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Michal Kosinski

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Michal Kosinski
(Michał Kosiński)
Head and shoulders photo of Michal Kosinski
Born (1982-05-08) May 8, 1982 (age 42)
Warsaw, Poland
CitizenshipAmerican, Polish
Education
OccupationPsychologist
Years active2013-present
EmployerStanford University
Known for
  • Research on predicting psychological traits from digital footprints
  • First article warning against Cambridge Analytica
TitleAssociate professor, Stanford University
Websitemichalkosinski.com

Michal Kosinski is an associate professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University, a computational psychologist, and a psychometrician. He studies the psychological processes in Large Language Models (LLMs), as well as AI and big data to model and predict human behavior.[1]

He has co-authored the textbook Modern Psychometrics and published over 90 peer-reviewed papers in journals including Nature Computational Science, Scientific Reports, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Machine Learning, that have been cited over 21,000 times according to Google Scholar.[2]

He is among the top 1% of Highly Cited Researchers according to Clarivate.[3] His research inspired a cover of The Economist,[4] a 2014 theatre play "Privacy", multiple TED talks, a video game, and was discussed in thousands of books, press articles, podcasts, and documentaries. Kosinski was behind the first press article warning against Cambridge Analytica published in The Guardian.[5] His research exposed the privacy risks that they have exploited and measured the efficiency of their methods.

Kosinski appeared in the film Do You Trust This Computer alongside Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil.

Education

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Kosinski holds a doctorate in psychology from the University of Cambridge and master's degrees in psychometrics and in social psychology. He used to work as a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford's Computer Science Department, as the deputy director of the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre before that, and as a researcher at Microsoft Research (Machine Learning Group).[6]

Research

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In 2013, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell published a paper entitled "Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior".[7] Kosinski and his co-authors claimed that by studying someone's Facebook Likes, one could figure out personal traits and sensitive attributes they may not want to share, from sexual and political orientation to mental health. "Individual traits and attributes can be predicted to a high degree of accuracy based on records of users' Likes," they wrote.

Kosinski and Stillwell would improve their prediction methods and publish a paper that claimed that using Facebook Likes alone, a researcher could know someone better than their close friends or life partner. In 2012, Facebook had actually patented a method doing precisely what Kosinski and Stillwell did, "Determining user personality characteristics from social networking system communications and characteristics".[8]

Two weeks after Kosinski and Stillwell's paper was published, Facebook changed the default settings on Likes so that only friends could see them (until then, they were by default visible to anyone on the internet) unless people chose to share more widely. The exception was for Facebook itself, which saw everyone's Likes and could keep using them for targeting, ranking, selecting versions of products, and various other purposes.

In 2017, Kosinski co-published a paper showing that modern artificial intelligence can predict someone's sexual orientation based on facial images.[9][10][11] The research was conducted on over 130,000 pictures and used existing facial recognition systems and AI algorithm. Their AI could predict the sexual orientation of gay men 81% of the time, while a human would be right 61% of the time.[12]

Controversies

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His research on facial recognition systems raised controversy although Kosinski and his co-author claimed they conducted it as a demonstration of the power of machine vision, to warn policy makers and to raise the alarm around the inevitable erosion of privacy.

While at Cambridge University, Kosinski was directly engaged in negotiations with Cambridge Analytica to work for the company on micro-targeting in elections. The negotiations broke down - per The Guardian[13] over Kosinski's demands for $500,000 in fees from Cambridge Analytica.[14] Kosinski's Cambridge University Department colleague Aleksandr Kogan decided to work for Cambridge Analytica to replicate Kosinski's & Stillwell's research, which upset them and their university department.[15] It was after the negotiations breakdown and Kogan's professional engagement with CA, that Kosinski decided to write and warn against Cambridge Analytica. Kosinski claims he 'had nothing to do with Cambridge Analytica'.[16]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Dr. Michal Kosinski website". www.michalkosinski.com. Retrieved 2023-11-15.
  2. ^ "Michal Kosinski". scholar.google.co.uk. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  3. ^ "Web of Science". www.webofscience.com. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  4. ^ "What machines can tell from your face | Sep 9th 2017". The Economist. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  5. ^ "Ted Cruz campaign using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users". The Guardian. 2015-12-11. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  6. ^ Kosinski, Dr Michal (2013-07-06). "Dr Michal Kosinski". www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2022-12-09.
  7. ^ Kosinski, Michal; Stillwell, David; Graepel, Thore (2013-04-09). "Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 110 (15): 5802–5805. Bibcode:2013PNAS..110.5802K. doi:10.1073/pnas.1218772110. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 3625324. PMID 23479631.
  8. ^ US 8825764, Nowak, Michael & Eckles, Dean, "Determining user personality characteristics from social networking system communications and characteristics", published 2014-09-02, assigned to Facebook Inc. 
  9. ^ "APA PsycNet". psycnet.apa.org.
  10. ^ "Advances in AI are used to spot signs of sexuality" – via The Economist.
  11. ^ "'I was shocked it was so easy': meet the professor who says facial recognition can tell if you're gay". The Guardian. July 7, 2018.
  12. ^ "What machines can tell from your face" – via The Economist.
  13. ^ "'Artificial intelligence can tell your sexuality and politics – and we should worry'". The Guardian. Retrieved 2024-09-22.
  14. ^ "'I made Steve Bannon's psychological warfare tool': meet the data war whistleblower". The Guardian. Retrieved 2024-09-22.
  15. ^ "Cambridge Analytica academics' work upset university colleagues". The Guardian. Retrieved 2024-09-22.
  16. ^ "Michal Kosinski". Stanford Graduate School of Business. Retrieved 2024-09-22.
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