application – Data Science, Data Analytics and Machine Learning Consulting in Koblenz Germany

Smartphones of Policemen could give criminals a competitive advantage

Rene — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:31:43 +0000

If I were a criminal I would create a smart phone app which would give me the possability to geographically and socially track policemen. Here some background on this thought.
Yesterday I was sitting in the German summit on “Facebook Goolgle & Co – Chances and Risks” (which I will blog about soon) But today during my train trip to the second day of the summit I was sitting in the train talking to a very friendly police officer. He agreed with what was said on the summit. The police is using social networks to find potential criminals. They also use cellphone tracking together with mobile providers to find people they are looking for. Nothing new and special so far. But now my interesting observation.
The police officer proudly told me that he is not using any social networking service because he enjoys his life in privacy. I understood that he believed this to be necessary in his job. By telling me this he was holding his iPhone in his hand. Again this shows one of the most crucial parts in this entire privacy discussion. Even highly educated people often lack an understanding of how much private information they implicitly give to third parties.
So I asked him if he used it during work times and he told me that he did since only mobile providers would know where he is and they could not give away data that easily. I was amazed! A policeman using an iPhone during work. That is such a security lack. If I were a terrorist organization I would create an iPhone and android app (or if possible an open mobile html5 app like Tim Berners Lee suggests <– you see the ethics overwhelm I am just not a criminal (-:). I would design this app in a way to support policemen. Help them communicate or have a cool map integration anything that was useful for the police. In this way I would create a database with real movement data of policemen. This data I could use for a different service similar to http://girlsaround.me/ displaying the current position and face of policemen (including if requested a list of people they recently communicated with including their phone numbers) on a map to anyone of my terrorist organization. The police just could never catch me since I would always know where they are (without asking any mobile provider!) I could even give them fake phone calls pretending I am one of the people they recently communicated with inputting them false information or just distracting them.

Of course this setting is only half realistic:

Every policeman would have to have a smartphone and use it during work time
Every policeman would have to install the app of the criminal
The criminal can distinguish between policemen and other people using the app (should be possible with data mining)
The criminal can decide weather the policeman is currently working or in leisure time

But it should show and demonstrate the dangers…

To conclude:

We have to disallow policemen to use private smart phones during work! Or if they do so they must not install any applications from a source they don’t trust. And here is the crucial point. Who to trust and who not? Trust usually is created through social ties. So if the app is there and some policemen like the service and recommend it to their coworkers trust is created. Who does really ask about the source of an app and about who is running/owning the data servers. A service that is well known on the web can easily run by 2 or 3 people and even if they are nice it is easy to manipulate or blackmail them in order to get access to these very sensitive data.
And on another more technical topic: We need a decentralized mobile space. There has to be a frequency on which people are able to set up their own transmitters and create decentralized mobile networks. It is a shame that those frequencies are all owned by companies creating centralized services.
By the way this would be a good solution since it would also enable the police to have their own decentralized mobile networks giving them privacy against third parties!

Disclaimer:

I never thought I would write an article in this paranoid way telling people what is possible and where the risks are. I almost feel like a member of ccc, anonymous or finally like a real pirate. But one year of PhD in a very data driven environment having social networks, information retrieval and the web as a focus really makes me understand more and more what is possible (in particular easy to achieve). Also the low awareness of society about these dangers (probably due to the complex technologies) overwhelms me and makes me feel like I have to act and at least inform people.
To bad that mostly people who are already aware of these topics read my blog. Maybe I have to go geek and create this app to demonstrate the functionality in order to really rise awareness. There are just too many interesting things to do during a PhD program so I think this time only writing about this has to be sufficient.

