On secondhand marketplaces like eBay, people trust online sellers who post their own high-quality photos of items for sale more than they trust those who use stock images or poor-quality photos, a Cornell Tech study has found.
The findings could help online marketplaces improve trust in their sites by offering guidelines on how to take better photos or introducing augmented reality features that instruct users to change lighting or camera angles, the researchers said.
This is particularly important for new or growing sites that are working to establish trust, said Xiao Ma, lead author of “Understanding Image Quality and Trust in Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces,” to be presented at WACV 2019, Jan. 7-11 in Waikoloa Village, Hawaii.
At Wake Radiology in North Carolina, roughly 50 doctors scrutinize x-rays and other images for local medical providers. Within a few weeks, they should start to get help on some lung CT scans from machine-learning algorithms that highlight potentially cancerous tissue nodules. Although Wake is based in a region known as the Research Triangle, for its intensity of high-tech R&D, the lung-reading software hails from elsewhere—China.
Infervision, a four-year-old Beijing startup, has amassed more than a million scans from Chinese hospitals that it’s using to train and test algorithms. Gathering medical data is much easier for Chinese companies than for their US counterparts, because patient populations are larger and the burden of privacy regulations smaller.
The Brookings Institution, Ryan Hass and Zach Balin
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Under President Donald Trump, great power competition has become the organizing principle of American foreign policy. This has led to near-daily invocations of the Cold War to describe the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China, and to frequent analogies to an “arms race” to describe bilateral competition in advanced technologies, including quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI). Public statements and national plans from both governments have reinforced this zero-sum dynamic. Such framing has done more to conceal than clarify and, if taken to its logical end-point, will do more harm than good for the United States.
Something strange is going on at the top of the world. Earth’s north magnetic pole has been skittering away from Canada and towards Siberia, driven by liquid iron sloshing within the planet’s core. The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move.
On 15 January, they are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet’s magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones.
Two more notes about this study, drawn from my conversation with a researcher who did not work it: Matthew Gentzkow, who has researched the efforts of Facebook’s efforts to slow the spread of fake news.
First: Gentzkow, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, noted that this paper is unusual for recording actual Facebook user behavior, rather than self-reported survey data. Researchers were able to do this because — with users’ consent — they scraped user timeline posts to see which links they had actually shared. It’s one reason why the paper’s findings are more compelling than previous work that has been done on the subject.
Second: who exactly were these Facebook-obsessed seniors? Gentzkow noted that despite Facebook’s near-total penetration of the North American market, in 2016 it was still somewhat unusual to see hyperactive social media use among septuagenarians.
College students hoping to start the spring semester off on the right foot ought to consider keeping their phones in their dorm rooms during class. A new study finds that students perform worse on final exams if they are allowed access to a smartphone or tablet for non-academic purposes during lectures, compared to students who don’t have access to mobile devices.
In fact, researchers from Rutgers University say students who didn’t use mobile devices during lectures where they were permitted phone use still performed worse than pupils in mobile-restricted lectures. The finding shows just how the mere presence or availability of phone can be detrimental.
As the federal government shutdown slogged through its 18th day on Tuesday, patience was starting to wear thin for the hundreds of researchers across Boulder County whose work and data collection is threatened by the budget impasse.
Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, said most scientists he knows look on the situation with “dismay and disgust.”
Speaking only for himself and not as a representative of his research facility, he said, “I see it as petty bickering. And there’s no reason why we can’t come to a compromise on this. Meanwhile, we’re putting our scientific enterprise in limbo and that is not helping anyone.”
The MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) has expanded its academic program to include a new doctoral field: computational Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences.
EAPS is now the latest department to participate in the Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Program, which has been offering PhD degrees in computation since 2013. This move resonates with the Institute’s growing awareness of the advantages provided by education based in computation, as exemplified by the recent creation of the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing.
While enrolled in the CSE program, students are able to specialize at the doctoral level in a computation-related field of their choice through focused coursework and a doctoral thesis through a number of participating host departments, including Aeronautics and Astronautics, Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Mathematics, Nuclear Science and Engineering, and now EAPS.
Facebook Inc. is among the technology companies leading the race to develop artificial intelligence. But Americans don’t trust it to do so responsibly, a survey from a U.K. think tank has found.
More than two-thirds of those surveyed said they had either “no confidence” or “not too much confidence” in Facebook developing A.I., a report from the Center for the Governance of AI, part of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, said. The public was significantly more skeptical about Facebook than other tech companies working on cutting-edge A.I. research, according to the survey.
In 2017, University of Utah physicist Valy Vardeny called perovskite a “miracle material” for an emerging field of next-generation electronics, called spintronics, and he’s standing by that assertion. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, Vardeny, along with Jingying Wang, Dali Sun (now at North Carolina State University) and colleagues present two devices built using perovskite to demonstrate the material’s potential in spintronic systems. Its properties, Vardeny says, bring the dream of a spintronic transistor one step closer to reality.
Data science is making inroads into the world of impact investing, helping program designers and beneficiaries achieve closer alignment between their goals and strategies. While some are building on models from the business world to correlate different pieces of ecosystems to understand how impact flows, others are attempting to marshal next-generation digital technologies such as blockchain to improve outcomes in areas such as disaster response and land titling.
The Rockefeller Foundation has been designing ways to harness data effectively in order to improve the effectiveness of impact investing. “Data really helps you understand the nature of the problem, and thinking about data ahead of time helps you structure your experiments and your interventions,” said Zia Khan, vice president of initiatives and strategy at the foundation. “Measuring data helps you prove what works, what doesn’t work, and then you can monitor and scale things up.” [audio, 47:23]
Who knew AI would become such a wordsmith. But not long ago, Spence Green and John DeNero were perplexed that the latest and greatest natural language processing research wasn’t yet in use by professional translators.
The Stanford grads set out to change that. In 2015, they co-founded Lilt, an AI software platform for translation and localization services.
Applications for natural language processing have exploded in the past decade as advances in recurrent neural networks powered by GPUs have offered better performing AI. That’s enabled startups to offer the likes of white-label voice services, language tutors and chatbots.
Two of the biggest questions related to AI and robots today are how much we should embrace these new technologies and how government policy should respond. Specifically, many are asking if taxes should be levied on the use of robots to offset their job-displacement effects.
Iván Werning, macroeconomics researcher and the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics at MIT, addressed both of these important topics at a recent seminar at the IDE. Discussing a new working paper, “Robots, Trade, and Luddism: A Sufficient Statistic Approach to Optimal Technology Regulation,” Werning offered a model and formula for evaluating the impact of technology and the optimal tax on it. His research with MIT’s Arnaud Costinot, examines whether taxation or protectionist trade policies — like those being discussed in the U.S. and in Europe — might help to better distribute the economic benefits of AI technologies.
“focuses on data science and related expertise such as machine learning, data visualization, and causal inference to meet legislative and policymaking challenges.” Deadline to apply is January 15.