Cyber Command is a unified combatant command, with the highest profile in its existence, and the cyber mission force is at its largest. With operational lessons in hand and an evolving cyber domain at play, how the Department of Defense trains — and teaches — cyber operations is changing quickly.
Based in Augusta, Georgia, Fort Gordon is becoming a regional cyber hub for the military. Army Cyber Command is moving its headquarters there in 2020 and with it will come a flurry of investments from government and private sector cybersecurity groups, including a $100 million taxpayer-funded cybersecurity center to be built in downtown Augusta.
Lawrence Carin, a Duke engineering professor and one of the world’s leading experts on machine learning and artificial intelligence, has been named Vice President for Research at Duke University and will lead a new university-wide Office of Research, officials announced Wednesday.
Companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter already use AI-powered software to detect and remove hateful content, as Recode’s Rani Molla explained. And just this month, the FBI put out a request for proposals for a “social media early alerting tool in order to mitigate multifaceted threats.” That sounds a lot like what Trump is calling for: a tool to identify potential shooters before they have the chance to hurt anyone.
The big question is: Can these tools work? The answer, according to tech experts I interviewed, is no — not yet, anyway. On a purely technical level, our software is nowhere near good enough right now.
Perhaps more important, using predictive AI in the way Trump seems to be suggesting raises a whole slew of ethical concerns.
Inside Higher Ed; Edward J. Maloney, Joshua Kim amd James DeVaney
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The Office of Academic Innovation was established in early 2014 to consider how the University of Michigan would lead the way for higher education through the information age and further strengthen our institution’s impact on society. We were charged with creating a culture of innovation in learning and examining how teaching and learning can be enhanced by ubiquitous access to digital content, by unprecedented opportunities for connection and by an explosion of data about learners, educators and their interactions.
To support this strategic direction, we established a new and unique model for academic innovation. Part incubator, part internal consultancy, part design lab, the Academic Innovation team connects UM’s commitment to academic excellence, inclusion and innovation in order to continue Michigan’s leadership role in defining how the world learns from and with a great public research university.
A security researcher was able to get companies to give him his fiance’s Social Security Number, passwords, and other sensitive private information with her consent by taking advantage of GDPR’s ‘Right of Access’ requests.
Bloomberg Business, Sammy Criscitello and Michael McDonald
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It pays to have worked at Yale University’s investment office.
David Swensen, the chief investment officer at Yale, and people who worked for him early in their careers, were among the highest-paid endowment chiefs in 2017, according to preliminary data collected by Bloomberg. They took five of the top 10 spots in our ranking.
The National Academy of Sciences planned a two-day summer workshop to address a high-stakes question: Could the development of next generation 5G wireless undermine the accuracy of information gathered by weather satellites?
On July 16, less than a week before the scheduled start, the event was canceled because many of the “most knowledgeable about the topic” were reluctant to participate, according to a statement released by the National Academy of Sciences.
The science workshop was a casualty of a nasty dispute within the federal government that has pitted Federal Communications Commission (FCC) officials who say the 5G technology can be safely developed against NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials who say tighter restrictions are needed to prevent a serious threat to data collection by polar-orbiting satellites.
How this gets resolved could have serious implications for the accuracy of forecasting, which will be increasingly important in a warming world expected to have more extreme weather events. It will also have repercussions for a U.S. wireless industry eager to deploy a transformative technology that offers much faster data speed.
Imitation meat made by Impossible Foods Inc. has become an unexpected craze, reaching more than 10,000 restaurant menus over the summer, by the company’s count. In a sign of both popularity and supply-chain problems, the Impossible Burger is sometimes impossible to obtain at these restaurants due to a months-long shortage.
More than 30% of locations listed on Impossible’s website were not serving the product last month, according to a survey conducted by Bloomberg News. The data, drawn from a random sample of 902 locations across the U.S. and Asia, found particularly widespread outages in some regions. In Massachusetts and Maine, for example, as many as 65% of restaurants did not have the burger in stock during a 14-day period in July. About 10% of those restaurants told Bloomberg they had switched to a competing product made by Beyond Meat Inc.
Now, as Impossible moves onto menus at more than 7,000 Burger Kings in the U.S.—joining the roster of White Castles, Red Robins, Qdobas and thousands of indie restaurants offering its products—we want you to help us keep tabs on the spread of the plant-based burger. That’s why we’ve made Bloomberg’s Burger Stalker.
We analyzed 1,457,000 student interviews to identify the trends and influences driving university recruitment across the world. Which university’s students are the strongest in key developer skills and why?
The threat from China is real, U.S. academic leaders say. But so, too, is the possibility that federal efforts to combat that threat could inhibit the U.S. research enterprise.
