On June 18, 2019, Sorbonne University inaugurated the Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI). Gérard Biau, professor at the Laboratory of Probability, Statistics and Modeling1, is the director. Below, he sheds light on the missions and objectives of this center of excellence dedicated to research, teaching and innovation in artificial intelligence.
Over the last couple of years, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has added to its already broad portfolio of storage, which includes 3PAR arrays, which HPE bought in 2010, and its homegrown XP7 lineup, aimed at mission-critical workloads that need high availability and uptime. In 2017, HPE bought Nimble Storage, spending $1.2 billion for the flash and hybrid storage vendor. The Nimble deal was announced a week after HPE said it was buying hyperconverged infrastructure vendor SimpliVity, another cog in the growing storage offerings.
With the Nimble acquisition, HPE also inherited the storage vendor’s InfoSight predictive analytics platform, a key technology that leverages artificial intelligence techniques to drive greater insights and automation around the huge amounts of data enterprises are collecting, storing and analyzing. HPE has taken InfoSight and begun extending it to other products, including its 3PAR and SimpliVity.
Strong privacy legislation in the United States is possible, necessary, and long overdue. EFF emphasizes the following concrete recommendations for proposed legislation regarding consumer data privacy.
Three Top Priorities
First, we outline three of our biggest priorities: avoiding federal preemption, ensuring consumers have a private right of action, and using non-discrimination rules to avoid pay-for-privacy schemes.
Today it takes 22 minutes to walk from one end of Microsoft’s sprawling 500-acre headquarters to the other. But that long-distance hike will shrink to a seven-minute stroll when the tech giant is finished with a major refresh of the original swath of campus, the storied ground from which the company rose to dominate the PC software industry.
Uniting the sprawling campus through better pedestrian access is a key aspect of Microsoft’s plans to redevelop 72 acres of its headquarters here. First announced in November 2017, the plans are now taking shape, and GeekWire got an exclusive first look at new images of the buildings, and more details about the company’s priorities for the project.
The future of manufacturing is software defined. You don’t have to look further than ABB to understand why companies are turning to 5G networks, artificial intelligence, and computer vision. The Swiss company is using these new tools to boost reliability and agility in its nearly 300 factories around the world, which produce a host of goods, from simple plastic zip ties to complex robotic arms.
For ABB and other companies pushing software-defined networking, it’s all about being safer while adapting to a growing clamor for personalized products.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computers and Society; David Rolnick et al.
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Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and we, as machine learning experts, may wonder how we can help. Here we describe how machine learning can be a powerful tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping society adapt to a changing climate. From smart grids to disaster management, we identify high impact problems where existing gaps can be filled by machine learning, in collaboration with other fields. Our recommendations encompass exciting research questions as well as promising business opportunities. We call on the machine learning community to join the global effort against climate change.
The National Science Foundation is awarding a second round of funding for the Regional Big Data Innovation Hubs — organizations launched in 2015 to build and strengthen data science partnerships across industry, academia, nonprofits and government to address scientific and societal challenges.
Each of the hubs will receive $4 million over four years for a total investment of $16 million, double the budget for the first round of Big Data Hubs awards.
Nvidia has announced the launch of a ‘technology centre’ through which it aims to foster artificial intelligence (AI) and data science research and education in the UK, with three founding members: The Hartree Centre, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Reading.
The Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub has been awarded a four year, $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue its work in building cross-sector data science partnerships that address societal challenges, spur economic development, and accelerate big data innovation. The Northeast Hub was launched in 2015 with a grant from the NSF. This second round of funding validates the efforts of the Hub to harness the data revolution for social impact.
During its first three years of operations, the Northeast Hub built a network of more than 200 organizations throughout the Northeastern United States and beyond.
In the wake of reports that the Chinese government is using artificial intelligence-based technology to track and detain some of its citizens, a Newfoundland and Labrador scientist is questioning how AI is being used and who should answer for its misuse — and he’s not alone.
“It seems to me that there’s not enough people actively fighting against what’s happening,” said David Churchill, an associate computer science professor at Memorial University (MUN) in St. John’s.
