Thursday, September 12, 2019

AMERICAN TRAITOR GOOGLE, SERVANT FOR CASH OF RED CHINA - "Company collaborates with entities that conduct AI research with military applications."

Google’s China Ties in AI Research Eyed

Company collaborates with entities that conduct AI research with military applications
September 11, 2019 Updated: September 12, 2019
Google’s connections to China have come under scrutiny after U.S. President Donald Trump in late July said his administration would look into allegations that Google was working with the Chinese government on projects that could threaten U.S. national security.
“There may or may not be National Security concerns with regard to Google and their relationship with China. If there is a problem, we will find out about it. I sincerely hope there is not!!!” Trump wrote in a July 26 tweet.
Google left the Chinese market in 2006, and its search engine is blocked by China’s “Great Firewall.” But the U.S. internet giant maintains a number of tech research projects in China, many of them focused on artificial intelligence (AI). The company has offices in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.
Google placed its emphasis on AI research in the country by appointing Li Fei-Fei, an AI researcher and professor at Stanford University, to start its AI China Center in Shanghai.
According to the company, the research center was established to encourage research collaborations with the country’s top AI and machine-learning experts.
While there is no information to suggest that the AI center conducted sensitive research that could have national security concerns, through scouring Chinese-language media reports and online sources, The Epoch Times found information about Google’s AI collaborations in China that indicates they have military applications.
In addition, Li, who left the company in September 2018, has extensive ties to Chinese AI research and academic circles. She is a member of a science and tech research forum that is supervised by Chinese authorities. In addition, mentors she has cited as important to her career are participants of the “Thousand Talents” program, an initiative started by Beijing to recruit top scientists and engineers from the West to work in China.
In recent months, the Thousand Talents program has come under U.S. scrutiny because of its potential in abetting academic espionage. Several Chinese individuals indicted on federal charges of stealing trade secrets were participants in the program.
Google and Li didn’t immediately respond to The Epoch Times’ requests for comment.

Research Project

On June 28, the official website of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country’s top state-run research institute, published an article entitled “Progress in the Basic Research on Human–Computer Interaction of Mobile Targets in Software.” The article stated that a top Chinese AI research scientist employed by Google, Zhai Shumin, came to Beijing to work with researchers at the academy on developing a “human-computer interaction” project, the results of which were published in a paper.
According to the paper, the researchers developed a kind of target selection-assisting technology, which increased the speed of users’ selection of moving targets by about 57 percent and accuracy by about 79 percent. At the same time, the team also used the model to predict the error rate of a moving target selection.
Upon publication, two unidentified Chinese researchers familiar with the project confirmed to Hong Kong-based newspaper South China Morning Post (SCMP) that the technology allows fighter pilots or air defense missile operators to select fast-moving targets quickly and accurately using a touch screen, and that the Chinese military’s most advanced stealth fighter jet, the J-20, has the opportunity to adopt the technology.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences stated in the initial version of its online press release announcing the research results: “The research … plays an important role in the interface design and technology development of human-computer interaction widely applicable in the military, medical, education, digital entertainment, and other fields.”
But after SCMP reported about the paper and sought comment from Google, the word “military” was deleted from the online press release.
But many Chinese media, such as Sina.com, which reprinted the press release, retained the word in their reporting.
Google confirmed to SCMP its involvement in the research paper, but denied a link to the military.
“This paper addresses a very general research question in user experience design of how people interact with moving items on a touch screen. … This paper is simply not about military applications,” SCMP cited Google as saying. “Research like this is key to improving finger or stylus-based navigation in any app.”

