The Brazilian government has taken another step towards the creation of public policies around artificial intelligence (AI).
A national AI strategy will be created as a response to the worldwide race for leadership in the field and the need to discuss the future of work, education, tax, research and development as well as ethics as the application of related technologies becomes more pervasive.
A public consultation has been launched to gather input around how AI can solve the country’s main issues, identify priority areas of focus for the development and use of the technologies, as well as limits for it.
Swiftly’s cashierless solution isn’t exactly the type of “friction free” shopping its rivals like Trigo and Grabango are trying to create. To use Swiftly, you must download an app to your phone, use that app to scan an item’s barcode, and then interact with a human in a special checkout lane to confirm you aren’t stealing something. While that may be more complicated for the consumer to use, the lack of hardware installation does make it cheaper for retailers to adopt.
But Swiftly is more interested in what happens after you leave the store. In addition to integrating with a grocer’s POS system, Swiftly’s system is also tied into store’s loyalty program, managing any loyalty points accrued and applying them to purchases when available. Being integrated with the loyalty program means Swifty’s system has a shopper’s purchase history, with which Swiftly can use to suggest products, whether it’s because those items are on sale or because Swiftly’s algorithms think an item might be of interest.
Los Angeles Times, Rong-Gong Lin II and Casey Miller
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In a milestone, California’s new statewide earthquake early warning cellphone app sent out its first public alert for a magnitude 4.3 earthquake that ruptured Tuesday in the mountains between the Central Coast and San Joaquin Valley.
More than 40 people received the warning, said Jennifer Strauss, project manager for the MyShake app, which was created by UC Berkeley and released publicly in October. It is available on iOS and Android systems.
Federal researchers have found widespread evidence of racial bias in nearly 200 facial recognition algorithms in an extensive government study, highlighting the technology’s shortcomings and potential for misuse.
Racial minorities were far more likely than whites to be misidentified in the US government’s testing, the study found, raising fresh concerns about the software’s impartiality even as more government agencies at the city, state and federal level clamor to use it.
In a release, Patrick Grother, one of the researchers behind the report, said race-based biases were evident in “the majority of the face recognition algorithms we studied.” Compared to their performance against whites, some algorithms were up to 100 times more likely to confuse two different non-white people.
From probing the ocean depths to deciphering human health mysteries, researchers across scientific disciplines are increasingly including microbiomes in their work. The Microbiome Centers Consortium has been launched by two University of California, Irvine School of Bioscience faculty members to advance growth in this life science field, increasingly recognized as relevant to many other disciplines and industrial applications.
Jennifer Martiny, UCI professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, Katrine Whiteson, UCI assistant professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, co-authored a paper in the current issue of the online journal Nature Microbiology describing the new organization and its mission.
The AI talent grab is real. This year alone, Pinterest CTO Vanja Josifovski jumped ship to Airbnb, while Pinterest hired Walmart CTO Jeremy King to head up its engineering team. Moreover, all the big tech companies, including Google and Apple, have for some time been vacuuming up AI talent through acquisitions — a recent CB Insights report noted 635 AI acquisitions since 2010, topped by Apple with 20 acquisitions. Elsewhere, Microsoft turned to online education platforms to help train a new generation of AI students.
But while the AI talent pool may be growing, a significant shortage remains. Those with the necessary skills — ranging from robotics to computer vision and natural language processing — are in high demand, and they face a clear choice: Take a paycheck at one of the big tech companies, chase a longer-term moonshot at an emerging startup, or launch their own business from scratch.
For 14 months, I worked as a graduate student researcher in Ito’s group on AI ethics at the Media Lab. I stopped on August 15, immediately after Ito published his initial “apology” regarding his ties to Epstein, in which he acknowledged accepting money from the financier both for the Media Lab and for Ito’s outside venture funds. Ito did not disclose that Epstein had, at the time this money changed hands, already pleaded guilty to a child prostitution charge in Florida, or that Ito took numerous steps to hide Epstein’s name from official records, as The New Yorker later revealed.
Inspired by whistleblower Signe Swenson and others who have spoken out, I have decided to report what I came to learn regarding Ito’s role in shaping the field of AI ethics, since this is a matter of public concern. The emergence of this field is a recent phenomenon, as past AI researchers had been largely uninterested in the study of ethics. A former Media Lab colleague recalls that Marvin Minsky, the deceased AI pioneer at MIT, used to say that “an ethicist is someone who has a problem with whatever you have in your mind.” (In recently unsealed court filings, victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre testified that Epstein directed her to have sex with Minsky.) Why, then, did AI researchers suddenly start talking about ethics?
In a sometimes-obsessive quest, thousands of Old Weather volunteers have extracted millions of observations about barometric pressure, wind speed, air temperature and ice from the old logbooks. These are fed into a huge dataset at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, creating what NOAA calls “a dauntingly complex, high-resolution, four-dimensional reconstruction of the global climate that estimates what the weather was for every day back to 1836.”
Or, as NOAA has nicknamed it, “a weather time machine.”
