This is the epicenter of a Silicon Valley tech boom that is minting millionaires but also fueling a homelessness crisis that the United Nations recently deemed a human rights violation. Thousands of people live in RVs across San Francisco and the broader Bay Area because they can’t afford to rent or buy homes. In December, Mountain View police logged almost 300 RVs that appeared to be used as primary residences. Palo Alto, Berkeley and other Bay Area towns have similar numbers.
Some Silicon Valley towns have cracked down in recent months, creating an even more uncertain future for RV residents. At a March city council meeting, Mountain View voted to ban RVs from parking overnight on public streets. The ban hasn’t taken effect yet, but soon, the town’s van dwellers will need to go elsewhere.
University of Michigan, The Michigan Engineer, News Center
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In a step toward home-helper robots that can quickly navigate unpredictable and disordered spaces, University of Michigan researchers have developed an algorithm that lets machines perceive their environments orders of magnitude faster than similar previous approaches.
“Robot perception is one of the biggest bottlenecks in providing capable assistive robots that can be deployed into people’s homes,” said Karthik Desingh, a graduate student in computer science and engineering and lead author of a paper on the work published in Science Robotics.
There’s a new Echo in town. The Echo Show 5 is a smart display with a 5.5-inch screen scheduled for a June 26 release, and it’s the first Echo device with a physical shutter to cover the onboard camera. With this release, Amazon is also making some changes to how all Echos treat Alexa privacy settings. Users will now have the ability to tell Alexa to delete the current day’s recordings. Which sounds good at face value, but the proposition is more complicated than that.
While economic development and infrastructure ranked highest, the report found that sub-topics including climate change and the opioid epidemic revealed that mayors are having nuanced conversations about the issues hitting their communities the hardest.
“While Washington talks, mayors take action. As the government that’s closest to the people, mayors work every day to reach across the aisle, bring people together, and find solutions that help our residents,” said Karen Freeman-Wilson, president of the NLC and mayor of Gary, Indiana.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital today announced clinical genome sequencing data will be available in real-time on St. Jude Cloud, the world’s largest public repository of pediatric genomics data. The first-of-its-kind initiative will provide researchers with high-quality whole-genome, exome and transcriptome data from consenting St. Jude patients. Data will be uploaded to the cloud in a private, secure environment on a monthly basis.
St. Jude is the first institution to release prospective, comprehensive clinical whole-genome sequencing data. Traditionally, such data is collected retrospectively and released following the publication of research. In addition, the data are available to researchers and clinicians at no cost for use in their own research.
Garmin International, Inc., a unit of Garmin Ltd. (NASDAQ: GRMN), and Blue365®, an exclusive health and wellness program for Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) members, today announced a collaboration that encourages improved health and wellbeing through access to the health metrics of Garmin wearable devices.
Dr. Roni Zeiger, cofounder and CEO of Smart Patients and ex-chief health strategist at Google, is leaving his startup after seven years to join Facebook as the social network giant’s Head of Health Strategy, a position Facebook appears to have newly created.
Zeiger quietly announced the news in a post on his own blog entitled “An Opportunity I Can’t Resist.” Based on that short post, it appears that Facebook’s recently launched Health Support Groups will be his main focus.
You’re probably aware that Google keeps tabs on what you’re up to on its devices, apps, and services—but you might not realize just how far its tracking reach extends, into the places you go, the purchases you make, and much more. It’s an extensive set of data, but you can take more control over what Google collects about you and how long the company keeps it. Here’s how.
It’s worth emphasizing first that we’re really dealing with two topics: The amount of data Google collects on you, which is a lot, and what Google then does with it. Google would say its data collection policies improve its services—helping you find a restaurant similar ones you’ve liked previously, say—whereas users might disagree.
Back in January, Google announced a proposed change to Chrome’s extensions system, called Manifest V3, that would stop current ad blockers from working efficiently. In a response to the overwhelming negative feedback, Google is standing firm on Chrome’s ad blocking changes, sharing that current ad blocking capabilities will be restricted to enterprise users.
Manifest V3 comprises a major change to Chrome’s extensions system, including a revamp to the permissions system and a fundamental change to the way ad blockers operate. In particular, modern ad blockers, like uBlock Origin and Ghostery, use Chrome’s webRequest API to block ads before they’re even downloaded.
When Samuel Maddock built a browser that lets friends watch an online video at the same time, he used what seemed like the cheapest and simplest option: Chromium, a free, open-source version of Google’s Chrome web browser.
