Microsoft has published on Tuesday two out-of-band security updates to patch two vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows Codecs Library.
Tracked as CVE-2020-1425 & CVE-2020-1457, the two bugs only impact Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 distributions.
In security advisories published today, Microsoft said the two security flaws can be exploited with the help of a specially crafted image file.
If the malformed images are opened inside apps that utilize the built-in Windows Codecs Library to handle multimedia content, then attackers would be allowed to run malicious code on a Windows computer and potentially take over the device.
The two bugs -- described as two remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities -- received patches earlier today.
The patches have been deployed to customer systems via an update to the Windows Codecs Library, delivered through the Windows Store app -- not the Windows Update mechanism.
"Customers do not need to take any action to receive the update," Microsoft said.
Redmond said the bugs were privately reported and they haven't been used in the wild before today's patches.
The OS maker said it learned of the bugs after a report from Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, a program that intermediates communications between security researchers and larger companies. Microsoft credited Abdul-Aziz Hariri for first discovering these bugs, before passing them to the ZDI team.
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Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease characterized by a deterioration in memory and other cognitive domains and the cerebral accumulation of amyloid-β peptide. Advancing age is the most significant risk factor for the disease, with incidence doubling every 5 years after the age of 65.1 Approximately 46.8 million people worldwide currently have AD or a related dementia.2 However, this number is expected to increase exponentially in the coming years, largely as a result of the ageing population.2 The associated economic burden of AD is substantial; in 2015, the total estimated worldwide cost of dementia was US$818 billion, which is projected to rise to US$2.0 trillion by 2030 because of the increased prevalence of AD.2 However, despite decades of research, the etiology of AD remains unknown and there are currently no preventative or disease-modifying treatments.
A growing body of experimental and clinical data implicates the gut microbiome in the pathogenesis of several neurological conditions, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD),3 Parkinson’s disease (PD),4 and multiple sclerosis (MS).5,6 More recently, alterations in gut microbiome composition have been observed in patients with AD,7 suggesting a potential role for the microbiome in AD pathogenesis. This hypothesis has been supported by animal models;8,9 for example, germ-free amyloid-β precursor protein transgenic mice have markedly less cerebral amyloid-β pathology compared with control mice with intestinal bacteria.8 Certain bacteria within the gut microbiota are also capable of secreting large amounts of amyloids and lipopolysaccharides,10 a hallmark feature of AD.
Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) is the infusion of fecal material from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an individual with disease. This procedure represents the most powerful means of modulating the gut microbiome. The therapy has risen to prominence in the last decade following several outbreaks of severe Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) in North America and Europe, which were caused in part by the emergence of the hypervirulent NAP1/B1/027 strain. In these difficult-to-treat cases as well as in subsequent randomized, controlled trials, FMT has consistently achieved cure rates >90%.11 Serendipitous improvements following FMT have since been reported in a number of extra-intestinal conditions, including ASD,3 MS,12,13 and myoclonus dystonia.14 To our knowledge, ours is the first report of a patient who experienced rapid improvement in their AD symptoms following FMT for recurrent CDI.
Case report
An 82-year-old man presented for opinion and management of recurrent CDI following hospitalization for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus pneumonia. The patient had previously failed several courses of antibiotics for CDI, including vancomycin, vancomycin with metronidazole, fidaxomicin, and bezlotoxumab, with relapse confirmed via symptom recurrence and positive stool test.
At the time of presentation, the patient was under the care of his primary care physician and his neurologist for the treatment of AD, following a gradual 5-year decline in memory and cognition. The patient was taking memantine (28 mg once daily) and donepezil (23 mg once daily). The patient’s dementia symptoms included confusion, memory loss, depression, and flattened affect. On his most recent Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) administered by the neurologist, the patient scored 20, indicating mild cognitive impairment. This result reflected the gastroenterologist’s findings and was within the expected range for patients with AD. The patient’s wife reported that he no longer appeared to enjoy socializing, and required considerable assistance with basic tasks such as food preparation, bathing, and taking his medication. Neuropsychiatric testing revealed significant impairments in the areas of memory and semantic language abilities, nonverbal learning, and divided attention and response inhibition. His scores in these areas were within the first through fifth percentiles for function.
