No matter their skill level when they enter the class, students will leave the Data Challenge Lab at Stanford University after 10 weeks with the confidence to tackle even the most unwieldy data.
“The class has no prerequisites. We have students from a very wide variety of majors and all seven schools,” said Bill Behrman, PhD ’98, course instructor and director of the Stanford Data Lab. “By the end of the quarter, we give them the same raw data and challenges as Pulitzer-prize winning journalists and a Nobel-prize winning economist.”
A team of researchers from the University of Maryland have used machine learning to accurately predict the future state of a chaotic system that extends far beyond the scope of what has been historically possible. The series of results were reported in Physical Review Letters and Chaos, where the team, led by chaos theory pioneer Edward Ott, employed advances in the machine learning area – the same application recently used to successfully advance artificial intelligence. The method is called ‘reservoir computing’ and experts are calling the technique ‘groundbreaking’, with high hopes for widespread application.
Most participants in clinical trials believe the benefits of broadly sharing person-level data outweigh the risks, according to a new study by Stanford University researchers.
And despite low levels of trust in pharmaceutical companies, most of those who take part in clinical trials are willing to share their data with drug firms, the researchers found.
The study was published in the June 7 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. The lead author is Michelle Mello, JD, PhD, professor of law and of health research and policy. Steven Goodman, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and of health research and policy, is the senior author.
The National Cancer Institute’s Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice (NCI-MATCH) trial, the largest precision medicine trial of its kind, has released results from several sub-studies that could bring targeted treatments to patients with certain gene abnormalities, no matter their cancer type.
Findings from three sub-studies were released at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) annual meeting in Chicago this year, adding to results released from one sub-study in November of 2017.
NCI of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group of the NCI-sponsored National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN) developed the study.
MIT News, School of Architecture and Planning and School of Engineering
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Urban settlements and technology around the world are co-evolving as flows of population, finance, and politics are reshaping the very identity of cities and nations. Rapid and profound changes are driven by pervasive sensing, the growth and availability of continuous data streams, advanced analytics, interactive communications and social networks, and distributed intelligence. At MIT, urban planners and computer scientists are embracing these exciting new developments.
The rise of autonomous vehicles, sensor-enabled self-management of natural resources, cybersecurity for critical infrastructure, biometric identity, the sharing or gig economy, and continuous public engagement opportunities through social networks and data and visualization are a few of the elements that are converging to shape our places of living.
In recognition of this convergence and the rise of a new discipline bringing together the Institute’s existing programs in urban planning and computer science, the MIT faculty approved a new undergraduate degree, the bachelor of science in urban science and planning with computer science (Course 11-6), at its May 16 meeting.
Microsoft’s underwater data center initiative, Project Natick, has taken the next step towards commercialization, with a new test installing a small data center in the North Sea.
The company has submerged a shipping container-sized prototype data center off of the coast of the Orkney Islands, Scotland, with the sea’s naturally icy waters expected to provide more than enough cooling for the system.
For the longest time, chips were a little bit boring. But the revolution in deep learning has now opened the market for startups that build specialty chips to accelerate deep learning and model evaluation. Among those is Israel-based Hailo, which is building deep learning chips for embedded devices. The company today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A round.
Investors include Israeli crowdfunding platform OurCrowd, Maniv Mobility, Next Gear, and a number of angel investors, including Hailo’s own chairman Zohar Zisapel and Delek Motors’ Gil Agmon.
Hailo tells me that it will use the new round, which brings its total funding to $16 million, to further develop its deep learning processors.
The Wharton School and the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania today announced the launch of The Ripple Project at Penn. This joint-school effort is supported by the blockchain-based global payments leader Ripple under its just-announced University Blockchain Research Initiative. The goal of this strategic collaboration is to support academic research, technical development, and innovation in blockchain, cryptocurrency, and distributed ledger technology.
Ripple’s financial donation to the University will support cross-disciplinary faculty research, financial aid for graduate students, and a broad range of educational programs. The Ripple Project will enable faculty research at both Wharton and Penn Engineering to unlock the full potential of blockchain to inform the creation of truly valuable solutions in the marketplace.
Donald Trump’s chief technology advisor, Michael Kratsios, said today that the US government would release any data that might help fuel AI research in the United States, although he didn’t specify immediately what kind of data would be released or who would be eligible to receive the information.
Speaking at EmTech Next, a conference held at MIT, Kratsios, who is deputy assistant to the president and deputy US chief technology officer, said the government is looking for ways to open up federal data to AI researchers. “Anything that we can do to unlock government data, we’re committed to,” Kratsios told MIT Technology Review. “We’d love to hear from any academic that has any insights.”
Data has been a key factor behind recent advances in artificial intelligence. For example, better voice recognition and image processing have been contingent on the availability of huge quantities of training data. The government has access to large amounts of data, and it’s possible that it could be used to train innovative algorithms to do new things. “Anything we can do to figure that out, we will work very hard on,” Kratsios added.
[Bobby] Kasthuri, a neuroscientist at Argonne National Laboratory, is one of many scientists whose research will use a new supercomputer the lab is building, which is scheduled to be deployed by 2021. The computer, called Aurora 21, will run one quintillion operations in parallel—a billion billion calculations—putting it on par with the processing power of the human brain. For the U.S., which has lagged behind China in an intensifying supercomputing race since 2013, this milestone—exascale computing power—is both a national status symbol and a scientific game-changer.
