to sell it and beyond that they should probably be financially responsible for the harm. Host professor weitzner, can you explain how in laymans terms, how facial recognition is developed and how, how it recognizes faces and how it is being used today . Guest sure, face recognition uses a branch of Artificial Intelligence called Machine Learning. The weight Machine Learning works generally so its a technique to try to get machines to learn things. For example, to try to match names to faces. In a nutshell, the way you teach a machine to learn how to recognize faces is you give it lots and lots of images of faces. And then their associated names. The computer looks for patterns and all of those images. It may look at millions of images to try to figure out how to recognize one from the other. In some cases face recognition is about matching one phase to another so for example, if you want to use your face as the key to enter a building, for example, that type of Face Recognition Technology will try to figure out whether the video image for example that its ease of peter is like the one that is on file. When its the question of putting names to faces then it would do a different kind of technique but either way its about Teaching Computers to find patterns in very large amounts of data and then recognizing that pattern again and some new data. The key to face recognition or any other kind of Machine Learning technology is that the pattern recognition is only as good as the data called the Training Data that is initially presented to the computer. For example, if you try to train a computer to do face recognition and all the images of people with darker skin are poorly lit and dont have adequate contrast then that system is not going to learn how to recognize people with darker skin as well as people with lighter skin. This is a problem and this is an engineering problem which is a solvable problem if enough effort is put into it. Because these technologies are often in the commercial context companies will spend as much effort as they feel they need to expend to sell their product but no more. So part of what we have to do is make sure that we have the right kind of standards in place in the right kind of response ability and place in case the system doesnt work properly. Host just to go back to what kyle said earlier, there is a real issue about privacy here, isnt there in potential abuse . Guest absolutely. There is no question that in order to make Machine Learning techniques work well, work accurately they need a lot of data. In a lot of cases that is personal data. Now, there are different approaches that you can take to that problem and you can try to secure the data to make sure that even though one company perhaps gets to gather personal data for training purposes it protects them and make sure no one can get in to the data. Thats always somewhat risky because, as we no, its been hard to build perfectly secure system. There are also techniques that are being developed in my lab at mit and by people all around the world for what are called private learning techniques so you can do the same kind of Machine Learning training that we talked about but do it in a way that the data stays with the owner of the data and the computation remains private so the computer can learn the patterns that it needs to learn in order to recognize whatever it is, the face or the credit risk or the incidence of cancer perhaps in an xray or anything else while at the same time preserving the privacy of that information by allowing it to stay in control of the person who has it additionally. Academia has been out front on a lot of these issues you are alluding to in the way that facial Recognition Systems are more poorly on peoples color. We are starting to kind of see the industry catch up a number of Major Tech Companies have a pulse moratoria on facial Recognition Technology like Police Department at the very least. Do you see any reckoning going on . Do see more sincere awareness in Silicon Valley of how products may be exacerbating existing inequality . Guest i think society generally is taking a more critical look at a lot of the technology that is being put in front of us and being offered for use. If you look at the way the internet developed initially, commercially in the 1990s, it had a lot of excitement about it and people called it the wild west and it was very enticing new technology and there was a real spirit of experimentation then which was great and it led to a lot of innovation in a lot of advances and i think im very happy with the kind of expanded access to information it created for all of us in society but i think theres a recognition also that maybe some of the concerns about privacy werent attended to as carefully as they are so now and what almost feels like a second wave of data intensive technology that is Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, everyone is looking more critically and carefully partly because the companies that are developing a lot of these technologies went from the proverbial couple of inventors in a garage to you know in normas, Global Entities that have strong in some cases dominant positions in markets so i think were appropriately looking at these things more carefully and we also recognize that our lives depend on them. Its a lot more urgent where in viewing this technology was compared to drive us around and the powers that make very important decisions about our lives and so yes, and i think we are right though in the middle of that process of trying to figure out what it means to hold Companies Accountable for ejecting peoples privacy and for building their products and Services According to a certain set of standards. You know, its a legal detail but for a long time and to this day software and really all were talking about software here, exclusively pretty much, software isnt subject to the normal Product Liability rules we think of that for things like automobiles or consumer appliances or whatever else. If your car, you know, has an accident when it shouldnt and it explodes or catches fire the car company is responsible for a lot of money. Thats not the case for software and Internet Service providers. So, there i think were in the process of trying to figure out what kind of response abilities should be put on these companies when we are going to depend on their products and services for our lives. You mention our lives do depend on technology more than ever right now we are in the middle of a Global Pandemic and what are may be areas where you see, you know, what is something you are hopeful about that technology could solve as we try to fight covid . Guest im spending a lot of time myself working in an area called digital Contact Tracing and your viewers will, many of them probably know that apple and google in april announced a global offering of a number of technologies would make it possible for people to determine if theyve been in close Parks Committee with someone who has been identified as infected with the covid19 virus. The design for those systems came out of some work we did in my lab at mit and labs around the world from switzerland and germany and elsewhere and this all happened very, very quickly in response to the pandemic we were all looking for what we could do to help and came to this view that we could use the cell phones that are in our pockets and are in our hands for many, many people around the world to help with the epidemiological process with the publichealth process of making sure the people who been exposed to this Infectious Disease take appropriate measures. So, its interesting because the Technology Development super quickly. We put out a design and about three weeks and one week later apple and google said we will do that. And one month later it was already deployed in both of their mobile operating systems. We are now in a more completed process where Public Health authorities all around the world are trying to figure out how to use that we are working very closely with a number of them to try to make this work and weve moved from what is a narrow technical question is how do you get phones to recognize when they are in proximity