… Brown’s Actuated Robotics Guidance Systems team, which consisted of Brown undergrads Jung Yeop (Steve) Kim, Mckenna Cisler, and Howon Lee, advised by Professors George Konidaris and Stefanie Tellex, won First Place and were awarded $40,000. Their competition included not only fellow undergraduates but teams made up of graduate and post-graduate students.
The team explains that although falling is the leading cause of death for people over the age of 65, the aid and care devices used to support them have not improved over the past few decades. They designed an actuated walker that allows a user to walk naturally while the walker adjusts itself to the user’s pace, keeping them safe and stable. Their approach uses multiple sensors to detect the center of mass of the user, as well as their intent (sitting down, going uphill or downhill, and so on) to autonomously brake/accelerate the walker to adjust its position relative to the user.
Professional investors have largely abandoned the stock market amid the coronavirus pandemic, but sports bettors and bored millennials have jumped into the retail stock trading market with both feet.
Why it matters: They may be a driving force pushing U.S. stocks to their recent highs — and potentially driving them further.
[Aakrita] Pandita, 31, now sees a pandemic that has upended daily life from two distinct perspectives: As a patient who’d get winded by the walk from her bedroom to the bathroom, and an infectious diseases specialist who became curious, even obsessive, about the malady that once ailed her.
So she’s able to speak from experience when she tells her patients that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. There was for her, too.
But she was able to advocate for herself in a way that others could not.
“It was an unsettling question for me: How many cases did we miss in those early days because of our lack of understanding of this disease?” she said.
Stanford Social Innovation Review; Ben Nelson, Genevieve Smith & Ishita Rustagi
from
Private and public entities around the world, particularly in the health care and governance sectors, are developing and deploying a range of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in emergency response to COVID-19. Some of these systems work to track and predict its spread; others support medical response or help maintain social control. Indeed, AI systems can reduce strain on overwhelmed health care systems; help save lives by quickly diagnosing patients, and assessing health declines or progress; and limit the virus’s spread.
But there’s a problem: The algorithms driving these systems are human creations, and as such, they are subject to biases that can deepen societal inequities and pose risks to businesses and society more broadly. In this article, we look at data on the pandemic, share two recent applications of AI, and suggest a number of ways nonprofit and business leaders can help ensure that they develop, manage, and use transformative AI equitably and responsibly.
Until recently, when Amazon customers typed “melatonin” into the site’s search bar, a variety of sleep supplements would appear in the most coveted real estate on the listings results — top left on the first page.
One of consultant Jason Boyce’s clients, a seller of natural supplements, often sought to outbid competitors for the best spots by promising Amazon about $6 each time someone clicked on the product. While the brand never attained the top left slot, it regularly landed in the top row. But in late March, Boyce noticed that Amazon’s own brand, Solimo, had taken over the top left, while his client’s product had been bumped to a lower row. Then Boyce typed “ground coffee” in the search bar, only to find AmazonFresh Colombia ground coffee in the top left, pushing down another client.
“This is madness,” Boyce said. “They’re putting their own product right in the front of the line.”
A Princeton University startup with new solar technology that harnesses ultraviolet light to power smart windows captured top honors in the Princeton Startup Showcase.
The winner, Andluca Technologies (Princeton), was one of six finalists competing virtually on Zoom for bragging rights and exposure. Of the six finalists, three were faculty-led spinoffs and three were alumni-led startups.
Cal Poly has joined the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN), a partnership that fosters collaboration between universities and colleges committed to building the nascent field of public interest technology and training a new generation of civic-minded technologists.
As a part of this collaboration, Cal Poly has launched an internal competition for the Public Interest Technology Grants, which provide up to $180,000 funded by PIT-UN to support research and training at the intersection of technology and public benefit. Proposals selected from Cal Poly will be submitted to the PIT-UN national competition. Faculty may apply through this link. (Note: This page requires a Cal Poly portal account to access.)
