Importantly i am really interested in how to evolve our Computing Technology so that it is more responsive to Public Policy needs. We need encryption to protect our email exchanges, our financial transactions, political speech that goes on. We hope privately online what it needs to. Governments for decades have ofn concerned that the use strong Encryption Technology would thwart the ability of Law Enforcement to conduct electronic surveillance. From a technical perspective, we look at that question and while acknowledging that encryption and pose some barriers for the police, we have shown through Technical Research that if you try to force all encryption palpable or have upkdoors, then you will end harvesting the security of the millions of people around the world to use the internet and Computing Technology, so well this is an ongoing debate, even governments trying to control encryption have acknowledged that they should not do so in a way that introduces systemic weaknesses. At that is one area we have had a real effect. To help us explore some of those other areas and policy initiatives involving technology daily, the Technology Editor with axios is joining us. Thank you. I want to stick on encryption for a moment. As you alluded to, there is an appetite in washington washington, d. C. We have seen it from bill barr, some unveiled to impose backdoors on companies. Are you concerned about that . Concerned thatly governments make decisions that would really get the balance right, look at all of the interests on all sides of this debate and make sure to make the right decisions. Understand the frustration that Law Enforcement has. And are in many ways digitally behind, but that is a problem that goes far beyond just Encryption Technology. They need help and better training and better equipment to do investigations in the Digital World and i think we should be providing Law Enforcement that help to be able to function in this environment. The problem is trying to regulate encryption is a quickfix. Concerted criminal activity is always going to find ways to hide their communication one way or the other end it doesnt leave all of the rest of us in a more vulnerable state. Policymakersd that really should look at the whole picture when they are making this choice. You mentioned policymakers are always playing catchup, always a little behind. Do you see any remedies for that . I teachully the program at m. I. T. Is part of the remedy for that. We are constantly trying to understand how to educate our Computer Science students so they are more of their aware of Public Policy needs to be spent on working with Public Policy makers around the world to understand the challenges they face, to understand how to approach them and to understand how to make possible the systems we are building meet the Needs Society has. Treated a lot of technology as a kind of fixed quantity, that there is some absolute wall between the Public Policy world ending technical world and we very much want to bring that wall down. Most of us think we could do a better job of designing systems and we think policymakers can do a better job of making policies. What does it look like from washington, d. C. s side . You guys can better educate students on policy but how do you educate policymakers on Computer Science . I will give you an example. We are doing research on election security. A group of my students have loved very carefully at some of the mobile voting apps that are out there, some of the internet online voting apps and what we have learned is in some cases the apps some election jurisdictions are choosing have very significant flaws and we have been glad to see dhs as an example have worked very hard to thoseinformation about vulnerabilities to election jurisdictions all around the country in looking at some of the Internet Voting Services where there are different choices about how the systems are designed, whether they are used to actually enable people to submit ballots electronically or get copies of ballots that they can mail it on paper. We have been able to show that one is a safe approach, the electronic ballot delivery with the mail and return and one is a dangerous approach where there could be hundreds of thousands or millions of ballots sitting on unprotected servers. Sometimes the policy world misses the nuance in a certain way. Internet voting, goodbad, and what our research has shown is there are techniques that can be used to be productive, expand access to ballots who needed and wanted, who face barriers but there are some things that should not be done. As long as we Pay Attention to the details, we can make progress on these things. There has been a lot of talk about a number of tech policy issues, whether it is security, recognition,acial and we are not seeing a lot of firm action. Do you think there is a lack of leadership in washington, d. C. On some of these issues . Face recognition is a great example. A lot of the concerned about facial recognition arose from Research Done to buy student of found that. T. Who the widely used systems from some of our leading Technology Companies are dramatically less accurate if you are a person of color or a woman, and the result of this has been a deep investigation as to what it takes to build more accurate phase Recognition Technology. There are parts of the government that it worked really hard. The National Institute of standards and technology doing more testing in this area to establish benchmarks on how to tell when you have a good facial recognition system and when one is not good. I think there is more need for policy leadership in this area. All types maligned on of Artificial Intelligence technology for critical decisions whether you are going to get arrested or not to whether you will get a loan or not or hired 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 on whether those systems are Accurate Enough for the purpose they are using. There are always going to be companies that could have different technologies. Try this or that. Stakes fine for low usage but for higher stakes usage when peoples liberty or livelihood ismic on the lawn, i think the government does have to step in and set some standards and make arelear if companies deploying technologies that are substandard, at minimum they should not be able to sell it and to be on that they should be financially responsible for the lord. Professor, could you explain in laymans terms how facial recognition is developed and how it recognizes phases and how it is being used today . Uses recognition branchcognition uses a of technology called Machine Learning. It is a technique to get machines to learn things. Faces, and in to a nutshell, the way that you teach a machine to learn how to recognize faces is you give it lots of images of faces and associated names and the computer looks for patterns in all of those images. It may look at it millions of images to try to figure out how to recognize one from the other. In some cases, facial recognition is about matching one phase to another. Face asant to use your the key to enter a building, for phasee, that kind of Recognition Technology will try to figure out whether the video image for example that it sees of peter is like the one on file. Faces, it would do a different technique. Either way, it is about Teaching Computers to find patterns in large amounts of data and then recognizing that pattern again in new data. Facial recognition or any kind of Machine Learning that pattern recognition is only as good as the data, the Training Data initially presented to the computer. If you try to train a computer to do face recognition and all of the images of people with darker skin are poorly lit and do not have adequate contrast, then that system will not learn how to recognize people with darker skin as well as people with lighter skin. Problem,n engineering which is a solvable problem if enough effort is put into it. Because these technologies are developed very often in a commercial context, companies will expend as much effort as they feel they need to spend to sell their product and no more. Part of what we need to do is make sure we