In what many consider a stunning revelation, it’s been reported that Apple Music actually has surpassed Spotify in paid subscribers in the United States. Apparently both gone past the 20 million mark, with Apple Music now slightly out in front.
If you’d have polled a group of music insiders about subscriber levels a year ago, few would have predicted that Apple would have overtaken Spotify so quickly. That said, it was reported by the Wall Street Journal at the beginning of the year that Apple Music’s growth rate in the U.S. was at 5%, compared to Spotify’s 2%.
Spotify wants to make it easier for artists and labels to put forward new music for playlist consideration.
The streaming giant has launched a new feature in beta, which improves the way content owners can reach out to Spotify’s editorial team with their unreleased tunes.
With this new rollout, Spotify for Artists account holders or label reps plugged into Spotify Analytics can log in, select an unreleased song for playlist consideration and hit submit.
Denmark’s reputation as one of the most proactive countries in the world in the fight against climate change took a heavy knock recently. Despite its reputation as a green energy pioneer, a Danish government memorandum obtained by newspaper Politiken suggests that the country’s carbon emissions are due to rise sharply, by as much as 10 percent between now and 2030. The potential culprits: Apple, Facebook, and Google, among others.
That’s because these tech companies are all either planning or building major data centers in the country. It’s estimated (if not confirmed) that Denmark will host six new data centers within 12 years, and the three companies mentioned above are all either in the process of constructing or scouting sites for major facilities. According to analysis by the Danish Energy Authority, just one data center could push up the country’s electricity consumption by 4 percent—that’s more than is used in an entire year in Denmark’s third city, Odense.
The world is struggling to fund climate change research after President Trump’s 2019 budget plan axed $2 million in contributions to the Green Climate Fund — the global funding pool for climate research, which is managed by the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). For now, the best the UN can do to fund climate change research is to lean heavily into private partnerships — this time, with Google.
According to a United Nations press release from Monday, Google is sharing maps and data from its environmental satellites with a series of national and multinational space agencies associated with the UN.
Like many parents in the United States, Rob Glaser has been thinking a lot lately about how to keep his kids from getting shot in school. Specifically, he’s been thinking of what he can do that doesn’t involve getting into a nasty and endless battle over what he calls “the g-word.”
It’s not that Glaser opposes gun control. A steady Democratic donor, Glaser founded the online streaming giant RealNetworks back in the 1990s as a vehicle for broadcasting left-leaning political views. It’s just that any conversation about curbing gun rights in America tends to lead more to gridlock and finger-pointing than it does to action. “I know my personal opinions aren’t going to carry the day in this current political environment,” Glaser says.
So he started working on a solution that he believes will prove less divisive, and therefore more immediately actionable. Over the past two years, RealNetworks has developed a facial recognition tool that it hopes will help schools more accurately monitor who gets past their front doors.
The Department of Defense plans to spend $1.7 billion over the next five years to stand up a new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, according to new budgeting figures.
The reprograming documents sent to Congress, obtained by C4ISRNET sister publication Defense News, outline the Pentagon plans to spend $5 million to get the center stood up with an estimated $70 million for the new project to be spent in fiscal year 2018.
These funds will go toward the center’s establishment to “rapidly field Artificial Intelligence (AI) at scale to the Services and Combatant Commands (CCMDs) to effectively deploy AI-enabled capabilities in support of DoD’s warfighting missions and business functions,” the documents state.
Bird populations are plummeting, thanks to logging, agriculture, and climate change. Scientists keep track of species by recording their calls, but even the best computer programs can’t reliably distinguish bird calls from other sounds. Now, thanks to a bit of crowdsourcing and a lot of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers say they have something to crow about.
AI algorithms can be as finicky as finches, often requiring manual calibration and retraining for each new location or species. So an interdisciplinary group of researchers launched the Bird Audio Detection challenge, which released hours of audio from environmental monitoring stations around Chernobyl, Ukraine, which they happened to have access to, as well as crowdsourced recordings, some of which came from an app called Warblr.
Under pressure to be more transparent about the results of drug testing studies, some companies have begun to share anonymized patient data from clinical trials with approved researchers on secure websites. An online platform launched today aims to expand such efforts by offering a one-stop clearinghouse for those seeking to mine these data for new insights.
The platform, created by Vivli, a nonprofit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, debuts with access to more than 4000 clinical trial data sets from eight companies and nonprofits. It also features tools for combining and analyzing the data. “This is the first time it’s all going to be available in one place,” Vivli Executive Director Rebecca Li says.
Lee Cronin’s lab at the University of Glasgow, UK, has created an organic synthesis robotic AI system that can quickly explore the reactivity of a set of reagents from the bottom-up with no specific target. By just performing around 10% of 969 possible reactions from a set of 18 reagents the autonomous system was able to predict with 86% accuracy the reactivity of the remaining 90% of reactions. It then automatically performed more rounds of experiments based on the reactivity data it had gathered, continually updating the database, and in doing so discovered four new reactions. These were followed up manually by the team to isolate and characterise the new compounds.
‘I’m really surprised that the system was able to discover new reactions and molecules and especially the structure of one of the molecules is really strange and unexpected,’ says Cronin. ‘This is proof of principle that target-free organic discovery and synthesis can yield really unexpected and perhaps even very novel results that could fundamentally change how we go about looking for new reactions.’
As machine learning algorithms — such as those that enable Siri and Alexa to recognize voice commands — grow more sophisticated, so must the hardware required to run them. Professor Andreas Moshovos (ECE) heads a national research network that aims to create the next generation of computing engines optimized for artificial intelligence.
