Along with billionaire Nike cofounder Phil Knight (MBA ’62), [John Hennessy] is in the process of creating a template for what some see as the future of higher education and leadership: an interdisciplinary intellectual home that stresses collaboration.
Launching for the 2018-2019 academic year with plans for a $750 million endowment, Knight-Hennessy Scholars will be the largest fully endowed scholars program in the world. That number will fully fund the first three years of graduate education (from MBA or JD to MD or PhD – tuition plus living and academic stipend) for the up to 100 students in the program annually. Those students whose degree requirements go past three years will be funded by their departments.
The point? To cultivate a new generation of leaders across disciplines who can “creatively address the world’s thorniest problems.”
University of Southern California, Viterbi School of Engineering
from
It turns out, Mom was right: Spending more time studying, and less time partying, will lead to greater academic success. But according to a new study by USC computer scientists, hitting the books and avoiding all-nighters will also make you happier.
Using computational methods and machine learning algorithms, the researchers from USC Viterbi’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) combed through sensor data collected from student volunteers to discover hidden trends in wellbeing, academic performance and behavior.
While it may come as no surprise that students who spent more time at the library and practiced healthy sleep habits performed better academically, the researchers found these students also reported greater overall life satisfaction.
“This could imply that happiness and wellness are correlated with performance and engagement,” said lead author Homa Hosseinmardi, an ISI postdoctoral research associate who specializes in computational social science and mathematical modeling.
Warning artificial intelligence will revolutionize warfare, a key House lawmaker has opened the pod bay doors to legislation aimed at preparing for the threat posed by intelligent machines.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, introduced legislation on AI Wednesday, which she hopes to add into this year’s defense policy bill. Her bill would develop a commission to review advances in AI, identify the nation’s AI needs and make recommendations to organize the federal government for the threat.
Stefanik’s legislation comes as U.S. officials are increasingly worried about China making a major government-led push on AI, and it lines up with calls from the military AI space for America to launch an all-of-government approach to the problem. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told lawmakers last month that AI is making him question what impact AI will have on the nature of war, and the Pentagon plans to increase AI-related investments over the next two years.
Last week, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) imposed unusual new requirements on researchers based at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who receive federal funds. The changes are a response to concerns over how the institution handled recent cases involving research misconduct and grant management.
According to a Duke spokesperson, NIH now requires Duke researchers to obtain prior approval for any modifications to new and existing grants. And any Duke researcher submitting a so-called “modular application” for a grant worth less than $250,000 per year must include “detailed budgets” justifying the costs.
University Data Science News
Three biomedical researchers from Stanford have proposed the u-index. Similar to the h-index for publications, the u-index tracks use of software tools and datasets. So far, they have created u-index scores for tools in medicine, biology, bioinformatics, and medical informatics drawing largely on PubMed. Giving creators credit for the software used in science is necessary to increase the production value and career trajectory of scientific software creators. I’d love to hear what readers think about modeling this u-index on the h-index.
An Iranian team of nine men known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corpsallegedly hacked data from “7998 professors at 320 universities around the world over the past 5 years” according to an indictment filed in the Southern District of New York, (one of the nation’s highest profile legal districts). Targets included universities in Australia, Canada, China, the UK, and 17 other countries as well as the UN and five US federal agencies. The indictment speculates that the hackers were interested in obtaining intellectual property from “the nation’s brightest minds.” They apparently sold the data.
Mehdi Bennis at the University of Oulu in Finland explains that on-device AI is better from a privacy perspective (because sensitive data can be stored locally), and it will converge with 5G technology to overcome some of the challenges associated with federated learning where each device only has access to a small amount of training data. This is technical news of vast importance given the many, many products and social problems that revolve around data sharing.
A new survey of UK and Canadian PhD holders found that 30% of PhD holders in the UK who are working full- or part-time 3.5 years after receiving their PhDs are in academia. In Canada, there was a higher unemployment rate for PhD holders (5.1% compared to 2% in the UK), and 23% of respondents had tenure or tenure-track positions. The survey asked people how satisfied they were with their jobs and found that 95% of the Canadians were at least “somewhat satisfied” with their careers, assuaging fears about leaving academe.
