A new study finds a close connection between transit access and startups of all types—not just high-tech startups. The study, by Kevin Credit from the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago, uses advanced spatial econometric techniques to examine the connection between transit and business startups in five cities. Two of them, San Jose (Silicon Valley) and Austin, are well-documented startup hubs with underdeveloped transit infrastructure; two others, Philadelphia and Cleveland, have reasonably well-developed transit systems but low rates of startup activity; and Boston has both a high level of startup activity and an established transit system.
Looking to give the 2020 Summer Olympics something a little different — something a little humanoid — organizers on Monday unveiled several robots expected to be part of the experience in Tokyo next year.
Technology has been an emphasis during the build-up to the Games — scheduled to begin a year from Wednesday — with Panasonic and Toyota joining the effort to develop automated helpers.
“It’s one of the unique initiatives,” Masa Takaya, a Tokyo 2020 spokesman, said during an interview at the organizing headquarters.
The “Tokyo 2020 Robot Project” will be employed on and off the field.
Microsoft is investing $1 billion in OpenAI to support us building artificial general intelligence (AGI) with widely distributed economic benefits. We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We’ll jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider—so we’ll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems.
The researchers from Penn State, AccuWeather, Inc. and the University of Almería in Spain developed a framework based on machine learning linear classifiers — a kind of artificial intelligence — that detects from satellite images rotational movements in clouds that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.
“The very best forecasting incorporates as much data as possible,” said Steve Wistar, senior forensic meteorologist at AccuWeather. “There’s so much to take in, as the atmosphere is infinitely complex.”
Getting AGI right may be one of the most important challenges ahead for humanity. Microsoft’s billion dollar investment has the potential to push the frontiers forward for AI development, but to get AGI right, investors have to be willing to prioritize safety concerns that might slow commercial development.
The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has joined hands with Google to train experts in artificial intelligence (AI).
KAIST announced on July 21 that it has signed a two-year industrial-educational partnership agreement at the main campus in Daejeon on July 19. It has been working together with Google since last year to operate Asia’s first “AI intensive research awards program.”
With the latest agreement, KAIST will run seven cooperative programs in the future. The programs include AI intensive research awards PhD fellowship, a program which helps students to take part in international conference, curriculum development and support, Google cloud platform training support, Google internship and Google visit.
The startup incubator at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence is getting so busy that it has to move into new digs across the street.
Starting Aug. 12, the incubator will occupy a 7,250-square-foot “long-term home” at 2101 N. 34th St., near Gasworks Park and AI2’s main offices on Northlake Way, the institute said in its email newsletter for friends and families.
“We anticipate having 50+ workstations for our EIRs and CTOs [entrepreneurs in residence and chief technology officers] — complemented by numerous team pods, phone booths, conference rooms, a classroom, a lounge and our own large outdoor deck overlooking Lake Union,” AI2 said.
Looking for that perfect recipe, or a new flavor combination that delights the senses?
Increasingly, players in the food industry are embracing artificial intelligence to better understand the dynamics of flavor, aroma and other factors that go into making a food product a success.
Earlier this year, IBM became a surprise entrant to the food sector, announcing a partnership with seasonings maker McCormick to “explore flavor territories more quickly and efficiently using AI to learn and predict new flavor combinations” by collected data from millions of data points.
The partnership highlights how technology is being used to disrupt the food industry by helping develop new products and respond to consumer preferences and offer improved nutrition and flavor.
Protecting scientists, their research, and their data and ensuring data availability without government meddling is the aim of legislation recently introduced in the US House of Representatives.
The bill, called the Scientific Integrity Act (H.R. 1709), was introduced in March and has 192 cosponsors. It was the subject of discussion at a July 17 hearing of the Subcommittee on Research and Technology of the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, & Technology.
Amazon’s announcement that it will invest US$700 million to retrain 100,000 employees – a third of its U.S. workforce – in new technologies is the latest reminder that the much-heralded future of work is well underway.
Policymakers, analysts and scholars trying to discern the retailer’s motives and objectives chalked it up to a public relations move or the natural result of a tight labor market. Others deemed it standard retraining and investment.
Lost in the reaction, however, is what it means for the rest of us workers. As an expert in technology disruption, I believe the main message in Amazon’s announcement is clear and indisputable: The jobs of tomorrow will require at least some competency in the STEM fields – science, technology, engineering and math.
One of the more extravagant claims made by tech companies is that they can detect emotions by analyzing photos of our faces with machine learning systems. The premise is sometimes dressed up in claims about “micro-expressions” that are below the threshold of human detection, though some vendors have made billions getting security agencies to let them train officers in “behavior detection” grounded in this premise.
A panel of eminent psych researchers have signed an open letter condemning these products as grounded in “outdated science.” The authors cite more than 1,000 journal articles that show that facial expressions are complex and cannot be classified using the techniques promoted by the self-interested commercial peddlers of emotion detection systems: a scowl is not a reliable indicator of anger, nor is a smile a reliable indicator of happiness.
Arizona State University announced today that it has been selected by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to build a field-deployable, point-of-care device that will determine in 30 minutes or less if a person has been exposed to weapons of mass destruction or their precursors. The DARPA award, worth up to $38.8 million over four years in phases and options, will build on the university’s growing capabilities in developing molecular diagnostics for applications in defense and human health.
