New York University’s engineering school and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur are embarking on an international partnership, offering a new dual doctoral degree program in computer and electrical engineering.
The two universities recently signed a five-year agreement which will allow doctoral students in computer or electrical engineering to enroll in either school, completing their last two years at the other. Program participants will graduate with degrees from both universities
Today, at the 2019 American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) meeting, an important discussion took place surrounding the topic of open science. An esteemed panel of scientists, publishers, and regulators gathered to discuss where they see open access heading in the future.
Defining open science
If one thing was clear among the experts, it’s that open access, and hopefully open science will become a reality in the very near future. As panelist, John Inglis, Executive Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and co-founder of bioRxiv, offered that open science can mean different things. He explains that open science should be freely accessible, providing “unhindered availability to anyone who wants it”. It can mean transparency, being freely disclosed in regards to the evaluation of manuscripts, including the names of reviewers, technical methods and analysis. Taking it a step forward he suggests that open science should be inclusive and welcoming, engaging with people who don’t do science but who are directly affected by it (think patients, advocates, and citizen scientists). And lastly, Inglis suggests that open science should be “candid and forthright, even honest,” providing scientific truths.
FPF announced the winners of the 10th Annual Privacy Papers for Policymakers (PPPM) Award. This Award recognizes leading privacy scholarship that is relevant to policymakers in the United States Congress, at U.S. federal agencies and for data protection authorities abroad.
Over the coming decades, however, agility will take on a new meaning: the ability to explore multiple domains at once and combine them into something that produces value. We’ll need computer scientists working with cancer scientists, for example, to identify specific genetic markers that could lead to a cure. To do this, we’ll need to learn how to go slower to have a greater impact.
This change will be profound. We will need to rethink old notions about how we compete, collaborate, and bring new products to market. More specifically, we will have to manage three profound shifts that will force us to widen and deepen connections between talent, technology, and information rather than just moving fast and breaking things.
At t the beginning of 2015, Alex Balk, then-editor of the now-defunct website the Awl, wrote a post of advice for young people in which he supplied three laws about the internet. The first: “Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people.” The second: “The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything.” But Balk’s third law was most prescient, especially as we end this miserable decade: “If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.” He went on: “The moment you were just in was as good as it got. The stuff you shake your head about now will seem like fucking Shakespeare in 2016.” Reader, we’ve waited a while, and today it seems indisputable that Balk’s law has held: The 2010s is the decade when the internet lost its joy.
The internet was always bad, but at least it used to be fun. At the start of this decade, being online still had less of the feeling of chaotic good than the years preceding it, but it wasn’t yet consumed by the monolithic forces that rule today’s web. Since the turn of the millennium, we’ve been used to the flood of emerging platforms — Myspace, Xanga, Friendster, Napster, Flickr, Tumblr, Neopets — each vying to be a better version of the last.
Once known as a platform for white-collar professionals to host their resumes, LinkedIn is now a learning platform, a media company, and a software-as-a-service provider. Three years ago this week, Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in its largest acquisition ever. In the three years since, LinkedIn’s audience has grown over 60% and its revenue has nearly doubled, to over $7 billion.
“Engagement is growing at a faster rate than ever,” says Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn’s global head of product. “And we’ve done it in a fairly boring way.” It seems fitting that LinkedIn, the khaki shorts of the social networks, takes pride in its pedestrian approach to growth. “We’re here to build a business, not to create something cool,” cofounder Konstantin Guericke told Business Week in 2006. On an internet where foreign governments treat Facebook like Gutenberg’s printing press and white supremacists breed hate speech in Twitter’s petri dish, perhaps LinkedIn is the normcore social media we need.
In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau faced a pivotal choice in its plan to digitize the nation’s once-a-decade population count: build a system for collecting and processing data in-house, or buy one from an outside contractor.
The bureau chose Pegasystems Inc, reasoning that outsourcing would be cheaper and more effective.
Three years later, the project faces serious reliability and security problems, according to Reuters interviews with six technology professionals currently or formerly involved in the census digitization effort. And its projected cost has doubled to $167 million — about $40 million more than the bureau’s 2016 cost projection for building the site in-house.
Finland, which holds the rotating EU presidency until the end of the year, said on Tuesday it aims to teach 1% – or more than 50 million – of all Europeans basic skills in artificial intelligence through a free online course.
The European Union is pushing for wide deployment of artificial intelligence across the bloc, to help European companies catch up with rivals in Asia and the United States.
“Our investment has three goals: we want to equip EU citizens with digital skills for the future, we wish to increase practical understanding of what artificial intelligence is, and by doing so, we want to give a boost to the digital leadership of Europe,” said Finnish Minister of Employment Timo Harakka.
