Bloomberg Economics, Matthew Boesler and Craig Torres
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The U.S. economy faces unprecedented risks from the coronavirus if fiscal and monetary policy makers don’t rise to the challenge, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said while pushing back against the notion of deploying negative interest rates.
“The recovery may take some time to gather momentum, and the passage of time can turn liquidity problems into solvency problems,” Powell said Wednesday in remarks to a virtual event hosted by the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “Additional fiscal support could be costly, but worth it if it helps avoid long-term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery.”
Facebook’s AI tools are the only thing standing between its users and the growing onslaught of hate and misinformation the platform is experiencing. The company’s researchers have cooked up a few new capabilities for the systems that keep the adversary at bay, identifying COVID-19-related misinformation and hateful speech disguised as memes.
Twitter said Monday it plans to put labels and warning messages on some tweets that contain disputed or misleading information related to Covid-19, even if it’s tweeted by President Donald Trump.
Twitter (TWTR) announced in March that it would remove Covid-19 tweets that could cause a “direct risk to people’s health or well-being.” Starting Monday, it will use labels and warning messages “to provide additional explanations or clarifications in situations where the risks of harm associated with a Tweet are less severe but where people may still be confused or misled by the content.”
Amazon is said to have studied a deal for AMC and the two sides may have held talks, according to a May 9 report in the British newspaper the Daily Mail citing unnamed sources. Deadline later contradicted the story, saying there aren’t any discussions. This may turn out to be a case in which investor hope, rather than deal logic, was informing a rumor. AMC is the largest cinema operator in the U.S. and Europe, where it owns the Odeon & UCI circuit. That purchase, along with the takeover of its U.S. rival Carmike Cinemas and a costly theater renovation streak, has left AMC with a large debt burden that now threatens to topple the company as most of its cinemas remain closed due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
The international alarm about the COVID-19 pandemic was sounded first not by a human, but by a computer. HealthMap, a website run by Boston Children’s Hospital, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to scan social media, news reports, internet search queries, and other information streams for signs of disease outbreaks. On 30 December 2019, the data-mining program spotted a news report of a new type of pneumonia in Wuhan, China. The one-line email bulletin noted that seven people were in critical condition and rated the urgency at three on a scale of five.
Humans weren’t far behind. Colleagues in Taiwan had already alerted Marjorie Pollack, a medical epidemiologist in New York City, to chatter on Weibo, a social media site in China, that reminded her of the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which spread to dozens of countries and killed 774. “It fit all of the been there, done that déjà vu for SARS,” Pollack says. Less than 1 hour after the HealthMap alert, she posted a more detailed notice to the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, a list server with 85,000 subscribers for which she is a deputy editor.
But the early alarm from HeathMap underscores the potential of AI, or machine learning, to keep watch for contagion.
The Brazilian-British biologist Peter Medawar won the Nobel Prize in 1960 for his study of acquired immune tolerance. Beyond his scientific work, he was also a gifted writer and expositor of scientific culture. One of the many treasures of his Advice to a Young Scientist (1979) is a passage in his chapter on “Aspects of Scientific Life and Manners” where he discusses “techniques used in the hope of enlarging one’s reputation as a scientist or diminishing the reputation of others by nonscientific means.”
One such “trick,” Medawar writes, “is to affect the possession of a mind so finely critical that no evidence is ever quite good enough (‘I am not very happy about. . . .’; ‘I must say I am not at all convinced by. . . .’).” After all, as he writes in a different passage, “no hypothesis in science and no scientific theory ever achieves . . . a degree of certainty beyond the reach of criticism or the possibility of modification.”
I share Medawar’s pragmatic vision of scientific reasoning.
Among the many uncomfortable truths revealed by the coronavirus pandemic is, apparently, this: America can’t build anymore. Faced with an unprecedented emergency, U.S. factories have struggled to make even relatively simple products such as swabs, masks and protective gear.
This is more surprising than it seems. While millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost over the past two decades as low-end production has shifted to Asia, real output in U.S. manufacturing hovers around all-time highs. American manufacturers dominate high-tech sectors such as wide-body aircraft and semiconductors.
Worrying signs have been mounting, however. The Boeing Co.’s troubles with the 737 MAX revealed deep problems in its engineering culture. Intel Corp. has seen the timeline for shipping its latest process node slip continuously. And, after a much-publicized decision in 2013 to start assembling the Mac Pro in Texas, Apple Inc. has struggled to scale up its plant. The fumbling U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic suggests something more fundamental is broken.
Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech News
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As the world contemplates ending a massive lockdown implemented in response to COVID-19, Vinod Singhal is considering what will happen when we hit the play button and the engines that drive industry and trade squeal back to life again.
Singhal, who studies operations strategy and supply chain management at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has a few ideas on how to ease the transition to the new reality. But this pandemic makes it hard to predict what that reality will be.
“We know pandemics can disrupt supply chains, because we’ve had the SARS experience, but this is something very different,” said Singhal, the Charles W. Brady Chair Professor of Operations Management at the Scheller College of Business, recalling the SARS viral pandemic of 2002 to 2003. But that event did not have nearly the deadly, worldwide reach of COVID-19.
