A new Seattle-based artificial intelligence startup just raised cash to help companies improve their customer support processes.
SmartAssist today announced a $5 million Series A round from Madrona Venture Group. The 10-person company will use the fresh funding to hire more employees and further develop its product, which is already being used by customers like Twilio, Groupon, MailChimp, and others.
Visit the office of Amazon’s head of Devices, Dave Limp, and you may get an offer to look at a piece of corporate history: the original short documents drafted by an internal team in 2011 to propose the development of Alexa, the intelligent personal assistant Amazon launched in late 2014. Call it an e-memento; Limp hasn’t deleted it. And it’s hardly the only memento. He can also call up dozens of other sets of documents, amazingly similar in format, setting forth the initial visions for what would become blockbuster products and services.
And if you keep looking, you might catch a glimpse of the new proposals he’s considering, again all taking the same form. Each consists of a one-page “press release” (for an offering that doesn’t even exist and might never be commercialized), a six-page set of FAQs (frequently asked questions that customers can be anticipated to have about the offering, and their straightforward answers), and often a bit more descriptive material, sometimes even a mockup or prototype. Over a hundred of these ideas arrive in Dave Limp’s in-box every year. The same goes for leaders of other Amazon businesses, like Jeff Wilke, the CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business and Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS). And these leaders see only a fraction of the total number being circulated through the company.
Columbia Journalism School is launching a new master of science degree in data journalism, the school’s fourth degree, aimed at students who want “practical, hands-on training essential to producing deeply reported data-driven stories.”
“Not everyone’s going to get the Panama Papers,” said Giannina Segnini, data journalism program director at Columbia Journalism School. “But if they did, they would be able, from the technical side and the judgment side, to handle bulk data with this.”
Beñat Arregi made a series of Airbnb maps with a simple premise. If you look at the average ratings for the location of listings in an area, you’ll see how the area is perceived by visitors. And that’s what he got.
Business intelligence and analytics firm Tableau today announced that it has acquired ClearGraph, a service that lets you query and visualize large amounts of business date through natural language queries (think “this week’s transactions over $500”). Tableau expects to integrate this technology with its own products as it looks to make it easier for its users to use similar queries to visualize their data.
Typically, you’d have to know SQL or a similar database query language to pull information out of most enterprise databases. Recent advances in natural language processing and machine learning now allow services like ClearGraph to understand more about the underlying database and then take these sentences and essentially translate them into database queries. Given that Microsoft’s Power BI and other competitors already offer this capability, it’s no surprise that Tableau is also looking into this (though Tableau argues that — unlike the likes of Microsoft — it can be a neutral party given that it has no investment in any particular cloud or on-premise technology outside of its own).
The photos you share online speak volumes. They can serve as a form of self-expression or a record of travel. They can reflect your style and your quirks. But they might convey even more than you realize: The photos you share may hold clues to your mental health, new research suggests.
From the colors and faces in their photos to the enhancements they make before posting them, Instagram users with a history of depression seem to present the world differently from their peers, according to the study, published this week in the journal EPJ Data Science.
“People in our sample who were depressed tended to post photos that, on a pixel-by-pixel basis, were bluer, darker and grayer on average than healthy people,” said Andrew Reece, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University and co-author of the study with Christopher Danforth, a professor at the University of Vermont.
A Johns Hopkins University mathematician and computer scientist joined an international team of neuroscientists to create a complete map of the learning and memory center of the fruit fly larva brain, an early step toward mapping how all animal brains work.
In a paper published online in the journal Nature, the team reported on drawing up the map, known as a “connectome.”
The project could serve as a guide as scientists work their way up the animal kingdom and eventually chart connections among neurons in the brains of mammals. The part of the fruit fly larva brain used in the study corresponds roughly to the cerebral cortex in mammals.
Law enforcement accounts for just a small part of Palantir’s business, which mostly consists of military clients, intelligence outfits like the CIA or Homeland Security, and large financial institutions. In police departments, Palantir’s tools are now being used to flag traffic scofflaws, parole violators, and other everyday infractions. But the police departments that deploy Palantir are also dependent upon it for some of their most sensitive work. Palantir’s software can ingest and sift through millions of digital records across multiple jurisdictions, spotting links and sharing data to make or break cases.
The scale of Palantir’s implementation, the type, quantity and persistence of the data it processes, and the unprecedented access that many thousands of people have to that data all raise significant concerns about privacy, equity, racial justice, and civil rights. But until now, we haven’t known very much about how the system works, who is using it, and what their problems are. And neither Palantir nor many of the police departments that use it are willing to talk about it.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai abruptly canceled a planned companywide meeting on Thursday intended to air concerns raised by a former employee’s broadside against Google’s diversity programs. The move came just minutes before the meeting was to start, as the company that aims to organize the world’s information struggles to deal with reverberations from the memo and its decision to fire the author.
