Basic Information n/a ------------------------------ Project Title The PlanLogic News Analysis System ------------------------------ Primary Contact First Name Andrew ------------------------------ Primary Contact Last Name Dougherty ------------------------------ Primary Contact Job Title n/a ------------------------------ How are you applying? Project ------------------------------ Consent to join AI Fund email newsletter? true ------------------------------ Proposal n/a ------------------------------ 1. Describe your project in one sentence. This project leverages 20 years of artificial intelligence research towards providing readers with at least 25 counter-propaganda analysis tools, including logical fallacy detectors, evidential reasoners, shared knowledge bases, text to logic pipelines, text paraphrasing and rewriting tools, news analysis repositories, fact extracting and checking, and a peer review capability. ------------------------------ 2. Which problem area is your proposal focused on addressing? Governing the platforms Stopping the bad actors ------------------------------ 3. How will your project work to ensure that the use of artificial intelligence in the news ecosystem is done ethically and in the public interest? I have studied propaganda, for instance by reading the US Army Psychological Operations field manual, and I feel that people (myself included) lack the ability individually and without assistance to counter disinformation. What is needed are a set of coherent tools that map out both the semantic and pragmatic values of the news text. For example, if a particular story comes out, it would necessarily ask this (pragmatic) and other critical questions - is this story designed to distract us from another more important issue? When reading text, the system would highlight overt and implied claims, and require corroboration, careful to note that the popularity of an opinion is not tied to the truth value of the opinion. In fact, a logical fallacy detector is employed. It could function either as a web-based application or a custom web browser or plug-in ecosystem. An argumentation system which using argumentation theory would be used for evidential reasoning, and critical questions can be shared by peer trust management mechanism, based on public key cryptography, access control logics and trust management, careful to subject these critical questions themselves to the same scrutiny as they could be vectors of disinformation. All news is stored in a WayBackMachine like digital repository, and most evidence is treated as default information that can be overturned. For instance, during the Laquan McDonald story, the initial media reports turned out to be later contradicted by video evidence. These tools would help people worldwide see through the agendas of bad actors. ------------------------------ 4. One major reason we are holding this open call for ideas is to support voices which are frequently left out of the design, development and deployment of artificial intelligence systems. How does your project help forward this goal? Well the FRDCSA project is a coherent set of AI tools under development for the last 20 years which are strongly motivated to assist individuals with their security. This system itself was designed outside of the auspices of the academic, governmental, and corporate sectors by a motivated individual, and is targeted towards empowering other individuals, under the belief that being truly informed about the state of the world is a boon to security. It is also peer to peer, and transforms every motivated reader into an intelligence analyst, thus providing an entropy sync and helping to inventory all angles, is designed to be resilient against disinformation campaigns, reduce unnecessary arguing, and helps to make rigorous the decision making process, much as any other intelligence analyst tools would. In fact, one of the tools that it is centrally based on, the CYC system, has been used to create the Cyc Analytic Environment and the Terrorism Knowledge Base, among other intelligence analysis tools. So, by fielding evidence and reasoning from all news readers, and tools to refine these, as well as being positioned outside of conventional institutions, we support unheard voices. ------------------------------ 7. Why are you uniquely well positioned to take this project on? This project has been free/libre / open source from the beginning, is available in large part already at https://github.com/aindilis , is designed by an independent without institutional conflicts of interest, makes use of the PrologMUD system which contains among other things a free/libre clone of the CYC system, has been under development for over 20 years, is a coherent system which could not be developed if any of the major components were missing, is designed to be shared among individuals, is uniquely poised to tackle the problem of disinformation - based on its capabilities for natural language understanding, story understanding, news topic detection and tracking, argumentation technology, and so on. Without these additional capabilities on top of the software stack no one could build this system. We also thoroughly leverage the open source ecosystem. More information can be found at https://frdcsa.org FRDCSA subystems tapped (non-exhaustive): argument-system, news-monitor, conspiracy theorist, politico, formal-forum, reasonbase, wow, bookmark-clustering, coauthor, definitional-question-answering, documentary-generator, fact extraction, formalize, workhorse, nlu, paraphraser, personal adaptive filter, rte, story-generation, story-teller, alleyoop, clear, critic, digilib, quac, tdt. PrologMUD subsystems tapped: e2c, psyclone, nlg, (many others). ------------------------------ Thank you for your application We appreciate the time and effort you put into your AI and the News: An Open Call application. Semi-finalists will be notified by November 2018. Please don't hesitate to reach out to challenge@aiethicsinitiative.org if you have any questions or concerns. Track your submissions & find new opportunities on your mobile device. Check out the Submittable App