Students, seated on the floor with laptops on their knees, lined the hallways of Rhodes and Hollister Halls last week during office hours for computer science classes. Some said that they waited between one and three hours for help on their late-semester assignments.
Cornellians took to social media, posting on Reddit and Twitter about the overcrowded situation. The Reddit thread in r/Cornell was filled with a discussion surrounding CS 1110: Introduction to Computing Using Python, while Julian Koh ‘20 — despite not being enrolled in the course — took to Twitter to share an image of the long lines of CS 3110: Data Structures and Functional Programming.
The National Weather Service is readying to launch its “next-generation” weather model after a delay of several months.
Pending a successful test over the next 30 days, the Weather Service will replace its GFS (Global Forecast System) model, often referred to as the American model, with an upgraded version around mid-June.
The new version of the model is known as the GFS-FV3 (FV3 stands for Finite Volume Cubed-Sphere dynamical core), and it contains what is known as a “dynamic core.” The Weather Service says this dynamic core will make the model run more efficiently and modernizes the agency’s approach to forecasting.
When we last covered the Linux Foundation’s Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project—a collaborative, cross-industry, nonprofit effort to develop a common, open-source software stack for the connected car—it was 2016 and the automotive industry was just beginning to warm up to development partnerships that could advance autonomous vehicles and other mobility services.
Three years later, and AGL is “a completely different organization for the better,” says Dan Cauchy, executive director.
Facing an unusually full agenda during its last full meeting of the academic year, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) this afternoon:
legislated a new committee to “improve the current system” of undergraduate course registration;
adopted the “Quantitative Reasoning with Data” requirement that completes the architecture for the General Education curriculum debuting this coming fall;
Facebook and Google aren’t merely competing for dominance in online advertising. They’re also battling over artificial intelligence.
At the core of their fight is the underlying software for creating neural networks, the software that learns on its own to recognize patterns within data. Although neural networks have been around for decades, it wasn’t until recently that researchers discovered that the technology could be useful for helping computers with tasks like automatically translating languages and recognizing people and objects in photos.
Currently, there’s no easy way for companies to create neural networks, like there is for developing more conventional software. But, in recent years, several big companies have introduced so-called developer “frameworks” that are a first stab at helping coders build neural networks and at making the technology more practical to use widely in apps.
Google today awarded $25 million in grants to a range of organizations to help them apply machine learning to fight some of the world’s biggest challenges.
Recipients range from New York City’s fire department, which wants to find ways to reduce emergency call response time, to an experiment to track air quality with sensors attached to mopeds in Uganda, information that may shape public policy.
Since leaving Epic Games in late 2017, UX expert Celia Hodent has been cutting across the game industry, meeting with developers to discuss ethical and practical UX solutions, as the industry itself grapples with the rising ethical concerns that come with more and more successful games. … At the top of Hodent’s mind: The two primary ways that the game industry can earn more trust from players and employees is to begin thinking about the act of self-regulating, and to begin to move away from designing engagement mechanics around the fear of missing out (or FOMO).
Uber and Airbnb are among at least six California-based companies valued at more than $1 billion expected to go public this year, creating a new class of millionaires and billionaires and a welcome quandary for the state’s budget writers.
Though it’s tough to gauge the total tax revenue all those profits will produce, it’s not a stretch to estimate California will add $1 billion or more after the initial public offerings, or IPOs, are made.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” said Daniel Morgan, senior portfolio manager for the investment firm Synovus Trust. “It’s definitely going to be a big lottery for everyone. Not only tech owners, but I think the state of California.”
Our conversation begins with the origin story of the Fake News Challenge, including Delip’s initial motivations for the project, and what some of his key takeaways were from that experience. We then dive into a discussion about the generation and detection of artificial content, including “fake news” and “deep fakes.” We discuss the state of generation and detection for text, video, and audio, the key challenges in each of these modalities, the role of GANs on both sides of the equation, and other potential solutions. Finally, we discuss Delip’s new book, Natural Language Processing with PyTorch and his philosophy behind writing it. [audio, 58:40]
The major tech players are seeking to use their cloud computing heft to grab the game-streaming market, expected to explode from $10 billion in 2018 to $125 billion by 2025. They’re hoping to power game-streaming free from the pricey consoles that have anchored the video game industry for decades. Broadband slaying the game box. That’s the idea, anyway. In the process, they want to marry the success of video games like Fortnite and streaming platforms like Twitch.