Yes, social media companies are irrevocably altering our way of life, our information streams are more tainted than ever, and you’re tracked everywhere you go (and that could affect your criminal record, your job prospects, and more) — so what are you going to do about it?
This is exactly the question that Recode’s new community-oriented project wants to get at. Now part of Vox, the tech vertical is writing for a broader audience seeking explanatory journalism behind Silicon Valley happenings. And Recode has funding from the Omidyar Network to do it for the next year, starting today. (Vox wouldn’t disclose the terms of the funding.)
“For me, success will be telling stories that reach people where they are and giving people a sense of empowerment,” Recode editor Samantha Oltman said. “It’s about cutting through the apathy that a lot of people have about tech because it feels mysterious, letting people know there are decisions and changes you can make to your behavior that will feel empowering to people.”
As a high school student, Lupe Paniagua didn’t think computer science was for her. Coding classes were mostly taken by male students, many with prior experience in the subject, which she found intimidating.
“Anytime someone mentioned computer science, I compared myself to them and I never quite felt like I had the ability to do what they were doing,” Paniagua said. “All my misconceptions of computer science made me believe that the field wasn’t meant for me.”
But an online programming course she took her senior year sparked Paniagua’s passion for code. It also inspired her, as an incoming UC Berkeley student, to participate in CS Kickstart, a one-week course that brings together students with little or no background in computer science to meet each other and learn the basics of the field.
“The program was a life-changing experience for me,” says Paniagua.
Microscopic shards of plastic from degraded water bottles, shopping bags, synthetic clothing, and other waste are floating in the atmosphere and falling back to earth in raindrops and snowflakes, say recent studies.
In an effort to determine the levels of microplastics in New York State’s precipitation, a group of researchers led by Marco Tedesco, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is soliciting the help of ordinary citizens. This winter, Tedesco’s team is recruiting dozens of New York residents to collect fresh snow samples, remove any tiny bits of plastic from the snow using special filtering kits, and then mail the extracted materials to Columbia for chemical analysis.
“We want to know exactly what kinds of plastic are prevalent in snowfall in different parts of the state,” says Tedesco. “Then we’ll look for clues to where the plastic originates.”
Over the past decade, federal and local governments in the United States have spent hundreds of millions of dollars encouraging grocery stores to open in food deserts. The federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative has leveraged over $1 billion in financing for grocers in under-served areas. The Healthy Food Access for All Americans Act, which is currently under consideration in Congress, would extend these efforts with large tax credits. Meanwhile, cities such as Houston and Denver have sought to institute related measures at the local level.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama articulated this proposed remedy quite clearly: “It’s not that people don’t know or don’t want to do the right thing; they just have to have access to the foods that they know will make their families healthier.”
However, recent research in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, co-authored by Hunt Allcott, an associate professor in the Department of Economics, raises questions about the efficacy of this approach. He spoke with NYU News about food deserts and how they may—or may not—improve nutrition.
Here are the Physics World Top 10 Breakthroughs for 2019, in the order in which we covered them this year. Come back next week to find out which one has bagged the Breakthrough of the Year award.
1. Neuroprosthetic devices translate brain activity into speech
New York, NY December 13, starting at 5 p.m., Columbia University Zuckerman Institute Education Lab. “Welcome an exciting addition to Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute’s Education Lab: a new, brain-inspired art installation created by Harlem-based artist Ivan Forde. This work was designed in conjunction with neuroscientists in the building to spark curiosity of lab users and passersby.”
Online December 17, starting at 20:00 GMT, BBC 4. “Angela Saini investigates the lethal spread of alternative facts and discovers that the very architecture of the web amplifies dangerous pseudoscience online.” [audio, 37:00]
“AARP and the GovLab are using the Internet to capture what AARP members feel are the most urgent issues confronting them to try to discover what worries people most: the use of big health data or the failure to use it.” … “You can participate in this crowdlaw process about the opportunities and challenges of big health data by going to aarp.crowd.law.”
There is a growing concern that this increasingly fast-paced digital environment that we inhabit might be toxic for our judgement-making abilities. We are quickly overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information presented to us, and robbed of the opportunity to reflect on our decisions. But if fast computing systems lead to productivity and engagement, slow computing systems may lead to reflection and serendipity. Now more than ever, as algorithms make deeply personal and consequential judgements ranging from who will be released on bail to who will get preventive health care, the end users as well as other stakeholders could benefit from an opportunity to reflect on, and make conscious assessments of the judgements made in collaboration with computer systems and algorithms. The designers of these systems, in turn, need to design the interaction with the intention of enabling and encouraging such processes in mind.
In recent years, interest in slowing down technology has increased both inside and outside of academia.