That’s why university officials are scrambling to shape legislation moving rapidly through Congress. It’s aimed at thwarting attempts by foreign entities, notably the Chinese government and affiliated institutions, to take unfair advantage of the traditionally open U.S. research system.
The House of Representatives has already adopted language that universities like. And on 12 July it was tucked into a larger piece of legislation almost certain to become law in some form. But this month also saw a bipartisan group of senators introduce a similar bill that added provisions universities find hard to swallow.
The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year, $5 million grant to the University of California, San Diego, the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley to develop CloudBank, a suite of managed services to simplify public cloud access for computer science research and education.
Driven by the ongoing emergence and potential of the public cloud and the associated complexity in using it, CloudBank will serve both novice and advanced users, providing a comprehensive set of user-facing and business operations functions and services to the computer science research and education community.
Project participants include the UW’s eScience Institute, UC San Diego’s Information Technology Services Division and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and UC Berkeley’s Division of Data Science and Information. Initially, CloudBank will provide access to Amazon AWS, Google GCP, and Microsoft Azure. Others may become available over time.
The incoming dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s renowned School of Computer Science is a roboticist and head of CMU’s Robotics Institute who has been a university faculty member for 35 years.
Martial Hebert has served as the institute’s director since 2014 and is known among colleagues as a top researcher in the areas of computer vision, robotics and artificial intelligence.
He becomes dean Aug. 15, university officials announced Thursday.
Daedalean, a Zürich, Switzerland-based startup, has amassed $12 million in funding toward the development of the aviation industry’s first autopilot system to feature an advanced form of artificial intelligence (AI) known as deep convolutional feed forward neural networks.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O) on Wednesday released the second generation of its processor chip for data centers and said that it had landed Alphabet Inc’ (GOOGL.O) Google and Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) as customers.
Syracuse University, School of Information Studies
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New York, NY August 14-15 at Syracuse University’s Lubin House. “The aim of this convergence conference is to produce an agenda for convergent, interdisciplinary research. To do so, we will bring together participants from diverse perspectives (e.g., business, government, law, geography, psychology, computer science, urban planning and more) in order to identify common research themes related to work and intelligent machines.” [login and registration required]
“At the Aspen Tech Policy Hub, we take tech experts, teach them the policy process through an in-person fellowship program in the Bay Area, and encourage them to develop outside-the-box solutions to society’s problems. We model ourselves after tech incubators like Y Combinator, but train new policy thinkers and focus the impact of their ideas. We’re building new ideas for policymaking — every fellow must complete one practical policy output during their time with us — and an alumni base of technologists who understand policy and want to engage with it.” Deadline to apply is August 15.
“The Business Intelligence Journal is a semiannual journal that focuses on all aspects of unbiased, critical business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) knowledge. The Journal’s name and content reflect TDWI’s mission to educate business and IT professionals about the array of technologies and disciplines required to deliver valuable insight to business users and to help organizations operate more intelligently.” Deadline for Volume 24 submissions is August 23.
“TechCongress places computer scientists, engineers, and other technologists to serve as technology policy advisors to to Members of Congress through our one-year Congressional Innovation Fellowship. We bridge the divide of knowledge and experience between DC and Silicon Valley for better outcomes for both.” … “We are now recruiting for the 2020 Congressional Innovation Fellowship!” Deadline to apply is September 3.
I’m not planning to commit any lakeworthy crimes, but stories about tech companies’ violations of privacy do have me thinking about a scenario that once seemed unimaginable: life without Gmail. Google, after all, has been repeatedly accused of improperly collecting user data. Earlier this year it paid $13 million to settle a class action over its Street View program’s scooping up personal information from people’s home Wi-Fi networks. (It denied any wrongdoing.) And yet I was still giving it the entirety of my inbox. If some of the world’s plutocrats didn’t trust Gmail—or Yahoo Mail or, God help them, AOL—why should I?
“You shouldn’t have to be in some sort of political or financial elite to have access to something like this,” says Giri Sreenivas. He’s an engineer who runs Helm, a startup in Bellevue, Wash., that aims to bring the Hillary setup [named after Hilary Clinton] to the rest of us.
Uber open sources yet another internal project, this time a framework for designing, training and deploying conversational AI to further the research state in this field. In comparison to other frameworks, their framework Plato claims to have the most flexible architecture for plugging in different deep learning libraries, building different flows, and supporting multi-agent conversational dialogsenabling agents how to learn to exchange information between themselves. The framework is fully downloadable from their github page.
In n 2017 and 2018 I ran an exhaustive survey of the data visualization community to try to better understand the trends and issues that were most important to our community. With the founding of the Data Visualization Society, I thought it made sense for that survey to pass over to the DVS so that it could be better designed and its responses better handled by a real organization, rather than a single individual.
The 2019 edition of the survey ran from May to June and received over 1350 responses. I’m happy to announce those responses have been cleaned up and are publicly available here.