It has been an interesting 5 years learning more about Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Social Media and Algorithms.

Through various sources books, podcast, documentaries I have gone from a skeptic to realist that our world in the 21st Century has forever changed!

Below are books, videos and presentations that deal with all the topics mentioned above

They key point of sharing all this information is to make everyone fully aware that our online world is changing and we should more informed and education on what is happening.

Our personal privacy is under attack. Whether you like it or not we are being watched as we shop and as we do our online business.

We have to make sure that the due diligence is put in place to safeguard our information.

From Cambridge Analytica scraping our information from Facebook to hackers breaking into major corporation and asking for ransomware. This all affects us!

In this explosive memoir, a political consultant and technology whistleblower reveals the disturbing truth about the multi-billion-dollar data industry, revealing to the public how companies are getting richer using our personal information and exposing how Cambridge Analytica exploited weaknesses in privacy laws to help elect Donald Trump—and how this could easily happen again in the 2020 presidential election.

When Brittany Kaiser joined Cambridge Analytica—the UK-based political consulting firm funded by conservative billionaire and Donald Trump patron Robert Mercer—she was an idealistic young professional working on her fourth degree in human rights law and international relations. A veteran of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, Kaiser’s goal was to utilize data for humanitarian purposes, most notably to prevent genocide and human rights abuses. But her experience inside Cambridge Analytica opened her eyes to the tremendous risks that this unregulated industry poses to privacy and democracy.

Targeted is Kaiser’s eyewitness chronicle of the dramatic and disturbing story of the rise and fall of Cambridge Analytica. She reveals to the public how Facebook’s lax policies and lack of sufficient national laws allowed voters to be manipulated in both Britain and the United States, where personal data was weaponized to spread fake news and racist messaging during the Brexit vote and the 2016 election. But the damage isn’t done Kaiser warns; the 2020 election can be compromised as well if we continue to do nothing.

In the aftermath of the U.S. election, as she became aware of the horrifying reality of what Cambridge Analytica had done in support of Donald Trump, Kaiser made the difficult choice to expose the truth. Risking her career, relationships, and personal safety, she told authorities about the data industry’s unethical business practices, eventually testifying before Parliament about the company’s Brexit efforts and helping Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, alongside at least 10 other international investigations.

Packed with never-before-publicly-told stories and insights, Targeted goes inside the secretive meetings with Trump campaign personnel and details the promises Cambridge Analytica made to win. Throughout, Kaiser makes the case for regulation, arguing that legal oversight of the data industry is not only justifiable but essential to ensuring the long-term safety of our democracy.

Longlisted for the National Book Award

New York Times Bestseller

A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life — and threaten to rip apart our social fabric

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.

But as Cathy O’Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.” Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.

Tracing the arc of a person’s life, O’Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. These “weapons of math destruction” score teachers and students, sort résumés, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, and monitor our health.

O’Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it’s up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change.

Named a Best Book of the Year
By Amazon and Foreign AffairsMagazine

Through the weaponization of social media, the internet is changing war and politics, just as war and politics are changing the internet. Terrorists livestream their attacks, “Twitter wars” produce real world casualties, and viral misinformation alters not just the result of battles, but the very fate of nations. War, tech, and politics have blurred into a new kind of battle space that plays out on our smartphones.

P. W. Singer and Emerson Brooking tackle the mind bending questions that arise when war goes online and the online world goes to war.

Delving into the web’s darkest corners, Like War outlines a radical new paradigm for understanding and defending against the unprecedented threats of our networked world.

