They look to be one of the top Black Friday bargains this year — those smart speakers like Alexa and Google Home that can give you the weather forecast, turn on your favorite tunes or arm the alarm on your house.
If you haven’t adopted one yet or don’t have it on the holiday list, it’s likely you just don’t see the value of having one. Or, you don’t trust the devices and the companies who make them to keep your personal business private.
If you already are a user or have asked Santa to bring you one this year, chances are you are excited about how handy a voice-controlled smart speaker is and are willing to give up the privacy in your home for the convenience.
These are among the findings of recent research from the University of Michigan School of Information looking at privacy perceptions, concerns and privacy-seeking behaviors with smart speakers.
The federal government believes Edmonton and the University of Alberta will lead Canada into the coming artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, which is expected to increase global GDP by $15.7 trillion by 2030 and disrupt every facet of life.
That’s why Western Economic Diversification Canada announced $2.5 million for the creation of the Artificial Intelligence-Supercomputing Hub for Academic and Industry Collaboration at the U of A, today.
Artificial heart valves, prosthetic hips, bedside monitors, MRI machines – these and so many other innovations that we now take for granted emerged at the interface of engineering and medicine.
In an era of big data, personalized medicine and artificial intelligence, the importance of engineering, especially in medicine, is increasing. In my own field of cardiovascular bioengineering, engineers now routinely build and run sophisticated, patient-specific computer models of blood flow in just a few hours, helping doctors diagnose and treat heart disease. These groundbreaking inventions are possible only through the contributions of multidisciplinary teams of researchers, clinicians and engineers.
The National Science Foundation’s biology branch has rescinded a policy that limited the number of grant proposals on which scientists could be listed as principal investigator to one per year, the agency announced last Thursday (November 15). The change was effective immediately.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is bringing its deep pockets and science-based problem-solving acumen to bear on diagnostic error. It will invest $85 million over the next six years to improve diagnostic performance through its Diagnostic Excellence Initiative. The initiative aims to “reduce harm from erroneous or delayed diagnoses, reduce costs and redundancy in the diagnostic process, improve health outcomes and save lives.”
It will be tight in focus, concentrating on the three clinical categories that are responsible for “a disproportionate share of serious harm and preventable death because of sub-optimal diagnosis” —cardiovascular events, infections and cancers
As human impacts on the world accelerate, so does the need for tools to monitor the effects we have on species and ecosystems. Alongside technologies like camera traps and satellite remote sensing, passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has emerged as an increasingly valuable and flexible tool in ecology. The idea behind PAM is straightforward: autonomous acoustic sensors are placed in the field to collect audio recordings. The wildlife sounds within those recordings are then used to calculate important ecological metrics – such as species occupancy and relative abundance, behaviour and phenology, or community richness and diversity.
Ian Siegel is CEO of ZipRecruiter, the Santa Monica company he co-founded in 2010 to disrupt the recruitment and hiring industry. Since then, more than 1.5 million businesses and more than 430 million job seekers have used the online employment marketplace, according to the company. ZipRecruiter has nearly 1,000 employees, a quarter of whom are engineers.
Studying sociology, psychology and English at Oberlin College wasn’t the waste of time that Siegel feared it might be once he started a career in business.
“If you think of psychology as the individual, sociology as society and social psychology as the study of small group dynamics, I was already identifying the opinion leader, the emotional leader, early on in my career. I was breaking down every group into the categories I studied while I was in college, and it actually was really helpful,” Siegel said.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Social and Behavioral Sciences Initiative (SBSI) will be a meeting of the minds—about minds.
Spearheaded by psychologists Coren Apicella and Geoffrey Goodwin and supported by the interdisciplinary endeavor mindCORE, the new Penn SBSI aims to foster sharing of ideas, resources, and datasets among scientists at the University studying the brain and social decision-making. Borrowing a model used widely in business schools, 19 faculty from six departments in the School of Arts and Sciences and Annenberg School for Communication, as well as a handful of graduate students, will have access to two communal labs and the opportunity for novel collaboration.
“There are so many people around the University doing social and behavioral science, but there’s been no way to connect them,” says Apicella.
