The authorities called it a free health check. Tahir Imin had his doubts.
They drew blood from the 38-year-old Muslim, scanned his face, recorded his voice and took his fingerprints. They didn’t bother to check his heart or kidneys, and they rebuffed his request to see the results.
“They said, ‘You don’t have the right to ask about this,’” Mr. Imin said. “‘If you want to ask more,’ they said, ‘you can go to the police.’”
Microsoft announced the introduction of a new smart camera for business at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona on Sunday.
Microsoft is drawing on both its Kinect and Azure public cloud brands, as it sets off on the next phase in the company’s emphasis on artificial intelligence — an area Microsoft identified as a top priority in a recent annual report.
The Microsoft Azure Kinect is “new intelligent edge device that enables developers to create a wide range of AI-powered experiences,” Julia White, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Azure marketing, said at the conference.
If you need to build an app quickly and easily, you might decide to use Facebook’s SDK, which has lots of bells and whistles, including easy integration of Facebook ads in your app’s UI.
The quid pro quo is that your app will send all your users’ sensitive data to Facebook, and Facebook stores that data forever and uses it in every conceivable way.
That means that menstruation-tracking apps like Flo Period and Ovulation, real estate apps like Realtor, and fitness trackers like Instant Heart Rate send incredibly sensitive personal data to Facebook, with unique identifiers that allows Facebook to track individuals across different apps, even when those individuals don’t have Facebook accounts.
While working on a PhD in astrophysics, Chris Moody used supercomputers to simulate how galaxies crash into each other. For his first nonacademic job, he joined Square as a data scientist in 2013. About a year later, he started talking with some data-scientist friends who were employed at a startup called Stitch Fix, an upstart e-commerce service that delivered boxes of women’s fashion, known as “Fixes,” using a mix of algorithmic and human curation.
Moody was mystified. “What on earth are you guys doing at a clothing company?” he recalls asking, admitting that his sartorial taste at the time hewed to “what costs less than ramen?” Their response, though, sent his brain firing. How do you mail customers clothes they’ll love, and that fit them perfectly, without the client ever getting measured or viewing the inventory? Soon he was pushing for a job. “When I was interviewing, I was like, Ooh, this is a place where I’m going to be continuously thinking about this stuff in the shower, going to bed, waking up in the morning.”
He joined in January 2015, and he’s still obsessed.
Not everyone wants to or feels they can participate in open science approaches. I’m interested in clearly identifying reasons why people feel this way, so that we can do our best to mitigate and address these reasons.
In this context, I was thinking this morning about the various impediments to scientists that want to build their reputation through online interaction. I know from listening to people in person and on Twitter that many scientists are quite hesitant to engage on Twitter and blogs because of the many known and expected negatives.
One warning – some people may find this line of thought depressing or anxiety inducing, and you may not want to read on! My goal is to improve the situation by confronting and exploring the negatives so that we can mitigate them
Don Taylor, a leading scholar of health policy, has been named director of the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), Provost Sally Kornbluth announced this week.
His appointment comes following the work of a faculty search committee chaired by Political Science professor Sunshine Hillygus.
A professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, Taylor succeeds Tom Nechyba, who has led SSRI since 2012, building it into a vibrant center for fostering intellectual community in the social sciences.
The University of Vermont Board of Trustees announced today that Dr. Suresh Garimella will become the University’s 27th president. His appointment will be effective July 1, 2019.
“The Board is very excited about Dr. Garimella becoming our next president,” said Board Chair David Daigle. “He clearly emerged as the most capable candidate for this position. We are confident that we have selected an exceptional individual who will inspire our University to reach even greater levels of excellence.”
Garimella, who is currently Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships and the Goodson Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University.
A small start-up in Boston has an oddball idea for a fast and efficient processor for artificial intelligence that could just work: Let there be light.
More specifically, Lightmatter’s chip includes an optical component called a Mach-Zehnder interferometer instead of a more common multiplier-accumulator, or MAC, unit. The swap is intended to circumvent limits facing today’s chips.
Procter & Gamble Co. is set to roll out the Oral-B Genius X electric toothbrush, which uses artificial intelligence to track where people are brushing in their mouth. A smartphone app provides personalized details on areas that require additional brushing.
