Somewhere between the 14th and 15th floors in a concrete stairwell, Bryan Salesky pauses, searching for the right words to explain his mission for the foreseeable future. He wants to give cars the eyes, ears, and brains they need to operate without humans. And he wants to do it for Ford Motor Company by 2021.
The CEO of Argo AI — a startup that appeared seemingly out of nowhere six months ago, with $1 billion in backing from Ford — is hardly alone in the pursuit to transform the automobile into a vehicle controlled by artificial intelligence. Though a fire alarm interrupted an interview in a San Francisco conference room, Salesky stays focused and collected. And if he is feeling the pressure to develop and deliver this system so Ford — its sole customer, backer, and majority shareholder — can deploy fully autonomous vehicles in just four years’ time, it doesn’t show.
Although there have been some signs that the industry’s output may plateau — cable companies like A&E and WGN have said they are getting out of the scripted television business — the entry of Apple, Facebook and Google into the fray almost guarantees that the volume of shows will continue to grow, even as viewers grapple with a glut of programming and an expanding number of streaming platforms.
With the prospect of a flood of tech money about to rush in, Hollywood has welcomed the news.
“If you ask the creative community if we’re going to be competitive, the answer is yes,” said Robert Kyncl, the chief business officer at YouTube, which is owned by Google.
University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley Institute for Data Science
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We are thrilled to announce a new addition to the BIDS team, Jonathan Dugan, who is joining us as Chief Research Officer.
In this new position Jonathan will work with the Berkeley research community, using his deep expertise and knowledge to empower faculty and researchers to develop missing areas of the data science environment (topical and methodological focus areas, tools, methods, systems, workflows, etc.), and secure the resources to fund them.
Natalia Adler describes herself as a problem-solver, not a data scientist. When she came to work at UNICEF’s New York headquarters after seven years in Nicaragua and Mozambique, she joined the data research and policy division. “I immediately saw that, even though we do all sorts of data work, we were behind on the data science component,” says Adler, now a data, research, and policy manager at UNICEF (The United Nations Children’s Fund). “And if you want to make progress on that front, you need to access to big data – however, most relevant datasets sit with corporations.”
That insight has been the impetus for Adler to work on a project called data collaboratives, which seeks to better understand how private companies can share their data to help the public good. One of her partners in this initiative is Stefaan G. Verhulst, the co-founder and chief research and development officer of The Governance Lab at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, better known as The GovLab. Adler, like Verhulst, is a member of this year’s Program Committee for the Data for Good Exchange, which will take place at Bloomberg headquarters in New York on Sunday, September 24, 2017.
Shelby Bonnie was one of the earliest pioneers in digital publishing when in 1993 he and Halsey Minor cofounded the tech site CNET.
Now Bonnie sees a chance to be early in a new medium once again – one that may have just as much transformative potential as the web did a quarter century ago.
He’s set to roll out Tasted, an audio media brand built for voice assistant devices like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home. And the plan is for Tasted to be the first of many new voice-centric “publications” built on a new tech platform Bonnie and his team have produced, dubbed Pylon ai.
Each year, approximately 12 million adults in the U.S. experience a diagnostic error as part of an outpatient office visit – that’s one in 20 people. The National Academy of Medicine defines a diagnostic error as the failure to establish an accurate and timely explanation of the patient’s health problem(s) or communicate that explanation to the patient. In 2015, the academy published a report titled, Improving Diagnosis in Health Care. The report finds that diagnosis – and, in particular, the occurrence of diagnostic errors – has been largely underappreciated in efforts to improve the quality and safety of health care.
Health systems are stepping up to the challenge and addressing errors in diagnosis. Patient safety researchers from Baylor College of Medicine, in collaboration with Geisinger, are developing a novel program to systematically measure and improve safety of clinical diagnosis, which they have named “The Safer Dx Learning Lab.” The foundation is supporting this first-of-its kind learning lab with Baylor and Geisinger, a pioneering integrated health care system known for its work in improving health care quality. The work is part of the Patient Care Program’s work in patient safety.
People say they want to protect their personal information, but new research shows privacy tends to take a backseat to convenience and can easily get tossed out the window for a reward as simple as free pizza.
Neuroscientists who painstakingly map the twists and turns of neural circuitry through the brain are about to see their field expand to an industrial scale. A huge facility set to open in Suzhou, China, next month should transform high-resolution brain mapping, its developers say.
California has a history of going it alone to protect the environment. Now, as US President Donald Trump pulls back on climate science and policy, scientists in the Golden State are sketching plans for a home-grown climate-research institute — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
The initiative, which is backed by California’s flagship universities, is in the early stages of development. If it succeeds, it will represent one of the largest US investments in climate research in years. The nascent ‘California Climate Science and Solutions Institute’ would fund basic- and applied-research projects designed to help the state to grapple with the hard realities of global warming.
US president Donald Trump’s administration has disbanded a government advisory committee that was intended to help the country prepare for a changing climate.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established the committee in 2015 to help businesses and state and local governments make use of the next national climate assessment. The legally mandated report, due in 2018, will lay out the latest climate-change science and describe how global warming is likely to affect the United States, now and in coming decades.
London, England September 6-7. “A leading international discussion forum around the theory and applications of Data Science as relevant to governments and policy research.” [registration deadline is August 25, $$$]
Ames, IA September 14. UAPSE is “Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Plant Sciences and Education,” organized by Midwest Big Data Hub. [registration coming soon]
Bethesda, MD November 15 at National Library of Medicine. This special one-day workshop for data and information professionals is focused on characterizing and managing digital representations of research objects. [registration opens September 1]
Social Science Research Council’s Abe Fellowship is designed to encourage international multidisciplinary research on topics of pressing global concern. Deadline for applications is September 1.
This award will be presented to a data center project that has used an “open” approach/methodology in whole or in part, and that demonstrates its success over and above that of a traditional deployment. Projects must be operational by September 31.
The MXNet community introduced a release candidate for MXNet v0.11.0 with support for Keras v1.2. In this post I’ll show you how to use Keras with the MXNet backend to achieve high performance and excellent multi-GPU scaling. To learn more about the MXNet v0.11.0 release candidate, check out this post on the Amazon Web Services AI blog.