Thursday’s town hall meeting was intended to allow Pichai to address employee questions about James Damore’s polarizing missive and his subsequent dismissal. But in a companywide email sent less than 45 minutes before the meeting was to start, Pichai said he had canceled it because proposed questions submitted by Google employees had “appeared externally” and some employees feared for their safety if they were ” ‘outed publicly’ for asking a question.”
If scientists exclusively study individuals of one ethnic group, they may not know how to refine their treatments for a person from a different group.
A 2009 analysis of the studies that can link a genetic variant to a disease or trait showed that fully 96 percent of participants were of European descent. In a 2016 commentary in the journal Nature, Alice Popejoy and Stephanie Fullerton, respectively a graduate student and a professor at the University of Washington, showed that these studies had grown more diverse and people of European ancestry now account for 81 percent of research subjects. “Things are getting better, and it’s still pretty darn slow,” Fullerton said in an interview. And of the progress that has been made, much of it is attributable not to an increase in diversity in U.S. research but to studies conducted in Asian countries, which involve local participants.
Disparities in biomedical research exacerbate an existing gap in U.S. health care. African-Americans and Latinos are less likely to have health insurance and more likely to suffer from chronic diseases. Even controlling for wealth differences between populations, African-Americans receive worse health care.
Cornell University, Cornell Computing and Information Science
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Cornell Computing and Information Science has announced the hiring of seven new faculty members to join the Ithaca and Cornell Tech campuses. With research and teaching experience in machine learning, human-robot interaction, complexity theory, and social and cultural effects of interactive technologies, these new CIS faculty are facilitating integrated research and learning across computer science fields. “These new faculty are the very best in their fields, and we are thrilled to have them come to Cornell,” said CIS Dean Greg Morrisett.
A few NASA-funded astronomer teams are always on the hunt for potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, asteroids and comets whose orbits periodically bring them within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit. At NASA, the Planetary Defense Coordination Office supports the search programs, while also planning and coordinating any response to possible asteroid impacts. [video, 3:20]
Scientists love pointing hyperspectral cameras at the Earth to analyze things like crop health, or the mineral content of exposed soil. But there aren’t many spectroscopic satellites in orbit: The US decommissioned one of the best, called Hyperion, earlier this year. So a private company called Satellogic wants to give scientists its data for free—the company plans to have 300 spectroscopic satellites in orbit by the early 2020s.
Morningstar, Dow Jones, Betsy Morris and Deepa Seetharaman
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Tech startups live by the rule that speed is paramount. Houseparty, creator of a hot video app, has an extra reason for urgency.
Facebook Inc., a dominant force in Silicon Valley, is stalking the company, part of the social network’s aggressive mimicking of smaller rivals. Facebook is being aided by an internal “early bird” warning system that identifies potential threats, according to people familiar with the technology.
This fall, Facebook plans to launch an app similar to Houseparty, internally called Bonfire, say people familiar with the project. Both apps let groups of people hang out over live video on a smartphone.
“They see we’re having traction,” says Sima Sistani, co-founder of Houseparty, which is based in San Francisco. “That’s why we’re pushing so hard.”
Americans might not need a fast home Internet connection, the Federal Communications Commission suggests in a new document. Instead, mobile Internet via a smartphone might be all people need.
The suggestion comes in the FCC’s annual inquiry into broadband availability. Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband (or more formally, “advanced telecommunications capability”) is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. If the FCC finds that broadband isn’t being deployed quickly enough to everyone, it is required by law to “take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.”
New York, NY September 29-30. “The event aims to bring Columbia University together with the local NYC tech community to address local issues in healthcare, transportation, tech, and the environment. [registration required, Columbia only]
Develop an adversarial attack that causes image classifiers to predict a specific target class. Deadline for third (optional but highly recommended) development round is September 15.
“For this competition Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is making available an expert-annotated knowledge base where world-class researchers and oncologists have manually annotated thousands of mutations. We need your help to develop a Machine Learning algorithm that, using this knowledge base as a baseline, automatically classifies genetic variations.” Entry deadline is September 24.
NIPS is sponsoring an open competition to create a chatbot that can hold an intelligent conversation with a human partner. Deadline for ubmission of conversational agents closes on November 12.
The ggvis package is used to make interactive data visualizations. The fact that it combines shiny’s reactive programming model and dplyr’s grammar of data transformation make it a useful tool for data scientists.
This package may allows us to implement features like interactivity, but on the other hand every interactive ggvis plot must be connected to a running R session.
