Just after was one from a different perspective by Tom Britton @Stockholm_Uni
and colleagues https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.03085.
They are complementary. Both consider the impact of individual heterogeneity. Gomes et al. consider a well-mixed model with individuals varying in their rates of exposure or probabiity of infection given exposure (susceptibility). [thread]
There are a lot of obvious explanations for my own mileage increases as well as others’: Many of us have more time since we’re not commuting to work each day (and unfortunately, some have lost jobs altogether). Gyms are closed, meaning our regular weight-lifting routines are on an indefinite hiatus. The pandemic coincided with a warming of the air on the East Coast, making the weather ideal for a long run. It’s also safer these days with fewer cars on the road and less pollution.
But I had a feeling there was something deeper going on, too. So I called sports psychologist Lennie Waite, Ph.D., to get her take. “These days, people crave time outside of their house, and they crave a structured schedule—running is something that can give them both of those things,” Waite says.
The Stem Cellar (The Official Blog of CIRM, California's Stem Cell Agency), Yimy Villa
from
Scientists at Gladstone and U.C. San Francisco have formed two new research institutes to broaden its impact on unsolved diseases such as COVID-19.
One of these institutes is the Gladstone Institute of Virology and will be lead by Dr. Melanie Ott. The immediate focus of this newly formed institution will be the current coronavirus pandemic. Additionally, it will focus on searching for new therapies against future infectious diseases. The Gladstone Institute of Virology will focus on how viruses interact with human cells to cause disease and how to intervene in that process. Dr. Ott’s goal is to identify pathways these viruses use to infect human cells as a way to develop innovative treatments.
In a press release from Gladstone Institutes, Dr. Ott talks about the goal of her work in more detail.
“Contrary to the current strategy of combining several drugs to treat one virus, we want to develop one drug against multiple viruses. As antibiotic resistance becomes an increasingly urgent problem, we will also delve into how we can use viruses as therapeutics, which involves using viruses against themselves or to fight bacteria.”
Two days after the JAY-Z YouTubes were posted, they were removed due to a copyright claim. But just as quickly, they returned. The takedowns may have been a first attempt to challenge audio deepfake makers, but musicians and fans could potentially be grappling with the weird consequences of AI voice manipulations long into the future.
Here’s a breakdown of JAY-Z’s copyright dispute, the laws around audio deepfakes, and what all this could mean in the years to come.
Sharing intelligence features between hardware and software would offset the energy needed for using AI in more advanced applications such as self-driving cars or discovering drugs.
To just solve a puzzle or play a game, artificial intelligence can require software running on thousands of computers. That could be the energy that three nuclear plants produce in one hour.
“Software is taking on most of the challenges in AI. If you could incorporate intelligence into the circuit components in addition to what is happening in software, you could do things that simply cannot be done today,” says Shriram Ramanathan, a professor of materials engineering at Purdue University.
I do have some parting thoughts about the unique situation data scientists face in academia currently. 1/
There is increasing recognition that everyone *needs* a data scientist, and this is often distinct from a statistician (which everyone also needs!!). Data are messy, projects need reports/dashboards, figures should be elegant, reproducible pipelines/data sharing should happen
Jeanne Holm, the high-profile senior technology adviser to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, has been named the city’s new chief data officer (CDO).
Before the promotion to her new role, Holm also held two other titles with the city — deputy chief information officer and assistant general manager of the city Information Technology Agency (ITA).
In her new role, Holm’s areas of oversight are broad. In an announcement about her new position, she describes her new responsibilities this way: “Create innovative, data-driven solutions for the City to use in managing public health and safety, focusing on equity, improving digital inclusion, improving City services, and ensuring businesses and residents have the data they need.
Twitter added a renown expert in artificial intelligence to its board of directors on Monday, in a move that signals the increasing importance that the social media company is placing on AI.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, a computer science professor at Stanford University and a former VP at Google, will join Twitter’s board as an independent director effective immediately, the company announced in a press release.
University of Delaware data scientist Jing Gao is fascinated by the ways that cities and towns grow over time. This concept is known as urbanization.
Take Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. All of these are cities, but they each grow differently, in terms of how the city’s land areas expand. The same is true globally, from New Delhi, India, to Paris, France.
Gao, an assistant professor of geography and spatial sciences in UD’s College of Earth, Ocean and Environment, and collaborator Brian O’Neill, a UD alumnus and professor from the University of Denver, have created a new global simulation model to predict how urban land will change over the next 100 years under different social and economic conditions.
