This year, five of the six prize finalists, who were just announced by ACM, did their work on the new NVIDIA GPU-accelerated Summit system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Sierra system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Summit is currently the world’s fastest supercomputer and Sierra is the third fastest, according to most recent Top500 list.
The Gordon Bell Prize winner will be announced Nov. 15 at the Supercomputing 2018 conference, in Dallas.
Summit, an open system for researchers worldwide, is designed to bring 200 petaflops of high-precision computing performance and over 3 exaflops of AI, powered by 27,648 NVIDIA Volta Tensor Core GPUs.
After nearly five years serving as the City and County of San Francisco’s first chief data officer, Joy Bonaguro has moved on.
First announced by her coworker, Data Services Manager Jason Lally, in a blog post Monday, Bonaguro’s departure highlights the influence a single technology leader can have on an organization. To hear Lally tell it, San Francisco has lost not only the top official in his office, DataSF, but a veritable talent.
“I was immediately struck by her optimism, warmth, strategic action, grit and determination to move things forward,” Lally writes. “When offered the opportunity to become her first hire, it was not a hard decision to join her and double the team.”
The House Financial Services Committee Sept. 13 approved a bill that would codify existing standards and create a national data breach notification standard for the financial sector, including insurers.
Amazon.com Inc. is conducting an investigation into employees that are said to offer sellers on its e-commerce program with an advantage by providing confidential internal data and other services in exchange for a fee.
Employees are allegedly selling information on sales and searches to the independent merchants that operate on the site and providing a way to delete negative reviews, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. These practices may help sellers’ products appear higher in search results, bettering their chances of attracting customers. The newspaper cited brokers who act as intermediaries between employees and merchants, individuals who bought the services, and people familiar with the investigations.
The governing body of the American Association for the Advancement of Science voted Saturday to enact a policy under which an elected AAAS Fellow’s lifetime honor can be revoked for proven scientific misconduct or serious breaches of professional ethics.
The AAAS Council adopted and approved the new policy that includes procedures AAAS will follow in considering the revocation of an elected AAAS Fellow’s status. The action came during a special meeting of the AAAS Council, a member-elected body that includes the AAAS board of directors, at AAAS’ Washington, D.C. headquarters.
The new policy will go into effect on October 15, 2018. AAAS issued a related statement on the policy and notified its membership.
The sci-fi dream of wearable communication technology that enhances human perception is closer to becoming a reality thanks to a collaboration between Cambridge University and Nokia Bell Labs.
Launched yesterday (Tuesday), the new Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence will be based in Cambridge’s world-leading Department of Computer Science and Technology.
It will advance state-of-the-art mobile systems, security, new materials, and artificial intelligence (AI) to address one of the main human needs – the ability to communicate better with each other.
For generations, the social sciences—fields such as psychology and economics, which illuminate how people behave, spend money, live healthfully, and hurt or help each other—were primarily conducted and funded through universities and government agencies. That meant the sum of America’s knowledge about human behavior was available to most researchers and to the government. But, according to a new report from the Social Science Research Council, as more and more social scientists join tech companies, any accumulated data about human behavior is used not to solve societal problems—say, encouraging vaccinations, or protecting citizens from falling for conspiracy theories—but rather to pump up companies’ profits.
“We’ll miss a big opportunity, if we don’t find ways to have that knowledge be directed toward both scientific progress and the public good,” says Ron Kassimir, executive program director at the non-profit Social Science Research Council. The council’s panel on Monday featured experts, including Watts, who were unaffiliated with the report.
Science Translational Medicine, In the Pipeline blog, Derek Lowe
from
Add this to the (increasingly long) list of papers whose basic research plans would once have gotten a net dropped over your head. It’s looking at variations in the BRCA1 gene, the one that is famously associated with breast cancer risk. There is no doubt at all that there are mutations in this gene that raise such risk – but at the same time, there are a lot of mutations out there. And it’s well known that all genes carry mutations if you go around carefully sequencing large numbers of individuals – it’s just that most of these mutations appear to be silent. So which are the silent mutations in BRCA1 and which are the alarming ones? There are plenty of single-nucleotide variations seen in it, and unfortunately, most of them are (1) rare by themselves and (2) of unknown risk.
BRCA1 (the gene, italicized) codes for BRCA1, a protein (un-italicized) that’s crucial in homology-directed DNA repair (the most common route of which is homologous recombination). This new paper uses a cell line that’s particularly susceptible to impairment of that pathway as a readout for how the mutated genes/proteins would function. Using the CRISPR system, everyone’s gene-editing friend, they targeted 13 of the gene’s 22 coding exons for study.
