Marine conditions influence rain patterns, and new research on ocean temperatures could help improve predictions on whether the American West will face wet or dry times in the years ahead.
We’re delighted to announce that the California Digital Library has been awarded a 2-year NSF EAGER grant to support active, machine-actionable data management plans (DMPs). The vision is to convert DMPs from a compliance exercise based on static text documents into a key component of a networked research data management ecosystem that not only facilitates, but improves the research process for all stakeholders.
he Engine, founded last year by MIT, today announced investments in its first group of seven startups that are developing innovations poised for transformative impact on aerospace, renewable energy, synthetic biology, medicine, and other sectors.
The founding startups will be featured today at an event to celebrate the official opening of The Engine’s headquarters at 501 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, now renovated to include three floors of conference rooms, makerspaces, labs with cutting-edge equipment, computer stations, and other amenities.
University of California-San Diego, Jacobs School of Engineering
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What do you do if you’re an animal shelter and have to name a big litter of guinea pigs that suddenly become available for adoption and need to be named? Why, contact Janelle Shane, who earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at UC San Diego, of course. Shane works on lasers in her day job, but her hobby is using neural networks to create paint color names, band names and much more.
Her efforts have received an onslaught of media coverage, from Gizmodo, to Wired, to The Atlantic Online. When the Morris Animal Refuge in Portland, Ore., came to her, Shane agreed. She trained a neural network with existing names for guinea pigs. Pretty soon, it was coming up with its own creations, including Princess Pow, Popchop and Fuzzable.
“I highly recommend these guinea pigs,” Shane wrote on Twitter. “This project had me smiling all week.”
The opioid crisis has hit Indiana hard. In 2012, Indiana was among a handful of states whose opioid prescriptions roughly equaled its population. Three years later, intravenous drugs caused the nation’s worst HIV outbreak in two decades, affecting 181 people in rural Scott County, Indiana. And since 2013, Indiana has had the dubious distinction of leading the nation in pharmacy robberies, beating even California, which has six times its population.
Darshan Shah can recite stats like these from memory. As Indiana’s chief data officer, tracking these figures is kind of his job. He’s also aware of what the numbers represent. “Thousands of people are losing their lives,” Shah says. “It’s clearly a dire situation, before we lose a generation to this epidemic.”
Disturbing as those numbers are, Shah says understanding the data and blending them with data from other government agencies is critical to fighting the drug crisis in Indiana and elsewhere.
Brachman explained that the Jacobs Institute offers a two-year, dual-degree Master’s program, in which students are part of specific inter-disciplinary “hubs,” and will obtain degrees from both Cornell and Technion. This is different from the more traditional graduate Master’s degrees that are the focus of the rest of the Cornell Tech program. Brachman noted that the Jacobs Institute currently accounts for some 75 of the about 260 students at Cornell Tech, and the plan is to keep that number to between one-third and one-fourth of students at the campus as the institution grows.
The Jacobs Institute currently has two hubs, Connected Media and Health Tech, with a third hub planned, tentatively called Urban Life. Brachman explained that these hubs were part of the original proposal for the NYC Applied Sciences and Engineering campus competition, and highlight areas where the school believes that “the application of digital technology will make a quantum difference in industries of central importance to New York City (and the world).” He continued, adding that “New York City is the media center of the world and an international leader in healthcare,” and that both of these fields are changing rapidly because of the enabling power of digital technology.
While Cornell Tech is emphasizing interdisciplinary work, Brachman said the Jacobs Institute is taking an even deeper approach, looking for students with cross-disciplinary skills and non-traditional backgrounds.
Knowing the difference between a platform powered by AI and one powered by cognitive computing is the key to deciding which is the best for your business.
IBM’s Watson cognitive computing platform might be going through a defining time right now, and part of that seems to do with a small-but-complex question: What is the difference between artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing?
It’s an important question for any company and any system that’s working within this sector, as our assumptions about these two terms define how we respond to the emerging and existing products that claim to do one or the other. If you don’t know the difference between a platform powered by AI and one powered by cognitive computing, and what the implications of those differences, how can you decide which is the best for your business or your application?
Pineau told those assembled that she wanted to join the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) lab because she is interested in basic research and an open and collaborative approach between the public and private sectors. “With the opening of FAIR Montreal, I look forward to being able to offer new opportunities for attracting and retaining the brightest AI talent in Canada,” she said. “I have seen far too many talented colleagues and students leave Montreal. This new lab will keep them here, and perhaps even bring some back.”
Prime Minister Trudeau told the crowd that creativity is the engine of the new economy. “Artificial Intelligence is already part of our lives and our children will become users of FB in the future. Our scientists were pioneers in the world of AI,” said Trudeau. “The new lab is a vote of confidence in Canada and Canadians, and the federal government is very pleased to see this go ahead.”
The Common Fund at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which supports innovative endeavors with the potential for extraordinary impact, instituted the NIH Health Care Systems Research Collaboratory five years ago in 2012, with its coordinating center based at the DCRI. The goal of the program is to improve the way clinical trials are conducted by creating a new infrastructure for collaborative research with healthcare systems. At a time when reducing the cost of clinical trials and generating real-word knowledge is becoming progressively crucial, the NIH Collaboratory is leading the way in expanding the national capacity for pragmatic clinical research.
“The NIH Collaboratory embodies what makes clinical research exciting and simply fun,” said Adrian Hernandez, MD, one of three principal investigators of the NIH Collaboratory coordinating center at the DCRI. “We’ve learned together how to address challenges and then seeing how those solutions go forward to change how clinical trials should be done as opposed to how they are currently done.”
I’ve been posting preprints on arXiv since its beginning ~25 years ago, and I like to share research results as soon as they are written up. Science functions best through open discussion of new results! After some internal discussion, my research group decided to post our new paper on genomic prediction of human height on bioRxiv and arXiv.
But the preprint culture is nascent in many areas of science (e.g., biology), and it seems to me that some journals are not yet fully comfortable with the idea. I was pleasantly surprised to learn, just in the last day or two, that most journals now have official policies that allow online distribution of preprints prior to publication. (This has been the case in theoretical physics since before I entered the field!) Let’s hope that progress continues.
The work presented below applies ideas from compressed sensing, L1 penalized regression, etc. to genomic prediction. We exploit the phase transition behavior of the LASSO algorithm to construct a good genomic predictor for human height. T
The National Science Foundation has awarded a second phase, $10 million grant to the Chameleon cloud computing testbed project led by University of Chicago with partners at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), and Northwestern University. The three-year grant will add hardware and expand access.
Currently Chameleon is approximately 600-node cloud infrastructure with bare metal reconfiguration privileges. This level of access allows researchers to go beyond limited development on existing commercial or scientific clouds, offering a customizable platform to create and test new cloud computing architectures.
Two-dimensional materials called molecular aggregates are very effective light emitters that work on a different principle than typical organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) or quantum dots. But their potential as components for new kinds of optoelectronic devices has been limited by their relatively slow response time. Now, researchers at MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, and Northeastern University have found a way to overcome that limitation, potentially opening up a variety of applications for these materials.
The findings are described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in a paper by MIT associate professor of mechanical engineering Nicholas X. Fang, postdocs Qing Hu and Dafei Jin, and five others.
Mountain View, CA, and Online September 28 starting at 6 p.m., Computer History Museum. “HM Live presents a conversation with Yann LeCun, Greg Corrado, and Eric Horvitz.” [sold out, waiting list + online stream available]
National Taiwan Normal University and The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing (ACLCLP) and hosted by The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) Associations
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Taipei, Taiwan The 8th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2017) will be held November 27-December 1. [$$$]
New York, NYNYU College of Global Public Health is partnering with The Greenwall Foundation in sponsoring an event to honor William Stubing. October 10 starting at 5:30 p.m., Global Center for Academic and Spiritual Life – Grand Hall (238 Thompson Street, 5th Floor). [registration required]
New York, NY September 28. “The focus of this year’s Finance Disrupted conference, will be finding the new business models that will deliver future financial success.” Organized by Economist Events. [$$$$]
Long Beach, CA December 9 at NIPS 2017. “This workshop seeks to highlight recent works that use theory as well as systematic experiments to isolate the fundamental questions that need to be addressed in deep learning.” Deadline for submissions is October 30.
Before enrolling in the NYU master’s program in Data Science, I took a year off to work for a start-up in the Bay Area, where I developed a lidar system for autonomous vehicles. Being immersed in a high-end innovation ecosystem was a great experience: I discovered that I wanted to be part of a tech startup project sooner rather than later.
I am very honored and grateful to be awarded the DeepMind Scholarship. At NYU, I am really looking forward to honing my skills in Data Science, discovering a learning experience that is totally different than the one I experienced in France and, last but not least, getting involved in research projects with CDS faculty members.
“The Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN) database comprises an unprecedented wealth of cleaned and standardised botanical data, containing roughly 81 million occurrence records from c. 375,000 species, c. 915,000 trait observations across 28 traits from c. 93,000 species, and co-occurrence records from 110,000 ecological plots globally, as well as 100,000 range maps and 100 replicated phylogenies (each containing 81,274 species) for New World species. Here, we describe an R package that provides easy access to these data.”
As the world’s first Native Parallel Graph (NPG) database, TigerGraph sets out to solve these challenges. Unlike other technologies, the TigerGraph NPG focuses on both storage and computation, supporting real-time graph updates and offering built-in parallel computation. NPGs represent what’s next in the graph database evolution: a complete, distributed, parallel graph computing platform supporting web-scale data analytics in real-time.
Unifying the MapReduce and parallel graph processing paradigms, TigerGraph’s computing platform is based on the BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallel) programming model which enables developers to implement a scalable parallel graph algorithm quickly and easily. A SQL-like graph query language (GSQL) provides for ad-hoc exploration and interactive analysis of Big Data.