Among more than 16,000 American registered voters who interacted with fake news sources on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, individual consumption of such content was extremely concentrated. Only a small fraction — many older, conservative and politically engaged — accounted for most fake news exposures and shares on the social media platform, a study has found.
Fake news — defined by the study authors as news-like content by publishers who lack traditional editorial standards — has become a topic of public concern, particularly with regard to its role in the most recent presidential election.
The findings, published in the January 25 issue of Science, revealed that only about 1% of the Twitter users studied accounted for 80% of exposures to fake news content. Furthermore, 0.1% were responsible for 81% of the fake news shared. For most voters in the study, representing both sides of the political spectrum, political news exposure came from factual media outlets.
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy
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The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), along with the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), are pleased to announce a transition plan for NOAO leadership through the rest of this year, following the departure of David Silva January 25.
Lori Allen, Associate Director for Kitt Peak National Observatory, will serve as Acting NOAO Director. She will have the assistance of Adam Bolton (new Acting Deputy Director of NOAO and Associate Director for NOAO’s Community Science Data Center, CSDC) and Steve Heathcote (Associate Director of NOAO South and Director of Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory, CTIO).
Earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) announced a data privacy bill that would direct the Federal Trade Commission to write new privacy recommendations that overrule state laws. Similarly, a prominent technology think tank, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, has suggested a “grand bargain” of a new federal data law that would not only preempt state laws, but entirely repeal sector-specific federal privacy laws like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) and, of course, HIPAA.
These proposals are in very early stages, but experts agree that having an overarching federal data privacy law makes more sense than the current mix of sector laws and state-level laws. “Data travels freely across state and continental lines, so to have a patchwork of state laws makes no sense,” says Kayte Spector-Bagdady, a bioethicist at the University of Michigan. To avoid getting in trouble, every institution needs to follow the policy of the state with the most restrictive laws. The result is that California, with its tough new data privacy law, is essentially setting the national policy.
Researchers at Columbia University say they’ve translated brain signals directly into speech. This could help people recovering after a stroke. Ostensibly.
Initially the collaboration will focus on chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular disease, diseases with significant and growing burdens on society with the potential for the discovery and development of new medicines and improved pathways of patient care within the NHS. The programme may extend into other chronic diseases in the future.
The three-year research programme will draw on BDI’s expertise in population health, clinical informatics and machine learning and will be facilitated by access to anonymised longitudinal datasets for those patients in the NHS Trusts which builds on Sensyne Health’s existing capabilities through its Clinical AI and Strategic Research Agreements, as well as the data generated by Sensyne’s digital health applications for the management of chronic disease.
AI is being increasingly used to make important decisions. Many AI experts (including Jeff Dean, head of AI at Google, and Andrew Ng, founder of Coursera and deeplearning.ai) say that warnings about sentient robots are overblown, but other harms are not getting enough attention. I agree. I am an AI researcher, and I’m worried about some of the societal impacts that we’re already seeing. In particular, these 5 things scare me about AI:
Algorithms are often implemented without ways to address mistakes.
AI makes it easier to not feel responsible.
AI encodes & magnifies bias.
Optimizing metrics above all else leads to negative outcomes.
There is no accountability for big tech companies.
The Globe and Mail, Eric Andrew-Gee and Tavia Grant
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A chorus of researchers is calling for Statistics Canada to reinstate its annual publication of marriage and divorce rates, arguing numbers on the country’s marital health are vital for understanding housing, child care and public health.
University of Virginia, The Cavalier Daily, Phil Bourne
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With the recent announcement, we have the opportunity to expand the DSI into a new school, one of only 12 at the University. This will allow us to do something really special on a scale we can’t reach as an Institute. We are creating a “school without walls,” in the words of President Jim Ryan, as a means of connecting data to all academic disciplines. While the new School will have its own building, faculty and students — made possible by the generosity of Jaffrey and Merrill Woodriff and the Quantitative Foundation — it will also have satellites in other schools where data science can be studied and best academic practices exchanged. This makes sense as data science is an interdisciplinary endeavor, embodying aspects of statistics, computer science, information science and applied mathematics which are then applied to all disciplines and the vast treasure trove of data they are accumulating. The outcomes range from new scientific discoveries, to improved efficiencies to a better understanding of the world around us.
