Unfortunately, however, due to the propagation of poorly fleshed-out facts and figures, most individuals see biometric identity as this messiah-like deity that can do absolutely no wrong to the millions of users who rely on the tech. As idealistic as it might be, thinking of biometric authentication as the one-stop solution to all authentication problems is a pretty limited way of thinking, that does more harm than good.
Before we can get into informing our readers about the vulnerabilities present in the biometric technology, let’s have a brief rundown of what biometric technology is, along with the multiple benefits it has to offer to users.
In a reform aimed at reducing Ph.D. program timelines and attrition, University of Chicago will guarantee full funding to humanities and social sciences students — in exchange for program caps.
For enterprises, the path to adopting artificial intelligence involves more than just development tools and algorithms. A company looking to deploy AI must first and foremost train its engineers in using the technology, a task that Amazon Web Services Inc. hopes to simplify through the ML Embark program it debuted at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas today.
ML Embark is an employee training service delivered by the cloud giant’s machine learning staff. Michelle Lee, head of the AWS Machine Learning Solutions Lab, wrote in a blog post that the offering draws on lessons parent company Amazon.com Inc. gleaned while assembling its internal AI teams.
One of those lessons is the need to provide a clear project objective for employees being instructed in using a new technology, in this case AI. ML Embark training programs kick off with an exercise that requires technical and nontechnical staff from the participating company to collaborate on identifying a business problem they can solve with machine learning.
Patients and doctors have raised privacy concerns about the plan. Lack of notice to doctors and consent from patients are the primary concerns.
As a public health lawyer, I study the legal and ethical basis for using data to promote public health. Information can be used to identify health threats, understand how diseases spread and decide how to spend resources. But it’s more complicated than that.
The law deals with what can be done with data; this piece focuses on ethics, which asks what should be done.
As part of the founding of the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), the largest academic unit at MIT, has been restructured to provide a stronger base for enhancing existing programs, creating new opportunities, and increasing connections to other parts of the Institute.
Jointly part of the School of Engineering and Schwarzman College of Computing, EECS is now composed of three overlapping sub-units in electrical engineering (EE), computer science (CS), and artificial intelligence and decision-making (AI+D), which brings together computer science-heritage AI and machine learning with electrical engineering-heritage information and decision systems to exploit their significant synergies. The department will remain responsible for Course 6.
The organizational plan for EECS was developed over the summer based on the final report of the Organizational Structure Working Group of the Computing Task Force.
Purdue trustees will vote Friday to move plans forward on a large construction project.
The university announced Wednesday that it is looking to build a $40 million data science facility that is “designed to help the university meet its goal to be a national and global leader in the field of data science research and education for all students,” according to a news release.
The College of Science building would be four stories and 86,000 square feet. It will feature classroom and teaching space aimed for all of campus.
Clark Atlanta University (CAU) and Augusta University (AU) announced that they have forged a partnership between the CAU Department of Cyber-Physical Systems and the School of Computer and Cyber Sciences at Augusta University. The partnership was announced at a press event held at Comcast-NBC Universal’s tech accelerator, the Farm in Atlanta.
“Clark Atlanta University is excited about the possibilities of this unique partnership with Augusta University,” said CAU President, George T. French Jr., PhD. “Together we will drive the diversity of ideas, talents and opportunities that will ensure a successful and more inclusive ecosystem for innovation.”
The partnership between the two institutions forms a framework for collaboration in training, research, and other educational endeavors in the areas of cybersecurity and cyber-physical systems (CPS).
Stanford University, Stanford Medicine, News Center
from
Protein levels in people’s blood can predict their age, a Stanford study has found. The study also found that aging isn’t a smoothly continuous process.
ManTech and General Dymanics will “will develop a Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE) platform that empowers holistic, enterprise-wide U.S. cyber training capabilities for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), delivering cyber threat-informed services, regional compute and data storage capabilities, and real-time #DevSecOps on a global scale,” the Facebook post stated.
Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are extratropical storms that produce extreme precipitation on the west coasts of the world’s major landmasses. In the United States, ARs cause significant flooding, yet their economic impacts have not been quantified. Here, using 40 years of data from the National Flood Insurance Program, we show that ARs are the primary drivers of flood damages in the western United States. Using a recently developed AR scale, which varies from category 1 to 5, we find that flood damages increase exponentially with AR intensity and duration: Each increase in category corresponds to a roughly 10-fold increase in damages. Category 4 and 5 ARs cause median damages in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, respectively. Rising population, increased development, and climate change are expected to worsen the risk of AR-driven flood damage in future decades.
“The Electric Power Research Institute’s (EPRI) Incubatenergy® Network today announced “Incubatenergy Labs,” a program that connects startups with utilities to identify, prioritize, and demonstrate solutions addressing challenges common among electric power utilities. Incubatenergy Labs seeks solutions that address customer engagement, digitalization, distributed energy resource integration, workforce of the future, electric mobility, and customer and community resilience. Incubatenergy Labs will also accept applications in an open category for solutions that fall outside of these topic areas.” Deadline to apply is January 17, 2020.
“The Association for Computing Machinery‘s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) today announced that KDD 2020, the premier interdisciplinary conference in data science, has opened the call for papers in both its research and applied data science tracks.” Deadline for submissions is February 13, 2020.
Benchling’s value proposition is easy to see. For researchers—whether in an academic lab, small biotech, or big pharma—keeping track of research using paper lab notebooks, email, and spreadsheets is cumbersome and inefficient. But the challenges to science are much bigger than just misplaced notes or forgotten results. That is the lowest hanging fruit—the returns for an isolated scientist.
The real value, says Saji Wickramasekara, comes from enabling a new level of collaboration and data provenance.
Wickramasekara is Benchling’s co-founder and CEO. In 2012, Benchling started with that low-hanging fruit. “We started by building tools for the individual academic scientist working at the bench, and those are tools for designing experiments that had to do with nucleic acid sequences for DNA in proteins and then tools to document and track experiments,” Wickramasekara told Bio-IT World.