In a bid to accelerate research in the area of data science and Artifical Intelligence (AI), Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions (RBEI) and IIT Madras signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on Friday to set up the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI).
The RBC-DSAI intends to create societal impact through multidisciplinary interactions with government, academic, research and industrial collaborators on core challenges in data science and AI. The Centre will receive Rs 3 crore – Rs 4 crore funding a year for five years.
One of the potentially biggest problems is also among the least recognized: The use of big data to separate the healthy from the sick. Algorithms and artificial intelligence are very good at identifying patterns of behavior that predict certain outcomes. This, in turn, can be used to sort people by the expected cost of their health care.
All kinds of incidentally collected data — shopping history, public records, demographic data — can be repurposed for assessing people’s health. For example, LexisNexis offers a product called a “Socioeconomic Health Score” that seeks to predict costs using such information as education, criminal records and personal finances.
In a much-anticipated analysis of its first year of data, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) telescope experiment has gauged the amount of dark energy and dark matter in the universe by measuring the clumpiness of galaxies — a rich and, so far, barely tapped source of information that many see as the future of cosmology.
The analysis, posted on DES’s website today and based on observations of 26 million galaxies in a large swath of the southern sky, tweaks estimates only a little. It draws the pie chart of the universe as 74 percent dark energy and 21 percent dark matter, with galaxies and all other visible matter — everything currently known to physicists — filling the remaining 5 percent sliver.
The results are based on data from the telescope’s first observing season, which began in August 2013 and lasted six months. Since then, three more rounds of data collection have passed; the experiment begins its fifth and final planned observing season this month.
Two former Palantir Technologies engineers appear to be in charge of Palmer Luckey’s new defense technology start-up Anduril Industries, according to newly reviewed regulatory filings.
Luckey, a Long Beach native acclaimed for catalyzing the nascent virtual reality technology industry by founding Oculus VR, has said his new venture could do the same for the defense industry.
“We are spending more than ever on defense technology, yet the pace of innovation has been slowing for decades,” he told the New York Times in a brief statement in early June.
On the pastoral campus of the University of California Santa Cruz, Professor Marilyn Walker is a force behind the burgeoning major of Artificial Intelligence. In fact her face, thirty feet tall, graces the wall of the International boarding terminal at San Jose International Airport as she screen writes formulas. It also dots areas around the campus itself. Clearly, there’s a new Marilyn in town.
Virtualitics is a transformative start-up company that merges artificial intelligence (AI), big data and virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) to gain insights from big and complex data sets. Furthermore, Virtualitics leverages AI and easy-to-use machine learning tools so even non-expert users can uncover multidimensional relationships present in complex data sets with the click of a button.
The company was founded by engineers with a wealth of experience at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and a founding team of pioneers and luminaries in data analysis, data visualization, machine learning and mixed reality applications.
The National Institutes of Health and UK-based Wellcome Trust, in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, published their reflections on developing and implementing the Open Science Prize, a novel approach for funding international open science. The paper titled, Developing International Open Science Collaborations – Funder Reflections on the Open Science Prize, published in PLOS Biology on August 1, 2017, highlights a new partnership funding model for encouraging the development of open data technologies to address global health issues, and the challenges of multiple funders pursuing joint global health technology initiatives. The paper also provides a series of reflections addressing topics such as partnership development and sustainability.
Observations of clouds with enough three-dimensional detail to translate into a sculpture are not available, but the equations governing clouds are known, and so the structure of clouds can be computed. Caltech research scientist Kyle Pressel, who is part of Schneider’s group, worked closely with LaMonte to produce the cloud simulation from which she would create her sculpture. Over a period of five days, using a supercomputer located in a facility on the shores of Lake Lugano in Switzerland, Pressel and Schneider undertook one of the larger cloud simulations they had attempted.
Their goal: model conditions that would create a cumulus cloud worthy of sculpting. To do so, they modeled their simulation on conditions that occurred during the Barbados Oceanographic and Meteorological Experiment, conducted in the summer of 1969. The result? “A classic cumulus you’d see while lying on a beach in Barbados,” says Pressel, “a postcard Caribbean cumulus.” Or, in reality, a triangulation of the surface of such a cloud.