Following a detailed discussion regarding the potential risks and benefits associated with the procedure, the patient underwent a single 300 mL FMT infusion (per the Borody method)15 using stool from the patient’s 85-year-old wife as a donor. The patient’s wife was intellectually acute, with normal affect and stable mood. Following the procedure, the patient’s CDI symptoms resolved, and repeat stool testing 2 months later was negative.
At the follow-up visit 2 months post-FMT, the patient’s wife reported improvements in the patient’s mental acuity and affect. The MMSE was re-administered by the gastroenterologist (and subsequently by the neurologist) and the patient scored 26, indicating normal cognition. Four months post-FMT, the patient reported continued improvement in memory, with no progression in symptoms. The patient now remembered his daughter’s birthday, which he had not been able to recall previously, and was able to correct the physician’s recollections of his symptoms. Six months post-FMT, the patient reported a marked improvement in mood, was more interactive, and showed more expressive affect. Readministration of the MMSE revealed that the patient’s score had further increased to 29.
Because no study was conducted, no ethics approval or consent was required. Verbal consent was obtained from the patient for the publication of the report; however, this was merely a courtesy because all data have been de-identified.
Discussion
To our knowledge, this is the first report of a case of rapid reversal of AD symptoms in a patient following FMT for recurrent CDI. Improvements in AD symptoms occurred as early as 2 months post-FMT and continued to the 6-month follow-up visit (the date of the last follow-up), with no noted reversion of symptoms. The resolution of symptoms occurred in a stepwise manner: first, there was increased mental acuity and improved affect observed at 2 months post-FMT, and this was followed by marked improvements in memory and mood by 4 and 6 months post-FMT, which were accompanied by more expressive affect. These findings paralleled improvements in the patient’s MMSE scores, which increased to within the range of normal cognition by 2 months post-FMT. Eradication of CDI was also confirmed at the 2-month follow-up visit, via the resolution of symptoms and a negative stool test.
The central role of the gut microbiome in neurological dysfunction has been increasingly recognized, and alterations in gut microbiome composition have consistently been reported in ASD,3 PD,4 and MS.5,6 Rapid and dramatic improvements have also been observed in several of these conditions following manipulation of the gut microbiome, including with FMT, which further supports a causal association. In an open-label study in 18 children with ASD, 2 weeks of vancomycin treatment followed by daily FMT infusions for 7 to 8 weeks resulted in significant improvements in core ASD symptoms, which persisted at the 2-year follow-up.3 Furthermore, in a case series of three patients with MS and underlying gastrointestinal symptoms, 5 to 10 days of FMT infusions resulted in a profound reversal of major neurological symptoms, and led to longstanding disease remission.12 Similarly, a 61-year old female with secondary progressive MS achieved disease stability for over 10 years following FMT for recurrent CDI.13 In addition, in a patient with myoclonus dystonia, significant improvement in tremor and functional deficits were reported following the manipulation of gut microbiota with vancomycin, rifaximin, and metronidazole for chronic diarrhoea.14 In another study, a 71-year old male with longstanding constipation and PD experienced a rapid and dramatic reduction in PD symptoms, including an absence of persistent tremors, glabellar tap reflex, and cogwheel rigidity, when his constipation was treated with vancomycin, metronidazole, and colchicine.16
Gut bacteria may contribute to the pathogenesis of AD via a number of mechanisms. Microbe-mediated bidirectional communication pathways exist between the gut and the central nervous system, and many of the neurotransmitters that regulate mood and cognition in the brain, such as gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and dopamine, are also synthesized and catabolized by gut bacteria. GABA dysfunction has been shown to play a role in AD,17 and abnormally high GABA concentrations have recently been identified in reactive astrocytes of post-mortem AD patients.18 Molecular mimicry is a well-documented strategy that is commonly employed by pathogens to gain a competitive advantage over their host. It occurs when similarities between microbial proteins and host peptides result in the cross-activation of autoreactive T or B cells and a loss of self-tolerance.19 Rheumatic fever after Streptoccocus pyogenes infection is a classic example of this; antigen