o when I fire up my Android phone or open my Google search page, I’m feeling pretty good about it.
Still, Google must be stopped.
The race to dominate the personal AI space—to build the artificial intelligence that each of us will use as an all-purpose digital assistant—is closer to being over than most people realize. And Google is poised to win. And if ever there was a business that we can’t let any one company dominate, it’s AI. Using the government’s antitrust powers in new ways to stave off monopoly, and preserve a healthy oligopoly, is the only way to keep humankind from buying a one-way ticket to the Matrix.
University of Michigan, Michigan Institute for Data Science, MIDAS
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The University of Michigan’s new, interdisciplinary Data Science Master’s Program is taking applications for its first group of students. The program is aimed at teaching participants how to extract useful knowledge from massive datasets using computational and statistical techniques.
The program is a collaboration between the College of Engineering (EECS), the College of Literature Science and the Arts (Statistics), the School of Public Health (Biostatistics), the School of Information, and the Michigan Institute for Data Science.
U.S. federal government agencies experienced a 20 percent increase in the number of data breaches last year since 2016, according to Thales’ 2018 Data Threat Report.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign heads the research team, which also includes researchers from SRI International, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Massachusetts, and University of Southern California.
Researchers will also look to adapt to extraordinary circumstances. An SRI International press release explains on future battlefields “autonomous agents will require razor-sharp reflexes to quickly react to a novel and unforeseen circumstances and maintain safety without jeopardizing long-term mission effectiveness.” This requires the IoBT system to be in a continuous state of learning from past, present and future events.
mputer software can now quickly detect duplicate images across large swathes of the research literature, three scientists say.
In a paper published on 22 February on the bioRxiv preprint server1 , a team led by Daniel Acuna, a machine-learning researcher at Syracuse University in New York, report using an algorithm to crunch through hundreds of thousands of biomedical papers, searching for duplicate images. If journal editors adopted similar methods, they might be able to more easily screen images before publication — something that currently requires considerable effort and is done by only a few publications.
The work shows that it is possible to use technology to detect duplicates, says Acuna. He isn’t making the algorithm public, because of the risk it could trigger false allegations.
This will not come as a big shock: an estimated 16.7 million Americans were victims of identity theft last year, according to a survey published by the research and advisory firm Javelin Strategy & Research. And the company says this tops the previous record of 15.4 million compromised identities which occurred, not surprisingly, in 2016.
Javelin notes in its report that cyber thieves have changed tactics over the past year, which has made them more efficient and effective. They are now focusing on targeting cellphones and email accounts to obtain a person’s complete details, such as their name, address, and social security number, instead of trying to access individual pieces of personal information in order to piece together a profile.
This strategy is making it easier for cyber criminals to open fraudulent accounts and to exploit them for a longer period of time before they are discovered. The company estimates that fraud losses last year amounted to some US $16.8 billion.
In addition, nearly 1 in 3 Americans were notified of a data breach in 2017, a significant jump from 1 in 8 in 2016, Javelin reports.
The Washington Post, Opinion, Thomas F. Rosenbaum, (President, Caltech) and Edward C. Stone (Jet Propulsion Lab)
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Proposed budgets drastically cut support for telescopes that tell us about the universe’s origins and spacecraft that trace the changes on our home planet. And the United States has stood on the sidelines as nations across the world develop the next generation of land-based optical observatories.
Rarely has there been a more exciting and promising time for space science. Telescopes pointing deep into space detect thousands of planets orbiting faraway suns. Life may reside in the ocean worlds of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn or be revealed in the ancient history of Mars.
The increasing threat of infectious diseases is intensifying the need for breakthrough technologies and capabilities to protect first responders and equip them with therapeutics that can halt the impact of infectious agents. Current approaches for recent public health emergencies due to infectious diseases have not produced effective preventive or therapeutic solutions in a relevant timescale. Examples from recent outbreaks such as H3N2 (flu), Ebola, and Zika viruses highlight the significant lag in deployment and efficacy of life-saving solutions.
To address the growing threat from infectious diseases as well as to properly equip DoD Service members who regularly deploy worldwide to provide assistance in all manner of high-risk environments, DARPA launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform program (P3). The P3 program, which began in 2017, seeks to halt the spread of any infectious disease outbreak before it can escalate into a pandemic. This last weekend, at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas, Col. Matthew Hepburn, M.D., the program manager for P3, announced that all performer institutions are now on contract and moving forward with the program’s goals of developing technology to halt the spread of pandemic infectious diseases. The institutions funded through the P3 program include Duke University, Vanderbilt University, MedImmune, and Abcellera Biologics Inc.
Pasadena, CA March 23 at Caltech. “This will be a coming together of David’s academic family, which consists of about 250 doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting professors who have been through his laboratory as well as friends from science, academia, biotechnology, and finance.” [free, registration required]