A new instrument that will monitor our planet’s biggest power source, the Sun, arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It has a targeted November 2017 launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station. The Total Solar and Spectral Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1) instrument was built by the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Scientists will use TSIS-1 to study the Sun’s energy input to Earth. Specifically, it will measure both the total amount of light that falls on Earth, known as the total solar irradiance, and how that light is distributed among ultraviolet, visible and infrared wavelengths, called solar spectral irradiance.
States across the nation are ramping up their digital defenses to prevent the hacking of election systems in 2018.
The efforts come in the wake of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, which state officials say was a needed wake up call on cybersecurity threats to election systems and infrastructure.
The opening of a new ramen restaurant in Seattle usually does not get our journalistic engines firing.
But add a little robot action to the mix, and things get really fun.
That’s what happened Wednesday evening as members of the GeekWire team got an inside look at Hokkaido Ramen Santouka. The new ramen restaurant in Seattle’s University Village shopping mall serves up piping hot bowls of Hokkaido-style ramen where the yummy broth is made by simmering (never boiling!) pork bones for 20 hours.
Princeton University, Institure for Advanced Study
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A $2 million donation from Eric and Wendy Schmidt will support the launch of the Program in Theoretical Machine Learning in the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Mathematics. Eric Schmidt is the Executive Chairman of Google; Wendy Schmidt is President of The Schmidt Family Foundation and Co-Founder of the Schmidt Ocean Institute. The Schmidts have a history of supporting innovation. In 2009, they established the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund at neighboring Princeton University.
This gift will launch a three-year program beginning in the Fall of 2017 and will focus on developing the mathematical underpinnings of machine learning, including unsupervised learning, deep learning, optimization, and statistics. The program will also explore connections to neighboring fields, including biology, computer vision, natural language processing, neuroscience, and social science.
The JSM Program Committee is accepting Invited Session proposals. Please select “INVITED” as the session type. Deadline for submissions is September 6.
Good Judgment Open is the site for serious forecasting. The next challenge to conclude: The Economist’sThe World in 2017 challenge. Deadline is October 1.
“Deep Learning is the most popular and the fastest growing area in Computer Vision nowadays. Since OpenCV 3.1 there is DNN module in the library that implements forward pass (inferencing) with deep networks, pre-trained using some popular deep learning frameworks, such as Caffe. In OpenCV 3.3 the module has been promoted from opencv_contrib repository to the main repository and has been accelerated significantly.”
I’m a bit late in posting this, but travel delays post-JSM left me weary, so I’m just getting around to it. Better late than never?
Wednesday at JSM featured an invited statistics education session on Modernizing the Undergraduate Statistics Curriculum. This session featured two types of speakers: those who are currently involved in undergraduate education and those who are on the receiving end of graduating majors. The speakers involved in undergraduate education presented on their recent efforts for modernizing the undergraduate statistics curriculum to provide the essential computational and problem solving skills expected from today’s modern statistician while also providing a firm grounding in theory and methods. The speakers representing industry discussed their expectations (or hopes and dreams) for new graduates and where they find gaps in the knowledge of new hires.
Facebook Code, Engineering Blog; Juan Miguel Pino, Alexander Sidorov and Necip Fazil Ayan
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Creating seamless, highly accurate translation experiences for the 2 billion people who use Facebook is difficult. We need to account for context, slang, typos, abbreviations, and intent simultaneously. To continue improving the quality of our translations, we recently switched from using phrase-based machine translation models to neural networks to power all of our backend translation systems, which account for more than 2,000 translation directions and 4.5 billion translations each day. These new models provide more accurate and fluent translations, improving people’s experience consuming Facebook content that is not written in their preferred language.
“Below is a list of initiatives, programs, and groups related to data science at the 115 Research 1 (R1) institutions in the US. We don’t assert completion or correctness, but we welcome edits.”