Blog Reflection of Big Idea 5.3 and 5.4
This is my blog post reflecting on the class discussion on Computing Bias and Crowdsourcing
Overview of the Discussion
This discussion was pretty simple and was a little different that it was last week, because we had an inner circle and an outer circle. It was nice to be able to talk to different people and hear their perspectives. Afterwards, the whole class would discuss the two CollegeBoard topics, and this helped me to understand each topic.
Section 5.3
Write summary/thoughts/conclusions from each of the exercises above. Focus on avoiding Bias in algorithms or code you write
Age Groups: Facebook and Instagram
Although Facebook and Instagram are both from the same company and are popular social media with similar purposes, Instagram is for younger people while Facebook is for older people. This makes it easier for advertisers to advertise towards a certain age group. This is good bussiness because people will use a certain app based on their age and get to interact with others online around their age, so they will tend to use that app more.
Virtual Assistants
Usually, Virtual Assistants come with a Female Voice by default, but I am pretty sure that you can change the voice of these virtual assistants. So I don’t think it is as harmful as it would be if it was only female voices because consumers can always change the voice.
Company Algorithms
Two companies that work together that I have seen are Amazon and Google. For example, I googled Professional Table Tennis Paddles, and then a few minutes later, I would open Amazon and then on the home page would show a Table Tennis Paddle. This is very easy to order from Amazon, and this might influence where I would buy a Table Tennis Paddle.
HP Laptop Facial Recognition
- Does the owner of the computer think this was intentional? If yes or no, justify you conclusion.
No, I do not think that the owner of this computer thought it was intentional because he might’ve just thought it was a flaw, but there is a small chance he thought it was intentional because it was working for his coworker in the not ideal lighting.
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How do you think this happened? I think that this happened because this webcam is old and during testing, they did very little and focused more on recognizing facial features rather than focusing on skin color. They probably tested it in ideal conditions and just focusing on facial features, but didn’t think about facial features of people of color in unideal questions.
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Is this harmful? Was it intended to be harmful or exclude? I believe this is harmful to both the consumers and the company, because once the consumers buy it and try out this feature they will be dissapointed and buy ohter products from other companies. People will stop being loyal to HP. This means that HP will lose some customers and the people will be sad that they are not.
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Should it be corrected? It should be corrected so that way people will be loyal to the company, because if consumers like everything else about the product, except this webcam, if this were to be corrected, then consumers might starting buying products frm them again.
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What would you or should you do to produce a better outcome? In order to produce a better outcome, we should do a lot of testing with people who don’t have a lot of experience with traveling and those that do, so we can see how their interactions are different, and use that to improve on the website.
Section 5.4
Obtaining Data and Crowdsourcing
We have all experienced Crowdsourcing by using external data through API’s, namely RapidAPI. This data has influenced how we code and shown possibilities in obtaining and analyzing data. Discuss APIs you have used.
API’s I have used are the Google Maps API, and a bunch of other APIs when I first started using APIs for APCSP, I did not really understand how they all worked, and I was really confused, but I still worked around it and did it.
We have all participated in code Crowdsourcing by using GitHub. Many of you have forked from the Teacher repository, or exchanged code with fellow students. Not only can we analyze GitHub code, but we can obtain profiles and history about the persons coding history. What is the biggest discovery you have found in GitHub?
I have used Github to look at other people’s code and try to use that in my code. One of the biggest things I have found in Github was code for Del Norte’s Robotics Team, and I opened this up to see how exactly, their team coded a robot.
Kaggle datasets for code and science exploration. The avenue of data points us youtube or netflix channels. Analyzing crowd data helps us make decisions. Exam top 10 to 20. Did you see anything interesting?
I saw a lot of different datasets that had many different topics, and this is important because many people can use it for any ideas they have. Crowd Data might make us choose where we might want to eat or go. For example, if two Italian Restuarants are nearby to you, and you want to go to to one, you will probably choose the one with a higher rating.
Crowdsourcing in my Project
CompSci has 150 ish principles students. Describe a crowdsource idea and how you might initiate it in our environment?
In our classes, we have many students, and this can really help us improve our testing because we can introduce much diversity. We will get many different ideas and will be able to find out what exactly users are looking for and start to implement them. Another idea is using all these students for help with feedback and with coding for this project. We can make our repository more open to people in our classes and ask them to add some features. We can also use Pull Requests and ask people to review the Pull Request and ask people if they think that feature will be beneficial. Another thing that we can do is make a form and ask people to fill it out with feedback about our website.
What about Del Norte crowdsourcing? Could your project be better with crowdsourcing? If my group and I were able to crowdsource all of Del Norte, this would be very helpful because then we get feedback from students who have no computer science experience and we also get much more diversity in our testing. By opening it up to more people, we can get more suggestions to make our project better.
What kind of data could you capture at N@tM to make evening interesting? Perhaps use this data to impress Teachers during finals week.
Some data I could capture would be how many people come to our area to check out our website. I can look at how other groups are inviting others to come by and comparing it to others. I can compare our website to those who have a website attracting much more people, and then ask myself what makes their website more appealing.