All Hands/Berlin2020/Demos

Overview

On Wednesday, January 29, 2019 from 16:00 - 18:00 (4pm - 6pm) we'll host 35 demos at the Intercontinental. Here's who and what you can expect (we listed them alphabetically):

Demo Title (Contact) & Description

Browser Interop Visualisation (James Graham)

A healthy internet requires multiple browser engines that are able to work with all web sites and applications. When content is only accessible in some engines it causes compatibility issues leading users to switch to the browser which works with most sites, almost always the market leader. Left unchecked, this eventually leads to a web entirely controlled by a single vendor; one which is indistinguishable from a proprietary platform.

Even smaller levels of interop difference can lead to the web being hard to develop for; a recent MDN survey showed that 4/5 of the top frustrations for site authors were related to browser incompatibilities. These failings increase the chance that authors will develop sites that only support a subset of engines, or abandon the web for native app development.

This demo will focus on the work to visualise interoperability failures in the web platform. In particular it will showcase the data we get from the web-platform-tests project and how Gecko engineers can use this to find areas where we are incompatible with other implementations before they appear as site compatibility bugs.

Building User Agency via Personal AIs (Richard Whitt)

Advanced AI systems need not be the sole provenance of large, non-fiduciary plaforms motivated solely by their own financial or political gain. Each human being should have the ability to possess her own highly-individualized virtual intelligence, to provide both online and offline support. These computational agents would exist on one’s personal devices, managed for us by trustworthy mediators such as MoCo. This Personal AI, or "PAI," concept has the potential to evolve into an entirely new support system within the paradigm — the essential trusted digital agent.

The demo will show how the PAI interacts directly with the client’s digital “screens, scenes, and unseens” to, among other tasks:

(1) manage and protect their clients’ online and offline data flows, and other digital interactions with third parties; (2) ensure that online recommendation engines are serving relevant information, and not harmful content such as “deep fakes” or addictive videos; (3) challenge the efficacy of financial, healthcare, law enforcement, and other impactful algorithms for bias and other flaws that would harm its client; and (4) actively prevent environmental devices -- smart speakers, facial recognition cameras, biometric sensors -- from needlessly surveilling and extracting our data.

In all such cases, the demo will show how the PAI occupies a critical agential interface, between the ordinary human being it serves, and the vast range of Institutional AIs spanning our digital world. The various core PAI functions and dependencies, and the ways they mediate with the data extraction/influence lifecycle, also will be demonstrated.

Personal AIs are a natural fit for the Mozilla longer-term strategy, and a truly open Web. Simply put, the PAI can become the ultimate locus of human agency in the digital era. By developing and introducing PAIs to consumers, MoCo can become the leading provider of user agency online. Human beings then would be empowered to take greater control over their digital lives, with the PAI acting as the trusted virtual agent, and MoCo acting as the trusted institutional agent. Finally, a healthy Internet puts people first. The PAI can shift the current dominant platforms paradigm, from one where humans are the mere objects of data extraction and influence, to one where humans can become the empowered subjects and authors of their own digital experiences.

Campaigning for a Better Internet (Jessie Keating)

The Mozilla Foundation advocacy team is where the Mozilla manifesto is put into action. We actively campaign for policies and products that make our internet a better place for all of us, sometimes facing some of the biggest and best resourced companies in the world. Recent campaigns have included calling for more transparency around political ads, insights into Youtube's recommendation engine, and for popular consumer products and services like Venmo to put user privacy first.

===Common Voice (Megan Branson + Lindsay Saunders)

Common Voice is part of Mozilla's efforts to bridge the digital speech divide, through making voice recognition better and available for everyone (e.g. Mozilla strategy/vision). Voice recognition technologies bring a human dimension to our devices, but developers need an enormous amount of voice data to build them. Currently, most of that data is expensive and proprietary. Mozilla is working to make voice data freely and publicly available (e.g. Mozilla mission), and make sure the data represents the diversity of real people (e.g. Mozilla vision).

Fathom-ing User Tasks (Erik Rose)

By identifying what the user is doing—shopping, reading articles, using technical materials—we can bolster user agency by recommending relevant add-ons or services (like Pocket). All the while, we preserve user privacy by running entirely on the client.

Firefox Content Network: Disrupting the Ads Ecosystem on the Web (Matt Grimes)

We're cleaning up the web by offering alternative monetization strategies for content publishers. We aren't just fixing the web for the big players though. We're making it easy for any creative to monetize their content and be seen. This model encourages excellent content and discourages click-bait.