Big tech giants generally don’t have to follow federal health privacy laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and their state equivalents as long as they don’t offer medical services. Facebook can avoid direct liability for user posts by making user moderators responsible for following platform privacy rules and redacting sensitive health data.
“Because there aren’t health privacy laws for social media, they must rely on Facebook’s” and other tech giant’s general privacy policies, Dena Mendelsohn, senior policy counsel at Consumer Reports, said in an interview.
A social media platform’s privacy policy generally limits the company’s liability from content posted by users, Timothy Butler, privacy attorney at Troutman Sanders in Atlanta, said. That can leave users stuck in a tricky situation figuring out whether privacy or contract claims can be brought against moderators for posting health data without permission or outside of a group’s rules, he said.
Certain studies require sensitive data sets: the relationship between nutritious school lunch and student health, the effectiveness of salary equity initiatives, and so on. Valuable insights require navigating a minefield of private, personal information. Now, after years of work, cryptographers and data scientists at Google have come up with a technique to enable this “multiparty computation” without exposing information to anyone who didn’t already have it.
Today Google will release an open source cryptographic tool known as Private Join and Compute. It facilitates the process of joining numeric columns from different data sets to calculate a sum, count, or average on data that is encrypted and unreadable during its entire mathematical journey. Only the results of the computation can be decrypted and viewed by all parties—meaning that you only get the results, not the data you didn’t already own.
The Conversation, Alexander Strang and Peter Thomas
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With 24 declared candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination (and counting), many Americans are likely wondering how the party will ultimately make up its mind and settle on the best candidate.
As mathematicians, we wondered whether there might not even be a best candidate. In fact, this is an established mathematical paradox. The more candidates there are, the greater the chance there is no clear favorite.
In health care, [Jonathan] Zittrain said, AI is particularly problematic because of how easily it can be duped into reaching false conclusions. As an example, he showed an image of a cat that a Google algorithm had correctly categorized as a tabby cat. On the next slide was a nearly identical picture of the cat, with only a few pixels changed, and Google was 100 percent positive that the image on the screen was guacamole.
“This is a frontline system … installed across the world for image recognition, and it can be tricked that easily,” Zittrain said. “OK, so now let’s put this in the world of medicine: How do you feel when the [algorithm] spits out with 100 percent confidence that guacamole is what you need to cure what ails you?”
He was part of a panel that explored the pitfalls of applying AI in medicine and the many ethical, political, and scientific questions that must be addressed to ensure its safety and effectiveness. Here’s a look at the key points discussed during the event at Harvard Medical School.
Genetically engineered trees that provide fire-resistant lumber for homes. Modified organs that won’t be rejected. Synthetic microbes that monitor your gut to detect invading disease organisms and kill them before you get sick.
These are just some of the exciting advances likely to emerge from the 20-year-old field of engineering biology, or synthetic biology, which is now mature enough to provide solutions to a range of societal problems, according to a new roadmap released today (June 19) by the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, a public-private partnership partially funded by the National Science Foundation and centered at the University of California, Berkeley.
The roadmap is the work of more than 80 scientists and engineers from a range of disciplines, representing more than 30 universities and a dozen companies. While highly technical, the report provides a strong case that the federal government should invest in this area, not only to improve public health, food crops and the environment, but also to fuel the economy and maintain the country’s leadership in synthetic biology.
London, England September 5-6. “BX2019 will gather together the world’s leading policy-makers, academics and practitioners to explore new frontiers in behavioural science.” [$$$$]
“The fall class of the Aspen Institute’s Newmark Cyber Journalism Fellows will meet from Tuesday, October 15th through Friday, October 18th, 2019 in Washington, D.C. Applications for this fall fellowship class are due by midnight on Wednesday, July 3. Successful applicants will be notified in mid-July. Fellows must participate in all four days.”
“PyRobot is a framework and ecosystem that enables AI researchers and students to get up and running with a robot in just a few hours, without specialized knowledge of the hardware or of details such as device drivers, control, and planning.”