The Gauss Center for Supercomputing hosted a team of astrophysicists from top research universities in the US and Europe at its Bonn facility. They created the largest simulation of galaxy formation ever. It included better models of magnetic fields, leading to enhanced understanding of star formation and black holes.
One of the things I like about academia is that it tends to be ahead of the news cycle. That’s true this week in a post about faked audio and video content by Giorgio Patrini of the DELTA lab at the University of Amsterdam and his colleagues Simone Lini, Hamish Ivey-Law and Morten Dahl. If you’re worried about fake news, pay attention to the next big fakeness: video and audio. Why? In their words, “the meaning of evidence and trust will be critically challenged and pillars of the modern society such as information, justice and democracy will be shaken up and go through a period of crisis. Once tools for fabrication become a commodity, the effects will be more dramatic than the current phenomenon of fake news. In tech circles the issue are discussed only at a philosophical level; no clear solution is known at present time.” They have run a few initial experiments that map the new fake-detection territory that they explain in detail.
There is a new chapter in the reproducibility crisis, finely chronicled by Pete Warden, a current Google engineer and open source contributor, also a former start-up CTO. Warden does a fantastic job of using plain language to explain why machine learning projects are so hard to reproduce. Hint: It’s not laziness. I highly recommend using this in your classes, for those of you who teach.
There’s a new operating system for chemistry labs – ChemOS – that is designed to accelerate all sorts of chemical experimentation through machine learning, according to Alan Asuru-Guzik of Harvard. It can make cocktails suitable for happy hour. Finally, the AI application so many of us have been waiting for.
Former Stanford President, John Hennessy, partnered with Nike founder Phil Knight to create the Knight-Hennessy fellowships that will fund the first three years of graduate education for 100 students.
The FDA has launched a free mobile app version of its Drugs@FDA online database that offers consumers information on agency-approved drugs. The new app, called Drugs@FDA Express, is free and currently available for download on iOS and Android.
“The FDA is continuously seeking ways to bring information to consumers in more accessible formats,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said in a statement. “Today, with the launch of the Drugs@FDA Express mobile app, we’re bringing the public important information about drugs in an easy-to-use, mobile format. We hope that by making this important health information more easily accessible we can help empower patients and providers in making their treatment decisions.”
The masterminds behind a new artificially-intelligent soccer chatbot that will provide game updates and detailed player statistics for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia say their technology may one-day replace traditional TV commentators.
In what Beijing-based artificial intelligence company Cubee Technology is calling the world’s first AI-driven football [soccer] chatbot, the product, named AIBALL, uses natural language processing and deep learning to understand fan questions and to grow more intelligent over time.
AIBALL, which will be available via iOS and Android apps, will answer a variety of soccer-related questions, ranging from explaining the rules of the game to detailed stats and anecdotes about players.
Facebook has responded to this and other reports regarding the collection of call and SMS data with a blog post that denies Facebook collected call data surreptitiously. The company also writes that it never sells the data and that users are in control of the data uploaded to Facebook. This “fact check” contradicts several details Ars found in analysis of Facebook data downloads and testimony from users who provided the data. More on the Facebook response is appended to the end of the original article below.
This past week, a New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years’ worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.
NASA’s science programs get a big boost in the 2018 spending bill approved by Congress this week, allowing researchers to continue developing an orbiter and lander to study Jupiter’s moon Europa and robot probes to return soil samples from Mars.
Scientists were giddy over the 7.9% boost, to $6.2 billion, given to NASA’s science account. Within that total, the agency’s planetary science coffers get an even bigger raise, a 20.7% increase to $2.2 billion, the highest level ever after adjusting for inflation and programmatic changes over the years.
The agency’s earth science programs will receive flat funding at $1.9 million, while heliophysics gets an increase of 1.5%, to $688 million. Astrophysics is a big winner, with a surge of 13.3%, to $850 million. Lawmakers also saved NASA’s education programs, which the White House sought to begin closing down.