Many of the ships, like the Jeannette, hail from the great era of Arctic exploration, when crews risked everything in a race for the North Pole. Ships plunged into the frozen unknown and vanished, inspiring other ships to launch daring but luckless missions to rescue them. In an age when Arctic ice is fast disappearing, many Old Weather volunteers also see their work as a rescue mission, but with much higher stakes, as the warming Earth makes its own leap into the unknown.
More than half of Harvard Law School students who responded to a 2017 mental health survey reported experiencing mild to severe depression and anxiety, according to a report released Friday by a Law School working group of faculty, staff, and students.
The report references aspects of a 2017 student mental health survey at the Law School, whose results student activists have long called on administrators to publish. The working group’s report is accessible to affiliates of the school online.
The search of other worlds is a field of science on the cusp of a revolution. By unpacking the exoplanet hunters’ toolkit we can examine the techniques that are bringing closer than ever to understanding our place in the Universe.
Across the nation, university history departments have been shrinking in recent years amid a more general conversation regarding the value of the humanities. Within that broader landscape, programs in more specific subject areas, like the history of science and technology, are particularly in jeopardy. And that, say historians from Caltech and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, makes their recent launch of a new joint research institute both a timely and critical endeavor.
“Irrelevance equals obsolescence”
This latest endeavor builds on a commitment both institutions have made regarding the importance of history and, in particular, the light it can shed on both the past and future of science and technology.
“If you don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you are and you don’t know where you’re going,” says Jed Buchwald, Caltech’s Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History and director of the newly formed Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology (RIHST). “And history as a discipline is much older than science as a discipline. Until about the middle of the 18th century, it was actually considered to be the central discipline.”
Key themes in the embedded systems and Internet of things (IoT) world this year range from edge intelligence to security and the progress of open source. Below, we share what we see as the top five pivotal events from 2019 that are likely to have significant ramifications on 2020.
The Trump administration is reportedly considering issuing an executive order that would make it easier for everyone to access publicly funded research.
According to E&E News, the White House is considering mandating, via executive order, that all federally funded research be immediately available to the public upon publication. Currently, a lot of federally funded research is kept behind a paywall for one year before it becomes public. The executive order would reportedly mandate eliminating that paywall period.
It’s unclear what’s motivating the administration to issue this mandate, and the text of the potential executive order has not yet been released. At this point, it’s hard to completely evaluate its merits.
Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles have developed a groundbreaking model that aims to address the city’s homeless crisis by identifying people most in need of help before they fall into homelessness.
The theory is that by reaching out to people and getting them the help they need, homelessness can be prevented.
“How do you get to people before they experience homelessness,” Janey Rountree said. “Is there a way to intervene with them?”
Rountree, the executive director of the California Policy Lab at UCLA, and her team set out to answer those questions by building a model to predict who is most at risk of becoming homeless in the county in a given year. [video, 1:45]
Ogden, UT January 13, starting at 7 p.m., Weber State University’s Hurst Center Dumke Legacy Hall. “Panelists will discuss the important role the census plays in society, how the data helps provide necessary resources to the community and what it means when individuals and families do not complete it.” [free]
“Apply to join us at Janelia. We are now accepting applications for undergraduate and graduate student opportunities.” Deadline for graduate study applications is January 15.
“Security bugs that are novel, affect multiple platforms, work on the latest hardware and software, and impact sensitive components will give researchers a bigger chance at netting the top $1.5 million reward.”
Columbus, OH June 3-5. “Women in Analytics is focused on providing growth opportunities for women in the field by increasing visibility to the individuals making an impact in the analytics space, providing our conference as platform for them to lead the conversation, and supporting their success in communicating their expertise and experiences in their craft.” Deadline to express interest in speaking is February 29.
A self-directed year-end review can be done in a few different ways, says Sandler. You can break down your year in quarters, review past goals, or review the main areas of your life, such as career, finances, health, personal development, and relationships.
Uber Engineering Blog; Ankit Jain, Isaac Liu, Ankur Sarda, and Piero Molino
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The Uber Eats app serves as a portal to more than 320,000 restaurant-partners in over 500 cities globally across 36 countries. In order to make the user experience more seamless and easy-to-navigate, we show users the dishes, restaurants, and cuisines they might like up front. To this end, we previously developed ML models to better understand queries and for multi-objective optimization in Uber Eats search and recommender system in Uber Eats searches and surfaced food options.
Existing research [1] has shown the efficacy of graph learning methods for recommendation tasks. Applying this idea to Uber Eats, we developed graph learning techniques to surface the foods that are most likely to appeal to an individual user. Productionizing this method improves the quality and relevance of our food and restaurant recommendations on the platform.
Charts are everywhere, yet most are poorly designed, when not flat-out wrong. And while we are taught to draw charts as early as elementary school, we are rarely told how to design them well.
This sorry state of affairs is regularly chronicled in articles denouncing the evils of prevalent yet poorly-understood charts like pie charts. In these diatribes, we are told to use bar charts instead, often without proper explanations for the unique qualities of pie charts.
In this article, I will outline the main benefits and limitations of both charts.
Then, I will introduce a new kind of chart that combines the best of both.