Gene sequences for more than 1100 plant species have been released by an international consortium of nearly 200 plant scientists who were involved in a nine-year research project, One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative (1KP), that examined the diversification of plant species, genes and genomes across the more than one-billion-year history of green plants dating back to the ancestors of flowering plants and green algae.
Their findings, “One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes and Phylogenomics of Green Plants,” published today in Nature, (doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1693-2) reveal the timing of whole genome duplications and the origins, expansions and contractions of gene families contributing to fundamental genetic innovations enabling the evolution of green algae, mosses, ferns, conifer trees, flowering plants and all other green plant lineages. The history of how and when plants secured the ability to grow tall, and make seeds, flowers and fruits provides a framework for understanding plant diversity around the planet including annual crops and forest tree species. Sequences, sequence alignments and tree data are available through the CyVerse Data Commons.
Tech companies are growing their involvement in health fields, but Google’s hiring of Dr. Karen DeSalvo as the first chief health officer emboldens the company’s top-tier footing in the health industry.
The platform, which would most likely not carry the network’s branding, is being developed by an internal group called NewsCo.
The details are still murky, but CNN has recently created a new internal group called NewsCo that is developing a suite of digital products, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday.
Among other products, the group of about a dozen people is working on a news platform that would endeavor to provide a better user experience while also generating more revenue for outside publishers than they’ve traditionally received from third-party platforms.
People turn to many different sources for clothing style advice, from magazines to best friends to Instagram. Soon, though, you may be able to ask your smartphone.
A University of Texas at Austin computer science team, in partnership with researchers from Cornell Tech, Georgia Tech and Facebook AI Research, has developed an artificial intelligence system that can look at a photo of an outfit and suggest helpful tips to make it more fashionable. Suggestions may include tweaks such as selecting a sleeveless top or a longer jacket.
“We thought of it like a friend giving you feedback,” said Kristen Grauman, a professor of computer science whose previous research has largely focused on visual recognition for artificial intelligence. “It’s also motivated by a practical idea: that we can work with a given outfit to make small changes so it’s just a bit better.”
The tool, named Fashion++, uses visual recognition systems to analyze the color, pattern, texture and shape of garments in an image. It considers where edits will have the most impact. It then offers several alternative outfits to the user.
In the last five years, the University of Edinburgh’s School of Chemistry has diverted one million gloves — 15 metric tons of plastic — from landfill waste. The department was the first in Europe to sign up to the KIMTECH Nitrile Glove Recycling Program, also known as RightCycle, run by Kimberly Clarke Professional, a multinational consumer goods corporation, and TerraCycle, a company that specializes in recycling unconventional items. The scheme is operated not only in the United Kingdom, but also in the United States, with laboratories at the University of California Santa Cruz, University of Illinois, University of Texas Austin, and Purdue University signed up to the program. Between 2011 and 2017, more than 360 metric tons of waste — about 24 million gloves — were diverted from landfill because of the program. The nitrile gloves are turned into plastic granules that, after blending with other recycled plastics or being milled into a powder, form composite raw materials that can later be processed and turned into bins, garden equipment, furniture, or even rubber flooring and ground covering for sports facilities.
In 1995, Stuart Russell wrote the book on AI. Co-authored with Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach became one of the most popular course texts in the world (Norvig worked for Nasa; in 2001, he joined Google). In the final pages of the last chapter, the authors posed the question themselves: what if we succeed? Their answer was hardly a ringing endorsement. “The trends seem not to be too terribly negative,” they offered. A lot has happened since: – Google and Facebook for starters.
In Human Compatible, Russell returns to the question and this time does not hold back. The result is surely the most important book on AI this year. Perhaps, as Richard Brautigan’s poem has it, life is good when we are all watched over by machines of loving grace. But Russell, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, sees darker eventualities. Creating machines that surpass our intelligence would be the biggest event in human history. It may also be the last, he warns. Here he makes the convincing case that how we choose to control AI is “possibly the most important question facing humanity”.
According to a new report by researchers at the University of Illinois that focused on warehouse work automation and was shared exclusively with Recode, emerging technologies aren’t actually going to replace the over 1 million warehouse workers in the US anytime soon. But over the next 10 years, the technology may make their lives harder.