cross-reactivity between streptococcal M protein and cardiac myosin results in the targeting of myocardial tissue.19 However, a number of other well-documented molecular mimicry events exist, and a recent database study catalogued 261 validated host–microbial mimicry interactions.20 Although the focus to date has been on the role of molecular mimicry as a cause of autoimmune diseases, this mechanism may also be exploited in the development of AD. The progressive accumulation of β-amyloid protein plaques between neurons represents a hallmark of AD. However, the initiating factor responsible for the development and propagation of these prion-like proteins is unknown. Amyloids are secreted by a wide range of pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria, and play an important role in cell adhesion and biofilm formation.10 Similarities between the tertiary structure of microbe-derived amyloids and β-amyloid in AD may trigger antigen cross-reactivity, thus potentially initiating the formation of AD. Interestingly, both microbe-derived amyloids (such as curli) and AD-related β-amyloid are recognized by the same Toll-like receptor (TLR)2/TLR1 complex.21 Finally, dysbiosis itself may contribute to the development of AD. A dysbiosis-induced increase in gut permeability may potentially lead to persistent systemic inflammation, disruption of the blood–brain barrier, and ultimately neurodegeneration.
Neuroinflammation plays a central role in the pathogenesis of AD,22,23 and is characterized by elevated levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines,23 nuclear factor κβ signalling,24 and aggregation of activated microglia in damaged areas.25 The influence of the gut microbiome on neuroinflammation in AD remains poorly understood, as do the exact mechanisms of action of FMT in this disease. However, the potent immunomodulatory effects of FMT are well recognized. FMT has been demonstrated to ameliorate chronic intestinal colitis in both humans and animal models via the downregulation of pro-inflammatory cytokines, promotion of anti-inflammatory responses, and inhibition of nuclear factor κβ activity.26–28 In addition, similarly beneficial effects have since been observed in several other conditions with an inflammatory component.13,29,30 Thus, FMT may have a positive effect on cognitive function in AD via alterations in the levels of circulating cytokines. Alternatively, by restoring the previously impaired intestinal barrier function, FMT may prevent the translocation of neuroactive compounds and metabolites within the central nervous system that regulate mood and cognition and contribute to inflammation. However, further studies are urgently required to elucidate the exact mechanisms by which FMT may ameliorate symptoms in AD.
To our knowledge, this is the first documented case of a rapid reversal of AD symptoms in a patient following FMT for recurrent CDI. Although this is only a preliminary report, the remarkable resolution of AD symptoms following FMT for CDI is instructive and adds to the evidence that suggests a causal association between the gut microbiome and neurological dysfunction. Given the probable role of the gut microbiome in the pathogenesis of AD, modulation of the microbiome represents a promising avenue of treatment. A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial is currently underway to evaluate the efficacy of oral FMT in AD, the results of which are eagerly anticipated.
Acknowledgements
Third-party writing assistance was provided by Jordana Campbell, BSc, of Biocite Medical Writing Services.
Declaration of conflicting interest
Sabine Hazan has a pecuniary interest in Ventura Clinical Trials and ProgenaBiome.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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Easter Island’s colossal statues loom large—both literally and figuratively—in the popular imagination. The massive heads and torsos dot the landscape like stone sentinels, standing guard over the isle’s treeless, grassy expanse.
The statues have inspired widespread speculation, awe, and wonder for centuries. But the island, called Rapa Nui by its Indigenous people, has also captured the world’s imagination for an entirely different reason.
Rapa Nui is often seen as a cautionary example of societal collapse. In this story, made popular by geographer Jared Diamond’s bestselling book Collapse, the Indigenous people of the island, the Rapanui, so destroyed their environment that, by around 1600, their society fell into a downward spiral of warfare, cannibalism, and population decline. These catastrophes, the collapse narrative explains, resulted in the destruction of the social and political structures that were in place during precolonial times, though the people of Rapa Nui survive and persist on the island to the present day.
