The oldest genetic data ever to be recorded has been extracted from a 1.7 million-year-old rhino tooth. Scientists said the feat sparks an evolution revolution that could solve some of the biggest mysteries of animal and human biology.
Researchers identified an almost complete set of proteins, a proteome, in the dental enamel of the rhino. The genetic information discovered is one million years older than the oldest DNA sequenced, which came from a 700,000-year-old horse.
Angela Teng is a first-year in the Masters in Data Science program at NYU’s Center for Data Science. In July 2019, Angela published a book entitled The Data Resource: How Emerging Countries Can Thrive in a Changing Landscape. Angela shared with us insights about the book, CDS, and what she plans to do next. … I really love the innovative and passionate community here at CDS. CDS promotes a great ecosystem of in-depth learning across a wide range of disciplines, with professors from such unique backgrounds who focus on really cool research topics. I’m inspired and excited by the research opportunities at NYU that span industry and academia, whether it’s through participation in current research projects at NYU Center for Data Science, or through the Leslie eLab.
arXiv, Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction; Yu Gu, Yantong Wang, Tao Liu, Yusheng Ji, Zhi Liu, Peng Li, Xiaoyan Wang, Xin An, Fuji Ren
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Emotion is well-recognized as a distinguished symbol of human beings, and it plays a crucial role in our daily lives. Existing vision-based or sensor-based solutions are either obstructive to use or rely on specialized hardware, hindering their applicability. This paper introduces EmoSense, a first-of-its-kind wireless emotion sensing system driven by computational intelligence. The basic methodology is to explore the physical expression of emotions from wireless channel response via data mining. The design and implementation of EmoSense {face} two major challenges: extracting physical expression from wireless channel data and recovering emotion from the corresponding physical expression. For the former, we present a Fresnel zone based theoretical model depicting the fingerprint of the physical expression on channel response. For the latter, we design an efficient computational intelligence driven mechanism to recognize emotion from the corresponding fingerprints. We prototyped EmoSense on the commodity WiFi infrastructure and compared it with main-stream sensor-based and vision-based approaches in the real-world scenario. The numerical study over 3360 cases confirms that EmoSense achieves a comparable performance to the vision-based and sensor-based rivals under different scenarios. EmoSense only leverages the low-cost and prevalent WiFi infrastructures and thus constitutes a tempting solution for emotion sensing.
Schlumberger, Chevron and Microsoft have launched a cloud-based artificial intelligence platform to improve a digital services in the oil field.
The companies issued a joint statement from the SIS Global Forum in Monaco announcing the launch of DELFI, a cloud-based platform loaded with software for exploration, development, production, storage tanks and pipeline projects.
[Elliot] Schrage eventually left his role, and helped find his own replacement—but he hasn’t left the building, according to people close to the company. Instead, in the 15 months since announcing his resignation, Schrage has been quietly helping the company on a number of initiatives as a full-time employee with a new title: vice president of special projects. In July 2019, he helped prepare Facebook executive David Marcus before his testimony in front of Congress to explain why the company wants to build a cryptocurrency, called Libra. He sat through two days of testimony right behind Marcus’s hot seat, just like he had for Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg during his 2018 Congressional testimony on privacy.
Libra may be the most high-profile (and controversial) project Schrage is working on, but it’s not the only one, the people familiar with the situation said.
U.S. business may have been talking itself into a slowdown.
That’s one way of reading a study by the Carlyle Group, using techniques from narrative economics –- an emerging field set to gain momentum with the publication of Nobel prize-winner Robert Shiller’s much-anticipated book on the topic.
The Carlyle researchers wanted to know what stories people –- in this case, corporate executives –- were telling others, and maybe themselves, about the economy. So they used algorithms to search hundreds of earnings calls, as well as conversations with the 277 firms in Carlyle’s portfolio. And they spotted a sharp rise in use of the term “late-cycle’’ at the end of 2018 and into the first six months of this year.
Charlie Young has been fascinated with both astronomy and computers for as long as he can remember, so when he started applying to colleges, he jumped at the chance to combine the two topics in a blended arts and sciences program at the University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign. The Naperville, Illinois, native applied and was accepted to the school in 2016, joining its CS+X program, which allows students in various disciplines to earn a single degree that incorporates classes in computer science into their chosen major.
Young, who will graduate in May 2020, plans to use the “CS” portion of his undergraduate training to pursue a career in baseball analytics. While at the U of I, he has secured internships doing everything from web development to data mining for the Houston Astros, Baltimore Orioles and Cincinnati Reds.
One reason for the curiosity gap is that the United States no longer has a place to do that kind of technology review. The Office of Technology Assessment conducted 750 studies on topics ranging from biotechnology to robotics and fuel economy from 1972 until then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his allies shut it down in 1995. Two other congressional research groups have suffered severe cuts—the Government Accountability Office’s funding has fallen by a third since 1990, the Congressional Research Service’s by 40 percent. The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy created an AI task force in 2018, but its concern was promoting U.S. competitiveness, not oversight.