have the right standards in place in the right responsibility in place in case the system does not work properly. Kylest to move on to what said earlier, there is an issue about privacy here. Is there a potential abuse . Absolutely, there is no question that in order to make Machine Learning techniques work well, work accurately, they need data. In a lot of cases, that is personal data. There are different approaches you can take to that problem. You can try to secure the data to make sure even though one company has gathered a lot of data for training purposes, in a protected edda make sure no one can get into the data. Know it is pretty hard to build perfectly secure systems. There are also techniques being developed in my lab and by people around the world for what are called private learning techniques so that you can do the same kind of Machine Learning training that we talked about but do it in a way that the data actually stays with the owner of the data and the computation remains private. The computer can learn the patterns it needs to learn in order to recognize whatever it is, the face, a credit risk, the incidence of cancer and an xray, while at the same time preserving the privacy of that information by allowing it to stay in control of the person who has it initially. Been upfront on these issues you are alluding to, facial Recognition Systems more poorly on people of color and we are starting to see the industry catch up. Companiesf major tech and post moratoriums on facial Recognition Technology by police departments. Do you see a reckoning going on . More sincere awareness in Silicon Valley about our products may be exacerbating existing inequality . Is taking aociety more critical look at a lot of technology being put in front of us being offered for use. If you look at the way the internet is balanced commercially and the 1990s, it had a lot of excitement about it. As some people called it the wild west. It was very enticing new technology and there was a real spirit of experimentation then, which was great. It led to a lot of innovation and advances and i am very happy with the expanded access to information it created for all of us in society. That is a recognition also may some of the concerns about privacy were not tended to as carefully as they ought to have been. Now and what feels like a second wave of machine technology, everyone is looking more critically and carefully, partly because the Companies Developing these technologies went from the proverbial couple of inventors and a garage to enormous Global Entities that have strong and in some cases dominant positions and markets. We are appropriately looking at these things work carefully. We also recognize our lives depend on them more urgently. We are viewing this technology with the power to drive us around, the power to make important decisions about our lives. I think we are right in the middle of that process of trying to figure out what it means to hold Companies Accountable for protecting peoples privacy, building their products and Services According to a certain set of standards. A legal detail, but for a long time and to this day, software, and we are talking about software here exclusively, to thee is not subject normal Product Liability rules when we think about things like automobiles and consumer appliances and whatever else. Accident whens an it should not or explodes or catches fire, the car company is responsible for a lot of money. That is not the case for software and Internet Service providers. Think we are trying to figure out what kinds of responsibilities we should put on these companies when we depend on their products and services for our lives. . You mentioned our lives you mentioned our lives depend on technology more now in a global pandemic. What are scenarios what is something you are hopeful about that technology could solve as we try to fight covid . Timeam spending a lot of myself working in an area called digital Contact Tracing. Many of your viewers probably know apple and google in april offering of aobal number of technologies which make it impossible for people to determine if they have been in with someone who has been identified as infected with covid19 virus. Systems camer the out of work that we did in my lab and in labs around the world in switzerland and germany and elsewhere, and this all happened 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 cell phones in our pockets, in our hands for many people around the world to help with the epidemiological process, the publichealth process of making sure people exposed to this Infectious Disease take appropriate measures. It is very interesting because the Technology Developed super quickly. We had a design and three weeks and a week later apple and google said we will do that. And a month later it was already deployed into both of their mobile operating systems. We are now in a more complicated process where Public Health authorities all around the world are trying to figure out how to use that. We are working closely with a number of them to make this work. We move from what is a narrow technical question, how do you get phones to recognize when they are in proximity to each other to how do you integrate a system like this into a very complicated process that people are talking about a lot. . I am hopeful in the end this will make a contribution to the ability of Public Health a diseases to contain in different places around the world. There is a lot of complexity to it. There was a lot we have to learn , partly technically but more from a Health Policy perspective, how to do this and make sure it is done equitably and accurately. Professor, and how do you see that happening . Would somebody get an alert on their phone when someone who assisted deposit is nearby . We took a pro privacy approach to this task. We were aware some governments around the world, some asian governments were using gps to direct people and figure out whether they had been in process activity to others proximity to others. We felt that would not be accepted in the u. S. Or other democratic countries. Instead, we developed a privacy preserving approach to do it where phones listen to each others chirps, silent radio waves that get passed back and as an and if you individual decide you want to participate in the system, that you would install an app that would keep track of what chirps you have heard and if another individual became infected, if they volunteered to share ,nformation about the chirps everyone else couldnt figure out whether they had heard those chirps and that would give you an indication you had been in proximity with someone identified as infected. By public all be run health authorities, either state Public Health authorities or National Authorities in other countries. What it would do is it would give people a warning that they had perhaps been in proximity with someone infected and then give them instructions about how to contact Public Health authorities to determine what to do next, perhaps urge them to quarantine for inappropriate period of john. Perhaps get tested. Get them into the Public Health system so that they knew they had to take care of themselves. We think this will be especially important as we try to reopen around the country. What we know, what epidemiologist now know about virus this reticular virus is a particular virus is that it can spread without showing symptoms. You want to be able to reach back in time and say 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 it involves trade to Public Health workers calling people up and urging them to get the care they need. Evidence we may need to get initial notifications out to people faster than is possible to do by phone. We know not everyone returns those phone calls. Some people do not trust those phone calls. This could add to the established Contact Tracing an extrand provide layer of more rapid protection. Y, we have four minutes left. I went to stick with this for just a few minutes longer. Pollingbeen tracking around in this Contact Tracing and exposure notification as google and apple called their some of theit seems responses are out of place