Science is becoming increasingly driven by advanced technologies that are fundamentally changing the way research is conducted. But too often, the experts developing the technologies and the scientists interpreting the data these technologies produce are separated in different university departments, organizations, or even industries.
To create a central hub where mathematicians, engineers, and biologists can work closely together, the Gladstone Institutes is launching the new Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology. The institute will increase collaboration between those who develop and those who use biomedical technologies among Gladstone and its partners in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, including UC San Francisco (UCSF) and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, and throughout the Bay Area.
China wants to become a country of innovation, and lead the world in artificial intelligence in 2030. By one indicator, it’s on its way.
China is outdoing the US in some kinds of AI-related intellectual property, according to a report published in mid-February by US business research firm CB Insights. The number of patents with the words “artificial intelligence” and “deep learning” published in China has grown faster than those published in the US, particularly in 2017, the firm found. Publication is a step that comes after applications are filed but before a patent is granted. The firm looked at data from the European patent office.
When it comes to deep learning—an advanced subset of machine learning, which uses algorithms to identify complex patterns in large amounts of data—China has six times more patent publications than the US, noted the report (pdf, p.7).
Science; Santo Fortunato, Carl T. Bergstrom, Katy Börner, James A. Evans, Dirk Helbing, Staša Milojević, Alexander M. Petersen, Filippo Radicchi, Roberta Sinatra, Brian Uzzi, Alessandro Vespignani, Ludo Waltman, Dashun Wang, Albert-László Barabási
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The whys and wherefores of SciSci
The science of science (SciSci) is based on a transdisciplinary approach that uses large data sets to study the mechanisms underlying the doing of science—from the choice of a research problem to career trajectories and progress within a field. In a Review, Fortunato et al. explain that the underlying rationale is that with a deeper understanding of the precursors of impactful science, it will be possible to develop systems and policies that improve each scientist’s ability to succeed and enhance the prospects of science as a whole.
Two researchers from the Data Science Institute (DSI) have been awarded a Microsoft grant that gives them access to the company’s cloud-computing platform, Azure, and AI tools. They will use Microsoft’s tools to conduct ecological research in Puerto Rico, where they’re studying the effect of Hurricane Maria on El Yunque National Forest, the only tropical rainforest in the U.S. Forest System.
In September 2017, the hurricane left an unprecedented swath of destruction in the forest, felling thousands of trees. The researchers will call upon Microsoft’s machine-learning tools to analyze data regarding how tree species in the forest fared during the hurricane – which species withstood the winds and which didn’t – and how the topography of the forest protected some trees from wind damage. The 28,000-acre forest is home to some 240 tree species and thousands of plants.
It’s virtually impossible to survey a forest of that size using ground-based observations and “the human eye,” said Maria Uriarte, a professor of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia, one of the two researchers on the team. The Microsoft tools will help them analyze data generated from advanced imaging and remote-sensing technologies to create a clear portrait of the forest.
Nature Research Microbiology Community, Mick Watson
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The cow rumen is an under-characterised environment, with few rumen microbial genomes publicly available. What is the solution? Microbiome 2.0 will be characterised by building your own reference database, assembled from your own data!
The initial hype around bots — applications that run partly or entirely using natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision and other AI tech to help consumers ask and answer questions, buy things and get other stuff done — may have waned a bit, but a startup building the equivalent for the enterprise world, in a fast-growing field called robotic process automation, is seeing its star rise.
TechCrunch has learned that UiPath, a startup that builds ‘software robots’ for enterprises to help automate legacy and back-office functions, has raised a Series B round of funding that sources tell us is around $120 million — a round that will catapult it to a valuation of over $1 billion.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology research group that this week reported nearly three-quarters of Uber Technologies [UBER.UL] and Lyft Inc drivers earned below minimum wage is revisiting its study after a tweeted challenge by Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi.
University of Waterloo, Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute
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We are pleased to announce that the inaugural co-Directors of Waterloo.ai have been chosen. They are Prof. Fakhri Karray of the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering and Prof. Peter van Beek of the Cheriton School of Computer Science in the Faculty of Math.
“I realized I couldn’t write a function or a loop to generate a video as realistic as that,” he says. “It was a whole new way of programming computers, and I knew I had to learn more about it.”