In recent years, researchers working on the island have questioned this long-accepted story. For example, anthropologist Terry Hunt and archaeologist Carl Lipo, who have studied the island’s archaeology and cultural history for many years, have suggested an alternative hypothesis that the Rapanui did not succumb to a downward spiral of self-destruction but instead practiced resiliency, cooperation, and perhaps even a degree of environmental stewardship.
Now new evidence from Hunt, Lipo, and their colleagues, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, lends credence to their ideas. This evidence suggests that the people of the island continued to thrive, as indicated by the continued construction of the stone platforms, called ahu, on which the iconic statues stand, even after the 1600s.
“Our research shows that statue platform construction and use did not end prior to European arrival in 1722,” says Robert DiNapoli, a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Oregon, who led the study.
This finding, drawing on new statistical methods and excavation work, suggests that the Rapanui were not destitute when the first Europeans arrived. It’s therefore possible that it was the newcomers from Europe who contributed to the island’s societal collapse in the years to come.
Easter Island—known as Rapa Nui by its Indigenous people—features many human-like statues distributed across the isle as shown above. Eric Gaba and Bamse/Wikimedia Commons
The new work is controversial, and not everyone is convinced. But if DiNapoli and his team are correct, the popular story of Rapa Nui’s decline, as described by Diamond, needs to be rethought and its heroes and villains reconfigured. Instead of the Rapanui hastening their own destruction prior to European contact, it is possible that the people of the island may have been the victims of European exploration and exploitation.
Rapa Nui is one of the most remote islands in the world. A tiny speck in the eastern Pacific, it sits more than 2,000 miles west of South America and is about 1,200 miles from its nearest island neighbor, Pitcairn Island.
Archaeologists have documented at least 360 ahu, most of which cluster along the island’s shoreline. They vary in configuration, though most are typically rectangular in shape and are made of basaltic stones neatly fitted together. In addition to their use as statue platforms, the ahu functioned as shrines and places of burial.
DiNapoli and his colleagues used existing radiocarbon dates from previous excavations at 11 different ahu sites. They employed what is called Bayesian analyses, which allow scientists to model the probability of specific events, to build a more precise timeline of construction activities at each site.
The new research indicates that ahu construction began soon after the first Polynesian settlers arrived on the island and continued even after European contact in 1722. This timeline argues against the hypothesized societal collapse occurring around 1600.
The downturn of the islanders, DiNapoli and his colleagues claim, began only after Europeans ushered in a period characterized by disease, murder, slave raiding, and other conflicts.
Not all Rapa Nui specialists agree with DiNapoli and his colleagues’ methods or conclusions. Jo Anne Van Tilburg, an archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, is skeptical that all the radiocarbon dates used by the team reflect specifically ahu-related building events.
Van Tilburg also argues that Diamond’s environmental destruction argument remains a viable hypothesis. “The collapse narrative as these authors describe it is a straw man they have set up that does not accurately reflect the actual hypothesis,” she says.
If Europeans were to blame for the decline of Rapanui society, it would be similar to what happened to Indigenous peoples elsewhere.
In short, Van Tilburg believes the new work is missing some of the nuances of Diamond’s original theory. Diamond never described the collapse as a one-time event, Van Tilburg explains, but rather as a series of events that ultimately resulted in destructive societal changes that were hastened by European contact.
Diamond’s hypothesis is based on a mix of oral tradition, evidence of island deforestation, and the work of previous researchers, such as the Norwegian explorer and ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl. (Heyerdahl gained fame in 1947 for sailing a balsa raft, the Kon-Tiki, to test the theory that South Americans may have colonized Polynesia.)
Early 20th-century oral historians working on Rapa Nui theorized that an internecine clash had occurred between islanders. Heyerdahl later popularized his belief that this warfare, combined with deforestation, resulted in the collapse of the island’s social hierarchies and many traditions, such as the building of stone platforms and statues.
