The Data That Powers A.I. Is Disappearing Fast; The New York Times, July 19, 2024

Kevin Roose , The New York Times; The Data That Powers A.I. Is Disappearing Fast

"For years, the people building powerful artificial intelligence systems have used enormous troves of text, images and videos pulled from the internet to train their models.

Now, that data is drying up.

Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training A.I. models have restricted the use of their data, according to a study published this week by the Data Provenance Initiative, an M.I.T.-led research group.

The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used A.I. training data sets, discovered an “emerging crisis in consent,” as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested.

The researchers estimate that in the three data sets — called C4, RefinedWeb and Dolma — 5 percent of all data, and 25 percent of data from the highest-quality sources, has been restricted. Those restrictions are set up through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a decades-old method for website owners to prevent automated bots from crawling their pages using a file called robots.txt."

The government dropped its case against Gang Chen. Scientists still see damage done; WBUR, February 16, 2022

Max Larkin, WBUR ; The government dropped its case against Gang Chen. Scientists still see damage done

"When federal prosecutors dropped all charges against MIT professor Gang Chen in late January, many researchers rejoiced in Greater Boston and beyond.

Chen had spent the previous year fighting charges that he had lied and omitted information on U.S. federal grant applications. His vindication was a setback for the "China Initiative," a controversial Trump-era legal campaign aimed at cracking down on the theft of American research and intellectual property by the Chinese government.

Researchers working in the United States say the China Initiative has harmed both their fellow scientists and science itself — as a global cooperative endeavor. But as U.S.-China tensions remain high, the initiative remains in place."

Open access task force releases draft recommendations; MIT News, March 18, 2019

MIT Libraries, MIT News;

Open access task force releases draft recommendations

The MIT community is invited to comment on ways to increase sharing of research, data, software, and more.

"The Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research has released a set of draft recommendations that aim to support and increase the open sharing of MIT publications, data, software, and educational materials. They are available for public comment until April 17.

The recommendations include ratifying an Institute-wide set of principles for open science; broadening the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy to cover all MIT authors; adopting an open access (OA) policy for monographs; and asking department heads to develop discipline-specific plans to encourage and support open sharing from their faculty, students, and staff.

“Our recommendations are grounded in the view that openness leads to better research,” says Chris Bourg, director of the MIT Libraries and co-chair of the OA task force along with Hal Abelson, Class of 1922 Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “They are intended to reduce barriers and provide incentives to open sharing, while remaining flexible where needed to accommodate differences across disciplines.”"

Open Information Activist Indicted for Allegedly Stealing Millions of JSTOR Articles; Library Journal, 7/19/11

Aaron Swartz, Library Journal; Open Information Activist Indicted for Allegedly Stealing Millions of JSTOR Articles:

"Aaron Swartz, former tech lead for the Internet Archive's Open Library project and founder of the progressive activist group Demand Progress, was indicted today in federal court for allegedly stealing approximately 4.8 million articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the JSTOR journal archive."

5 Major Research Universities Endorse Open-Access Journals; Wired Campus, 5/14/09

Ben Terris via Wired Campus; 5 Major Research Universities Endorse Open-Access Journals:

"In an effort to support alternatives to traditional scholarly publishing, five major research universities announced their joint commitment to open-access journals on Monday.

The institutions—Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley—signed a compact agreeing to the “timely establishment” of mechanisms for providing financial support for free open-access journals."

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Five-Major-Research/8042/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks Are History; New York Times, 8/8/09

Tamar Lewin via New York Times; As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks Are History:

"Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.

“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.

“They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote,” Dr. Abshire continued. “Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks...

But the digital future is not quite on the horizon in most classrooms. For one thing, there is still a large digital divide. Not every student has access to a computer, a Kindle electronic reader device or a smartphone, and few districts are wealthy enough to provide them. So digital textbooks could widen the gap between rich and poor.

“A large portion of our kids don’t have computers at home, and it would be way too costly to print out the digital textbooks,” said Tim Ward, assistant superintendent for instruction in California’s 24,000-student Chaffey Joint Union High School District, where almost half the students are from low-income families.

Many educators expect that digital textbooks and online courses will start small, perhaps for those who want to study a subject they cannot fit into their school schedule or for those who need a few more credits to graduate...

The move to open-source materials is well under way in higher education — and may be accelerated by President Obama’s proposal to invest in creating free online courses as part of his push to improve community colleges.

Around the world, hundreds of universities, including M.I.T. and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia, now use and share open-source courses. Connexions, a Rice University nonprofit organization devoted to open-source learning, submitted an algebra text to California. ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/education/09textbook.html?_r=1&hp

MIT's Management School Shares Teaching Materials Online, The Wired Campus, 1/26/09

Via The Wired Campus, The Chronicle of Higher Education: MIT's Management School Shares Teaching Materials Online:

"What distinguishes the new site, according to JoAnne Yates, deputy dean for programs, is that whereas OpenCourseWare allows visitors to browse a linear series of resources and notes for a specific course, the management-school’s site allows them to search for specific “teaching artifacts”—e.g., case studies or simulation models—that might be applied to any number of courses. Those artifacts will be searchable by concept or business problem, like sustainability."

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3574&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en