Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › Academic › peer-review
Abstract
Anthropomorphism, artificial identity, and the fusion of personal and artificial identities have become commonplace concepts in human-computer interaction (HCI) and human-robot interaction (HRI). In this paper, we argue for the fact that the design and life cycle of ’smart’ technology must account for a further element of HCI/HRI, namely that, beyond issues of combined identity, a much more crucial point is the substantial investment of a user’s personality on a piece of technology. We raise the fact that this substantial investment occurs in a dynamic context of continuous alteration of this technology, and thus the important psychological and ethical implications ought to be given a more prominent place in he theory and design of HCI/HRI technology.
Enhancement and AI create moral dilemmas not envisaged in standard ethical theories. Some of this stems from the increased malleability of personal identity that this technology affords: an artificial being can instantly alter its memory, preferences, and moral character. If a self can, at will, jettison essential identity-giving characteristics, how are we to rely upon, befriend, or judge it? Moral problems will stem from the fact that such beings are para-persons: they meet all the standard requirements of personhood (self-awareness, agency, intentional states, second-order desires, etc.) but have an additional ability—the capacity for instant change—that disqualifies them from ordinary personal identity. In order to rescue some responsibility assignments for para-persons, a fine-grained analysis of responsibility-bearing parts of selves and the persistence conditions of these parts is proposed and recommended also for standard persons who undergo extreme change.
Auth0, the billion-dollar Seattle-area startup that is a leader in identity authentication software, is being acquired by Okta, another leader in the space, the companies announced Wednesday. The all-stock deal is valued at approximately $6.5 billion — one of the largest acquisitions of a Seattle tech company.
Auth0 was co-founded in 2013 by Eugenio Pace, who formerly ran the patterns and practices group at Microsoft, and Matias Woloski, a software engineer who remains the company’s CTO. Both hail from Argentina, and Auth0 has built its more than 850-person team through a distributed approach with workers scattered all over the world.
The startup raised a $120 million round in July at a $1.9 billion valuation, making it a rare Seattle unicorn. That step up in valuation from $1.9 billion to $6.5 billion in just eight months is impressive, but not everyone is thinking that Auth0 should have sold so soon.
funny market dynamics playing out in reaction to this news:
public investors: Okta overpaid! ???? private investors: Auth0 shouldn't have sold! ???? https://t.co/R5TSHmelKa
Even still, the deal is a huge windfall for the company’s founders and early investors, including Pacific Northwest firms Founders’ Co-op and Portland Seed Fund. And it’s a big payoff in Seattle’s startup scene — nearly tripling the $2.25 billion that EMC paid for Seattle data storage company Isilon in 2010.
“We started Auth0 seven years ago,” Pace said last year at the GeekWire Awards, after Auth0 won honors for Deal of the Year. “Sometimes it feels like seven minutes and sometimes it feels like 70 years. But it’s been a great journey.”
GeekWire heard rumblings about a play for Auth0 a few weeks ago, but we were unable to confirm the news. Forbes, which broke the story today, noted that the deal was slow to close because Auth0 was weighing other options, including an IPO and other possible suitors.
Auth0 will continue operating as an independent business within Okta.
San Francisco-based Okta boasts a market capitalization of $31 billion, with 2,800 employees worldwide. The company’s shares fell more than 13% in after-hours trading.
Okta reported its fourth quarter earnings Wednesday, with revenue up 40% to $234.7 million and net losses growing to $75.8 million, up from $50.4 million.
“Okta and Auth0 have an incredible opportunity to build the identity platform of the future,” Pace said in a news release.
Auth0 co-founders CEO Eugenio Pace, bottom left, and Matias Woloski, bottom right, sign acquisition agreement papers via video chat with Okta co-founders Frederic Kerrest and CEO Todd McKinnon, top right. (Okta Photo)
Auth0 is currently ranked No. 4 on the GeekWire 200, our index of top Pacific Northwest startups. However, as is customary with an acquisition or IPO, Auth0 will now be moved off the list.
“We think it’s a fantastic validation of their ‘developer-first’ approach to enterprise software, and of Seattle’s startup ecosystem more generally,” Founders’ Co-op Managing Partner Chris DeVore told GeekWire. “We’re thrilled for the founders and have already seen the knock-on effects of the entrepreneurial culture they built as two of our most recent investments (Fusebit and Zerowall) were both founded by Auth0 alums.”
Other Auth0 investors include DTCP, Bessemer Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Meritech Capital, World Innovation Lab, Trinity Ventures, Telstra Ventures, and K9 Ventures. Early investor and first Auth0 board member Sunil Nagaraj, who at the time of the deal was working for Bessemer, writes about the early days of the startup in this blog post congratulating the founding team on the acquisition.
