The Pentagon launched its Joint Artificial Intelligence Center in 2018 to strategically unify and accelerate AI applications across the nation’s defense and military enterprise. Insiders at the center have now spent about nine months executing that defense driven AI-support.
At an ACT-IAC forum in Washington Wednesday, Rachael Martin, the JAIC’s mission chief of Intelligent Business Automation Augmentation and Analytics, highlighted insiders’ early approach to automation and innovation.
“Our mission is to transform the [Defense] business process through AI technologies, to improve efficiency and accuracy—but really to do all those things so that we can improve our overall warfighter support,” Martin said.
Brown Daily Herald student newspaper, Jonathan Douglas
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In recent years, the computer science department has exploded. In 2015, 133 students graduated with a concentration or joint concentration in computer science. By 2019 — just four years later — that number had skyrocketed to 259, an increase of almost 95 percent. Course enrollment has also ballooned as students in other disciplines recognize the growing importance of the field. Enrollment in 1000-level courses increased from 874 students across 16 classes in fall 2016 to 1,352 students in fall 2019 across 22 classes.
This change has not gone unnoticed; in December 2018, the department announced that it would hire 15 new faculty members over the next five years, an increase of 50 percent, The Herald previously reported. But so far, only one new tenure-track professor and one new lecturer have joined the department, according to department chair Ugur Cetintemel.
Despite these two hires, the department’s growth has not happened fast enough.
These kinds of apps are billed as useful tools for people who are trying to have a baby, want to prevent pregnancy, or need to monitor menstrual-cycle-related health problems such as hormone-triggered migraines. But to do so, the apps collect deeply personal information that can go well beyond the dates of your period. Depending on the app, that can include how often you have sex, if you are trying to have a baby, and whether you engage in unprotected sex, have experienced a miscarriage, or are approaching menopause.
As Consumer Reports’ Digital Lab found in a recent examination of five popular period tracking apps—BabyCenter, Clue, Flo, My Calendar, and Ovia—this means even anonymous users like Feintuch have no guarantee that their information won’t be shared in some way with third parties for marketing and other purposes.
Police are currently using Rapid DNA technology as a tool to generate leads in investigations, helping solve a variety of crimes. In murder and kidnapping cases, police take DNA samples from crime scene evidence to help locate and charge suspects. Police also use Rapid DNA to solve property crimes, like burglaries and theft.
Additionally, increasing demand for DNA evidence has resulted in a substantial backlog of unprocessed samples, particularly in cases involving sexual assault. This backlog delays prosecution and denies justice to victims. Rapid DNA has the potential to alleviate the backlog by testing rape kits more quickly, providing both moral and economic benefits.
In addition to collecting DNA from crime scenes and victims, police collect DNA samples from people charged with crimes for both rapid and traditional DNA testing.
In this podcast, a16z operating partner Frank Chen interviews Stuart Russell, Founder of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at UC Berkeley. They outline the conceptual breakthroughs, like natural language understanding, still required for AGI. But more importantly, they explain how and why we should design AI systems to ensure that we can control AI, and eventually AGI, when it’s smarter than we are. The conversation starts by explaining what Hollywood’s Skynet gets wrong and ends with why AI is better as “the perfect Butler, than the genie in the lamp.” [audio, 26:03]
Tel Aviv and Harvard University scientists have created and linked up nine Organs-on-a-chip, including brain, heart and liver, paving way for personalized drug development
Van Andel [Research Institute] is not the only US research institute in hot water for allowing its scientists to accept Chinese funding. The Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Florida has also fallen foul of these rules. Its president and chief executive, Alan List, and director, Thomas Sellers, both resigned on 18 December over their participation in China’s ‘Thousand Talents’ programme, as well as participation by at least four other faculty members. The other four researchers also lost their jobs. For a decade, the Chinese government has been operating the Thousand Talents programme to recruit science and technology experts from western universities and research institutes to work in China.
A report from Moffitt earlier this month to Florida state legislators, who are investigating the issue, said the faculty members accepted personal cash honoraria and travel benefits during their visits to China, without reporting these to Moffitt, and that they also opened personal bank accounts in China to receive these unreported funds. There is no evidence, however, that intellectual property was stolen or that research or patient care was compromised.
The online Master’s in Health Informatics and Analytics program at Tufts University School of Medicine welcomed its first students in Fall 2019. The new program is designed for professionals in the health-care, data, and computer science fields, to give them the knowledge and skills to improve health care through information technology.
