The Purdue University Board of Trustees voted Friday (Dec. 6) to approve the construction of a new $40 million facility dedicated to Data Science, designed to help the university meet its goal to be a national and global leader in the field of data science and education for all students. The facility is slated to open for use in 2022.
The flagship four-story building will be approximately 86,000 square feet, featuring not only classroom and teaching space for all of campus, but also group workspace for College of Science researchers and faculty who form the core of the university’s strong and growing data science program.
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/96d208c8-0c78-11ea-8fb7-8fcec0c3b0f9
While the US is often seen as the birthplace of modern management education, the resurgent nationalism gripping America throws a spotlight on Europe’s historical strengths — and fresh opportunities to reassert its position.
The two-year full-time American MBA long gloried in global success, exporting its model and drawing in students from around the world. But older variants of business education in Europe are proving resilient and resurgent.
The most recent data from the Graduate Management Admissions Council, the body that administers the GMAT admission test, shows a decline in MBA applications to US business schools. This partly reflects slowing domestic demand but also hesitation among applicants from abroad.
The issue divides climate scientists and activists and plays out on social media. Texas Tech’s Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist who flies once a month, often to talk to climate doubters in the evangelical Christian movement, was blasted on Twitter because she keeps flying.
Hayhoe and other still-flying scientists note that aviation is only 3% of global carbon emissions.
Jonathan Foley, executive director of the climate solutions think-tank Project Drawdown, limits his airline trips but will not stop flying because, he says, he must meet with donors to keep his organization alive. He calls flight shaming “the climate movement eating its own.”
A new addition to the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard shows that students graduating from area universities are earning less than their counterparts across the state and country.
College Scorecard breaks down annual costs, median debt and other statistics for institutions of higher education to help high school students make their college decisions.
Now there is a new metric available: Field of Study Median Earnings.
The new category is based on the median earnings in the first full year after a student completes his or her degree. With the function, prospective students can compare their potential earnings after graduating with the same degree at different institutions.
Sophisticated machine learning applications require not only enormous amounts of training data, but powerful computer hardware on which to train. An analysis conducted by San Francisco research firm OpenAI found that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time, and that it’s grown by more than 300,000 times over that same time period.
The trend spurred the development of supercomputers like the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sierra and Summit, which leverage dedicated accelerator chips to speed up AI computation. Now, IBM’s Hardware Center, in collaboration with New York State, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, and other members of IBM’s AI Hardware Center, has delivered a new machine for the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) that’s optimized for state-of-the-art machine learning workloads.
The 33rd annual NeurIPS conference on artificial intelligence kicks off in Vancouver this weekend. Check out some of the research highlights in this selective review.
The New Jersey Alliance for Clinical and Translational Science, an academic consortium at the Rutgers Institute for Translational Medicine and Science, celebrated its $29 million grant from the National Institutes of Health with a health care-oriented event last week at Rutgers University’s campus in Piscataway.
“This is the kickoff of something that is absolutely seminal in terms of the progress for our state and for biomedical research, especially for translational research, and a real benchmark in our movement forward,” Robert Barchi, president of Rutgers University, said. “We thank Reynold Panettieri and Brian Strom for having accomplished the Herculean task of bringing this $29 million Clinical and Translational Science Award to Rutgers.”
In partnership with Princeton University and New Jersey Institute of Technology, as well as with RWJBarnabas Health and other hospitals, not-for-profit organizations, community health centers, outpatient practices, industry and pharmaceutical leaders, data centers, policymakers and more, NJACTS will work to translate clinical research into patient care and treatment more quickly, with additional funding from the member institutions growing the funding for the program to nearly $45 million.
Congress asked us to serve on a bipartisan commission of tech leaders, scientists, and national security professionals to explore the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and national security. Our work is not complete, but our initial assessment is worth sharing now: in the next decade, the United States is in danger of losing its global leadership in AI and its innovation edge. That edge is a foundation of our economic prosperity, military power and ultimately the freedoms we enjoy.
As we consider the leadership stakes, we are struck by AI’s potential to propel us towards many imaginable futures. Some hold great promise; others are concerning. If past technological revolutions are a guide, the future will include elements of both.
Some of us have dedicated our professional lives to advancing AI for the benefit of humanity. AI technologies have been harnessed for good in sectors ranging from health care to education to transportation. Today’s progress only scratches the surface of AI’s potential. Computing power, large data sets, and new methods have led us to an inflection point where AI and its sub-disciplines (including machine vision, machine learning, natural language understanding, and robotics) will transform the world.
Communications of the ACM; Paul Castro, Vatche Ishakian, Vinod Muthusamy, Aleksander Slominski
from
A major factor in the increased adoption of the cloud by enterprise IT was its pay-as-you-go model where a customer pays only for resources leased from the cloud provider and have the ability to get as many resources as needed with no up-front cost (elasticity). Unfortunately, the burden of scaling was left for developers and system designers that typically used overprovisioning techniques to handle sudden surges in service requests. Studies of reported usage of cloud resources in datacenters show a substantial gap between the resources that cloud customers allocate and pay for (leasing VMs), and actual resource utilization (CPU, memory, and so on).
