For the inaugural column in the Industrial Active Learning series, we focus on how communication challenges arise between data scientists and business stakeholders. We argue that the metrics that quantify outcomes are generally very different for data scientists and business stakeholders, making it likely that each side struggles to understand and speak in terms that are familiar to the other side. It’s not hopeless, though: great teams prioritize translating results from business terms to data science terms and back, a task that’s hard work but well worth the investment.
The Kansas City Star, Mará Rose Williams and Souichi Terada
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University of Missouri students, be warned: If it’s not Big Brother watching you, it might be your professors and university administrators.
The school is using hidden technology and an app on student cellphones to keep track of who is in class and who is not.
Officials say it’s for the students’ own good. Besides, they say, MU’s athletic department has been using the tracking app the past four years for all freshmen athletes, plus any athlete in academic trouble.
RFocus asks a simple question: What if instead of just antennas and transmitters on access points and mobile devices, we put the things just about everywhere? You know, just totally slather the walls with the stuff? The new “smart surface” from MIT’s CSAIL uses in excess of 3,000 antennas to boost signal strength by nearly 10x.
The department issued a paper today showcasing the technology, which is relatively cheap, with each antenna running a few cents. Better still, it’s low power, either reflecting a signal or allowing it through, depending on the software controller. CSAIL envisions a future where RFocus is used in homes and warehouses to boost signals for the Internet of Things and various network-connected devices.
Since 2003, the Tri-institutional Program in Computational Biology and Medicine (CBM), a graduate program bringing together faculty and resources from Cornell University, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Memorial Sloan Kettering, has filled an important niche in the Upper East Side’s biomedical ecosystem. It has put a specific focus on recruiting and training exceptional students in computational disciplines.
Now, Rockefeller is joining the CBM program. Given the importance of data analysis to all fields of science, participation in the program is expected to provide access to a steady stream of talented students working in this cutting-edge discipline. It will also give students in the program the opportunity to conduct research in Rockefeller labs and will help foster new collaborations between experimentalists and experts in computational disciplines.
The objective of this $1.2M research project is to create a model to better enable individuals to develop the skills needed for working in these complex social systems, and provide short- and long-term economic and social benefits via improvements in student outcomes, individuals’ skills and project outcomes.
This is a critical need for the AEC industry, as these project teams often have long-term social, economic and environmental impacts through their built environment products.
The University of Toronto has launched a FinTech boot camp and applications are open.
The course, which is 24 weeks long and is composed of two night classes during the week and one class on the weekends, is part of a series of boot camps that UofT has put together with Trilogy Education.
Maureen MacDonald, the Dean at the University of Toronto’s School of Continued Studies, spoke with IT World Canada about the course and said that a growing need for the skills in Toronto let them create this program.
In today’s world where the competition is fierce for talent, it says a lot when your country is selected for opening a major engineering centre. It says, even more, when that company is a global leader in bringing the power or AI and machine learning to the enterprise. As such, upon hearing about Databricks coming to Canada, it sparked my interest to learn more.
Databricks is leading the charge for organizations to derive value out of AI and machine learning and is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the world today. The next decade of innovation will combine the technology domains of cloud, data, and AI – Databricks is sitting at the intersection of all three.
The Daily Californian student newspaper, Emma Rooholfada
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UC Berkeley neurobiology professor John Ngai has been selected to join the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, to lead its Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN, Initiative — a government-established program aimed at advancing scientists’ understanding of brain function.
As head of the initiative, Ngai will be in charge of the project’s day-to-day operations and allocation of the organization’s funds to research projects nationwide. Ngai will also work with scientists, foundations, industrial partners and Congress to establish a long-term plan for the BRAIN Initiative.
The 2020 Census will be the first census to use a powerful new privacy protection system designed for the digital age. It uses a rigorous mathematical process, drawing from cryptography, to guarantee a level of privacy regardless of any new technology the future brings.
We’ve come a long way from those early days of posting local responses in the town square. Visit our Statistical Safeguards pages to learn more.
After being in stealth mode for two years, today we’re excited to finally launch Covariant to the world! In this blog post, we want to share the story of why we founded the company and our journey so far.
Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg Green, James M Gomez and Dorota Bartyzel
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Tackling climate change has become a top political priority in Europe. Green parties are now part of Austria’s governing coalition and inching up on power in Germany. Poland, though, has a mountain to climb. It’s home to more than 30 of the EU’s 50 most polluted cities, a legacy of communist-era industry. Almost 80% of its electricity is generated by coal, which is also the primary fuel for household heating. Preserving jobs for miners is government policy.
Krakow, the country’s historic capital and its most popular tourist destination, took a radical approach to fighting the smog. Buses are all-electric, but more remarkably the city is the first in Poland to issue a ban on burning coal and is policing its air with drones. The law went into effect on Sept. 1.
As Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs cluster around the worldview that artificial intelligence is poised to change how we work, investors are deciding which use cases make the most sense to pump money into right now. One focus has been the relentless communication between companies and customers that takes place at call centers.
