Salinas Post (KS), Kansas News Service, Celia Llopsis-Jensen
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What if researchers could go to a single hub for vast deposits of information on a range of issues from water quality to court rulings to the medicinal powers of marijuana?
Armed with all that existing research, they might begin to draw conclusions that apply across the country. They might also avoid repeating the work of other researchers.
Two professors at Kansas State University, Nathaniel Birkhead and Audrey Joslin, have begun construction on that online, open-source data hub. They’re teaming with colleagues at Rochester University, University of Notre Dame, University of Virginia, University of North Carolina, Charlotte and North Carolina A&T State University.
To feed a world population approaching 10 billion by 2050, global food production must become more efficient. Ongoing advances in agricultural research and farm management practices are helping improve food production, but the advent of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics could hold the key to agriculture’s future. SAS is forging a new agricultural technology business unit to help growers and agribusiness leaders turn an exploding amount of farm and agricultural data into insights that inform safe and secure food production. SAS is also enhancing agricultural research and talent development through its support of the North Carolina Plant Sciences Initiative at North Carolina State University (NC State).
For Ingrid, a 15-year-old in La Crosse, Wisconsin, going to high school means being monitored on surveillance cameras in her hallways and classrooms. Students are required to carry their school supplies in clear backpacks, as ordinary backpacks might be used to conceal a weapon, she said. Water bottles must also be clear, so school officials can see the color of the liquid inside. The monitoring continues on the laptops students use in school. Teenagers are warned that the school is tracking what they do, and that they can get in trouble for visiting inappropriate websites.
This level of surveillance is “not too over-the-top”, Ingrid said, and she feels her classmates are generally “accepting” of it.
When it comes to digital surveillance of what they do on school laptops, “I feel like everyone’s adjusted. I don’t think anyone really cares at this point,” Ingrid said. “The subject doesn’t really come up until someone’s gotten in trouble for something. Usually it’s just like, ‘Oh, that person is stupid, looking at what they were doing on a school device. They should have known better.’”
Philosopher Arthur Danto argued in 1965 that even the most informed person, an “ideal chronicler,” cannot judge a recent event’s ultimate significance because it depends on chain reactions that have not happened yet. Duncan Watts, a computational social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, had long wanted to test Danto’s idea. He got his chance when Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly suggested analyzing a set of two million declassified State Department cables sent between 1973 and 1979, along with a compendium of the 0.1 percent of them that turned out to be the most historically important (compiled by historians decades after their transmission).
Connelly, Watts and their colleagues first scored each cable’s “perceived contemporaneous importance” (PCI), based on metadata such as how urgent or secret it had been rated. This score corresponded only weakly with inclusion in the later compendium, they reported in September in Nature Human Behaviour: the highest-scoring cables were only four percentage points more likely to be included than the lowest-scoring ones. The most common prediction errors were false positives—cables that got high scores but later proved unimportant. “I do think there’s a kind of narcissism of the present,” Connelly says. “I’ve been struck by how many times sports fans say, ‘That’s one for the history books.’”
A few days ago, Loïc Estève, Alexandre Gramfort, Olivier Grisel, Bertrand Thirion, and myself received the “Académie des Sciences Inria prize for transfer”, for our contributions to the scikit-learn project. To put things simply, it’s quite a big deal to me, because I feel that it illustrates a change of culture in academia.
It is a great honor, because the selection was made by the members of the Académie des Sciences, very accomplished scientists with impressive contributions to science. The “Académie” is the hallmark of fundamental academic science in France.
Nieman Journalism Lab; John Bowers, Tim Hwang, and Jonathan Zittrain
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Three researchers argue the dangers of deepfakes are overblown, but they will still require journalists to give thought to how they handle unconfirmed information.
How Emotion AI Supplements Behavioral Intent Prediction? … On a small scale, Alexa is now able to recognize when someone is whispering and whisper back.
In our capitalist system, the supposed purposes of financial markets are twofold: To coordinate resources, getting them to their most productive economic uses, and to provide corporate governance via the votes that come with stock ownership. By trading assets and pursuing personal profit, investors on financial markets are supposed to power both goals.