Paul Wagner and Till Speicher won State Competition "Jugend Forscht Hessen" and best Project award using neo4j

Rene — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:18:38 +0000

6 months of hard coding and supervising by me are over and end with a huge success! After analyzing 80 GB of Google ngrams data Paul and Till put them to a neo4j graph data base in order to make predictions for fast scentence completion. Today was the award ceremony and the two students from Darmstadt and Saarbrücken (respectivly) won the first place. Additionally the received the “beste schöpferische Arbeit” award. Which is the award for the best project in the entire competition (over all disciplines).
With their technology and the almost finnished android app typing will be revolutionized! While typing a scentence they are able to predict the next word with a recall of 67% creating a huge additional vallue for today’s smartphones.
So stay tuned of the upcomming news and the federal competition on May in Erfurt.
Have a look at their website where you can find the (still) German Documentation. As well as the source code and a demo (which I also include here (use tab completion (-: as in unix bash)
Right now it only works for German Language – since only German data was processed – so try sentences like

“Warum ist die Banane krumm” (where the rare word krumm is correctly predicted due to the relation of the famous question why is the banana curved?
“Das kann ich doch auch” (I am also able to do that)
“geht wirklich nur deutsche Sprache ?” (Is really only German language possible?)

Wishlist of features for a distributed graph data base technology

Rene — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:53:59 +0000

I am just dreaming this does not exist and needs to be refined in a later stage.

Fast traversals:
- Jumping from one vertex of the graph to another should be possible in O(1)
Online processing:
- “Standard queries” (<–whatever this means) should compute within miliseconds.
- As an example: Local recommendations e.g. similar users in a bipartite “User – Band” graph should be possible to process online in less than a second.
Query language:
- A programming model that supports pattern matching and traversals with one (or possibly several) starting nodes
- No SPARQL (too general for a reasonable graph application) support needed.
- Support for reading and writing new data (to disk)!
Distribution effort:
- The programmer should not have to care about the distribution techniques.
- He should just be able to use the technology.
Fault tolerance:
- The system has to run stable if working computers are added or removed.
- Probably by introducing redundancy in some way [1]
Persistence:
- Transactions and persistence are important for any data base service.

It is very clear that this wish list is very high level. But I think these are reasonable assumptions from which we can break down the problem and discuss pros and cons of all the techniques needed to built such a system.

[1] on the Redundancy discussion:

Depending on the techniques used, introducing redundancy has probably two positive effects on:

Fast traversals
Fault tolerance

On the other hand it has a deep impact on

Persistence (which is hard to achieve in a distributed setting anyway is even harder to achieve once redundancies are included.)

It is not clear if we really need redundancy. Maybe there are some other techniques that enable us to find our goals but I personally have the feeling that a good model for redundancy will “solve” the problem.

relation to the reading club

I already found the time to look over our courrent reading assignments. Especially the VLDB paper (Topology partitioning applied to SPARQL, HADOOP and TripleStores) and the Challenges in parallel graph processing strengthen my confidence that an approach described above seems very reasonable.

What is your oppinion?

Do you think I am missing some features or should keep a focus on one particular feature? What about methods to achieve those goals? I am happy to discuss your thoughts!

First Impressions of Google+ Usability Reminding of Apple

Rene — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 07:49:56 +0000

Yesterday I was finally able to receive an invitation to Google+ (thanks to Lisa!). After seeing it from the inside, I am convinced that this is the killer application that will stop Facebook. Google+ feels totally comfortable. It also allows you to make your communication much more effective.
When you login to Google+, Google already knows many of your friends (especially if you are a Gmail user). Like other social networking sites, the most central thing to Google+ is your social news stream. The difference to Facebook is that you can group your friends to different circles and now see the streams of those circles. You can also post updates only to certain circles. This is great because it makes communication much more private and efficient.

No Friendship Requests Necessary

There are no friendship requests in Google+. You just add people by email adress to circles. They will get a notification but if they don’t add you to one of their circles, they will not “follow” you. So the system is much like Twitter, where you decide who you are interested in and who not. This will probably prevent a lot of spam and take away all those nasty marketing opportunities to companies. I considered to be active on Google+ with my band but for what reason? Even if fans add a band to one of their circles it will probably not be the circle with their best friends that they will pay most attention to. But maybe we give it a try anyway!

No API Implemented Yet

What I am missing in Google+ right now is the opportunity to access this site via a strong API. I am sure that this will change once the site is successful.According to Rafe Needleman’s cnet Article the developer API will come once Google Plus is more mature.

