The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will not debut its “next generation” weather forecasting model in March, as planned.
Meanwhile, it has named Neil Jacobs as the acting head of the agency, replacing retired Rear Adm. Timothy Gallaudet, who will step back into a supporting role.
The two actions are unrelated but call new attention to key challenges facing the agency: its forecasting and its leadership.
From autonomous vehicles, flying cars and online education, Sebastian Thrun is now working on application of artificial intelligence in preventive medicine.
“A lot of diseases that kill people are preventable if we have AI systems that can do proper screening,” Thrun said in an interview to BloombergQuint. “We proved to ourselves that we were able to find skin cancer more accurately that even the best human dermatologists couldn’t,” he said. “There is a great opportunity in health tech.”
A Stanford University research, led by Thrun, 51, is creating an AI application that can help detect skin cancer.
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania announced today a $10 million gift from 1986 undergraduate alumnus Josh Harris and his wife Marjorie Harris to establish the Joshua J. Harris Alternative Investments Program. This innovative new program will expand co-curricular opportunities for Wharton students in the field and bring together alumni and industry experts through events and dynamic programming. Mr. Harris is a co-founder, senior managing director, and director of Apollo Global Management, LLC, an alternative investment manager serving institutional investors worldwide.
Nielsen announced Thursday that it will acquire Sorensen Media as a step toward providing an end-to-end addressable TV ad delivery solution. The global analytics company also unveiled its Advanced Video Advertising Group, a “technology, product and commercial initiative” focused on the expansion and innovation of addressable TV advertising.
Nielsen plans to combine Sorensen Media’s addressable TV platform with its Gracenote automatic content recognition (ACR) technology to “help deliver on the promise of addressable TV advertising.”
It may seem as if everyone’s already on the bandwagon for artificial intelligence and machine learning, with players ranging from giants like Amazon and Microsoft to startups like Xnor.ai and Canotic — but the head of Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, says there’s still plenty of room to climb aboard.
“Let me assure you, if you have a machine learning-based startup in mind … you’re not late to the party,” AI2’s CEO, Oren Etzioni, told more than 70 people who gathered Tuesday evening at Create33 in downtown Seattle for a Startup Grind event.
China is doing far more than talking about AI. In 2017, the country’s national government announced it wanted to make the country and its industries world leaders in AI technologies by 2030. The government’s latest venture capital fund is expected to invest more than US$30 billion in AI and related technologies within state-owned firms, and that fund joins even larger state-funded VC funds.
One Chinese state alone has said it will devote $5 billion to developing AI technologies and businesses. The city of Beijing has committed $2 billion to developing an AI-focused industrial park. A major port, Tianjin, plans to invest $16 billion in its local AI industry.
Private companies with a billion-dollar valuation were so uncommon not that long ago that they were dubbed unicorns. Now there are 325 of these once-rare creatures, with a combined valuation north of a trillion dollars, as CB Insights maintains a running count of this exclusive Unicorn Club.
The subset of AI startups accounts for about 10 percent of the total membership, growing rapidly in just 4 years from 0 to 32. Last year, an unprecedented 17 AI startups broke the billion-dollar barrier, with 2018 also a record year for venture capital into private US AI companies at $9.3 billion, CB Insights reported.
Walmart has acquired Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) startup Aspectiva, the US retail giant has announced. Aspectiva will be joining Walmart’s Store N° 8, the incubation arm launched by the retailer in 2017 to promote technologies that will enhance the future retail and consumer experience. No financial details about the acquisition were disclosed but sources close to the deal say that it was for several tens of millions of dollars.
What got me thinking about this are a few of the big announcements from this week’s Mobile World Congress event. Specifically, the ones around gesture control in cars and some of the newest sensors in smartphones.
On the automotive side, we already have numerous sensors for assisted- and self-driving vehicles: radar, LiDAR, cameras and more. These, along with powerful chips and wireless connectivity empower cars to make safe driving decisions for us. But the car manufacturers aren’t stopping there. Along with voice controls — either built-in or through add-on products such as 3rd-party products — some automakers are moving ahead on gesture control.
The British Geological Survey (BGS) has amassed one of the world’s premier collections of geologic samples. Housed in three enormous warehouses in Nottingham, U.K., it contains about 3 million fossils gathered over more than 150 years at thousands of sites across the country. But this data trove “was not really very useful to anybody,” says Michael Stephenson, a BGS paleontologist. Notes about the samples and their associated rocks “were sitting in boxes on bits of paper.” Now, that could change, thanks to a nascent international effort to meld earth science databases into what Stephenson and other backers are describing as a “geological Google.”