Maddock’s creation worked well, but because it was based on Chromium, he needed another Google product called Widevine to authenticate users and prevent video piracy. He sent Google a request, outlining the project, and waited. And waited. Four months and 10 emails later he got a one-line answer: sorry, you can’t use the software for that.
Over the last five years, funders and journals around the globe, and across a wide range of disciplines, have adopted new policies that better recognize and promote data sharing. Researchers themselves have rallied behind the FAIR Data Principles, hosting workshops and training events that aim to make research data more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.
There have, of course, also been differences of opinion and obstacles. Researchers who rely heavily on the data of others were accused of being ‘research parasites’, a label that some chose to embrace and transform into a ground-breaking award that celebrates innovative data reuse. Other researchers have had to contend with shifting public views caused by high-profile data scandals and an increasingly divisive political climate.
Against this backdrop, Scientific Data has sought to be an advocate not just for open data sharing, but also for responsible and effective data sharing. Five years since our launch, over 750 data descriptors have been published at the journal, releasing and describing datasets across a wide range of fields and topics. We are delighted to see that our papers have been collectively cited by more than 6000 other scholarly papers, many of which are themselves compelling examples of data reuse.
High-tech companies have long promoted the idea that they are egalitarian, idyllic workplaces. And Google, perhaps more than any other, has represented that image, with a reputation for enviable salaries and benefits and lavish perks.
But the company’s increasing reliance on temps and contractors has some Google employees wondering if management is undermining its carefully crafted culture. As of March, Google worked with roughly 121,000 temps and contractors around the world, compared with 102,000 full-time employees, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times.
Online June 1-3. “We’re excited to announce that Facebook will host its first global Capture the Flag (CTF) competition June 1-3, 2019. As part of the competition, participants will be tasked with solving various security challenges to earn points using skills like cryptography, reverse engineering, binary exploitation, web exploitation and more.” [registration required]
Boston, MA June 5-6. “The Robotics Summit & Expo is a multifaceted educational forum and expo dedicated to addressing the issues involved with the design, development, manufacture and delivery of commercial robotics and intelligent systems products and services.” [registration required]
New York, NY June 14, starting at 9 a.m., JW Marriott Essex House (160 Central Park South). “Each year, over 200 leading behavioral scientists, executives, policymakers and journalists join together at the Behavioral Science in Policy & Application Conference to explore the latest insights from applied behavioral sciences research for addressing social challenges.” [$$$]
“HHMI is hosting an open, international competition to decide Janelia’s next research area. If you have a big idea that addresses a major unsolved problem in the life sciences, submit a proposal to lead our next research program.” Deadline for submissions is June 3.
“Every two years as part of it’s mission to develop the next generation of leaders in the computing research community, CRA’s Computing Community Consortium, in partnership with CRA’s Government Affairs Committee, holds the Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI) workshop, intended to educate computing researchers on how science policy in the U.S. is formulated and how our government works. We’re seeking nominations for participants for this year’s workshop, scheduled for November 21-22, 2019, in Washington DC.” Deadline for nominations is June 14.
Princeton University Press, Edited by Janet Vertesi and David Ribes
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“Scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences are grappling with how best to study virtual environments, use computational tools in their research, and engage audiences with their results. Classic work in science and technology studies (STS) has played a central role in how these fields analyze digital technologies, but many of its key examples do not speak to today’s computational realities. This groundbreaking collection brings together a world-class group of contributors to refresh the canon for contemporary digital scholarship.”
As a psychologist who has studied the perils of online interactions and has observed the effects of social media (mis)use on my clients’ lives, I have six suggestions of ways people can reduce the harm social media can do to their mental health.
“I’ve been at Google Brain robotics (now referred to as Robotics @ Google) for nearly 3 years. It’s helpful to reflect, from time to time, on the scientific, engineering and personal productivity takeaways gleaned from working on large research projects. Every researcher’s unique experiences and experimentation can potentially become their personal competitive edge for thinking about new problems in unique ways. Here are mine (so far).”
The Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Blog, Avi Singh
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“We have developed an end-to-end method that allows robots to learn from a modest number of images that depict successful completion of a task, without any manual reward engineering. The robot initiates learning from this information alone (around 80 images), and occasionally queries a user for additional labels. In these queries, the robot shows the user an image and asks for a label to determine whether that image represents successful completion of the task or not.”
