Privacy and Accountability in Black-Box Medicine

Black-box medicine—the use of big data and sophisticated machine learning techniques for health-care applications—could be the future of personalized medicine. Black-box medicine promises to make it easier to diagnose rare diseases and conditions, identify the most promising treatments, and allocate scarce resources among different patients. But to succeed, it must overcome two separate, but related, problems: patient privacy and algorithmic accountability. Privacy is a problem because researchers need access to huge amounts of patient health information to generate useful medical predictions. And accountability is a problem because black-box algorithms must be verified by outsiders to ensure they are accurate and unbiased, but this means giving outsiders access to this health information. This article examines the tension between the twin goals of privacy and accountability and develops a framework for balancing that tension. It proposes three pillars for an effective system of privacy-preserving accountability: substantive limitations on the collection, use, and disclosure of patient information; independent gatekeepers regulating information sharing between those developing and verifying black-box algorithms; and information-security requirements to prevent unintentional disclosures of patient information. The article examines and draws on a similar debate in the field of clinical trials, where disclosing information from past trials can lead to new treatments but also threatens patient privacy

An Iterative and Toolchain-Based Approach to Automate Scanning and Mapping Computer Networks

As today's organizational computer networks are ever evolving and becoming more and more complex, finding potential vulnerabilities and conducting security audits has become a crucial element in securing these networks. The first step in auditing a network is reconnaissance by mapping it to get a comprehensive overview over its structure. The growing complexity, however, makes this task increasingly effortful, even more as mapping (instead of plain scanning), presently, still involves a lot of manual work. Therefore, the concept proposed in this paper automates the scanning and mapping of unknown and non-cooperative computer networks in order to find security weaknesses or verify access controls. It further helps to conduct audits by allowing comparing documented with actual networks and finding unauthorized network devices, as well as evaluating access control methods by conducting delta scans. It uses a novel approach of augmenting data from iteratively chained existing scanning tools with context, using genuine analytics modules to allow assessing a network's topology instead of just generating a list of scanned devices. It further contains a visualization model that provides a clear, lucid topology map and a special graph for comparative analysis. The goal is to provide maximum insight with a minimum of a priori knowledge.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

The role of a building’s thermal properties on pupils’ thermal comfort in junior school classrooms as determined in field studies

Recent thermal comfort research in a light-weight junior school building showed that children were more sensitive to higher temperatures than adults and subsequently that current thermal comfort standards were not appropriate for the assessment of their thermal environment. This paper presents a comparison of these survey results to those from a survey conducted in a medium-weight school building, in order to evaluate the role of the construction type on the results. Both surveys followed the same methodology, including thermal comfort questionnaires and measurements of indoor environmental variables. A total of 2990 responses were gathered. The buildings had an average difference in air temperature of 2.7oC during occupied hours in the period of investigation (June and July 2012), with the medium-weight building being cooler than the light-weight building. However, the different construction type and the cooler overall thermal environment in the medium-weight school building had little impact on the pupils’ overall thermal sensitivity. The comparison showed a general agreement on the pupils’ warm thermal sensation trends, interpersonal variation and undeveloped adaptive behaviour. The results further support the finding that current thermal comfort criteria lead to an underestimation of pupils’ thermal sensation during summer