For several days, I had been trying to ignore the suggestions made by Smart Compose, a feature that Google introduced, in May, 2018, to the one and a half billion people who use Gmail—roughly a fifth of the human population. Smart Compose suggests endings to your sentences as you type them. Based on the words you’ve written, and on the words that millions of Gmail users followed those words with, “predictive text” guesses where your thoughts are likely to go and, to save you time, wraps up the sentence for you, appending the A.I.’s suggestion, in gray letters, to the words you’ve just produced. Hit Tab, and you’ve saved yourself as many as twenty keystrokes—and, in my case, composed a sentence with an A.I. for the first time.
Paul Lambert, who oversees Smart Compose for Google, told me that the idea for the product came in part from the writing of code—the language that software engineers use to program computers. Code contains long strings of identical sequences, so engineers rely on shortcuts, which they call “code completers.” Google thought that a similar technology could reduce the time spent writing e-mails for business users of its G Suite software, although it made the product available to the general public, too.
The United States is blacklisting a group of Chinese tech companies that develop facial recognition and other artificial intelligence technology that the U.S. says is being used to repress China’s Muslim minority groups.
A move Monday by the U.S. Commerce Department puts the companies on a so-called Entity List for acting contrary to American foreign policy interests.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted UPS’ drone delivery subsidiary, Flight Forward, full air carrier and operator (Part 135) certification Tuesday, according to U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.
Highlighting the growing excitement at the intersection of AI, 5G and IoT, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang kicks off the Mobile World Congress Los Angeles 2019 Monday, Oct. 21.
The keynote, NVIDIA’s debut at the wireless industry’s highest-profile gathering in the U.S., will be the first of a slate of talks and training sessions from NVIDIA and its partners.
AdExchanger examined recent changes Google has made, ostensibly in the interests of privacy, and how those changes have played out for digital media.
In 2017, YouTube announced it would no longer support third-party cookies and pixels, disabling most outside campaign measurement.
To accommodate advertisers, it introduced a product called Ads Data Hub (ADH), a clean room environment where brand data could be merged with Google searches and other Google data assets. Search data had never been used for YouTube ad targeting before.
Researchers at the University of Vermont’s Conversation Lab are using machine learning to develop algorithms designed to optimize clinician-patient discussions of serious illness, palliative care and end-of-life care.
The research team — led by Robert Gramling, M.D., associate professor of family medicine and the Miller Chair in Palliative Medicine at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine — has conducted several studies into features of these difficult conversations to identify common characteristics of effective communication that can be replicated.
The team plans to develop a new framework to speed the discovery of electronic materials based on active machine learning and intelligent search, human-machine interaction and visualization with a two-year, $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant is part of the NSF’s $300 million 10 Big Ideas program and falls under the Harnessing the Data Revolution Big Idea, which focuses on the emerging field of data science.
Roman Garnett, assistant professor of computer science & engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, brings his research and experience in active machine learning to the project with $306,000 in funding. Garnett, who has an NSF CAREER Award for his work in active machine learning, has extensive experience applying machine learning to automate discovery, particularly in active search for drug and materials discovery. In this project, his expertise will help to design a framework that most efficiently reaches its objective.
When health care providers order a test or prescribe a medicine, they want to be 100 percent confident in their decision. That means being able to explain their decision and study it over depending upon how a patient responds. As artificial intelligence’s footprint increases in medicine, that ability to check work and follow the path of a decision can become a bit muddied. That’s why the discovery of a once-hidden through-line between two popular predictive models used in artificial intelligence opens the door much wider to confidently spread machine learning further throughout health care. The discovery of the linking algorithm and the subsequent creation of the “additive tree” is now detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Together, the Long Island-based health system and technology vendor will design, build and test a new artificial intelligence-based, cloud-hosted, voice-enabled EHR, theys say – with close input along the way from clinicians.
Northwell’s own IT team and administrators will also work on the project, which Northwell aims to eventually implement across the enterprise.