Though many university professors and tech-funded think tanks are examining the ethical, social and legal implications of technologies like Big Data and machine learning, “it’s definitely happening outside the policy infrastructure,” said John Wilbanks, a philosopher and technologist at the Sage Bionetworks research group.
The city council of San Diego in December of 2016 passed what the city calls, “the worlds largest smart city platform.” As a 2017 Reuters article stated, “San Diego’s city council approved the lighting, without discussion of potential privacy issues raised by the surveillance system.”
Majority communities of color including City Heights, San Ysidro, and Logan Heights have been covered with these streetlights through what the city said was funding from a grant from community block development grants.
The cloud has been the central focus of this week’s Oracle OpenWorld user conference, and partnerships continued to be a key part of the enterprise software giant’s strategy for bolstering its Oracle Cloud efforts.
The Lowdown: The company announced a technology and support partnership with VMware, which itself has grown beyond its data center virtualization roots to become a player in the expanding cloud market. In addition, Oracle announced an expansion of its cloud interoperability alliance with Microsoft, as well as partnerships with IT consultancy Deloitte and cloud storage vendor Box.
If you’re in the market for an internet-connected garage door opener, doorbell, thermostat, security camera, yard irrigation system, slow cooker — or even a box of connected light bulbs — a new website can help you understand the security issues these shiny new devices might bring into your home.
Consumer-grade internet of things (IoT) devices aren’t exactly known for having tight security practices. To save purchasers from finding that out the hard way, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have done security assessments of representative devices, awarding scores ranging from 28 (an F) up to 100.
Their site, https://yourthings.info, shows rankings for 45 devices, though a total of 74 have been evaluated. That’s hardly a complete roundup of the tens of thousands of devices available, but the big idea behind the project is to help consumers understand important issues before connecting a new IoT helper to their home networks.
Imagine sending a text message to a friend. As your fingers tap the keypad, words and the occasional emoji appear on the screen. Perhaps you write, “I feel blessed to have such good friends :)” Every character conveys your intended meaning and emotion.
But other information is hiding among your words, and companies eavesdropping on your conversations are eager to collect it. Every day, they use artificial intelligence to extract hidden meaning from your messages, such as whether you are depressed or diabetic.
Companies routinely collect the digital traces we leave behind as we go about our daily lives. Whether we’re buying books on Amazon (AMZN), watching clips on YouTube, or communicating with friends online, evidence of nearly everything we do is compiled by technologies that surround us: messaging apps record our conversations, smartphones track our movements, social media monitors our interests, and surveillance cameras scrutinize our faces.
Have you ever stood atthe counter of a fast-food restaurant unsure of what to order? Well, that could become a thing of the past – artificial intelligence is cooking up something especially for you.
Many restaurants have already deployed automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, using innovations such as chatbots to guide customers through menus and help them order. But the next wave of food service automation is going even further. Here’s how.
Pro Publica; Jack Gillum, Jeff Kao and Jeff Larson
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Hundreds of computer servers worldwide that store patient X-rays and MRIs are so insecure that anyone with a web browser or a few lines of computer code can view patient records. One expert warned about it for years.
London, England September 23-25. “A distinguished line up of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and visionaries who are moving the world forward with the power of their technologies and ideas will convene to share their excitement with you.” [$$$]
Wilmington, NC The first “AI and Health” seminar will be at 10 a.m. Sept. 23 in Lumina Theater; speaker will be Chris Hillier, executive director of innovation at New Hanover Regional Medical Center. [free, registration required]
New York, NY September 24 at John Jay College. “Since 2017, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the Center for American Progress, and the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation have co-hosted this event to showcase the progress being made across the country to move communities toward a smarter, fairer, and more effective criminal justice system.” [free, registration required]
“The IARPA Passive Ionospheric Non-Characterized Sounding (PINS) Challenge is an open innovation competition that asks Solvers to develop an algorithm that characterizes, monitors, and models ionospheric variation effects on high frequency emissions. The PINS Challenge invites Solvers from around the world to develop innovative solutions that can lead to a greater understanding of the ionosphere and the effects it has on our technology.” Deadline for submissions is September 27.
“We are particularly interested in individuals committed to building a deep scientific understanding of cities and processes of urbanization, and researchers developing transformative methods and practices in urban contexts across disciplines.” Deadline for applications is December 19.
Often when we want to answer a question, we aren’t just interested in the answer, but also in why we think that answer is true. In case we’re wrong, we’re also interested in why other answers could be true. In short, we’re interested in the evidence for any answer.
Finding evidence can be hard work. For instance, finding evidence can require searching through large amounts of text. We found a way to find evidence automatically: probing machine-learned models.
“We are excited to announce the public launch of the Urban Institute Data Catalog, a place to discover, learn about, and download open data provided by Urban Institute researchers and data scientists. You can find data that reflect the breadth of Urban’s expertise — health, education, the workforce, nonprofits, local government finances, and so much more.”