China has been a leader in the field, with heavy investments in AI research and development, and President Trump wants to help the U.S. play catch-up to China with a new AI strategy. Trump signed an executive order this month that gets “the ball rolling on increasing investment in artificial intelligence,” says Gregory Allen (@Gregory_C_Allen) with the Center for a New American Security.
“The actual budget totals of what the federal government is going to spend on AI, we don’t really know yet,” he tells Here & Now’s Eric Westervelt (@Ericnpr). “I do think it is safe to say though that historically over the past years, China has demonstrated significantly greater levels of strategic focus and funding when it comes to artificial intelligence.”
In a recent study, Anastasios Noulas, Moore-Sloan Data Science Fellow, and researchers from University of Science and Technology of China (Xing Xie, Enhong Chen, Yingzi Wang) and University of Cambridge (Xiao Zhou, Cecilia Mascolo, Yingzi Wang) used patterns of human movement to determine likelihood of developing a chronic disease. Put simply, researchers studied where people go (treated here as “check-ins”), and how that translates to their health status. Mobility data can provide clues to a lifestyle. For example, college students may be people who regularly visit lecture halls, gyms, and libraries, where white-collar employee could be people more likely to dine out and spend time in offices. Researchers treat various “lifestyles” as categories with distinct check-in patterns.
Christakis’ research has shown that if you start to become happier with your life, a friend living close by has a 25 percent higher chance of becoming happy too. And your partner is more likely to feel better as well. The happiness can even spread to people to whom you’re indirectly connected.
To document this, Christakis and his colleagues mapped out the face-to-face interactions of about 5,000 people living in one town over the course of 32 years. Their emotional ups and downs were documented with periodic surveys. “We were able to show that as one person became happy or sad, it rippled through the network,” Christakis says.
Qualcomm Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Inc., today announced at the Mobile World Congress here its Qualcomm Robotics RB3 Platform – the company’s first integrated, comprehensive offering designed specifically for robotics. Building on Qualcomm Technologies’ success in robotics and drone products, this purpose-built platform features a highly optimized set of hardware, software and tools designed to help manufacturers and developers create the next generation of advanced consumer, enterprise, and industrial robotics products.
Bob Swan, Intel’s chief executive, said Intel’s future in 5G networks, which are expected to roll out this year and next and be much faster than current 4G networks, extends beyond selling modems to phone makers.
Intel plans to also sell modems to automakers for use in connected vehicles, as well as to manufacturers for use in connecting industrial equipment. And Intel also plans to land its other chips – including processors and the so-called programmable chips it gained by acquiring Altera Inc in 2016 – in a variety of networking gear, he said.
Oncology data company Flatiron Health and the FDA‘s Information Exchange and Data Transformation (INFORMED) Program have revealed a two-year renewal and expansion of their research collaboration.
The partnership, which started in 2016, has focused on how real-world evidence can support regulatory decision-making and offer insight into cancer treatment trends and clinical outcomes.
Cambridge, MA March 2, starting at 9 a.m., Hawes Hall (Harvard Business School). “Join us for the annual conference on machine learning, organized by student clubs at Harvard Business School.” [$$]
Washington, DC May 5-8 at George Washington University. “The 23rd edition of a series of algorithmic computational biology conferences bridging the areas of computational, mathematical, statistical and biological sciences.” [$$$]
There’s a good reason for writing this blog post – testing Airflow code can be difficult. It often leads people to go through an entire deployment cycle to manually push the trigger button on a live system. Only after can they verify their Airflow code. This is a painfully long process and as with any other software, people would like to write, test, and debug their Airflow code locally.
For about the past two years, I’ve been a product manager at Kaggle where I work on our public data platform as well as (more recently) our Google Cloud Platform integrations team. Lately I’ve had the opportunity to do quite a bit of reflection on my career thanks in part to having a mentee (being a mentor is awesome!). The other day she asked me how I “amassed as much engineering knowledge as I have”. (She asks great questions!) I shared my answer on Twitter and, you know what, I want to blog more so I’m sharing it here, too.
The newly launched Stanford Data Science Resources website is a central portal from which data scientists can access advanced tools, data platforms and experts in diverse methodologies for conducting biomedical research.
It might be small, but the Raspberry Pi is a very capable little computer. You won’t find a better platform for building your own projects or learning about electronics, programming and the Internet of Things. The Complete Raspberry Pi Hacker Bundle helps you get started, with four in-depth video courses on all things Pi. Right now, you can pick up the training for only $19 at the PopSci Shop.