The local economic impact of the geospatial industry is $4.9 billion, with nearly 11,000 people directly employed in the sector, according to figures recently calculated by the St. Louis Development Corporation.
“Geospatial has a strong root system here in St. Louis, with the NGA being the real anchor for us,” said SLDC Director Otis Williams.
“But there are a number of industry types and organizations that are already here. There are a significant number of jobs that are already here.” [audio, 4:08]
Imagine, however, if that editor could modify video using a text transcript. Much like word processing, the editor could easily add new words, delete unwanted ones or completely rearrange the pieces by dragging and dropping them as needed to assemble a finished video that looks almost flawless to the untrained eye.
A team of researchers from Stanford University, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University and Adobe Research created such an algorithm for editing talking-head videos – videos showing speakers from the shoulders up.
This is a story about more than subscription fees. It’s about how a private industry has come to dominate the institutions of science, and how librarians, academics, and even pirates are trying to regain control.
The University of California is not the only institution fighting back. “There are thousands of Davids in this story,” says University of California Davis librarian MacKenzie Smith, who, like so many other librarians around the world, has been pushing for more open access to science. “But only a few big Goliaths.”
After three years of increasing momentum, the SC Reproducibility Initiative makes Artifact Description (AD) Appendices mandatory for all papers submitted to the SC19 Technical Program, but optional for workshop papers and posters. Artifact Evaluation (AE) Appendices are still optional.
Business and science are joining forces at Clemson University to satisfy a marketplace appetite for business professionals who are capable of analyzing and applying big data to their strategic decision-making.
Illustration of people at a table using big data analysis Beginning in July, the College of Business and College of Science are collaborating to offer a Master of Science in Data Science and Analytics. The degree will be offered totally online and will cater to working professionals.
“Right now mental health disorders are defined in terms of symptoms and we want to be defining them based on biological mechanisms,” [Sean] Hill said. “That’s the Holy Grail of where we want to go.”
And that’s what the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics, officially opened Thursday at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, promises to do. One of the goals of the new research hub is to combine machine learning and data science, and apply it to neuroscience.
Medidata’s cloud-based services help with the development of therapeutic innovations and clinical operations performance for pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology firms and others.
Medidata acquired by Dassault Systèmes for $5.8 billion
French 3-D and product lifecycle management specialist Dassault Systèmes has acquired Medidata Solutions, a provider of SaaS-based clinical development software, for $5.8 billion.
The University of Oregon and Oregon Health & Science University announced plans today for a joint center in biomedical data science, empowering researchers at both institutions to attack cancer with big data.
The partnership would combine efforts at the UO’s Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact with those at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute to detect and fight deadly forms of cancer and other diseases in a jointly operated center initially involving as many as 20 researchers and their teams. The research center will develop new approaches to quickly and efficiently analyze large groupings of data, allowing researchers to “listen in” on cell development for early detection of lethal diseases.
Powerful new AI software has effectively democratized the creation of convincing “deepfake” videos, making it easier than ever to fabricate someone appearing to say or do something they didn’t really do, from harmless satires and film tweaks to targeted harassment and deepfake porn.
And researchers fear it’s only a matter of time before the videos are deployed for maximum damage — to sow confusion, fuel doubt or undermine an opponent, potentially on the eve of a White House vote.
“We are outgunned,” said Hany Farid, a computer-science professor and digital-forensics expert at the University of California at Berkeley. “The number of people working on the video-synthesis side, as opposed to the detector side, is 100 to 1.”
The NIH and the FBI are targeting ethnic Chinese scientists, including U.S. citizens, searching for a cancer cure. Here’s the first account of what happened to Xifeng Wu.
PR Web, Pitt School of Health and Rehabilitation Services
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The University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS) today launched its first-ever online Master of Science in Health Informatics (MSHI) degree program to address the growing need for professionals who can use data to improve the quality of care.
This new program is part of a larger effort for SHRS to bring more graduate degrees online. The Master of Science in Health Informatics program will enroll its first cohort in January 2020. The school is poised to bring three more programs online with Noodle Partners through Fall 2021.
