Over the past year, electric scooters have descended en masse on U.S. cities, and local governments are rushing to respond. Scooters have called into question the role of bike lane and sidewalk traffic and have caused long-simmering conversations about public use, management, and maintenance of urban rights-of-way to boil over. Umair Irfan’s excellent Vox explainer has all the background on 2018’s scooter expansion. While many have argued the merits or flaws of these new lightweight mobility devices, it’s likely they’re here to stay.
And with scooters, comes an incredible opportunity to realign policies governing public space, capitalize on available data, and put cities back in charge of how streets are used.
In 2017, according the [American Community Survey], the share of commuters cycling to work actually dipped by 4.7 percent compared with the previous year. Less than 1 percent of American commuters regularly use their bicycles to get to work. But 84 percent of the seventy largest cities in the US have seen an upward cycle commute trend over the past 12 years.
The most interesting aspect to these numbers—and certainly not a new one—is the uncovering of a profound cycle commuting gap. In the five US cities with the highest share of cycle commuters (Davis, Santa Cruz, and Palo Alto, all in California, along with Boulder, Colorado, and Somerville, Massachusetts), an average 11.7 percent took bicycles to work last year. But in the next five (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Berkeley, California, Miami Beach, Florida, Portland, Oregon, and Ames, Iowa), just 7 percent do. Take cities 20 to 25 (Redwood City, California, San Francisco, Bloomington, Indiana, Portland, Maine, and Salt Lake City), and just 3.1 percent of those cities take bikes to work.
The Reid Hoffman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and the Human starts this fall, and will operate through the spring semester of 2024, supporting extensive research into these and related questions surrounding AI. The chair will also give a public lecture on the topic each year.
Deutsche Bank and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are broadening their collaboration in the field of economic and technological research. Both parties signed an agreement to this effect in Boston on September 18. Deutsche Bank will become a founding member of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE), and thus considerably expand its collaboration that was initiated in 2016 with the renowned technical university.
The alliance has now been renewed for three more years. The bank and the Institute want to jointly analyse how platform economy firms are organised, managed, and operate profitably. Special attention will be focused on the conditions whereby banks can transform from product vendors and service companies into platform providers.
Workplace wellness programs that offer employees a financial carrot for undergoing health screenings, sticking to exercise regimens or improving their cholesterol levels have long been controversial.
Starting January 1, they may become even more contentious. That’s when a federal judge’s decision to overturn existing rules about the programs takes effect. The decision casts uncertainty over what the appropriate upper limit for these types of financial incentives should be — specifically when employers offer them to workers to participate in programs that require clinical testing or the disclosure of their personal health data.
Adobe Analytics Cloud — a set of analytics tools used by large media companies including Spotify, Pandora, Time Warner, Viacom and CBS Interactive — launched a spate of new features Tuesday for its clients to gather an unprecedented amount of information from users’ audio-streaming habits. These metrics include meticulous streaming measurements and a machine-learning tool that detects patterns and can identify the “most valuable segment of listeners” on a platform.
The software giant’s new analytics tool provides more than 70 metrics by which to observe some of the most infinitesimal details of users’ streaming habits, such as ad completion rate, number of times a playback session is paused, rate of pause versus play seconds, and specific time markers measuring the percent completion of ads and content. Through a feature called “Segment IQ,” which operates through the company’s AI and machine-learning platform Adobe Sensei, clients can also figure out specific groups of listeners to best target for marketing and engagement campaigns.
The U.S. could face heightened national security threats and lose its economic edge if the government doesn’t step up its game when it comes to artificial intelligence, according to a pair of oversight lawmakers.
Reps. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Robin Kelly, D-Ill., on Tuesday published a report detailing the current state of the country’s artificial intelligence ecosystem and offering recommendations for how government could steer and accomodate the technology’s development in the years ahead.
The report is based on a series of hearings examining the government’s role in advancing AI hosted earlier this year by the House Oversight Subcommittee on Information Technology, on which Hurd chairs and Kelly serves as ranking member.
Communications of the ACM, ACM News, Mark Broderick
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Banks, investment firms, and insurance companies are responsible for safeguarding the assets and financial well-being of consumers and businesses, but the financial services industry is the target of more digital security incidents than any other sector. With trillions of dollars of assets at risk, identity thieves, scammers, and cyber-terrorists view banks and other financial services providers as prime targets.
In recent months, Facebook has been in the news as revelations about the amount of data it shares on its users have been unearthed. Said Avi Cohen, CEO of The Floor, a Tel Aviv-based financial technologies (FinTech)-focused cybersecurity firm that works with six of the world’s largest financial services firms, “Banks have a different responsibility than Facebook. Facebook’s primary thing to protect is customer data. Banks have to protect not only their customers’ data, but also their actual financial assets.”
The convergence of a growing number of sophisticated cybercrimes and a shortage of qualified digital security professionals to counter these threats has created an environment that is exposing the financial services industry to higher costs and greater risk.
Starting in fall 2018, the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences (EAS) will offer students a new undergraduate degree option in a field that is at the forefront of computer science: information and data sciences (IDS).
