U-M leaders, who have been at the forefront of research demonstrating the opportunities and pitfalls surrounding society’s expansive use of technology and data, are coming together under a new Center for Ethics, Society and Computing.
“This is a topic that used to be on the fringes but more recently has gotten broader attention as we have experienced many unintended consequences of technology,” said center Associate Director Silvia Lindtner, assistant professor of information and art and design.
The dream of creating a fruit fly connectome—a wiring diagram of neurons and synapses—has been nurtured for more than a decade, says Gerry Rubin, executive director of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus. Rubin and his colleagues in Janelia’s FlyEM group have now taken a big step toward making this goal a reality: They have completed a connectome of a region that covers roughly a third of the fly brain and includes areas involved in key functions, such as learning, smell and spatial navigation. The data set, which has been dubbed the hemibrain, contains more than 20,000 neurons and approximately 20 million synaptic connections.
A new collaboration spearheaded by the University of Pittsburgh’s cyber institute aims to help governments address the challenge of minimizing bias in data tools using algorithms and artificial intelligence.
The newly formed Pittsburgh Task Force on Public Algorithms was announced Wednesday morning and includes participation from Pittsburgh and Allegheny County public agencies. Its work will span two years, culminating with a report spotlighting problems and establishing best practices moving forward.
“We have begun to make a lot of decisions relying on big data,” former U.S. Attorney David Hickton, founder and director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Kathleen M. Rose, Ezra M. Markowitz, Dominique Brossard
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In an era of large-scale science-related challenges and rapid advancements in groundbreaking science with major societal implications, communicating about science is critical. The profile of science communication has increased over the last few decades, with multiple sectors calling for such activities. As scientists respond to calls for public-facing communication, we need to evaluate where the scientific community stands. We conducted a unique census of science faculty at land-grant universities across the United States intended to spur the next generation of science communicators and research. Despite scientists’ strong approval of science communication efforts, potential areas of tension, attributable to lack of institutional support and confidence in communication skills, constrain these efforts.
In a recent experiment, the Harvard senior Max Weiss used a text-generation program to create 1,000 comments in response to a government call on a Medicaid issue. These comments were all unique, and sounded like real people advocating for a specific policy position. They fooled the Medicaid.gov administrators, who accepted them as genuine concerns from actual human beings. This being research, Weiss subsequently identified the comments and asked for them to be removed, so that no actual policy debate would be unfairly biased. The next group to try this won’t be so honorable.
Chatbots have been skewing social-media discussions for years. About a fifth of all tweets about the 2016 presidential election were published by bots, according to one estimate, as were about a third of all tweets about that year’s Brexit vote. An Oxford Internet Institute report from last year found evidence of bots being used to spread propaganda in 50 countries. These tended to be simple programs mindlessly repeating slogans: a quarter million pro-Saudi “We all have trust in Mohammed bin Salman” tweets following the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, for example. Detecting many bots with a few followers each is harder than detecting a few bots with lots of followers. And measuring the effectiveness of these bots is difficult. The best analyses indicate that they did not affect the 2016 U.S. presidential election. More likely, they distort people’s sense of public sentiment and their faith in reasoned political debate. We are all in the middle of a novel social experiment.
The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on 1 May of that year, the unsolicited file was sent, according to sources who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity.
Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Guardian has no knowledge of what was taken from the phone or how it was used.
The extraordinary revelation that the future king of Saudi Arabia may have had a personal involvement in the targeting of the American founder of Amazon will send shockwaves from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.
New initiatives were announced by Mr S Iswaran, Singapore’s Minister for Communications and Information, and Ms Kay Firth-Butterfield, AI Portfolio Head at the World Economic Forum, at a joint press conference with the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (“WEF C4IR”) at WEF’s Annual Meeting in Davos.
These initiatives follow Singapore’s launch of the Model AI Governance Framework in Davos in 2019, as well as the announcement of Singapore’s National AI Strategy in November 2019, and demonstrate the progress made in supporting organisations in deploying responsible AI.
In the global discourse on AI ethics and governance issue, Singapore believes that its balanced approach can facilitate innovation, safeguard consumer interests, and serve as a common global reference point.
[Atul] Butte was moderating a fireside chat with Cora Han, who is UC Health’s chief health data officer, at the Precision Medicine World Conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California. The two were discussing the concerns that have spilled into the public consciousness over Google Health’s data agreement with Ascension Health among other news stories probing the confluence of artificial intelligence tools and patient care.
Both settled on the fact that transparency is key to building trust — something that is imperative today not just between health systems and the companies they work with but more importantly between patients/people and health systems.
“I want to make it really clear that in healthcare, trust means everything for us and the public,” Butte told the audience. “That is our brand. UCSF has been in business for 154 years for a reason. People trust a brand here. We’d rather not do a deal with a nontrustworthy partner than tarnish the brand.”