At the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, in 1916—when annual tuition was $180—biology majors enrolled in Organs of Special Sense, civil engineering majors in Railway Curves and Earthwork, and physics majors in Sound and Light. Beyond their archaic lilt, these course titles are a measure of the great pace of scientific progress over the last century. Yale students today take Quantum Chemistry, Immunoengineering, and Astrostatistics and Data Mining. “Science is a constantly moving entity,” notes Scott Strobel, a professor in chemistry as well as molecular biophysics and biochemistry. “No committee I ran even a few years back would have predicted, say, the power of gene engineering from CRISPR.” As chair of the University Science Strategy Committee (USSC), Strobel had to exercise just these powers of prediction, trying to envision where science is going—and where it should be going—over the next several decades.
President Peter Salovey ’86PhD and Provost Ben Polak convened the USSC in January 2017 to identify the most important currents in modern science. “What are the big ideas that we should be considering?” asks the charge letter. And how should Yale invest over the next ten years to become a research pioneer for each of those big ideas? What artifacts remain in Yale’s physical and administrative organization that might stifle the returns on investment?
As far as Strobel knows, Yale had never undertaken such a sweeping consideration of its scientific endeavors.
‘In the user study we conducted, we showed participants real reviews written by humans and fake machine-generated reviews and asked them to identify the fakes. Up to 60% of the fake reviews were mistakenly thought to be real,’ says [Mika] Juuti.
Juuti and his colleagues then devised a classifier that would be able to spot the fakes. The classifier turned out to perform well, particularly in cases where human evaluators had the most difficulties in telling whether a review is real or not.
MIT and Community Jameel, the social enterprise organization founded and chaired by Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel ’78, launched the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (J-Clinic). This is the fourth major collaborative effort between MIT and Community Jameel.
J-Clinic, a key part of the MIT Quest for Intelligence, will focus on developing machine learning technologies to revolutionize the prevention, detection, and treatment of disease. It will concentrate on creating and commercializing high-precision, affordable, and scalable machine learning technologies in areas of health care ranging from diagnostics to pharmaceuticals, with three main areas of focus:
preventative medicine methods and technologies with the potential to change the course of noninfectious disease by stopping it in its tracks;
cost-effective diagnostic tests that may be able to both detect and alleviate health problems; and
drug discovery and development to enable faster and cheaper discovery, development, and manufacture of new pharmaceuticals, particularly those targeted for individually customized therapies.
Vinton G. “Vint” Cerf is the man who helped craft the internet. But even decades after his creation moved from government research labs and into the commercial world, it still remains a work in progress.
Even though it underlies 21st-century commerce, art, entertainment, government and most forms of communication in the developed world, it is constantly under siege – both in terms of security and the way people behave online.
“We are very vulnerable,” Cerf told a crowd Thursday evening at the Baker Institute on the Rice University campus. “No matter how secure you make software, if there is one hole, someone will find it.”
Have you ever noticed web content performing poorly out of the blue? Video footage becomes blurry. Web pages take longer to load.
If so, your internet service provider might be slowing down your data on purpose. It’s known as “throttling,” and it’s a way for a provider to ease congested network traffic.
But when one type of network traffic—say, video streaming—is throttled more than another, this is called differentiation. And according to Dave Choffnes, assistant professor of computer and information science at Northeastern, differentiation is also “what most people would refer to as a net neutrality violation.”
The EU is doing away with the twice-yearly clock changes and has given member states until April to decide if they will remain on summer or winter time. But there are fears Europe is heading for time-zone chaos.
New York, NY September 26, starting at 12 noon, Kimmel Center (NYU). “One of the only opportunities for all students and faculty to come and see some of the most promising startups coming out of two top NYU programs, The Summer Launchpad and Stern Venture Fellows, present to the public in the NYU Demo Day.” [rsvp requested]
Jen Christiansen, Ni-ka Ford, Jill Gregory, Amanda Montañez, Christopher Smith
from
New York, NY November 16, starting at 8:30 a.m., Davis Auditorium, Leon and Norma Hess Center for Science and Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (1470 Madison Ave). [$$]
“nique among postdoctoral appointments, these fellowships offer scholars the opportunity to join a collaborative research community that nurtures creative, transdisciplinary thought in pursuit of key insights about the complex systems that matter most for science and society.” Deadline to apply is October 28.
One image that is commonly found in the literature on design thinking is the “double diamond”, which is a model for the design process. I think this model can be usefully adapted to help us think about data analysis and my best representation is here (apologies for the scribble).
From the beginning, StatsBomb has been about fostering an analytics community dedicated to learning more about the game of football. One of the major issues for new potential analysts is difficulty in obtaining high quality data at scale. The same problem exists for teachers who are responsible for training new data scientists. The World Cup data, along with our continuing release of women’s football data, helps address this problem directly.
