For airlines, generating ancillary revenues is vital. However, Lundgren pointed to the fact that airlines often go about this the wrong way. “The goal of offering a hotel to someone who has flown to the same location 20 times and never booked a hotel with us is probably not a good idea,” he said.
EasyJet is also evaluating the possibility of loyalty programs and looking for ways it can reward customers. “Loyalty programs absolutely fit in. Every company needs something where you reward your customers. I think for us, it is to find ways that are the easyJet way. We need to bring something that has clear benefits for customers. We can certainly do much more before we look at crypto currencies (in this way),” Lundgren said.
Patients want to see their medical information. Researchers want to share their data.
Now, scientists at Scripps Research have released a new technology designed to make these measurements easier to perform and more accessible to practitioners, scientists and the general public.
“This is really about data sharing and accelerating the process of discovery,” says Gary Siuzdak, PhD, professor at Scripps Research and co-corresponding author of the new XCMS/METLIN open data analysis platform, published recently in Nature Methods.
XCMS-MRM and METLIN-MRM represent a cloud-based analysis platform that allows scientists to quantify molecules from biological samples and make their results publicly available.
“When we say ‘publicly available,’ we mean it. Anyone with a computer would have access,” says Siuzdak.
The company introduced its Clara platform, a combination of a new GPU-based hardware architecture and a software development kit allowing third-party developers to build applications for medical imaging.
After entering into discussions with his bosses, Poulson decided in mid-August that he could no longer work for Google. He tendered his resignation and his last day at the company was August 31.
He told The Intercept in an interview that he believes he is one of about five of the company’s employees to resign over Dragonfly. He felt it was his “ethical responsibility to resign in protest of the forfeiture of our public human rights commitments,” he said.
New York University physicists have created new techniques that deploy machine learning as a means to significantly improve data analysis for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
“The methods we developed greatly enhance our discovery potential for new physics at the LHC,” says Kyle Cranmer, a professor of physics and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Whether you’re in the US, Kenya, Asia, Australia, the UK, Netherlands, or elsewhere in Europe, like plain old Germany, chances are your faculty will make you use Turnitin.
“Most systems match against the internet and they use third-party search engines to do that,” says Turnitin’s Chief Revenue Officer, Marc Daubach. “It used to be Yahoo! before it shutdown the service, and now most people use Bing. But we’ve built our own repository — we’ve been crawling the internet for almost 20 years now — so we rely on our in-house technologies.”
Daubach says that means they can check your work against historically indexed web pages — basically, things that may have disappeared from the internet. And a standard search engine won’t give you that.
American ride sharing service Uber said Thursday it would spend Can$200 million (US$154 million) over five years to expand its Toronto lab dedicated to developing artificial intelligence for self-driving cars.
Top technology companies, looking to hire the smartest people for their artificial intelligence and machine learning operations, are hiring professors away from academia. It’s not a new trend, and many companies have done it, from Microsoft to Google to Facebook. But it seems to have picked up steam in recent years as organizations are scrambling to hire machine learning and AI talent in a very tight market.
“We’ve done it too,” said Eric Haller, executive vice president and global head of Experian DataLabs, an analytics and machine learning R&D organization inside the credit reporting bureau company. He recently spoke with InformationWeek in an interview. “We’ve recruited professors in London and Sao Paulo. Our chief scientist there [Renato Vincente] was a top professor and still teaches at the University of Sao Paulo…It’s definitely a trend.”
For some academics, making a move to industry can mean a big boost in pay — after all, AI and machine learning skills are in high demand and highly paid. Even universities that pay their top professors well won’t be able to compete with the likes of Google and Facebook. There are benefits beyond financial rewards, too.
The app called Druid—an acronym for “driving under the influence of drugs”—is designed to detect cognitive and behavioral deviations caused by a variety of substances, including weed. With a few taps and swipes, the program takes users through four arcade-style levels aimed to test decision making, reaction time, object tracking, and balance.
Developed by Michael Milburn, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the self-assessment tool aims to help drivers make educated decisions before hopping behind the wheel.