The new option will focus on the acquisition, storage, communication, processing, and analysis of data—making sense of a world where information is acquired at an ever-increasing rate, with opportunities to generate actionable knowledge based on its analysis.
More than a week after Hurricane Florence made landfall, many roads in the Carolinas remain inundated. Receding floodwaters have left behind a trail of destruction (and dead fish) on major highways, and hundreds of roads and bridges are heavily damaged or impassable because of fallen trees and power lines. And more flooding is expected as rain-swollen rivers in South Carolina crest. As of Friday, more than 840 roads in North and South Carolina remained closed.
For drivers used to relying on GPS navigation apps, it can be dangerously fluid situation, since road conditions can change too fast for official government maps of road closures to keep up. Following complaints on social media of evacuees who followed a third-party navigation app and ended up in a flooded street, the North Carolina Department of Transportation warned motorists not to trust GPS navigation apps like Waze last week.
University of California-San Diego, THE TRITON student newspaper, Anabel King
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The UC San Diego Department of Political Science will offer a new Data Analytics major, the first Bachelor of Science degree for the department, starting Fall 2018.
The new major focuses on the study of data collection, hypothesis testing, and computation with an emphasis on political and social science issues. It is the eighth concentration in the Political Science Department, joining seven Bachelor of Arts degrees: American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Public Law, Political Theory, Public Policy, and General Political Science.
“Our new major represents the growing demand from employers, internship coordinators, and graduate programs,” said Natalie Ikker, Undergraduate Advisor for the Political Science Department. “It is currently the first and only political science major with the Bachelor of Science notation in the University of California system. This first-of-its-kind program gives students the chance to explore their passion for politics and policy through the lens of a rigorous grounding in data science.”
Canada has all the ingredients needed to take advantage of the coming artificial intelligence revolution – a shift that promises to supercharge the growth of a wide range of industries from transportation to health care, according to Jensen Huang, the CEO of graphics chip giant Nvidia.
Huang, who spoke at an event celebrating Nvidia’s new Toronto AI lab, lauded Canada for its potent mix of top AI researchers and an innovation sector that encourages collaboration between business, academia and government.
“The [AI] talent here is incredible,” Huang told a packed auditorium at the MaRS Discovery District last Friday.
It’s not enough to have a great idea for a Netflix original. The company’s manager of Science and Analytics explains how data can be used to help creative teams tackle the operational and logistical challenges of content production.
At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, students are immersing themselves in Chinese culture without setting foot outside their classroom.
The Mandarin Project, a collaboration between RPI, located in upstate New York, and the tech giant IBM, places students in a virtual world where they can practice their Mandarin language skills in a series of simulated scenarios, such as ordering lunch in a restaurant or taking a tai chi class.
The project aims to make students feel as if they are actually in China, without the inconvenience of traveling there, says Helen Zhou, assistant professor of communication and media at RPI, who has been actively involved in designing the project.
Health data breaches are on the rise, a new study shows.
While the largest number of data breaches occurred at health care providers’ sites – such as hospitals and physicians’ offices – it’s health care plans that account for the greatest number of patient records stolen over the past seven years, according to the study published in JAMA.
“The climb in the total number of records breached is primarily attributable to very large breaches of electronic systems,” said study leader Dr. Thomas McCoy, an assistant professor of psychiatry and medicine at Harvard University and director of research for the Center for Quantitative Health at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
“The Seed Networks should generate new tools, open source analysis methods, and significant contributions of diverse data types to the Human Cell Atlas Data Coordination Platform. Applications should have a primary focus on the healthy tissues that will contribute to a reference atlas. These projects should establish the HCA as a resource for applications such as clarifying genetic variants associated with disease, cell type-specific drug toxicity, or therapeutic applications.” Deadline for applications is November 13.
Data breaches, when information like your username and password are stolen from a website you use, are an unfortunate part of life on the internet today. It can be hard to keep track of when your information has been stolen, so we’re going to help by launching Firefox Monitor, a free service that notifies people when they’ve been part of a data breach. After testing this summer, the results and positive attention gave us the confidence we needed to know this was a feature we wanted to give to all of our users.
Reproducibility breaks down in three main places: the code, the data and the environment. I’ve put together this guide to help you narrow down where your reproducibility problems are, so you can focus on fixing them. Let’s go through the three potential offenders one by one, talk about what kind of problems arise and then see how to fix them.
The primary goal of Swift 5.0 is for the language to achieve ABI stability. This will enable a stable Swift runtime to be deployed by OS vendors that can be linked against by executables and libraries.
“Visual analytics helps people make sense of complex systems that use large data and discover insights by effectively visualizing them and let people interact with them,” said Minsuk (Brian) Kahng, a Ph.D. student in the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).
Kahng has recently been working alongside Associate Professor Polo Chau to build visualization tools for deep learning models, with an emphasis on public accessibility. Two examples of his work are ActiVis, a visualization system for industry-scale deep neural network models that is deployed at Facebook, and the newly released GAN Lab, which is now available to the public online.