One of the longest-running questions about this pandemic is a simple one: where did it come from? How did a virus that had seemingly never infected a human before make a sudden appearance in our species, equipped with what it needed to sweep from China through the globe in a matter of months?
Analysis of the virus’s genome was ambiguous. Some analyses placed its origin within the local bat population. Others highlighted similarities to pangolins, which might have been brought to the area by the wildlife trade. Less evidence-based ideas included an escape from a research lab or a misplaced bioweapon. Now, a US-based research team has done a detailed analysis of a large collection of viral genomes, and it finds that evolution pieced together the virus from multiple parts—most from bats, but with a key contribution from pangolins.
President Trump’s call to treat antifa supporters like terrorists could be a green light for high-tech surveillance of dissidents.
Why it matters: It’s unlikely the Trump administration can designate antifa as a terrorist group in any legally meaningful way, but the declaration gives law enforcement tacit approval to use a plethora of tech tools to monitor protesters and left-leaning activists.
The Army knows it needs more brain power behind its future firepower.
To retain and educate soldiers that have technology skills, the Army’s Futures Command announced it will launch a master’s degree program in artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University this fall. The program — for military personnel only — will offer a crash course on data science and then build practical skills with the Army AI Task Force, a part of Futures Command located at CMU.
The Army is also looking to stand up a new “software factory” that will teach soldiers across the Army basic coding skills. The new educational programs come as the Army is formalizing a way to pair technologists with those that conceptualize strategies and future force structures to have experts inform how the Army will use technology in the future.
Harvard Business Review, Vijay Govindarajan and Anup Srivastava
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Universities have many pressing short-term issues to deal with right now: large budget cuts, a growing reluctance among students to pay full tuition fees for online education, demands for reimbursement of already-paid fees, the possible disappearance of international students who pay full fees, the large-scale deferral of admissions, a sharp spike in the need for financial assistance among students because of the impact of the pandemic and ensuing recession, and finally, the question of whether and how to reopen.
Nevertheless, university leaders should not overspend their time on fighting fires and forget about the long term. The current crisis also creates opportunities to remake institutions. We provide a strategic framework for how universities must start considering their options, experimenting with alternatives, and start planning now.
On land, it’s easy for us to see divisions between ecosystems: A rain forest’s fan palms and vines stand in stark relief to the cacti of a high desert. Without detailed data or scientific measurements, we can tell a distinct difference in the ecosystem’s flora and fauna.
But how do scientists draw those divisions in the ocean? A new paper proposes a tool to redraw the lines that define an ocean’s ecosystems, lines originally penned by the seagoing oceanographer Alan Longhurst in the 1990s. The paper uses unsupervised learning, a machine learning method, to analyze the complex interplay between plankton species and nutrient fluxes. As a result, the tool could give researchers a more flexible definition of ecosystem regions.
Using the tool on global modeling output suggests that the ocean’s surface has more than 100 different regions or as few as 12 if aggregated, simplifying the 56 Longhurst regions. The research could complement ongoing efforts to improve fisheries management and satellite detection of shifting plankton under climate change. It could also direct researchers to more precise locations for field sampling.
In response to high demand for professionals with scientific and technical training to understand and work with massive amounts of data, The University of Texas at Austin is set to launch a new online master’s degree program in data science. Pending final approval by UT System and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the new program will be a collaboration between the Department of Computer Science, ranked among the top 10 programs in the country by U.S. News and World Report; the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences, one of the university’s newest and fastest-growing departments; and online learning company edX.
The expansion of AI in healthcare could at the same time lead to profound threats to privacy and civil liberties, among other concerns. Even when AI systems are relatively accurate, their implementation in complex social contexts can cause unintentional and unexpected problems, for example resulting in over-testing, which is inconvenient for patients and burdensome for resource-strapped healthcare facilities. The challenges associated with developing and implementing AI technologies responsibly calls for the adoption of a suite of practices, mechanisms, and policies from the outset.
A new report from the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity provides a timely overview of some of the approaches currently being used to roll out AI technologies responsibly. These range from monitoring and documentation techniques to standards and organizational structures that can be utilized at different stages of the AI development pipeline. The report includes three case studies that can serve as a guide for other AI stakeholders — whether companies, research labs, or national governments — facing decisions about how to facilitate responsible AI innovation during uncertain times.
AMD and Penguin Computing will deliver a combined seven petaflops of computing power to New York University (NYU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Rice University.
The computing clusters will be used in the ongoing fight against Covid-19.
Every petaflop helps
“High-performance computing technology plays a critical role in modern viral research, deepening our understanding of how specific viruses work and ultimately accelerating the development of potential therapeutics and vaccines,” Dr. Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD, said.
This article is about a particularly ubiquitous trope: the conflict narrative. By this I mean the notion that battle—in a military sense—is the right way to think about our stance toward the problems of disinformation and misinformation. This article explores this narrative, its weaknesses, and what alternatives might provide a better path forward.
Kartik Hosanagar has taught a course on the business impact of emerging tech for 17 years at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Lately, interest in the portion of the class that deals with artificial intelligence has been so great that Hosanagar and Wharton last month announced a whole new initiative called Wharton AI for Business.
