Vielka Hoy developed a passion for educational equity, which led her to establish a college preparation and success consultancy for underserved students in 2013. Now, she’s poised to take it a step further with the Bridge To College mobile app.
“I saw some things that could be translated to other schools and that could change a lot, so I started the consulting business,” said Hoy. “It worked really well. And I thought, ‘How can we scale that using technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning, what I was doing in person, so more folk had access to it?’”
Rescue teams descended on the destruction left by Hurricane Michael in October, frantically searching for survivors. But a week later, more than 1,000 people were still accounted for, leaving families to wait and hope.
Drone assistance in natural disaster response now is simplistic at best with a number of hurdles. But new research led by Purdue University professors is working to use artificial intelligence and learning algorithms to create a platform allowing multiple drones to communicate and adapt as mission factors change.
Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission are negotiating a possible settlement that would require the company to place privacy-minded executives at the company’s highest levels, a source close to the talks told POLITICO on Wednesday — in addition to paying the expected multibillion-dollar fine it disclosed last week.
The steps, which are subject to change until a deal is final, would include appointing a federally approved privacy official at the social network and creating an “independent” privacy oversight committee that may include Facebook board members, said the person, who requested anonymity because the discussions are ongoing.
Parametric Press, Issue 01, Alice Feng and Shuyan Wu
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Wide-ranging applications of data science bring utopian proposals of a world free from bias, but in reality, machine learning models reproduce the inequalities that shape the data they’re fed. Can programmers free their models from prejudice?
So you’re the CEO of a clothing retailer, a rental car agency, or a payroll processing company, and you hear that artificial intelligence is changing the world. What are you supposed to do?
The short answer, says Paul Oyer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, is to start learning fast.
“Artificial intelligence will affect every industry, whether it’s clothing or shipping,” says Oyer, a professor of economics and the codirector of a new multidisciplinary course on AI for senior executives. “We need to find a complementary relationship between those who deal with the technology of AI and the managers who understand what drives their companies. Managers don’t need to learn all the technical details, but they do need to understand the implications for their business.”
Facebook is partnering with Udacity to supply learners with a course in “secure and private” artificial intelligence (A.I.).
And yes, “Secure and Private AI” is the name of the course, which will be hosted on Udacity. The course itself is free. Skills on offer include “Federated Learning, Differential Privacy, and Encrypted Computation,” as well as an introduction to “privacy-preserving technologies” such as OpenMined’s PySyft, which leverages PyTorch and other deep-learning tools to train A.I. models on “distributed private data while maintaining users’ privacy,” according to Udacity chief product officer Alper Tekin.
At some level, we are all experiencing the Web’s toxic possibilities. But as with other toxins, young developing bodies and brains are more susceptible.
Indiana University has signed a new 10-year, $40 million contract with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to support its science and operations network, N-Wave.
This high-speed network connects thousands of scientists and engineers to the data and resources they need to advance environmental science — to the tune of up to 20 petabytes of data per month — in a variety of fields such as oceanography, chemistry, biology and meteorology.
Using machine learning in materials science, which attempts to design and make materials for use in future technologies, has proven to be more difficult due to the lack of labeled data in the field. In materials science, data about materials that have successfully been created is considered labeled data, but information about the vast pool of materials postulated but yet to be synthesized is unlabeled. As such, creating new materials can feel a bit like guesswork for scientists, but a recent study at Penn strives to bring more clarity to the synthesis of new materials through an innovative machine learning technique.
IBM and New York University researchers have improved deep learning techniques to better spot glaucoma and detect it early.
Big Blue researchers will present their findings at Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology’s annual meeting.
In a nutshell, deep learning models can be trained to learn from retina images and then estimate visual function. Those estimates can then be used as a glaucoma indicator. The hope is that non-invasive retina imaging can diagnose glaucoma faster.
U.S. Air Force, Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs
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The Air Force announced May 1 it will deepen its partnership with Carnegie Mellon University by embedding a 10-person science and technology team focused on robotics and associated technologies affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University’s Center of Excellence.
The Air Force team will be located at CMU to work through the center to connect with faculty from across the university and take advantage of CMU’s cutting-edge research and education.
The announcement followed a recent visit to the center by Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson. The meetings between Wilson and CMU officials underscored the changes that can advance robotics and associated technologies within the Air Force.
Data source: I wrote down the number of unread emails my professor had whenever he plugged in his computer to the projector. … Notes: This data suggests that my professor gets 13 unread emails per day. If we extend this trend back in time, my professor would have had 0 unread emails about 4.6 years ago. [496 comments on May 3]
Repair advocates say manufacturers have increasingly used restrictive warranties, digital locks, and more to make it hard, or in some cases even impossible, for consumers to fix everything from iPhones to John Deere tractors. To fix the problem, right-to-repair bills often mandate companies release manuals and diagnostic software, as well as sell replacement parts and repair tools to the public so device owners and third-party technicians can find problems and do repairs more easily. The laws are designed to foster competition in the repair industry, as well as benefit the environment, since people may simply buy a new device if they can’t get it fixed.
Securepairs.org, founded by technology journalist Paul Roberts, has attracted the support of more than 20 security experts, including Harvard University security technologist Bruce Schneier, bug bounty expert Katie Moussouris, and ACLU technologist Jon Callas. They plan to arrange for expert witnesses to testify at legislative hearings across the country in an effort to convince lawma
When lawmakers convened Tuesday for a hearing about the decennial count, government auditor Nick Marinos described a litany of vulnerabilities that could leave Americans’ information hackable — and that are far more pressing because this is the first census that will be conducted primarily online.
Members of the House Appropriations panel, however, didn’t ask a single question about the cybersecurity weaknesses during the two-hour hearing, which focused primarily on the Trump administration’s plan to add a question about citizenship to the count. They also did not devote any time to grilling Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham, who also testified at the hearing, about the progress (or lack thereof) making security fixes his own department identified as critical.
Cambridge, MA May 31 at MIT. “This workshop will focus on the promise of GANs and include discussion of how we can exploit their benefits while minimizing their potential harm.” [registration required]
London, England September 30-October 2. “Our line-up of speakers will take you beyond the hype, showing you how to use the latest tools and frameworks, how to get your team up and running on AI and ML projects, and what the technological and ethical pitfalls are.” [$$$]
Dublin, Ireland July 2-3. “The School of Computer Science, UCD would like to invite submissions for abstracts, for a Workshop on Implementing Machine Ethics. Participation is welcome from practitioners, professionals, junior researchers, and senior academics, who have an interest in the technological, political, social, legal and philosophical implications of concrete implementations of ethics in machines.” Deadline for submissions is May 12.
“With the rapid growth and interest in NeurIPS and its associated workshops, the competition for workshops has intensified. In order to attempt to mitigate confusion and anxiety regarding what is expected, the workshop chairs have agreed on the following guidance for proposals to hold a NeurIPS workshop in 2019. Organizers of workshop proposals should take care to respect every piece of guidance provided here.” Deadline for submissions is June 3.
I’ve decided to engage in a pretty interesting self development project this summer: Completing the requirements for the MIT Applied Math curriculum through auditing classes, meeting professors, and completing the corresponding OCW course assignments and exams where applicable. In this post, I’ll explain my background and motivations for doing this, as well as the specific courses I’ll be taking on my journey.
Feel free to skip straight to the plan if you don’t feel like reading the “why”.