Allscripts will focus on the systems integration of the new EHR, which will be designed with optimal physician and patient experience as a key goal.
This morning, BMO announced that it is making a $5 million investment in a new University of Toronto lab called the BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies, and AI. This is the bank’s largest investment in a Canadian post secondary institution to date.
The BMO lab will be housed within the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. Students from the arts, humanities, sciences, and engineering will be able to explore how AI and other technologies can impact artistic expression.
What would a needy person do if you gave them $500 a month, no strings attached?
Stockton, California, is finding out. The city is eight months into an 18-month experiment with basic income, the idea that the government should give citizens a regular infusion of unconditional free cash. And it just released the first batch of data about how recipients are spending the money.
It turns out, they’re mostly spending it on food, clothes, and utility bills.
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog, Andrew Gelman
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Statistical nitpickers: Do they cause more harm than good?
I’d like to think we cause more good than harm, but today I want to consider the counter-argument, that, even when we are correct on the technical merits, we statisticians should just pipe down and not interfere with the publicity machine.
For months, customers have been questioning the future of Fry’s, posting photos of empty shelves on social media as employees and experts chime in, blaming everything from the rise of smartphones and competition from Amazon to changing customer demand. Though the company is closing its Palo Alto store, it insists it has no plans to quit the business or close its remaining 33 stores in nine states.
But in recent postings on job sites like Glassdoor, dozens of Fry’s employees have been complaining about the company, with several saying their hours have been cut and that many are now working part time. Because of that, they say many employees have left or are actively looking for other jobs.
The General Services Administration is making artificial intelligence the sixth pillar of its Centers of Excellence program, and agency leaders are already teasing a few of their potential areas of focus.
The new AI center will be rooted in GSA’s work with the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, which last month became the fifth government organization to participate in the CoE initiative. After helping the JAIC accelerate its development of AI technologies and increase the Pentagon’s adoption of those tools, GSA officials see the opportunity to reapply that work to help the rest of the government reap the benefits of the emerging tech.
Fast Company: The big idea of your TED Talk is that the most important tech change happening in the world right now lies in video games. Is it really as important as AI? Convince me.
Herman Narula: If we look at the quantity of time that people, particularly young people, are going to start spending in social game worlds, it’s going to dramatically exceed—in fact, I think it already exceeds—the time they spend on social media. That means that, in the same way that social media was a profound influence on how our society is organized and how we spread ideas, games have the potential to become as big a part of our lives, if not bigger.
Ann Arbor, MI October 25 starting at 8 a.m. “A2.AI is the first conference of its kind in the Ann Arbor area, focusing on how machine learning and applied artificial intelligence enable businesses to make more informed and actionable decisions with their data.” [free, registration required]
Washington, DC October 11, starting at 11 a.m., The Brookings Institution. “Andrew Gelman, Professor of Statistics and Political Science at Columbia University, will present to the Brookings community on the replication crisis in science and its relevance to policy research.” [registration required]
The Hague, Netherlands October 29-31, hosted by Statistics Netherlands. “The main objectives of the meeting are to facilitate the exchange of experience and identify the best practices in dealing with technical issues related to statistical data confidentiality in statistical offices.” [registration required]
New York, NY, and Online October 10, starting at 7 p.m., New York Academy of Sciences. “Social psychologist Michelle “Lani” Shiota, writer Caspar Henderson, and astrophysicist Alex Filippenko unpack the emerging science behind the emotion of awe and wonder, and its function in our ongoing quest for understanding and knowledge.” [$$]
“For the 9th consecutive year, Atos invites university students from all around the world to participate to its IT Challenge. The contest offers students the opportunity to turn their ideas into working concepts and a €10,000 prize for the winning team.” Deadline for team registration is November 30.
New York, NY October 31, starting at 2 p.m., NYU Kimmel Hall 914. “Our panelists will share their experiences using Jupyter Notebooks in a variety of courses and discuss the new NYU Central IT Jupyter Hub service for teaching and learning, which is administered and maintained by the High Performance Computing team.” [registration required]