Bloomberg Businessweek; Drake Bennett, Janet Lorin and Michael McDonald
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Swensen is regularly mentioned in the same breath as Warren Buffett and other investing greats. “He’s right up there with John Bogle, Peter Lynch, [Benjamin] Graham, and [David] Dodd as a major force in investment management,” says Byron Wien, a longtime Wall Street strategist. The endowment was worth $1 billion in 1985 when Swensen started at Yale; today it’s $29.4 billion. Other schools—including Bowdoin, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Penn, whose endowment heads all once worked for Swensen—have seen their wealth multiply. Harvard’s stash is bigger, at $39 billion, but Swensen’s reputation is more than a matter of returns and asset size. He’s an intellectual leader whose once-radical ideas have become an orthodoxy. More than anyone, Swensen convinced the smart money that the best opportunities lie not in buying and holding ordinary stocks, but in esoteric hedge fund strategies and private equity—a template for long-term investing now widely known as “the Yale model.” Swensen did all this not as the chief of a giant asset management firm, but as the financial steward of a nonprofit institution of higher learning.
Today, though, the massive size of the top universities’ purses has become a flashpoint in a broader argument about elitism and inequality.
The Scholarly Kitchen, Alice Meadows and Karin Wulf
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The theme of Peer Review Week 2019 is quality in the peer review process. There’s no question that researchers see peer review as essential. At its best it helps them ensure that their work is clear, free of errors or biases, and ready to share with the wider community. However, as plenty of social media and other discussions, including the Facebook group “”Reviewer 2 Must Be Stopped” suggests, there are also plenty of examples of unhelpful — or even offensive — peer review.
Samuel Mehr has long been interested in questions of what music is, how it works, and why it exists — and he’s turning to the whole world for help in finding the answers.
A fellow of the Harvard Data Science Initiative and Research Associate in the Psychology Department, Mehr is the director of the Music Lab, an online, citizen-science project aimed at not just understanding how the human mind understands music, but why music is a virtually ubiquitous feature of human societies.
Canadian startup Shopify is taking the e-commerce scene by storm.
The company has quickly become the most popular online shopping destination, second only to Amazon, thanks to an astronomical increase of its shares in the past year. So far this year, stock has soared 160% with revenue coming in at $362 million during its last quarter.
As we transition to a more automated society, the core aim of the Centre is to create new AI technologies and advise on the use of AI in science, industry and society. The Centre brings together researchers with a shared interest in fundamental challenges in Machine Vision, Machine Learning, Machine Reading, Machine Action, Interpretation and Knowledge Representation.
The Centre takes inspiration from the vast array of applications across UCL and acts as the engine of methodological progress. The AI Centre has close research and training links to other local AI communities, including the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit and the Alan Turing Institute.
“A lot of senior executives and business leaders today are almost desperate to understand how AI may affect their businesses,” said [Thomas] Malone, who teaches a popular executive education course on artificial intelligence and business strategy. “I think leaders are increasingly worried in many cases that if they don’t figure out how to use AI effectively, they’ll be left behind.” Malone said the course emphasizes the history of artificial intelligence and common misconceptions along with how businesses can harness technology.
Malone said the course also tries to give business leaders a level of AI understanding in between a superficial knowledge of buzzwords and the technical know-how of programmers. He compared it to knowledge about how a car works. You don’t have to know how to repair a car in order to know what to do when you have a flat tire or when the car runs out of gas.
I was recently honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Alongside Oakland Privacy and William Gibson, I received a 2019 Barlow/Pioneer Award. I was asked to give a speech. As I reflected on what got me to this place, I realized I needed to reckon with how I have benefited from men whose actions have helped uphold a patriarchal system that has hurt so many people. I needed to face my past in order to find a way to create space to move forward.
This is the speech I gave in accepting the award. I hope sharing it can help others who are struggling to make sense of current events. And those who want to make the tech industry to do better.
Artificial intelligence is still in its youth. But some very big things have already happened. Some of them captured the attention of the culture, while others produced shockwaves felt mainly within the stuffy confines of academia. These are some of the key moments that propelled AI forward in the most profound ways.