The fate of Rapa Nui has been heatedly debated over the last several years with the development of new theories and innovative techniques, such as Bayesian methods. For many archaeologists, the pre-contact collapse theory is ripe for questioning.
Speaking of the research conducted by DiNapoli’s team, for example, Seth Quintus, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, who was not involved in the study, says, “Their work adds to the growing body of evidence that has accumulated over the last 10 years that the previous narratives of collapse on Easter Island are not correct—and need to be rethought.”
One mystery the island presents is a lack of trees—an absence that contributes to the belief that ecological devastation led to societal collapse. Theb2b/Wikimedia Commons
If Europeans were to blame for the decline of Rapanui society, that explanation is similar to what happened to other Indigenous peoples elsewhere throughout the world, DiNapoli notes. From that perspective, he says, the popular story of environmental destruction has obscured the islanders’ successes.
“The degree to which their cultural heritage was passed on—and is still present today through language, arts, and cultural practices—is quite notable and impressive,” DiNapoli says. “This degree of resilience has been overlooked due to the collapse narrative and deserves recognition.”
Apple is encouraging developers to prioritize newer web technologies inside their iOS and macOS applications.
In a short technical presentation at the WWDC 2020 conference last week, Apple shared some internal statistics in the hope of convincing app developers to adopt new web technologies and protocols, such as IPv6, HTTP/2, TLS 1.3, and Multipatch TCP.
IPv6
One of the newer technologies that Apple would like developers to implement is IPv6, the next iteration of the IP protocol, set to replace the older IPv4 version.
"Apple platforms have had native IPv6 support for a number of years, including support for IPv6-only networks," said Jiten Mehta, Internet Technologies Engineer at Apple.
"There has been a growing trend of IPv6 usage on the internet. If we look at the last month of connections made worldwide by Apple devices, we see that IPv6 now accounts for 26% of all connections made," Mehta added. "20% of the time, the connection could have used IPv6, but the server didn't have it enabled.
"And when IPv6 is in use, the median connection setup is 1.4 times faster than IPv4. This is primarily due to reduced NAT usage and improved routing."
HTTP/2
Another technology that Apple is trying to get app developers to adopt is HTTP/2, the current and latest version of HTTP, the protocol used to load websites on the internet.
Mehta said that in the last month, around 79% of all web pages loaded in Safari were loaded via an HTTP/2 connection, which were usually 1.8 times faster to load than the older HTTP/1.1 connections.
Apple says that writing apps that work on top of IPv6 and HTTP/2 is now easier than ever. All that app developers have to do is to use the latest versions of the company's networking APIs -- such as URLSession and Network.framework -- which will guarantee the apps will work on IPv6 and HTTP/2 by default, with fallbacks to older protocols, when needed.
Furthermore, Apple is also looking ahead. The company will also add experimental support in macOS 11 and iOS 14 -- set to be released this fall -- for HTTP/3, the next major version of the HTTP protocol, currently undergoing standardization at the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).
TLS 1.3 support is, however, disabled by default, and is only included on Apple devices for experimental purposes -- with users/app devs being required to flip a switch for it to work.
TLS 1.3
In addition, Mehta also reported good news on the security front, where the newer TLS 1.3 security protocol has been widely deployed after the company added support for it in iOS 13.4 (November 2019).
Mehta said that over the past month, 49% of all HTTPS network connections on modern Apple devices were running TLS 1.3, where HTTPS connections were being established 1.3 times faster than connections handled via the older TLS 1.2.
Multipath TCP
And the final network technology that Apple hopes app developers chose to support is Multipath TCP, an extension of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that allows connections to use multiple network paths to load the same data.
Mehta said Apple uses this technology to allow apps to continue working without glitches even as users switch their internet network.
At Apple, Mehta said the company has had "great success" using this new technology for Apple Music, where the company reported a 13% reduction in stream stalls and a 22% reduction in stream stall duration, as the Apple Music service was able to function without re-starting downloads when users changed networks.