Last March, Robert Grossman, director of the Center for Data Intensive Science (CDIS) at the University of Chicago, took the stage at Bio-IT World West. He was outlining his vision for the evolution of data commons to data ecosystems. Along the way he plugged Gen3, the open-source platform for building data commons.
“Gen3 is how data commons are made,” he said then, but, “it’s not just a data commons software stack. It offers a steppingstone to data ecosystems.”
The Veterans Affairs Department’s nascent National Artificial Intelligence Institute is focusing on hammering out policies and streamlining its processes so it can share data with partners in a speedy way.
After its initial launch late last year, the agency’s inaugural artificial intelligence director and lead of the center Dr. Gil Alterovitz shared few details with Nextgov about its ultimate aims, but at an event in Washington Wednesday, he expanded on the center’s early intentions and efforts.
“We are at that time in history where human intelligence at some point will intersect with artificial intelligence,” Alterovitz said at the ACT-IAC’s second intelligent automation and AI forum. “And so it’s a really special time for us to learn about it.”
Caltech’s new university librarian, Kara Whatley, came to the Institute from New York City, where she was the head of science and engineering library services for NYU. Whatley was born in Arkansas, earned her bachelor’s degree in biology from Hendrix College (a small liberal arts university in Arkansas), and went on to earn one master’s degree in library and information studies at the University of Oklahoma and another in biological sciences at Texas Tech. We sat down with her to talk about modern librarianship and her goals for supporting Caltech’s researchers.
Target, one of the notable large retailers to embrace beacons a few years ago, had rolled out the technology to most of its stores by last year. Shoppers who download the Target app (which is equipped with software that interacts with the beacons) will display their location on the app’s map as they move throughout the store.
Mike McNamara, Target’s CIO, explained in a video discussing the technology that the store-tracking technology is “a bit like driving your car with GPS. Just click on an item from your list, and the app will indicate on a store map the precise aisle where you will find your item.” McNamara noted that the app will even tell you if the product is on sale.
Because beacons are designed to tie offline behavior (shopping in a physical store) to online behavior (which is often tracked by the use of a store app or via browsing history on a mobile or desktop device), retailers can capture, analyze, and make predictions on a substantial amount of personal data. A retailer then can use this data to increase both online and offline sales by offering discounts, loyalty points, or other incentives in order to further engage customers and drive sales. That means consumers’ private habits are quickly becoming public knowledge, which is then used for commercial purposes.
Cook commented on Apple’s contributions to the healthcare space during a panel, suggesting what started with heart health tracking on Apple Watch could soon branch out into other areas of interest. … “I’m seeing that this intersection has not yet been explored very well. There’s not a lot of tech associated with the way people’s healthcare is done unless they get into very serious trouble.”” Cook said in a Q&A session with IDA Ireland CEO Martin Shanahan, according to Silicon Republic. IDA on Monday presented Cook with the inaugural Special Recognition Award for Apple’s 40 years of investment in Ireland
As we closed last year (and the last decade), we put out a call to help us imagine the next decade of behavioral science. We asked you to share your hopes and fears, predictions and warnings, open questions and big ideas.
We received over 120 submissions from behavioral scientists around the world. We picked the most thought-provoking submissions and curated them below.
We’ve organized the responses into three sections. The first section, Promises and Pitfalls, houses the responses about the field as whole—its identity, purpose, values. In that section, you’ll find authors challenging the field to be bolder. You’ll also find ideas to unite the field, which in its growth has felt for some like the “Wild West.” Ethical concerns are also top of mind
Export control on AI and machine learning algorithms is becoming a more important part of national security strategy as the world moves to a great-power competition landscape and technological changes force accommodation and rapid change to many national interests. However, like security software before it, AI presents unique challenges to how export control has traditionally worked, and these should be considered before being codified into international regulatory frameworks.
As an example, on January 6, 2020, The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) in the U.S. Department of Commerce released the following rule, which imposed a license requirement on a particular kind of software useful for automatically identifying objects from drone or other imagery.
Mountain View, CA February 26-27 at Computer History Museum. “The creators of TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Apache Spark, Tesla Autopilot, Keras, Horovod, Allen AI, Apache Arrow, MLPerf, OpenAI, Matroid, and others will lead discussions about running and scaling machine learning algorithms on a variety of computing platforms, such as GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs, TPUs, & the nascent AI chip industry.” [$$$]
RStudio has an auto-save feature which keeps internal copies of files as they’re edited. However, certain kinds of crashes or RStudio state resets can make these copies inaccessible from RStudio itself. If you had a file open in RStudio and never manually closed it, there is a good chance RStudio has a backup.
This is an R package which extracts files from those backups. It can help you restore files you’ve accidentally deleted or unsaved changes lost in a crash.