Longtime AIDS researcher Dr. Robert Redfield will be the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday.
Redfield, 66, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and a co-founder of the Institute for Human Virology, succeeds Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, a former commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health who resigned in January because of financial conflicts of interest. The position does not require Congressional approval.
University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences
from
The Data Science in Libraries Project is funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and led by Matt Burton and Liz Lyon, School of Computing & Information, University of Pittsburgh; Chris Erdmann, North Carolina State University; and Bonnie Tijerina, Data & Society. The project explores the challenges associated with implementing data science within diverse library environments by examining two specific perspectives framed as ‘the skills gap,’ i.e. where librarians are perceived to lack the technical skills to be effective in a data-rich research environment; and ‘the management gap,’ i.e. the ability of library managers to understand and value the benefits of in-house data science skills and to provide organizational and managerial support.
This report primarily presents a synthesis of the discussions, findings, and reflections from an international, two-day workshop held in May 2017 in Pittsburgh, where community members participated in a program with speakers, group discussions, and activities to drill down into the challenges of successfully implementing data science in libraries. Participants came from funding organizations, academic and public libraries, nonprofits, and commercial organizations with most of the discussions focusing on academic libraries and library schools.
London, England May 3, starting at 5:30 p.m. Debate participants come from Imperial College Data Science Institute and The Economist. [free, registration required]
Cleveland, OH April 30-May 1 at the HIMSS Innovation Center. “A new joint initiative of Health 2.0 and HIMSS, the Dev4Health Conference has been created by innovators for innovators to bring together hundreds of developers, innovator leaders, designers, and tech enthusiasts to share and accelerate new ideas to enable healthier communities through hands-on demonstrations, education, and networking.” [$$$]
London, England April 17-19. “The two-and-a-half day event will boast four computational social science challenges set by Facebook Research, GitHub, and LSE Social and Economic Data Science.” [free, registration required, space is limited]
Dublin, Ireland May 30-June 1 at University College Dublin. “CarpentryCon 2018 is the key community-building and networking event in The Carpentries’ annual calendar of activities.” [$$$]
New York, NY March 27 at Columbia University. “Learn how the Hub has grown over the past year, including updates on new cross-sector initiatives, lightning talks from our Big Data Spokes, and opportunities to collaborate with our stakeholders in breakout sessions on data literacy, ethics, and health.” [free, registration required]
This is a month-long cricket hackathon sponsored by Analytics Vidhya. The predictions will be made for the league stage matches. The competition will end just before the IPL begins on April 7.
“These are the number of paper submissions and acceptances for various CS-related conferences over time, including from AI, ML, HCI, NLP, Vision, Databases, and Data Mining, Web, and IR. Y-axis is a log scale, so acceptance rate corresponds to the vertical space between dots.”
“In July 2017, my team in the Design Lab at UC San Diego scraped and analyzed over 1 million Jupyter Notebooks from GitHub. Today I am excited to announce we are making these data publicly available for you to explore! While only a snapshot of one corner of the Jupyter universe, these data provide unique perspective into how people use and share Jupyter Notebooks.”
Last week, I wrote a blog post emphasizing the distinction between the social internet and social media. The former describes the internet’s ability to enable connection, learning, and expression. The latter describes the attempt of a small number of large companies to monetize these capabilities inside walled-garden, monopoly platforms.
My argument is that you can embrace the social internet without having to become a “gadget” inside the algorithmic attention economy machinations of the social media conglomerates. As noted previously, I think this is the right answer for those who are fed up with the dehumanizing aspects of social media, but are reluctant to give up altogether on the potential of the internet to bring people together.
The key follow up question, of course, is how to fruitfully engage with the social internet outside the convenient confines of social media. In my last post I pointed toward one possibility: the development of open social protocols that support the network effect usefulness of large social networks without a centralized company in charge.
This solution, however, requires that you wait for others to make progress on a somewhat complicated technological agenda.