Element AI has the pedigree to push the boundaries of what is possible with the technology. The question is whether it can accomplish that without becoming what it despises.
On Father’s Day, Alex Gil was IMing with his colleague Manan Ahmed when they decided they had to do something about children being separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border.
Since May, the US government had taken more than 2,300 kids away from their families as a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ new “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which calls for criminally prosecuting all people entering the country illegally. Reports started surfacing of the ensuing chaos at the border; in one especially horrible case, a child was reportedly ripped from her mother’s breast. As outrage grew, the question came up over and over again: Where were the children? Between the ad-hoc implementation of “zero tolerance” and the opaque bureaucracy of the immigration system in general, migrant advocates, journalists, and even politicians struggled to find clear answers.
Gil, a father of two, knew they could be useful. As the digital scholarship librarian at Columbia University, Gil’s job is to use technology to help people find information—skills he had put to use in times of crisis before.
Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC today announced the opening of JLABS @ NYC. The 30,000-square foot facility, located at the New York Genome Center in the heart of SoHo, is a collaboration between Johnson & Johnson Innovation, New York State and the New York Genome Center. JLABS @ NYC can accommodate up to 30 biotech, pharmaceutical, medical device, consumer and health tech companies and opens with 26 resident companies, including the four winners of the JLABS @ NYC QuickFire Challenge.
“Johnson & Johnson has deep entrepreneurial roots in New York and we are pleased to see our unique JLABS model applied in this rich ecosystem to foster the creation of new healthcare innovations that have the potential to change the trajectory of health for humanity,” said Paul Stoffels, M.D., Chief Scientific Officer, Johnson & Johnson. “Expanding our JLABS network to NYC will link entrepreneurs around the region with Johnson & Johnson Innovation experts, allowing some of the brightest minds in healthcare to work collaboratively in a shared space.”
WHETHER to get a promotion or merely a foot in the door, academics have long known that they must publish papers, typically the more the better. Tallying scholarly publications to evaluate their authors has been common since the invention of scientific journals in the 17th century. So, too, has the practice of journal editors asking independent, usually anonymous, experts to scrutinise manuscripts and reject those deemed flawed—a quality-control process now known as peer review. Of late, however, this habit of according importance to papers labelled as “peer reviewed” has become something of a gamble. A rising number of journals that claim to review submissions in this way do not bother to do so. Not coincidentally, this seems to be leading some academics to inflate their publication lists with papers that might not pass such scrutiny.
Experts debate how many journals falsely claim to engage in peer review. Cabells, an analytics firm in Texas, has compiled a blacklist of those which it believes are guilty. According to Kathleen Berryman, who is in charge of this list, the firm employs 65 criteria to determine whether a journal should go on it—though she is reluctant to go into details. Cabells’ list now totals around 8,700 journals, up from a bit over 4,000 a year ago. Another list, which grew to around 12,000 journals, was compiled until recently by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado. Using Mr Beall’s list, Bo-Christer Björk, an information scientist at the Hanken School of Economics, in Helsinki, estimates that the number of articles published in questionable journals has ballooned from about 53,000 a year in 2010 to more than 400,000 today. He estimates that 6% of academic papers by researchers in America appear in such journals.
With a dragnet closing in, engineers at a Taiwanese chip maker holding American secrets did their best to conceal a daring case of corporate espionage.
As the police raided their offices, human resources workers gave the engineers a warning to scramble and get rid of the evidence. USB drives, laptops and documents were handed to a lower-level employee, who hid them in her locker. Then she walked one engineer’s phone out the front door.
What those devices contained was more valuable than gold or jewels: designs from an American company, Micron Technology, for microchips that have helped power the global digital revolution. According to the Taiwanese authorities, the designs were bound for China, where they would help a new, $5.7 billion microchip factory the size of several airplane hangars rumble into production.
China has ambitious plans to overhaul its economy and compete head to head with the United States and other nations in the technology of tomorrow. The heist of the designs two years ago and the raids last year, which were described by Micron in court filings and the police in Taiwan, represent the dark side of that effort — and explain in part why the United States is starting a trade war with China.
Reliable, low-cost sensors and the data they generate are enabling companies to monitor facilities of all kinds for leaks, malfunctions and other wasteful emissions around the clock, instead of every now and then. As this technology continues to emerge, it raises the bar for everybody. In the face of rising expectations about corporate responsibility on climate, best practices should soon become standard practice, and doing nothing simply won’t be an option anymore.
It’s all part of an incredibly powerful wave of innovation changing the way we solve environmental problems, giving both business and advocates like us new ways to drive progress. We call this Fourth Wave environmentalism – it supercharges the kind of partnerships Environmental Defense Fund is known for.
The defining divide in American politics is probably between Republicans and Democrats. It encapsulates all our other divides — by race, education, religion and more — and it’s growing.
This partisan divide is such a big part of people’s political identities, in fact, that it’s reinforced simply by “negative partisanship,” or loyalty to a party because you don’t like the other party. A Pew Research Center poll from last year found that about 40 percent of both Democrats and Republicans belong to their party because they oppose the other party’s values, rather than because they are particularly aligned with their own party.
