This paper investigates the strengths and weaknesses of the position of the public library to present viewpoint free materials to enhance the independent investigations of any user of any public library

Positioning the public library in the modern state

Data, and the economy around it, are said to be driving the fourth industrial revolution. Interestingly, the people—whose data are what moves the new economy—have a rather passive role in it as they are left outside the direct value flow that transforms raw data into huge monetary benefits. This is a consequence of a de facto understanding (or, one may say, misunderstanding) between people and companies that the former receive unpaid access to online services in exchange for the unpaid access to their personal data. This article argues in favor of an alternative human-centric data economy in which people will be paid whenever their data will be used by revenue-generating products and services. We discuss the benefits of such an economy, the main challenges for realizing it, and its feasibility in the view of existing technologies and business practices.

Why Online Services Should Pay You for Your Data? The Arguments for a Human-Centric Data Economy

While Autonomous Systems (ASes) are crucial for routing Internet traffic, organizations that own them are little understood. Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) inconsistently collect, release, and update basic AS organization information (e.g., website), and prior work provides only coarse-grained classification. Bootstrapping from RIR WHOIS data, we build ASdb, a system that uses data from established business intelligence databases and machine learning to accurately categorize ASes at scale. ASdb achieves 96% coverage of ASes, and 93% and 75% accuracy on 17 industry categories and 95 sub-categories, respectively. ASdb creates a more rich, accurate, comprehensive, and maintainable dataset cataloging AS-owning organizations. This system, and resulting dataset, will allow researchers to better understand who owns the Internet, and perform new forms of meaningful analysis and interpretation at scale.

ASdb: a system for classifying owners of autonomous systems

Online tracking is a whack-a-mole game between trackers who build and monetize behavioral user profiles through intrusive data collection, and anti-tracking mechanisms, deployed as a browser extension, built-in to the browser, or as a DNS resolver. As a response to pervasive and opaque online tracking, more and more users adopt anti-tracking tools to preserve their privacy. Consequently, as the information that trackers can gather on users is being curbed, some trackers are looking for ways to evade these tracking countermeasures. In this paper we report on a large-scale longitudinal evaluation of an anti-tracking evasion scheme that leverages CNAME records to include tracker resources in a same-site context, effectively bypassing anti-tracking measures that use fixed hostname-based block lists. Using historical HTTP Archive data we find that this tracking scheme is rapidly gaining traction, especially among high-traffic websites. Furthermore, we report on several privacy and security issues inherent to the technical setup of CNAME-based tracking that we detected through a combination of automated and manual analyses. We find that some trackers are using the technique against the Safari browser, which is known to include strict anti-tracking configurations. Our findings show that websites using CNAME trackers must take extra precautions to avoid leaking sensitive information to third parties.

The CNAME of the Game: Large-scale Analysis of DNS-based Tracking Evasion

The automatic classification of fish species appearing in images and videos from underwater cameras is a challenging task, albeit one with a large potential impact in environment conservation, marine fauna health assessment, and fishing policy. Deep neural network models, such as convolutional neural networks, are a popular solution to image recognition problems. However, such models typically require very large datasets to train millions of model parameters. Because underwater fish image and video datasets are scarce, non-uniform, and often extremely unbalanced, deep neural networks may be inadequately trained, and undergo a much larger risk of overfitting. In this paper, we propose small convolutional neural networks as a practical engineering solution that helps tackle fish image classification. The concept of “small” refers to the number of parameters of the resulting models: smaller models are lighter to run on low-power devices, and drain fewer resources per execution. This is especially relevant for fish recognition systems that run unattended on offshore platforms, often on embedded hardware. Here, established deep neural network models would require too many computational resources. We show that even networks with little more than 12,000 parameters provide an acceptable working degree of accuracy in the classification task (almost 42% for six fish species), even when trained on small and unbalanced datasets. If the fish images come from videos, we augment the data via a low-complexity object tracking algorithm, increasing the accuracy to almost 49% for six fish species. We tested the networks with images obtained from the deployments of an experimental system in the Mediterranean sea, showing a good level of accuracy given the low quality of the dataset.

