A few spectators for the US Open finals in New York’s Flushing Meadows last month probably weren’t smiling for the cameras.
Why not?
Because facial recognition cameras may have been scanning the seats looking for people transmitting real-time betting data to far-flung international locations, according to a disclosure earlier this year by the United States Tennis Association (USTA), the organization that runs the U.S. Open.
McKinsey; Solly Brown, Darshit Gandhi, Louise Herring and Ankur Puri
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The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the defining business opportunities for leaders today. Closely associated with it: the challenge of creating an organization that can rise to that opportunity and exploit the potential of AI at scale.
Meeting this challenge requires organizations to prepare their leaders, business staff, analytics teams, and end users to work and think in new ways—not only by helping these cohorts understand how to tap into AI effectively, but also by teaching them to embrace data exploration, agile development, and interdisciplinary teamwork.
Often, companies use an ad hoc approach to their talent-building efforts. They hire new workers equipped with these skills in spurts and rely on online-learning platforms, universities, and executive-level programs to train existing employees.
But these quick-fix tactics aren’t enough to transform an organization into one that’s fully AI-driven and capable of keeping up with the blazing pace of change in both technology and the nature of business competition that we’re experiencing today.
Two recent reports give us new insights into how to encourage women to persist in computing. Both reports stress the importance of giving women technical skills, especially programming.
Tim Weston, Wendy DuBow, and Alexis Kaminsky published a paper in ACM Transactions on Computing Education in September, “Predicting Women’s Persistence in Computer Science- and Technology-Related Majors from High School to College” (see link here). Over a six year period, the authors followed almost 500 applicants to the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing award for high school women. They found that 177 of the women persisted in computer science, 137 persisted in a non-CS technology-related major, and 180 were no longer involved in CS or technology. The authors used multinomial regression to determine what predicted persistence.
Today, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) officials and donors broke ground on a new academic and research facility, taking an essential step as the university commits to leading the Fourth Industrial Revolution and preparing its graduates for long-term success in jobs that do not yet exist. The building will provide space for researchers and educators to work together—and with partners from industry, governments and academia—to apply their collective expertise towards developing integrated solutions with computational methods and smart design to some of the planet’s most pressing problems in health, energy, transportation, and the built environment.
“This building will be an apex of connectivity—a place of teaching, learning, discovery, collaboration, creation, and support,” said WPI President Laurie Leshin. “It will create connections between academia and the rest of the world in ways that realize the development of ‘smart’ applications and technologies, as well as policies, businesses, and positive societal outcomes.
Biomedical engineers at Duke University have devised a machine learning approach to modeling the interactions between complex variables in engineered bacteria that would otherwise be too cumbersome to predict. Their algorithms are generalizable to many kinds of biological systems.
In the new study, the researchers trained a neural network to predict the circular patterns that would be created by a biological circuit embedded into a bacterial culture. The system worked 30,000 times faster than the existing computational model.
To further improve accuracy, the team devised a method for retraining the machine learning model multiple times to compare their answers. Then they used it to solve a second biological system that is computationally demanding in a different way, showing the algorithm can work for disparate challenges.
The University of Southampton and Shell Shipping & Maritime have launched the Centre for Maritime Futures which will bring together university and industry partners to transform the energy shipping industry to be safer, cleaner and more efficient.
The Centre has received a gift of £1.5m from Shell Shipping & Maritime, the largest corporate gift in the University’s history.
Drawing on the extensive expertise in maritime research in both institutions and using ground-breaking digital and technological advances, the Centre will play a vital role in delivering the UN International Maritime Organisation’s goal to reduce greenhouse emissions from international shipping by 50 percent by 2050.
The most valuable weapon against the next deadly disease outbreak may be data. Scientists aiming to stop or prevent the spread of viral or bacterial pathogens need rapid, comprehensive access to datasets on their genomics, structure, function and more, combined with computational tools to quickly analyze data and make predictions using artificial intelligence techniques.
That critical service will be provided by the new Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center (BV-BRC), based at the University of Chicago. The big data resource combines two independent efforts at UChicago and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) into a common infrastructure that will support richer scientific data and more powerful analytic tools.
The data resource will be funded by the National Institutes of Health and the contract award totals $43,196,984 over five years, if all options are exercised. The primary awardee is the University of Chicago, with sub-awards given to JCVI, the University of Virginia and the Fellowship for Interpretation of Genomes.
Recent massive increases in the number of sequences available in public databases challenges current experimental approaches to determining protein function. These methods are limited by both the large scale of these sequences databases and the diversity of protein functions. We present a deep learning Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) trained on sequence and structural data and evaluate it on ~40k proteins with known structures and functions from the Protein Data Bank (PDB). Our GCN predicts functions more accurately than Convolutional Neural Networks trained on sequence data alone and competing methods. Feature extraction via a language model removes the need for constructing multiple sequence alignments or feature engineering. Our model learns general structure-function relationships by robustly predicting functions of proteins with ≤ 30% sequence identity to the training set. Using class activation mapping, we can automatically identify structural regions at the residue-level that lead to each function prediction for every protein confidently predicted, advancing site-specific function prediction. De-noising inherent in the trained model allows an only minor drop in performance when structure predictions are used, including multiple de novo protocols. We use our method to annotate all proteins in the PDB, making several new confident function predictions spanning both fold and function trees. [full text]
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) have reached an agreement with Los Angeles law enforcement agencies under which the police and sheriff’s departments will turn over license plate data they indiscriminately collected on millions of law-abiding drivers in Southern California.
