On their project page, UW computing scientists Chung-Yi Weng and Brian Curless, along with Facebook’s Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, describe a process that can take one single photo and create a character that walks out of the frame toward the viewer. They can also make the character run, sit, or jump.
One place where an embryonic form of human-machine teaming already takes place is in the world of retail: Walmart uses robots to scan store shelves for stock levels and has automated truck unloading (via a system called the “Fast Unloader”) at many stores—using sensors and conveyor belts to sort shipments onto stocking carts. And robotic systems have already taken over the role of warehouse “picking” at Amazon, working with humans to retrieve and ship purchases.
Conversely, an element of Industry 4.0 that has evolved past the embryonic stage is the use of sensor data to drive plant operations—especially for the task of predictive maintenance. Unexpected equipment downtime is the bane of all industries, especially when the failure of a relatively minor part leads to the total failure of an expensive asset.
Satellites measure the health of planet Earth by bouncing signals off a patch of ocean, ice sheet, or rainforest and discerning digital vital signs upon their return. But a new cluster of satellites will harness the global positioning system to help predict weather patterns, long-term climate change, and even crippling interference from solar flares.
The same GPS signals you rely on to navigate through rush-hour traffic, find a restaurant, or track your kids can also be used to forecast when hurricanes form in tropical waters. At least that’s the hope of researchers who developed a fleet of six small satellites scheduled to blast off on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket next Monday from Cape Canaveral. The mission is also the latest round in an ongoing contest of sorts between government-sponsored and privately operated weather data collection systems, a competition that many observers hope will result in better forecasts that cost less money.
As a misanthrope living in a vibrant city, I’m never short of things to complain about. And in particular the problem of people crowding into my photos, whatever I happen to shoot, is a persistent one. That won’t be an issue any more with Bye Bye Camera, an app that simply removes any humans from photos you take. Finally!
The former Harvard professor and her tight team of policy advisers have waded deeper into the world of academia than is usual in presidential campaigns, according to interviews with more than a dozen people her campaign has consulted and a review of the scholarship underlying her plans.
Leafing through Warren’s plans posted on Medium, voters will find links to obscure academic literature from places like the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics, the Upjohn Institute, the Journal of Applied Business and Economics, and the American Journal of Sociology.
PatientsLikeMe was in a haste to find a buyer after regulators at the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), forced its majority shareholder Shenzhen, China-based iCarbonX to divest their holdings in the startup.
Told to optimize for speed while racing down a track in a computer game, a car pushes the pedal to the metal … and proceeds to spin in a tight little circle. Nothing in the instructions told the car to drive straight, and so it improvised.
illustration of a car following a path
This example – funny in a computer game but not so much in life – is among those that motivated Stanford University researchers to build a better way to set goals for autonomous systems.
Dorsa Sadigh, assistant professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, and her lab have combined two different ways of setting goals for robots into a single process, which performed better than either of its parts alone in both simulations and real-world experiments.
A team of researchers has carried out a detailed study of the genomes of ruminants, giving new insight into their evolution and success.
Ruminants including deer and antelope, as well as sheep, goats, cattle and their wild relatives, have thrived in many ecosystems around the globe. They range in size from the tiny lesser mouse deer of Malaysia to the towering African giraffe.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) this month announced the second phase of funding for the regional Big Data Innovation Hub (BD Hubs) program. Under the planned four year, $4 million award, the Midwest Big Data Hub will continue to be led from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The Hub’s priority focus areas will be co-led by five partner institutions in the region: Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, and the University of North Dakota.
First funded in 2015, the four regional BD Hubs were designed by NSF to follow U.S. Census Regions, with offices in the Midwest (led by Illinois), West (UC Berkeley), South (Georgia Tech and UNC Chapel Hill) and the Northeast (Columbia University). The Midwest Hub serves a 12-state region that encompasses Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
There’s so much computer data out there these days that it’s measured in something called zettabytes — a trillion gigabytes. Keep in mind that a gigabyte is roughly the amount of data on a typical DVD.
In this era of Big Data, there’s a lot of information to be analyzed — and a lot of jobs out there for people willing to do that kind of work. To meet this high-tech demand, UNCG this fall will roll out a new master’s degree program in analytics and informatics — the science of extracting meaning and information from trillions and trillions of bits and bytes.
Marine litter isn’t the only hazard whose contours we can’t fully see. The United Nations has 93 indicators to measure the environmental dimensions of “sustainable development,” and amazingly, the UN found that we have little to no data on 68 percent of them—like how rapidly land is being degraded, the rate of ocean acidification, or the trade in poached wildlife. Sometimes this is because we haven’t collected it; in other cases some data exists but hasn’t been shared globally, or it’s in a myriad of incompatible formats. No matter what, we’re flying blind. “And you can’t manage something if you can’t measure it,” says David Jensen, the UN’s head of environmental peacebuilding.