Last week, at the same WWDC 2020 conference, Apple also announced full support for encrypted DNS on iOS and macOS, with plans to support DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS starting macOS 11 and iOS 14.
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Turing Award Winner and Facebook Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun has announced his exit from popular social networking platform Twitter after getting involved in a long and often acrimonious dispute regarding racial biases in AI.
Unlike most other artificial intelligence researchers, LeCun has often aired his political views on social media platforms, and has previously engaged in public feuds with colleagues such as Gary Marcus. This time however LeCun’s penchant for debate saw him run afoul of what he termed “the linguistic codes of modern social justice.”
It all started on June 20 with a tweet regarding the new Duke University PULSE AI photo recreation model that had depixelated a low-resolution input image of Barack Obama into a photo of a white male. Penn State University Associate Professor Brad Wyble tweeted “This image speaks volumes about the dangers of bias in AI.” LeCun responded, “ML systems are biased when data is biased. This face upsampling system makes everyone look white because the network was pretrained on FlickFaceHQ, which mainly contains white people pics. Train the *exact* same system on a dataset from Senegal, and everyone will look African.“
Research scientist, co-founder of the “Black in AI” group, and technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google Timnit Gebru tweeted in response, “I’m sick of this framing. Tired of it. Many people have tried to explain, many scholars. Listen to us. You can’t just reduce harms caused by ML to dataset bias.” She added, “Even amidst of world wide protests people don’t hear our voices and try to learn from us, they assume they’re experts in everything. Let us lead her and you follow. Just listen. And learn from scholars like @ruha9 [Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University]. We even brought her to your house, your conference.” (This was a reference to ICLR 2020, where LeCun served as president and Benjamin presented the talk 2020 Vision: Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology & Society.)
Known for her work on racial and gender bias in facial recognition systems and other AI algorithms, Gebru has been advocating for fairness and ethics in AI for years. The Gender Shades project that she leads with MIT Media Lab Computer Scientist Joy Buolamwini revealed that commercial facial recognition software was more likely to misclassified and was less accurate with darker-skinned females compared to lighter-skinned men.
Gebru’s CVPR 2020 talk Computer vision in practice: who is benefiting and who is being harmed? again addressed the role of bias in AI, “I think that now a lot of people have understood that we need to have more diverse datasets, but unfortunately I felt like that’s kind of where the understanding has stopped. It’s like ‘let’s diversify our datasets. And that’s kind of ethics and fairness, right?’ But you can’t ignore social and structural problems.“
LeCun replied that his comment was targeting the particular case of the Duke model and dataset. “The consequences of bias are considerably more dire in a deployed product than in an academic paper,” continued LeCun in a lengthy thread of tweets suggesting it’s not ML researchers that need to be more careful selecting data but engineers.
“Again. UNBELIEVABLE. What does it take? If tutorials at your own conference, books and books and talks and talks from experts coming to YOU, to your own house, feeding it to you, Emily and I even cover issues with how the research community approaches data. Nope. Doesn’t matter.” Gebru replied. “This is not even people outside the community, which we say people like him should follow, read, learn from. This is us trying to educate people in our own community. Its a depressing time to be sure. Depressing.”
Others from the AI and activist communities joined the fray, with far too many simply attacking either LeCun or Gebru. On June 25 LeCun offered an olive branch: “I very much admire your work on AI ethics and fairness. I care deeply about about working to make sure biases don’t get amplified by AI and I’m sorry that the way I communicated here became the story.” Gebru replied, “We’re often told things like ‘I’m sorry that’s how it made you feel.’ That doesn’t really own up to the actual thing. I hope you understand *why* *how* you communicated became the story. It became the story because its a pattern of marginalization.”
