The U.S. government claimed that turning American medical charts into electronic records would make health care better, safer, and cheaper. Ten years and $36 billion later, the system is an unholy mess. Inside a digital revolution that took a bad turn.
To accurately forecast the weather, you first need lots of data — not just to train your forecasting models but also to generate more precise and granular forecasts. Typically, this has been the domain of government agencies, thanks to their access to this data and the compute power to run the extremely complex models. Anybody can now buy compute power in the cloud, though, and as the Boston and Tel Aviv-based startup ClimaCell is setting out to prove, there are now also plenty of other ways to get climate data thanks to a variety of relatively non-traditional sensors that can help generate more precise local weather predictions.
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Now you may say that others, like Dark Sky, for example, are already doing that with their hyperlocal forecasts. But ClimaCell’s approach is very different, and with that has attracted as clients airlines like Delta, JetBlue and United, sports teams like the New England Patriots and agtech companies like Netafim.
Brown University, Brown Daily Herald, Donnie Sahyouni
from
As computer science students on this campus know all too well, any trip to the Center for Information Technology is bound to be accompanied by the murmurs and moans of concentrators buried under heaps of assignments. In fact, frequent attendees like me probably have heard whispers of a sort of sick contest as to who can sustain the heaviest workload or survive the most all-nighters. Much of CS culture at Brown is, unfortunately, infected with workaholism.
There are, as I’m sure my fellow CS concentrators are well aware, countless mental and physical health risks that come with severe sleep deprivation and fatigue. Heart disease, obesity, anxiety and depression, to name just a few potential problems, are all strongly correlated with insufficient sleep and chronic exhaustion. Irregular eating and inadequate nutrition are also associated with heart disease, diabetes and stress.
Minnesota State University, Mankato will offer a new Master of Science degree program in data science beginning in the 2019 fall semester, and the program is currently accepting applications for admission.
Minnesota State Mankato’s M.S. in data science program is the first and only graduate program in data science in the Minnesota State system.
When Rakesh Ravi was working as a data analyst in digital marketing, he often wondered about the impact of his work.
“You get involved in the numbers, the analytics, in solving a problem, and you lose sight of the effects of your work on actual people,” he says. “One of the most important concepts a data scientist has to grasp is an understanding of your impact on the world around you – an algorithm can’t do that.”
Data science plays a crucial role in today’s world and, as data-driven technologies find application in virtually all aspects of contemporary life, data scientists must consider what effects their work has and should have. How does data science relate to issues of privacy, bias, discrimination, and inequality? What new ethical problems emerge from artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making? How might values of justice, care and the good life guide responses to these pressing issues?
In two years observing surgeons in teaching hospitals, social scientist Matthew Beane noticed something troubling: doctors were finishing their residencies licensed to use robots in the operating room, but most were barely trained to do so.
At fault, Beane reported, is how hospitals have introduced machines and artificial intelligence to the workplace — a way that has left a large part of the new generation of doctors lacking crucial surgery skills.
In recent years, data analysts have gone from optional to a career that holds great promise, but demand for quantitative skills applied in business decisions has raced ahead of supply as college curriculum often lags behind the fast-changing workplace.
CareerTu, a New York-based startup launched by Ruiwan Xu, a former marketing manager at Amazon, aims to close that talent gap. Think of it as Codecademy for digital marketing, data analytics, product design and a whole lot of other jobs that ask one to spot patterns from a sea of data that can potentially boost business efficiency. The six-year-old profitable business runs a flourishing community of 160,000 users and 500 recruiting partners that help students land jobs at Amazon, Google, Alibaba and the likes, an achievement that has secured the startup a spot at Y Combinator’s latest batch plus a $150,000 check from the Mountain View-based accelerator.
Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, James Landay
from
AI has as much to do with its interface as it does with the underlying capabilities it provides. If we want to build a future of open possibility and empowerment, it’s vital that our ability to harness AI evolves alongside AI itself.
For the Defense Department, last month’s executive order on artificial intelligence was the starting gun, and the department doesn’t mean to lose the race it’s been preparing for for some time. Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, director of the DoD’s new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told lawmakers that he’s already trying to stand up a small office around robotic process automation, a specific type of AI aimed towards improving business practices.