Several area universities, such as CUNY, NYU and Cornell Tech, developed research and partnership plans to help Amazon meet its needs. But Amazon ran into political opposition from elected officials and community activists in New York City who were opposed to the nearly $3 billion in tax incentives the company would receive. That resistance led the company to back out of the New York headquarters deal. Amazon’s withdrawal imperils the plans that the New York colleges developed to help attract it. Which brings us to a problem I think needs more consideration.
When colleges and universities rush to make sure that Amazon – or any other company – has what it needs, they run the risk of damaging the very things that make them unique and valuable to their communities in the long term.
Veo Robotics Inc., a startup developing sensor technology that lets industrial robots work safely side-by-side with humans, closed a funding round as it prepares to roll out the product in May.
The company raised $15 million late last month, bringing total financing to around $28 million, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Patrick Sobalvarro said in an interview. Veo’s proprietary technology uses lidar sensors to create real-time maps of factory work spaces, so that robots can slow or stop completely when human workers get too close.
Digital health has been around for a little over a decade, meaning it is one of the newest—and arguably hottest—emerging trends in healthcare. But like any new industry it is working out the ethics.
Last week Stanford Libraries released a statement of guiding principals for digital health. The document was created based on input from 30 participants from across disciplines including the former surgeon general, executives from Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, Proteus, and Kaiser Permanente, and academics from UC Berkeley and Stanford.
Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Centre for Doctoral Training in Application of Artificial Intelligence to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER) is one of 16 new Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) announced today. The Cambridge Centre will be led by Professor Simon Redfern, Head of the Department of Earth Sciences.
Climate risk, environmental change and environmental hazards pose some of the most significant threats we face in the 21st century. At the same time, we have increasingly larger datasets available to observe the planet, from the atomic scale all the way through to global satellite observations.
The Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition announced the creation of a task force dedicated to monitoring competition in U.S. technology markets, investigating any potential anticompetitive conduct in those markets, and taking enforcement actions when warranted.
To create the Technology Task Force, the Bureau of Competition will draw upon existing staff and expertise to enhance the Bureau’s focus on technology-related sectors of the economy, including markets in which online platforms compete. The creation of this task force is modeled on the FTC’s successful Merger Litigation Task Force, launched in 2002 by then-Bureau of Competition Director Joe Simons. The 2002 task force reinvigorated the Commission’s hospital merger review program, and also sharpened the agency’s focus on merger enforcement in retail industries, particularly regarding matters involving food, beverages, and supermarkets.
“The role of technology in the economy and in our lives grows more important every day,” said FTC Chairman Joe Simons. “As I’ve noted in the past, it makes sense for us to closely examine technology markets to ensure consumers benefit from free and fair competition. Our ongoing Hearings on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century are a crucial step to deepen our understanding of these markets and potential competitive issues. The Technology Task Force is the next step in that effort.”
State College, PA March 14, starting at 1:30 p.m., Penn State Institute for CyberScience. ” Dr. Lee Giles, the David Reese Professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, will discuss what a machine learning problem is and what it can do, as well as introduce a new machine learning model, deep learning.” [free, registration required]
Long Beach, CA June 16. “Deep neural networks trained with a large number of labeled images have recently led to breakthroughs in computer vision. However, we have yet to see a similar level of breakthrough in the video domain. Why is this? Should we invest more into supervised learning or do we need a different learning paradigm?” Deadline for submissions is March 4.
“You can view a list of suggested projects at https://github.com/salesforce/gsoc. If you see a specific idea that interests you, please include that in your proposal. New ideas are welcome and encouraged, use the suggested projects as a guide on how to think about the scope of your idea.”
Computing Community Consortium, CCC Blog, Khari Douglas
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Four years ago the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) launched the Postdoc Best Practice Program (Postdoc BP), designed to develop, implement and institutionalize the implementation of best practices for supporting postdocs.
Welcome to Observable — the home of magic notebooks for the web! There’s a lot to learn, and a lot to explore. This notebook organizes our reference material into a table of contents, to serve as a jumping-off point for learning whatever you need to know next.
In the case of creative tools, and particularly in the case of visual creative tools, this kind of precision is already an enormous limitation: software that does to pixels and polygons exactly what the user said while completely oblivious to what the user actually meant.
The path forward is “smart” features that build in some knowledge about the visual context: in Photoshop, content-aware fill is often better than healing brush, magnetic lasso is often better than plain marquee selection, etc.
The question I want to pose is, what happens when the canvas itself understands the visual world in human terms, and can learn from human intent in context?