Firefox Lite 2.0 (Wesly "One E" Huang)

Firefox Lite 2.0 is a one-stop browser platform providing beyond-browser experiences for Emerging Markets users. It supports the exploration of growth market opportunities.

Firefox Private Network VPN and Secure Proxy Demo (Chris More)

FPN and Secure Proxy support Mozilla's goals for financial resilience. Come check 'em out!

Firefox Reality (Janice von Itter)

Firefox Reality aka "FxR" contributes to Mozilla's broader Resilience KPI to diversify our products and revenue.

Firefox Reality AR (Josh Matthews)

Bringing Firefox's values to augmented reality-based platforms to ensure the web remains open on these new platforms.

Firefox Voice (Jofish Kaye)

Leaning into privacy-first voice experiences.

Firefox's Fantastic Developer Tools (Harald Kirschner)

DevTools help Firefox's engineers and support developers to build a web that works excellent for Firefox's users.

GLAM! (Rob Miller)

GLAM is the new "Glean Aggregated Metrics dashboard", a major new tool for Firefox (and Fenix, and Lockwise, and ...) product managers and engineers to use to understand performance and to see how telemetry probes are behaving for various user populations.

Glean SDK: Telemetry for Humans (Alessio Placitelli)

The Glean SDK is the future of the telemetry collection at Mozilla: it was build to support Fenix, and it recently expanded to support platforms other than Android (iOS, Python, Rust). The cross-platform Glean SDK is the future: our 2020 will be about bringing Firefox on Glean, boosting data as a service and reducing the cost and frustration of adding new telemetry instrumentation.

Hello, WebXR (Fernando Serrano García)

Our demos and technology democratize the access to and creation of XR content unlike the current closed proprietary alternatives.

How Lockwise and Monitor Work Across Platforms to Keep you Safe (David Durst)

Lockwise and Monitor support the Reach KPI as well as the Privacy and Security features. We are driving towards a cross-platform, personal data protection suite that integrates with desktop to encourage good security hygiene and expanded use of Mozilla products.

Iodide (William Lachance)

Iodide supports Mozilla's data science and engineering teams by providing a convenient tool to create dashboard and reports using Telemetry data. Going forward, we expect that Iodide will be used as a publishing tool for communicating our work with the outside world.

Looking at Web Monetization (Anselm Hook )

Fixing Web Monetization may attract Creators to the Web and help Patrons have better experiences.

Mozilla & Data Stewardship: Why, How, and You! (Alicia Gray)

At Mozilla, like at many other organizations, we rely on data to make product decisions. But here, unlike many other organizations, we balance our goal of collecting useful, high-quality data with our goal to give users meaningful choice and control over their own data. The Firefox data collection program was created to ensure we achieve both goals whenever we make a change to how we collect data in our products. This program supports product needs and provides transparency for our users, directly driven by our data privacy principles and making us a more trusted user agent.

Mozilla Accessibility: Making the internet "accessible to all" (James Teh)

We are demoing features which make Firefox and the web delightfully accessible to people with disabilities and thus more inclusive of all. Accessibility and inclusion are fundamental values enshrined in the Mozilla Manifesto, specifically in our commitment "to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth - where a person's demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience."

Mozilla Growth & Usage Dashboard aka "GUD" (Jesse McCrosky)

Provides a standardized and accessible view supporting data democratization around our reach and relationship KPIs. Empowers everyone to answer metric questions.

Mozilla IoT - Delivering Smart Home Privacy, Security, and Interoperability (Kathy Giori)

IoT - everyone talks about security, but privacy and interoperability are rarely mentioned. We protect users with an open source implementation that does all three!

Mozilla WebThings (Ben Francis)

Building a trusted personal agent for the connected home.

Performance Tools: Optimize memory usage and performance with the Firefox Profiler (Julien Wajsberg)

We want to show the tooling we develop so that mozillians know how to optimize their app. This is good because we want all our products and websites to work better and faster and consume less energy.

"*Privacy Not Included" Buyer’s Guide and Raffle (Jen Caltrider)

The *Privacy Not Included buyers guide and special edition Internet Health Report on “Rethinking the Smart Home” encourages consumers and companies to adopt higher standards for privacy and security. We’ll highlight MoCo/MoFo collaborations on these projects, and include other calls to action or ways to get involved in future editions.