How Twitter got into the business of verifying and de-verifying white supremacists in the first place speaks to the platform’s deep-seated struggle to balance free speech with user safety. Like so many of the world’s major social media networks, the company has been careful to toe the line between detached service provider and morally conscious moderator—the latter of which would require it to make human decisions, and therefore invest in significantly more human resources. On the few occasions that the platform has decided to ban or suspend users, it has offered very little insight as to how those cases might inform its user behavior policies as a whole. (Perhaps in part because then it might have to reckon with the fact the current U.S. president violates them.) But after the platform verified Kessler earlier this month, CEO Jack Dorsey responded to public outcry by acknowledging that Twitter’s verification policy was past due for a rewrite.
“Our agents have been following our verification policy correctly, but we realized some time ago the system is broken and needs to be reconsidered,” Dorsey tweeted. “And we failed by not doing anything about it.”
Even the best college hackathons teeter on the edge of chaos. At these impromptu programming contests, aspiring engineers stay up all night, competing to turn wild ideas into winning prototypes. Months worth of strategic thinking gets compressed into a single weekend. Crazy deadlines induce crazy missteps, and they can’t all be fixed in time.
In spite of all these hazards — or perhaps because of them — hackathons have become as pervasive as Red Bull on engineering campuses. In the first three weeks of November alone, event organizer Major League Hacking is masterminding 28 hackathons at schools ranging from Princeton to Kansas State.
Paul Cutsinger, Amazon’s head of Alexa voice-design education, spends as much time on the hackathon circuit as anyone. He’s a tech evangelist aiming to get the world excited about voice-based computing in general — and Amazon’s Alexa gadgets in particular. He’s also a reflective fellow with lots of ideas about how students, schools and sponsors can optimize their hackathon approaches.
The expertise and growth of University of Washington’s computer science department was on full display Wednesday evening on campus in Seattle.
The Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering hosted its Poster and Demo Session as part of the 2017 Industry Affiliates Annual Research Day.
The evening showcase event is a science fair on steroids, with UW students showing off their latest research projects to colleagues, friends, and others from the local tech community.
Cathy O’Neil has been one of the most important public voices raising concerns about the indiscriminate use of algorithms in decision making and the danger this presents to society. For many of us, her book ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’ has been a powerful motivator for our work and for our students, which makes it all the more puzzling that she wrote a New York Times Op-Ed that accuses academics of “being asleep at the wheel” when it comes to talking and writing about the role of algorithms in society. Here are four ways in which her article incorrectly frames the issues and misrepresents the underlying facts.
translators have long been on the frontlines of AI-induced job panic, and they aren’t worried. In fact, some are delighted. For those that have seized on the potential of AI tools, productivity has skyrocketed, along with demand for their work.
Think of them as the canary in the white-collar coal mine. At the moment, they’re still singing. As deep learning burgeons, many industries are coming to grips with the fact that AI is indeed capable of tasks that were once regarded as deeply human. Unlike drivers and warehouse employees, knowledge workers aren’t in immediate danger of being displaced. But as AI becomes an essential part of their workflow, their jobs are changing—and there’s no guarantee that today’s helpful AI tools won’t become a threat in the future. This presents workers with a choice: Set aside your ego and embrace your new AI coworker, or get left behind.
Now, with [Alex] Rucker at the helm, the Sixers employ a team of 10 who are under the analytics umbrella. That’s not counting consultants, scouts who use analytics, and the sports science team that works closely with Rucker’s department.
“We almost certainly have the largest analytics staff in the NBA,” Rucker said, noting that his team is as diverse as it is large. “We are, I believe, the only analytics team with two women full-time, and my team has members hailing from Catalonia, Italy, Taiwan, Croatia, and Canada.”
The Washington Post, Wonkblog, Christopher Ingraham
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Traditionally, historians and archaeologists have analyzed texts like these for bits of qualitative information that might locate a site — descriptions of landscape features, for instance, or indications of distance or direction from other, known cities.
But Barjamovic and his co-authors had a different idea: What if they analyzed the quantitative data contained in the tablets instead? In the passage above, for instance, you have a record of three separate cargo shipments: Durhumit to Kanesh, Kanesh to Wahshushana, and Durhumit to Wahshushana.
If you analyze thousands of tablets and tally up each record of a cargo shipment contained therein, you end up with a remarkably comprehensive picture of trade among the cities around Kanesh 4,000 years ago. Barjamovic did exactly that, translating and parsing 12,000 clay tablets, extracting information on merchants’ trade itineraries.
At Planet, we’ve been pursuing Mission 1: to image the entire Earth’s landmass every day. I couldn’t be more excited to announce that we have achieved our founding mission.
Geisinger Health System has announced the launch of its new National Precision Health Initiative, an effort to expand its brand’s already extensive influence in the realm of genomics, precision medicine, and data analytics.
