The I.I.I.’s paper explains how insurers are encouraging customers to better protect their homes by installing Class A fire-rated roofs, metal screens, as well as double or multi-paned tempered glass windows.
“Creating what’s called a defensible space around a structure can significantly reduce the risk of embers and surface fires spreading and igniting the structure,” the paper found.
Perhaps the biggest issue the I.I.I. paper tackles is the regulatory challenges insurers face as wildfires intensify and become more frequent over time. The issue is particularly notable in California, the institute pointed out, where the state insurance regulator has prohibited property insurers from setting premium rates based on either the cost of reinsurance or catastrophe models.
Kebotix, a Cambridge, Massachusetts–based start-up with a novel idea for an autonomous materials discovery lab, came together in September 2017 at a conference on technology innovation to combat climate change.
Harvard University chemistry and chemical biology professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik and three partners from his lab were planning to attend the event, which was held in Mexico City and sponsored by Mission Innovation, an initiative backed by 24 countries and the European Union. They wanted to pitch the idea of melding artificial intelligence and robotics as a means of accelerating the discovery of materials.
At the last minute, the group invited Jill S. Becker, whom they had recently approached as a potential CEO for the company they envisioned, to join them.
A team from the University of California’s (UC) Lawrence Berkeley National Lab are working with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to use high performance computing (HPC) and machine learning to help improve the agency’s real-time decision making when highway incidents occur.
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame Magazine, Author: Brett Beasley
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At last month’s kickoff conference for Notre Dame’s new Technology Ethics Center (ND-TEC), Flynn weighed in on the role professional ethics has played in the rise of deepfakes. He pointed out that digital tools that fashion deepfakes were birthed in the labs of computer scientists and engineers, people with positive aims and general standards of appropriate and inappropriate use. But now the tools have left the lab. They are being wielded by people without the same rulebook. It has led Flynn and some of his colleagues to question whether it is always best to publish their research. They are now more guarded, wary of the technologies they invent and the tools they develop falling into the wrong hands.
The damage done by deepfakes is not limited to the people they dupe. In fact, many technologists worry more that people will simply stop trusting anything they see. They will opt out of the search for reliable information altogether as part of what Aviv Ovadya, founder of the Thoughtful Technology Project, calls “reality apathy.” When reality apathy sets in, Ovadya warns, “People stop paying attention to news and that fundamental level of informedness required for functional democracy becomes unstable.”
Other experts warn that the real challenge is not simply to cure the deepfake disease but to root out the underlying chronic conditions that enable it. Jessica Silbey, a legal scholar who also holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature, says we can diagnose these conditions by thinking of deepfakes as a kind of storytelling.
President Donald Trump has lost 41% of the Cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries and under secretaries he appointed in his first year in office, new data from the Partnership for Public Service‘s Center for Presidential Transition shows.
Why it matters: This far outpaces the turnover rate for recent predecessors at the same stage of their presidencies — and underscores the challenges Trump may face in recruiting and retaining a new stable of top officials if he wins re-election.
This is a film shoot held by Athena Security. It’s one of several companies creating artificial intelligence software to identify weapons. AI requires a lot of data to learn what is a gun — and what isn’t. But there aren’t enough images in the public domain of people holding weapons, and very few are from the perspective of security cameras. So Athena is creating its own data by filming the footage itself.
At the shoot, Dagger enters the room again, this time without a face mask. Then again, while wearing a hat. The idea is to get as many variations of the scene as possible so that the AI can still identify the gun, no matter what the person holding it looks like. [audio, 7:22]
As admission rates have dropped, the cost of attendance has increased—a correlation seen at many highly selective schools. By 2025, the University of Chicago’s sticker price is predicted to pass the $100,000 mark, which would make it the first U.S. college where attendance costs six figures, according to a new analysis by The Hechinger Report, an education-news outlet. The analysis suggests at least a handful of other U.S. colleges will follow suit soon after Chicago hits that milestone, including California’s Harvey Mudd College, New York City’s Columbia University, and Texas’s Southern Methodist University.
And after that, given the way American higher education has been going, it likely won’t be long before six-figure prices are common among selective colleges and universities. “The [colleges] that are expensive are the ones that students want to apply to,” explains the Seton Hall University professor Robert Kelchen, who studies higher-education finance. “Being expensive is seen as being good—if one [elite] college is 20 percent cheaper than another [elite] college, students are going to wonder what’s wrong with it.”
A whistleblower who works in Project Nightingale, the secret transfer of the personal medical data of up to 50 million Americans from one of the largest healthcare providers in the US to Google, has expressed anger to the Guardian that patients are being kept in the dark about the massive deal.