Collaboration With Tsinghua

The Epoch Times previously reported that in June 2018, Google founded a new AI research body with Tsinghua University, one of China’s most prestigious schools.
Earlier that month, it was revealed that the university received significant funding from the Chinese military to work on a project aimed to advance the military’s AI capabilities.
China Education Daily, a state-owned newspaper run by the regime’s Ministry for Education, reported on June 8, 2018, that Tsinghua University received more than 100 million yuan ($14.53 million) from the Science and Technology Committee of China’s Central Military Commission—a Party organ that oversees the military—to work on an AI project for the military.
The project is tasked with researching and developing AI for human-machine combat teaming, the report said.
The report added that the work of the university’s military AI lab, called “Military Intelligent High-End Lab” and established in 2018, would be “guided by military needs” and would help build China into an advanced AI country.
The Chinese regime has set the development of AI as one of its top priorities, especially in “military-civilian integration,” or developing technology that can have both military and civilian applications. In July 2017, China’s State Council, a cabinet-like agency, published a detailed plan for China to become a “world leader” in AI by 2030. The plan aims to build a domestic AI industry worth $150 billion.

Li Fei-Fei

The Tsinghua lab collaboration was announced at a joint Google–Tsinghua symposium held in Beijing on June 28, 2018. Li Fei-Fei, then a vice president at Google Cloud, was in attendance. She was hired by Google in November 2016 to lead a new AI research unit.
Li was born in 1976 and immigrated to the United States with her parents at the age of 16, according to Chinese media reports that have noted her success as an AI expert.
She left Google in September 2018, when she announced she would resume teaching at Stanford, where she is director of the university’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Vision and Learning Lab.
Li is involved with a number of science and tech organizations in China that have close ties to authorities in Beijing.
Li is a member of the Future Forum science committee. According to the forum’s official website, the organization was founded in Beijing in 2015 by leaders in the scientific, educational, internet, and investment fields to facilitate cross-disciplinary research. It is directed by the China Science and Technology Association (CAST) and supported by the Beijing Chaoyang District government.
CAST describes itself as a non-governmental organization, but also clearly states on its website that it “serves as a bridge that links the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government to the country’s science and technology community.”
Future Forum also lists “strategic cooperation media” partners such as People’s Daily, Xinhua, and The Paper, all Chinese state-run media.
Other members of the forum are descendants of or associated with former top Communist Party officials, commonly referred to as “princelings,” including Liu Lefei, son of Liu Yunshan, former member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Party’s top decision-making body; Zhu Yunlai, son of former Premier Zhu Rongji; and Ma Xuezheng, a business executive at Boyu Capital, a private equity firm that was founded by Jiang Zhicheng, grandson of former Party leader Jiang Zemin.
In December 2017, at an “overseas talent exchange” conference held in Guangzhou City that was jointly organized by the European and American Alumni Association and the Chinese Ministry of Education, Li was selected as one of 50 top Chinese who studied abroad.
The European and American Alumni Association was founded by late imperial intellectuals in Beijing in October 1913. It was originally a group for Chinese intellectuals who studied abroad.
After 1949, the association was taken over by the communist regime and became an important tool for the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, an agency tasked with spreading the regime’s agenda at home and abroad.
An August 2016 report by state-run media Xinhua noted that Beijing authorities issued a notice on how to better build Party allegiance in the Alumni Association, explaining that it’s an organization “directed by the Party” as a “united front mass organization.”
Many former Party leaders, top researchers at state-run institutes, and university presidents are members of the association.

Li’s Mentors

In July 2017, Li delivered a speech before the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, where she thanked her mentors for their support.
Li said she got her first teaching job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with the help of Thomas S. Huang, or Huang Xutao. A naturalized U.S. citizen and research professor in electrical and computer engineering at the university, Huang in 2002 was appointed a foreign academician of the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2012, Huang was recruited under the Thousand Talents program by a research institute in Chongqing City in southwestern China.
Li also mentioned Li Kai, a professor at Princeton University, during her speech. She explained how she received his help while ​​organizing the international AI imaging competition ImageNet.
She said that Li Kai allowed her to use machines in his lab, and made the competition possible.
In November 2017, Li Kai was also elected a foreign academician, of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He is a lecture professor at Tsinghua University and also a Thousand Talents Program recruit.
They haven’t been accused of any wrongdoing. But U.S. authorities are on the alert about China’s recruitment programs. At a congressional hearing in December 2018, Bill Priestap, then-assistant director of the counterintelligence division at the FBI, said that China’s recruitment programs, such as the Thousand Talents, were “brain gain” programs that “encourage theft of intellectual property from U.S. institutions.”
Earlier this year, the United States’ National Institutes of Health published a report about the risks of state-sponsored programs such as Thousand Talents for presenting conflicts of interest, as scientists may be recruited by foreign countries to conduct research that could be funded with U.S. federal grants.
Li Fei-Fei didn’t immediately respond to questions about her relationship to Li Kai and Huang, nor her affiliation with the alumni association.
Follow Annie on Twitter: @annieeenyc