Today, Zeiler is the founder and CEO of Clarifai, a company that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) techniques — including neural nets — in its mission to “understand every image and video to improve life.” In late January, Zeiler visited U of T Engineering as part of the Engineering Science Education Conference: a recording of his talk is available online.
Writer Tyler Irving sat down with Zeiler following his talk to learn more about his journey in AI and entrepreneurship.
For Roopa Vasudevan, an artist and coder whose recent work has focused on the U.S. political climate, a home base in China has been a safe haven of sorts: The 13-hour time difference between the East Coast of the United States and her location in Shanghai provides a temporal buffer that allows her to more methodically process the events emanating out of Washington, D.C.
“It’s very easy to compartmentalize—everything happens overnight,” says Vasudevan, an assistant arts professor at NYU Shanghai. She takes time to read the news during her morning, “allowing myself that hour to feel infuriated or scared” before proceeding into her own work day as America’s political scene goes to sleep.
California is about to learn a whole lot more about how water moves through its many diverse landscapes.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded a $2.2 million grant to the University of California to use remote sensors and drones to monitor hydrology across various landscapes. The subject areas will be the U.C.’s Natural Reserve System, a network of protected lands covering more than 750,000 acres and representing many habitat types in the state.
Called the California Heartbeat Initiative-Freshwater, the project will equip reserves with wireless sensor nodes to track weather, soil moisture, transpiration, and a host of other criteria. Each node, about the size of a thermos, is outfitted with a battery and solar panel. They communicate wirelessly with each other and a central computer. Drones will fly programmed routes with special cameras attached to monitor how vegetation changes with the climate.
Brooklyn, NY April 24-27. “This year’s summit focus is on overall 5G system design across the entire spectrum range, progress in 5G channel modeling and 5G regulatory aspects.” [invite only]
San Jose, CA March 26-29. “The premier AI and deep learning event, providing you with training, insights, and direct access to experts from NVIDIA and other leading organizations.” [$$$$]
You are invited to share your perspective in the wide world of coding. Help us gain insight into the work environments, tools, and compensation of practitioners in our diverse field. All responses are reported in aggregate to assure your anonymity.
Woods Hole, MA Directors: Gabriel Kreiman (Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School), Boris Katz (MIT) and Tomaso Poggio (MIT). Course Dates: August 9-30. Deadline for application is April 9.
“In a joint initiative with Google and Udacity, Bertelsmann, the international media, services and education company, is inviting the people 18 and older to apply for its ‘Udacity Data Science Scholarship Program,’ in which the company will provide 15,000 three-month Udacity online courses in descriptive statistics.” Deadline for applications is April 15.
“Facebook is pleased to invite the academic community to respond to this call for research proposals on low-resource Neural Machine Translation. Applicants for the grants will be expected to contribute to the field of low-resource NMT through research into novel, strongly performing models under low-resource training conditions and/or comparable corpora mining techniques for low-resource language pairs.” Deadline for applications is April 15.
“In Kaggle Datasets’ inaugural Data Science for Good challenge, Kiva is inviting the Kaggle community to help them build more localized models to estimate the poverty levels of residents in the regions where Kiva has active loans. Unlike traditional machine learning competitions with rigid evaluation criteria, participants will develop their own creative approaches to addressing the objective. Instead of making a prediction file as in a supervised machine learning problem, submissions in this challenge will take the form of Python and/or R data analyses using Kernels, Kaggle’s hosted Jupyter Notebooks-based workbench.” Deadline for submissions is May 15.
Vienna, Austria “The Conference on Natural Language Processing (“Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache”, KONVENS) has been held every second year since 1992. KONVENS 2018 will take place September 19–21.” Deadline for submissions is May 31.
“This browser extension redirects links to PDFs on ACM, arXiv, JMLR, NIPS, OpenReview and PMLR to an HTML index page, unless you clicked on the link from the hosting site.”
Open AI; Matthias Plappert, Marcin Andrychowicz, Alex Ray, Bob McGrew, Bowen Baker, Glenn Powell, Jonas Schneider, Josh Tobin, Maciek Chociej, Peter Welinder, Vikash Kumar & Wojciech Zaremba.
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We’re releasing eight simulated robotics environments and a Baselines implementation of Hindsight Experience Replay, all developed for our research over the past year. We’ve used these environments to train models which work on physical robots. We’re also releasing a set of requests for robotics research.