The planned School of Data Science will help faculty, students and researchers work across disciplines, in keeping with the original Jeffersonian notion of the Academical Village.
Citing high cost and poor predictive value of success in graduate school, some chemistry departments are dropping the standardized test from their admission requirements
How does it feel to be a black scientist who owes much to James Watson in general, and in my case, is linked to his specific pedigree? Is it much ado about nothing, or might the black scientist occupy a special place in modern conversations about scientific racism?
Ironically, I was introduced to the scientific legacy of James Watson by my mother, an African-American woman raised in west Baltimore in the 1940s and ’50s, the granddaughter of a woman born in North Carolina near the time of emancipation.
“We were invited to come to New York, and we want to invest in a community that wants us,” said Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president for public policy, told the Council in his prepared testimony. He added, later, that the company wanted to “be part of the growth of a community where our employees and our company are welcome.”
The 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19) is now underway in Hawaii, USA. The program chairs are Pascal Van Hentenryck (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) and Zhi-Hua Zhou (Nanjing University, China). The annual AAAI conference aims to promote AI research and scientific exchanges among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. The conference has a diverse technical track and includes student abstracts, poster sessions, invited speakers, tutorials, workshops, and exhibit and competition programs.
There were a record high 7,745 total AAAI paper submissions this year; while the conference’s paper acceptance rate also hit a new record of just 16.2 percent. The AAAI-19 Special Awards and Honors, including Outstanding Paper, Honorable Mention, Outstanding Student Paper Award, Blue Sky Idea, etc. were presented on Tuesday, January 29 by Subbarao Kambhampati, Awards Committee Chair and AAAI Past President; Yolanda Gil, AAAI President; and Bart Selman, AAAI President-Elect.
WHAT WOULD induce a software developer to quit a good job in Silicon Valley and trade California’s sunshine for Toronto’s wintry skies? For Vikram Rangnekar, born in India and educated in America, the triggers were the restrictions placed on immigrant tech workers holding an H-1B visa (starting companies or taking long holidays is discouraged) and what looked like a 20-year wait to get the green card he needed in order to settle down. Rising anti-immigrant sentiment under President Donald Trump’s administration did not help. Two years later he thinks he made the right choice. “I didn’t want to spend the best years of my life on a restrictive visa.”
People like Mr Rangnekar are part of an exodus of tech workers from Silicon Valley.
“Program provides an opportunity for talented undergraduates studying math, computer science, and related disciplines to work in teams on a real-world research projects proposed by sponsors from industry or the public sector.” Deadline for applications is February 12.
Jackie Gartner-Schmidt is a speech-language pathologist at the University of Pittsburgh. She studied why people’s voices tremble or even squeak when they get nervous. It’s because our vocal cords close up as a protective response to stressful situations, so we don’t accidentally inhale water. In the video above, filmed at a TEDx event, Gartner-Schmidt shows an exercise to open your vocal cords if you are nervous about having to speak in public.
Feuerriegel and Prendinger (2018) examine the use of textual analysis in a trading strategy by creating and comparing the performance of several models. As a benchmark, they utilize a time-series momentum strategy which places trades solely based on the rate-of-change of the price of an asset and a cross-sectional momentum strategy which considers a portfolio of 20 stocks, buying those with positive monument and selling those with negative momentum. Next, two rules-based strategies are created: (1) a news-sentiment trading strategy which uses a decision support system and places trades based on the sentiment of news releases; and (2) a combination momentum strategy and textual analysis news trading strategy which uses price momentum and news sentiment signals. Finally, supervised and reinforcement learning models are used to improve upon the weaknesses of the rules-based systems.
AI bets is a forum for the creation of adjudicatable predictions and bets about the future of AI. While it is easy to make a prediction about the future, this forum was created to help researchers craft predictions whose accuracy can be clearly and unambiguously judged when they come due. The bets will be documented on line, and regularly in this publication under the column name, AI Bookies.
This is a major release from 0.23.4 and includes a number of API changes, new features, enhancements, and performance improvements along with a large number of bug fixes.
The 0.24.x series of releases will be the last to support Python 2. Future feature releases will support Python 3 only.