Feature: Quantumly Leaping Podcast

Privacy in the 21st Century (S01 - E06)

Privacy has been in everyone’s mind for the past few years especially after news of data breaches breaking multiple times a year from huge corporates and institutions. With the COVID-19 crisis and the contact tracing apps that people are welcoming without knowing how collecting such data without regulation and transparency we believe it’s important to talk about this very essential topic. Episode Topics _______________ 0:00 Opening Title 1:00 Introduction about the privacy topic 2:10 Redefining Privacy 12:25 Privacy in Healthcare Data 23:33 Border Security and the Invasion of Privacy 35:43 Cambridge Analytica and the big Facebook breach 44:19 Closing on the importance of privacy for everyone

Social Platforms Responsibility Against the Spread of Misinformation (S01 - E10)

According to the Pew research center 62% of adults in the United States get their news from social media platforms. And, while most major media outlets have presence on social media, much more news outlets that are not legit or even regulated are their most of which spread lies, misinformation and conspiracy theories. The numbers of people who believe and share this news from those sources are staggering and rising every day. Currently social media platforms are protected under the US law as being a provider (platform) not as a publisher which means they can decide for themselves what content should stay on their own platforms. While the pressure is getting higher and higher for those platforms to moderate the content and many of them are trying hard to make that happen, we hear politicians threatening of suing them or even shutting them down when they moderate their content. How content moderation affects the spread of misinformation? How these companies will balance content moderation and still profit from content? And how politics plays a huge part in that? All of these questions are in the core of this episode’s topics. Episode Topics: ________________ 0:00 Opening Title 0:33 Intro - our 10th episode and upcoming topics. 5:15 A quick history of how social platforms became news sources. 15:59 The rise of extremism on social media. 25:48 Using social platform to spread political misinformation. 37:25 The effort that - finally - most platforms are putting to moderate the content. 48:24 Closing remarks and inspiring stories. Resources __________ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_... https://www.statista.com/statistics/5... https://www.rcinet.ca/en/2019/04/09/c... Follow Us You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjNZ...

Post Covid19 Digital Transformation

There is no doubt that COVID-19 pandemic caused the worst economic crisis in the history of modern humanity. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed permanently, millions are suffering and are on the edge of collapse, small business owners lost their life work, some even lost their lives, because of this. Yet, the pandemic also raised a lot of chances and opportunities for growth in the new circumstances of what is becoming a “new norm”. Suffice to say that those defied technology and transform their businesses into the new technical atmosphere were left behind to close or suffer a lot while those who rode the new wave survived and even flourished. Yet, no good deed goes unpunished. As businesses, and governments, moved more toward technology the chances of being exposed to digital attacks rose up to the roof and created a new gigantic challenge in a world that is already tackling the biggest challenges in history. In this episode we shed the light on all these topics and how we expect a world post COVID-19 will look like from a Digital Transformation point of view. Episode Topics _______________ 0:00 - 0:17 Podcast Intro 0:17 - 1:10 Opening Remarks 2:10 - 11:16 Why Businesses Failed due to COVID-19 11:16 - 22:06 Quick Digital Transformation During COVID-19 22:06 - 33:50 Using AI and Data Modelling to Help Businesses 33:50 Closing Remarks

Centre of Ethics at University of Toronto: Zachary Lipton Carnagie Mellon University

Zack Lipton, Fairness, Interpretability and the Dangers of Solutionism (Ethics of AI in Context)

Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, January 14, 2020

ethics.utoronto.ca Zack Lipton Carnegie Mellon University

Will AI Take Over Humanity's Future? | Hisham Qaddoumi | TEDxUnionville

People have been scared of every invention since the dawn of history, and they might not be very wrong! After all new inventions took jobs from humans since the invention of the wheels. Yet, there might be no paranoid scare about any other invention than AI. For the first time, we invented something that might compete with us on the very things we felt most secured about: Our intelligence and our creativity. So, will AI be the end of the era of humans? Hisham is technology specialist in both AI and Cyber security. He started programming since he was 10 and has a great interest in film and Sci-Fi. He has been working on AI for more than 10 years. He is passionate about public speaking and raising awareness about technology and privacy especially regarding the roles of AI and cyber security in everyone’s modern life. He recently launched the free cyber security awareness site cytips.ca for all. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx