How did Elvis Kahoro, the son of a truck driver and a retirement home aide in Kennesaw, Ga., end up attending Pomona College, an elite liberal arts school over 2,000 miles from his hometown? The total cost of tuition, fees and room and board at Pomona, east of Los Angeles, runs over $67,000 per year. Fewer than 10 percent of applicants are admitted.
The story begins with Mr. Kahoro’s achievements — 13 Advanced Placement classes and over 1,000 hours of community service — but hardly ends there. To lure Mr. Kahoro, who was born in Kenya, Pomona went to extraordinary lengths. It flew him to campus during the fall of his senior year, paying for all his travel expenses. After he was accepted, financial aid covered close to the full cost of attendance, and he has never had to take out a loan; the college even gives him extra money for textbooks and cross-country trips to visit his family.
Pomona’s demographics do not match America’s: Low-income and black students like Mr. Kahoro remain underrepresented. Even so, according to a new analysis by The New York Times, Pomona is one of just a few elite colleges nationwide where more than 10 percent of noninternational students in recent incoming classes were black and more than 20 percent were Hispanic.
Last week, the credit reporting agency Equifax announced that malicious hackers had leaked the personal information of 143 million people in their system. That’s reason for concern, of course, but if a hacker wants to access your online data by simply guessing your password, you’re probably toast in less than an hour. Now, there’s more bad news: Scientists have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to create a program that, combined with existing tools, figured more than a quarter of the passwords from a set of more than 43 million LinkedIn profiles. Yet the researchers say the technology may also be used to beat baddies at their own game.
The work could help average users and companies measure the strength of passwords, says Thomas Ristenpart, a computer scientist who studies computer security at Cornell Tech in New York City but was not involved with the study. “The new technique could also potentially be used to generate decoy passwords to help detect breaches.”
Researchers warned that unintuitive workflows and burdensome documentation requirements could contribute to provider burnout in addition to being unhelpful to organizations seeking to use the EHR as a point of data collection for analytics projects.
“This study reveals what many primary care physicians already know – data entry tasks associated with EHR systems are significantly cutting into available time for physicians to engage with patients,” said AMA President David O. Barbe. “Unfortunately, clerical and administrative demands are not being reconciled with patient priorities and clinical workflow.”
Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco delivered the 2017 Cybercrime Symposium keynote address, with the symposium’s topic being “When Cybercrime Turns Violent and Abusive.” Blanco spent much of the speech calling for more federal and private sector involvement in combating cyberbullying, cyber harassment, cyberstalking, sextortion, doxing and non-consensual pornography.
Blanco emphasized how the aforementioned elements correlated with crimes against “Americans’ cherished right to privacy” and how “these forms of abuse have a tremendous and lasting harm upon victims.’” He related the experiences of victims of a serial sextortionist who were so terrified that they could not leave their homes or sleep alone.
Cognitive neuroscientists Rosie Cowell and David Huber at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently received a four-year, $2.36 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a new computational tool that will help researchers in interpreting functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) of the brain and improve accuracy in relating fMRI data to neural responses in the brain.
Cowell says, “Right now it can be difficult to relate fMRI data to the underlying brain activations to see how different groups of neurons are responding when a person is performing a task. This is because, with the methods we have now, the signal is averaged across too many neurons, millions of them at once. Even the narrowest view we can achieve is too coarse; you can’t see how smaller subsets of neurons are behaving.”
Huber adds, “Our goal is to develop a mathematical tool for more accurately interpreting fMRI in a more fine-grained way.
As Editor-in-Chief of a major AGU journal I frequently deal with inquiries from authors about the process of having their papers accepted for publication. Nothing in the recent past has generated more correspondence than the matter of data reporting requirements, particularly the fact that we no longer permit the statement of “Data available by contacting the author.” I would like to describe, using some personal examples, why AGU’s new data policy is both necessary and a benefit to all.
Having been dubbed as ‘the Silicon Valley of AI’, Montreal is steaming ahead with startups, and tech giants with leading AI research coming out of the Canadian city. With pioneers such as Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Geoffrey Hinton hailing from Canada, it was only a matter of time before Canada took the lead in the AI race.
At the centre of this hub is the Vector Institute, who ‘will drive excellence and leadership in Canada’s knowledge, creation, and use of artificial intelligence to foster economic growth and improve the lives of Canadians’. Having launched in March of this year, Vector Institute was a response to a significant opportunity to make Canada a global leader in artificial intelligence. Canada produces ‘some of the best and graduates in machine learning, reinforcement learning and deep learning’ under the supervision of Bengio, LeCun and Honton.
RoboTutor LLC, a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff created by Professor Jack Mostow, was named one of five Global Learning XPRIZE finalists for its RoboTutor software, educational technology that teaches children basic math and reading skills.
