Four of the world’s best professional poker players will compete against artificial intelligence developed by Carnegie Mellon University in an epic rematch to determine whether a computer can beat humans playing one of the world’s toughest poker games.
Columbia University‘s Professor Sam Sia has developed a hydrogel microrobot implant to deliver drugs, catheterize, or serve as a pacemaker without relying on a toxic battery or silicon.
University of Toronto professors and Ontario tech leaders published a call to propel Toronto to the head of the global AI race. They want funding, more industrial partnerships, and one modern facility to house all the academics. Why not get some of the industrial partners on campus or in the building, too (e.g. UW-Seattle)? Also: consider adding technology studies and ethics experts.
Todd Mostak, recently of MIT CSAIL, launched MapD, a GPU-dominated database structure that is 100 times faster than traditional systems. The CIA, Verizon, and “a social media giant” are customers.
A new $27m fund to support study of the social impacts of AI launched with backing from Reid Hoffman, Omidyar Network, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Adding sincerity to the long-running, half-humorous tension between social physicists and social scientists, Duncan Watts argues that social scientists need to diminish the vaunted status of theory in favor of practical problem solving.
Columbia University, The Fu Foundation School of Engineering & Applied Science
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A team of researchers led by Biomedical Engineering Professor Sam Sia at Columbia Engineering has developed a way to manufacture microscale machines from biomaterials that can safely be implanted in the body. Working with hydrogels, which are biocompatible materials that engineers have been studying for decades, Sia has invented a new technique that stacks the soft material in layers to make devices that have three-dimensional, freely moving parts.
Machine learning is driving advances in areas like commerce, gaming, navigation, cybersecurity, and voice recognition. However, Yao Wang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, is using it to deliver strong medicine to health care research, diagnostics, self-therapy, and ultimately, prognosis.
The Globe and Mail; Jordan Jacobs, Tomi Poutanen, Richard Zemel, Geoffrey Hinton and Ed Clark
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There is one solution that will help keep the best minds in Canada, solve the current and future talent gap for domestic businesses, lure investment from foreign data-rich companies, and ensure Canada leads future AI breakthroughs: We must build a world-leading AI Institute in Toronto. We are leading an effort to make this happen.
Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, Freedom to Tinker blog, Joel Reidenberg
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During the holiday season, New York City through its Taxi & Limousine Commission (the “TLC”) proposed a new rule expanding data reporting obligations for car service platform companies including Uber and Lyft. If the rule is adopted, car services will now have to report the GPS coordinates of both passenger pick-up and drop-off locations to the city government. Under NY’s Freedom of Information Law, that data in bulk will also be subject to full public release.
In a year chock full of moves in Brooklyn tech, nothing stands out quite so much as the number of successes the NYU Tandon Future Labs produced in 2016.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has selected a research consortium led by the New York University Tandon School of Engineering to become the first Tier 1 University Transportation Center (UTC) in New York City, charged with taking on some of the most pressing mobility challenges facing urban areas of all sizes.
Coursera, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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The MCS-DS builds expertise in four core areas of computer science: data visualization, machine learning, data mining and cloud computing, in addition to building valuable skill sets in statistics and information science with courses taught in collaboration with the University’s Statistics Department and iSchool (ranked #1 among Library and Information Studies Schools.)
San Francisco, CA February 14, in Honor of Black History Month GitHub will be hosting a summit for Black Open Source maintainers, contributors and rising leaders. [free, invite only]
“Well, Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and Smokin’ Solstice, because this year, we got [American Community Survey data] up for you in under a month! As is always the case, new ACS data brings new goodies.”
A couple of months ago I experimented with using RxJS for unidirectional data flow. The focus was on showcasing how action streams could be used to form state streams via plain old reducer functions, and how we could then use those state streams to push new state to our components. I
Summarizer is an algorithm that extracts sentences from a text document, determines which are most important, and returns them in a readable and structured way.
Communication with external services is an integral part of any modern system. Whether it’s a payment service, authentication, analytics or an internal one — systems need to talk to each other.
In this short article we are going to implement a module for communicating with a made-up payment gateway, step by step.
Every so often, data scientists who are thinking about going off on their own will email me with questions about my year of freelancing (2015). In my most recent response, I was a little more detailed than usual, so I figured it’d make sense as a blog post too.
If my response comes across as negative, that’s certainly not the intention — being straight-forward about my experience is.
I learned a lot, it just wasn’t for me. Working by yourself on short(ish)-term things can get old.
In this article, I clarify the various roles of the data scientist, and how data science compares and overlaps with related fields such as machine learning, deep learning, AI, statistics, IoT, operations research, and applied mathematics. As data science is a broad discipline, I start by describing the different types of data scientists that one may encounter in any business setting: you might even discover that you are a data scientist yourself, without knowing it.
“Uber is opening up in an area where it might make sense competitively for it to stay more closed off: The ride-hailing company’s new Movement website will offer up access to its data around traffic flow in scores where it operates.”
