Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/8395f842-7712-11e9-be7d-6d846537acab
Of course, not all companies can — or should, or would even want to — build a business on monetising data. For the majority, their interest in AI and data analytics will be in the application of tools to their existing business models and processes to enable reduced costs, better targeting, greater efficiency or deeper customer insight, among other benefits. They know, or will soon find out the hard way, that if they don’t capitalise on the vast amount of data up for grabs — either because they trust “old-school” intuition or because they simply don’t have the technical or human resources to handle it effectively — then someone else will, and they risk being left behind.
Managers and executives don’t need to learn the detail of data analysis methods and tools. But they do need to understand the business and strategic challenges and opportunities that those methods and tools could address, while empowering specialists who understand the technicalities to lead the work. Staying on the technical frontier is as much an organisational challenge as it is a technical one, requiring structures that enable managers and technical specialists to talk meaningfully to each other.
Each camera captured nearly 90 minutes of video. The footage supported studies of software with person recognition technology, and the inter-connected cameras allowed researchers to test trackers from one zone to the next.
“The data were then placed on a public website. As a result of this significant deviation from the approved protocol, the public website was taken down on April 25, 2019, and there are no plans to reopen it,” Schoenfeld said.
MegaPixels, an independent research project that reviews face recognition image datasets and research, assessed the MTMC project and its use by researchers around the world. MegaPixels found dozens of reports of the duke data sets use, nearly half of which came from China. Two are from Chinese military academies, while many others are from private companies.
The latest dispute in higher education, highlighted by a recent three-day walkout at the University of Chicago, is whether graduate students in private universities should be allowed to unionize. A federal government ruling made this possible in 2016, but that policy may soon be reversed.
As a faculty member, I believe unionization would be a mistake, most of all in the longer run.
The Oregon State study, and others like it, carry on — despite the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to roll back environmental protections, remove the United States from international climate treaties and cast doubts on climate science. Decadeslong research programs like Oregon State University’s Cooperative Institute for Marine Resource Studies (CIMRS) continue, thanks to independent university partnerships with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which funds projects, keeping them surprisingly insulated from politics.
Throughout the country, there are 16 similar cooperative institutes, partnered with 43 universities, according to Monica Allen, a spokeswoman for NOAA. These institutes and the projects they conduct help NOAA meet its mission “to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts,” Allen said in a written statement.
The resulting work allows NOAA to share results with others to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources.
Wearable fitness trackers have made it all too easy for us to make assumptions about our health. We may look to our heart rate to determine whether we really felt the stress of that presentation at work this morning, or think ourselves healthier based on the number of steps we’ve taken by the end of the day.
But to get a better reading on your overall health and wellness, you’d be better off looking at the strength and structure of your circle of friends, according to a new study in the Public Library of Science journal, PLOS One.
While previous studies have shown how beliefs, opinions and attitudes spread throughout our social networks, researchers at the University of Notre Dame were interested in what the structure of social networks says about the state of health, happiness and stress.
“We were interested in the topology of the social network — what does my position within my social network predict about my health and well-being?” said Nitesh V. Chawla,
On the occasion of 2019 International Conference on Machine Learning last week in Long Beach, California, Synced spoke with Dr. Bengio on the Turing Award, ICML, global AI trends, etc.
You, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton and Dr. Yann LeCun winning the Turing Award is a big deal and exciting news for the AI community. What was the first thing you did when you heard the news?
It’s funny that you ask, because the first thing they (ACM) told me on the phone was you’re not supposed to tell anyone! (laughs) Of course my first impulse was to tell a lot of people. They said I could talk to my family a little bit. It was hard to inhibit myself from talking about it until three weeks later when it was announced publicly.
After I got the news, it’s kind of amazing, right? But in a way it’s a very short-lived feeling. It’s like you win the lottery, but then one day later, you’re still the same person.
The next thing that came to me, emotionally speaking, is, well, this prize really shouldn’t be just a prize for three researchers.
NumFOCUS is very pleased to announce that Terry Foor has been hired as the first Development Director for the organization. … We are thrilled to have Terry on board and working to ensure that NumFOCUS will have the resources it needs to fully carry out our vision of an inclusive scientific and research community that utilizes actively supported open source software to make impactful discoveries for a better world.
First things first, it’s not social data science, it is social data science!
Do you see the difference between these? What I’m trying to say is that it’s Social data-science rather than social-data Science. It’s not data science applied to social data, it’s a data science that is social. And I don’t mean a data science that is talkative and fun to be around, I mean a data science that borrows from social sciences. Maybe it’d be better to call it social science data science or social data science science. How about computational social science?
Looker and Tableau have been successful because of their ability to open up business intelligence to users outside of IT who had previously never had the appropriate interface to work with data effectively. Users of these platforms come from various lines of business. As long as the data is clean and well-structured, anyone in an organization can quickly pick up Looker or Tableau, access data, and find the answers they need. By embedding these capabilities into their platforms, Google and Salesforce can empower a broader range of users to visualize diverse data across various applications.
