Companies experimenting with artificial intelligence technologies may find it challenging over the next few years, as they expand their operations in Europe. That’s because by May 2018, tough new European Union rules related to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect and could pose problems for companies that rely on gathering and processing user data for their businesses.
At a panel on data privacy at the annual RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco, Cisco (csco, +2.38%) chief privacy officer Michelle Dennedy explained that companies—from sports brands to pharmaceutical corporations—are gathering more data than ever from the influx of Internet-connected devices now wired into their IT infrastructure. And the problem is that the upcoming regulation is especially tough on what’s known as profiling, which is essentially the ability for companies to use automation to determine certain characteristics of their individual users.
bioRxiv; Lindsay Barone, Jason Williams, David Micklos
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In a 2016 survey of 704 National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences Directorate principle investigators (BIO PIs), nearly 90% indicated they are currently or will soon be analyzing large data sets. BIO PIs considered a range of computational needs important to their work, including high performance computing (HPC), bioinformatics support, multi-step workflows, updated analysis software, and the ability to store, share, and publish data. Previous studies in the United States and Canada emphasized infrastructure needs. However, BIO PIs said the most pressing unmet needs are training in data integration, data management, and scaling analyses for HPC, acknowledging that data science skills will be required to build a deeper understanding of life. This portends a growing data knowledge gap in biology and challenges institutions and funding agencies to redouble their support for computational training in biology.
The decisions we make are only as good as the information we base those decisions off of, but a lot of that information comes to us via our senses as incomplete and uncertain. Understanding how humans interpret their world requires a new approach to understanding the processes behind human decision-making. But how do people evaluate uncertain information they receive and act upon it?
In a new paper published in PLoS Computational Biology, NYU professors Elyse Norton and Michael Landy, along with Stephen Fleming (University College London) and Nathaniel Daw (Princeton), upend 60 years of signal detection theory.
Researchers have discovered more than 178 million Internet of Things (IoT) devices visible to attackers in the ten largest US cities.
On Wednesday, researchers Numaan Huq and Stephen Hilt from Trend Micro revealed at the RSA conference in San Francisco, California, that many IoT devices are lacking basic security and are visible using services such as the Shodan search engine, which is used to discover devices which are accessible from the Internet.
As hedge funds embrace the cool calculations of big data, they find themselves wrestling with something far more human — a struggle for power.
The firms have been loading up on data scientists and coders to deliver on the promise of quantitative investing and lift their ho-hum returns. But they are discovering that the marriage of old-school managers and data-driven quants can be rocky. Managers who have relied on gut calls resist ceding control to scientists and their trading signals. And quants, emboldened by the success of computer-driven funds like Renaissance Technologies, bristle at their second-class status and vie for a bigger voice in investing.
Each winter, hundreds of AI researchers from around the world convene at the annual meeting of the Association of the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Last year, a minor crisis erupted over the schedule, when AAAI announced that 2017’s meeting would take place in New Orleans in late January. The location was fine. The dates happened to conflict with Chinese New Year.
The holiday might not have been a deal breaker in the past, but Chinese researchers have become so integral to the meeting, it could not go on without them. They had to reschedule. “Nobody would have put AAAI on Christmas day,” says current AAAI president Subbarao Kambhampati. “Our organization had to almost turn on a dime and change the conference venue to hold it a week later.”
The 2017 AAAI meeting—which ultimately relocated to San Francisco—wrapped up just last week. And as expected, Chinese researchers had a strong showing in the historically U.S.-dominated conference.
Machine-learning startups are on the move to get serious funding from one of the most famous tech incubators in Silicon Valley.
On Thursday, Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator — the influential startup incubator that swaddled Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit — published his first-annual letter to the YC community that included an unusual prediction.
IBM is partnering with credit card giant Visa to spread the use of its IBM Watson supercomputing and artificial intelligence technologies into the retail world.
According to IBM, consumers will soon be able to use everything from washing machines to cars to fitness watches to make purchases using Visa.
Japan’s embrace of modern technology has never been fully comfortable or all-encompassing. Robot animals keep nonagenarians company in nursing homes, even as banking remains firmly stuck in the past. Robot dinosaurs tend to guests at a hotel, while fax is still a widely used form of communication.
The world of shogi, Japan’s answer to chess and Go, is now grappling with the rise of the robots. Last year, the country was shaken by an alleged cheating scandal when a top-ranked shogi player, Hiroyuki Miura, was accused by other players of cheating after he won a tournament in October. His opponents raised suspicions because Miura had repeatedly left the room during a match—insinuating that he went to use his phone to check what the best moves were. Miura, who denied wrongdoing, was suspended by the Japan Shogi Association (JSA) as they investigated the claims.
Boston, MA The OpenStack Summit—the must-attend open infrastructure event—will feature a new program called “Open Source Days,” happening May 8-11 in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center. [$$$]
Turin, Italy Registrations for Big Dive 2017 are open. The sixth edition of the training program on Development, Visualization and Data Science will be held from June 19th to July 21st. [$$$$]
Google and Kaggle today announced a new machine learning challenge that asks developers to find the best way to automatically tag videos. Deadline for submissions is June 15.
OpenAI, Ian Goodfellow, Nicolas Papernot, Sandy Huang, Yan Duan, Pieter Abbeel, Jack Clark
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“At OpenAI, we think adversarial examples are a good aspect of security to work on because they represent a concrete problem in AI safety that can be addressed in the short term, and because fixing them is difficult enough that it requires a serious research effort.”
