The President of Harvey Mudd College, Maria Klawe, has criticized the culture in some of Silicon Valley’s tech companies.
Klawe’s eleven-year tenure as president of the Southern California University has seen great strides in gender equality, with 55% of of 2016 undergraduate computer-science majors at the college being women, compared to the 2015 national average of 16%.
Despite this success, Klawe has expressed reluctance in recommending that female graduates of the college seek out venture-backed companies, citing the presence of “bro culture” as well as a lack of human resources.
The Student Technology Fund committee at UC Berkeley recently awarded Research IT a grant for the two-year project, Student 3D/Visualization Teams for Campus Museums, which will be run in collaboration with the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (PAHMA). The project builds on photogrammetry work done to create 3D models of Egyptian sarcophagi by Professor Rita Lucarelli of the Near Eastern Studies department and her graduate student Kea Johnston, who recently gave a talk on the workflow she developed with BRC support at the CaVraCon ’17 conference.
AI-powered technology holds a lot of promise—from improving patient health to making data centers more efficient. But while we’ve seen some amazing applications of AI so far, we know there are many more out there that haven’t even been imagined yet. And sometimes, these new ideas need support to flourish.
That’s why we’re announcing Gradient Ventures, a new venture fund from Google with technical mentorship for early-stage startups focused on artificial intelligence. Through Gradient, we’ll provide portfolio companies with capital, resources, and dedicated access to experts and bootcamps in AI. We’ll take a minority stake in the startups in which we invest.
If and when the robots finally take over, Spotify will be ready. The streaming music leader just hired Francios Pachet, a French professor and artificial intelligence researcher focused, among other things, on teaching computers to create their own music. But why?
Officially, Pachet will head up Spotify’s new Creator Technology Research Lab in Paris. The lab “will focus on making tools to help artists in their creative process,” according to a blog post from Spotify. The blurb doesn’t go into any more detail than that, but a rundown of Pachet’s previous work invites a few educated guesses.
By selling Thin Mints and Tagalongs in kindergarten, Elizabeth Lewelling earned Girl Scout badges for customer service and managing money.
Now going into eighth grade, she’s setting her sights on a topic a bit more complicated than the cookie business: cybersecurity.
The 12-year-old from Palmdale is one of 1.8 million Girl Scouts nationwide who will have the opportunity starting in 2018 to adorn their vests, tunics and sashes with merit badges for information security.
Over the years, I’ve watched networks built with the best of intentions be co-opted: by trolls, by advertisers, by spammers, by malware makers, and now by the network providers themselves. The damage has “always already begun”: trolling certainly existed on the ancient Usenet, as well as the original BBSs. And while it’s tempting to say this is a new crisis, it certainly isn’t: remember when every newsgroup on Usenet was flooded by porn spam? Those were not the days. At the same time, our networks have always been the breeding ground for free expression, from the silly to the wonderful.
So, we’re not facing a new crisis; we’re facing the same old crisis, the crisis we had back in the ’80s, the crisis we pretended didn’t exist in the ’90s, the crisis we weren’t interested in addressing in the ’00s, and so on. And I’m tired of it. I won’t say “I want my internet back,” because that’s a myth of an innocent past that was never all that innocent. But it’s high time to build the internet that we wanted all along: a network designed to respect privacy, a network designed to be secure, and a network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior. And a network with few barriers to entry—in particular, the certainty of ISP extortion as new services pay to get into the “fast lane.”
New York, NY October 23-27. The festival will feature more than 150 dynamic events in content tracks ranging from tech to design, leadership to creativity, fashion to healthcare, and more. [$$$-$$$$]
To explore how ML can learn subjective concepts, we introduce an experimental deep-learning system for artistic content creation. It mimics the workflow of a professional photographer, roaming landscape panoramas from Google Street View and searching for the best composition, then carrying out various postprocessing operations to create an aesthetically pleasing image. Our virtual photographer “travelled” ~40,000 panoramas in areas like the Alps, Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada, Big Sur in California and Yellowstone National Park, and returned with creations that are quite impressive, some even approaching professional quality — as judged by professional photographers.
