where software engineers will bring their unique expertise to the UW and collaborate with researchers, computer scientists, and data scientists for cutting edge research purposes.
There’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding the Beijing Olympics, but Ralph Lauren wants to at least ensure that American athletes stay toasty as they march in the opening ceremony.
Today, Ralph Lauren—the longtime outfitter of Team USA—unveils its looks for the Winter Games, which start on February 4. The outfits are sportier and more casual than the preppy blazers and nautical-inspired T-shirts designed for last year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics. The hero piece this year is a jacket made from a new material that adapts to the wearer’s body temperature, keeping them warm or cool without requiring any electronics. It’s part of Ralph Lauren’s broader goal of positioning itself at the intersection of classic American style and high-tech innovation.
The Biden administration plans to unveil new steps on Friday to retain international students who specialize in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), as part of its effort to counter China, officials said.
The measures will allow specialists in STEM fields to use cultural-exchange visas to stay for up to 3 years of training.
A program allowing those on student visas to stay for an extended period of training will also be expanded to areas such as data science, cloud computing and data visualization.
UW’s Scientific Software Engineering Center, or SSEC, will be part of the university’s eScience Institute.
David Beck, a chemical engineering professor at UW, will serve as the center’s principal investigator. Other members of the leadership team include astronomer Andy Connolly, UW’s associate vice provost for data science and eScience Institute director; and Sarah Stone, executive director of the eScience Institute.
Beck, Connolly and Stone provided answers to our questions about the UW’s new software engineering center via email.
City University of New York, School of Public Health
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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) and the United States Military Academy at West Point an estimated $8.1 million over five years, pending available funds, to establish the world’s first artificial intelligence (AI) and computational modeling center for precision nutrition and health. Precision nutrition is an emerging area aimed at better tailoring diets to different people’s characteristics and circumstances to achieve better health outcomes. This award is part of the Nutrition for Precision Health, powered by the All of Us Research Program (NPH) initiative, a $170 million NIH-wide effort and first independent study that will recruit a diverse pool of participants from All of Us to inform more personalized nutrition recommendations. The NPH and the center are part of the NIH’s Common Fund, a special program aimed at catalyzing multiple biomedical disciplines.
University of Washington, Home UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
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UW ECE Professor Mo Li and graduate student Changming Wu have been working toward addressing this daunting challenge over the last couple of years, developing new optical computing hardware for AI and machine learning that is faster and much more energy efficient than conventional electronics. They have already engineered an optical computing system that uses laser light to transmit information and do computing by using phase-change material similar to what is in a CD or DVD-ROM to record data. Laser light transmits data much faster than electrical signals, and phase-change material can retain data using little to no energy. With these advantages, their optical computing system has proven to be much more energy efficient and over 10 times faster than comparable digital computers.
Mo Li and Changming Wu headshots
UW ECE Professor Mo Li (left) and UW ECE graduate student Changming Wu (right) led the interdisciplinary, multi-institutional research team that built this optical computing system. Mo Li photo by Ryan Hoover
Now, Li and Wu are addressing another key challenge, the ‘noise’ inherent to optical computing itself. This noise essentially comes from stray light particles, photons, that interfere with computing precision. These errant photons come from the operation of lasers within the device and background thermal radiation. In a new paper published on Jan. 21 in Science Advances, Li, Wu and their research team demonstrate a first-of-its-kind optical computing system for AI and machine learning that not only mitigates this noise but actually uses some of it as input to help enhance the creative output of the artificial neural network within the system.
When I eventually saw her again in May 2021, she’d regained some of the weight and her HbA1c had climbed to 10.4%. She explained that her diabetes doctor and a diabetes nurse educator had told her that she was eating too much “sugar” on the plant-based diet.
She’d been advised to limit carbohydrates by cutting back on fruits and starchy vegetables and eating more fish and chicken. Sugar-free candy, cakes, cookies and artificial sweeteners were encouraged. In the face of conflicting medical advice, she fell back on conventional wisdom that “sugar” is bad and should be avoided whenever possible, especially if you have diabetes.
