For decades, the basic principles governing how the Internet works have remained pretty much unchanged. But with massive growth on the horizon — thanks to everything from AI to blockchain, and from the 5G rollout to the ubiquitous Internet of Things — the amount of data we produce could eventually outpace physical storage capacity.
The solution? Look to space. That’s the bet companies like Amazon, Facebook, OneWeb, and other Silicon Valley darlings are wagering on. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, is planning to carpet low-earth orbit with thousands of satellites that will bring low-latency internet to all corners of the globe. Amazon is betting on a similar so-called mega-constellation worth billions, while Facebook created PointView Tech, a subsidiary to develop their secretive Athena broadband satellite, which was granted FCC approval to begin experimental trials.
Ricardo Galvao, the sacked head of Brazil’s space research agency, said on Saturday the trend of sharply rising deforestation was undeniable, a day after he was fired following a public spat with President Jair Bolsonaro over data published by the agency.
LifeOmic, the creators of LIFE mobile apps, and the Indiana Clinical Translational Sciences Institute, a research partnership among Indiana University, Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame, have announced a partnership to grow the institute’s All IN for Health program.
All IN for Health connects Indiana residents across the state with opportunities to improve their health and participate in research and clinical studies.
Through the partnership, participants will have access to free, complementary tools to enhance their health journey via the LIFE Extend app. Together, LifeOmic and the Indiana CTSI aim to engage over 100,000 residents in All IN for Health who are striving to take better control of their health and seek prevention-focused care.
Amherst is joining the stampede of college endowments that have moved their offices to financial centers while bringing on a new chief investment officer.
Letitia Johnson, a managing director at the investment firm Cambridge Associates, will run the $2.4 billion endowment starting Sept. 9, the college said in a statement Thursday. She and the fund’s six-person investment staff will work in a new office in Boston, about two hours away from their current location in Amherst.
People had thought about making a pixelated detector before, but it never got off the ground.
“This was a dream,” says Antonio Ereditato, father of the ArgonCube collaboration and a scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland. “We developed this original idea in Bern, and it was clear that it could fly only with the proper electronics. Without it, this would have been just wishful thinking. Our colleagues from Berkeley had just what was required.”
Pixels are small, and neutrino detectors aren’t. You can fit roughly 100,000 pixels per square meter. Each one is a unique channel that — once it is outfitted with electronics — can provide information about what’s happening in the detector. To be sensitive enough, the tiny electronics need to sit right next to the pixels inside the liquid argon. But that poses a challenge.
“If they used even the power from your standard electronics, your detector would just boil,” Dwyer says.
Our audit has led to substantial change in ShotSpotter operations & policy. Though we found the risk of law enforcement using ShotSpotter for targeted voice surveillance is already relatively low, we offered several recommendations to make the tech even more privacy protective.
Artificial intelligence (AI) still can’t see the future, but a new algorithm may come close: Using nothing but written movie summaries, the AI can consistently tell which films will play well—or rottenly—to critics and audiences. If the model can be further refined, it could one day help producers predict whether a movie will be a flop at the box office, before it’s even made.
To test several models, researchers used plot summaries of 42,306 movies from all over the world, many collected from Wikipedia. The models broke up the summaries by sentence and used something called sentiment analysis to analyze each one. Sentences considered “positive,” such as “Thor loves his hammer,” would receive a rating closer to one. And sentences that were considered “negative,” like “Thor gets in a fight,” would be rated closer to negative one.
The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal.
Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois.
Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”, according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, an aerospace and defence company.
Nature Communication; Jaehyuk Park, Ian B. Wood, Elise Jing, Azadeh Nematzadeh, Souvik Ghosh, Michael D. Conover & Yong-Yeol Ahn
from
Groups of firms often achieve a competitive advantage through the formation of geo-industrial clusters. Although many exemplary clusters are the subjects of case studies, systematic approaches to identify and analyze the hierarchical structure of geo-industrial clusters at the global scale are scarce. In this work, we use LinkedIn’s employment history data from more than 500 million users over 25 years to construct a labor flow network of over 4 million firms across the world, from which we reveal hierarchical structure by applying network community detection. We show that the resulting geo-industrial clusters exhibit a stronger association between the influx of educated workers and financial performance, compared to traditional aggregation units. Furthermore, our analysis of the skills of educated workers reveals richer insights into the relationship between the labor flow of educated workers and productivity growth. We argue that geo-industrial clusters defined by labor flow provide useful insights into the growth of the economy.
In this post, we would like to highlight a few works that we found particularly interesting.
Best paper award
The Best Paper Award was attributed to Variance reduction in gradient reduction in online learning to rank, by Huazheng Wang, Sonwoo Kim, Eric McCord-Snook, Qingyun Wu, Hongning Wang. In a context of online learning to rank, the approach reduces the variance of the gradient estimation by projecting the selected updating direction into space spanned by the feature vectors from examined documents under the current query. The paper proves that this method provides an unbiased estimate of the gradient and illustrate the benefits with significant improvements compared to several state-of-the-art models.
Michael Kratsios is officially the fourth U.S. CTO.
Kratsios, who has served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy since March 2017, was confirmed by unanimous voice vote Thursday afternoon.
With the goal of supporting cyberdefense research for the intelligence community, the University of Texas at San Antonio has launched new open-source software, called Galahad, designed to securely run desktop applications in the public cloud.
Named after the Arthurian knight who secured the Holy Grail, Galahad was developed by cyberdefense software developer Star Lab Corp. over the last 18 months for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity — a division of the Office of National Intelligence — which is responsible for leading research in the government intelligence community.
“This software is an overlay which is deployed in the public cloud,” Farhan Patwa, assistant director of UTSA’s Institute for Cyber Security, told EdScoop. “If you’re not able to leverage [public cloud] because of security, this solution enables you to do that.”
[Jake] Malcomb and his research partner, Linnea Saby, a doctoral candidate in UVA’s Department of Engineering Systems and Environment, plan to analyze a massive geospatial data set collected over a two-year period from the International Space Station, and then parsed by an “extreme machine learning” tool that aims to mimic the human brain.
The project is part of the Presidential Fellows in Data Science program at the UVA Data Science Institute, which provides funding to Ph.D. candidates partnering on collaborative, multi-disciplinary research projects that address real-world problems using traditional research methods alongside cutting-edge data science tools and techniques.
Improved data analysis could substantially increase the total known planets from NASA’s K2 mission, revealing fascinating new worlds and intriguing planetary patterns
There are few industries where data analytics play as important a role in a customer’s overall experience as hospitality. By tracking and analyzing consumer behavior and preferences, hotels and restaurants can create a more personalized experience. The global demand for professionals who can analyze this data and faculty who can educate these professionals has never been greater. That is why the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics is launching the first doctoral program of its kind in the world, a four-year, 54 credit-hour Ph.D. in hospitality business analytics.
Much of what enterprises say about their multicloud strategies is complete and utter rubbish. The idea of buying into multiple clouds to pit them against each other for price negotiations is one of my favorites, because the end result of buying into multiple clouds is multiple ways to lose track of cloud expenses. Not only that, but it’s beyond bizarre to think that, hard as it is to master just one cloud, adding others somehow will result in less cost.
Gmail‘s pretty much the first choice of email service for over a billion people on this planet (miss you, Inbox). But up until recently, a key functionality was missing from it: the ability to schedule emails. In April, Google enabled this function along with several other features.