The company is perfecting a sensor that can quickly detect two main things: the fat content in milk, which can increase what a farmer is paid for the milk, and somatic cell counts, which can indicate disease.
Early in September, Amazon canceled two pricey original dramas: Z: The Beginning of Everything (about Zelda Fitzgerald) and The Last Tycoon (based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel). The cancellations are part of a new programming shift at Amazon Studios, bent on emphasizing television series with “global appeal” — that is, finding the next Game of Thrones hit. But while Amazon Studios seems to be almost flailing with finding a cohesive programming slate, one aspect of the service is plugging along nicely: Amazon Studios’ children’s programming.
The majority of Amazon’s children’s series have been effortlessly progressive, with female leads and characters of color abounding.
Amazon.com Inc. is experimenting with a new delivery service intended to make more products available for free two-day delivery and relieve overcrowding in its warehouses, according to two people familiar with the plan, which will push the online retailer deeper into functions handled by longtime partners United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp.
The service began two years ago in India, and Amazon has been slowly marketing it to U.S. merchants in preparation for a national expansion, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the U.S. pilot project is confidential. Amazon is calling the project Seller Flex, one person said. The service began on a trial basis this year in West Coast states with a broader rollout planned in 2018, the people said. Amazon declined to comment.
Chinese search giant Baidu is opening a second research and development lab in Silicon Valley, amid a renewed push to attract local talent for its artificial intelligence and self-driving car projects.
The 36,000-square-foot building in Sunnyvale will be home to up to 150 engineers working on Baidu’s self-driving car platform, Apollo, and engineers focused on Internet security, the company said in a statement.
Government Data Science News
China has been out of the cyberthreat spotlight as Russia’s cyber activities have dominated our attention. A long read at The Conversation explains that “China appears to have refrained from conducting cyberattacks that cause overt damage to critical infrastructure in other countries, like the Russians did to Ukraine’s power grid. However, it has used disruptive cyberattacks to help enforce censorship policies within its own borders.” It’s quite interesting to see how patriotism, nationalism, defense, and hacking come together in any country, especially one as powerful as China.
Army Research Lab has committed $25m to develop an “internet of battlefield things.” I suppose that was inevitable. I hope social scientists are included in the consortium. Hard to tell from the press release. The release does note that “the ethical implications of autonomous machines on the battlefield are enormous, and one challenge for scientists is to ensure that the machines ‘know the bounds of autonomy’.”
CaliforniaGovernor Jerry Brownannounced the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Precision Medicine to bring together leading academics and industry researchers to advance personalized patient care. This is a renewal, of sorts, of the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine which was started in 2015. It will be interesting to see what comes of state-level adoption of pro-data science policy.
The National Science Foundation also just granted $600,000 over three years to the Texas Advanced Computing Center and the University of Louisville. It’s an education grant that “will support the development of training, tools, and a cloud-based virtual environment to teach data science at the largest scales.” The grant is part of NSF’s “Improving Undergraduate STEM Education” program.
The US Postal Service is developing self-driving postal trucks. The project is in partnership with the University of Michigan which is targeting rural areas first. Makes sense to me. Launching self-driving postal trucks in New York City would surely leave me begging for human mail carriers. Traffic here is not for the fidgety gadgets yet.
The US Census may be in trouble. We’ve reported here before that they have sustained an abrupt departure of previous leadership and a cut to their budget while they face new challenges for the 2020 count. At the moment, it seems they are quietly 6 months late (or more) with respect to completing the Economic Census survey conducted every five years. “The agency told POLITICO that it has not publicly announced the delay but confirmed that aspects of the Economic Census were ‘re-planned,’ and the results would be out six months late.”
Representatives Dave Trott (R-Michigan) and Susan Brooks (R-Indiana) have introduced legislation to create a public-private partnership to formulate a cybersecurity framework capable of protecting Americans’ sensitive healthcare information from cyber-attacks.
The Department of Health and Human Services is aiming to beef up it’s ability to utilize data science by retraining its staff in conjunction with a DC-based for-profit called Data Society. (This is not to be confused with Data & Society, a research institute based in New York.) I expect we will see much more in this retraining space. Academics, if you want to be part of this loop, we have to change our models so that we are equipped to educate existing employees.
Western Digital has created the world’s first 14TB hard drive, the Ultrastar Hs14, filled with Helium and relying on a technique called Shingle Magnetic Recording (SMR) to boost capacity at the expense of write speed.
By increasing capacity while keeping the familiar 3.5-inch form-factor, the company has also lowered the power consumption per TB, making the new drive more power efficient.
The UI will lead the effort to develop the scientific foundations for battlefield analytics and services, officials said.
The Alliance for IoBT Research on Evolving Intelligent Goal-driven Networks, funded by the Army Research Lab, includes collaborators from that lab, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Massachusetts, University of Southern California and SRI International, a research institute created by Stanford University. The funding covers the first five years of a potential 10-year effort.
Columbia Daily Spectator, Eli Lee and Ariana Nakhla
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Wing’s arrival coincides with the Data Science Institute’s launching of the Faculty Recruitment Program, a fund dedicated to hiring faculty from other departments who are interested in data science, as well as funding the hiring of data science experts in other schools or departments.
Wing said that both of these programs are crucial to the Data Science Institute’s mission, as they foster connections across Columbia’s schools that will lead to productive collaboration in order to apply data science to a greater social good.
“What I have found in talking to many faculty, administrators, and deans across campus is that a lot of people are sitting on really interesting data science, but they don’t know what questions to ask of it or what the data analytics techniques are to unlock some of the knowledge in that data,” Wing said. “At the same time, the data scientists are always looking for interesting data sets to see where the limitations of their techniques are.”
Three months ago we announced the opening of DeepMind’s first ever international AI research laboratory in Edmonton, Canada. Today, we are thrilled to announce that we are strengthening our commitment to the Canadian AI community with the opening of a DeepMind office in Montreal, in close collaboration with McGill University.
Bachelor’s and master’s degrees earned in statistics and biostatistics continue their strong growth while doctoral degrees are up only a couple percent from 2015 to 2016. According to the latest preliminary data release from the National Center for Education Statistics, bachelor’s degrees grew 19% to 2,790 (32 of which are for biostatistics) and master’s degrees increased 14% to 3,906 (657 for biostatistics), as seen in Figure 1. Doctoral degrees increased by 12 to 592 (190 for biostatistics). Figure 2 shows the comparable data for only biostatistics degrees.
The FCC has given Google permission to deploy its Project Loon balloons over Puerto Rico.
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Previously, the helium balloons were able to provide LTE coverage to Peru after extreme flooding. But in that case, Google had already partnered with a telecom provider on the ground, which it depended on to beam the signal to the balloons, for disaster relief.
“There are so many exciting stories across the league this year,” notes Stuart, a veteran of NBC and NBC Sports for nearly 15 years.
To capture it all — and then some — NBC Sports entered the campaign with a couple of enhancements to its coverage of the NHL, including expanding both specialty-camera resources and file-transfer capabilities.
Super-slow-motion cameras shooting at 6X were previously deployed only on marquee contests, but, with the network adding two robotic 6X units to bolster the total of SSM cameras to four, such shots will be available on a clear majority of NBCSN games this season.
Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, specialises in detecting manipulated images and videos. Farid, who provides his services to clients as varied as universities, media organizations, and law courts, says that image manipulation is becoming both more frequent and more sophisticated. He spoke to Nature about the arms race to stay ahead of the forgers.
Antonio Regalado at MIT Technology Review tells us that scientists can now predict birds’ songs by deciphering birds’ brain signals. Eric Schmidt calls it a major advance for brain-computer interfaces.
NYU’sYann LeCun, who also happens to be the Director of Facebook AI Research, gave a Shannon Luminary Lecture at Nokia Bell Labs. His warm personality and accessible explanatory style make this a very gentle primer on neural networks.
Gigaom has a new podcast series, Voices in AI, that features interviews with leading AI researchers including Yoshua Bengio, Oren Etzioni, and Daphne Koller.
If you want a job at a tech company, you may want to check out the new book “Swipe to Unlock” by Parth Detroja. The tell all describes how Detroja, a recent Cornell grad, received job offers from Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. Oh, and he had no coding experience.
Honolulu, Hawaii November 27-December 1. The 2017 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence is a flagship annual international conference on computational intelligence sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. [$$$]
“This annual award recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering supported by the National Science Foundation. The candidate should have demonstrated both individual achievements in their field, as well as origin.” Deadline for nominations is October 23.
“Up to ten $10,000 awards will be made directly to researchers, to provide unrestricted support for their work. The research should focus on key scientific challenges of interest to AI2, which also has the potential to provide significant advances to the greater artificial intelligence research community.” Deadline for proposals is Friday, November 10.
“The Medical Devices and Diagnostics section of the ASA is sponsoring a student paper competition to offset travel costs to JSM 2018. A manuscript suitable for journal submission is required to enter. The first-place winner will receive $500, and the second-place winner will receive $300.” Deadline for applications is December 15.
Today’s most powerful AI techniques learn almost everything about the world from scratch with the help of powerful computational resources. By comparison, humans and animals seem to intuitively understand certain concepts—objects and places and sets of related things—that allow them to quickly learn about how the world works. That begs an important “nature vs. nurture” question: Will AI learning require built-in versions of that innate cognitive machinery possessed by humans and animals to achieve a similar level of general intelligence?
Two leading researchers in AI and psychology went head-to-head debating that topic in an event hosted by New York University’s Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness last night.
“I was part of a team of designers and developers who unified a complex system with numerous rules to serve users from all corners of the country. I’ll shed some light on how we built tools to leverage industry-standard best practices and produce a design system with reusable components. You’ll also see how our system is helping agency teams in the federal government create simple, efficient, consistent experiences quickly and at reduced cost.”
“The facets project contains two visualizations for understanding and analyzing machine learning datasets: Facets Overview and Facets Dive.”
“The visualizations are implemented as Polymer web components, backed by Typescript code and can be easily embedded into Jupyter notebooks or webpages.”
