Facebook announced on Wednesday that Northeastern is one of 17 research universities selected to partner with the company on next generation, joint technology projects. The Sponsored Academic Research Agreement makes it easy for research faculty and labs to work together with Facebook.
The agreement was created by Building 8, the new team at Facebook that applies DARPA-style breakthrough innovation to the development of new hardware products.
Baidu is demonstrating some of its most recent tech advancements in novel ways, including a partnership with KFC China (yes, the fried chicken KFC). The search giant sometimes referred to as the ‘Google of China’ partnered with KFC to open a new “smart restaurant” in Beijing, which employs facial recognition to make recommendations about what customers might order, based on factors like their age, gender and facial expression.
The restaurant also offers up augmented reality games via table stickers, but these are also deployed at 300 other KFC locations in Beijing. The facial recognition tech is unique to this one location, though Baidu has previously worked with KFC on another type of smart restaurant at a pilot location in Shanghai, where a robot customer service agent can listen for and recognize orders made by customers using natural language input.
utonomous technologies are rapidly spreading beyond the transportation sector, into health care, advanced cyberdefense and even autonomous weapons. In 2017, we’ll have to decide whether we can trust these technologies. That’s going to be much harder than we might expect.
A university science professor helped develop a computer program to visually map out relationships between genes and molecules. Then his wife pointed out he could use it to find perfect wine and cheese pairings.
arXiv, Computer Science > Digital Libraries; Samuel F. Way, Allison C. Morgan, Aaron Clauset, Daniel B. Larremore
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A researcher may publish tens or hundreds of papers, yet these contributions to the literature are not uniformly distributed over a career. Past analyses of the trajectories of faculty productivity suggest an intuitive and canonical pattern: after being hired, productivity tends to rise rapidly to an early peak and then gradually declines. Here, we test the universality of this conventional narrative by analyzing the structures of individual faculty productivity time series, constructed from over 200,000 publications matched with hiring data for 2453 tenure-track faculty in all 205 Ph.D-granting computer science departments in the U.S. and Canada. Unlike prior studies, which considered only some faculty or some institutions, or lacked common career reference points, here we combine a large bibliographic dataset with comprehensive information on career transitions that covers an entire field of study. We show that the conventional narrative describes only one third of faculty, regardless of department prestige, and the remaining two thirds of faculty exhibit a rich diversity of productivity patterns. To explain this diversity, we introduce a simple model of productivity trajectories, and explore which factors correlate with its parameters, showing that both individual productivity and the transition from first- to last-author publications correlate with departmental prestige.
To take a photo of a black hole, you’d need a telescope the size of a planet. That’s not really feasible, but Katie Bouman and her team came up with an alternative solution involving complex algorithms and global cooperation. Check out this talk to learn about how we can see in the ultimate dark.
Our breath contains a slew of information about our health in the form of molecules whose existence and concentration can serve as biomarkers for disease. Typically breath sensors focus on a single biomarker and therefore are limited in their scope and screening ability. A worldwide scientific collaboration headed by a team from Technion−Israel Institute of Technology has developed a breath sensor capable of detecting many different molecules and correlated these biomarkers to 17 different diseases.
Ocean scientists will now find it easier to track deep-sea data from disparate sources: introducing SeaView, a new central home for ocean data that strings together five online databases.
Over the past several years, Jack Gallant’s neuroscience lab has produced a string of papers that sound absurd.
In 2011, the lab showed it was possible to recreate movie clips just from observing the brain activity of people watching movies. Using a computer to regenerate the images of a film just by scanning the brain of a person watching one is, in a sense, mind reading. Similarly, in 2015, Gallant’s team of scientists predicted which famous paintings people were picturing in their minds by observing the activity of their brains.
The Vermont Complex Systems Center’s MS in CSDS is a two year degree with optional disciplinary tracks (see below). UVM undergraduates may incorporate the degree as part of an Accelerated Master’s Program.
A decade ago, a group of biologists, venture capitalists and computer whizzes gathered under the name “clean tech.” They hoped to overturn polluting industries with microorganisms cheerily excreting industrial chemicals through the miracle of reprogramming nature’s genetic code.
The idea lost billions of dollars. Genes may indeed be programmable code, akin to computer software, but it turned out nature was more complex than first believed.
Now, with less fanfare, a few clean tech companies are aiming for a comeback. And the big idea has not changed much: Create cheap, safe and natural materials for fuel, cosmetics and other goods, much the way yeast ferments sugars into alcohol.
I thought it might be worthwhile grabbing my prediction goggles to look to the future. Let’s consider what AI tricks and treats might be in store for the medical world in 2017.
With Moore Foundation funding, the Association of American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and its partner organizations, the Center to Advance Palliative Care, the National Palliative Care Research Center, the Global Palliative Care Quality Alliance, and the Palliative Care Quality Network will set out to improve the current registry system for people with serious illness, bringing clarity to the field regarding data collection with the goal of developing a system that works for, and with, the patient.
Pascale Fung, an AI researcher at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), said several milestones have been reached in developing computers that are similar to the human brain. Speech and emotional recognition were among the areas “reaching new milestones”, Fung said.
Asia-focused AI experts say the region has lagged the West in research, but its technology companies and universities have enormous potential to make up for lost ground.
To some, the proliferation of dating tech has heralded a kind of “dating apocalypse,” as Vanity Fair’s Nancy Jo Sales coined it in 2015. But I’d offer a different perspective. Rather than obliterating the dating scene as we know it, tech has opened up a bevy of new options to sate our various tastes. Dating is no longer a one-size-fits-all game. And while hookup culture may seem like an exhausting, unwanted guest who forever overextends his welcome, let’s remember we invited him over in the first place.
Orlando, FL The 2017 HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition, February 19–23, 2017 in Orlando, brings together 40,000+ health IT professionals, clinicians, executives and vendors from around the world. [$$$$]
Are you passionate about all things space, football and social media? Then don’t miss the opportunity to join our NASA Social event at Johnson Space Center in Houston on Feb. 1, the week leading up to Super Bowl LI. The deadline to apply is Monday, January 9.
We are offering a $1,000 Women in Technology Scholarship to an outstanding female student who is planning a career in the field of computer science and/or computer programming. Deadline is Friday, May 5.
Using environmental data collected by various U.S. Federal Government agencies—from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S. Department of Commerce—can you predict the number of dengue fever cases reported each week in San Juan, Puerto Rico and Iquitos, Peru?
This is an intermediate-level practice competition. Deadline is Friday, December 22, 2017.
What happens when you have to learn a lot of things ? Two ICLR papers seem to point to the need for equally big models with an implication on regularization or in sparsely using them.
This post is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of recurrent neural networks. It is intended for readers without any machine learning background. The goal is to show artists and designers how to use a pre-trained neural network to produce interactive digital works using simple Javascript and p5.js library.
This is a hands-on guide to machine learning for programmers with no background in AI. Using a neural network doesn’t require a PhD, and you don’t need to be the person who makes the next breakthrough in AI in order to use what exists today. What we have now is already breathtaking, and highly usable.
Everyone developing software in an academic setting should have working knowledge of software licenses. We recommend reading: “A Quick Guide to Software Licensing for the Scientist-Programmer,” by Morin et al.