Google CEO Won’t Rule Out Launching Censorship, Surveillance App in China


December 11, 2018 Updated: December 12, 2018
Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, didn’t rule out launching a censorship and surveillance tool in China, but indicated the company will be transparent and “thoughtful” about any such plans.
Pichai had indicated that Google is still working on a search app for the Chinese market, a project that some company employees claim will include censorship and surveillance features. However, he said the launch of such a product isn’t imminent.
“We have undertaken an internal effort, but right now, there are no plans to launch a search service in China,” Pichai said, while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 11.
Google has faced enduring criticism after information leaked that it was secretly developing the censored app as part of a project dubbed “Dragonfly.” Lawmakers, human-rights advocates, and even some employees protested against the project.
The communist regime in China requires companies, even those that are foreign, to censor topics it deems to be “sensitive,” such as democracy, human rights, and the ongoing persecution in China of Falun Gong practitioners, underground Christians, human-rights activists, and others. Companies are also forced to share with the regime any of their data stored in China.
According to insider information leaked to the Intercept, the controversial Google app was designed to link users’ search history with their phone numbers, making it easier for the regime to target dissidents.
Pichai appeared to deny the company is in discussions with Chinese officials regarding Dragonfly, when asked by Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.). However, his response suggests the project is ongoing.
“This effort, currently, is an internal effort,” he said.
Pichai wouldn’t confirm who is leading the Dragonfly project.
“Our efforts around building search, you know, it’s undertaken by our search teams, but these are distributed efforts,” he said. “It’s a limited effort internally, currently.”
Finally, when asked whether he’d rule out “launching a tool for surveillance and censorship in China” while CEO of Google, Pichai responded:
“Congressman, I commit to engaging. One of the things which is important to us as a company, we have a stated mission of providing users with information and so we always … We think it’s in our duty to explore possibilities to give users access to information and, you know, I have that commitment but, you know, as I said earlier on this, we’ll be very thoughtful and we will engage widely as we make progress.”
Google ran a censored version of its search engine in China from 2006 to 2010, but exited after the company said a cyber attack originating from China had targeted Google email accounts of dozens of Chinese human-rights activists.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who was born in Soviet Russia, said in 2010, he saw “some earmarks of totalitarianism” in China, which was “personally quite troubling” to him, The Wall Street Journal reported. “People familiar with the discussions” said then-Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and others advocated for staying in China.
China is one of the worst abusers of human rights, according to watchdogs. In recent decades, the regime has killed hundreds of thousands of prisoners of conscience to sell their organs for transplants, based on extensive research conducted since allegations of the crime first surfaced in 2006.
Aside from its stated reason, Google also had an economic incentive to exit China. The company struggled to expand its claim on the Chinese market, where the regime favors domestic companies with top cadre connections.
In an Aug. 31 letter to several U.S. senators, Pichai outlined the company’s wish to expand its China business, while finding a “balance” between satisfying the demands of the communist regime and the company’s stated dedication to freedom of expression.