The anonymous whistleblower has posted a video on the social media platform Daily Motion that contains a document dump of hundreds of images of confidential files relating to Project Nightingale. The secret scheme, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, involves the transfer to Google of healthcare data held by Ascension, the second-largest healthcare provider in the US. The data is being transferred with full personal details including name and medical history and can be accessed by Google staff. Unlike other similar efforts it has not been made anonymous though a process of removing personal information known as de-identification.
According to the Pew Research Center, 46% of Americans say they use voice-controlled digital assistants in their consumer behavior, with nearly half via a smartphone. The remainder use it on a computer, tablet or other device. As you can imagine, it’s more likely to be used by a younger person. Most like the convenience of these, with others liking them for their entertainment value, the ease of simply speaking and the ability for kids to use them.
And such AI usage might be undercounted.
Deloitte Research reveals that nearly two-thirds of America are likely to be using those products and services previously mentioned, without realizing that the voice on the other end is not likely a live human respondent. And we’ve been using such machine learning around 47 time a day—for the past three years—while folks over 55 are increasingly getting interested in this new technology.
Concerns over voter fraud have surged in recent years, especially after federal officials reported that Russian hackers attempted to access voter records in the 2016 presidential election. Administrative voting errors have been reported, too; for example, an audit by state officials revealed that 84,000 voter records were inadvertently duplicated by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in the 2018 June primary election.
Michael Alvarez, professor of political science at Caltech, and his team are helping with the situation by developing new algorithms for tracking voter data. They have partnered with Neal Kelley, Orange County’s registrar of voters, and, from April 2018 to May 2019, evaluated more than 1.5 million voting records in Orange County. The project’s first results, reported in the journal American Politics Research, show that this type of technology can be used to assess the integrity of an election. In this case, however, no instances of fraud or significant administrative errors were found.
To decide whether to visit a page, people take into account how much relevant information they are likely to find on that page relative to the effort involved in extracting that info.
Anxious couples are approaching fertility doctors in the US with requests for a hotly debated new genetic test being called “23andMe, but on embryos.”
The baby-picking test is being offered by a New Jersey startup company, Genomic Prediction, whose plans we first reported on two years ago.
The company says it can use DNA measurements to predict which embryos from an IVF procedure are least likely to end up with any of 11 different common diseases. In the next few weeks it’s set to release case studies on its first clients.
Microsoft on Monday announced that it intends to follow California’s landmark online privacy law nationwide when it goes into effect next year, a move that comes as federal efforts to draw up the country’s first comprehensive privacy law have stalled.
In a blog post, Microsoft called Congress’s “lack of action” on privacy legislation “a serious issue.”
Governor Ralph Northam’s office released new figures for additional computer science degrees to be generated by the state as part of the Tech Talent initiative. The commonwealth will produce a minimum of 25,000 new degrees over the next 20 years, with a goal to exceed that figure by producing 31,000 new degrees.
William & Mary will receive more than $1.3 million annually in additional state support as part of a bipartisan initiative designed to generate 25,000 additional computer science degrees in Virginia by 2039.
Governor Ralph Northam announced a round of awards in the Tech Talent Investment Program in a Nov. 7 ceremony at Virginia State University. William & Mary President Katherine A. Rowe was present at the ceremony.
Science is a network, each paper linking those that came before with those that followed. In an exclusive analysis, researchers have delved into Nature’s part of that network. We explore their results, taking you on a tour of 150 years of interconnected, interdisciplinary research, as represented by Nature’s publication record. [video, 5:08]
Lausanne, Switzerland January 25-29. “Five days of 30 hands-on sessions and 29 tracks on machine learning and artificial intelligence with top speakers from around the world.” [$$$$]
“The deadline to apply for the prestigious Innovative Applications in Analytics Award (IAAA), brought to you by the Analytics Society of INFORMS, Kinaxis and Adelphi University, has been extended to Dec. 2. IAAA provides an excellent way to receive recognition within and outside of your organization for your analytics success stories.”
“To facilitate the use of NEON data and infrastructure, we are opening a call for providing a two-day Explore NEON workshop at host institutions.” Deadline for applications is December 16.
You need a solution that’s simple and easy: processing your data on a single computer, with minimal setup, and as much as possible using the same libraries you’re already using. And much of the time you can actually do that, using a set of techniques that are sometimes called “out-of-core computation”.
CamemBERT is a state-of-the-art language model for French based on the RoBERTa architecture pretrained on the French subcorpus of the newly available multilingual corpus OSCAR.