Wellth teams up with insurers and risk-based providers to give patients financial incentives for taking their medications and engage in healthy behaviors. The platform caters to patients with heart failure, Type 2 diabetes, COPD, and asthma, as well as patients who have recently been discharged from the hospital following a heart attack.
A patient can enroll at the hospital and then is offered a certain financial incentive for a set number of adherence days. Users get daily reminders to take their medication that include how much money they will get for adhering. Patients verify that they have taken their medications by snapping a photo, which is then processed by Wellth’s AI technology. The company claims this leads to a 40 percent or more reduction in hospital readmission.
A new Purdue-created online platform called the Social Media Analytics and Reporting Toolkit could help first responders better monitor areas where hurricanes make landfall, thus help people caught in weather-related disasters. The platform, known as SMART, allows first responders to monitor social media posts to find people in need of help.
“SMART distills the ocean of social media data down to relevant and usable information in real time,” said David Ebert, director of Purdue’s Visual Analytics for Command, Control and Interoperability Environments and the Silicon Valley Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “What an incredible opportunity to use our engineering talents at Purdue to make a life-saving impact.”
Take Social Finance, otherwise known as SoFi, for starters. On its website, the fintech, which started out refinancing student loans, has a waitlist for SoFi money, which it says is coming in the next few months. It will combine the attributes of a checking and a savings account into one interest-earning deposit account that has an APY of as much as 1%. The account is fee-free with SoFi picking up the ATM fees for six transactions per month. On top of that, SoFi will offer free access to career coaching, discounts on other SoFi products including a 0.125% rate break on a SoFi loan and access to community events in which customers can get financial advice and interact with other SoFi members. It is the latter services that are setting SoFi apart from traditional banks and providing benefits to consumers they aren’t accustomed to with their traditional bank. After all how many national banks do you know that offer customers free career coaching with a savings or checking account or access to community events throughout the country?
Walk the halls of the Old Animation building on the Disney Studios lot in Burbank, Calif., and you’ll encounter constant reminders of the company’s history, with walls full of framed sketches of iconic Disney characters from decades past.
But turn a corner, and you might find yourself face to face with the company’s future: An illuminated glass door displaying a glowing, animated Mickey silhouette, with the iconic mouse head morphing into play buttons, cogwheels, and networked nodes.
Behind that mysterious door is the Walt Disney Studios’ StudioLab, a facility the company opened earlier this summer to explore and showcase cutting-edge technologies. Typically, the lab is only open to studio creatives and executives. But earlier this month, the company closed it down for the day to keep any still-unannounced projects safe from prying eyes, and invited Variety for a tour.
There is agreement that the next financial crisis will not look like the one that hit 10 years ago this week.
Interconnectivity and the concentration of key businesses at a handful of firms raise the risk a cyberattack on one of them could send shockwaves through the rest of the financial system.
Boston, MA October 12, starting at 9:30 a.m., Northeastern University. “The influence of AI is growing in fields ranging from journalism to law, from business to teaching. What will its effect be on media and democracy?” [free, registration required]
Toronto, ON, Canada November 26-27. “The AI World Forum is a 2-day educational innovation conference that brings together global thought leaders in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to advance the dialogue on the AI revolution.” [$$$]
Philadelphia, PA September 20, starting at 8 a.m., Pennsylvania Convention Center. “The theme of this year’s conference is AI @Home.” [registration required]
A fact of life at the Financial Times is the sheer wealth of cartographic talent here: data visualization editor Alan Smith studied and began his career making maps; visual journalist Chris Campbell crafts some of the FT’s most sumptuous cartographic creations; and interactive design editor Steve Bernard is renowned throughout the interwebs for his encyclopaedic knowledge of QGIS. Accordingly, it was with a combination of excitement and very real dread that, when Alan approached us in late February 2018 to ask if we’d be interested in mapping Britain’s broadband speeds, we said: “Sure! Sounds… great?”
We’d be working with a data set released by the UK’s telecommunications regulator, Ofcom, detailing the speed and availability of broadband internet connectivity for over 1.3m British postcode units.
“The Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center is a new, collaborative, pediatric research effort with the goal of understanding the genetic causes of and links between childhood cancer and structural birth defects.”