Google’s data-driven approach has long applied to its own workplaces. It has crafted onboarding and maternity leave practices around insights derived from employee statistics, gathered figures to investigate what makes the best teams, and designed its cafeteria around finely documented observations, like the importance of making dried figs easier to reach than chocolate.
But now it’s supporting an employee-led program for which it is not collecting any metrics whatsoever.
The program is called Blue Dot, and it’s something akin to peer-to-peer counseling, though Google will never call it that—partly because it doesn’t want to suggest that Blue Dot could replace professional therapy or medical care, and because Blue Dot volunteers don’t coach people or even offer opinions. Rather, they practice compassionate listening, promising openness and kindness to co-workers who come to them.
The Emory Healthcare Innovation Hub today announced Konica Minolta Healthcare, Novo Nordisk, Philips and Stryker as its newest strategic partners committed to improving the patient care and provider experience by using information technology to solve the most pressing problems facing health care.
The Innovation Hub, along with partner Sharecare, uses a demand-driven innovation approach, developed with 11ITEN Innovation Partners, to identify improvement through the eyes of the end user and to develop solutions with the greatest impact on cost, quality and health outcomes in the state of Georgia and across the U.S. Initial areas of focus include precision medicine, genetics, trauma/emergency medicine, orthopedics, obesity and rural access to care through telehealth.
Ariella Russcol specializes in drama at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Queens, New York, and the senior’s performance on this April afternoon didn’t disappoint. While the library is normally the quietest room in the school, her ear-piercing screams sounded more like a horror movie than study hall. But they weren’t enough to set off a small microphone in the ceiling that was supposed to detect aggression.
A few days later, at the Staples Pathways Academy in Westport, Connecticut, junior Sami D’Anna inadvertently triggered the same device with a less spooky sound — a coughing fit from a lingering chest cold. As she hacked and rasped, a message popped up on its web interface: “StressedVoice detected.”
“There we go,” D’Anna said with amusement, looking at the screen. “There’s my coughs.”
The students were helping ProPublica test an aggression detector that’s used in hundreds of schools, health care facilities, banks, stores and prisons worldwide, including more than 100 in the U.S. Sound Intelligence, the Dutch company that makes the software for the device, plans to open an office this year in Chicago, where its chief executive will be based.
Soon, you might not need anything more specialized than a readily accessible touchscreen device and any existing data sets you have access to in order to build powerful prediction tools. A new experiment from MIT and Brown University researchers have added a capability to their ‘Northstar’ interactive data system that can “instantly generate machine-learning models” to use with their exiting data sets in order to generate useful predictions.
Sandia National Laboratory, Sandia Labs News Releases
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Homeowners and businesses may now have an easier time getting solar panels on rooftops thanks to software developed at Sandia.
The new software can run a detailed, second-by-second simulation, known as quasi-static time series analysis, that shows utility companies how rooftop solar panels at a specific house or business would interact with a local electrical grid throughout the year.
Matthew Reno, Sandia National Laboratories
Utility companies need the analysis because they must deliver electricity at the standard voltage used to run everything from refrigerators to phone chargers. Large amounts of solar generation in one section of a city can lead to extreme voltage fluctuations, which can damage household electronics.
In a pair of papers published last year (in the Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing and the IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, respectively), the researchers set forth an efficient approximation algorithm for nearest neighbor search that covers a wide class of distance functions. Their algorithm finds, if not the very closest neighbor, then one that’s almost as close, which is good enough for many applications.
The distance functions covered by the new algorithm, called norms, “encompass the majority of interesting distance functions,” said Piotr Indyk, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The new algorithm is a big leap forward, Pagh said, who added, “I wouldn’t have guessed such a general result was possible.”
Global technology and industrial manufacturing company Siemens has announced a new Industry 4.0. academic teaching programme in partnership with UK universities.
Called Connected Curriculum, the aim is to bring advanced industrial tools, data and approaches into the universities’ respective apprenticeship, undergraduate and masters courses.
The program follows accelerated interest by Siemens in UK additive manufacturing. Last year, the company established a £27 million 3D printing facility in Worcester, UK, which was followed participation in opening a £24 million research facility at the University of Nottingham (UoN), built to accelerate advanced manufacturing technologies.
Until recently, there wasn’t a way to measure those human activities, like run-off from farming, shellfish aquaculture and coastal development.
Researchers in Nova Scotia at Dalhousie University and the Bedford Institute of Oceanography have changed that. They analyzed data for a number of factors, including nutrient pollution, population density, coastal land protection, land use, invasive species, commercial fishing and aquaculture, and figured out how to quantify those activities.
“Seagrass beds are incredibly important,” said lead author Grace Murphy, a post-doctoral researcher in the biology department at Dalhousie. “I like to think of them as kind of an underwater forest.”
Somerville, Massachusetts just became the second U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition in public space.
The “Face Surveillance Full Ban Ordinance,” which passed through Somerville’s City Council on Thursday night, forbids any “department, agency, bureau, and/or subordinate division of the City of Somerville” from using facial recognition software in public spaces. The ordinance passed Somerville’s Legislative Matters Committee on earlier this week.
