The Health Foundation (UK); Adam Steventon, Sarah Deeny, Josh Keith, Arne Wolters
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In August 2019 the UK government announced a welcome boost for artificial intelligence (AI) in health care, with £250m for a national laboratory in England. Public imagination is captivated by robots, but the new lab will prioritise technologies more likely to benefit the health system and patients in the short term, including algorithms to predict demand for hospital beds and tools that identify signs of disease from diagnostic images, all underpinned by a focus on ethical and fair AI.
One of the early tasks the National Security Agency’s new cybersecurity directorate will have is helping to secure the defense industrial base and defense weapons systems, the agency’s director said Oct. 9 at the FireEye Cyber Defense Summit in Washington.
Gen. Paul Nakasone, NSA director, said he gave the agency and the directorate, which opened last week, an initial task as it addresses the demanding challenge of preventing and eradicating cyberthreats to national security systems and critical infrastructure.
Fostering collaboration and data sharing is the impetus behind the new UW Data Collaborative (UWDC), initiated and hosted by the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology and in partnership with the Population Health Initiative, Urban@UW and the Student Technology Fee program.
The UWDC shows how building collaborative infrastructure, particularly by leveraging existing technology widely offered by UW-IT, can help strengthen the UW research community, said Brad Greer, associate vice president and chief technology officer.
“The UWDC is built on two critical UW research infrastructure IT principles — solid enterprise infrastructure and solid security,” Greer said.
arXiv, Physics > Physics Education; Tor Ole B. Odden, Elise Lockwood, Marcos D. Caballero
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Computation is becoming an increasingly important part of physics education. However, there are currently few theories of learning that can be used to help explain and predict the unique challenges and affordances associated with computation in physics. In this study, we adapt the existing theory of computational literacy, which posits that computational learning can be divided into material, cognitive, and social aspects, to the context of undergraduate physics. Based on an exploratory study of undergraduate physics computational literacy, using a newly-developed teaching tool known as a computational essay, we have identified a variety of student practices, knowledge, and beliefs across these three aspects of computational literacy. We illustrate these categories with data collected from students who engaged in an initial implementation of computational essays in an introductory electricity and magnetism class. We conclude by arguing that this framework can be used to theoretically diagnose student difficulties with computation, distinguish educational approaches that focus on material vs. cognitive aspects of computational literacy, and highlight the benefits and limitations of open-ended projects like computational essays to student learning.
The Washington Post, Douglas MacMillan and Image without a caption Douglas MacMillan Reporter covering corporate accountability Email Bio Follow Nick Anderson
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Before many schools even look at an application, they comb through prospective students’ personal data, such as web-browsing habits and financial history
In her report to the panel, Amato emphasized that, because funding for basic AI research in the United States has not kept up with the demand, many researchers are abandoning academia for industry or for other countries, where AI funding is more easily accessed. She is recommending that the National Science Foundation and others change their funding model in this vital area.
In addition to funding, universities need other resources like expansive computational systems and relevant data sets to work worth with. She suggested that industry and universities could share these resources though the cloud.
A cross-disciplinary team of Texas A&M University researchers led by statistician Bani K. Mallick has been awarded a three-year, $1.5 million Transdisciplinary Research In Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) grant from the National Science Foundation to establish a new institute, the Texas A&M Research Institute for Foundations of Interdisciplinary Data Science (FIDS).
Texas A&M’s new TRIPODS institute, funded last week through the Division of Computing and Communications Foundations (CCF) from October 2019 through September 2022, brings together nearly three dozen researchers from six disciplinary areas: statistics, mathematics, electrical engineering, computer science, industrial engineering and information and operations management. The institute will conduct research on the foundations of data science motivated by problems arising in bioinformatics, the energy arena and both power and transportation systems.
“A lot of individuals, a lot of terrific international applicants, they’re choosing not to apply to any U.S. schools,” said Matthew J. Slaughter, dean of the Tuck School at Dartmouth. One growing concern for international students is that they won’t be able to obtain employment visas to remain in the U.S. post graduation, driving them to consider programs elsewhere, he said.
