Connectionists: The Silicon Jungle [Book Announcement]

[shumeet baluja]

Dear Colleagues,

If you teach courses about, or are interested in, scientific responsibility and 
ethics, in particular with respect to data privacy and machine learning, please 
read on.

Princeton has just published The Silicon Jungle.  It is a fictionalized account 
of data mining and machine learning in today's largest internet companies.    It 
is written for a general audience and is easily accessible for a 
non-specialist.  Though it provides a gentle introduction to concepts in data 
mining and machine learning, the lessons are on data safety, scientific 
responsibility, and how data can be constructively used as well as misused when 
not handled carefully.

If you, or faculty in your department, may be interested in using this book for 
undergraduate courses (typical courses will use novels from Sinclair, Orwell, 
Huxley, etc) or simply as a "what-not-to-do-with-user- data" manual,  please let 
me know - course materials will follow based on interest.  

Thank you,
Shumeet Baluja
Google, Inc.

p.s. because of my current and previous affiliations, I must emphasize that 
though the lessons are real, the events are not.

~~~~~~

The Silicon Jungle:
A Novel of Deception, Power, and Internet Intrigue

What happens when a naive intern is granted unfettered access to people's most 
private thoughts and actions? Young Stephen Thorpe lands a coveted internship at 
Ubatoo, an Internet empire that provides its users with popular online services, 
from a search engine and shopping to e-mail and social networking. When 
Stephen's boss asks him to work on a project with the American Coalition 
for Civil Liberties, Stephen innocently obliges, believing he is mining Ubatoo's 
vast databases to protect the ever-growing number of people unfairly targeted in 
the name of national security. But nothing is as it seems. Suspicious 
individuals--do-gooders, voyeurs, government agents, and radicals--surface, 
doing all they can to access the mass of desires and vulnerabilities gleaned 
from scouring Ubatoo's wealth of intimate information. Entry into Ubatoo's 
vaults of personal data need not require technical wizardry--simply knowing how 
to manipulate a well-intentioned intern may be enough.

Set in today's cutting-edge data mining industry, The Silicon Jungle is a 
cautionary tale of data mining's promise and peril, and how others can use our 
online activities for political and personal gain just as easily as for 
marketing and humanitarian purposes. A timely thriller, The Silicon 
Jungle raises serious ethical questions about today's technological innovations 
and how our most confidential activities and minute details can be routinely 
pieced together into rich profiles that reveal our habits, goals, and secret 
desires--all ready to be exploited in ways beyond our wildest imaginations.

[amazon hardback] [kindle] [bn] [nook]



Selected Reviews:

"A cerebral, cautionary tale. Credible and scary."--Vint Cerf, Google Vice 
President and Chief Internet Evangelist and one of the "Fathers of the Internet"

"Clever and prophetic. The Silicon Jungle will be required reading from Silicon 
Valley to Washington, DC."--Marc Rotenberg, Electronic Privacy Information 
Center

"This novel will open your eyes to issues of privacy on the internet and to the 
hazards of placing uncritical, blind trust in the people overseeing this vast 
enterprise. Baluja tells a story about something that could happen to any of 
us--if you're even modestly concerned about information privacy, this is an 
important book to read."--Roy Maxion, Carnegie Mellon University


Bio:

Shumeet Baluja is a senior staff research scientist at Google, focusing on data 
mining, statistical machine learning, and computer vision. He was formerly the 
chief technology officer of Jamdat Mobile and chief scientist at Lycos. He holds 
a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and has served as 
an adjunct faculty member in both the computer science department and 
the Robotics Institute at CMU.
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