Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first order of business after descending on Donald Trump’s hometown Wednesday was to enlist thousands of newly minted American university graduates in the fight against a rising tide of intolerance and nationalism around the world.
Officials had billed Trudeau’s three-day trip to New York and Boston as focused on trade and the economic relationship between Canada and the U.S., with looming NAFTA deadlines as a backdrop.
But inside the towering stone, gilt-lettered facade of Yankee Stadium, Trudeau kicked off his latest U.S. visit with an earnest commencement speech to more than 10,000 enthusiastic, cheering New York University grads, urging them to break out of their comfort zones.
LSE has become the latest university to launch its own open-access publishing platform to compete with major online journals, as institutions turn increasingly online and away from traditional publishing methods.
LSE Press, managed through the LSE Library and Ubiquity Press publishing group, will host research publications in the social sciences contributed by academics from within the institution and external scholars. It follows a similar move made by UCL, which became the first British university to launch a competitive open-access megajournal earlier this year.
Researchers will be invited to start their own open-access journals on the LSE platform, submit a book proposal or explore other styles of academic publication, according to the platform’s founders.
SRI International has been selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) system able to learn continuously and apply that learning to become better and more reliable at performing new tasks. The contract will be supported under DARPA’s Lifelong Learning Machines (L2M) Program.
While AI systems have become core to many commercial and government applications, they are not able to handle new scenarios that they are not trained on. AI systems today can repeatedly make the same mistakes. Even with retraining, today’s systems are prone to “catastrophic forgetting” when a new item disrupts previously learned knowledge.
“Our goal is to address these limitations by enabling AI systems to know what to learn and when,” explained Sek Chai, Ph.D., technical director in the Center for Vision Technologies, SRI International.
The Trump administration has eliminated the White House’s top cyber policy role, jettisoning a key position created during the Obama presidency to harmonize the government’s overall approach to cybersecurity policy and digital warfare.
POLITICO first reported last week that John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, was maneuvering to cut the cyber coordinator role, in a move that many experts and former government officials criticized as a major step backward for federal cybersecurity policy.
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The US continues to experience a weak and declining birth rate: “The rate has generally been below replacement since 1971,” according to the report from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Women in their 40s are the only group experiencing increases in birth rates. I blame the economy.
New research released by two security companies paints an unsettling picture for the health-care industry: Hackers are stepping up their attacks on hospitals and other health organizations that may be ill prepared to defend against the wave of malicious activity.
In its quarterly threat report unveiled Tuesday, cybersecurity company Rapid7 found that the health-care sector experienced a surge in cyberattacks during the first quarter of 2018 — so many that it ranked as the top-targeted industry in the first three months of the year.
The spike marked a continued shift away from attacks on the financial, professional and administrative services industries as hackers seek to take advantage of health organizations’ aging and complex IT systems, which are difficult to secure quickly, according to Rapid7.
Facebook announced on Thursday that it is launching a partnership with the Atlantic Council to boost its global election security efforts.
Experts from the international think tank’s Digital Forensic Research Lab will help provide Facebook “real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”
Facebook said it will also use the Atlantic Council’s Digital Research Unit Monitoring Missions during elections and other “highly sensitive moments,” according to a post written by Facebook’s global politics and government outreach director, Katie Harbath.
This technological leap could actually be good news for journalists—and might also provide an opportunity for the kind of goodwill gesture that tech platforms ought to extend to a suspicious public.
Sure, photos have been manipulated basically since photographic technology was invented. And the media itself is a simulacrum of reality, in which each selection, edit, highlight, or turn of phrase shapes the audience’s interpretation of events. What’s new here is that media-synthesis algorithms further fracture any expectation of authenticity for recorded media while enabling a whole new scale, pervasiveness, potential for personalization, and ease of use for everyone from comedians to spies. Faked videos could upset and alter people’s formation of accurate memories around events. And visual evidence may largely lose its teeth as strategic misinformers use the specter of the technology to undermine any true veriticality.
So what happens when the public can no longer trust any media they encounter online? How can a society have an informed understanding of world events when media can so easily be polluted by algorithmic media synthesis?
The Toronto Declaration: Protecting the rights to equality and non-discrimination in machine learning systems was launched on May 16, 2018 at RightsCon Toronto.
The preamble of the Declaration can be found below and the full text is available here.
At the time of the launch, the Declaration prepared by Amnesty International and Access Now and it has been endorsed by Human Rights Watch and Wikimedia Foundation.
A small satellite designed and built by Brown students is now just a few days away from its trip to space.
The satellite, dubbed EQUiSat, will fly aboard an Antares rocket and Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station, where astronauts will deploy it into orbit sometime in June. The launch is scheduled for Sunday, May 20, at 5:04 a.m EDT from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility. The launch will be streamed live on the web. [UPDATE: NASA announced on Friday that the launch has been bumped to Monday, May 21, at 4:39 a.m. EDT.]
The launch marks a moment that has been awaited anxiously by more than 100 current and former Brown students who have worked on the project over the past seven years. Around 30 students and alumni will make the trip to Wallops this weekend to watch in person.
Google has far more data about us than Facebook. Yet unlike Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking empire, which has been under fire for improperly leaking user data, Google has sidestepped controversy.
