Love.Law.Robots. August 2020
Hi ,
Here’s to August 2020, another month of experiencing the new normal.
To the little victories
We’re staying at home, but everything else is moving ahead.
I have been reviewing my coding adventures and there’s certainly room for improvement. For example, pdpc-decisions currently processes in batches – it reads the entire website, then pulls the decision one by one. It’s great when you are obtaining a set for the first time, but once you would like to update your database, it’s doing a lot of work when you just need a few things.
That’s not my biggest problem though. After being far more effective at wrangling text from PDFs, I now have a reasonably comprehensive corpus. So what do I do with it? Toying around with Hugging Face transformers and PDPC decisions offered a sneak peak at the possibilities. Training specific models would probably improve the accuracy and effectiveness of various NLP tasks, but that’s going to be a major undertaking!
I :heart: graphs
I had some fun making a new version of the graph of citation network in PDPC decisions. I even christened it as a “Star Map”, because it looked like a constellation. Visually it needs a bit more refinement, but it definitely gives you a fascinating bird’s eye view of PDPC decisions. As the PDPC releases more “Summaries” and less “Decisions”, sadly the “Star Map” loses much of its power. However, there are other ways to extract relations (such as common themes), so I am not so despondent.
Justice is in the news these days
I do want to pen a few thoughts on the Parti Liyana acquital in the blog soon. For now, NUS cases show why judge analytics is needed in Singapore reflects my views that “doing justice in Singapore” “is far more complicated. The media often misreports (you mean the family justice system still hasn’t done anything to reduce acrimony?!) and authorities have fairly limited means to explain to the public how this works. A data driven approach would definitely assist.
Here’s a few other posts this month
- In the PDPA gets Personal, I wrote about increased persona liability being considered in the amendments to the PDPA. What’s in it and should a DPO warn his colleagues that they are going in trouble personally?
- I was bothered that Apple may have over-extended this time. Apple tries to shake WordPress – it’s a terrible idea. Luckily cooler heads prevailed and the App remains free, but it’s a cautionary tale about the risks of having an App in a store.
That’s it!
I hope you enjoyed this month’s newsletter. As always, you can reply to this email to let me know if you have any comments. Subscription options are also located in the following section.