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Classification of Underwater Fish Images and Videos via Very Small Convolutional Neural Networks

Domain classification services have applications in multiple areas, including cybersecurity, content blocking, and targeted advertising. Yet, these services are often a black box in terms of their methodology to classifying domains, which makes it difficult to assess their strengths, aptness for specific applications, and limitations. In this work, we perform a large-scale analysis of 13 popular domain classification services on more than 4.4M hostnames. Our study empirically explores their methodologies, scalability limitations, label constellations, and their suitability to academic research as well as other practical applications such as content filtering. We find that the coverage varies enormously across providers, ranging from over 90% to below 1%. All services deviate from their documented taxonomy, hampering sound usage for research. Further, labels are highly inconsistent across providers, who show little agreement over domains, making it difficult to compare or combine these services. We also show how the dynamics of crowd-sourced efforts may be obstructed by scalability and coverage aspects as well as subjective disagreements among human labelers. Finally, through case studies, we showcase that most services are not fit for detecting specialized content for research or content-blocking purposes. We conclude with actionable recommendations on their usage based on our empirical insights and experience. Particularly, we focus on how users should handle the significant disparities observed across services both in technical solutions and in research.

Mis-shapes, Mistakes, Misfits: An Analysis of Domain Classification Services

The idea of paying people for their data is increasingly seen as a promising direction for resolving privacy debates, improving the quality of online data, and even offering an alternative to labor-based compensation in a future dominated by automation and self-operating machines. In this paper we demonstrate how a Human-Centric Data Economy would compensate the users of an online streaming service. We borrow the notion of the Shapley value from cooperative game theory to define what a fair compensation for each user should be for movie scores offered to the recommender system of the service. Since determining the Shapley value exactly is computationally inefficient in the general case, we derive faster alternatives using clustering, dimensionality reduction, and partial information. We apply our algorithms to a movie recommendation data set and demonstrate that different users may have a vastly different value for the service. We also analyze the reasons that some movie ratings may be more valuable than others and discuss the consequences for compensating users fairly.

Valuating User Data in a Human-Centric Data Economy.

The task of visual classification, done until not long ago by specialists through direct observation, has recently benefited from advancements in the field of computer vision, specifically due to statistical optimization algorithms, such as deep neural networks. In spite of their many advantages, these algorithms require a considerable amount of training data to produce meaningful results. Another downside is that neural networks are usually computationally demanding algorithms, with millions (if not tens of millions) of parameters, which restricts their deployment on low-power embedded field equipment. In this paper, we address the classification of multiple species of pelagic fish by using small convolutional networks to process images as well as videos frames. We show that such networks, even with little more than 12,000 parameters and trained on small datasets, provide relatively high accuracy (almost 42% for six fish species) in the classification task. Moreover, if the fish images come from videos, we deploy a simple object tracking algorithm to augment the data, increasing the accuracy to almost 49% for six fish species. The small size of our convolutional networks enables their deployment on relatively limited devices.

Very Small Neural Networks for Optical Classification of Fish Images and Videos

Spatio-temporal information is used for driving a plethora of intelligent transportation, smart-city, and crowd-sensing applications. Since data is now considered a valuable production factor, data marketplaces have appeared to help individuals and enterprises bring it to market to satisfy the ever-growing demand. In such marketplaces, several sources may need to combine their data in order to meet the requirements of different applications. In this paper we study the problem of estimating the relative value of different spatio-temporal datasets combined in wholesale and retail marketplaces for the purpose of predicting demand in metropolitan areas. Using as case studies large datasets of taxi rides from Chicago and New York, we ask questions such as "When does it make sense for different taxi companies to combine their data?", and "How should different companies be compensated for the data that they share?". We then turn our attention to the even harder problem of establishing the relative value of the data brought to retail marketplaces by individual drivers. Overall, we show that simplistic but popular approaches for estimating the relative value of data, such as using volume, or the ``leave-one-out'' heuristic, are inaccurate. Instead, more complex notions of value from economics and game-theory, such as the Shapley value need to be employed if one wishes to capture the complex effects of mixing different datasets on the accuracy of forecasting algorithms. Applying the Shapley value to large datasets from many sources is, of course, computationally challenging. We resort to structured sampling and manage to compute accurately the importance of thousands of data sources. We show that the relative value of the data held by different taxi companies and drivers may differ substantially, and that its relative ranking may change from district to district within a metropolitan area.

Marius Paraschiv

Papers

Mis-shapes, Mistakes, Misfits: An Analysis of Domain Classification Services

Classification of Underwater Fish Images and Videos via Very Small Convolutional Neural Networks

Valuating User Data in a Human-Centric Data Economy.

Very Small Neural Networks for Optical Classification of Fish Images and Videos

Computing the Value of Spatio-Temporal Data in Wholesale and Retail Data Marketplaces.