“You will not find another person on Earth that cares more about understanding someone and communicating something clearly than Auth0 CEO Eugenio Pace,” Nagaraj wrote.
Auth0 co-founders Matias Woloski, left, and Eugenio Pace. (Auth0 Photo)
Auth0 combines existing login and identity verification options into a few lines of code that developers can quickly add to their applications. Its platform includes services like single sign-on, two-factor authentication, password-free login capabilities, and the ability to detect password breaches.
The pandemic has put a spotlight on security tech companies with accelerated adoption of digital services. Pace told GeekWire last year that demand for Auth0’s services was “massive” as companies connect more and more with customers in the cloud.
Auth0 processes more than 4.5 billion login transactions per month.
“I’m thrilled by the choice, flexibility, and value we’ll offer customers: Okta and Auth0 address a broad set of identity use cases, and our identity platforms are robust and extensible enough to serve the world’s largest organizations and most innovative developers,” Todd McKinnon, CEO and co-founder of Okta, wrote in a blog post.
Genomic surveillance in Belgium is based on whole genome sequencing (WGS) of a selection of representative samples, complemented with targeted active surveillance initiatives and targeted molecular markers aiming to early detect and precisely monitor the epidemiological evolution of variants of concern (VOCs). Currently, 5.050 sequences of samples collected in Belgium are available on GISAID in open access. During week 3 of 2021, Belgium achieved a coverage of 3,5% of all positive sequences being sequenced. During the last 2 weeks (week 5 and 6), 146 samples have been sequenced as part of the baseline surveillance, among which 48 (33%) were 501Y.V1 and 8 (5%) were 501Y.V2. Since week 52 of 2020, Belgium has experienced multiple introductions of VOCs followed by sustained local transmissions. As a consequence of a higher transmissibility of these variants, we observe a progressive shift in viral populations, with 501Y.V1 expected to represent the majority of circulating strains by early March. Together with the rollout of vaccination, genomic surveillance will monitor the eventual positive selection of VOCs harbouring immune escape mutations such as S:E484K. During the last 2 weeks, the progressive phenomenon of viral population replacement by more transmissible strains did not alter the overall stability of the epidemic in Belgium. This is probably due to a combination of active public health response and limited number of social interactions in the population. The risk of disruption of this equilibrium remains, as the proportion of more transmissible viruses will continue rising, but this risk can be mitigated by a combination of active outbreak control interventions, maintained efforts to reduce transmission in the population and rapid roll-out of vaccination.
In this chapter, we try to find social media penetration barriers to the development of democracy and social justice in the Middle East. We also try to suggest some strategies to overcome these obstacles. To achieve this objective, the context of political, economic, social, technological and technical, ethical, legal analysis (PESTEL) is used and the barriers in each context are considered. Although there is no priority among these barriers, it can be argued that political instability, legal uncertainty, corruption and ethical issues play the major role in reducing the influence of social media penetration for the promotion of democracy and social justice.
On the other hand, we have argued that what happens in the circumstances of virtual social media is a clear manifestation of events in the physical environment of the country. In social media or social networks, if people, whether using real or fictional identities, stand up to protest against a group, persons or particular government, this happens because of the oppression in the physical environment, which has suddenly crossed into the virtual environment. Consequently, with any policy for cyberspace (whether in an environment of 100% government control of the media or freedom of the media), if the physical environment is not accompanied by supporting policies, physical well-being and social justice it will lead to the failure of individuals to change their government through social media.
Analysis of ethical factors
In much of the research on social media, discussion of ethical factors is impeded by a lack of sufficient information and in some cases issues regarding copyright law and morality are raised. But given the difference in objective analysis, here we try to look at it from another angle. When can we expect to see real people with real faces promoting democracy and social justice from social media? Ethical issues in social media begin when a virtual identity is shaped and the user is able to create a picture of him- or herself as he or she would like to be, not what he or she really is. It becomes extreme when people in the real world cannot show themselves as they really are, while if they express their true opinions they face penalties that are more likely to be found in dictatorial regimes. Please re-read the previous sentence. From this statement we can clearly see that an unblemished environment and observing the ethics of social media are the effect of freedom and justice in the physical environment. It can upset all the equations, even when there has been heavy investment in social media, and we cannot obtain the desired result because of the problems in the physical environment. In this case it is better to revisit the examples of our listed companies. When a company invests a lot in their brand on social media but the employees in the organisation are not happy, the employees simply share their disastisfaction and the problems they have with the work on their personal pages on social networks.