In other words, if we’re going to help the planet heal and adapt, we need a data revolution. We need to build a “digital ecosystem for the environment,” as Jensen puts it.
In a move that recognizes deep changes underway in the construction of computer software, Purdue University’s Office of the Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships on Monday (June 24) announced the launch of a new research center that aims to connect fundamental research in programming languages (PL) and software engineering with domains such as artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.
The new Purdue Center for Programming Principles and Software Systems (PurPL) gathers researchers from the Department of Computer Science and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
As out-of-control wildfires in the West grow more frequent and more intense, fire departments in Southern California are looking to big data and artificial intelligence to enhance the way they respond to these disasters.
The marriage of computing, brawn and speed, they hope, may help save lives.
“In Los Angeles, with our population density, a fire is going to be burning houses down right away,” said Ralph Terrazas, the chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department. “There’s smoke, there’s fire, there’s sirens, and we have to make decisions in just minutes.”
As U.S. officials prepare an antitrust probe of Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG -0.49% Google and possibly other Silicon Valley giants, a loose-knit crew of its rivals is gearing up to help.
In industries from news to travel and online shopping, Google’s competitors are readying documents and data in anticipation of meetings with the Justice Department, according to industry representatives.
Many of these companies have long argued that Big Tech platforms illegally abuse their market power. In recent years, some of them have found a receptive audience in Europe, where authorities have thrice fined Google for alleged monopolistic practices. Google has paid the fines but is challenging them in court.
Argo AI will invest $15 million over five years to create a center for autonomous vehicle research at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the latest efforts by the Ford-backed company to accelerate the development of self-driving cars.
The center, Carnegie Mellon University Argo AI Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research, will focus on advanced perception and decision-making algorithms for autonomous vehicles, the company said Monday.
Redmond, WA June 29, starting at 9 a.m., Microsoft Building 9. “This event is sponsored by Microsoft and the Seattle Artificial Intelligence Workshops group.” [free, registration required]
“Season of Docs brings together technical writers and open source projects to foster collaboration and improve documentation in the open source space.” … “On May 29, 2019 at 18:00 UTC, Season of Docs will begin accepting technical writer applications and publish a link to the application form on the website. The deadline for technical writer applications is June 28, 2019 at 18:00 UTC.”
The eighth annual Exeter Prize for Research in Experimental Economics, Decision Theory, and Behavioral Economics is accepting submissions. Deadline for nominations is July 4.
“You may not be aware that we’re organizing the Visualization for Communication (VisComm) workshop at [IEEE VIS again this year. That’s why we’ve decided to push back the deadline to July 15, so you can submit all your amazing research papers, position papers, posters, and visual case studies.”
“We invite proposals for short tutorials on machine learning and related fields. Ideally, the tutorial should attract a wide audience, provide a broad coverage of core research problems in its chosen research area, elucidate technical solutions, discuss their key insights, and stimulate future work.” Deadline for submissions is July 20.
“The SAGE open access journal Big Data & Society (BD&S) is soliciting proposals for a Special Theme to be published in late 2020 or early 2021.” Deadline for proposals is September 1.
Everything has been updated. It starts with a faster system-on-a-chip. The processor now uses the Cortex-A72 architecture (quad-core 64-bit ARMv8 at 1.5GHz). It supports H.265 hardware video decoding for instance.
The Raspberry Pi has been stuck at 512MB or 1GB of RAM for years. For the first time, you can buy models with more memory if you want more memory. The base model still starts with 1GB of RAM. But you can optionally buy a model with 2GB RAM or even 4GB of RAM.
It’s no secret that IBM wants to establish itself as a major hybrid cloud player. That was the major motivator behind its $34 billion Red Hat acquisition, which now appears to be in the final stages of the closing process.
Its cloud aspirations also seem to be behind a move the company made a few weeks ago when it open sourced Razee, a continuous delivery tool for managing applications in Kubernetes-based cluster deployments. It’s probably no coincidence that the software seems to be ready-made for Red Hat to fold into its hybrid cloud offerings.
Kubernetes, of course, is all about the cloud, being the centerpiece of the cloud-native software ecosphere. And Razee isn’t some not-yet-ready-for-prime-time software that’s untried and untested in production. IBM’s been using it to drive Kubernetes on its own cloud for a while now.
“We are excited to announce that, as of today, Kaggle has officially integrated into BigQuery, Google’s enterprise cloud data warehouse. In addition to our Python and R environments in Kernels, this integration opens up a third possibility to execute BigQuery’s renowned, high-performance SQL queries on your massive datasets.”