The demands for a simulation of the brain are immense, and just building a computer like Aurora 21 is a massive undertaking. The finished computer is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It will occupy around a quarter-acre, have thousands of miles of wiring, and, if supercomputer trends continue, draw as much electricity as a medium-sized city.
Aurora 21 is designed for more than just simulating our brains. It will be able to perform computationally demanding simulations for tasks as diverse as predicting the weather, tracing the evolution of the cosmos, and understanding how new medicines will interact with the human body.
The number of colleges that require applicants to complete the timed-essay portion of college admission tests is dwindling.
On Friday, Yale University said applicants will no longer be required to submit an essay score from the SAT or the ACT. The policy will take effect for rising high school seniors who seek to enter the university’s Class of 2023. Yale’s action comes weeks after Harvard University and Dartmouth College dropped the requirement.
In recent years many states, counties and cities have funded SAT and ACT testing during the school day in public schools, making the exams free for students. Sometimes, those testing programs include the optional essay sections, but sometimes they don’t. That produces a quandary for students who might be thinking about whether to apply to colleges that require the essay: Should they have to take the test all over again just to get an essay score?
Business Secretary Greg Clark has today launched the £103m Rosalind Franklin Institute (RFI), a national centre of excellence that will harness disruptive technologies such as AI and robotics to improve dramatically our understanding of biology.
Spotify really does want to make its own hardware: The company registered with the FCC Tuesday, a key prerequisite to getting devices approved for use in the U.S. Previous reports pointed to plans for an in-car device, capable of bringing Spotify streams to older vehicles.
A Spotify spokesperson declined to comment.
Tuesday’s FCC registration gives the company a so-called grantee code, which in Spotify’s case is 2AP3D. As a grantee, Spotify can file to have devices that use wireless networking approved by the FCC, something it needs to do before it can sell any hardware to U.S. consumers.
PR Newswire, Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA)
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As Singapore develops its digital economy, a trusted ecosystem is key, where industries can benefit from innovations in technology while consumer confidence and understanding can be assured. It is thus timely to proactively discuss and address ethical issues that may arise from the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data, as new business models and innovations rapidly develop in the emergent AI space.
In order to drive awareness of the benefits and understand the challenges of AI (such as on ethics[1] and legal issues), IMDA is engaging key stakeholders including government, industry, consumers and academia to collaboratively shape the Government’s plans for the AI ecosystem. Such discourse will inform the Government’s ongoing plans to support Singapore as a hub for AI development and innovation, and help Singapore to effectively respond to global developments.
With Vector Institute co-founder Richard Zemel joining as an advisor, integrate.AI is hoping to position itself as a leader in ethical AI.
integrate.AI helps large B2C enterprises use AI to comb through social media, alternative data, and first-party data to personalize experiences with customers. The company—which has been outspoken about the need for businesses to think about social good in the past—will use Zemel’s expertise to explore privacy and fairness in AI, while the Vector Institute has the opportunity to test their research with enterprises.
New York, NY June 13 starting at 4 p.m. “Data & Society invites you to our annual Fellows Talks, a three-part final showcase of interdisciplinary connections and provocative questions from our 2017-2018 fellows.” [rsvp required]
Stanford, CA August 22. “The AiMIE (Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Inclusion & Equity) Symposium recognizes and seeks to explore how AI and technology can help address the deeper problems of access and inequity in healthcare.” [$$$]
London, England August 19. “The KDD Deep Learning Day provides a single big plenary schedule with exciting invited speakers and leaders from both academia and industry, paper spotlight presentations, and a poster session. We wish to exchange ideas on recent approaches to the challenges related to deep structures, identify emerging fields of applications for such techniques, and provide opportunities for relevant interdisciplinary research or projects.” Deadline for submissions is July 1.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates October 22-24. Hosted by Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Authority, of United Arab Emirates with support from the Statistics Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, under the guidance of the United Nations Statistical Commission and the High-level Group for Partnership, Coordination and Capacity-Building for Statistics for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Deadline for registration is July 31.
Registration to join the challenge will take place through Challenge.gov. You can find the challenge details and rules at that site. From the Challenge.gov webpage, participants will be directed to register with the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Registration closes on August 6, 2018.
Research and cultural heritage institutions are facing increasing costs to provide long-term public access to historically valuable collections of scientific data, born-digital records, and other digital artifacts. With many institutions moving data to cloud services, data sharing and access costs have become more complex.
As leading institutions in decentralization and data preservation, the Internet Archive (IA), Code for Science & Society (CSS) and California Digital Library (CDL) will work together on a proof-of-concept pilot project to demonstrate how decentralized technology could bolster existing institutional infrastructure and provide new tools for efficient data management and preservation. Using the Dat Protocol (developed by CSS), this project aims to test the feasibility of a decentralized network as a new option for organizations to archive and monitor their digital assets.
I attended CHI 2018, an international conference of Human-Computer Interaction, to present BubbleView. There were a lot of visualization papers this year. I collected the papers here for those who want to keep them up to date about visualization research happening at CHI. I categorized the papers by session names.