There must be a better way than this to eliminate problems. Using the network to communicate directly with the government and the people can be useful before people share their dissatisfaction with the government, whether as themselves or under a false identity, on the public network. This is a safety valve to prevent an overflow of people’s grievances. The next thing that has become clear during our research is that when a group of people who believe that social media have taken steps toward achieving their goals, the ethical points have peaked, but if the team feels that social media are phenomena that are harmful to them and which in the long term will weaken the group, failure to take note of the ethics and social media gossip from the group can eventually turn the tide in their favour. The most important points evident here are that the beginnings of such failure to comply with the ethics of such groups not only arise from social media but also from the physical environment. Suppose a religious group is strongly dissatisfied with the development of an anti-religious culture in the social media and do not see a way to deal with it. So gossip in the physical environment against social media represents attempts to blacken the reputation of social media and reduce their role in society. However, experience has shown that gossip does not end with the physical environment but evolves. The next step is for the group to create multiple pages, blogs and websites, opening up a new front in the struggle against the social media. And in the third stage of evolution, this group finds that social media must be confronted by other social media, for success to be achieved. The next thing that is one of the positive aspects of social media in the area of ethics and social justice is the high percentage of respondents who believe that regardless of whether or not governments have a role in the distribution of wealth and social justice, people must exert pressure through the Internet and social media to create justice. The minimum amount of work that must be done in this area is helping people who have low incomes and live in poverty. In all the Arab countries surveyed and Iran over 55% of people are in this situation, while the percentage in America is 38%. Most of the former are in Iran and Tunisia, at 69% and 68% per cent, respectively. This creates a strong potential for governments to increase people’s capacity to take advantage of democracy and social justice, while it appears that in some Western countries, this is more of a burden on the state.
Given the importance of ethical issues and social responsibility in the virtual environment, the researcher came up with the idea of seeking new criteria for ranking websites and social media pages. Alexa.com provides website ratings in terms of the number of visits, which is a factor that has an important role in the value of a web page or website. There will be a greater need to value sites in terms of ethical standards. That is why, in the middle of 2014, an elite group of programmers in the web field came together to launch the site http://www.EthicsRank.com, and readers of this book can also assist in measuring the observance of ethics on the web. According to our investigation, the principal costs of material and moral wrongdoing in virtual space in the Middle East and developing countries are higher than in developed countries. Owing to the nature of governments in the Middle East and the need for the constant monitoring of virtual environments to counter threats, Middle Eastern countries have defined more crimes in cyberspace and consequently there is greater punishment. This can be useful, leading to a reduction in non-compliance with ethics, but it also leads to changes in the identity of most people in the virtual community and therefore it becomes uncontrollable.
This chapter discusses the use of virtual worlds for people with disabilities, exploring the ways that immersive environments are used for education, fellowship, companionship, and therapy. It investigates the interaction models of virtual reality, examining how the body and mind respond to controlling an avatar, and includes a case study where virtual reality is used as a form of pain distraction. The chapter concludes with an emphasis on how people with disabilities and illness find communities of practice within their virtual circles of peers.
Virtual Reality and the Self
Vivian Sobchack, media theorist and film critic, once wrote that “even the most ordinary images find their value, their substance, their impetus, in the agency and investments of our flesh.” She was speaking about the concept of decorporealization—that point in which a media object, such as a photograph, depicts a persona that is at once representative and interchangeable with our identity of the self.
This is a complicated way of saying that users of virtual worlds who associate more closely with their avatars tend to have a more rewarding experience. Something takes over in the mind, which begins to show activity typical of what the avatar is doing on the screen. Digital outcasts who participate in this space identify very personally with their in-world personas and take their virtual lives very seriously. We might consider this primarily an augmentationist approach, but we find this behavior spanning all users of virtual worlds.
Digital outcasts associate very personally with their virtual identities.
Researchers at Stanford University have found that the more closely an avatar resembles the actual person, the more likely it is to psychologically inhabit the virtual body and assume its characteristics. “The remarkable thing is how little a virtual human has to do to produce fairly large effects on behavior,” said Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford. His team discovered that slightly tweaking visual characteristics of the avatar—adjusting the avatar’s appearance in weight or making the avatar “more” or “less” attractive—created social effects that seeped into real-life interactions. “What we learn in one body is shared with other bodies we inhabit, whether virtual or physical,” concluded the research team.
Virtual worlds have found a strong and enthusiastic audience among people who live with autism spectrum disorders. Predominant among this user group are those who experience mild to severe anxiety when interacting with other people—a textbook example of an immersionist. They may also have limited attention spans and difficulty controlling their emotions. The virtual world is thus used as a way to work on social skills and common etiquette practices in a relatively safe environment, where they feel they will be judged more fairly than in real life.