In this post, I share slides and notes from a keynote that Roger Chen and I gave at the 2019 Artificial Intelligence conference in New York City. In this short summary, I highlight results from a — survey (AI Adoption in the Enterprise) and describe recent trends in AI. Over the past decade, AI and machine learning (ML) have become extremely active research areas: the web site arxiv.org had an average daily upload of around 100 machine learning papers in 2018. With all the research that has been conducted over the past few years, it’s fair to say that we now have entered the implementation phase for many AI technologies. Companies are beginning to translate research results and developments into products and services.
An early indicator of commercial activity and interest is the number of patent filings. I was fortunate enough to contribute to a recent research report from the World Intellectual Patent Office (WIPO) that examined worldwide patent filings in areas pertaining to AI and machine learning. One of their key findings is that the number of patent filings is growing fast: in fact, the ratio of patent filings to scientific publications indicates that patent filings are growing at a faster rate than publications.
When Kathryn Dellinger moved to the Pacific Northwest five years ago to take a position at Amazon, she fretted over friends and relatives back home in Virginia as successive hurricanes tore apart coastal towns on the East Coast.
But when wildfires ripped through Washington State last summer, filling the Seattle area with smoke, Dellinger had someone new in her life to worry about: her first child.
“I was really freaking out,” she says. “All I could think about is I have this little baby who is breathing this stuff in any time I take him outside. What’s his future going to be like? I just have these moments when I’m so scared for him.”
To identify bacteria, labs still rely on century-old techniques from Louis Pasteur — putting a few drops of blood or other sample in a lab dish and waiting days or sometimes weeks to see what germs grow. To test for a virus, a doctor usually has to guess what the patient is sick with. Testing for a fungus or some other things can take a long time.
Several companies and university labs now offer gene-based tests on blood or spinal fluid. Once fragments of foreign DNA or other genetic material are found, their code is analyzed, or sequenced, to identify bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites causing sepsis, meningitis, encephalitis and other deadly illnesses.
“The key advantage of sequencing is it can look for everything at once” rather than doing separate tests for each virus or other microbe that’s suspected, said Dr. Charles Chiu, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Harvard University, Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
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Cambridge, MA June 19-21 at Harvard University. “Over three days of presentations, posters, workshops, working group meetings, and informal networking, we aim to promote and learn about behavioral and technical solutions and standards for curating, sharing, and preserving data that can be discovered and reused across disciplines to reproduce and advance research.” [registration required]
Harvard Medical School, Blavatnik Institute for Systems Biology
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Boston, MA June 18, starting at 8 a.m., Harvard Medical School Joseph B. Martin Conference Center (77 Ave. Louis Pasteur). [free, registration required]
Denver, CO July 29. “Members of the Committee on Meetings chose a panel session reporting on the NSF workshop, ‘Statistics at a Crossroads: Challenges and Opportunities in the Data Science Era.'”
London, England June 15. “Curated by the award-winning WIRED editorial team, WIRED Pulse: AI at the Barbican focuses on the impact of artificial intelligence on the human experience. Co-presented by the Barbican, the event is the official headline consumer event of London Tech Week, and will welcome hundreds of attendees interested in artificial intelligence, technology and the future.” [$$]
Berkeley, CA September 11-13. “APPLY NOW, to attend ImageXD 2019. Participants will be selected based on their submitted abstracts, and participants with the most highly rated abstracts will be invited to give 20-minute presentations.” Deadline to apply is June 28.
“Matrix is an open source project that publishes the Matrix open standard for secure, decentralised, real-time communication, and its Apache licensed
reference implementations.”
The Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Blog, Kate Rakelly
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“For agents that must take actions and collect their own experience, meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) holds the promise of enabling fast adaptation to new scenarios. Unfortunately, while the trained policy can adapt quickly to new tasks, the meta-training process requires large amounts of data from a range of training tasks, exacerbating the sample inefficiency that plagues RL algorithms. As a result, existing meta-RL algorithms are largely feasible only in simulated environments. In this post, we’ll briefly survey the current landscape of meta-RL and then introduce a new algorithm called PEARL that drastically improves sample efficiency by orders of magnitude.”