The device will be capable of detecting the health effects of a number of substances associated with weapons of mass destruction, including biological agents, radiation, chemicals and explosives.
Carleton University’s Michael Weiss, an associate professor in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, received a $560,000 grant from the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), PROMPT and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to fund an Open Source Cyber Fusion Centre as part of the Cybersecurity R&D Challenge. The award will be shared with co-principal investigator, Mourad Debbabi, at Concordia University.
Vast stretches of Earth’s northern latitudes are on fire right now. Hot weather has engulfed a huge portion of the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland to Siberia. That’s helped create conditions ripe for wildfires, including some truly massive ones burning in remote parts of the region that are being seen by satellites.
Pierre Markuse, a satellite imagery processing guru, has documented some of the blazes attacking the forests and peatlands of the Arctic. The imagery reveals the delicate landscapes with braided rivers, towering mountains, and vast swaths of forest, all under a thick blanket of smoke.
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced a commitment of nearly $50 million in research to better understand how technology is transforming our democracy and the way we receive and engage with information. Amidst a growing debate over technology’s role in our democracy, these investments will help ensure society is equipped to make evidence-based decisions on how to govern and manage the now-digital public square.
Knight’s investment will fund new, cross-disciplinary research at 11 American universities and research institutions, including the creation of five new centers of study — each reflecting different approaches to understanding the future of democracy in a digital age (see descriptions and Table A below). In addition, Knight has opened a new funding opportunity for policy and legal research addressing major, ongoing debates about the rules that should govern social media and technology companies.
Des Moines, IA August 6, starting at 6:30 p.m. “Join a candid conversation with three state climatologists whose professional experience spans four U.S. states—moderated by PBS science correspondent Miles O’Brien. Learn about what in their jobs keeps these experts up at night and how they are working to protect residents, farms, businesses, and infrastructure from rapidly changing climate-related risks.” [free, registration required]
Mississippi State University, National Strategic Planning and Analysis Research Center
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Starkville, MS September 12-13, at Mississippi State University’s National Strategic Planning and Analysis Research Center (NSPARC). “This year’s theme is ‘Cybernetic City: An Ecosystem for Big, Smart, and Fast Economies.'” [$$]
“This competition marks the first time that we’re inviting Automated ML Tools (AMLTs) to formally submit their models as benchmarks to Kaggle competitions.” Deadline for entries is September 24.
“The goal of this RFP is to spark new research that will expand our understanding of productivity and fundamentally change the ways that people work and live. To help accomplish this goal, Microsoft intends to fund $1 million USD in new collaborative research efforts with university partners so that we can invent the future of productivity together.” Deadline for proposals is October 16.
Information extraction is a major problem in the fields of natural language processing and web mining, in particular when it comes to evaluating domains where language cannot be taken at face value. In the study recently published on the journal Applied Network Science, Mayank Kejriwal and Rahul Kapoor present a method that can potentially be used to assess the quality of information extraction systems in the analysis such domains, using the of human trafficking. This article was published as part of the ongoing collection on Modeling, Analyzing and Mining Feature-Rich Networks.
In the late 19th century, the English social reformer Charles Booth went door-to-door with a small group of researchers asking London residents questions about their socioeconomic status. He published his findings in a series of maps that used an eight-point color scale to illustrate wealth on a street-by-street level. A few years later, Parliament passed the Old-Age Pensions Act, which provided financial aid for people over the age of 70. The new laws paved the way for modern social welfare in the United Kingdom.
Although collecting data on populations predates the 19th century—the concept of a census is a few thousand years old—Booth played a special role by recording social and economic data of a population and using the findings to influence legislation. Subsequently, surveys became one of the most important features of the modern era. They were the first scientific tool we used to study ourselves in groups, and our new self-knowledge has paid off enormously. The social progress, economic growth, improvements in education and advances in health of the last 150 years were made possible, at least in part, by survey work. Progress became a lot easier once we could measure the things we were trying to change.
arXiv, Computer Science > Databases; Doris Jung-Lin Lee, John Lee, Tarique Siddiqui, Jaewoo Kim, Karrie Karahalios, Aditya Parameswaran
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Visual query systems (VQSs) empower users to interactively search for line charts with desired visual patterns, typically specified using intuitive sketch-based interfaces. Despite decades of past work on VQSs, these efforts have not translated to adoption in practice, possibly because VQSs are largely evaluated in unrealistic lab-based settings. To remedy this gap in adoption, we collaborated with experts from three diverse domains—astronomy, genetics, and material science—via a year-long user-centered design process to develop a VQS that supports their workflow and analytical needs, and evaluate how VQSs can be used in practice. Our study results reveal that ad-hoc sketch-only querying is not as commonly used as prior work suggests, since analysts are often unable to precisely express their patterns of interest. In addition, we characterize three essential sensemaking processes supported by our enhanced VQS. We discover that participants employ all three processes, but in different proportions, depending on the analytical needs in each domain. Our findings suggest that all three sensemaking processes must be integrated in order to make future VQSs useful for a wide range of analytical inquiries.