DEF CON 16 - Ian Clarke: Hacking Desire
Channel: DEFCONConference
Date: 26/11/2013

DEF CON 16 - Ian Clarke: Hacking Desire
What do you want? This is the question that almost every commercial organization on the planet thinks they have an answer to, but do they? Figuring out what people want is essentially a process of reverse engineering human needs, desire, and preference. It turns out that hackers are particularly adept at reverse engineering, so what happened when we applied our skills to reverse engineering what you, and everyone else, wants?

This talk will describe how we constructed a model for how the human mind decides what it wants, and then customize this model to imitate particular individuals, and thus anticipate specifically what they want. I will demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on guessing how much particular users will like particular movies, based on the feedback they've given to a popular movie rental website. I'll also discuss flaws in how "collaborative filters" are designed, and measured, and explain why our approach is an improvement.

This talk will discuss sophisticated ideas in machine learning and artificial intelligence, but no background in these topics will be required for attendees.

Ian Clarke is a Computer Scientist and Entrepreneur, with a track record of both technical and business innovation, and an outspoken thinker and activist on issues relating to freedom of speech, intellectual property law, and technology. Ian is the founder and coordinator of the Freenet Project; designed to allow true freedom of communication, Freenet was the first decentralized anonymous peer-to-peer network, and a precursor of the "distributed hashtable" data structure. Ian has also founded a number of innovative and diverse commercial ventures, including Revver, the first online video website to share revenue with video creators, and Thoof, a collaboratively generated personalized news website. Ian has a degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from Edinburgh University, Scotland.


For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 16 Archive here: https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-16-archive.html