The world of computing, from chips to software to systems, is going to change dramatically in coming years as a result of the spread of machine learning. We may still refer to these computers as “Universal Turing Machines,” as we have for eighty years or more. But in practice they will be different from the way they have been built and used up to now.
Such a change is of interest both to anyone who cares about what computers do, and to anyone who’s interested in machine learning in all its forms.
In February, Facebook’s head of A.I. research, Yann LeCun, gave a talk at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, one of the longest running computer chip conferences in the world. At ISSCC, LeCun made plain the importance of computer technology to A.I. research.
“Hardware capabilities and software tools both motivate and limit the type of ideas that AI researchers will imagine and will allow themselves to pursue,” said LeCun. “The tools at our disposal fashion our thoughts more than we care to admit.”
Episode 90 of Voices in AI features Byron speaking with Norman Sadeh from Carnegie Mellon University about the nature of intelligence and how AI effects our privacy. [audio, 43:27]
Researchers from CSIRO’s Data61, the data and digital specialist arm of Australia’s national science agency, have developed a world-first set of techniques to effectively ‘vaccinate’ algorithms against adversarial attacks, a significant advancement in machine learning research. … Dr Richard Nock, machine learning group leader at CSIRO’s Data61 said that by adding a layer of noise (i.e. an adversary) over an image, attackers can deceive machine learning models into misclassifying the image.
Apple, the company made famous by its unique designs, did not name a replacement for Ive, who carries the title “chief design officer” and reports directly to CEO Tim Cook. Instead, two vice presidents, Evans Hankey and Alan Dye, were put in charge of hardware and software design, respectively. They’ll report to chief operating officer Jeff Williams, not Cook. That alarmed longtime Apple watcher and online columnist John Gruber.
Before Sidewalk Labs’ recent digital presser even began, it wanted reporters to know that building a globally significant community would require plenty of documentation. Having to haul the physical master plan upstairs to my apartment was an endeavor unto itself. Opening the package revealed a massive, sleek four-book compilation—designed by Pentagram—that spans 1,500 pages. The 253-page overview states, however, it’s still “a work-in-progress meant to be refined by further consideration.”
Bluster followed by caution—that was the dynamic at play during Monday’s press conference. The company insisted that the 190-acre district, now known as the Innovative Development and Economic Acceleration (IDEA) District, can become a global model for equity, technology, sustainability, and all other buzzwords in modern urban policy. At the same time, it also sought to assure Toronto citizens and government they still have a stake determining the project’s future.
Seattle, WA December 17-19. “This is aimed at early-career researchers, including graduate students and postdocs, who are familiar with the basics such as the Unix shell, version control with Git, and Python programming, and would like to learn more about best-practices for developing research software.” [save the date]
Honolulu, HI January 26-28, 2020. “Only a multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder effort can find the best ways to address these concerns, including experts of various disciplines, such as ethics, philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, law, history, and politics. In order to address these issues in a scientific context, AAAI and ACM have joined forces to start a new conference, the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.” [$$$]
Washington, DC July 18, starting at 8 a.m., WeWork Universal North (1875 Connecticut Ave NW, 10th Floor). “IARPA’s CASE Challenge seeks novel methods to measure the performance of credibility assessment techniques and technologies. Credibility assessment refers to both the assessment of the truthfulness of specific claims and to the assessment of the reliability, honesty, and trustworthiness of a source of a particular claim, whether that be an individual, group, or a broader organization or entity.” Workshop registration deadline is July 10.
“To build a stronger evidence base, MIT GOV/LAB is piloting an open call for research proposals on topics related to citizen engagement and government accountability in a diversity of contexts.” Deadline for submissions is August 31.
Welcome to the second issue of Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spatial community. Each issue I’ll highlight the most interesting and inspiring things that I’ve found — cool demos, new tools, tutorials, beautiful maps, interviews, behind-the-scenes and more.
University of California-Santa Barbara, The UCSB Current
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Providing a concise introduction to a complex topic like big data is a tall order. But Dawn Holmes has managed it in less than 120 pages.
Her book, “Big Data: A Very Short Introduction,” helps those who are new to the field familiarize themselves with its core concepts. She seems to have struck a chord, as the book is already available in two languages — English and Spanish — with Chinese, Japanese and Slovenian translations soon to come.
National Institutes of Health, Office of Extramural Research, Dr. Michael Lauer
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We are pleased to announce a new webform that allows for anybody in the biomedical research community to share information related to a potential case of sexual harassment directly and, if desired, anonymously, to NIH. The establishment of this webform, in tandem with other actions, is taken as part of our continuing commitment to address the underlying culture that enables sexual harassment to take place.
When forecasting time series with a hierarchical structure, the existing state of the art is to forecast each time series independently, and, in a post-treatment step, to reconcile the time series in a way that respects the hierarchy (Hyndman et al., 2011; Wickramasuriya et al., 2018). We propose a new loss function that can be incorporated into any maximum likelihood objective with hierarchical data, resulting in reconciled estimates with confidence intervals that correctly account for additional uncertainty due to imperfect reconciliation. We evaluate our method using a non-linear model and synthetic data on a counterfactual forecasting problem, where we have access to the ground truth and contemporaneous covariates, and show that we largely improve over the existing state-of-the-art method.