Health informatics is the collection and management of health data, including deciding what data to collect from patients and others and the design of the systems that collect it. Health analytics is about leveraging that data to answer pressing questions related to disease prevention and treatment, access to care, and health-care delivery.
By 2030, Microsoft has pledged to become “carbon negative” — meaning it will remove more carbon from the air than it emits. To do so, the U.S. tech giant announced this month that it will slash annual emissions not only from its offices, factories, and data centers but also from the living rooms and basement dens where people use its products. That means tackling the outsized impact of a relatively small device: the Xbox.
The gaming console has the largest carbon footprint of any Microsoft device, due to the amount of electricity people use while playing video games, a company spokesperson said by email. Each Xbox One X console, for instance, contributes the equivalent of more than 1 ton of carbon emissions over eight years — and 86 percent of that is solely from product use. (The remaining 14 percent is from manufacturing, packaging, shipping, and end-of-life recycling.)
University of Missouri-Kansas City, University News student newspaper, Henry Gamber
from
Students looking to find a career in what Harvard Business Review describes as “the sexiest job of the 21st century” are in luck.
UMKC is launching a new data science program to propel students further into data education with workshops designed to provide hands on research experience in the field.
The Institute for Data Education, Analytics and Science (IDEAS) was created by Chancellor Mauli Agrawal, who saw potential for UMKC to take a lead position for data science education in Missouri.
DAWNBench, the AI accelerator benchmark, is being retired to make room for MLPerf, according to its creators. DAWNBench will stop accepting rolling submissions on 3/27 in order to help consolidate benchmarking efforts across the industry.
Created as part of the five-year DAWN project at Stanford, DAWNBench launched in 2017 and was the first benchmark to compare end-to-end training and inference across multiple deep learning frameworks and tasks. It allowed optimizations across model architectures, optimization procedures, software frameworks and hardware platforms.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced a new visa system, designed to recruit leading scientists and mathematicians to the UK, just days before the country plans to leave the European Union.
“The UK has a proud history of scientific discovery, but to lead the field and face the challenges of the future we need to continue to invest in talent and cutting-edge research,” Johnson says in a statement posted today (January 27). “That is why as we leave the EU I want to send a message that the UK is open to the most talented minds in the world, and stand ready to support them to turn their ideas into reality.”
Beginning on February 20, the Global Talent visa will be managed by the UK Research and Innovation Agency rather than immigration officials at the Home Office. The goal is to “provide an accelerated path” to entry where researchers’ credentials are assessed by the scientific community, according to the press release.
La Jolla, CA February 7-8. “UC San Diego will host the Cultured Data Symposium, bringing together experts from data science and the arts and humanities to examine the emerging relationship between data and culture.” [registration required]
University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley Institute for Data Science.
from
Berkeley, CA April 3, starting at 11 a.m., University of California-Berkeley, 190 Doe Library. “The ‘Information and Uncertainty in Data Science’ Discussion Forum is a forum for open inquiry and discussion about a wide range of recurring data science fundamentals, including information, uncertainty, entropy, bits, probability, machine learning, generalization, and others.”
“The Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) is holding a competition to re-christen its supercomputer, which is currently called the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences Advanced Infrastructure, or ICDS-ACI.” Deadline for submissions is February 9.
“We at the Stack Overflow blog want to provide our community, as well as the larger programming community, with interesting articles about what life is like as a coder today. Whether that’s coverage of research on security vulnerabilities in Stack Overflow code examples, insights into what it really takes to be a full-stack engineer, or a look at the never-ending migration from Python 2 to 3, we hope the articles we publish are the ones that coders—hobbyists, beginners, or professionals—want to read.”
“the right tools can go a long way in achieving the desired result in the time frame that can surprise even the most optimistic of us. Needless to say, R is an excellent example of that right tool”
To celebrate the World Data Privacy Day, Florian Schaub, assistant professor in the UM School of Information and College of Engineering, has created seven tips for consumers who want to lock down their data.
1. Check the privacy policy. Find the privacy link at the bottom of a company’s website and check (1) Are they using data for things you’re not OK with? And (2) Are they sharing data for advertising or marketing?
These days, if you have decent connection, you are seconds away from finding almost any public knowledge in the internet. However, there is another aspect of information: personal and specific to your needs, work and hobbies. It’s your todo list, your private notes, books you are reading. Of course, it’s not that well integrated with the outside world, hence the tooling and experience of interacting with it is very different.