A new virus recently detected in China has now been found in a woman with pneumonia in Thailand, prompting the World Health Organization to offer guidance to hospitals worldwide about infection control in case the virus spreads. Suspected to be a type of coronavirus, the new strain doesn’t appear to be as dangerous as some in this viral family, but its outbreak makes it worth revisiting a conceptual framework proposed by a public health specialist in Issues for dealing with unexpected microbial threats that emerge naturally or through bioterrorism.
A highly sensitive, wearable gas sensor for environmental and human health monitoring may soon become commercially available, according to researchers at Penn State and Northeastern University.
The sensor device is an improvement on existing wearable sensors because it uses a self-heating mechanism that enhances sensitivity. It allows for quick recovery and reuse of the device. Other devises of this type require an external heater. In addition, other wearable sensors require an expensive and time-consuming lithography process under cleanroom conditions.
Indiana University, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering
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Big Red 200, Indiana University’s new artificial intelligence supercomputer, will be dedicated as part of IU’s Bicentennial event, “A Day of Commemoration: IU’s 200th Anniversary” on January 20, 2020. The ceremony will take place at 10am ET in the Cyberinfrastructure Building on the IU Bloomington campus. It is free and open to the public.
With this latest high-performance computing acquisition, IU is now home to the state of Indiana’s fastest supercomputer. How fast is Big Red 200? It would take everyone in the state of Indiana more than 28 years—performing one calculation per second 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year—to perform the same number of calculations that Big Red 200 can do in just one second. It is almost 300 times faster than the original Big Red supercomputer from 15 years ago.
The United States was once the dominant, global leader in science and engineering, but that ranking has dropped as other countries invest in research and development, according to a new report.
And although there are more women and minorities involved in the science and engineering workforce than before, they are still underrepresented in the US.
The findings were presented this week in the State of US Science and Engineering 2020 report, compiled and published by the National Science Board and the National Science Foundation. The report is published every two years and submitted to Congress.
Bloomberg; Bruce Einhorn, Kari Lindberg, Hannah Dormido and Adrian Leung
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China is taking its rivalry with the U.S. to another planet.
The Chinese space agency is preparing a mid-year mission to Mars, marking the most ambitious project on an exploration checklist intended to achieve equal footing with NASA and transform the nation’s technological know-how.
Landing the unmanned probe on the red planet would cap President Xi Jinping’s push to make China a superpower in space. The nation already has rovers on the moon, and it’s making bold plans to operate an orbiting space station, establish a lunar base and explore asteroids by the 2030s.
By combining prior CDC data with heart rate and sleep measurements, Scripps developed a new disease tracking model that they say could deliver speedy and accurate estimates.
Alexandra Elbakyan, founder of the scholarly piracy website Sci-Hub, is suspected of working with Russian intelligence officials to steal confidential research and military secrets from American universities.
According to The Washington Post, Elbakyan, nicknamed the Robin Hood of science, is currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for suspected criminal acts and espionage.
The film business used to run on hunches. Now, data analytics is far more effective than humans at predicting hits and eliminating flops. Is this a brave new world – or the death knell of creativity?
Deep learning has had exciting progress in the last few years especially in supervised learning tasks in computer vision, language, speech, etc. The next decade will be focused on developing new techniques that will address its current shortcomings.
Here are some major areas that I see will be important in the next decade:
Labeled data is currently a big barrier to the adoption of deep learning. There will be more research in deep active learning and human-in-the-loop learning, where intelligent data collection is part of the machine-learning feedback loop. Self-supervision has shown recent promise for semi-supervised learning. We will see more development in these areas.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is calling for regulations on artificial intelligence, warning that the technology can bring both positive and negative consequences, AP reports.
Why it matters: Lawmakers are largely scrambling to play catch-up on AI regulation as the technology continues to grow. Pichai did not provide specific proposals, but did urge while speaking at the Bruegel European economic think tank Monday that “international alignment” between the United States and the European Union will help ensure AI is used primarily for good.
University of California, Office of Scholarly Communication
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This letter represents US publishing organizations who support a potential White House Executive Order for immediate Open Access to federally funded research and directly addresses some of the prior claims in a letter released by AAP. CDL has signed this letter as an open access publisher (eScholarship Publishing). Publishing organizations and scholarly societies who would like to join as additional signatories can reach out to PLOS at community@plos.org.