with each other to how do you integrate a system like this into a very complicated Public Health process known as Contact Tracing that people are talking about a lot. Im hopeful that this will, in the end, make a contribution to the ability of Public Health authorities to help contain the disease in all different places around the world. But there is a lot of complexity to it and theyre still a lot we have to learn, partly technically but more from the Health Policy perspective but how to do this and how to make sure its done equitably and accurately. Host professor, how do you see that actually happening. Would someone get an alert on their phone if somebody who was tested positive is nearby . Guest we took a very pro privacy approach to this task and we were aware that some governments around the world, asian governments especially were using a gps to actually track people and then try to figure out whether they had been in proximity with others who had been, in fact but we thought that was not going to be accepted in the u. S. Or probably other democratic countries and so instead we developed a more privacy preserving approach to doing this with phones listen to each other is what we call chirps which are silent little radio waves they get passed back and forth and if you as an individual decide you want to participate in the system you would install an app that would keep track of what chirps you have heard and then another individual became infected they would again, if they volunteered to share information about the chirp they emitted, than everyone else can figure out whether they had heard those trips. That would give you an indication that youve been approximately with someone who identified as infected. This would all be run by the Public Health authorities, either state or National Authorities in other countries. What it would do is it would give people a warning that they had perhaps been approximately with someone who was infected and then give them instructions about how to contact their Public Health authorities to determine what to do next and perhaps urge them to quarantine for the appropriate time or suggest they get tested and tell them how to do that but basically get them into the Public Health system since they knew they had to take care of themselves we think it will be especially important as we try to reopen around the country and what we know and what epidemiologists now know about this particular virus is that it can spread before anyone shows any sign of infection so what that means is the moment that someone determines their positive you want to be almost reach back in time and say will who was i close to and how do i get information to them super quickly. The core of this process is what is called Contact Tracing and involves trained Public Health workers calling people up and urging them to get the care they need but there is evidence that we may need to get initial notifications out to people faster than is possible to do by phone and we know that not everyone returns those phone calls and some people dont trust the phone calls and so we are hoping that this could add to the established Contact Tracing process and provide an extra layer for more rapid production. Host kyle daly, we have four minutes left. Sure. I did want to stick with this just a few minutes longer. Weve been tracking some of the polling around this Contact Tracing and exposure notification as google and apple call their systems and it seems like there is, you know, some responses are all over the place because i think people havent made their minds necessarily but broadly it seems like there is a thin line of people like the idea and maybe they dont want to install the app themselves and how do you overcome that trust cap . Guest the trust is the key question. What we are 100 focused on now is working to do pilot projects with states and to watch Public Private products that are happening around the world in order to understand whether this is effective in a Public Health context. I think that people are perfectly rational today to say well, i dont know what this is and im not sure whether it works or not but if you look at other behaviors that have been encouraged on people, social distancing, masking i thank you have to say its pretty extraordinary in the United States at least for a significant period of time a huge proportion of the popular asian did take very costly steps to protect themselves and their community because there was an apparent reason to do it. There was a good case that it made sense whether it was quarantine or isolation or or or Wearing Masks but i think we have to go through the same kind of process with digital Contact Tracing so we are working very hard with Public Health authorities to develop the evidence to see whether it works and then hopefully becomes part of a Public Health education strategy that says you should do it and here is the reason why. To tight us all back to privacy how can people be assured that these systems arent going to be then taken and, you know, ms. Used for other purposes that have nothing whatsoever to do with covid . Guest great question but i think the key to privacy in this digital age is accountability. We have to know where our personal information is going and who is doing much with it. The days where we can stop the collection of our personal information for better or worse are more or less overpaid you can live off the grid under iraq and had no one had the information about you that i dont think we should have to tell people the choice is either to be a hermit or give up all your privacy. We want people to participate in society economically, politically, socially et cetera and in order to guarantee that we have to do a much better job of keeping track of who has information and really auditing the way that personal information is used, the same weight we audit to banks and financial institutions. We trust banks with our money in them because first of all we can get it out when we wanted and there was a whole regulatory apparatus that makes sure that the right amount of money is kept in the right place for the right time under the right conditions and that doesnt work 100 of the time but it works about 99 of the time and that is why we trust our Financial System and we need to develop same kind trust in the way personal information is stored and we will not do that by locking it all up in a big safe. We will do it by keeping track of how that information flows and making sure that when it is used you can tell its used and you can tell who used it and if you are harmed in some weight you should be able to know who ms. Used your information they should be punished. Host Daniel Weitzner of mit and kyle daly of ack axios thank you for being on the communicators. Thank you, peter. Guest thank you peter. Thank you kyle. Weeknights this month we are featuring book tv programs as a preview of what is available every weekend on cspan2. Tuesday night our topic is science. First, Research Seismologist susan huff provides a dual biography of geologists Bailey Willis and scientists robert hill in the early studies of earthquake activity in southern california. And then Space Shuttle endeavor pilot gives an inside look at space travel and exploration. Later author and producer and provides a followup to her late husband carl sagans study of space. It all begins at 8 00 p. M. Eastern enjoy but to beat this week and every weekend on cspan2. Youre watching tv on cspa cspan2. Every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2, created by americas Cable Television company as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Tomorrow is election date november 3, stay with us to learn who the voters elect to leave the country as president and which parties will control congress. A live coverage on Election Night starts at 9 00 p. M. Eastern and continues through the washington journal at 7 00 a. M. Eastern enjoy the conversation, share your experiences that when the results come in and hear from the candidates. Watch live on cspan and she spent at work or listen live on the cspan radio app. Election night on cspan, your place for an unfiltered view of politics