In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Andrew Burt, chief privacy officer and legal engineer at Immuta, a company building data management tools tuned for data science. Burt and cybersecurity pioneer Daniel Geer recently released a must-read white paper (“Flat Light”) that provides a great framework for how to think about information security in the age of big data and AI. They list important changes to the information landscape and offer suggestions on how to alleviate some of the new risks introduced by the rise of machine learning and AI.

We discussed their new white paper, cybersecurity (Burt was previously a special advisor at the FBI), and an exciting new Strata Data tutorial that Burt will be co-teaching in March.

How Machine Learning Impacts Information Security

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

How Machine Learning Impacts Information Security

O'Reilly Radar