Michal Kosinski

Last updated
Michal Kosinski
(Michał Kosiński)
2023 michal kosinski (c)pavelbecker.jpg
Born (1982-05-08) May 8, 1982 (age 41)
Warsaw, Poland
Citizenship American, Polish
Education
Occupation Psychologist
Years active2013-present
Employer Stanford University
Known for
  • Research on predicting psychological traits from digital footprints
  • First article warning against Cambridge Analytica
TitleAssociate Professor at Stanford University
Awards
Website michalkosinski.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]

Contents

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

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

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] This research 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.

See also

Related Research Articles

Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally covers specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and related activities. Psychometrics is concerned with the objective measurement of latent constructs that cannot be directly observed. Examples of latent constructs include intelligence, introversion, mental disorders, and educational achievement. The levels of individuals on nonobservable latent variables are inferred through mathematical modeling based on what is observed from individuals' responses to items on tests and scales.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Privacy</span> Seclusion from unwanted attention

Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively.

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Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being careful or diligent. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to be efficient and organized as opposed to easy-going and disorderly. They tend to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; they display planned rather than spontaneous behavior; and they are generally dependable. Conscientiousness manifests in characteristic behaviors such as being neat, systematic, careful, thorough, and deliberate.

Interpersonal attraction, as a part of social psychology, is the study of the attraction between people which leads to the development of platonic or romantic relationships. It is distinct from perceptions such as physical attractiveness, and involves views of what is and what is not considered beautiful or attractive.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital footprint</span> Ones unique set of traceable digital activities

Digital footprint or digital shadow refers to one's unique set of traceable digital activities, actions, contributions, and communications manifested on the Internet or digital devices. Digital footprints can be classified as either passive or active. The former is composed of a user's web-browsing activity and information stored as cookies. The latter is often released deliberately by a user to share information on websites or social media. While the term usually applies to a person, a digital footprint can also refer to a business, organization or corporation.

Elias Hull Porter was an American psychologist. While at the University of Chicago Porter was a peer of other notable American psychologists, including Carl Rogers, Thomas Gordon, Abraham Maslow and Will Schutz. His work at Ohio State University and later at the University of Chicago contributed to Rogers’ development of client-centered therapy. Porter's primary contributions to the field of psychology were in the areas of non-directive approaches, relationship awareness theory and psychometric tests. His career included military, government, business and clinical settings.

Thin-slicing is a term used in psychology and philosophy to describe the ability to find patterns in events based only on "thin slices", or narrow windows, of experience. The term refers to the process of making very quick inferences about the state, characteristics or details of an individual or situation with minimal amounts of information. Research has found that brief judgments based on thin-slicing are similar to those judgments based on much more information. Judgments based on thin-slicing can be as accurate, or even more so, than judgments based on much more information.

Big Data Scoring is a cloud-based service that lets consumer lenders improve loan quality and acceptance rates through the use of big data. The company was founded in 2013 and has offices in UK, Finland, Chile, Indonesia and Poland. The company's services are aimed at all lenders – banks, payday lenders, peer-to-peer lending platforms, microfinance providers and leasing companies.

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References

  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.