When Spencer Pauly envisioned the Skiwise app (a crowdsourced report of ski trails across America), he thought showing all the relevant information on the home page would make sense for the users. However, users didn’t like the layout at all. They were fed information on trails throughout America when they only cared about trails 30 minutes away from home. After switching the homepage to an interactive map, he discovered that users loved hunting down the information they needed, even though the process took much longer compared to before. Read full article here
Societal Issues
AI Predicts Crime A Week In Advance With 90 Per Cent Accuracy
An artificial intelligence model built by Ishanu Chattopadhyay and his colleagues analysed crime data in Chicago from 2014 to 2016 and managed to predict future levels of crime down to the nearest 300 metres, a week before they actually happened. While extremely useful, this artificial intelligence has been shown to expose racial prejudice in law enforcement. Hopefully, as the study’s data and methodology have been made available for others to evaluate, these prejudices can be avoided in the next iteration. Read full article here
Merv
August 15, 2022
