At the Dec. 10 meeting of the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors, UVA President Jim Ryan announced a $5 million commitment from Donna and Richard Tadler to create the Donna and Richard Tadler University Professorship of Entrepreneurship. The gift will be matched with an additional $5 million from the University’s Bicentennial Professorship Fund for a total investment of $10 million.
arXiv, Computer Science > Machine Learning; Shlomo Kashani, Amir Ivry
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The second edition of Deep Learning Interviews is home to hundreds of fully-solved problems, from a wide range of key topics in AI. It is designed to both rehearse interview or exam specific topics and provide machine learning MSc / PhD. students, and those awaiting an interview a well-organized overview of the field. The problems it poses are tough enough to cut your teeth on and to dramatically improve your skills-but they’re framed within thought-provoking questions and engaging stories. That is what makes the volume so specifically valuable to students and job seekers: it provides them with the ability to speak confidently and quickly on any relevant topic, to answer technical questions clearly and correctly, and to fully understand the purpose and meaning of interview questions and answers. Those are powerful, indispensable advantages to have when walking into the interview room. The book’s contents is a large inventory of numerous topics relevant to DL job interviews and graduate level exams. That places this work at the forefront of the growing trend in science to teach a core set of practical mathematical and computational skills. It is widely accepted that the training of every computer scientist must include the fundamental theorems of ML, and AI appears in the curriculum of nearly every university. This volume is designed as an excellent reference for graduates of such programs.
The covid-19 pandemic created unprecedented challenges for both clinicians and healthcare institutions. Adapting to a rapidly emerging disease while facing staff and material shortages prompted difficult decisions on how best to allocate resources. Artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly moved to the forefront of the effort to adapt our healthcare systems to coping with covid-19. Hundreds of new models were developed, promising best solutions for all aspects of patient care from diagnostics to therapeutics and logistics. Yet only a small minority of these models were deployed, and none became widely adopted.12 We argue that the covid-19 pandemic exposed flaws in the technological, institutional, and ethical foundations upon which AI must build to considerably improve bedside care. If AI is to be part of a rapid response to future health crises, the challenges that it faced during the covid-19 pandemic must be carefully analysed and overcome.
AI is a branch of computer science that uses data and algorithms to extract meaning in a way that is characteristic of intelligent beings—that is, turning data into effective decision making processes. Research applications of AI in medicine have already emerged far and wide—for example, in drug discovery and modelling of complex biological systems. By contrast, efforts to integrate AI into everyday clinical care have had minimal success, despite the comparatively simple nature of the problems: optimising patient trajectories, maximising use of existing facilities, or determining when and how to reallocate resources. We surmise that this translational gap, which was magnified by the covid-19 pandemic, is due to the nature of the underlying data, the infrastructure through which they emerge, and the human context in which they occur. By understanding the influence of these factors on the chances of success of AI, healthcare systems can improve their readiness for future crises.
The fast-rising autonomous vehicle industry is lobbying federal safety regulators to limit the amount of data companies must report every time their cars crash, arguing that the current requirements get in the way of innovation that will benefit the public.
The industry’s efforts to make driving safer and more accessible are at risk of being “drowned out by misinformation, inflation or dubious data without context” under reporting rules issued last summer by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, says Ariel Wolf, general counsel for the industry lobbying group Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets. Among its members: Alphabet-owned Waymo, Argo, Ford, General Motors, Cruise, Volvo, Aurora, Motional, Zoox, Uber and Lyft.
“We are desperate to share information,” Wolf told The Times. But that doesn’t include information the companies believe could be misinterpreted by the public, and certainly not information those companies deem proprietary.
“Most apps are similar, no matter the behavior. There’s a graphical depiction of a user’s progress relative to their goal,” said Angela Fidler Pfammatter, PhD, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
Pfammatter focuses on the field of preventive medicine, which aims to help people build behaviors that improve physical health and mental well-being. She and her colleague Bonnie Spring, Ph.D., direct the Catalyst Lab at Northwestern, which for several years has run a healthy lifestyle research study known as Evo. Participants join the 12-month study with the hopes of improving their dietary quality, physical activity, stress, or sleep.