This is because trading is presumably happening with some kind of strategy and intent: human beings investigate companies and industries and make their trades accordingly — or they rely on other people who specialize in giving that advice. That’s why brokerage giants like Charles Schwab and the somewhat-less-gigantic TD Ameritrade traditionally provided their customers with financial advisers as a core part of their business. They act as financial middle men, linking investors to trading opportunities, facilitating the transactions, and providing financial advice along the way.
On Monday, Charles Schwab inked a $26 billion deal to buy TD Ameritrade. The resulting “goliath” wealth management firm will control a whopping $5 trillion in assets. But just as interesting as the merger itself are the tectonic changes in American financial trading that set the stage for it — in recent decades, financial management by adviser has essentially died off.
On the heels of forming a new partnership with Google (GOOGL), Mayo Clinic announced it has hired Dr. John Halamka — a Harvard professor and hospital IT veteran — to guide its efforts to apply artificial intelligence to vast stores of data from patients and devices.
Halamka will leave Beth Israel Lahey Health in Boston to become president of the Mayo Clinic platform, a unified data repository the Minnesota-based health system is creating to develop new analytics capabilities and digital services. His appointment will take effect Jan. 1.
Google, The Keyword blog, Larry Page and Sergey Brin
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With Alphabet now well-established, and Google and the Other Bets operating effectively as independent companies, it’s the natural time to simplify our management structure. We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company. And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President. Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He will be the executive responsible and accountable for leading Google, and managing Alphabet’s investment in our portfolio of Other Bets. We are deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term, and will remain actively involved as Board members, shareholders and co-founders. In addition, we plan to continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we’re passionate about!
Hello, NumFOCUS Community! It’s me, Gina—the Director of Communications and Culture.
Most of the time I write these blog posts from a more “official” point of view. Today I’m writing very personally, from me to all of you, to let you know that I will be leaving NumFOCUS. I’ve accepted a new position as Program Officer for Global Technology at Internews, where I’ll be working to support the development of open source tools protecting digital safety and access to uncensored information worldwide.
Personal income growth has been surging in some U.S. political battlegrounds, including a third of the counties in Pennsylvania — which Donald Trump narrowly flipped in 2016 and may need to win re-election next year.
In the president’s first two years in office, a total of 325 counties representing nearly 6% of the U.S. population experienced their best annualized income gains since at least 1992, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. And 127 of those are located in perennial swing states, including Ohio and Iowa.
As neurotechnology advances at an unprecedented pace, scientists are in a unique position to consider the ethical, legal, and societal implications of their use, today and in the future. Neuroscience 2019 highlighted such vital dialogues with two engaging presentations: A “Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society” lecture given by Fei-Fei Li, Ph.D., co-director of Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Institute, and a social issues roundtable entitled “Ethical and Social Issues Raised by Neural-Digital Interfaces,” moderated by Tyler. (see video of the lecture)
To Augment, Not Replace
Li, in her special lecture, discussed the “dizzying rise of AI,” including the development of computer algorithms that can mimic human intelligence to reason, problem solve, and/or make decisions. Technological advances, including faster hardware with more memory as well as “big data,” or immense data sets that can train AI algorithms, are driving enormous change, not only in the computing industry but across society. And because of that, she argued, it raises an important question: Has the technology exceeded our humanity?
Alphabet may need to lean more heavily on its other bets, which include companies like Waymo and Verily, as its core digital advertising business run by Google shows signs of slowing down. Google showed slowing ad revenue in its first quarter of 2019 and lower profit compared to the previous year during the third quarter. The company has still struggled to generate significant revenue in hardware, although its cloud business is growing.
Page and Pichai have overseen the company during a tumultuous few years as Google employees have voiced their discontent with company policies. Thousands of Google employees walked out of offices around the world last year to protest a $90 million exit package Google reportedly paid to former Android leader Andy Rubin despite finding sexual misconduct claims against him to be credible, a New York Times investigation revealed. Alphabet’s board has opened an investigation into how executives have handled claims of sexual misconduct, CNBC reported last month.
The California Council on Science and Technology “is seeking PhD scientists and engineers for a year of public service and government leadership training in the California State Legislature AND California state agencies.” Deadline to apply is March 1, 2020.
“Amazon CodeGuru is a machine learning service for automated code reviews and application performance recommendations. It helps you find the most expensive lines of code that hurt application performance and keep you up all night troubleshooting, then gives you specific recommendations to fix or improve your code.”