In October, Microsoft outlined plans for a game-streaming platform — Project xCloud — that would bring games like Halo to any device. It will begin public trials this year, with an expected launch in 2020. Apple doesn’t plan to get left behind. On the heels of Google’s Stadia announcement, the company took the wraps off Apple Arcade, a game subscription service for iOS, Mac and Apple TV devices. Analysts expect Amazon to join the game-streaming fray too, given its strength in cloud computing, expansion into digital media and ownership of popular live game broadcasting site Twitch, which it purchased in 2014.
You can only understand the voice platform wars by first recognizing that voice assistants, specifically, represent both a platform and user interface (UI) shift comparable to the web and smartphones. The key difference is that these new platforms are neither based on open standards, nor on relatively open access to consumers. Voice assistants introduce a proprietary intermediary into all digital consumer interactions. This scenario both excites and frightens the leading tech companies that carved out enviable positions in the earlier web and smartphone platform wars.
Microsoft has surprised many in the Linux developer community in recent years. Surprises have included bringing things like the Bash shell to Windows, or native OpenSSH in Windows 10, and even including Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora in the Windows Store. Microsoft is now going even further, with plans to ship a full Linux kernel directly in Windows 10.
“Beginning with Windows Insiders builds this Summer, we will include an in-house custom-built Linux kernel to underpin the newest version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL),” explains Microsoft program manager Jack Hammons. “The kernel itself will initially be based on version 4.19, the latest long-term stable release of Linux. The kernel will be rebased at the designation of new long-term stable releases to ensure that the WSL kernel always has the latest Linux goodness.”
Bloomberg Businessweek; Karen Leigh , Stepan Kravchenko , and Saritha Rai
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Early on, the narrative around the internet was it should be unfettered and borderless, a global commons. That didn’t last. China’s President Xi Jinping has led the way in asserting what’s become known as cybersovereignty — a nation’s right to control the digital realm. Other authoritarian regimes such as Russia’s and Vietnam’s, but also governments in places such as India and France, are following suit. With America’s more hands-off approach under fire for enabling election meddling, fake news and hate speech, China is trumpeting its method of controlling the internet to serve state interests.
At dueling conferences this week, Microsoft and Google will vie for developers’ attention, with Microsoft emphasizing new offerings for its growing Azure cloud and Google pressing forward with new features for Android and its voice-based Assistant.
Why it matters: These developer conferences serve multiple roles, allowing companies to position themselves strategically, generate developer enthusiasm, introduce new products, and grab media attention.
New York, NY May 9, starting at 9 p.m., New York Live Arts (219 W 19th St.) “Music Community Lab presents an evening of music and AI with Yuka Honda and Angélica Negrón.” [$$]
Support the University of California in its attempt to transform the landscape of scholarly publishing. Boycott Elsevier journals by: (1) publishing your work elsewhere and (2) refusing to donate your time to them as a reviewer or editorial board member.
“We are happy to share two new requests for proposals — An RFP for the CrowdTangle API and an RFP for the Ad Library API. Each RFP features simple application processes and fast decisions.”
Designing accurate and efficient CNNs for mobile devices is challenging due to the large design space and expensive computational methods. Although many mobile CNNs are available for developers to train and deploy to mobile devices, existing CNN architecture may not be able to achieve the best results for some tasks on mobile devices.
Neuroscientists and computer vision scientists say a new dataset of unprecedented size — comprising brain scans of four volunteers who each viewed 5,000 images — will help researchers better understand how the brain processes images.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Fordham University, reporting today in the journal Scientific Data, said acquiring functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans at this scale presented unique challenges.
Each volunteer participated in 20 or more hours of MRI scanning, challenging both their perseverance and the experimenters’ ability to coordinate across scanning sessions. The extreme design decision to run the same individuals over so many sessions was necessary for disentangling the neural responses associated with individual images.