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania announced today the establishment of Wharton AI for Business (Artificial Intelligence for Business), which will inspire cutting-edge teaching and research in artificial intelligence, while joining with global business leaders to set a course for better understanding of this nascent discipline. The launch of AI for Business is made possible by a new $5 million gift from Tao Zhang, WG’02 and his wife Selina Chin, WG’02.
Kathy Ensor, Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics (STAT), has been elected president of the 19,000-member American Statistical Association (ASA).
“We are thrilled that Kathy Ensor will be the 117th President of the ASA,” said Ron Wasserstein, ASA executive director. “Not only is she a leading researcher in statistical science and an advocate for the sound practice of statistics in research and policy, but she has proven herself an effective leader during her three-year term as ASA vice president.”
UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla said Tuesday the university is going to begin mass testing students for the novel coronavirus as a major step toward resuming on-campus courses in the fall.
The school’s experimental “Return to Learn” program will begin May 11 when UCSD starts giving self-administered tests to 5,000 students who are currently living in campus housing. The testing is voluntary; students must opt in.
If the program works, UCSD officials plan to test roughly 65,000 students, faculty and staff on a monthly basis.
Ecologists have been unable to gather water samples vital to understanding the impact of climate change on state forests. Marine biologists who regularly collect data about conditions in the Gulf of Maine have been stuck on land, while others who do aerial surveys critical to monitoring endangered whales have been grounded.
With much of the world still shut down, the coronavirus has hampered the painstaking work of many scientists whose findings rely on regularly collected data and seasonal experiments.
The loss of that work — much of which can’t be replicated or done at another time — could have a long-lasting impact on scientists’ understanding of everything from the warming of our oceans to the demise of certain species.
Ferguson was hypocritical. But hypocrisy is rather a boring vice – all it means is that there was a gap between his words and his actions. So, which were wrong: his words about the importance of lockdown, or his actions of breaking those measures?
The unfairness of free riding
It might seem obvious that the problem was his actions. By now, we all know why we should stay at home: to protect the NHS and save lives. But if everyone is staying home except one or two of us, the NHS will probably be protected whatever we do. What’s wrong with a few small violations?
Online June 14-19. ” The conference general chairs together with the program chairs and the SIGMOD Executive Committee, have decided to hold SIGMOD/PODS as a fully virtual conference on the original dates.” [registration required]
“The annual SC Test of Time Award (ToTA) recognizes an outstanding paper that has deeply influenced the HPC discipline. It is a mark of historical impact and recognition that the paper has changed HPC trends.” Deadline for nominations is May 15.
” The purpose of this project is to learn about how working from home is currently organized, given that so many people are doing so these last few weeks, and how this affects productivity, work/life balance and well-being. We are curious as to how your home set-up influences your work, how space is utilized and shared with others that might be in the house, and how others in your household may influence your daily work. We are also interested in how moving to remote meetings each day influences social ties, productivity and stress levels.”
“This survey is the premier survey of data scientists and trends in our community, including questions about job titles, growth of data science within organizations, tools used (usually several: commercial and open source), algorithms used, and more. Go here to begin: https://lnkd.in/gPHjC22”
Amazon is trying to change the enterprise search game by putting it into a more modern machine learning-driven context to use today’s technology to help you find that perfect response just as you typically do on the web.
Today the company announced the general availability of Amazon Kendra, its cloud enterprise search product that the company announced last year at AWS re:Invent. It uses natural language processing to allow the user to simply ask a question, then searches across the repositories connected to the search engine to find a precise answer.
The EU-funded research project COMPRISE seeks to find novel ways to protect the privacy of the users of voice assistants, while at the same time keeping in mind the need to improve the performance of such systems through continuous data collections. We employ state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and natural language processing methods to find ways to protect the users’ privacy by transforming the dialogue transcripts before they are uploaded to the cloud. The goal is to “disarm” the conversations from any privacy threats, so that even in cases where they accidentally get into the wrong hands, little to no harm can be done.
So how can this be achieved?
The names of people and organizations, and the mentions of locations and dates or times, are instances of what are referred to as “named entities” in the computational linguistics literature. One route to improved privacy consists of detecting these named entities automatically and either deleting them altogether or replacing them with something else, so that the result is less of a privacy concern for all parties involved.