People who are on the spectrum are a fiercely protective group, and many of them find a sense of fellowship and community within their virtual networks. The folks they connect with every day become part of their extended digital family. There are some who believe that the relationships they form in virtual worlds are more meaningful than those in real life—they’ve overcomed their awkwardness and learned to translate their anxiety productively.
Researchers in Dallas are conducting brain-imaging and neurocognitive tests on people with autism before and after virtual therapy sessions. Subjects tend to show improvements in several areas, including social appropriateness and ability to read a person’s body language. One 35-year-old graduate student revealed that he felt more confident making small talk since practicing in virtual reality. “I’m usually not good with someone face to face,” he said. “I tend to feel awkward and put my foot in my mouth.”
The Center for BrainHealth in Dallas has picked up on this study and taken a truly futuristic approach in helping children with autism learn how to navigate social situations, from ordering something in a coffee shop to practicing for a job interview. An avatar on the screen shows facial expressions and gestures, helping the subject better understand emotional triggers. So far, the therapy is proving to be successful. “Four or five sessions in here is worth about 2 or 3 years of real world training,” says Clark Thurston, a 16 year old with Asperger’s syndrome. Thurston’s mother was astounded at how well the virtual reality therapy worked for her autistic son. “He got bullied a lot, so he carried around a lot of pain,” she said tearfully. “I never even dared to hope that [the treatment] would be this good.”
The face is the gateway to improving social interaction among people with autism spectrum disorders.
Why is this approach so successful for some people? Researcher Dan Krawczyk thinks it has to do with the bond between avatar and subject:
When you’re driving an avatar, you’re in virtual space, riding one of these characters as yourself. [But] it’s not just recognizing a face. It’s recognizing emotion. A lot of brain areas have to talk to each other and coordinate, and some of these connections are not as strong as they should be. The face is the gateway to social interaction.
What Dr. Krawczyk describes is a form of anthropomorphic realism, which is the degree to which an object or depiction is personified to represent a human form.
Operating an avatar onscreen triggers a neurological response that replicates the authenticity of a physical experience.
Studies further indicate that a kinetic response improves anthropomorphic realism, which might reveal insights into how people with limited mobility connect with their virtual selves. “A fundamental difference is you have an avatar,” says Mark Dubin. He is a professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado and designs haptic interfaces for virtual reality. He supports the notion that avatars can act as an extension for the mind and body by replicating the feel of authenticity to a physical experience, which triggers a neurological response:
You have a representative that is you and responds to you. You move, it moves. You feel like you’re there, literally. Your brain will show activity typical of what the avatar is actually doing.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that is revolutionizing the way we conduct transactions, protect our identity, and preserve our privacy. By providing a secure and transparent platform for recording and verifying transactions, blockchain is fortifying the traditional finance system and unlocking new opportunities for innovation and growth. With its decentralized and immutable nature, blockchain is also empowering individuals to take control of their personal data and protect it from unauthorized access and exploitation. Whether you are a business owner, investor, or consumer, blockchain is a technology that you cannot afford to ignore in today's digital age.
Blockchain and AI are revolutionizing the way we perceive identity. With virtual identity tokenization, individuals can take ownership of their digital self and protect their data. The impact of this technology is inevitable, and it will change the way we interact with the digital world forever.
The anime classic Ghost in the Shell has been praised for its exploration of transhumanist themes, questioning what it means to be human in a world where artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly. The central question of the film is whether AI is just a shell, or if it is capable of developing true consciousness and emotions.
As our lives become more intertwined with technology, the concept of virtual identity has become increasingly important. From social media profiles to online banking accounts, our virtual identities can have a significant impact on our lives. However, with the rise of AI and other advanced technologies, questions about the ethics of virtual identity are becoming more complex. In this article, we will explore the different systems and technologies that make up virtual identity, as well as the ethical considerations that must be taken into account when developing these systems.
As technology continues to advance, our lives are becoming increasingly intertwined with virtual spaces. From social media platforms to online gaming communities, virtual identities have become an integral part of our daily lives. In these virtual spaces, we have the opportunity to express ourselves, interact with others, and explore new identities. However, as we spend more time in these virtual spaces, it is important that we understand the systems, behaviours, and ethics related to virtual identities.
Virtual Identity and Digital Integrity In today’s digital age, virtual identity has become an integral part of our online existence. It is the representation of who we are in the digital world, and it plays a significant role in our interactions with the online community. However, the growing concern of identity theft and data breaches
04 Feb’23 | By Amit Ghosh As the country pushes its sustainability agenda, the use of new technology deserves a closer look in order to make a difference in this cause When we examine blockchain’s role in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies and markets around the world, we can see how technology is already changing ESG