Political Bias Refuted

While Pichai has denied any political bias in Google products, several Republican lawmakers appeared unsatisfied with his answers.
“You’ve got almost 90,000 employees. Somebody out there is doing something that just isn’t working, if you’re looking for unbiased results,” said Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio).
On Dec. 10, Breitbart published what appears to be leaked internal emails that show Google employees discussing efforts to kick the conservative outlet off the Google advertising platform. Based on the emails, the employees organized to comb through Breitbart content around February 2017 to find anything that could be classified as “hate speech,” including in user comments posted on Breitbart’s website.
A Google spokeswoman told Breitbart that the company “regularly and routinely” reviews sites in its ad network “to ensure compliance with our policies.”
“These emails from early 2017 simply show the AdSense team explaining that such a periodic review was underway,” she said.
Yet, the emails suggest it was more than just “a periodic review,” since the effort appears to have been organized through an internal discussion group called “Resist”—a common label used by opponents of the agenda of President Donald Trump.
“I’m not aware of any such group,” Pichai said, when asked about the matter by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).
Breitbart would understandably be hard-pressed to survive without Google ads as about two-fifths of all U.S. online advertising revenues flow through the tech giant.
In August, President Donald Trump accused Google of shutting out “Republican/Conservative” and “Fair Media” from Google News searches, referring to a PJ Media report that among the top 100 search results for “Trump” on Google News, 96 percent of them were from left-leaning media.
The Epoch Times conducted a similar experiment on at least three dates, reaching similar results. In the last test on Nov. 28, some 97 percent of the 154 articles featured on the first 10 pages of search results for “Trump” came from traditionally left-leaning media.
Pichai disputed bias in the news search.
“We have looked at results on our Top News category. We find we have a wide variety of sources, including sources from the left and sources from the right,” he said.
Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Correction: A previous version of this report incorrectly stated two-fifths of Breitbart’s U.S. online advertising revenues flow through Google. Two-fifths of all U.S. online advertising revenues flow through Google. The Epoch Times regrets the error.

Robert Epstein: How Big Tech Bias Threatens Free and Fair Elections

September 12, 2019 Updated: September 12, 2019
Tech giants have “a whole class of techniques” exclusively at their disposal “for shifting people’s opinions, thinking, attitudes, beliefs, purchases, and votes without people knowing, and without leaving a paper trail,” Robert Epstein said in an interview with The Epoch Times for the “American Thought Leaders” program.
Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, has devoted the past 6 1/2 years to researching tech giant bias, especially with Google, which dominates the search engine market.
“Americans see Google search results about 500 million times a day. Google controls roughly 90 percent of search. The next largest search engine, Bing, controls about 2 percent of search,” Epstein said.
Epstein’s peer-reviewed research found that research participants were remarkably susceptible to bias: search engine bias could easily shift 20 percent or more of votes in an election. He also found that while results on Google leaned left substantially, results on Bing and Yahoo did not.
On Sept. 9, it was announced that 48 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have opened a bipartisan antitrust probe into Google. The new investigation follows existing investigations by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission into Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon.
One major form of bias that Epstein is research is the search engine manipulation effect, something he began exploring after finding research in 2012 on how search result rankings affected purchases and clicks. It said that users tended to trust the highest-ranked search results the most, so much so that 50 percent of clicks went to the top two items.
To study how search engine rankings could shift voting preferences, he conducted a series of experiments in which he showed groups of randomly assigned people biased search results. They used a Google-like search engine, Kadoodle, that featured real search results and web pages taken from Google. The only difference was the ranking of the results.
One group was shown results biased to one candidate, one saw results biased to the other candidate, and the control group was shown mixed results, with bias in both directions. Before and after looking at the search results, participants were asked about their thoughts on the candidates, and who they’d vote for if they had to decide at that moment.
“I thought I could produce a shift in voting preferences and opinions of maybe 2 or 3 percent,” Epstein said. “First experiment I ran, the shift I got was 48 percent.”
Epstein conducted more than a dozen different experiments, in which he found substantial shifts every time. In one large-scale national study across all 50 states with more than 2,000 participants, Epstein found that among different demographic groups, some were especially susceptible to manipulation, with shifts in preferences as high as 80 percent.
These shifts are reflective of actual behavior in the ballot box, Epstein said. Survey research has shown that “if you ask people who they’re going to vote for, it turns out that’s a very good predictor of who they actually vote for,” he said. “Generally speaking, we’re talking about 90, 95 percent accuracy in predictions.”
And according to Epstein, what they found in their experiments likely underestimated the real impact that Google has, since most of his experiments had participants conducting only one online search.
“In real life, people are conducting many searches over a period of weeks or months that are election-related. If they’re undecided, that means they’re being hit over and over and over again with biased search results, taking them to web pages that favor one candidate,” he said.
So far, Epstein has identified 12 major techniques of tech giants that can shift perceptions and opinions.
Another easy way to influence voters is by targeted messaging, such as sending out “go vote” reminders only to people with certain political biases. Based on Epstein’s calculations using Facebook’s published data in 2012, Hillary Clinton would have received 450,000 more votes on election day in 2016 if Facebook had sent a “go vote” reminder just to left-leaning users.
And notably, Google, even if it sent a reminder to everyone, both liberal and conservative—as it did by changing its homepage logo in 2018—that would give Democrats upwards of 800,000 more votes than it would have given Republicans, simply because Google has more left-leaning than right-leaning users, according to Epstein.