The report shows how technologies are modifying the day-to-day work of people who organize, store, and package physical goods in warehouses. It found that technology and automation can help workers by reducing the “monotonous and physically strenuous activities” of, say, lifting heavy packages. But it also could affect workers’ health, safety, and morale, and accelerate the rate at which employees are replaced. That’s because tools like self-driving shelving carts, body sensors, and AI-powered management systems are putting pressure on workers to work harder, faster, and under more scrutiny. This is helping boost productivity but could be bad for workers, the report argues.
Twitter blamed its third-quarter earnings whiff on the top and bottom lines Thursday in part on issues with technology that helps advertisers promote mobile apps on the platform. The unexpected miss sent Twitter shares down as much as 20%.
While there were a variety of factors to blame for the lackluster results, the key problem area was Twitter’s “Mobile Application Promotion” (MAP) suite of products that help advertisers promote mobile apps on the platform, including app installs, conversions or engagements on apps. Twitter said it inadvertently used information that users wanted to be private as a way of serving ads to them, including their device data.
The GPT-2 case sparked a spirited debate within the AI community on whether OpenAI made the right call. Now, the task is to extrapolate out from the GPT-2 case study and develop consensus around responsible AI publication norms.
If you want to know how the global regulation of artificial intelligence might shape up in the coming years, best look to Berlin.
Last year Angela Merkel’s government tasked a new Data Ethics Commission with producing recommendations for rules around algorithms and A.I. The group’s report landed Wednesday, packed with ideas for guiding the development of this new technology in a way that protects people from exploitation.
History tells us that German ideas around data tend to make their way onto the international stage. That’s what happened with online privacy—German rules fed into the EU-level General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is influencing global policy because of the EU’s economic weight. And it seems likely to happen here, too. Indeed, the Data Ethics Commission specifically calls for a new, EU-wide set of A.I. rules, based on its recommendations.
Not long after Foxconn Technology Group announced plans to build a massive manufacturing facility in southeast Wisconsin, the tech giant began making promises to share its model for economic development across the entire state. But 18 months after purchasing its first building in downtown Milwaukee, there is little evidence that what Foxconn calls its innovation centers are moving forward.
UK Research and Innovation, Arts and Humanities Research Council
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The Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK (AHRC) and the Irish Research Council (IRC) are collaborating on a new programme that aims to deliver a transformational impact on Digital Humanities research in the UK and Ireland. The programme will exploit complementary strengths in the Digital Humanities between world-leading centres of excellence in the UK and Ireland, leading to new partnerships and cross-disciplinary projects, building capacity and enhancing the integration of humanities and technology in Digital Humanities development.
In the UK, the programme is supported by £4million of funding secured by the AHRC through the UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) Fund for International Collaboration. The Irish component of projects will be supported by the IRC. The programme will support a range of collaborative activities over three years, including research networking activity and larger research grants. The programme will begin with an inaugural two-day workshop in Dublin from 22nd-23rd October 2019. The workshop will bring together 60 leading Digital Humanities researchers from the UK and Ireland to build partnerships around the aims of the programme and identify priority thematic areas to be taken forward by the partners. The first joint networking call will be announced shortly after the workshop.
Research shows that people form impressions about a leader’s competence in as little as half a minute. This means, within seconds, listeners will decide whether you are trustworthy, and they will do it based on your body language and vocal attributes. What you say and how you say it are equally important.
The good news is that there is plenty of hard evidence that explains how you can give the appearance of confidence and competence — even if you’re nervous or timid on the inside.
Medium, Netflix Tech Blog; Jeremy Smith, Jonathan Indig, Faisal Siddiqi
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We are pleased to announce the open-source launch of Polynote: a new, polyglot notebook with first-class Scala support, Apache Spark integration, multi-language interoperability including Scala, Python, and SQL, as-you-type autocomplete, and more.
Polynote provides data scientists and machine learning researchers with a notebook environment that allows them the freedom to seamlessly integrate our JVM-based ML platform — which makes heavy use of Scala — with the Python ecosystem’s popular machine learning and visualization libraries. It has seen substantial adoption among Netflix’s personalization and recommendation teams, and it is now being integrated with the rest of our research platform.
“We’ve been working towards it for many years, but now it’s finally here: an incredibly smooth workflow for publishing Wolfram Notebooks to the web—that makes possible a new level of interactive publishing and computation-enabled communication.”