The data, which has been deidentified to protect drivers’ privacy, will allow EFF and ACLU SoCal to learn how the agencies are using automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems throughout the city and county of Los Angeles and educate the public on the privacy risks posed by this intrusive technology. A weeks’ worth of data, composed of nearly 3 million data points, will be examined.
The Chinese satellite, Gaofen-10, was launched at 2:51 a.m. Saturday (Beijing Time) aboard a Long March-4C rocket and entered the planned orbit successfully. It was the 314th flight mission of the Long March carrier rocket series.
As part of the country’s high-definition Earth observation project, the microwave remote sensing satellite is capable of providing photographs with a ground-level resolution of less than a metre.
European Union rules require people to actively choose to allow companies to install tracking cookies, judges said in another key ruling on privacy from the EU’s top court.
The EU Court of Justice said in a judgment on Tuesday that the placement of cookies requires the active consent of internet users and that “a box checked by default is therefore insufficient.”
urvey data and experts suggest that students generally appreciate libraries most for their simple, traditional offerings: a quiet place to study or collaborate on a group project, the ability to print research papers, and access to books. Notably, many students say they like relying on librarians to help them track down hard-to-find texts or navigate scholarly journal databases. “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers,” as the writer Neil Gaiman once said. “A librarian can bring you back the right one.”
Some colleges see libraries as prime real estate that can hold any number of miscellaneous student services, from tutoring to child care. “As the college grows and space becomes tight, a library that sometimes looks empty might be a tempting target for administrators trying to maximize the use of space on their campuses,” noted a trade-association article published earlier this year. Such “tides of change,” as an Indiana University library-sciences professor argued in a 2016 study, “threaten the core of library practices and values.”
On 23 June 2016, 34 million U.K. citizens took to the polls to vote on a simple, fateful question: Should the United Kingdom remain a part of the European Union, or should it leave? Nearly 52%—a majority of 1.3 million—wanted out, and conservative politicians vowed to carry out the people’s wishes.
Sandra Arndt, a German biogeochemist working at the University of Bristol, couldn’t cast a ballot. So, she voted with her feet. In 2017, she got a job at the Free University of Brussels and moved her family to Belgium. “Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that one of the oldest democracies of the world—one of the most tolerant, outward-looking countries, one of the most pragmatic and successful nations—would descend into such a dangerous political mess,” Arndt says.
That mess is far from resolved, even though the latest deadline for Brexit is 31 October.
A new survey found that more than half of B.C’s. artificial intelligence companies believe the federal government is not doing enough to boost the sector, and half have considered leaving the province.
The non-profit industry association, Artificial Intelligence Network of B.C., says there are more than 150 AI-related firms in B.C. and more than 65 submitted responses to its survey, which was conducted by CityAge and released this week.
More than 56 per cent of respondents said the federal government needs to do more to help the local AI sector grow, with 31 per cent saying its efforts were lacking and 24 per cent saying they needed major attention.
Case Western Reserve University, Innovation Research Interchange
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Cleveland, OH October 14-16 at Case Western Reserve University. “Get the tools to coordinate multiple digital innovation efforts across your organization.” [$$$]
“Nine to twelve months of support to graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are enrolled in PhD programs in the United States and conducting dissertation research on non-US topics. Seventy fellowships are awarded annually.” Deadline to apply is November 5.
“The University of Michigan School of Information invites applicants for the U-M Presidential Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). UMSI faculty members have a successful record of providing a nurturing and productive post-doctoral experience for Presidential Post-Doctoral Fellows.” Deadline for applications is October 15.
“Just launched: a new free online course produced with the Knight Center for Journalism for anyone wanting to learn how to do data journalism with free tools. I get to teach the introduction and welcome you to the course, along with the great Alberto Cairo and a fabulous set of teachers, including: Debra Anderson, Duncan Clark, Jan Diehm, Minhaz Kazi, Dale Markowitz, Marco Túlio Pires and Katherine Riley.
Through 4 rounds of revisions, we made a survey more specific and usable. Running pilot studies before conducting a full-scale survey ensures you’ll reach your research goal.
Survey questions are delicate things. Even small details in wording can affect how your respondents interpret and answer them. A carelessly written question can ruin a study, so it’s worth a little extra time to perfect your survey.
MIT Sloan School of Management, Sloan Managemet Review, Chris Brahm
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Among U.S. technology workers, there’s a clear preference for jobs in cities with strong technology hubs and at companies with well-established track records in analytics. Recent Bain & Company research shows this tendency of advanced analytics talent to cluster in big cities is actually a global phenomenon. (See “Advanced Analytics Talent Clusters in Major Cities.”) In the U.S., 10% of the pool of advanced analytics talent sits in greater metropolitan New York City, and 14% is in the San Francisco Bay area. Similarly, more than a quarter of India’s advanced analytics talent pool is located in Bangalore, with another 13% in Delhi. And the concentration is even more pronounced in China, where two cities — Shanghai and Beijing — account for fully half of the country’s analytics talent.
So, what actions can organizations outside of these power centers take?
“In this talk William Falcon goes through the implementation details of the 10 most useful of these techniques, including DataLoaders, 16-bit precision, accumulated gradients and 4 different ways of distributing model training across hundreds of GPUs. We’ll also show how to use these already built-in in PyTorch Lightning, a Keras-like framework for ML researchers.” [video, 57:07]