Today, as Hurricane Irma has finally fizzled out and response and recovery efforts for it and Hurricane Harvey ramp up (and Jose twirls menacingly out over the Atlantic), an OSTP official says it is still heavily engaged in these processes. But the office has been radically transformed under the Trump administration: The official told WIRED the current staffing level is only 42, down from more than 130 during the Obama years, and the president has put forward no nominee for its director. Even if the remaining staff members are working diligently to aid in disaster preparedness, it is likely that all that work has little if any connection to the president’s inner circle.
In July, the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium overruled dozens of members’ objections to publishing a DRM standard without a compromise to protect accessibility, security research, archiving, and competition.
EFF appealed the decision, the first-ever appeal in W3C history, which concluded last week with a deeply divided membership. 58.4% of the group voted to go on with publication, and the W3C did so today, an unprecedented move in a body that has always operated on consensus and compromise. In their public statements about the standard, the W3C executive repeatedly said that they didn’t think the DRM advocates would be willing to compromise, and in the absence of such willingness, the exec have given them everything they demande
The New York Times, Paul Mozur, Mark Scott and Mike Isaac
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Populous, developing countries like Vietnam are where the company is looking to add its next billion customers — and to bolster its ad business. Facebook’s promise to Vietnam helped the social media giant placate a government that had called on local companies not to advertise on foreign sites like Facebook, and it remains a major marketing channel for businesses there.
The Coca Cola Company is the world’s largest beverage company selling more than 500 brands of soft drink to customers in over 200 countries. Every single day the world consumes more that 1.9 billion servings of their drinks including brands like Coca Cola (including Diet and Zero) as well as Fanta, Sprite, Dasani, Powerade, Schweppes, Minute Maid and others.
Of course, this also means that it generates mountains of data – from production and distribution to sales and customer feedback, the company relies of a solid data-driven strategy to inform business decisions at a strategic level.
The Computing Research Association (CRA) has just released a supplement to their 2016 Taulbee Survey report. They now are collecting individual course data, which gives them more fine-grained numbers about who is entering the major, who is retained until mid-level, and who makes it to the upper-level. Previously, they mostly just had enrollment and graduation data. These new data give them new insights. For example, we are getting more women and URM in computing, but we are not retaining them all.
It’s all fine and good to sign a climate treaty, but how do you know whether a country is keeping its word? Track it from space. Researchers have shown that observations by Earth-orbiting instruments can be used to estimate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from individual power plants. NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2; artist’s concept above), which was launched in July 2014, was designed to monitor the movement of CO2 in and out of ecosystems worldwide. Despite the satellite’s generally broad focus, its sensors are able to measure CO2 concentrations in the air to within about 1 part per million in areas covering 3 square kilometers or less. When the team combined OCO-2 data from selected passes over certain power plants in the United States with computer models of how emissions plumes would disperse, its estimates of those plants’ emissions fell within 17% of the actual amounts those facilities reported for those days, the researchers report this week in Geophysical Research Letters. OCO-2, by itself, returns to view any particular spot on Earth only once every 16 days. But a handful of satellites circling Earth in low-Earth, geostationary, and highly elliptical orbits would likely provide the capability to monitor CO2 emissions from mid- and large-sized power plants, the researchers say.
MIT News, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
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[David] Simchi-Levi developed a machine-learning algorithm, which won the INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Practice Award, and first implemented it at online retailer Rue La La.
The initial research goal was to reduce inventory, but what the company ended up with was “a cutting-edge, demand-shaping application that has a tremendous impact on the retailer’s bottom line,” Simchi-Levi says.
Rue La La’s big challenge was pricing on items that have never been sold before and therefore required a pricing algorithm that could set higher prices for some first-time items and lower prices for others.
Within six months of implementing the algorithm, it increased Rue La La’s revenue by 10 percent.
Santa Clara, CA November 3-4. “We are bringing the leaders in applied AI from companies to share with you the latest advances in deep learning products.” [$$$]
Mathematical Sciences Research Institute invites the submission of proposals for Research Programs, Hot Topics Workshops, and Summer Graduate Schools. Proposals should be submitted before October 15, 2017.
“At Khan Academy, (nearly) every piece of code that goes into our codebase has been reviewed by at least one other person. Code reviews help us keep code maintainable and clean, catch big-picture issues early, build a shared understanding of the codebase, and socialize new engineers. To learn more about our code review beliefs and practices, check out some oft-cited blog posts here and here.”
Recently I gave a talk at PyData Seattle about how to ramp up your data science skills by borrowing tips and tricks from the developer community. These suggestions will help you become a more proficient data scientist who is loved by your team members and stakeholders.
We are pleased to announce CoffeeScript 2! This new release of the CoffeeScript language and compiler aims to bring CoffeeScript into the modern JavaScript era, closing gaps in compatibility with JavaScript while preserving the clean syntax that is CoffeeScript’s hallmark.
