As the publishing world continues to face new challenges amidst the shift to digital, news media and publishers are tasked with unlocking new opportunities. With online news consumption continuing to grow, it’s crucial that publishers take advantage of new technologies to sustain and grow their business. Machine learning yields tremendous value for media and can help them tackle the hardest problems: engaging readers, increasing profits, and making newsrooms more efficient. Google has a suite of machine learning tools and services that are easy to use—here are a few ways they can help newsrooms and reporters do their jobs
Numerous startups in the tech hub of Toronto say they have had steady, double-digit increases in job applications from the United States since last year’s presidential election. This is among the first concrete evidence that President Trump’s hard line on immigration may be impacting the global race to attract the best minds.
What they’re saying: “I’ve been in tech for over 20 years in Canada and in Silicon Valley, too. I’ve never seen candidates from the U.S. apply for Canadian positions from places like Silicon Valley,” Roy Pereira, the CEO of Zoom.ai, told Axios. “That’s never happened.”
The Governance Lab @ NYU, Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young
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The twenty-first century will be challenging on many fronts. From historically catastrophic natural disasters resulting from climate change to inequality to refugee and terrorism crises, it is clear that we need not only new solutions, but new insights and methods of arriving at solutions. Data, and the intelligence gained from it through advances in data science, is increasingly being seen as part of the answer. This report explores the premise that data—and in particular the vast stores of data and the unique analytical expertise held by social media companies—may indeed provide for a new type of intelligence that could help develop solutions to today’s challenges.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is pleased to release the Health Atlas mobile application (formally “Health Atlas by IHME”)- a mobile app, available on Android and Apple devices, that provides country-level statistics from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD).
“We’re putting it all together specifically for this crazy, interconnected world that we’re in to understand how these models can all be brought to bear to understand what it means to be accurate, what it means to be biased, and what it means to preserve privacy,” said project lead Lise Getoor, a professor of computer science at UCSC.
Another goal of the three-year initiative is to build educational materials that can help introduce young people to the key concepts and concerns involved in data science, Getoor said.
“There’s a real need to educate the public and students to be aware of even the most basic versions of bias,” she said.
Data can be biased in a number of ways, according to Abel Rodriguez, a professor of applied mathematics and statistics at UCSC and the project’s co-lead.
At Bloomberg’s 2017 Data for Good Exchange, the fourth annual conference exploring how data science can help solve problems for social good, a partnership was announced between Bloomberg, BrightHive and Data for Democracy to develop a code of ethics for data scientists from the ground up. Called the “Community Principles on Ethical Data Sharing (CPEDS),” this code of ethics will provide a set of guidelines about responsible data sharing and collaboration.
“When data scientists are entrusted with the most private and valuable data out there, the data science community must work to deserve the trust of those whose data we are holding,” said Gideon Mann, Bloomberg’s head of data science.
The Holberton School, which helps select students get potentially lucrative software engineering jobs, defers tuition charges until after graduation. Now, along with a few allies, it wants to help them defray the stratospheric cost of living in its home town of San Francisco as well.
Google, Accenture (acn, -0.96%), Scality, and CloudNow have ponied up $40,000 to help with that. Scality is a cloud storage company. CloudNow is a non-profit organization that aims to increase women’s participation in the tech industry. That aligns with Holberton’s goal of bringing more women and minorities into technology.
In this episode of the ARCHITECHT Show, data scientist extraordinaire Hilary Mason covers a wide range of topics, including her path from Bitly to Cloudera — where she’s now VP of research after the company acquired her applied research firm, Fast Forward Labs. Among other topics, Mason also discusses the state of AI readiness and adoption within large enterprises; the importance of getting “big data” pieces in place before jumping into AI; and who will actually do AI inside the companies that adopt it. [audio, 41:20]
Deep Genomics, an artificial intelligence-powered health startup co-founded by University of Toronto’s Brendan Frey, has raised US$13 million from a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
The startup, launched in 2015, combines artificial intelligence, or AI, and genomics research to help develop genetic medicines to treat a myriad of disorders – everything from autism to cancer.
Frey, a professor in U of T’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, told the Globe and Mail the cash raised through an equity investment by Khosla Ventures of Menlo Park, Calif. will be used to hire a range of scientific experts, doubling the firm’s current 20-person staff.
As the world’s most popular creation engine, Unity is at the crossroads between machine learning and gaming. It is critical to our mission to enable machine learning researchers with the most powerful training scenarios, and for us to give back to the gaming community by enabling them to utilize the latest machine learning technologies. As the first step in this endeavor, we are excited to introduce Unity Machine Learning Agents.
NIH is utilizing a multi-faceted approach to strengthen policies across the life cycle of a clinical trial, from development of the funding opportunity announcement (FOA), to the information collected in a grant application or contract proposal, to peer review of the application/proposal, and through to monitoring of the award. These actions include the implementation of new and more rigorous review criteria for evaluating clinical trial applications. Addressing these challenges will ensure the highest likelihood of translating research results into knowledge that will improve human health.
The Daily Progress (Charlottesville, VA), Ruth Serven
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On the Monday after the Aug. 12 Unite the Right rally, Phil Bourne was sitting in a meeting with other University of Virginia deans and institute directors. Even in the first few days after the clashes in Charlottesville, he said, campus leaders were beginning to recognize problems with their response to the violent white nationalist march on Grounds on Aug. 11.
“It was clear we hadn’t made as much out of social media as we could have,” he said. “So we started to wonder if there were ways to use social media and big data to handle these things in the future.”
Almost immediately, several faculty members and state agencies were interested in helping, he said.
Bourne is the director of the Data Science Institute, an interdisciplinary department that compiles large-scale data analysis, and he knew the project would be a good fit for his capstone students. Though it is just in its beginning stages, Bourne hopes the project will help the university and law enforcement accurately sort and promptly respond to information at future events.
Washington, DC The U.S. General Services Administration Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) team and the Advanced Technology Academic Research Center (ATARC) will host a DCOI Technology Resources Summit on November 20.
Eos; Shanan E. Peters, Ian Ross, John Czaplewski, Aimee Glassel, Jon Husson, Valerie Syverson, Andrew Zaffos, and Miron Livny
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“GeoDeepDive combines library science, computer science, and geoscience to dive into repositories of published text, tables, and figures and return valuable information.”
Internet Archive’s Third Eye project scans the lower thirds of TV screens, using OCR, or optical character recognition, to turn these fleeting missives into downloadable data ripe for analysis. At launch, Third Eye tracks BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, and contains more than four million chyrons captured in just over two weeks.