Call center tech has spawned dozens if not hundreds of AI startups, many of which have focused on automating services and using robotic voices to point customers somewhere they can spend money. There has been a lot of progress, but not all of those products have delivered. Cresta is more focused on using AI suggestions to help human contact center workers make the most of an individual call or chat session and lean on what’s worked well for past interactions that were deemed successful.
Scientists are constantly searching for the source of things like the origin of the universe, matter or life. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, in a collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and several other universities, have demonstrated a way to experimentally detect the most hidden aspect of all chemical reactions — the extremely short-lived transition state that occurs at their initiation. This pivotal discovery could become instrumental in gaining the ability to predict and externally control the outcomes of chemical processes.
Unfortunately, peer review has problems that run deeper than the quality of any particular reviewer. The process is inconsistent and subjective to the degree that — in the words of Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal — it’s “something of a lottery.” Smith wrote that Robbie Fox, a one-time editor of the Lancet, went so far as to question “whether anybody would notice if he were to swap the piles marked ‘publish’ and ‘reject.’” There’s a mountain of evidence that these claims aren’t far from the truth.
The situation is especially grim in artificial intelligence, where most impactful publications appear in conference proceedings. Every year, each of several large conferences in the field receives thousands of submissions in a single day, which are then reviewed simultaneously by a “program committee” consisting of thousands of volunteers. It’s obvious that enforcing consistency at this scale is all but impossible.
Thwaites Glacier is one of the most remote parts of the Antarctic (which is saying a lot) and yet its fate is intimately tied with millions of people around the world. The glacier is the bulwark against ice stored on West Antarctica. If it collapses, it could destabilize the region’s ice and send sea levels spiraling up to 10 feet higher.
Yet for all its importance, very few people had ever set foot on its icy shoulders until this austral summer. A team comprised of 100 researchers from the U.S. and UK was deployed to the glacier in November, and they recently completed groundbreaking fieldwork, including a host of firsts including the first-ever ice cores and first-ever footage captured under the ice. The trove of data they’re bringing back could help reveal how imminent the risk of Thwaites’ collapse is.
Menlo Park, CA Feb 11-12, Quadrus Conference Center (2400 Sand Hill Road). “ApplySci’s 13th Wearable Tech + Digital Health + Neurotech conference.” [$$$$]
Penn State University, Institute for Computational and Data Sciences
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State College, PA March 16-17. “‘We organized this symposium not just to help researchers grapple with the considerable challenges of big data — or the data deluge, as it has been called — but we also want to call attention to the enormous opportunities that this data can offer scholars engaged in interdisciplinary research on science and society’s biggest questions,’ said Jenni Evans, professor of meteorology and atmospheric science and ICDS director.” [registration required]
San Francisco, CA June 22-25. “As the largest data and machine learning conference, Spark + AI Summit brings together over 7,500 engineers, scientists, developers, analysts and leaders from around the world to San Francisco every year.” [$$$$]
Corvallis, OR August 11-14 at Oregon State University. “The four-day event will be two days of tutorials and two days of talks, open discussions, and statistical modeling.” [$$$]
New York, NY September 13-16. “To stay competitive, you need to understand AI. And you can’t have AI without data. At the O’Reilly Strata Data & AI Conference, you get both. Be a part of the program—apply to speak by March 10.”
Today, we are pleased to introduce PLOS ONE’s Science of Stories Collection, which includes submissions invited through a Call for Papers last year. The Call for Papers welcomed primary research papers that propose solutions to real world, data-rich problems that use different empirical methods. The Guest Editors overseeing the scope and curating the Collection are Peter Dodds (University of Vermont), Mirta Galesic (Santa Fe Institute), Matthew Jockers (Washington State University), and Mohit Iyyer (University of Massachusetts Amherst).
At launch, the Collection includes over 15 papers illustrating data-driven approaches to understanding stories and their impact. Some articles explore the nature of narrative and narrative thinking in texts and other media, for instance, the role of similarity in narrative persuasion, the effects of choosing violence in narratives, the importance of characters in narratives communicating risk of natural disaster, the impact of storytelling in complex collaborative tasks such as food preparation, and the role of narrative in collaborative reasoning and intelligence analysis.
Layer Cake is a graphics framework built on top of Svelte. It measures your target div and your data and creates scales that stay synced on layout changes. Use these scales to organize multiple, mostly-reusable Svelte components, whether they be SVG, HTML, Canvas or WebGL. Since they all share the same coordinate space, you can build your graphic one layer at a time.
After the release of one of Compass’ most visible AI projects, Similar Homes and Recommendations, the AI Services Team at Compass has been hard at work launching other AI projects to improve the efficiency of our agents and expand usability for our customers. One area where we saw an opportunity to leverage AI to significantly improve the user experience is search suggestions — the suggestions displayed in the dropdown when you type into the search box. Our intuition proved correct, and in this post we’ll discuss how we launched this new feature.
Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!