The University of Hawaii has installed an energy internet of things (IoT) platform to create an ‘energy-smart university’ at ten of its campuses.
The project was in partnership with Blue Pillar, and funded by Elemental Excelerator to help the university achieve a net zero energy university system by 2035.
The university’s office of energy management uses the energy IoT platform to access real-time equipment energy use data. The platform enables the collection of over 2,600 new data points every second.
Dan Huttenlocher SM ’84, PhD ’88, a seasoned builder and leader of new academic entities at Cornell University, has been named as the first dean of the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. He will assume his new post this summer.
A member of Cornell’s computer science faculty since 1988, Huttenlocher has served since 2012 as the founding dean of Cornell Tech, a graduate school in New York City that focuses on digital technology and its economic and societal impacts. Previously, he helped create and then led Cornell’s Faculty of Computing and Information Science.
Every American has official medical records, locked away in the computers and file cabinets of their doctors’ offices and hospitals, and protected by strict privacy laws.
But most people don’t think about their other medical record—the informal “shadow” one they generate during everyday life.
In a new article in the journal Science, a team of experts led by two University of Michigan researchers calls for attention to this shadow record.
Euan Robertson started his job with New York City’s economic development team at an ominous moment. It was Monday, Sept. 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and ignited the financial crisis.
Mr. Robertson made his way through City Hall’s sprawling open office to a conference table, where he huddled with top advisers to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
“No one knew what was going to happen or how bad it would be,” Mr. Robertson recalled. “But everyone agreed we’d better come up with a plan.”
The plan that emerged called for developing tech start-ups and tech workers in New York. The goal, Mr. Robertson said, was to “build a talent engine” that would help make the city a magnet for coders and companies.
Should Facebook be considered an “information fiduciary” when it comes to the privacy of its clients? How should we weigh the pros and cons of encryption schemes which might bolster privacy and data security at the risk of shutting out law enforcement? And why shouldn’t Facebook tell users how much advertising revenue their respective data generates on a daily basis? Those were some of the questions Facebook Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed with Jonathan Zittrain ’95, HLS’s George Bemis Professor of International Law, in a conversation among students at Harvard Law School on Feb. 11.
The nearly two-hour discussion was part of a series of study sessions for Harvard’s Techtopia initiative, a program for students across the University to explore problems in technology and governance, and it included participants from Zittrain’s course on Internet & Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control.
A widening financial scandal at the University of Central Florida, which may have cost a newly minted president his job, has raised deeper questions about whether a culture of ethical shortcuts and lapses in oversight took root during years of unbridled growth at the institution.
The university’s Board of Trustees will consider on Thursday whether to accept the resignation of Dale Whittaker, who ascended from provost to president just eight months ago. Whittaker and the university have been in state lawmakers’ cross hairs since August, when an audit found that Central Florida had misappropriated $38 million of restricted taxpayer money for the construction of a new building.
For the last two decades, the story of the University of Central Florida has been about more students and more buildings. Under John C. Hitt, who preceded Whittaker and led the university for more than a quarter century, Central Florida transformed from a midsize commuter campus into a behemoth public research university of 66,000 students.
It works like this: As you’re driving along toward an intersection the car communicates with a light that’s equipped with the technology. If that light is red—or is going to be when you get there—a traffic signal icon appears either on the car’s head-up display, dashboard display, or both. As you’re waiting, a countdown will let you know how long you have before it turns green.
After filling a position that was previously vacant for more than two years, the new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) said he is ready to enact changes that will push the U.S. to new frontiers in science.
During the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting on Feb. 15, Kelvin Droegemeier, PhD, made his first public speech since the Senate confirmed him on January 2, explaining his approach to his new job.
“I would like to propose three pillars for this bold era,” he said during the speech at the event in Washington D.C. “The first pillar is to understand the R&D ecosystem in a new context and undertake long-term planning looking farther down the road and the future.
Project Deal, a consortium of libraries, universities, and research institutes in Germany, has unveiled an unprecedented deal with a major journal publisher—Wiley—that is drawing close scrutiny from advocates of open access to scientific papers.
The pact, signed last month but made public this week, has been hailed as the first such country-wide agreement within a leading research nation. (Only institutions in the United States, China, and the United Kingdom publish more papers.) It gives researchers working at more than 700 Project Deal institutions access to the more than 1500 journals published by Wiley, based in Hoboken, New Jersey, as well as the publisher’s archive. It also allows researchers to make papers they publish with Wiley free to the public at no extra cost.