The week-long back-and-forth between LeCun and Gebru attracted thousands of likes, comments, and retweets, with a number of high-profile AI researchers expressing dissatisfaction with LeCun’s explanations. Google Research scientist David Ha commented, “I respectfully disagree w/Yann here. As long as progress is benchmarked on biased data, such biases will also be reflected in the inductive biases of ML systems Advancing ML with biased benchmarks and asking engineers to simply ‘retrain models with unbiased data’ is not helpful.” Canada CIFAR AI chair Nicolas Le Roux tweeted, “Yann, I know you mean well. I saw many people act like you just did in good faith, and get defensive when people pointed that this was not the proper response, until one day they stopped to listen and reflect and ultimately change their behaviour.”
Amid the heated debate, the Duke PULSE research team updated their paper, adding: “Overall, it seems that sampling from StyleGAN yields white faces much more frequently than faces of people of color.” The researchers referenced an April 2020 paper on demographic bias in artificially generated facial pictures by Salminen et al.: “Results indicate a racial bias among the generated pictures, with close to three-[fourths] (72.6%) of the pictures representing White people. Asian (13.8%) and Black (10.1%) are considerably less frequent, while Indians represent only a minor fraction of the pictures (3.4%).”
The team also added a “model card” to their study. Gebru was part of a team that introduced the model card framework in 2019 to “provide benchmarked evaluation in a variety of conditions, such as across different cultural, demographic, or phenotypic groups (e.g., race, geographic location, sex, Fitzpatrick skin type) and intersectional groups (e.g., age and race, or sex and Fitzpatrick skin type) that are relevant to the intended application domains.”
Slides from Gebru’s CVPR 2020 tutorial Computer vision in practice: who is benefiting and who is being harmed?
The artificial intelligence community has made a number of moves in recent years to encourage diversity and inclusivity, such as the “AI for All” initiative launched by Gebru’s Stanford supervisor Fei-Fei Li, and scheduling the major AI conference ICLR 2020 in Ethiopia (the conference went virtual due COVID-19). This year, NeurIPS, the world’s most prestigious AI conference, required authors to include a statement of the potential broader impact of their submitted papers, “including its ethical aspects and future societal consequences. Authors should take care to discuss both positive and negative outcomes.”
Journalist: Fangyu Cai | Editor: Michael Sarazen
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Verily Life Sciences, the Alphabet-owned healthcare company, is suspending employee spot bonuses, as reported by Business Insider. The money will be funneled instead to fund diversity and inclusion initiatives. The move frustrated workers, many of whom have been working grueling hours on the company’s COVID-19 testing projects.
In a letter to management obtained by Business Insider, employees said the decision implied these initiatives are not a priority. They wrote: “The use of spot bonuses to subsidize social justice programs such as Healthy@Work for HBCUs [Historically Black colleges and universities], clinical trial recruitment of underrepresented populations, and an internal Product Inclusion group implies that these efforts are charity causes not worthy of their own investment.”
Employees asked that spot bonuses be reinstated and called for the creation of a board of executives and employees to measure progress toward diversity goals. Alphabet, Verily’s parent company, made a profit of $46.07 billion in the fourth quarter of 2019. Because of Alphabet’s strong financial position, diversity and inclusion shouldn’t be hard to invest in, the employees wrote.
The pressure from this announcement — along with the very real need for COVID-19 testing and screening — resulted in long work hours for Verily employees. “If you’re not working on the weekend, you’re seen as slacking off,” an employee told Business Insider. That made the news about bonuses sting beyond the company’s implied message that diversity didn’t deserve its own investment.
“Verily taking away employee spot bonuses after what many consider to be the most grueling and difficult time of our careers show a lack of recognition,” employees wrote in the letter.
Verily CEO Andrew Conrad is set to meet with staffers from Project Baseline to discuss the letter on Wednesday. Verily did not immediately return a request for comment. In a statement to Business Insider, Verily spokesperson Carolyn Wang defended the company’s decision.
“At this time, we think it’s important we put our money where our mouth is, and direct some of our discretionary funds — such as those typically used to fund a spot bonus program (which is separate and distinct of our annual bonus program) — to bolster our efforts to ensure our products and services are accessible to the people who need them,” she said. “This requires making a few small sacrifices, but why wouldn’t we do that?”
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