Artificial intelligence is fueling the next phase of misinformation. The new type of synthetic media known as deepfakes poses major challenges for newsrooms when it comes to verification. This content is indeed difficult to track: Can you tell which of the images below is a fake?
(Check the bottom of this story for the answer.)
We at The Wall Street Journal are taking this threat seriously and have launched an internal deepfakes task force led by the Ethics & Standards and the Research & Development teams. This group, the WSJ Media Forensics Committee, is comprised of video, photo, visuals, research, platform, and news editors who have been trained in deepfake detection. Beyond this core effort, we’re hosting training seminars with reporters, developing newsroom guides, and collaborating with academic institutions such as Cornell Tech to identify ways technology can be used to combat this problem.
Scientists can’t study what they can’t measure — as David Muller knows only too well. An applied physicist, Muller has been grappling for years with the limitations of the best imaging tools available as he seeks to probe materials at the atomic scale.
One particularly vexing quarry has been ultra-thin layers of the material molybdenum disulfide, which show promise for building thin, flexible electronics. Muller and his colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have spent years peering at MoS2 samples under an electron microscope to discern their atomic structures. The problem was seeing the sulfur atoms clearly, Muller says. Raising the energy of the electron beam would sharpen the image, but knock atoms out of the MoS2 sheet in the process. Anyone hoping to say something definitive about defects in the structure would have to guess. “It would take a lot of courage, and maybe half the time, you’d be right,” he says.
This July, Muller’s team reported a breakthrough. Using an ultra-sensitive detector that the researchers had created and a special method for reconstructing the data, they resolved features in MoS2 down to 0.39 angstroms1, two and a half times better than a conventional electron microscope would achieve.
Carnegie Mellon University today announced it will collaborate with Microsoft on a joint effort to innovate in edge computing, an exciting field of research for intensive computing applications that require rapid response times in remote and low-connectivity environments.
By bringing artificial intelligence to the “edge,” devices such as connected vehicles, drones or factory equipment are able to quickly learn and respond to their environments, which is critical in scenarios like search and rescue, disaster recovery and safety.
To enable discovery in these areas and more, Microsoft will contribute edge computing products to Carnegie Mellon for use in its Living Edge Laboratory, a testbed for exploring applications that generate large data volumes and require intense processing with near-instantaneous response times. Intel, which already is associated with the lab, also is contributing technology to the lab.
“Imagine you have an image of the 22 soccer players on the field, and you were to combine them into a single unit that you would call the ‘generic soccer player,’” she said. “It will look like a blurry picture — you could barely see that it’s a humanoid form and that there is some kind of motion, but you wouldn’t realize that a difference exists between the players.”
The improved pictures are a result of better detectors developed originally by colleagues at Berkeley Lab, and steadily improving computer algorithms to analyze the huge amounts of data collected by the detectors. This helped Nogales and her team to define five distinct structures of the TFIID molecule.
“They span the whole binding sequence: before binding to the DNA, initial binding to the promoter, subsequent binding after it double checks that this is the right place, and the final state,” Nogales said.
She and her colleagues continue to push the limits of cryo-EM, hoping to determine the 3D structure of TFIID after other transcription proteins land on it to complete the transcription process.
Chicago, IL November 29, starting at 5:30 p.m., 1871 (22 W Merchandise Mart Plaza #1212). “Capco in collaboration with 1871 will be hosting a fireside chat with Peter Dugas.”
In August, Redis Labs decided to convert the license it uses for new database extensions built on top of Redis — but not Redis itself — to the Commons Clause license, which specifies that other companies are not allowed to offer those extensions as a cloud service.
“We keep the freedom to decide for each piece of software whether to put that under the permissive open-source license or Commons Clause,” Bengal said. “This is basically a business decision.”
Then in October, another well-known open-source database company made a similar decision. MongoDB announced that going forward, it would license the MongoDB Community Server software under a different license called SSPL, which allows cloud providers to offer MongoDB as a service but requires them to either open-source all of the code they write to create that service or reach a commercial arrangement with MongoDB.