But what if Americans’ views of the parties, particularly whichever one they don’t belong to, are, well, kind of wrong? That’s the argument of a study by scholars Douglas Ahler and Gaurav Sood that was recently published in The Journal of Politics. They had the polling firm YouGov ask American adults to estimate the size of groups in each party. For example, what percentage of Democrats are black, or lesbian, gay or bisexual? What percentage of Republicans earn more than $250,000 a year, or are age 65 or older?
What they found was that Americans overall are fairly misinformed about who is in each major party — and that members of each party are even more misinformed about who is in the other party.
The New York Times, Sheera Frenkel and Matthew Rosenberg
from
Eight of the tech industry’s most influential companies, in anticipation of a repeat of the Russian meddling that occurred during the 2016 presidential campaign, met with United States intelligence officials last month to discuss preparations for this year’s midterm elections.
The meeting, which took place May 23 at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., was also attended by representatives from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oath, Snap and Twitter, according to three attendees of the meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity because of its sensitive nature.
The company officials met with Christopher Krebs, an under secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, as well as a representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s newly formed “foreign influence” task force.
For decades, America’s satellites had circled Earth at a largely safe remove from the vicissitudes of geopolitics. An informal global moratorium on the testing of anti-satellite weapons had held since 1985; the intervening decades had been a period of post–Cold War peace—and unquestioned American supremacy—high overhead. During those decades, satellites had become linchpins of the American military apparatus and the global economy. By 2007, ships at sea and warplanes in the air had grown reliant on instant satellite communications with ground stations thousands of miles away. Government forecasters relied on weather satellites; intelligence analysts relied on high-resolution imagery to anticipate and track adversaries the world over. GPS had become perhaps the single most indispensable global system ever designed by humans—the infrastructure upon which the rest of the world’s infrastructure is based. (Fourteen of the 16 infrastructure sectors designated as critical by the Department of Homeland Security, like energy and financial services, rely on GPS for their operation.)
Now, Shelton feared, all those satellites overhead had become so many huge, unarmored, billion-dollar sitting ducks.
Last fall, Reveal asked the largest tech companies based in Silicon Valley to share their one-page, federally mandated forms, known as EEO-1 reports.
After Reveal’s initial report, Slack and PayPal released their EEO-1 reports for the first time. Reveal obtained forms from electronics manufacturer Sanmina and data services firm NetApp through Freedom of Information Act requests. Besides Facebook, some other tech giants – including Google, Apple and Intel – regularly publish theirs.
In all, the data is public for only 26 firms for 2016.
But a collaboration between Reveal and the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst offers the most detailed picture ever of the entire field and allows those that are public to be compared with all their peers. The equity center, after a confidentiality review by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, provided Reveal with anonymized statistics for 177 companies. Reveal and the equity center then independently analyzed the data.
Urban science is a budding discipline that has exploded over the past half-decade, and multidisciplinary programs have cropped up at mostly private institutions like New York University, Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and Carnegie Mellon. In some places, it goes by “urban informatics,” in some, “spatial science,” but taken together, these departments ask: What can researchers glean from all this new data? What can’t they? And how much can that new knowledge really improve people’s lives?
Those in charge of the MIT program, officially a collaboration between the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, don’t necessarily envision their students as future city planners. They want to attract kids who might otherwise go straight to the sciences, but who also want some context about where the numbers go once they’ve organized, cleaned, and crunched them.
IBM, a venerable tech company on a mission to stay relevant, has staked much of its future on IBM Watson. The company has touted Watson, its flagship artificial intelligence, as the premier product for turning our data-rich but disorganized world into a smart and tidy planet.
Just last month, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty told a convention audience that we’re at an inflection point in history. Putting AI into everything will enable businesses to improve on “an exponential curve,” she said—a phenomenon that might one day be referred to as “Watson’s Law.”
But according to engineers swept up in a major round of layoffs within IBM’s Watson division last month, the company’s promotions of its “cognitive computing” platform mask its own real difficulties in turning its AI into a profitable business.
New York, NY September 11. “A new day of data-meets-finance talks, tailored for Strata Data Conference events in the world’s financial hubs. Bringing together bankers, analysts, entrepreneurs, financiers, and technologists, it’s a can’t-miss day for anyone working in the financial sector.” [$$$]
“We are interested in what our membership considers important issues for attention over the next three years. The SIGCHI Grand Challenges call is an opportunity for you to voice your concerns right to the EC and for us to respond through investigation or form a new committee to address it.”
“From a continuing professional development perspective, there is no better way for health information and technology professionals, from early careerists to advanced executives and everyone in between, to share one’s expertise by submitting an idea to the HIMSS19 Call for Proposals.” Deadline for submissions is July 16.
For years, GitHub has been free to individual students and teachers for classroom use. Now, we’re making it possible for schools of all types and sizes to adopt GitHub and our education offerings in a single bundle through GitHub Education.
GitHub Education includes access to GitHub, an ever-growing suite of developer tools in the Student Developer Pack, workflows for teachers in GitHub Classroom, and training through Campus Experts and Campus Advisors.
Now we are putting all of these tools and programs together—along with free access to our Business Plan and GitHub Enterprise, so your entire school can get on board at no cost.
In this blog post, we dive into the world of wild yeast (commonly known as sourdough starter) by tracking its growth through timelapses, automated image analysis, and cool graph animations. Read on to find out more!