Serverless computing is emerging as a new and compelling paradigm for the deployment of cloud applications, largely due to the recent shift of enterprise application architectures to containers and microservices.23 Using serverless gives pay-as-you-go without additional work to start and stop server and is closer to original expectations for cloud computing to be treated like as a utility. Developers using serverless computing can get cost savings and scalability without needing to havea high level of cloud computing expertise that is time-consuming to acquire.
We only have a few days left until Verizon kills off Yahoo Groups, and the volunteer archivists who’ve been battling with the company to preserve its legacy have just been dealt a crushing blow.
From the Yahoo Groups Crusade Headquarters: “The Archive Team (who is working with to save content to upload to the Internet Archive) was again blocked by Yahoo. The block is wiping out the past month of work done by hundreds of volunteers. This info was reported on their IRC channel.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has launched a new National Artificial Intelligence Institute (NAII) to leverage innovative tools and improve the health and well-being of veterans.
The NAII will incorporate input from veterans and its partners in academia, federal agencies, nonprofits and industry to prioritize AI research and development that is meaningful to veterans and the public.
NAII is a joint initiative between VA’s Office of Research and Development and the Center for Strategic Partnerships. NAII will design, execute, and collaborate on large-scale initiatives and national strategy, and build on both the American AI Initiative and the National AI R&D Strategic Plan.
You’ll notice familiar names—such as Pacific Biosciences, Horizon Discovery, and 10x Genomics—among our 2019 winners, as instrument makers continue to advance their platforms and protocols to better meet the needs of biologists. New players also made the cut this year. Companies including Owlstone Medical and Berkeley Lights appear in our Top 10 Innovations list for the first time with products that wowed The Scientist’s independent panel of judges with their potential to enable new discoveries.
This year has proven to be a great one for the life sciences, and the 2010s have been an exciting decade. Here, The Scientist presents the fine-tuned tweaks and brand-new technologies that make up our Top 10 Innovations for 2019.
Once a scrappy disrupter in a trailer at the edge of campus, Stanford’s d.school — and its signature idea, design thinking — has grown into a Silicon Valley institution. Is it up for bigger challenges, like affordable housing, the courts, even democracy itself?
Matt Boggie and Alexis Lloyd met while they were working together at the New York Times R&D Lab, a division of the news publisher devoted to experimenting with how emerging technologies can be used in journalism to enable new forms of storytelling. While there, they found themselves looking for different signals – be they opinions, stories, and news articles – that when taken on their own might not be monumental, but lend themselves in aggregate to bringing a larger picture into focus.
A few years later, both having moved on to other jobs – Matt is currently CTO of daily news site The Skimm, and Alexis is the VP of Product Design for Medium – they found themselves missing the practice of foresight, and wanted to create a conversation about the ethical concerns around new technologies. The pair founded the Ethical Futures Lab, with its newsletter – aptly named Six Signals – as a way of holding up a lens to both themselves and the tech industry. “We are trying to get people to think about the ethical choices behind the technologies they use and the ways in which those technologies are put out into the world,” explains Matt. “To consider those choices as they’re being made, and to ask: Is there a better way, a different direction, or a more preferred outcome that I want here?”
We sit down with Matt and Alexis to hear more about why our online personas can get the better of us, and how small choices have big impacts.
New York, NY January 8, 2020, starting at 5 p.m. “Dr. McNealy argues that we require an ecological approach for understanding this era of emergent technology and data — both for creating adequate policy, and for protecting the vulnerable.” [rsvp required]
Seattle, WA December 12, starting 8:30 a.m. “This year, the public policy conference is focused on better understanding the landscape of artificial intelligence and creating a robust conversation about how Washington State can continue to be a leader in AI.” [$$$]
“Submissions for innovations that could improve player health and safety, including but not limited to: protective equipment, medical devices, sensors and training devices. Up to four start-ups will be selected as finalists and will have the chance to present their innovations on stage in Miami.” Deadline for entries is January 2, 2020.
Chicago, IL September 21-22, 2020, at University of Chicago. “The aim of the symposium is to foster interaction among diverse communities of research and practice using contextual integrity to reason about privacy, and to design and evaluate, craft regulation, and generate formal logics for privacy.” Deadline for submissions is June 22, 2020.
“Our OAI-PMH service is one of the common ways we offer to harvest our public metadata, and we are launching a new version this Wednesday. This technology refresh allows us to continue supporting the OAI-PMH service. For the most part, there is no functional change, we adhere to the OAI-PMH standards and have attempted to keep the service as backward compatible as possible. The main change in the new service is that it uses our REST API instead of directly integrating with our Solr search index. The REST API uses our newer Elasticsearch-based search index under the hood, and with OAI-PMH being the last service still depending on Solr, this allows us to retire our Solr search index, completing the transition to Elasticsearch that started in 2018.”
Our Transformers library implements many (11 at the time of writing) state-of-the-art transformer models. It is used by researchers and practitioners alike to perform tasks such as text classification, named entity recognition, question answering or text generation. Its API is compatible with both PyTorch and Tensorflow.
While many recent models have focused on single-stack architectures, encoder-decoders have come under the spotlight again recently, notably with Facebook’s BART and Google’s T5.
This post briefly goes through the (modern) history of transformers and the comeback of the encoder-decoder architecture. I will walk you through the implementation of encoder-decoders in the transformers library, show you can use them for your projects, and give you a taste of what is coming in the next releases.