On a recent Hawaiian vacation, Don stayed at a truly luxurious resort. It wasn’t his style. He couldn’t help but notice the contrast with the poorer sections of the island where locals lived and tourists rarely ventured. Is this the planet’s future? Two distinct cultures, one of isolated wealth and excess, the other of poverty? When we discussed this question, Don couldn’t help but mention he’d also found amazing pizza on the island.
The disparity between rich and poor, between tourist and local, was disappointing, but not surprising. But as we pondered how we might address these issues, we recognized pizza provided a possible direction.
Pizza? How is that relevant? Two ways. First, pizza can be thought of as an open-source platform. An Italian creation, it is now found all over the world, in all incarnations, tailored to local tastes and cultures, yet all recognizable as pizza. Second, it bridges the gap we were pondering, for pizza can be made by local artisans serving local customers, as well as by large, international corporations that serve mass markets. In other words, “Pizza as a Platform” provides a powerful metaphor to describe how we hope to address some of the world’s most intractable problems.
Intel and Alibaba will collaborate over an AI project which will provide 3D real-time tracking of athletes during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, the firms announced this week at CES 2019.
By combining Intel hardware, Alibaba cloud infrastructure, and deep-learning algorithms, the companies hope to provide coaches with biomechanical data during training and competition without the need for special sensors or suits, Intel said at CES on Monday.
Nearly every person who’s run the Food and Drug Administration in recent history agrees the agency should break free from its political supervisors — a rare consensus from commissioners who served under Republican and Democratic administrations alike.
In two papers published Monday, all seven of the FDA’s most recent commissioners wrote that the current setup — in which the agency is a mere subdivision of the Department of Health and Human Services — interferes with the ability of its scientists to protect the health of the public. They described a situation in which a tangled web of responsibilities, along with political overseers who aren’t necessarily motivated by science, all make it harder for the FDA to keep people safe.
At NYU’s Tech Summit on November 14th, Hong Gao, CDS MS student, introduced her project, Development of an Ecological Momentary Assessment Platform for Public Health Research. Explaining Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), Gao discussed how the project tackles the challenges of acquiring real time, ecologically valid feedback from survey participants. Specifically, Gao’s system employs surveys regularly deployed via SMS to participants’ phones. Why SMS? Gao responds that SMS remains a relevant form of communication; one, she argues, that is inclusive for subjects without smartphones while still leveraging the modern ubiquity of cell phones. Since the public health field aims to reach as many participants as possible and collect as much real-time data as possible, SMS surveys simply make the most sense. Gao noted, “Self-reported data is subjective, of course. But that’s exactly what we’re looking for.”
Google is showing off auto-translation on smart display speakers, letting you naturally talk to each other with the speaker acting as the translator automatically. It has announced integrations with dozens of well-known brands. It will put Google Assistant on millions more iPhones with a Trojan horse play: integrating it into Google Maps.
Google is going big. In an interview with The Verge, Manuel Bronstein, VP of product for Google Assistant, made the case that Google is building an entire ecosystem for Assistant that’s akin to the ecosystem it’s built for Android. It’s a platform play, basically, just like Alexa. And Google wants to ensure it’s everywhere.
More than a dozen former Facebook employees detailed how the company’s leadership and its performance review system has created a culture where any dissent is discouraged.
Employees say Facebook’s stack ranking performance review system drives employees to push out products and features that drive user engagement without fully considering potential long-term negative impacts on user experience or privacy.
In a Deloitte survey of 1,500 senior executives in the United States, 76 percent said AI would transform their companies within the next three years, and 92 percent said the technology was “important” or “very important” to their internal business processes.
But, the survey also found, challenges abound—the high cost of implementation, the complexity of integrating AI technologies with existing systems, and a shortage of expertise among them. The following interactive infographic illustrates AI’s transformative potential as well as its current complications.
Facebook has hired a well-known research scientist from Google DeepMind in the UK just months after the social media giant moved in over the road from DeepMind’s London headquarters.
Artificial intelligence expert Edward Grefenstette revealed on Monday that he has joined the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) group after four years at DeepMind.
No one in America explains the importance of good network policy than Susan Crawford (previously), a one-woman good sense factory when it comes to Network Neutrality, municipal fiber, and reining in the excesses of the goddamned ISP industry. Her latest book is Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution―and Why America Might Miss It, a timely and urgent look at how America is sacrificing its digital future, productivity, connectivity, social mobility, entrepreneurial growth, education, and every other public good, thanks to rapacious telcos, scumbag lobbyists, and negligent, cash-hungry politicians. Crawford and her publisher, Yale University Press, were kind enough to give us an excerpt (below) so you can get a sense of why you should be reading this.
Next week, Las Vegas is hosting the massive annual CES trade show. It will be a showcase for innovative technology that will soon impact our lives in many ways, including transportation, health services, and entertainment. In addition, the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) at the end of the show will give a view of the future of consumer electronics looking out over the next 5 to 10 years. Let’s look at some things that we expect to see at CES as well as at the ICCE conference.
Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) are ubiquitous in new cars. ADAS uses sensors, memory, processing, and networking to detect road conditions and provide feedback to drivers—and in some cases to drive the vehicle off the road if there are unsafe conditions. As in the last few years, the 2019 CES will have a heavy automotive company presence.
On July 1-3, 2019, the Rostock Retreat on Simulation will bring together population researchers and social scientists from many disciplines who use computer simulations to advance discovery and generate new insights. Scientists are welcome to apply. The deadline for applications is February 28, 2019.
I know you had to read that title carefully to get it right. But User Experience Design theory isn’t always simple or easy to read. I for one, am a UX/UI designer who never went to design school. So design theory and practices always seemed alien to me. But one practice that I can always relate to and feel comfortable using is — Hierarchical Taxonomy.
It’s defined as separating parts of a list of items into ‘taxons’ which further have parents and below that, children. Taxons can be taken as organised lists of items which in the case of UX, are often contextual in nature.
Let’s quickly understand the concept using The Spoon Problem.
The textbook for the UC Berkeley Data Science course is available for free online at Computational and Inferential Thinking. It is an online textbook and appears to be created as a collection of Jupyter notebooks.
Proton Technologies AG, Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union
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