Three-pointer:

1. A new PCI-Crackdown project on Hong Kong;
2. A new Storyline game on Hong Kong; and
3. NBER Economics of AI Conference.

Dear Human Readers,

After the August recess, our machines are back with more updates—just kidding; who takes breaks in the summer. In all seriousness, our newsletter is excited to bring to you a special edition dedicated to Hong Kong.

A brand new PCI-Crackdown project on Hong Kong. This year has seen a series of oft-violent protests in Hong Kong that has spurred speculation of a Tiananmen-like crackdown. Is it possible to know if and when that will happen? Julian TszKin Chan and Weifeng Zhong developed a machine learning program to do just that.

The Policy Change Index for Crackdown (PCI-Crackdown) takes as input protest-related articles in the People’s Daily, China’s official tabloid and the same data source as the PCI-China. The program tries to learn the buildup of China’s negative propaganda against Tiananmen protesters—finding out where articles fall in the Tiananmen timeline. The trained algorithm then casts current articles on Hong Kong protests—in the same way—back to 1989, giving an estimate of how close in time Hong Kong is to when tanks rolled over Tiananmen Square.

The chart below shows the daily PCI-Crackdown for this year’s Hong Kong protests from June 9, when the protests first broke out, to the present day. The higher it jumps toward the crackdown line, the more likely it will happen again. How close did it get, you ask? Well, it reached June 1, 1989 on August 5, 2019.

 

Figure: PCI-Crackdown for 2019 Hong Kong protests, Jun 9 to Sep 27

We will continue to monitor and provide daily updates on the PCI-Crackdown for as long as the Hong Kong protests last. To learn more and see those updates, please visit the PCI website and the PCI-Crackdown code repository.

A brand new Storyline game on Hong Kong. Hong Kong has been all over the news in recent months. Have you wondered what the Chinese government thinks about the city? One way to gauge that is to look at how often the People’s Daily mentions the word “Hong Kong.” We partner with Storyline to create a new quiz—challenging you to take a guess on this for the past seven decades. Try it out and see how well you do!

Play the game!

Next month, we’ll come back with an analysis of all our players’ guesses. Stay tuned!

We continue to get feedback from the policy and academic communities. We recently presented the PCI projects at the Federal Reserve Board, and the NBER Economics of AI Conference in Toronto—it’s still going on as we speak!

The presentations at the NBER conference are truly thought-provoking. Among other things, Jack Clark of OpenAI gave a fascinating dinner talk about the company’s vision and a powerful defense of OpenAI’s release strategy for GPT-2, its controversial text-generating model that can create fake news that looks impressively real. Check out the conference website for more details.

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