The features and functions of Google+ will likely change substantially in short order. More functions will be definitely be added to the service, as well as increased integration with other Google apps. Giving developers access now might be premature, as some might built products that end up duplicating features that Google itself is just about to layer into the publicly available service.

Many Privacy Settings:

What other company but Google could know better about users’ privacy concerns. The network is centralized and not distributed. This of course is a huge privacy issue but one that most users don’t understand. For the average user who just wants to save his privacy in his social circle or extended social circle, Google+ is really great.

Great Usability Reminding of Apple:

The UI of Google Plus really is a strong thing. It just feels very good to use it. According to techcrunch especially the UIof circles goes back to no one less than Andy Hetzfeld one of the key designers of the first Macintosh software.

Hetzfeld, who has been working at Google since 2005, is indeed the one we can thank for the better-looking interface on Google+, as he’s the design lead on the project. You’ll likely recognize his name from his time spent at Apple (1979 – 1984) where he was a key designer for the original Macintosh software team.

Response to Critique on other sites:

I read some blogs and articles saying that Google plus will not be able to compete with Facebook, that it is to late to enter the market and so on… Well, I would say that Google already has many advantages

a huge user base
fans
a similar yet superior social networking product
together with other google products they have a complete product
android to push their social network to the mobile market
a lot of experience on how to do things viral

I would also guess that the similarity to Facebook is intended. Great usability comes from consistency in design. It doesn’t take much time to learn from using Facebook to Google+. Some new things like circles have excellent usability and due to the similarity to the Facebook UI, the rest feels just easy to use. So this is not stealing or a lack of creativity. It is just the amount of perfection that you expect from a company like Google!
So join me and start inviting your friends to Google Plus. Here is how it works.

First privacy impressions of my new android phone

Rene — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 17:29:44 +0000

My new cellphone finally arrived today. Being a fan of Google products, I was excited to test Android and get a feeling for everything. I wasn’t sure whether I would really need a smartphone or whether it was rather a time wasting but cool toy. After a bit of testing and playing around, I have to admit that I will probably use the option to retrieve feeds and read more news / blogs while being on the train or bus. I might also work on my Chinese more frequently with Anki for Android and there are some other features that will most certainly enrich my life.
One of them was that Google offered to synchronize my Gmail address book + calender with Android. The data is with Google anyway so I decided that it is not a big deal. And voilà, all my contacts, including phone numbers, are on my new phone. Amazing, considering my heart attack after my old cell broke down for which I did not have any backups.

All this comes at a very high price.

Since I started blogging and working on my PhD, I also started to use Twitter. So I wanted to download a Twitter app from the Android app market. It is incredible that the official Twitter app asks permission to access my phone’s address book. Remember, my phones address book is just a copy of my Gmail address book. I see how it helps Twitter to increase their service but to me, it became just too easy to share very sensitive data with companies that you might not (?) trust. I wonder whether the service Twitter offers to us will really improve that much if we share our private address book with the company. In my opinion, the small improvement we get does not justify their need to access my private address book. What would I have to promise someone to have a copy of his address book?

Can I escape?

I decided not to install the Twitter app. But does that really make sense? I guess most people don’t mind. After all, it is Twitter, a well known brand, that asks for the data. Additionally, Twitter is a communication service, so it makes sense to share this kind of data. However, even if I don’t share, Twitter can still guess the entries of my address book. Most of my friends who use Twitter with an android phone will probably accept the terms and condition of the Twitter app. Does not installing the app really help to protect my and my friends(!) privacy?
It is amazing that I am thinking right now about the consequences of blogging my experience of interviewing with Google when exactly this company creates structures that make us all sit in a glass house! I am very sure that this is intentionally like this. Please don’t missunderstand me. My first impression of Android is very good and I knew before that it encourages you in several ways to share data with anyone. Still, Android is probably one of the most useful tools which were brought to customers within the last ten years. I am only pointing out that things are changing very fast these days.

Which Android apps do I need?

So far I have:

Google Maps
Gmail
Google Search
Google Voice Recognition
Google Reader
Google News
Tweetdeck (without sharing my address book !)
Ankidroid
Google Docs
Google Calendar

What else would you suggest? And no, I don’t want a Facebook app. (-: