A pair of San Antonio researchers have created a startup that aims to reduce the cost of energy consumption for commercial buildings using solar power and machine learning technology.
Called Leaptran, the young startup plans to help commercial building owners, such as at a university or warehouse, use solar panels to soak up and store energy in batteries for potential future use. The company says its software can help the building owner predict how much power the building will use and when—based on data analytics of previous usage—which is especially useful when utilities face high levels of power consumption and charge higher rates. Leaptran’s co-founders believe the businesses or owners of the commercial buildings can then switch their power usage from the utility to the energy saved and stored in its batteries.
“We can predict and control when the battery will discharge to the building, instead of from the grid,” says Bing Dong, a co-founder and assistant professor at University of Texas at San Antonio, which licensed the technology to Leaptran.
The recent crash of a self-driving car that resulted in the death of a pedestrian in Arizona shows that self-driving technology is still a work in progress, and will require more rigorous testing, according to a University of Virginia researcher who studies the safety of autonomous vehicles.
However, UVA computer scientist Madhur Behl predicted these vehicles will be safely deployed in the near future, and eventually will become ubiquitous on our streets.
“My 6-month-old niece probably will never need a driver’s license,” he said. “Her car will do the driving for her.”
Two physicists at ETH Zurich and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a novel machine-learning algorithm that analyses large data sets describing a physical system and extract from them the essential information needed to understand the underlying physics.
So something a bit lighter today, after a few academic-y posts. I want to look at the received wisdom that the visual medical professions (radiology, pathology, etc.) that will be the first to suffer the cruel sting of automation.
This does make sense, because AI technologies excel at visual tasks. But I think another area of medicine might experience disruption even earlier. Quite soon, in fact.
That area is trauma care. The surgeons, emergency responders and clinicians, intensive care specialists, rehabilition specialists, and neurosurgeons in this field may be in for some shake-ups. Especially if they work in a big city, and especially if they work in a big trauma hospital.
Aquaculture proponents view the ocean off Southern California as an ideal place for an emerging industry. The key, new research found, will be to carefully locate facilities to minimize environmental risks and conflicts with other marine uses.
Google could owe Oracle Corp. billions of dollars for using Oracle-owned Java programming code in its Android operating system on mobile devices, an appeals court said, as the years-long feud between the two software giants draws near a close.
Google’s use of Java shortcuts to develop Android went too far and was a violation of Oracle’s copyrights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Tuesday. The case — first filed in 2010 — was remanded to a federal court in California to determine how much the Alphabet Inc. unit should pay. Oracle had been seeking $8.8 billion, though that number could grow. Google expressed disappointment and said it’s considering its next steps in the case.
The dispute, which could have far-reaching implications for the entire software industry, has divided Silicon Valley for years between those who develop the code that makes software steps function and those who develop software programs and say their “fair use” of the code is an exception to copyright law.
Jeffrey Brock ’92, a mathematician, will serve as the inaugural dean of science for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, pending approval from the Yale Corporation, Dean of the FAS Tamar Gendler announced in an email to the FAS on Wednesday.
As FAS Dean of Science, Brock, who is the former chair of the mathematics department at Brown and the current director of its data science initiative, will oversee issues related to faculty in the nine biological and physical sciences departments within the FAS, including hiring, retention and promotion, and both long-term and day-to-day planning in the departments. In his capacity as dean, he will also eventually chair the physical sciences and engineering advisory committee and help lead the corresponding tenure and appointments committee alongside Gendler.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flew down to announce the agreement with Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, last October, and the project has received international attention for being one of the first smart-cities designed from the ground up.
But five months later, few people have actually seen the full agreement between Sidewalk and Waterfront Toronto.
As council’s representative on Waterfront Toronto’s board, Mr Minnan-Wong is the only elected official to actually see the legal agreement in full. Not even the mayor knows what the city has signed on for.
“We got very little notice. We were essentially told ‘here’s the agreement, the prime minister’s coming to make the announcement,'” he said.
Time Warner Inc.’s proposed takeover by AT&T Inc. would finally address one of the biggest problems facing its Turner Broadcasting division — a lack of customer data for use in targeted marketing, Turner’s chief executive officer testified in defense of the deal being challenged in an antitrust lawsuit.
Turner CEO John Martin said Wednesday that AT&T’s massive trove of detailed customer information will help it craft ads that appeal to a wider array of specific groups and compete for scarce ad dollars that have been siphoned off by Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. He referred to the battle for data as an “arms race” that Turner is losing.
“We’re at a huge disadvantage” compared to the Silicon Valley giants, which have captured at least 85 percent of the ad spending that’s shifted to digital in recent years, Martin said in federal court in Washington. Facebook and Google “can dynamically serve ads to the users because they know who they are.”
LIE DETECTORS ARE not widely used in business, but Ping An, a Chinese insurance company, thinks it can spot dishonesty. The company lets customers apply for loans through its app. Prospective borrowers answer questions about their income and plans for repayment by video, which monitors around 50 tiny facial expressions to determine whether they are telling the truth. The program, enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), helps pinpoint customers who require further scrutiny.
AI will change more than borrowers’ bank balances. Johnson & Johnson, a consumer-goods firm, and Accenture, a consultancy, use AI to sort through job applications and pick the best candidates. AI helps Caesars, a casino and hotel group, guess customers’ likely spending and offer personalised promotions to draw them in. Bloomberg, a media and financial-information firm, uses AI to scan companies’ earnings releases and automatically generate news articles. Vodafone, a mobile operator, can predict problems with its network and with users’ devices before they arise. Companies in every industry use AI to monitor cyber-security threats and other risks, such as disgruntled employees.
Usually, talk of the troubles that doctors have with electronic health records revolve around issues of frustration and burnout, and the drag on the doctor-patient relationship when a screen is between them.
(Not for nothing was “Death By A Thousand Clicks: Leading Doctors Decry Electronic Medical Records” our most viral post last year, followed by live discussions of how to improve the system.)
Now, a paper published in the journal JAMA adds to those concerns: It looked at how “usability issues” — design problems ranging from data entry and display, to defaults and drug orders — can and do hurt patients.
The federally funded study looked at more than 1.7 million reports of safety issues mainly in Pennsylvania, and found 1,956, or .11 percent, that mentioned a top-five health record system as a cause of patient harm.
The new Collaborative Research Education and Technology Enhancement in Surgery, or Pittsburgh CREATES, will be in the Biomedical Science Tower South on Lothrop Street in Oakland.
Pittsburgh CREATES will pursue research in computer-assisted image guidance, remote sensing, machine learning and other technologies to advance surgical practice and improve patient care. Surgical robots, a $1.53 billion industry, will play a large role.
“Pittsburgh CREATES offers the opportunity to bring the unique strengths of our region to companies that are laying the groundwork for significant health care improvement in the surgical domain,” Max Fedor, executive director of Pittsburgh CREATES, said in a statement.
West Virginia University is one of only two universities worldwide selected to receive a research and development program award from AVEVA, a leader in engineering and industrial software. The first-of-its-kind award will be used to focus on the research and development of next-generation engineering design and simulation software.
The WVU team, led by Richard Turton, WVU Bolton Professor, Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, and Fernando Lima, assistant professor of chemical and biomedical engineering, will use AVEVA’s Unified Simulation Platform or SimCentral platform, a process simulation tool for designing and operating power plants.
“SimCentral is a new generation simulation platform that piggybacks on some of the work we have been doing at the AVESTAR Center,” Turton said. “This new platform allows for the simultaneous development of steady state, dynamic and fluid flow models, a feature that is currently lacking in other platforms. The platform is quite transparent and allows users to develop a wide variety of customized models within a simulation platform.”
Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the all-flash storage platform that helps innovators build a better world with data, today announced the industry’s first comprehensive AI-Ready Infrastructure, AIRI, powered by NVIDIA. Architected by Pure Storage and NVIDIA, AIRI is purpose-built to enable data architects, scientists and business leaders to extend the power of the NVIDIA DGX-1 and operationalize AI-at-scale for every enterprise. With AIRI, cloud, enterprise and government organizations can accelerate time-to-insight and bring new, impactful innovations to humanity, faster.
AIRI enables organizations to turn data into innovation at an unprecedented pace. AI represents an opportunity for enterprises to innovate not only at a product level, but within day-to-day operations as they lead their industries through periods of tremendous change. According to Gartner, 80 percent of enterprises will deploy AI by 2020. AIRI provides a simple, yet powerful, architecture that empowers organizations with the data-centric infrastructure needed to harness the true power of AI.
London, England April 16-21. “The Festival consists of lectures, workshops, demos, code sprints, panel discussions and social events, spread across London. Culminating with a training day and a free to attend, day long Mainstage event!” [tickets required]
Next month, students at five U.S. universities will work on next-generation software concepts in an on-campus FutureMakers Challenge program designed to foster innovation and develop the next-generation digital engineering workforce. The competition is being hosted by Siemens in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology. [registration required]
Kingston, RI April 4, starting at 12 noon in the Galanti Lounge at the Robert L. Carothers Library. “Diversity and inclusion in the artificial intelligence lab are among the topics that will be discussed.”
Raleigh, NC April 5 starting at 6 p.m. “This is the first FuturePub to be held in Raleigh.” … “Six quick-fire talks cover a range of new and exciting developments in science, research & publishing tech.” [free, registration required]
An algorithm that can predict which passengers survived the 1912 Titanic disaster with 97 percent accuracy demonstrates the power and the shortcomings of artificial intelligence, a new book argues.
AI may get things right, this finding shows, but for all the wrong reasons.
Meredith Broussard, a journalism professor at New York University, outlines this paradox in her new book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press, 2018). Broussard takes the reader on a series of unconventional adventures in computer programming, including an up-close view of what it really looks like to “do” artificial intelligence.
Nineteen project leads, eScience data scientists, and researchers participated in this year’s Winter Incubator program, which focused on projects in hydrology, political science, astronomy, atmospheric science and neuroscience. The five teams met over the course of 10 weeks to develop their projects, and presented their results on Mar. 13, 2018 in the WRF Data Science Studio.
Details on the projects can be found on the program’s GitHub page. The next opportunity to participate in the program will be in 2019 and a call for proposals will be announced this fall.
As we did last year, we offered project leads the opportunity to give feedback on this program. Here are the responses we received.
Imagine a system for editing and reviewing code where:
Every branch of every repo gets its own sandboxed directory. Your revision history in each branch, including uncommitted stuff, is persisted, as are build artifacts. When you switch contexts, each project is just as you left it.
Within your editor, you can pull up a global view of all your branches, your outstanding pull requests, and the pull requests you’re assigned to review. It’s one keystroke to view the summary for a pull, and one more to start editing any of its files right there under your cursor.
Code review happens entirely within the editor. You’re fed a series of diffs: one keystroke to approve, one keystroke to start editing. Dive in, make your changes, leave comments for the author, push, and move on.
The Linux Foundation has launched the LF Deep Learning Foundation, an umbrella organization for open-source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. Its first project is the Acumos AI Project, an AI/ML platform and open-source framework.