Twitter has acquired Fabula AI, a London-based startup that uses machine learning (ML) to help detect the spread of misinformation online.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition will underpin a research group at Twitter led by Sandeep Pandey that will work toward finding new ways to leverage machine learning across natural language processing (NLP), recommendations systems, reinforcement learning, and graph deep learning. The group will also address ML ethics.
“Almost every satellite company I’ve worked with tends to process and put their data into [Amazon Web Services],” said Shayn Hawthorne, a former US Air Force officer and defense contractor who worked with Amazon’s most security conscious customers, including those in the intelligence community. “Why don’t we just get rid of the bumps in the line, make it really easy to get the data into AWS?”
Hawthorne is now the general manager of Amazon Web Services Ground Station, tasked with solving that problem. Today, eight private satellite operators and an undisclosed number of government agencies are using the service, which came online with two ground stations last week. Ten more are expected to open this year across the globe, with the goal of giving customers access to their satellites every 25 to 35 minutes.
Motorists cruising the famed Peak to Peak Highway north of Nederland as they savor the scenery or head out for a visit to Brainard Lake might well sail right past a modest signpost for one of the highest elevation long-term ecological research sites in the world.
The University of Colorado Boulder’s Mountain Research Station, within the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest and situated just a few miles west off of Colo. 72, is the jumping-off point for some of the most important ongoing research into the nuanced and changing dynamics of alpine ecology going on anywhere in North America.
Increasingly, the focus of that work relates directly to the signals and effects of climate change — a problem not even being considered by scientists when University of Colorado biology professor Francis Ramaley launched the Tolland Summer Biology Camp in the vicinity in 1909.
The debate over screen time is typically accompanied by a good deal of finger-wagging: The digital experience is a ruinous habit, akin to binge-eating curly fries, gambling on cock fights or drinking whiskey with breakfast.
Meanwhile, social scientists who are trying to study the actual psychological effects of screen time are left in a bind. For one thing, good luck finding a “control group” of people living the nondigital life or anything close to it. Children pick up devices early, and by their teens are spending six hours a day and more on screens — with phones, laptops and iPads, guzzling from the spigot of Netflix, Hulu and YouTube.
Moreover, standard measures such as “average daily Facebook usage” are now practically meaningless. Consider what a person can do in just the time it takes to wait for a bus: text, watch a comedy skit, play a video game, buy concert tickets, take five selfies, each with a different set of cartoon ears.
Learning how that behavior shapes an individual’s life experience requires an entirely new approach, one that recognizes that screen time is no mere habit but now a way of life. So argued a consortium of social and data scientists recently in the journal Human-Computer Interaction. The phrase “screen time,” they noted, is too broad to be scientifically helpful; it cannot remotely capture the fragmented, ever-shifting torrent of images that constitutes digital experience.
Few university provosts, let alone those at places like Stanford, call the work of their institution “second-rate.” Yet that is how Provost Persis Drell described the Stanford University Press three weeks ago to defend a $1.7 million funding cut to the Press.
While faculty successfully mobilized to delay the reduction for one year, I am still left wondering what this episode reveals about Stanford’s perception of the humanities. After all, just last year the University endowed the Knight-Hennessy scholar program with $800 million, which did not accept a single humanities student in its inaugural class. The much-acclaimed Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) is seeking to raise more than one billion in funding. With billions flowing into these brand-new initiatives, what led Stanford to target the Press, whose subsidy accounts for just 0.00275% of Stanford’s annual budget?
The University Press’ most damning crime may be its commitment to the traditional humanities and social sciences, a rarity on The Farm.
For an annual subscription of $600, SpellPundit offers the massive list, which is sorted by difficulty levels and guarantees that it includes all words used in the competitions. Business took off after last year’s champion, Karthik Nemmani gave a shout-out to the service.
Of this year’s top 50 spellers, 38 were customers, according to Ms. Dasari, 18. One selling point, the siblings say, is that their comprehensive database of words and modules saves time. The Dasaris estimate that their service, which allows users to type the words instead of spelling them aloud, makes preparation four times faster.
Next week, a school district in western New York will become the first in the United States to pilot a facial recognition system on its students and faculty. On Monday, June 3, the Lockport City School District will light up its Aegis system as part of a pilot project that will make it broadly operational by Sept. 1, 2019. The district has eight schools.
