When you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days.
Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work.
As an Arctic researcher, I’m used to gaps in data. Just over 1% of US Arctic waters have been surveyed to modern standards. In truth, some of the maps we use today haven’t been updated since the second world war. Navigating uncharted waters can prove difficult, but it comes with the territory of working in such a remote part of the world.
Over the past two months though, I’ve been navigating a different type of uncharted territory: the deleting of what little data we have by the Trump administration.
Now that Republicans are in charge, the federal government is poised to roll back regulations limiting access to consumers’ online data. States have other ideas.
As on climate change, immigration and a host of other issues, some state legislatures may prove to be a counterweight to Washington by enacting new regulations to increase consumers’ privacy rights.
Illinois legislators are considering a “right to know” bill that would let consumers find out what information about them is collected by companies like Google and Facebook, and what kinds of businesses they share it with. Such a right, which European consumers already have, has been a longtime goal of privacy advocates.
The Canadian connection is hardly coincidental: Universities in Toronto and Montreal have played a big role in the rise of deep learning, a collection of AI techniques that allows machines to learn tasks by analyzing large amounts of data. As deep learning remakes the likes of Google and Microsoft, Canada has become a hotbed for new talent.
[CEO Jeff] Glueck’s Nostradamus act was a long time in the making — the result of a process that was set in motion four years earlier, in 2012, when Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley began looking for help in turning his company around. The startup had accumulated mountains of data about where people shopped and traveled but hadn’t figured out how to monetize it. Today, that puzzle seems to have been solved: Foursquare is on the path to $100 million in revenue, and profits are within sight for the first time. But a shift like this wasn’t easy — because as Crowley and his new leadership team discovered, it takes more than just a good insight to jump-start a company’s growth. First, the entire company and its culture must be reshaped to fit a new vision.
A team of globally renowned researchers at the University of Toronto is driving the planning of a new institute staking Toronto’s and Canada’s claim as the global leader in AI.
Geoffrey Hinton, a University Professor Emeritus in computer science at U of T and vice-president engineering fellow at Google, will serve as the chief scientific adviser of the newly created Vector Institute based in downtown Toronto.
The characters we see on-screen play a significant part in determining the roles we occupy off-screen. … With support from Google.org, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media teamed up with Google machine learning engineer Hartwig Adam and USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering’s Dr. Shri Narayanan, the Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering, and his SAIL Laboratory, to develop software that accurately measures how often we see and hear women on-screen. “Media arts are an amazing source of information that can provide insights into who we are as society,” says Dr. Narayanan.
Modern artificial intelligence is built to mimic nature—the field’s main pursuit is replicating in a computer the same decision-making prowess that humankind creates biologically.
For the better part of three decades, most of AI’s brain-inspired development has surrounded “neural networks,” a term borrowed from neurobiology that describes machine thought as the movement of data through interconnected mathematical functions called neurons. But nature has other good ideas, too: Computer scientists are now revisiting an older field of study that suggests putting AI through evolutionary processes, like those that molded the human brain over millennia, could help us develop smarter, more efficient algorithms.
Artificial intelligence (AI) will become the primary way banks interact with their customers within the next three years, according to three quarters of bankers surveyed by consultancy Accenture (ACN.N) in a new report.
Four in five bankers believe AI will “revolutionise” the way in which banks gather information as well as how they interact with their clients, said the Accenture Banking Technology Vision 2017 report, which surveyed more than 600 top bankers and also consulted tech industry experts and academics.
ielsen (NLSN) announced the launch of Everyday Analytics. This new suite of analytics will enable fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) manufacturers to keep up with the constantly changing, daily conditions of today’s fragmented marketplace. By reducing the time, cost and resource demands of traditional analytics, coupled with simple and intuitive tools, the new offering will make sophisticated analytics more accessible for everyday decisions across all FMCG growth drivers, including price and promotion, advertising and innovation.
New research coming out of the University of Texas at Austin could make depression easier to diagnose, however — or even to highlight individuals who could be vulnerable to depression prior to its onset.
“There’s a whole lot of literature that’s emerging in the field of cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry that looks at using in vivo brain imaging techniques in humans to examine differences that might be associated with mental disorders,” David Schnyer, a cognitive neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, told Digital Trends.
The broad goal of the Michigan Micro Mote (M3) initiative is to make smarter, smaller sensors for medical devices and the Internet of Things—sensors that can do more with less energy. Many of the microphones, cameras, and other sensors that make up the eyes and ears of smart devices are always on alert, and frequently they beam personal data into the cloud because they can’t analyze it themselves. Some have predicted that by 2035, there will be 1 trillion such devices. “If you’ve got a trillion devices producing readings constantly, we’re going to drown in data,” says Blaauw. By developing tiny, energy-efficient computing sensors that can do analysis on board, Blaauw and Sylvester hope to make these devices more secure, while also saving energy and bandwidth.
MedyMatch Technology and Samsung NeuroLogica have teamed up to help paramedics and EMTs more quickly and accurately assess stroke patients in prehospital environments.
By integrating MedyMatch’s artificial intelligence technology into ambulance-based mobile stroke units equipped with Samsung NeuroLogica’s CereTom computed tomography scanner, the companies say first responders can more easily use CT scans to determine whether a patient is suffering from a blood clot or hemorrhage.
Seattle, WA Metis Seattle Data Science meetup, Wednesday, April 26, starting at 6:30 p.m., Metis Seattle (83 S. King Street, Suite 250) [rsvp required]
We already know that the tone of media coverage influences people’s attitudes and opinions. But is that influence conditional? Amber Boydstun, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Davis, addressed this question at last Thursday’s Text as Data seminar titled The Conditional Effects of Media Tone on Public Opinion: The Case of Immigration.
The seminar, based on her Policy Frames Project, which is in collaboration with Dallas Card (Carnegie Mellon University) and Noah Smith (University of Washington), is centered around two hypotheses. First, the effects of media coverage on public attitudes towards immigration is stronger the more coverage there is. And, second, the effects of media coverage on public attitudes towards immigration is weaker the more varied that coverage is.
Kairos is a Human Analytics platform that uses face analysis to recognize and understand how people feel in videos, photos and the real-world. We measure identity, emotion and demographic data; these ‘human metrics’ can be used individually or in combination to gather unique & actionable insights about people as they interact with the world.
Today I will be discussing artificial intelligence and empathy.