Modern culture happens at buzzing speed. The Beatles, superhero movies, hip hop, Instagram — they all whoosh by as if pushed by speedy, undetectable forces. Culture moves at a much faster pace than our bodies do; or so it would seem.
A new study actually claims the contrary. They move about as fast as our biology, researchers conclude — and may be shaped by evolutionary forces.
Originally set up in 2017 as a pilot project supported by The National Lottery Community Fund, Statisticians for Society has so far matched 57 RSS volunteers with 47 charities. We provide this service at no cost to help organisations meet their charitable aims and objectives, and you can read about some of the completed projects on our website.
The new commitment from The National Lottery Community Fund – the largest funder of community activity in the UK – will support the growth of this project. We now aim to support up to 50 projects a year, focusing on organisations with a turnover of less than £500,000. These charities often lack the internal skills and expertise needed to carry out robust statistical analysis that can help maximise their performance and impact.
How do we throw open our collections when those collections involve vast amounts of data? As staff member Laurie Allen explains, for many years libraries have built infrastructure around traditional models of research. But research using huge amounts of digital information, like the data found in Chronicling America or our Web Archives, requires a different—and unknown—infrastructure. And each year brings new digitized and born digital materials to our collections.
In 2019, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the Library of Congress a grant for “Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud.” This project will help us learn about what data people want, how they want to use it, and how we can provide access to collections as data at scale. We’re underway—and look out for upcoming librarian and researcher opportunities soon!
Combinations of toxic behaviour, including discrimination and exploitation, mixed with routine pressures of working life led more than a third to seek professional help for depression or anxiety, with nearly another fifth saying they wanted help. Overall, 70% of the scientists surveyed said they felt stressed on the average work day.
The survey, commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, the biomedical research funder, shines a spotlight on a research environment that has been in trouble for some time. The system imposes a hierarchy in which superiors can seem to do no wrong, and subordinates can feel powerless to complain. It is a problem the Wellcome Trust faced itself in 2018, when it investigated leaders of its Sanger Institute in Cambridge after staff alleged bullying, mistreatment and discrimination.
New York, NY February 6, starting at 9 a.m., NYU’s Hemmerdinger Hall (32 Waverly Place). “The event marks the launch of NYU’s Alliance for Public Interest Technology, a new, cross-university initiative launched by an interdisciplinary group of NYU faculty.” [rsvp required]
Las Vegas, NV March 5-8. “Connect with colleagues and industry leaders for discussion and collaboration on spine and peripheral nerve topics around the theme Focus on Data-driven Innovation.” [registration required]
Toronto, ON, Canada May 21-22, University of Toronto. “The GI 2020 program covers technical and fundamental contributions in both Graphics and HCI.” Second deadline for submissions is January 24.
“The UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative is delighted to host the 3rd annual Summer Institute in Migration Research Methods (SIMRM), to be held at the University of California, Berkeley campus from May 26-June 5, 2020. The Institute is organized and directed by Irene Bloemraad (UCB) and Jennifer Van Hook (Pennsylvania State University).” Deadline for applications is February 10.
“The MLSS will make its fifth appearance in the beautiful medieval university town of Tübingen, in southwestern Germany. It will be hosted by the Department of Empirical Inference at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems between 28 June – 10 July 2020.” Deadline to apply is February 11.
Cambridge, England March 23, at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. Part of 15th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction. Deadline for abstracts submission is February 14.
“The WiDS Datathon 2020 focuses on patient health through data from MIT’s GOSSIS (Global Open Source Severity of Illness Score) initiative. Brought to you by the Global WiDS team, the West Big Data Innovation Hub, and the WiDS Datathon Committee, this year’s datathon is open until February 24.”
“The goal of this special focus issue is to highlight the continuing innovative and cross-disciplinary scholarship at the intersection of biomedical informatics and the social sciences, in the tradition of Diana Forsythe’s work.” Deadline for paper submissions is February 28.
“Dr. Lauren Buckley spent her fall sabbatical at NCEAS, where she chatted with Julie Lowndes about her lab practices and open data science. Here she shares how she is using practices from Openscapes in her own research group at the University of Washington.”