This business arrangement, known as a “publish and read” deal, has been touted as one way to promote open-access publishing. But until this week, a key part of the Wiley agreement—how much it will cost—had been secret.
This week, cell biologist Ron Vale was named executive director of Janelia Research Campus, the in-house research arm of the $20 billion Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Vale, now at the University of California, San Francisco, has been part of HHMI’s cadre of roughly 300 investigators at institutions for the past 24 years. Next January, he will replace fruit fly geneticist Gerald Rubin, Janelia’s director since its founding in 2003.
As alchemy and astrology evolved, the participants became more deliberate and organized – what might now be called more scientific – about their studies. That shift eventually led to important findings in chemistry, such as those by Lavoisier and Priestley in the 18th century. In astronomy, Kepler and Newton himself made significant findings in the 17th and 18th centuries. A similar turning point is coming for artificial intelligence. Bold innovators are putting aside tempting but impractical dreams of anthropomorphic designs and excessive autonomy. They focus on systems that restore, rely on, and expand human control and responsibility.
President Trump’s call for “6G” immediately became a punchline in Silicon Valley, where tech and telecom workers are just starting to prepare for the still-nascent 5G wireless technology.
Trump’s Thursday tweet sought to pressure companies to step up their investment in 5G as his administration released a report touting its work to facilitate its expansion. But floating the idea of 6G –- a technology that does not yet exist — instead added to the perception that Trump does not understand basic tech policy issues.
In a memo to Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin designated Kennedy as his choice to become the first director of the Space Development Agency.
New York University, Marron Institute of Urban Management
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The Marron Institute is pleased to announce the winning proposal for its second annual Seed Grant Award: “The Impact of Flooding on the Urban Microbiome and City Residents’ Exposure to Sewage Pathogens.” The research team includes: Professor Andrea Silverman of the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU Tandon and NYU’s College of Global Public Health, as well as Professors Elizabeth Hénaff and Tega Brain of the Department of Technology, Culture and Society at NYU Tandon.
Bellevue, WA April 15-17. “This year’s Symposium will feature sessions ranging from HIV transmission dynamics in an era of test and treat, mapping maternal newborn child health (MNCH) trends, understanding health seeking behavior in treating malaria, applications for data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence in health, utilizing GPU resources for agent-based models, tuberculosis diagnostics, among others.” [registration required]
London, England February 25, starting at 6 p.m., Open Data Institute (65 Clifton St.) Panelists: Alice Piterova (Hazy), Elena Simperl (University of Southampton), Peter Jackson (Legal and General). [free, registration required]
I’m a person who’s only satisfied if I feel I’m being productive. I like figuring things out. I like making things. And I want to do as much of that as I can. And part of being able to do that is to have the best personal infrastructure I can. Over the years I’ve been steadily accumulating and implementing “personal infrastructure hacks” for myself. Some of them are, yes, quite nerdy. But they certainly help me be productive. And maybe in time more and more of them will become mainstream, as a few already have.
Now, of course, one giant “productivity hack” that I’ve been building for the world for a very long time is the whole technology stack around the Wolfram Language. And for me personally, another huge “productivity hack” is my company, which I started more than 32 years ago. Yes, it could (and should) be larger, and have more commercial reach. But as a nicely organized private company with about 800 people it’s an awfully efficient machine for turning ideas into real things, and for leveraging what skills I have to greatly amplify my personal productivity.
This is a brief tutorial introducing you to a new JupyterLab extension for creating and editing Plotly charts through a user-friendly point-and-click interface, based on https://github.com/plotly/react-chart-editor, which is a customizable React-based editor panel for Plotly charts. I will demonstrate how you can construct and save plots using plotly.py and then open and edit them using the new chart editor, all without leaving JupyterLab. We will cover how the chart editor can be used to style traces, legends, axis labels, fonts, annotations, and more!
This extension gives users the ability to customize and display an existing figure without having to write too much code. A basic understanding of plotly’s JSON data structure is helpful but not necessary to get started with this awesome extension!
After this guide you’ll be able to create and save figures from Python, then open and edit them in the editor. All in JupyterLab. All offline.
The British Psychological Society, Research Digest, Christian Jarrett
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Now, in the hope of injecting more clarity and realism into the literature, Manuel Gonzalez and John Aiello have tested the common-sense idea that the effects of background music on mental task performance will depend on three things: the nature of the music, the nature of the task, and the personality of the person. “We hope that our findings encourage researchers to adopt a more holistic, interactionist approach to investigate the effects of music (and more broadly, distractions) on task performance,” they write in their new paper in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.