These neural networks have, it seems, competed their way to generating images of fabricated human faces that genuine humans have trouble distinguishing from images of the real deal. Their architecture, described in a paper by the Nvidia researchers who developed it, “leads to an automatically learned, unsupervised separation of high-level attributes (e.g., pose and identity when trained on human faces) and stochastic variation in the generated images (e.g., freckles, hair), and it enables intuitive, scale-specific control of the synthesis.” What they’ve come up with, in other words, has made it not just more possible than ever to create fake faces, but made those faces more customizable than ever as well.
How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
It might seem like a straightforward question, but finding the answer can be a monumental task. New York City’s 2015-2016 tree census, for example, took nearly two years (12,000 hours total) and more than 2,200 volunteers. Seattle’s tree inventory won’t be complete until at least 2024. Such efforts aren’t done in vain; in the short term, they allow cities to better maintain their urban trees. And over the long run, they lay out the foundation for various initiatives that address everything from climate change to public health.
The latest move comes from Aiera (pronounced like “era”), a New York- and Boston-based company that announced today it took in $3.5 million in seed funding. Flybridge Capital Partners led the investment and was joined by Macquarie Group, Innovation Endeavors, Fin Venture Capital, and WGI Group.
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Aiera, which stands for “artificially intelligent equity research analyst,” wants to use A.I. technologies to help active investment managers make decisions, in part by forecasting stock performance and recommending whether to buy, hold, or sell particular stocks.
For tween and teen young men — and even college and young celebrities and pro athletes — “Fortnite: Battle Royale” in 2018 became more than a live-streaming game: It’s now so consuming that it has taken on hallmarks of a social network. Think of it as the new Snapchat.
As President Christopher L. Eisgruber noted in July, standing alongside New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy at Princeton Innovation Center BioLabs, “We believe that these cross-sector partnerships will foster a vibrant innovation ecosystem with the potential to generate transformative ideas, benefit the regional economy and attract top talent — outcomes that will make central New Jersey an increasingly attractive place for all who live, learn and work here.”
The year kicked off with the opening of the Biolabs facility in Plainsboro at the Princeton Forrestal Center, and closed with Google and the University announcing that a new artificial intelligence laboratory would open in the town of Princeton in January. In between were other developments such as an agreement between the Princeton Catalysis Initiative (PCI) and Celgene Corp., and a Princeton-Microsoft agreement to research biofilms.
On December 21, 2018, the United States House of Representatives voted to enact H.R. 4174, the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2017, in a historic win for open government in the United States of America.
The Open, Public, Electronic, and Necessary Government Data Act (AKA the OPEN Government Data Act) is about to become law as a result. This codifies two canonical principles for democracy in the 21st century:
public information should be open by default to the public in a machine-readable format, where such publication doesn’t harm privacy or security
federal agencies should use evidence when they make public policy
First, it’s important to prepare your panelists in advance for what to expect. At one recent conference where I was a panelist, my moderator didn’t contact me until the morning of our session. “Unfortunately I couldn’t find your email address in my mailbox,” he wrote me, “and I couldn’t obtain it from the [conference organizers]. They’ve been a bit overwhelmed I guess these last few days. But [fellow panelist] gave it to me this morning and so here is the outline. Let me know if it works and see you later today!”
OrbitDB is a serverless, distributed, peer-to-peer database. OrbitDB uses IPFS as its data storage and IPFS Pubsub to automatically sync databases with peers. It’s an eventually consistent database that uses CRDTs for conflict-free database merges making OrbitDB an excellent choice for decentralized apps (dApps), blockchain applications and offline-first web applications.