MIT News, School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
from
“The purpose of this class is to engage MIT students in thinking about data — data creation, data analysis — in ways that are not only technical but are also societal,” says Eden Medina, associate professor of science, technology, and society, who co-taught the class this spring with Sarah Williams, an associate professor of technology and urban planning.
Medina is particularly well-versed in the social, historical, and ethical aspects of computing, and Williams brings expertise as a practicing data scientist. Their multi-layered course is designed to “train practitioners who think about the ethics of the work that they’re doing” and who know how to use data in responsible ways.
National Editor Steven Ginsberg sought from a group of staffers. It’s an X-ray of the issues I wrote about this week, and you can read the full thing here: https://int.nyt.com/data/documenth
Some countries in Europe, like Italy and Spain, were faced with a rapid surge in cases early in the pandemic; others had the examples of Italy and Spain to guide their policy. The end result was that most European countries imposed pretty severe social distancing regulations, banning large gatherings, closing schools, and limiting access to a variety of businesses. In most cases, this has limited the spread of the pandemic, or at least it started to bring an out-of-control situation back into something more manageable.
Sweden largely didn’t do this. Restaurants and cafes remained open, as did the lower grades in schools. Sporting events did stop, and people were asked to protect the most vulnerable and elderly populations. But many of those measures were voluntary. Personal protection, like face masks, weren’t encouraged for general use.
In recent weeks top administrators at elite American universities have been talking about potential furloughs and layoffs for staff and non-tenure track faculty, because of the financial damage being wrought by the pandemic.
These statements illustrate the extent to which such institutions have become obsessed with increasing their on-paper net worth (which has exploded over the last several decades), to the detriment of all other considerations.
After a grueling month of battling COVID-19, [Kelly] Michels went back to work at a testing laboratory at UCHealth where she quickly found herself validating a COVID-19 antibody test.
“The only thing I can say is irony, really, I’m the only person in the laboratory who has the illness and I come right back, and I have to validate the antibody test,” she said.
And the real irony was they used her own blood to do it.
Three unlikely collaborators are at the heart of the fast-moving COVID-19 research scandal, which led to retractions last week by The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), and the withdrawal of an online preprint, after the trove of patient data they all relied on was challenged. The three physician-scientists never were at the same institution nor had they ever before written together, but they are the only authors in common on the disputed papers, and the other co-authors all have ties to at least one of them. Their partnership, which seized a high-impact role during a global public health crisis, has now ended disastrously.
Academia, including the sciences, is rife with racism. This is not news to Black professors, researchers, and graduate students, who are often reluctant to share their stories because of potential backlash and retaliation from their superiors and peers. But Dr. Shardé Davis of the University of Connecticut and Joy Melody Woods, a PhD student at the University of Texas-Austin have changed that, by starting a Twitter conversation using the hashtag #BlackintheIvory.
Bournemouth, England November 3-6. “ICIDS is the premier conference for researchers and practitioners concerned with studying digital interactive forms of narrative from a variety of perspectives, including theoretical, technological, and applied design lenses. The annual conference is an interdisciplinary gathering that combines technology-focused approaches with humanities-inspired theoretical inquiry, empirical research and artistic expression.” Deadline for submissions is June 26.
“This year, ACTIVATE will take place online, with a series of virtual events starting in September 2020. Additional events will be announced soon and we’ll be accepting submissions for virtual talks throughout the year and into 2021.” Deadline for speaker proposals is July 17.
Boston, MA March 22-25, 2021. “The Summit is a conference that gives a voice to informaticians from four key constituencies who are working to improve healthcare. Attendees will experience content dedicated to Bioinformatics, Clinical Research Informatics, Informatics Implementation, and Data Science in one integrated conference experience.” Deadline for submissions is August 13.
We have built a tool that calculates an optimal model size and training time for your budget so you don’t have to. See it in action at https://huggingface.co/calculator/!