Cloud native is a requirement of the modern data stack
The word “cloud” can have a million different meanings depending on who you’re speaking to and the context of the conversation. A technology vendor claiming support for “cloud deployment” can range from supporting a traditional application/server architecture in the cloud to supporting native cloud processing, security, access controls, elastic scale, etc. As the momentum towards cloud continues, organizations will quickly find that in order to fully modernize their operations to capture the benefits of the cloud, they will need native integration with cloud services. This is not only applicable to business intelligence but to the entire modern data stack, including data preparation, quality, cataloging, machine learning and data science.
There’s another explanation for how the company selected these two pricey locales over hundreds of lower-cost options. It revolves around a set of ideas developed by a West Coast economist named Enrico Moretti—ideas that directly challenge the old world-is-flat consensus.
The jobs of tomorrow, Moretti’s research shows, aren’t heading to affordable markets offering lucrative public subsidies. They’re going to thrumming, dynamic cities that are already home to dense concentrations of highly educated workers. There are only a few of them, but these regions, the economist argues, offer employers such as Amazon advantages even more valuable than tax perks.
Moretti is not a household name, though his work is increasingly influential. One of the people he has influenced is Moret, the man in charge of Northern Virginia’s Amazon bid, who considers himself a disciple. As it happened—and unbeknownst to Moret at the time—Amazon executives were reading from the same text.
University of Southern California, Viterbi School of Engineering
from
In the 1960s cartoon The Jetsons, the future was a world full of self-driving cars and sassy, meticulous robots. Individuals, like the patriarch George, could move through space—and the shower—without having to lift a finger. The mechanisms around him played a pivotal role in making decisions on his behalf, based on a learned understanding of his most basic preferences. For a while, this future seemed distant, but upon us now is an unprecedented opportunity to merge human behavior and preferences with automation to create a personalized, dynamic and improved daily reality for individuals at work and at home.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced technologies for sensing, communication and actuation have been applied successfully to everything from our cars to personal assistants to entertainment. But when it comes to implementing it in our buildings—the places in which we live and work—things become more delicate. Last week, the Center for Intelligent Environments (CENTIENTS) launched to examine the bi-directional interactions between humans and buildings and define an emerging field. The center aims to pave the way forward for smarter, more comfortable and more personalized buildings.
“We are envisioning an unprecedented built environment–one that knows its users, their needs, desires and goals,” said Burçin Becerik-Gerber, co-director and Stephen Schrank Early Career Chair and professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to upend the practice of medicine, boosting the efficiency and accuracy of diagnosis in specialties that rely on images, such as radiology and pathology. But as the technology gallops ahead, experts are grappling with its potential downsides. “Just working with the technology, I see lots of ways it can fail,” says Albert Hsiao, a radiologist at the University of California, San Diego, who has developed algorithms for reading cardiac images and improving their quality. One major concern: Most AI software is designed and tested in one hospital, and it risks faltering when transferred to another.
Last month in the Journal of the American College of Radiology, U.S. government scientists, regulators, and doctors published a road map describing how to convert research-based AI into improved medical imaging on patients. Among other things, the authors urged more collaboration across disciplines in building and testing AI algorithms, and intensive validation of algorithms before they reach patients. For now, Hsiao says, “I would want a human physician no matter what,” even if a machine hums alongside.
This report examines current and trend data on course access, enrollment, and equity in computer science education across California.
Key findings from this report include:
Just 39% of high schools in California offer computer science courses, and only 14% offer Advanced Placement Computer Science A.
Low-income schools are 4x less likely to offer AP CS A than high-income schools and high-URM schools are 3x less likely to offer AP CS A than low-URM schools
Grace Vanden Heuvel takes math courses online just for fun. She also likes to play music, especially percussion — “anything I can hit, bang or make noise out of.” She’s even written a few of her own compositions.
But at age 15, she has one other important distinction. She did something many other students in Wisconsin won’t get a chance to do: She completed AP Computer Science.
The Hortonville High School freshman (now a rising sophomore) could do that because of a program that pairs tech professionals with classroom teachers. Hortonville High just finished its second year with TEALS — or Technology Education and Literacy in Schools. It’s one of 34 Wisconsin schools that have embraced the program, which was created by the philanthropic arm of the tech giant Microsoft.
TEALS is one of Microsoft’s answers to a serious shortage of computer science professionals in the U.S.
Honolulu, HI October 30-31. “As part of the Mathematical Sciences Collaborative Diversity Initiatives, six mathematics institutes are pleased to host their annual SACNAS pre-conference event, the 2019 Modern Math Workshop (MMW). The Modern Math Workshop is designed to encourage undergraduates from underrepresented minority groups to pursue careers in the mathematical sciences.” [registration required]
Washington, DC October 24-26. “Comprehensive three-day forum to educate and inform public sector agencies on the strategic and tactical benefits of deploying AI and cognitive technologies. With AI technology at the forefront of our everyday lives, data-driven government services are now possible from federal, state, and local agencies. This has led to the rapid rise in availability and use of intelligent automation solutions.” [$$$$]
