When Kursat Ceylan, who is blind, was trying to find his way to a hotel, he used an app on his phone for directions, but also had to hold his cane and pull his luggage.
He ended up walking into a pole, cutting his forehead.
This inspired him to develop, along with a partner, Wewalk – a cane equipped with artificial intelligence (AI), that detects objects above chest level and pairs with apps including Google Maps and Amazon’s Alexa, so the user can ask questions.
The last decade has seen the proliferation of AI for Social Good programs within companies and academia. PAI conducted an analysis to understand the current landscape of AI for Social Good, and the areas that need improvement. At the PAI All Partners Meeting that took place in September of 2019, we organized a working session with our partner DataKind that brought together individuals across the fields of computer science, ethics, human rights and others to discuss how AI for Social Good projects can be scaled successfully.
Stack Overflow has long been the Q&A site of choice for developers. But while that’s what most people know the company for, it has also built out a jobs site and Teams, its private Q&A service for enterprise clients, over the years. Now, it’s looking to capitalize on that and kickstart growth of Teams, especially, under its new CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar.
Chandrasekar, a former investment banker and Rackspace exec, took over as Stack Overflow’s CEO. Teresa Dietrich, who was previously at McKinsey New Ventures, joined him at the beginning of the year as the company’s chief product officer. Ahead of today’s Teams product update, which mostly includes a number of new integrations, I sat down with Chandrasekar and Dietrich to talk about the company’s plans for the future and the role Teams will play in that.
We need your help! Folding@home is joining researchers around the world working to better understand the 2019 Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) to accelerate the open science effort to develop new life-saving therapies. By downloading Folding@Home, you can donate your unused computational resources to the Folding@home Consortium, where researchers working to advance our understanding of the structures of potential drug targets for 2019-nCoV that could aid in the design of new therapies. The data you help us generate will be quickly and openly disseminated as part of an open science collaboration of multiple laboratories around the world, giving researchers new tools that may unlock new opportunities for developing lifesaving drugs.
Google has made a string of big bets on Canada in 2020. Last month, Google announced plans to expand and open three new offices across Canada – in Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, and Montreal – with a commitment to hiring around 3,500 new employees.
Google also announced it will launch a new startup accelerator in Kitchener-Waterloo, marking the first Google Accelerator in Canada. The announcements saw Google expressly pointing to its commitment to deepen investment within Canada.
On Monday, Google for Startups opened applications for the accelerator program, looking to draw in startups from across the country to participate. BetaKit recently sat down with Ashley Francisco, Google’s Canadian startup ecosystem lead, who is also leading the newest accelerator, to discuss what the program signals for Google’s presence in Canada.
Issues in Science and Technology magazine, Carolyn Bartholomew
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Beijing’s techno-nationalist approach to digital innovation puts the United States at a disadvantage, with serious ramifications for economic, military, and political security. Now is the time for a strategic response.
South by Southwest 2020 is scheduled to begin in just over a week. The festival will bring a slew of big-name speakers and performers to Austin—from Hillary Clinton to St. Vincent, Ozzy Osbourne to Kim Kardashian West, Judd Apatow to Admiral William McRaven. Venues across the city are booked for events. (Editor’s note: Texas Monthly has an official SXSW event of its own this year.)
It’s also the subject of a Change.org petition which, at the moment, has nearly 25,000 signatures. The petition urges the festival—or maybe the city—to cancel the event amid fears surrounding the coronavirus outbreak that’s killed thousands and raised pandemic concerns around the globe. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, whose company has been closely associated with SXSW since breaking through at the festival in 2006, announced on Monday that he would be canceling his keynote due to coronavirus concerns.
After Facebook canceled its F8 developer conference and Google itself moved its Cloud Next event in April to a digital-only conference, it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that Google is canceling its I/O developer conference in Mountain View for 2020 as well. The company has sent an email to attendees informing them of the cancellation. The event was originally scheduled to run from May 12 to 14, but because of concerns around the coronavirus, it is now canceling the show.
Google said in a blog post that it would roll out free access to advanced Hangouts Meet video-conferencing capabilities to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers globally as the company pitches its remote work tools as an option for companies looking to let employees work from home.
As the COVID-19 outbreak evolves, CDC strongly encourages event organizers and staff to prepare for the possibility of outbreaks in their communities. Creating an emergency plan for mass gatherings and large community events can help protect you and the health of your event participants and local community.
After March 31, a bunch of amateur alien hunters will regain some personal computing power. The Berkeley SETI Research Center announced Monday that SETI@home, the two-decades-old crowdsourcing effort to hunt for signs of E.T. in radio telescope data using internet-connected computers, is shutting down at the end of the month.