You may wonder: Why is that? After all, we turn to Google for not only our internet searches but also for our emails, calendaring, maps, photo uploads, video streaming, mobile phones and web browsers. That’s far more pervasive than the baby photos and comments that we post on Facebook.
To help get an answer, I downloaded a copy of all of the information that Google has on me. Then I compared the trove to all the data that I already knew Facebook had obtained on me.
What I found was that my Google data archive was much larger than my Facebook file — about 12 times larger, in fact — but it was also packed with fewer unpleasant surprises.
Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai’s demonstration of the company’s new virtual-assistant technology, unveiled at the company’s annual developer conference last week, was more unnerving than Pichai presumably intended it to be. Google Duplex, as the technology is called, represents a major leap forward in Silicon Valley’s efforts to produce robots that sound like people. It can make phone calls to schedule appointments, say, or to reserve a table at a restaurant, using familiar human verbal tics and filler words—“uhm,” “mmhmm,” and “gotcha”—that make it eerily hard to tell that the voice on the other line is an artificial intelligence. To show the tech in action, Pichai played a recording of the Google Assistant device—Google’s answer to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa—calling and interacting with someone who was purportedly an employee at a hair salon to make an appointment. “What you’re going to hear is the Google assistant actually calling a real salon to schedule an appointment for you,” Pichai told the audience. “Let’s listen.”
The demo was indeed impressive. It was also pretty unsettling, as many people quickly noted. (“Horrifying,” wrote one critic.) But is it possible that the promise of Google’s advanced artificial-intelligence tech is too good to be true?
Harvard hosts some of the most prestigious programs in the world, especially in business and law. So it was big news in the data science industry when the university announced a new master’s program in data science in March 2017 — and it was bigger news when the university recently credited the program for a 2 percent increase in international applications to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
The fact that elite universities are now investing in — and seeing results from — data science programs should send a signal to entrepreneurs: It’s time to start seriously considering the implications of data science in every industry. Like blockchain, data science has quickly emerged from virtually nowhere to find applications in every sector. Until now, bigger universities have been slow to keep up, which has allowed independent, alternative educators such as Kaggle, Udemy and Coursera to drive the industry.
A new algorithm developed by UCLA researchers more accurately predicts which people will survive heart failure, and for how long, whether or not they receive a heart transplant. The algorithm would allow doctors to make more personalized assessments of people who are awaiting heart transplants, which in turn could enable health care providers to make better use of limited life-saving resources and potentially reduce health care costs.
As precision medicine gains ground in health care, this study could be a key step toward tailoring organ transplant procedures to individual patients. The study, which was published in PLOS One, was led by Mihaela van der Schaar, Chancellor’s Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.
The algorithm, which the researchers call Trees of Predictors, uses machine learning — meaning that computers effectively “learn” from additional new data over time. It takes into account 53 data points — including age, gender, body mass index, blood type and blood chemistry — to address the complex differences among people waiting for heart transplants and the compatibility between potential heart transplant recipients and donors.
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, asked a judge on 11 May to dismiss portions of three gender-discrimination lawsuits filed by senior female scientists there in July 2017. To prove their cases, the plaintiffs are seeking to compel the Salk — a private research institution — to disclose information about how funds and laboratory space are allocated, as well as about complaints concerning sexual harassment and the unfair treatment of women.
The plaintiffs’ quest for evidence highlights how difficult it can be to identify and demonstrate discrimination in science, especially when information about salaries and the division of resources is confidential.
To prove gender discrimination in court, plaintiffs must show that they were denied opportunities or rewards because of their gender. Harassment can also be a sign of discrimination when the people responsible are in positions of power. However, recognizing and remedying these problems in academia is challenging for reasons that are deeply entrenched in the culture of science, and in how institutions have long operated, say legal and social-science scholars. For example, scientists pride themselves on objectivity, and may therefore be slow to see how unconscious biases alter their judgement and actions.
Zurich, Switzerland May 28. “Working with Romeo Kienzler and Susan Malaika, we will share information about open source, AI applications, architecture, and tech. Other topics include AI trends, AI frameworks like TensorFlow, chatbots, AI in the context of healthcare and in financial industries. The event will be of interest to a variety of participants such as developers (particularly the workshops), and for those defining the strategy for AI in their companies.” [free, registration required]
“In this competition, you are tasked with developing a controller to enable a physiologically based human model with a prosthetic leg to walk in requested many directions with varying speeds. You are provided with a human musculoskeletal model and a physics-based simulation environment where you can synthesize physically and physiologically accurate motion.” Deadline for submissions will be in November.
SAGE Connection – Insight, Alex Clark and Bailey Sousa
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“Student-supervisor meetings are vital but too often leave either or both parties with little sense of success and satisfaction. At our workshops, more than any other single task, we hear frustrations about supervisory meetings. Students struggle to get the time and support they perceive they need, while supervisors bemoan having too many meetings. With academic workplaces, staff, and students facing ever more pressures to complete programs of study on time: it’s in everyone’s interests to work together better. But, like so many vital elements of academic work, this is not going to happen by magic. Accordingly, here are our top tips for better student-supervisor meetings.”