I’m a physician, board certified in preventive medicine with a lifestyle medicine clinic at Morehouse Healthcare in Atlanta. This emerging medical specialty focuses on helping patients make healthy lifestyle behavior modifications. Patients who adopt whole-food plant-based diets increase carbohydrate intake and often see reversal of chronic diseases including diabetes and hypertension. In my clinical experience, myths about “sugar” and carbohydrates are common among patients and health professionals.
Since then, U.S. science has done nothing but get older, with researchers <35yo now receiving less than 5% of funding.
Meanwhile the NSF is poised to hand over half a billion dollars to Google for basic data and cloud engineering.
Getting an academic field to change its ways is hard. Independent scientists can’t just go rogue – they need research funding, they need to publish, and they need (or want) tenure. All those things require convincing a community of your peers to accept the merit of your research agenda. And yet, humans are humans. They can be biased. And if they are biased towards the status quo, it can be hard for change to take root.
But it does happen. And I think changes in the field of economics are a good illustration of some of the dynamics that make that possible.
IBM said Friday that it will sell off the healthcare data and analytics assets housed under its Watson Health unit to private equity firm Francisco Partners.
The deal signals that IT giant IBM (IBM) is stepping back from its ambitions in the healthcare space as it focuses on building hybrid cloud computing capabilities, an effort that has accelerated since Arvind Krishna took over the CEO position in 2020.
IBM stood up Watson Health as a separate business unit in 2015 with the goal of using data to help doctors, researchers and insurers solve some of healthcare’s biggest problems. The company invested in a series of deals to acquire healthcare data, and took on challenges ranging from improving diabetes care to overhauling cancer treatment.
The IRS is pushing taxpayers to start using a login service that leverages facial recognition and requires users to send photos of themselves to a third-party company. The news, first flagged by independent investigative reporter Brian Krebs, has been met with incredulity by privacy and cybersecurity experts, who say the program will create numerous privacy, cybersecurity and accessibility concerns for taxpayers.
To start, it does not appear that a user will *need* to submit a photo of themselves to file taxes, but the IRS website presents it as the default option, with alternatives buried in the frequently asked questions section. In response to initial reports around the program, the agency sent a statement to Gizmodo that said in part that “taxpayers can pay or file their taxes without submitting a selfie or other information to a third-party identity verification company” and that payments “can be made from a bank account, by credit card or by other means without the use of facial recognition technology or registering for an account.” For those unable (or unwilling) to verify through ID.me, they can also request transcripts through phone or mail, but this process will take five to 10 days.
But experts in privacy and cybersecurity say that by making it the default option for users to create an account with ID.me and submit photos, the IRS is pushing potentially millions of taxpayers into using a risky technology with a spotty track record, one that isn’t even owned by the government.
Are you more concerned about the security of your online information than you were last year?
A raft of high profile hacks, along with reports of data misuse, have sparked a new wave of debate over how social platforms utilize the information that you submit, or how it can be made available to others. And according to a new survey by Go Verizon, more people are now considering what they can do about it, and how they can better protect themselves online.
Go Verizon surveyed 1,000 Americans to get their direct insights into how they feel about data security and online safety.
The NFL has been collaborating with AWS on its Next Gen Stats since 2017 and is halfway through an expanded three-year partnership targeting player safety initiatives. This work is part of the broader $60 million commitment the league made in its Engineering Roadmap. Among the milestones thus far: a 25% reduction in concussions over the past three seasons compared to the three prior years; a shift from 40% to 99% of players wearing top-performing helmets as rated by safety; and the creation of the first position-specific helmet. It has already helped inform the league’s decision to expand from 16 regular season games to 17.
The Digital Athlete draws on wide-ranging inputs that generate nearly three terabytes of data per week: video review, equipment scans, mouthguard sensors, game and practice performance data, field mapping, pose tracking and much more. This prevalence of sensors, married to video, helps the engineers measure the range of experience for NFL players that can be used to create a digital twin—not an identical Tom Brady or Derrick Henry—but a virtual placeholder replicating the attributes of a player at each position.