Superintendent Michelle Bradley announced the move on Tuesday, as first reported by The Lockport Union-Sun and Journal. Bradley described the test as an “initial implementation phase” meant to troubleshoot the system, train district officials on its use, and discuss proper procedures with local law enforcement in the event of an alert triggered by the facial recognition tech.
David Cameron has taken a job as chair of a US artificial intelligence firm’s advisory board, it was announced on Friday.
The former prime minister “will be responsible for curating and overseeing the strategic guidance” the board provides to Afiniti, the company said in a statement.
The position represents one of Cameron’s most prominent appointments since he stood down as prime minister in 2016. He has previously taken a number of roles at not-for-profit organisations and has a memoir, For the Record, due out later this year.
As the Central Intelligence Agency harnesses machine learning and artificial intelligence to better meet its mission, insiders are aggressively addressing issues around bias and ethics intrinsic to the emerging tech.
“We at the agency have over 100 AI initiatives that we are working on and that’s going to continue to be the case,” Benjamin Huebner, the CIA’s privacy and civil liberties officer said Friday at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution in Washington. “That’s a big complicated issue that we are very much thinking about all the time.”
Huebner said collaborating with the intelligence agency’s data scientists is one of his favorite parts of his job. His privacy team works directly with their tech-facing colleagues on projects around statistics, coding, and graphical representations.
Recorded Future is being acquired by tech investor Insight Partners in a $780 million all-cash deal, the cyber-threat intelligence company announced this morning.
Insight Partners, a New York-based venture capital and private equity firm, led a $25 million round of funding that Recorded Future raised in October 2017. At the time, the cash put the Somerville, MA-based startup’s total venture haul at $58 million. It was founded in 2009 and has raised funding from Google’s venture arm, GV, In-Q-Tel, Accomplice, IA Ventures, Balderton Capital, Reed Elsevier Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, and others.
Stanford University prides itself on its many partnerships with its neighboring tech giants. Its researchers have helped Alphabet’s life sciences unit Verily assess what it means to be healthy, and they’ve evaluated the Apple Watch’s ability to detect heart rhythm changes.
But Stanford’s collaborative spirit can come with a cost — when medical researchers decide they like working with industry so much that they jump ship to go work for industry.
A few high-profile moves: Dr. Sumbul Desai and Dr. Lauren Cheung, who helped launch an institute at Stanford meant to help companies develop digital health tools, both decamped for Apple in 2017. Dr. Rajiv Kumar, who as a Stanford pediatric endocrinologist used Apple software to develop a diabetes monitoring tool, joined the company in 2016. And cardiovascular medicine specialist Dr. Mike McConnell left his full-time gig at Stanford in 2015 to head up Verily’s work on heart health.
Alex Wang; Amanpreet Singh; Yada Pruksachatkun; Julian Michael; Felix Hill; Nikita Nangia; Omer Levy; Samuel R. Bowman
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“We take into account the lessons learnt from original GLUE benchmark and present SuperGLUE, a new benchmark styled after GLUE with a new set of more difficult language understanding tasks, improved resources, and a new public leaderboard.”
“A topic that is not always explained in-depth, despite its intuitive and modular nature, is the backpropagation technique responsible for updating trainable parameters. Let’s build a neural network from scratch to see the internal functioning of a neural network using LEGO pieces as a modular analogy, one brick at a time.”
“The developers of the Python language extended support of Python 2.7 from 2015 to January 1, 2020, recognising that many people were still using Python 2. We believe that the extra 5 years is sufficient to transition off of Python 2, and our projects plan to stop supporting Python 2 when upstream support ends in 2020, if not before. We will then be able to simplify our code and take advantage of the many new features in the current version of the Python language and standard library.”
I use conda all the time with Python, but I hadn’t tried it with R until this evening. Apparently it just works. The libraries I was trying to install have a lot of dependencies, and conda is very good at managing dependencies.
“Why’d I write the book? I love TypeScript, and I didn’t see any great resource out there that explained not just the language and build system features, but went deeper to explain why things were designed the way they were, how the different parts of the language fit together, how that compares to other languages out there, and how it all looks in practice.” … “The rest of this post is a brief laundry list of tips for writing your own technical book.”