1. Isaac Asimov writes the Three Laws of Robotics (1942)
“ImageNet Roulette” is a website created by programmer Leif Ryge for researcher Kate Crawford and artist Trevor Paglen’s recent art exhibit “Training Humans.” The site takes your photo and runs it through some common machine learning software before returning the labels that the AI decided to apply to you. As numerous people discovered (and tweeted about) while using the tool, these labels are often weird, mean, racist, and misogynistic.
Contributing to the advancement of scientific research doesn’t always mean conducting experiments in state-of-the-art laboratories. In fact, one way to help solve questions in science is designed for almost anyone: playing video games — more specifically, scientific discovery games (SDGs).
Associate biology professor Rhiju Das and assistant bioengineering professor Ingmar Riedel-Kruse discussed scientific effectiveness, player communities and costs of developing SDGs in a review published on July 2 in the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science. Both Das and Riedel-Kruse have developed early SDGs and platforms for playful interactions with living microbiology.
Focusing on educational games, Riedel-Kruse has developed biotics games in which players can interact with microorganisms. One such game is Pac-Mecium, a spin-off of Pac-Man in which players guide paramecia, a common genus of unicellular ciliates, to eat little dots.
Two years after leaving Facebook’s Oculus to start a company building a virtual wall on the southern border, Palmer Luckey is set to score big. His new venture, Anduril Industries, is being valued at more than $1 billion in a new fundraising round, according to people familiar with the matter.
Anduril’s latest financing includes capital from Andreessen Horowitz, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details of the round are still confidential. Anduril’s border control technology includes towers with cameras and infrared sensors that use artificial intelligence to track movement. It’s been deployed in Texas and Southern California.
Yale is currently conducting a search for a new University Librarian to succeed Susan Gibbons, who was recently appointed to the expanded role of Vice Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communications.
The University Librarian’s principal job is to make sure that Yale libraries adapt to the research needs of students and faculty members alike. The librarian must also respond to inquiries about the university’s collection. The University Librarian Search Advisory Committee, chaired by Professor Christina Kraus, is carrying out the search.
“We have a search [committee], and we’re working closely with them through September into October consulting with as many different constituencies as we can — people in the library, undergraduates, graduates, faculty,” Kraus said.
Chicago, IL October 8. “Advance the state of data science within your organization, glean new ideas and technical best practices, and meet like-minded people at the Midwest Data Science Pop-up in Chicago. Don’t miss these practical talks and workshops for data science leaders and practitioners.” [free, registration required]
University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley Engineering
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Berkeley, CA September 18, starting at 12 p.m. Speaker:
Barbara Simons (Ph.D.’81 EECS), Board Chair, Verified Voting, Can We Recover From an Attack on Our Elections? [free, lunch provided]
“The Stanford Science Fellows program is focused on incubating new directions in foundational scientific research by an interdisciplinary community of exceptional postdoctoral scholars from around the globe, driven by a sense of wonder about the natural world.” Deadline to apply is November 1.
“This is for work that was accomplished before the nominees turned 35, i.e. terrific support for junior faculty.” Deadline for nominations is January 15, 2020.
“Coil, Mozilla and Creative Commons are launching a major project to reshape the economics of the web. Funded and led by Coil in collaboration with Mozilla and Creative Commons, Grant for the Web is a $100 million fund to empower individual creators, galvanize open-standard monetization service providers, and allow users to directly support content they value.” Call for proposals coming in early 2020.
This weekend I attended my first Unconference. On the one-year anniversary of the announcement of Emergent Ventures, Tyler Cowen convened the grantees in Arlington, VA. But among the grantees, I had the unique experience of going directly from the Unconference to an academic conference (which I’ll just refer to as the Conference). Because my schedule conveniently juxtaposed the two experiences, I wanted to share my insights from the weekend.
The big takeaway is that the Unconference was a much more exciting experience than the Conference. I’m sure that surprises no one. But I wanted to articulate why the Unconference worked. Unfortunately, I think it’s unique and hard to replicated. I don’t see academic conferences changing.