The project includes a new course on the business implications of A.I. as well as a guest lecture series. The whole thing is backed by a $5 million gift from Tao Zhang and Selina Chin, the Wharton alumni couple who founded the food delivery app Dianping and run the Singapore-based Blue Hill Foundation, respectively.
I spoke to Hosanagar about what he sees happening with A.I. in business, especially in light of the pandemic. He tells me the immediate pressures—both practical and financial—may make it difficult for companies to think more strategically about how to use A.I.
Coronavirus has shattered the spring rituals of college admissions this year, with tours canceled and standardized testing dates scratched off the calendar. The campus tours will resume someday, and the SAT and the ACT will be administered again – but the stakes of those once-feared exams may be lower.
Almost 200 schools – including some of the most selective, such as Amherst and Williams colleges and Ivy League member Cornell University – have scrapped the requirement for standardized test scores at least for current high school juniors, acknowledging the chaos of lockdowns. Last week, the mammoth University of California system, one of the largest in the U.S. with almost 300,000 students, said it would suspend its testing requirement until at least 2024.
Still, it may be too soon to declare the demise of admissions testing, said Bob Schaeffer, interim executive director of FairTest, a nonprofit that has led the “test optional” movement for 30 years.
The menu at the Henderson, Nevada, diner where Amy Nelson likes to take a break from work is notable for its side dishes, including caramelized bananas, cinnamon apples, and mushrooms and onions. Each can feed an appetite in its own right. Together with an entrée, they add up to breakfast.
That’s much like the radically new way Nelson and a small number of other pioneering students have been experiencing college.
First they get a credential in a skill they need, then another, and another. Each can quickly pay off on its own by helping to get a job, raise, or promotion. Over time, they can add up to a bachelor’s degree.
“Even if I chose not to finish, I would still have these pieces and I’d say, ‘Look what I’ve done,’ as opposed to, ‘I have two years of college’” but nothing to show for it, said Nelson, who works as an information technology consultant and hopes to move into an administrative role.
German Journal of Sports Medicine; Wackerhage H, Everett R, Krüger K, Murgia M, Simon P, Gehlert S, Neuberger E, Baumert P, Schönfelder
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In this review, we will answer five questions in relation to COVID-19 fromthe perspective of sport and exercise. The questions deal with 1) how SARS-CoV-2 targets ACE2-expressing human cells via its spike protein, 2) the COVID-19 disease caused by it, 3) the COVID-19 pandemic and attempts to control it, 4) how the immune system responds to SARS-CoV-2 and how the immune system is affected byexercise training, 5) advice for exercise during the pandemic for healthy adults, athletes and elderly, and possible control measures to help to return to normal sport and exercise at the end of the pandemic before herd immunity or mass vaccination hasbeen achieved.
These figures were published by Mapping Police Violence, a research collaborative collecting comprehensive data on police killings nationwide to quantify the impact of police violence in communities … The animated map below visualizes this data and shows killings that took place in 2019
Percepta, a start-up that Penn Engineering students that launched last year and will be joining the Pennovation Accelerator this summer, was recently profiled in Technical.ly Philly. What began in Penn Engineering classrooms has now grown into a retail security product that aims to cut down race, gender, and age bias in the search for shoplifters.
Instead of standard video surveillance, Percepta uses “ethical AI” technology to turn footage of shoppers into 3D scans that analyze body movements. The technology looks for tell-tale behaviors, such as avoiding employees, looking for cameras, or putting products in their clothing.
Online June 11, starting at 9:30 a.m. EDT. “This symposium will provide a nuanced perspective on the human impacts of AI and how to ensure that AI technologies are safe and fair in their development and application, which will inform policymakers, academics, and industry leaders as they seek to implement these technologies.” [free, registration required]
“Whether you’re hearing about NeurIPS competitions for the first time, or you’re a seasoned expert, we encourage you to take a close look at this years’ ambitious, creative, high-impact competitions, and consider participating in one or more of them. Participating in a NeurIPS competition is an exciting way to connect with others in the community, develop or expand on new skills, and contribute to solving some of the hardest and most impactful machine-learning challenges today.”
This repository contains excess mortality data for the period covering the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. The data has been gathered from national, regional or municipal agencies that collect death registrations and publish official mortality statistics. These original data were reshaped into a standardised format by Financial Times journalists to allow cross-national comparisons, and have been used to inform the FT’s reporting on the pandemic.
Law enforcement data, especially at the local level, is hidden in the corners of the internet, obfuscated by bureaucracy, and served up via low quality user experiences. All this makes it difficult for citizens to access, consolidate, and make use of the data for accurate and factual inferences. Our approach empowers volunteer hunter-gatherers to contribute to a product empowering the citizenry with oversight capability.
Our product is a consolidated, publicly available library of law enforcement related records. Our goal is to ease data consumption, facilitate open source software analytics, and provide an interface for reporting and analysis of law enforcement activity. Our product will be made publicly available, free of charge.
Acme is a framework for building readable, efficient, research-oriented RL algorithms. At its core Acme is designed to enable simple descriptions of RL agents that can be run at various scales of execution — including distributed agents. By releasing Acme, our aim is to make the results of various RL algorithms developed in academia and industrial labs easier to reproduce and extend for the machine learning community at large.