Arturo Calvo - Blog

For the last 9 months I have co-organised and presented  Machine Learning Dublin , a meetup group started by  ADAPT Centre that rapidly grew from 0 to 1350 members. Now that I have stepped back, I want to share ten lessons that I learned through this wonderful experience. Form a great team.  The effort to organise a meetup is largely underestimated: it can easily take you 30 hours per event. Make sure you have a good team of at least 4 people and assign responsibilities: finding speakers, sponsors and venues, presenting, managing website and social media, registration desk, etc. Secure great venues.  The event space plays a fundamental role in the success or failure of a meetup. Secure nice-looking event spaces in the city centre that are easy to find by the attendees. Some topic-related companies, startup incubators and co-working spaces might offer their facilities for free. Be picky about speakers. Select 2 or 3 good speakers per event that engage...

I was exploring different load testing tools in order to make sure that the Ethics Canvas platform would resist peaks of up to 100 users  signing in every 10 seconds , when I came across Apache JMeter . JMeter is a robust Java-based open-source tool that allows users to test performance both on webservices, web dynamic languages, Java Objects, databases and queries, FTP servers, etc. Running JMeter (Linux): Download Apache JMeter Extract the content from the compressed file From the Terminal, navigate into the apache-jmeter/bin Type ./jmeter and it will open the Java app (make sure you have Java installed) Running load tests on Ethics Canvas: Right-click on Test Plan -> Add -> Threads -> Thread Group On Number of Threads we enter the desired number of users: 100 On Ramp-Up Period we enter the desired test duration: 10 Right-click on Thread Group -> Add -> Sampler -> HTTP Request On Server Name we type ethicscanvas.org On ...

In 2008, Alexander Osterwalder presented an innovative tool called " Business Model Canvas " (BMC) that aimed to help entrepreneurs to capture the fundamental business knowledge about their project, and bring about pivots in order to make the business model more consistent and successful.  Since then, the BMC has helped over 5 million entrepreneurs increase the value that they provide to their users, and find a sustainable model. In 2015, a group of researchers from ADAPT Centre  started using a similar approach in order to detect at early stage all the ethical implications of a project, and help entrepreneurs and researchers pivot their idea in order to minimise these issues. If you think about new technologies such as biotech, AI, IoT, VR, biometrics, blockchain, 3D printing,... they all bring great advancements for humanity, but they have some potential ethical issues that could have a catastrophic impact. After some months of hard work and experiments, we h...

If you are using Apache 2 as a web server on Linux, you might have seen that directory listing is enabled by default . Directory listing allows anyone to view all the files and subfolders contained in a specific folder, by entering the URL on the browser. The image below is an example of the directory listing that you could see when you visit the fictitious URL www.example.com/images . This might affect some privacy protection rules. In order to disable directory listing, you just need to type the following command from the terminal: sudo a2dismod autoindex

If you want to run your website from an Apache2 server  and make it available from yourdomain.com , you can follow these steps: 1) Go to /var/www/ and copy the root directory of yourproject (or clone the repository from Git). 2) Create a new file on /etc/apache2/sites-available/ named yourdomain.com .conf with this content:     <VirtualHost *:80>         DocumentRoot "/var/www/ yourproject "         ServerName www. yourdomain.com         ServerAlias yourdomain.com     </VirtualHost> 3) Activate the website with the command: sudo a2ensite yourdomain.com 4) Find your public IP with the command: sudo ifconfig (it should appear as innet_addr ) 5) From your domain management site, edit the A DNS record for ' @ ', pointing now to your public IP address 6) From your domain management site, edit the CNAME DNS record for ' www ', pointing now too ' @ ' 7) Wait a couple o...

If you have a MySQL database running on your server, and you want it to accept remote connections, you have to follow these steps: 1) Allow MySQL to listen to all interfaces (default is the loopback interface only): sudo vim /etc/mysql/my.cnf You replace this statement: bind-address            = 127.0.0.1 by this one: bind-address            = 0 .0.0.0 2) Create a new database use with all privileges granted (you shouldn't allow remote connections with the root user): mysql -u root -p -h 0.0.0.0 mysql> CREATE USER ' yourusername '@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY ' yourpassword '; mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO ' yourusername '@'localhost'  WITH GRANT OPTION; mysql> CREATE USER ' yourusername '@'%' IDENTIFIED BY ' yourpassword '; mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO ' yourusername '@'%'  WITH GRANT OPTION; 3) Test the connection from a different network (make sure ...

Big Data is not precisely a new trend, but the latest advances in computing capacity have set the stage for its rise. The hype and the reality of these new developments raise ethical issues that demand deliberation. I came across an interesting white paper titled Perspectives of Big Data, Ethics, and Society , by the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society , that raises concerns about the obsolescence of the Common Rule (rule of ethics regarding research involving human subjects). The Common Rule assumes that research methods using existing public datasets have no risk to individual human subjects. However, new data science techniques can create composite pictures of persons from different datasets that might be innocuous on their own but produce highly sensitive personal insights when combined . Since the informed consent occurs at the point of collection, before any data is used, it is not always possible to explain to the subject all the risks that the uses of his data...