The NSERC Strategic Partnership Network in Computer Hardware for Emerging Sensory Applications (COHESA) brings together researchers from academia and industry to develop hardware that can deliver faster speeds and better performance for machine learning applications, from image recognition to autonomous vehicles.
Pentagon leaders, already worried about the emerging technologies that will shape the next generation of war, have reorganized their leadership structure to emphasize quantum science, artificial intelligence and directed energy, Defense News has learned.
The new effort is a major restructuring for the two Pentagon offices that determine how the Department of Defense buys and develops weapon systems. Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan approved the changes in a July 13 memo, obtained by Defense News.
The 17-page document lays out the organizational charts for the offices of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment and the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, as well their responsibilities. The two offices were created Feb. 1, when Congress required the former Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L) office to be divided. A potential organization chart was published in August, but the new document features significant changes, particularly on the R&E side.
China has a national AI strategy entailing $150 billion in focused-research spending and military applications. France has an AI strategy with $2 billion in applied-research spending, and a collective-defense model with other NATO allies called the JEDI Collective. The UAE established a separate cabinet-level department, the Ministry of AI, which released its national AI strategy in 2017. “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. . . . It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world,” said Russian president Vladimir Putin. The activities of other countries around the world suggest he is right.
The United States? The White House has held a conference on AI strategy, is home to a series of independent working groups, and has issued a general statement entitled “Artificial Intelligence for the American People.” America is being outpaced in the global race for AI leadership. The country needs an AI strategy.
Researchers have shown that it is possible to train artificial neural networks directly on an optical chip. The significant breakthrough demonstrates that an optical circuit can perform a critical function of an electronics-based artificial neural network and could lead to less expensive, faster and more energy efficient ways to perform complex tasks such as speech or image recognition.
“Using an optical chip to perform neural network computations more efficiently than is possible with digital computers could allow more complex problems to be solved,” said research team leader Shanhui Fan of Stanford University. “This would enhance the capability of artificial neural networks to perform tasks required for self-driving cars or to formulate an appropriate response to a spoken question, for example. It could also improve our lives in ways we can’t imagine now.”
If you’re an NFL-caliber football player, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to end up playing in the NFL no matter where you come from. But what if you’re an Olympic-caliber mathematician? There are such things, and you can identify them every year at the math combine International Mathematics Olympiad for late teenagers. So what happens to them?
Via Alex Tabarrok, Ruchir Agarwal and Patrick Gaulé gathered together a dataset to figure this out. Of the partipants competing between 1981-2000, about 8 percent won gold medals, 16 percent won silver medals, and 24 percent won bronze medals. Unsurprisingly, these medalists mostly go on to earn PhDs in mathematics, and they tend to be more productive than their fellow PhDs who didn’t win medals. Bottom line: these are really super smart math folks.
But there’s always a but, isn’t there? It turns out that although rich countries are pretty good at shepherding these young geniuses into top PhD programs, poor countries aren’t.
Temple University’s Fox School of Business has been ensnared in public controversy since a report published this spring alleged the school had been knowingly submitting inaccurate data to U.S. News and World Report in order to pad the school’s rankings.
The Inquirer first reported of the probe in March, two months after U.S. News dropped the Fox School from its rankings — a particularly shocking move, as Temple’s online MBA program had held the number one spot for four years straight.
An employee who discovered the falsifications self- reported them U.S. News, and Temple then launched an internal investigation. In the past week, the school has come under unwelcome publicity even more intensely, with the ouster of the business school’s dean and questions about his legacy, more scrutiny from U.S. News, a lawsuit and an investigation by the state Attorney General’s Office. If you’re looking to catch up on the drama surrounding Fox, here’s a recap of the wild week for the business school.
Indiana University, Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research
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Alexandria, VA August 21-23. “The Summit will bring together leaders in NSF cyberinfrastructure and cybersecurity to continue the process initiated in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017: Building a trusting, collaborative community, and seriously addressing that community’s core cybersecurity challenges.” [$$$]
“We are seeking nominations for election of five (5) At-large Representatives for the MBDH Steering Committee. We ask for a 1-2 year commitment at the time a nominee submits their materials to stand for election.” Deadline for nominations is July 24.
“The program will empower teams to adopt the “lean” startup method to search for and develop a business model for their startup concept. The program runs from September through November 2018 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Participating teams will receive mentorship from leading media and technology executives and investors from NYC Media Lab Member Companies and $10,000 in funding.” Deadline for applications is August 3.
“Do you want to meet people who share the same interests with you, discuss a topic that you care about or that brings the visualization community forward, or share viewpoints and experiences to foster community building? If yes, organize a meetup!” Deadline for submissions is August 3.
“We’ve launched a modern new ODK website at https://opendatakit.org 11! Like all things ODK, the website can and does change with your feedback, so please take a look and post your feedback in the Website 1 category or propose your changes on Github.”
Science Advances; Martin Gerlach, Tiago P. Peixoto and Eduardo G. Altmann
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“Despite their success—particularly of the most widely used variant called latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)—and numerous applications in sociology, history, and linguistics, topic models are known to suffer from severe conceptual and practical problems” … “We obtain a fresh view of the problem of identifying topical structures by relating it to the problem of finding communities in complex networks. We achieve this by representing text corpora as bipartite networks of documents and words.”
University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania
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“The MOOC Replication Framework (MORF) is a framework that facilitates the replication of previously published findings across multiple data sets. It facilitates the construction and evaluation of end-to-end pipelines from raw data to evaluation. MORF is designed to ensure the seamless integration of new findings as new research is conducted or new hypotheses are generated, and to support the generation of novel research in the learning sciences.”