“The idea is to create a representation of NFL athletes that we can put into scenarios, and we’re not risking anybody,” says Biocore principal data scientist Sam Huddleston, whose firm is led by NFL Engineering Committee chairman Jeff Crandall.
A new data-rich report by the National Science Foundation (NSF) confirms China has overtaken the United States as the world’s leader in several key scientific metrics, including the overall number of papers published and patents awarded. U.S. scientists also have serious competition from foreign researchers in certain fields, it finds.
That loss of hegemony raises an important question for U.S. policymakers and the country’s research community, according to NSF’s oversight body, the National Science Board (NSB). “Since across-the-board leadership in [science and engineering] is no longer a possibility, what then should our goals be?” NSB asks in a policy brief that accompanies this year’s Science and Engineering Indicators, NSF’s biennial assessment of global research, which was released this week. (NSF has converted a single gargantuan volume into nine thematic reports, summarized in The State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2022.)
Achieving earthly emissions reductions goals will hinge upon the extraterrestrial capabilities of artificial intelligence technologies that are taking precision measurements from space, according to former Vice President Al Gore.
“What’s so unique about the space resource is we can see and measure and identify things from space that are extremely difficult to measure at ground level,” Gore said on Tuesday.
The former vice president, who backs an AI-powered platform called Climate TRACE, made the remarks during a virtual panel focused on space as a “next frontier” at the World Economic Forum’s annual Davos Agenda in Switzerland.
Intel will build two chip factories in New Albany, Ohio, at cost of more than $20 billion on a mega-site that could eventually have eight fabs total valued at $100 billion, creating tens of thousands of long-term jobs for the area.
The chip giant also said it will spend $100 million over a decade to build a partnership with universities and community colleges in the region to include labs and curriculum leading to undergrad and associate degrees.
To accommodate the continued growth of its School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, UB is moving ahead with plans to construct a new building for the school on the North Campus.
The effort took a major step forward earlier this month when Gov. Kathy Hochul announced funding for the $102 million project in her State of the State address. The support is part of a broader initiative focusing on SUNY, including naming UB and Stony Brook University as flagships of the system.
It’s hardly news that exercise is good for your physical health. But only more recently have researchers come to realize its benefits for mental health — as effective as drug therapy, in some cases. And now researchers are starting to understand how, exactly, exercise works its mental magic.
Exercise, they are learning, has profound effects on the brain, and especially the regions most affected by depression and schizophrenia. It also provides other, more subtle benefits such as focus, a sense of accomplishment and sometimes social stimulation, all of which are therapeutic in their own right. And while more is generally better, even modest levels of physical activity, such as a daily walk, can pay big dividends for mental health.
“It’s a very potent intervention to be physically active,” says Anders Hovland, a clinical psychologist at the University of Bergen in Norway.
But that knowledge has barely begun to percolate into practice, says Joseph Firth, a mental health researcher at the University of Manchester in the UK. Just ask a hundred people receiving mental health care how many are getting exercise prescriptions as part of that care. “You wouldn’t find many,” Firth says.
The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) announced a seven-year $50 million commitment from Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, which will support various research groups within Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB). HIMB will leverage this gift to make meaningful progress in restoring Hawaiʻi’s ocean health.
This gift will fund research and programs that document changing ocean conditions, explore solutions to support healthier ocean ecosystems, enhance coastal resilience from storms and sea-level rise, and tackle challenges to marine organisms ranging from the tiniest corals to the largest predators.
“The Internet Measurement Research (IMR) program, headed by the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering in partnership with the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, is a new focused program to support methodologies, tools, and research infrastructure for internet measurements.” Initial proposal deadline is February 15.
The submission to become a peer-reviewer for the upcoming LatinX in CV Workshop at #CVPR2022 is now open. Fill in the form and submit your application now!
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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.
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