Researchers at King’s College London, Massachusetts General Hospital and health science company ZOE have developed an artificial intelligence diagnostic that can predict whether someone is likely to have COVID-19 based on their symptoms. Their findings are published today in Nature Medicine.
The AI model uses data from the COVID Symptom Study app to predict COVID-19 infection, by comparing people’s symptoms and the results of traditional COVID tests. Researchers say this may provide help for populations where access to testing is limited. Two clinical trials in the UK and the US are due to start shortly.
Initially conceived to unite the schools of Engineering (STI), Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) and Basic Sciences (SB), CIS’s unique mission is to connect and support all EPFL researchers working in fields related to intelligent systems. These fields are developing technologies that, when brought together, can be used to construct intelligent systems capable of making complex, nuanced decisions in challenging, dynamic environments.
CIS Executive Director Jan Kerschgens says his goal for the center is to get researchers out of their research silos, and their comfort zones, to pursue ambitious and collaborative projects.
“We have never had three schools come together like this to promote research and technology transfer under the umbrella of intelligent systems. The CIS is also 100% synergistic with other EPFL centers like the Center for Digital Trust and the Swiss Data Science Center,” Kerschgens says.
Stanford Social Innovation Review; Ben Nelson, Diana El Azar & Ayo Seligman
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Imagine building a university from the ground up, and doing it specifically with 21st-century students in mind. It would mean no baggage, no legacy systems, and no outdated curricula. It would also mean attracting a completely new faculty and student body, and raising the funding needed to operate.
This was our challenge. Born in 2012 to address the problems inherent in the centuries-old system of higher education, Minerva’s ambition is to establish a model for the next generation university: intentionally designed to equip future leaders and innovators to solve complex challenges, to make decisions of consequence, and to work collaboratively to improve the world. We’ll not only outline how we began an innovative university from scratch, but how we are will scale our impact through strategic partnerships across educational levels, sectors, and geographies.
Q: You think the discussions going on about the ethics of AI have something to learn from the African concept of Ubuntu…
A: Yes. To think we can come up with a value system to guide AI without looking into other cultures’ value systems, and then to call it universal, is off.
As we observe the actual discriminatory effects of AI and technology on segments of society, often historically marginalized people, intuitively we know something is wrong with its underlying assumptions. It comes down to the concept of personhood, what it means to be human. Who counts as human and whose humanity does AI take into account? Different societies have come up with different answers to this fundamental question.
The University of California president is recommending the suspension of ACT and SAT tests as an admissions requirement until 2024.
Under the recommendation to the board of regents made public Monday, submitting the standardized test scores would be optional for applicants until 2023. During the 2023 and 2024 admissions cycles, the university, which has 10 campuses around the state, would not use the scores at all in considering applications.
In the meantime, UC would come up with “a new test that better aligns with the content UC expects applicants to have learned and with UC’s values,” UC President Janet Napolitano wrote.
It seems many people are breathing some relief, and I’m not sure why. An epidemic curve has a relatively predictable upslope and once the peak is reached, the back slope can also be predicted. We have robust data from the outbreaks in China and Italy, that shows the backside of the mortality curve declines slowly, with deaths persisting for months. Assuming we have just crested in deaths at 70k, it is possible that we lose another 70,000 people over the next 6 weeks as we come off that peak. That’s what’s going to happen with a lockdown.
As states reopen, and we give the virus more fuel, all bets are off. I understand the reasons for reopening the economy, but I’ve said before, if you don’t solve the biology, the economy won’t recover.
Cornell University, Game Design Initiative at Cornell
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Online May 22, starting at 1 p.m. EDT. “The annual games showcase has long been a Cornell tradition. Each year students get a chance to show off their games to the public with their first official release.”
“In this competition, you will predict multiple assessments plus age from multimodal brain MRI features. You will be working from existing results from other data scientists, doing the important work of validating the utility of multimodal features in a normative population of unaffected subjects. Due to the complexity of the brain and differences between scanners, generalized approaches will be essential to effectively propel multimodal neuroimaging research forward.” Deadline for entries and team mergers is June 22.
The first 10% of this article is gonna be me giving you advice on how to learn Rust in 2020 following a practical hands-on coding approach. This is the good part of the article. You can safely exit after this part (I’ll tell you when). The remaining 90% of this article is me ranting about how most online coding challenge sites have poor support for Rust.
Unity Technologies Blog; Marwan Mattar, Jeffrey Shih, Vincent-Pierre Berges, Chris Elion and Chris Goy
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On September 17, 2017, the first version of Unity Machine Learning Agents Toolkit (ML-Agents) was released. The mission was simple – allow game developers and AI researchers alike to use Unity as a platform to train and embed intelligent agents using the latest advancements in machine learning. Since our initial “Hello World” release, we’ve seen the community and development of the toolkit grow significantly, with the project amassing over 8400 GitHub stars. Today, after more than two and a half years of development and 15+ release updates, we are excited to announce that the ML-Agents Unity package has reached v1.0 and is available as a Preview package. We’re also launching a new product and resources page for ML-Agents.