“When you talk about smart automation, or in the vernacular of the industry, robotic process automation, it’s not headline grabbing in terms of big AI projects, but it may be where the most efficiencies can be found,” Shanahan said during a March 12 hearing of the Senate Armed Services committee’s subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. “That’s the case if you read some of the dailies in industry, whether it’s in medicine or finance, this is where early gains are being realized in AI. Some of the other projects we take on in the department are probably years in the making in return on investment. These other areas I think will be much shorter term in return on investment.”
The internet is an ocean of algorithms trying to tell you what to do. YouTube and Netflix proffer videos they calculate you’ll watch. Facebook and Twitter filter and reorganize posts from your connections, avowedly in your interest—but also in their own.
New York entrepreneur Brian Whitman helped create such a system. He sold a music analytics startup called The Echo Nest to Spotify in 2014, bolstering the streaming music service’s ability to recommend new songs from a person’s past listening. Whitman says he saw clear evidence of algorithms’ value at Spotify. But he founded his current startup, Canopy, after becoming fearful of their downsides.
“Traditional recommendation systems involve scraping every possible bit of data about me and then putting it in a black box,” Whitman says. “I don’t know if the recommendations it puts out are optimized for me, or to increase revenue, or are being manipulated by a state actor.”
Automation scientists in academia and industry have created devices to make lab work more efficient, but they haven’t yet made accessibility for this small population a priority
SAS is expanding its efforts to develop artificial intelligence, the privately held software giant announcing late Sunday night that it will invest $1 billion in AI research and development over the next three years.
An effort started by computational linguist James Pustejovsky aims to index and catalog some of the most famous programs in public television and radio’s history — no humans needed.
San Jose Mercury News, Bay Area News Group, Ethan Baron
from
The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, a cross-disciplinary research and teaching facility dedicated to the use of AI for global good, needs to educate government along with students, Gates said during his keynote speech.
“These AI technologies are completely done by universities and private companies, with the private companies being somewhat ahead,” Gates told the audience. “Hopefully things like your institute will bring in legislators and executive-branch people, maybe even a few judges, to get up to speed on these things because the pace and the global nature of it and the fact that it’s really outside of government hands does make it particularly challenging.”
Gates said AI can speed up scientific progress. “It’s a chance — whether it’s governance, education, health — to accelerate the advances in all the sciences,” Gates said.
One way to tell who made the aircraft you are boarding is to steal a glimpse of the cockpit. A traditional control yoke in front of the pilots suggests a Boeing; a joystick beside each seat, an Airbus. Pilots argue about which system is better; neither is considered safer than the other. Each exemplifies a different approach to a problem that manufacturers of not just aircraft but also cars, trains and ships must grapple with as long as human operators handle increasingly automated machines.
London, England March 28-29. The Practitioners’ Lecture Series … Introduction to back-propagation and automatic differentiation (AAD) in machine learning and finance. [free, registration required]
“FDL challenges must represent a clear and present scientific problem, for which there is available data, that could be significantly advanced by AI tools and techniques. It is these challenges that the research teams further narrow in the opening weeks of the FDL research sprint to refine their own particular concept approach.” Deadline for proposals is May 31.
“In January 2019, Wayfair Data Science was thrilled to host our third immersion program for graduate students in quantitative fields. Our largest round yet, this program brought 25 PhD candidates from 12 different universities to spend a week with the data science team at Wayfair’s headquarters in Boston.”
“Genome Biology is currently inviting submissions for our upcoming special issue on Benchmarking Studies. The issue, which is planned for the second half of 2019, will be guest edited by Professor Olga Vitek from Northeastern University and Professor Mark D. Robinson from University of Zurich.” Deadline for submissions is May 18.
This article provides a quick primer on how to see what data sites have collected about you, as well as how to download and delete it. It’s handy information to have before the next site shuts down or accidentally tells a bunch of bad guys your favorite movie and your cellphone number.
I’m a professional speaker coach, and work with individuals and teams who want to build their speaking skills. I made this video as the first part of a speaker coaching project for Automattic.
Its focus on story, structure and delivery is in response to questions submitted by Automatticians; they are all fundamental elements to explore if you really want to engage and connect with your audience.
