Cal Poly today announced the Satellite Data Solutions (SDS) Initiative built on Amazon Web Services to harness data from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites to address the planet’s most critical challenges. These challenges include forecasting natural disasters and assessing their impact, helping relief workers seek alternative access routes for delivering cargo or medical supplies, and weather tracking in order to alert ships and aircraft.
The initiative, which was announced at the AWS Public Sector Summit 2019 in Washington, D.C., is part of the Digital Transformation Hub (DxHUB) that was formed by Cal Poly and AWS to solve real-world challenges by providing innovation guidance to public sector organizations and their experts while offering Cal Poly student’s hands-on learning experience.
Winter in Antarctica is frigid, persistently dark, violently stormy, and, at least in some years, home to puzzling holes in the sea ice. Known as polynyas, these strange pits “have been this enduring mystery in polar oceanography” since several large ones were first spotted in the 1970s, says Ethan Campbell, a doctoral student in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington and the author of a new study that offers tantalizing clues about how polynyas form and where they fit in the study of the vast Southern Ocean. … The researchers used data from three different sources to help them better understand what’s happening with polynyas: satellite footage, sensors strapped to seals (yes, really), and drifting “float robots” that became trapped in a fortunate spot.
It’s pretty obvious why you’d want to keep personal information private, like passwords and credit card data. But medical data might not be as obvious: why would hackers care whether I have diabetes? Thanks to a new report, we now know a little more about what happens when healthcare systems’ data is breached.
According to the report, hackers can turn around and sell stolen data on the dark web. The most valuable health information isn’t actually your medical information, but rather documents that would help people commit other types of fraud.
Lost in the glowing headlines is the fact the United States is making choices that will leave rural America behind. These choices will harm our global leadership in 5G and could create new challenges for the security of our networks.
Here’s why. The most important input in our new wireless world is spectrum, or the invisible airwaves that are used to send and receive the radio signals that power wireless communications. For decades, slices of spectrum have been reserved for different uses, from television broadcasting to military radar. But today demands on our airwaves have grown. So the Federal Communications Commission has been working to clear these airwaves of old uses and auction them so they can be repurposed for new 5G service.
Jennifer Freyd, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, has spent years studying the concept of institutional betrayal, including when institutions don’t help right the wrongs committed within them.
Now Freyd is battling her own institution in court. She alleges that Oregon failed to properly respond to what her own department chair called a “glaring” pay gap between Freyd and the men she works with — $18,000 less than that of her male peer closest in rank.
They have the unique ability to capture images of the Earth at night and even in cloudy weather, said Dr. Roger De Abreu, acting director of the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing.
“It’s a pretty unique perspective of our lands, and importantly, our coastal waterways on all three coasts,” he said.
The satellites will collect images of Canada at least daily and even more frequently in the North, he said.
Hackers got access to photos of border crossers and their license plates this week, raising questions about border authorities’ plans to collect reams of sensitive biometric information.
Robots must be smarter if they’re going to pack boxes in warehouses, scan inventory in stores, and even care for the elderly.
The rise of machine learning in recent years is making that possible. Steady innovation has led to robots that can independently “learn” to navigate tight corridors and grasp delicate objects without crushing them.
Some of the leading American and Japanese robotics companies and investors recently gathered in Menlo Park, Calif. to discuss artificial intelligence in robotics and its impact on business. Their conclusion? The robots are coming. But it may require some cooperation between the U.S. and an important overseas ally.
“This year, this week, it was unfortunate,” YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki says. “We managed to upset everybody and we’re working really hard to try to do the right thing.”
Speaking with Recode’s Peter Kafka at the 2019 Code Conference, Wojcicki looked back on YouTube’s messy resolution to a dispute between conservative commentator Steven Crowder and Vox journalist Carlos Maza, saying YouTube made the right decision but was unintentionally “hurtful to the LGBTQ community.” More generally, she said it’s better for the platform to continue reviewing potentially controversial videos after they’re published — not before.
[Elizabeth] Honig — an art historian at the University of California, Berkeley — has a database of more than 1,500 digitally reproduced Brueghel pictures, most attributed to Jan. In 2016, she initiated an unusual collaboration with artificial intelligence (AI) researchers in France and the United States, deploying state-of-the-art computer vision to help in analysing similarities and tracing them from work to work. Other art historians are also seeing opportunities in harnessing machine learning to provide empirical support for theories and ideas previously confined to the subjective eyes of the beholders.