California is struggling to prevent wildfires from decimating communities each year. Now insurers wonder if they can accomplish what politicians can’t.
State leaders are pouring money into firefighting and clearing brush from drought-parched forests. They’ve allowed utilities to cut power on the riskiest days. But they’ve done little to discourage residents from living in extreme fire areas. And they’ve continued to allow development on the outskirts in a state desperate for housing.
Enter the insurance industry, which says it can no longer afford to back homes facing a high risk of burning up each year. It’s pushing for a new model that would account for future climate change risks — an approach that California has been alone in resisting.
Harvard Political Review, Aishani Aatresh and Shira Hoffer
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Liz O’Sullivan is an expert in fair algorithms, surveillance, and artificial intelligence (AI) and the current CEO of AI company Parity. In 2019, she publicly quit her job at Clarifai because of their work enabling lethal autonomous weapons. Since then, she has been a major figure working to make AI fairer and less biased.
The Stanford Daily student newspaper, Matthew Turk
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Professor Paul Milgrom M.S. ’78 Ph.D. ’79, who taught ECON 136: “Market Design” to McGregor and Angus-Sterling in 2017, said in an email statement that it was “totally amazing” to see the Marriage Pact come to life, adding that “Liam has a great chance of making the Marriage Pact into a business.”
This fall, 5,345 Stanford students once again participated in the Marriage Pact survey online, expressing various levels of agreement to statements like “I would keep a gun in the house” and “Gender roles exist for good reasons” in search of their companion. Roughly 3 to 4% of Marriage Pact survey respondents go on to date for a year or longer, which McGregor called “hitting the lottery.” Only 1 to 2% of matches on traditional dating apps end up meeting each other at all, he added.
The majority of heterosexual couples in the U.S. meet online nowadays, according to research data from sociology professor Michael Rosenfeld. As fewer Americans meet through third-person mediation, roles that families, neighborhoods and houses of worship traditionally would play are falling to the wayside — a trend whose inflection traces back to World War II. Friend-based mediation has also been on the decline, starting in 1995, as have overall American marriage rates.
A University of Utah lab received a $7.5 million grant from the National Mental Health Institute to conduct clinical trials for Neurogrow — a video game designed to treat older adults with depression.
Neurogrow invites players to care for a virtual garden with changing demands and conditions — intended to target and strengthen circuits in the front of the brain in older adults who suffer from depression. The game is developed by the Therapeutic Games and Apps Lab at the U. based on research by Dr. Sarah Shizuko Morimoto, an associate professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences.
The $7.5 million grant will fund two clinical studies — one at the U. and one at the University of Connecticut. Researchers now face a critical testing period to further assess the efficacy of the game that will determine how it may be distributed in the future, including as a potential medical treatment.
The eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program is now accepting applications for student fellows and project leads for the 2021 summer session. Fellows will work with academic researchers, data scientists and public stakeholder groups on data-intensive research projects that will leverage data science approaches to address societal challenges in areas such as public policy, environmental impacts and more. Student applications due 2/15 – learn more and apply here. DSSG is also soliciting project proposals from academic researchers, public agencies, nonprofit entities and industry who are looking for an opportunity to work closely with data science professionals and students on focused, collaborative projects to make better use of their data. Proposal submissions are due 2/22.
It’s been quite a year for Graph ML — thousands of papers, numerous conferences and workshops… How do we catch up with so many cool things happening around? Well, we are puzzled as well and decided to present a structured look at Graph ML highlighting trends and major advancements.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fascinating development in the realm of computing. Connected smart devices, home automation, and related areas of development are producing many interesting projects. Opensource.com’s writers shared their expertise about a variety of Internet of Things projects many times during 2021. Here are Opensource.com’s ten best Internet of Things articles from the year.
How to customize your voice assistant with the voice of your choice