In the rush preceding a conference deadline, many papers are produced, but there is not enough time to check things properly and the race to put out more papers (especially as first or equal-first author) is humanly crushing. On the other hand, I am convinced that some of the most important advances have come through a slower process, with the time to think deeply, to step back, and to verify things carefully. Pressure has a negative effect on the quality of the science we generate. I would like us to think about Slow Science (check their manifesto!).
Motivated by this feeling, I have been thinking of a potentially different publication model for ML, which has some similarity to what has been experimented elsewhere (e.g., VLDB). I shared these thoughts with the NeurIPS board, and I share them to you here. Here is the content of my message to the board:
Personal training is a popular but expensive option in the $100 billion fitness industry; it can cost an average of $40-70/hour. Local startup Delta Trainer is using artificial intelligence to make personal training more accessible.
Everyone who signs up for Delta Trainer gets an Apple Watch and is connected with a remote personal trainer, who sets up a unique workout plan for each of their clients. But the trainer isn’t there in person to monitor someone’s squats and lunges; that’s the AI’s job. [audio, 1:30]
In 1945, engineer and science administrator Vannevar Bush laid out a framework for support of science in the U.S. that drove prosperity and American dominance. That model isn’t enough anymore, experts said at an event this week in Washington, D.C.
The big picture: With China threatening to overtake the U.S. in R&D spending even as research becomes more international, science must manage the tension between cooperation and competition.
On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the report, the National Academy of Sciences, The Kavli Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation hosted a symposium to reflect upon the past, present and future of the United States’ scientific research enterprise. It brought together leaders from science, government, academia, business and philanthropy.
As a chemist in academia who’s just written a book called “The State of Science – What the Future Holds and the Scientists Making It Happen,” I was eager to see what symposium attendees had to say. The presentations and panels covered a range of topics, and four major themes – though not solutions – emerged.
University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine
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Philadelphia, PA June 22-25 at University of Pennsylvania. “The Center for Causal Inference is proud to announce its fourth annual Causal Inference Summer Institute, a four-day, intensive learning experience that will take place at the Jordan Medical Education Center (3400 Civic Center Blvd, Perelman School of Medicine). [$$$]
Seattle, WA June 14-15. “There is an emerging paradigm shift from ‘Internet AI’ towards ‘Embodied AI’ in the computer vision, NLP, and broader AI communities. In contrast to Internet AI’s focus on learning from datasets of images, videos, and text curated from the internet, embodied AI enables learning through interaction with the surrounding environment.” [registration required]
R-bloggers, University of California-Berkeley, Department of Statistics
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Berkeley, CA June 3-4. “Registration is now open for a two-day training workshop on NIMBLE, June 3-4, 2020 in Berkeley, California. NIMBLE is a system for building and sharing analysis methods for statistical models, especially for hierarchical models and computationally-intensive methods (such as MCMC and SMC).” [$$$]
Online March 19, starting at 10 a.m. Pacific time. “We’ll hear from [Laura Noren] on her recent research brief from Obsidian Security ‘Who’s Building Your AI?'” [registration required]
Portland, OR June 14, in conjunction with SIGMOD 2020. “DEEM brings together researchers and practitioners at the intersection of applied machine learning, data management and systems research, with the goal to discuss the arising data management issues in ML application scenarios.” Deadline for submissions is March 8.
“Microsoft actively seeks to foster greater levels of diversity in our workforce and in our pipeline of future researchers. We are always looking for the best and brightest talent and celebrate individuality. We invite candidates to come as they are and do what they love.” Deadline for submissions is April 15.
Pisa, Italy October 6-9. “The International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo2020) is an interdisciplinary venue that brings together researchers from the computational and social sciences to help fill the gap between the two communities.” Deadline for submissions is April 15.
Medium, Data & Policy; Stefaan G. Verhulst, Andrew Zahuranec, Andrew Young and Michelle Winowatan
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Not all data collaboratives are successful or go beyond pilots. Based on research and analysis of hundreds of data collaboratives, one factor seems to stand out as determinative of success above all others — whether there exist individuals or teams within data-holding organizations who are empowered to proactively initiate, facilitate and coordinate data collaboratives toward the public interest. We call these individuals and teams “data stewards.”
“As part of building FilingDB, we’ve extracted text data from tens of thousands of PDF documents. In the process, we have seen how every single assumption we had about how PDF files are structured was proven incorrect. Our mission was particularly difficult as we had to process PDF documents coming from a variety of sources, with wildly different styling, typesetting and presentation choices.”