The program will leverage data collected through Geisinger’s MyCode Community Health Initiative, a biobank of DNA samples from more than 160,000 volunteer patients.
The MyCode Initiative was launched in 2014 in partnership with the Regeneron Genetics Center. Geisinger patients who participate in the program are alerted if their DNA samples reveal an elevated risk for a known genetic illness, which occurs in about 3.5 percent of cases, Geisinger says.
You can probably tell happy and sad songs apart just by listening to a few bars—but what is it, musically, that makes the difference? In Western music, major and minor chords have long been linked to joy and sorrow. So a group of scientists decided to examine how other chords might affect emotion. First, they compiled their data: nearly 90,000 popular English-language guitar songs recorded from the 1950s to the 2010s across five regions of the world. Then, they looked at how the chords matched the song lyrics. Each song got a happiness score, based on a popular crowdsourced data set that ranks 10,000 of the most common English words for positive and negative emotions. They found—as expected—that minor chords were linked with unhappy words and major chords were linked with happy ones. But the most positive emotions were conveyed by seventh chords, a triad of notes with an extra note on top that changes the sound—like this. Major and minor sevenths were both more prevalent in happier songs, the researchers report today in Royal Society Open Science.
What do Cyrillic, Arabic, Sanskrit, and 113 other writing systems have in common? Different as they appear at first glance, they share basic structural features, according to a new study: characters with vertical symmetry (like the Roman letters A and T) and a preference for vertical and horizontal lines over oblique lines (like those in the letters X and W). The explanation appears to be rooted in the wiring of our brain.
“People appear to have an aesthetic preference for certain kinds of shapes and designs, and that preference seems to explain the writing systems we see,” says Julie Fiez, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study. Fiez, who studies the neuroscience of reading, says those features may tap into how our eyes and brains process images: Neurons fire faster at the site of objects that display vertical symmetry—like human faces—and horizontal and vertical lines, which are common in natural landscapes.
In the past year alone, a series of hacks and ransomware attacks by hostile governments and other malign actors have raised alarms about a major threat to global stability. Unfortunately, many governments are responding by developing still more cyber weapons, on the mistaken assumption that offense is the best defense.
Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai is setting a record pace for deregulating the communications industries. Since becoming chairman in January, he has, among other things, reinstated an outdated rule that allows TV companies like Sinclair to become massive, proposed to deregulate broadband and eliminate the agency’s popular net neutrality rules, proposed lowering the speed standard for broadband, refused to defend the agency’s decision to lower outrageous prison phone rates, and weakened the programs that provide subsidies for broadband for schools and libraries and the poor.
Believe it or not, things are about to get worse this month. Starting with the FCC’s open meeting tomorrow, the agency is poised to approve or propose no fewer than four decisions that will deregulate consolidated industries, remove consumer protections, and widen the digital divide.
“The Wearable Robotics Association (WearRA) is inviting entries that represent the most innovative new ideas in wearable robotic technology for its 3rd Annual Innovation Competition at WearRAcon 18. Your proposal should present component or system technologies that will benefit the wearable robotics industry.” Deadline for concept papers is January 18, 2018
“You should be able to see that with this definition our neural net shouldn’t be as easily fooled by our misshapen Kardashian.”
“This new architecture also achieves significantly better accuracy on the following data set. This data set was carefully designed to be a pure shape recognition task that shows the ability to recognize the objects even from different points of view. It beat out the state-of-the-art CNN, reducing the number of errors by 45%.”
“Archives Unleashed aims to make petabytes of historical internet content accessible to scholars and others interested in researching the recent past. Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we will be developing web archive search and data analysis tools to enable scholars and librarians to access, share, and investigate recent history since the early days of the World Wide Web.”
In August, freelance science writer Viviane Callier attended a small evolutionary-developmental-biology meeting in Calgary, Canada. She had asked the organizers if she could attend and report on the meeting, and they had agreed. Callier, a freelancer, hoped to turn some of the talks there into stories. … Callier isn’t alone in her struggle to balance the free flow of scientific information with a desire to mollify scientists who are reluctant to share their work. I heard from more than a dozen people who have experienced similar resistance to press coverage at scientific meetings. My reporting suggests that researchers’ reluctance seems to vary somewhat by field—biomedical researchers tend to be more wary of releasing unpublished results than astronomers or physicists. But no field is immune.
The Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) deep-learning format, introduced in September by Microsoft and Facebook, has a new backer following Amazon Web Services’ decision to embrace the framework with a new open-source project.
AWS released ONNX-MXNet Thursday afternoon, which sounds like a telecom standard from the 1990s but is actually a method for allowing deep learning models built around the ONNX format to run on the Apache MXNet framework. In supporting ONNX, envisioned as a standard way to build deep learning models, the cloud computing leader gives a significant stamp of approval to the concept of open data models.