The computer, says Honig, can pick up “so many more details, so much more easily”.
For the past two decades, seafaring scientists from Oregon State University have set out from the Newport, Oregon, harbor to collect data. Tracing ocean trenches and undersea mountains, their heavy equipment dips into the water taking measurements of the current, the ocean temperature and zooplankton levels.
The data helps researchers understand how climate change affects the marine food chain and can predict what the fishing season will look like.
The Oregon State study, and others like it, carry on — despite the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to roll back environmental protections, remove the United States from international climate treaties and cast doubts on climate science. Decades-long research programs like Oregon State University’s Cooperative Institute for Marine Resource Studies, continue thanks to independent university partnerships with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which funds projects, keeping them surprisingly insulated from politics.
Stanford Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering
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Stanford, CA August 12-17. “There are 10 full-day workshops. You can register for one workshop per day. If you complete four or more day-long workshops, you qualify for an ICME Fundamentals of Data Science Workshops Certificate of Completion.”
NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Veterans Future Lab
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New York, NY June 27, starting at 1 p.m., SAP Next-Gen (10 Hudson Yards, 48th Floor). “See how veteran founders are running game-changing startups, and how investors of all types fund veteran-led companies. Learn more about the innovations emerging from our first incubator program, and meet the extraordinary founders. And mingle with the thriving community that’s powering veteran entrepreneurship in New York.” [registration required]
“The DSFP consists of three, one-week schools per year over a two year period. On top of teaching our students the skills they need for modern survey astronomy, we also aim to create a collaborative, supportive learning environment, and work to empower our students to teach the skills they learn to others. We strive to create an inclusive program, and particularly encourage applications from students from underrepresented groups in astronomy.” Deadline for applications is June 14.
“The development team created the draft 2019-2020 Federal Data Strategy Action Plan (hereinafter draft Year-1 Action Plan) to identify Practice-related Action Steps that are the priority for the year, along with targeted timeframes for implementation and responsible assignments. The draft Year-1 Action Plan is now available for public comment.”
“Offers the opportunity for the bright minded companies to propose the best-in-class products and solutions within the Industrial Automation domain to international jury.” Deadline to apply is June 30.
Copenhagen, Denmark Part of RecSys 2019, September 16-20. “Asking the right question is half the answer: Revisiting the choice of offline metrics for recommender systems.” Deadline for abstract submissions is August 15.
“Today we announce the launch of a new open access and peer-reviewed journal: Data & Policy. Aimed at a growing global community of scholars, policy leaders, and industry innovators, this new venue, published by Cambridge University Press, seeks to explore a variety of issues related to the growing use of data science technologies for governance and in the public sector. It will offer a forum, among other topics, for commentary concerning developments in this emerging field; their social and ethical implications; and the emergence of data and policy as a distinct body of knowledge and practice.”
What could a musician, chemist, or physicist bring to your artificial intelligence team? Plenty. Let’s look at a range of skills and roles – including non-technical ones – that fuel successful AI efforts
NASA has released a dataset that includes more than a trillion precise measurements of the Earth’s height at various locations, including the height of glaciers and the height of the canopy of forests. NASA gathered the data, which includes the exact latitude and longitudes for a corresponding elevation, by shooting photons from a satellite 310 miles in space and recording how long it takes for the photon to bounce off the Earth and return to the satellite. This data can help researchers track the effects of the Earth’s warming climate and the health of forests.
“A data scientist is a ‘person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician.’ In Top 10 Coding Mistakes Made by Data Scientists we discussed how statisticians can become better coders. Here we discuss how coders can become better statisticians.”
Automagica is an open source Smart Robotic Process Automation (SRPA) platform. With Automagica, automating cross-platform processes becomes a breeze. With this open source library we want to provide a comprehensive and consistent wrapper around known and lesser known automation libraries .
There is a growing need to understand user profiles while personalizing content for them. The content and amount of the information within a user profile can vary depending on the application. The accuracy of the user profile is based on how user information is gathered and organized, and how accurately this information reflects the user needs. In other words, it depends on the user profiling process in which the information is gathered, organized and interpreted to create the summarization and description of users to provide a personalized experience.