No Paper Trail

In early 2018, a leak to The Wall Street Journal included one email from a Google employee that mentioned using “ephemeral experiences” to counter Trump’s immigration policy.
“What’s an ephemeral experience? That means you type in something, let’s say a search term. And some results are generated on the fly just for you. They impact you, they disappear; they’re gone. And they’re not stored anywhere. And you can’t go back in time and find them,” Epstein said.
“This is a fantastic way to manipulate people,” because it leaves no paper trail to follow, and people rarely spot the bias, he said.
“And here’s something creepy. The very, very small number of people who can spot the bias, they shift even farther in the direction of the bias.
“Most of these types of influence have never existed before in human history. They’re made possible by the Internet. They’re made possible by these huge tech monopolies, and they’re entirely in the hands of these tech monopolies.
“In elections, we’re influenced by billboards, by radio shows, and TV shows, and advertisements, and so on. All of that is competitive. And in that sense, it’s probably a good thing. It’s a good thing for democracy that there is so much competition out there vying for your attention and trying to convince you of this or that. But if there’s bias in search results, that’s controlled by the platform, in this case, Google. That’s not competitive.”
Even if you found and could measure such bias, “you cannot counteract it,” he said.

2016 Election

In 2016, Epstein set up a secret monitoring system that showed that Google results were significantly skewed toward Clinton in the months leading up to the presidential election.
Epstein had 95 field agents in 24 states conduct election-related searches with neutral search terms on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The results from all these searches were then saved.
“We were able to preserve 13,207 election-related searches as well as the 98,044 webpages to which the search results linked,” Epstein said. In effect, they were able to permanently preserve snapshots of what are normally “ephemeral” experiences.
Epstein decided only to collect the data, but not to analyze it prior to the 2016 election, because if he found bias, he would face an impossible dilemma.
“What would I do? I mean, if I announced it, there would have been absolute chaos, especially, I think, if there was bias against Donald Trump. And if I didn’t announce it, then I would be complicit in the rigging of an election,” he said.
In the analysis, “we found substantial bias favoring Hillary Clinton in all 10 search positions on the first page of search results on Google, but not Bing or Yahoo,” he said, adding that the probability that the bias was solely due to chance was less than 1 in 1000.
Through a series of calculations, Epstein concluded that if this level of bias was present nationwide, it would’ve shifted somewhere between 2.6 million and 10.4 million votes to Clinton.
Epstein describes himself as a moderate who leans liberal. And he had been a longtime supporter of the Clintons. “But I felt very strongly that since our results were so clear that I had a responsibility to report the findings,” he said.
Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, but the popular vote “might have been very different,” Epstein said, if there had been no bias in Google’s search results.
“It was uncomfortable for me to have to acknowledge that, to have to announce that. But that’s what I concluded from the research.”
People trust in Google’s search rankings, he said, because they believe it’s generated by a computer algorithm, and thus must be impartial. What was especially disturbing was the subliminal manipulation; in most cases, “people can’t see the bias in search results.”
For the 2018 midterm elections, Epstein set up a larger monitoring system focusing on three Republican districts in Orange County, California, which all ended up flipping Democrat. He found that on Google (but not Bing or Yahoo), search results were strongly biased in favor of Democratic candidates.
Based on Epstein’s calculations, if that same level of bias was present nationwide in 2018, it would have shifted more than 78.2 million votes across the different elections at the state, regional, and local levels

Is Tech Giant Bias Intentional?