The U.S. government issues 85,000 H-1B visas annually to high-skilled workers via a lottery, but demand far exceeds the supply. The Trump administration has sought to overhaul the visa system. It is increasingly requesting supplemental information to support H-1B applications and is denying more petitions, government data shows.
Stanford University will change its leave of absence policies to better accommodate students who are facing mental illness crises. The decision, which goes into effect next year, results from a settlement agreement with a group of students who say they were prodded to leave campus by administrators.
The coalition of Stanford students sued the university last year to change its involuntary leave of absence policy, arguing that it barred students from the university after incidents where they were deemed to present a risk to themselves or others, instead of providing solutions to keep them in classes, according to the complaint. Several students named in the class action lawsuit attempted suicide then had their university housing privileges revoked, or they were threatened with expulsion if leave was not taken.
Most companies that say they’re using artificial intelligence have yet to gain any value from their A.I. investments.
A survey from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group released Tuesday found that companies that view A.I. as merely a “technology thing,” akin to a product rather than a business overhaul, fail to gain financial results. The survey’s authors defined the “value” of an A.I. project as lifting sales, reducing costs, or creating a new product.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently launched a recruitment effort to hire its first-ever senior-level artificial intelligence expert to advance the agency’s applications of the emerging technology and provide technical expertise to keep employees on the leading edge.
In a conversation with Nextgov, USPTO’s chief information officer provided a look inside the search to fill the new role and explained how it all fits into the agency’s broader vision around modernization.
You may not realize that among more conventional applications of artificial intelligence like apps and search engines, emerging technologies are transforming yet another unexpected area of design: materials. A fascinating new material study released by Delft University is showing how machine learning may upend our assumptions of how materials are capable of behaving.
With its teaching mission, its predilection for interdisciplinary research, and its indifference to quick profits from research projects, academia is well positioned to lay down the path to ethical AI. The teaching part of that effort is already underway. A Law for Algorithms course, which explores the impact of algorithms on society, was recently jointly taught at Boston University, Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley, and many other universities include similar considerations in computer science courses. Cornell, MIT, Stanford, and the University of Texas offer specific courses on the ethical design of intelligent systems. Universities are undertaking the necessary research to power unbiased AI as well.
At Boston University, researchers are investigating techniques that could be used to reliably apply algorithms trained on one population to other populations that were underrepresented in the training set.
The project — AI, People & Planet — is a research initiative hosted by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. The group aims to advance both innovative research and action, and explore the challenges rapid technological change pose for biosphere based sustainability.
AI, People & Planet’s research projects explore such issues as deep learning for the biosphere, human-machine ecology and systemic risks; trolls, bots and disinformation; smart cities; planet-centric business intelligence; and studies of collective action. PIIRS is involved through their Global Systemic Risk project.
“This declaration sets out the current scientific consensus concerning the climate and ecological emergency, and highlights the necessity for urgent action to prevent further and irreversible damage to the habitability of our planet.”
Tel Aviv, Israel February 3, 2020. “400 Gophers will attend the event. GopherCon brings the Go community together through its events throughout the world. The GopherCon brand is well known and respected for its high standards and diverse appeal.” Deadline for submissions is December 1.
Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning is “a practical guide to optimizing the entire machine learning process, including techniques for annotation, active learning, transfer learning, and using machine learning to optimize every step of the process.”
The tool “makes it easy to efficiently and intuitively explore up to two models’ performance on a dataset. Investigate model performances for a range of features in your dataset, optimization strategies and even manipulations to individual datapoint values. All this and more, in a visual way that requires minimal code.”
“SandDance, the beloved data visualization tool from Microsoft Research, has been re-released as an open source project on GitHub. This new version of SandDance has been re-written from the ground up as an embeddable component that works with modern JavaScript toolchains.”
“ICON is a comprehensive index of research-quality network data sets from all domains of network science, including social, web, information, biological, ecological, connectome, transportation, and technological networks.”