Google has insisted that their algorithms for search ranking evolve according to the “organic” activity of users interacting with the algorithm.
“In my mind, that’s complete nonsense. I’ve been a programmer since I was a teenager,” Epstein said. “The fact is, Google has total control over what happens.
“Let’s say there are a lot of users who lean left or who lean right, the algorithm can respond any way it’s programmed to respond. So I simply don’t buy the idea that this was just the algorithm’s fault or just the user’s fault.”
Although he believes Google has total control of its search ranking, that doesn’t necessarily mean Google engineers deliberately designed their algorithms to have left-leaning biases.
“I admit I used to be obsessed with wanting to know whether executives at a company like Google or just rogue employees were fiddling around with search results and search suggestions,” he said.
But now Epstein doesn’t think it matters. Regardless of whether people working at the tech giants have intentionally skewed the results, or if they’ve simply been negligent about political bias, the reality is that they have an enormous impact on thinking, behavior, and votes even in distant corners of the world, he said.
“Let’s say in many countries, they don’t care. For many elections, let’s say they don’t care, but the algorithm is still going to do its thing,” he said. “Their algorithm is meant to tell you what’s best, and what’s best goes at the top.
“So what I realized was it’s very possible that a lot of important events right now in human history are being determined not by plans and goals and strategies of human beings at a company like Google, but by computer programs that are just being left to do their own thing. To me, that’s far more frightening than thinking that a Google executive is out to rule the world.
“The fact is, we have let loose upon humanity powerful computer algorithms, which are impacting humanity.

Combating Bias in 2020

For the 2020 elections, Epstein plans to launch a much more ambitious monitoring system to track tech-giant bias.
“I think that the tech companies are going to go all out” in 2020, he said. “I think they were very cautious and overconfident in 2016. I think there’s a lot of crazy things they could have done to shift votes that they just didn’t do.”
As the 2020 election nears, Epstein plans to set up at least 1,000 field agents in all 50 states. “And we’re planning this time to use artificial intelligence—we’ve been working on this in recent months—to analyze the massive amount of data that we’re receiving every day in real time. This means that if we find evidence of bias or some sort of manipulation, we’ll announce it. We’ll announce it as soon as we’re sure that we found it … either to the media or to the Federal Election Commission or to other authorities,” he said.
“And that is going to create a kind of chaos. But it’s the kind of chaos we need to have.”
He hopes that this monitoring project will encourage tech giants to stop political bias on their platforms.
On the other hand, he said, “if they don’t back down, and we continue to detect and capture evidence of large-scale vote manipulation, I think frankly these companies will pay a terrible price. I think there could be both civil actions taken against them and possibly criminal actions taken against them.”
Either way, Epstein said, “democracy wins. And that’s my concern here. I’m not concerned about any particular party or candidate, although I do lean left. I’m concerned about democracy and free and fair elections.”
He believes that Google could easily remove political bias in its search results using techniques it’s already developed to deal with what they describe as “algorithmic unfairness.”
Such techniques were thrust into the spotlight by the massive trove of documents recently leaked by former senior Google software engineer Zachary Vorhies. A simple example is the search term “American inventors.” Whereas the original results might have shown a majority of white males, more black Americans can be boosted to the top of search results to make the results more “fair.”
If machine learning fairness techniques can correct for what Google engineers see as racial unfairness, the same could easily be done for political bias, in Epstein’s view.
“And I think we have to think beyond the United States, because a company like Google is impacting more than 2 billion people around the world. Within three years, that number will swell to over 4 billion people,” he said.
“They can literally impact thinking behavior, attitudes, beliefs, elections in almost every country in the world.
“In my mind, that means building larger, better monitoring systems to keep an eye on companies like Google. I think that’s necessary, not only to protect democracy around the world, but to protect human autonomy.”
“American Thought Leaders” is an Epoch Times show available on Facebook and YouTube.
Follow Jan on Twitter: @JanJekielek 

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