The University last year established its 39th college – the first for 30 years – as a new base for graduate students who are eager to embrace opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange and apply their research to address key future challenges. Initially named Parks College for its location on Parks Road, the college is now set to become ‘Reuben College’, in recognition of the historic gift that secures its vision of a diverse, dynamic research community working on some of the key issues of our time.
Due to welcome its first students in the autumn of 2021, Reuben College has already attracted an outstanding line-up of academic Fellows. The college aims to generate new insights into the biggest questions of our time by bringing academics from traditionally different disciplines together to work on challenging themes and share their knowledge with the college’s graduate students.
David Shor is a 28-year-old political data analyst and social democrat who worked for President Obama’s reelection campaign. On May 28, Shor tweeted out a short summary of a paper by Princeton professor Omar Wasow. The research compiled by Wasow analyzed public opinion in the 1960s, and found violent and nonviolent protest tactics had contradictory effects. Shor’s synopsis was straightforward:
Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. https://t.co/S8VZSuaz3G. pic.twitter.com/VRUwnRFuVW
— (((David Shor))) (@davidshor) May 28, 2020
It is easy to see why a specialist in public opinion whose professional mission is to help elect Democrats while moving the party leftward would take an interest in this research. But in certain quarters of the left — though not among Democratic elected officials — criticizing violent protest tactics is considered improper on the grounds that it distracts from deeper underlying injustice, and shifts the blame from police and other malefactors onto their victims.
Apple has updated its own COVID-19 iOS app and website with new features to allow users to anonymously share info, including their age, number of existing health conditions, symptoms, potential exposure risks and the state in which they’re located. This info, which is not associated with any of their personal identifying data in any way, according to the company, will be used in an aggregated way to help inform the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and improve the organization’s COVID-19 screening protocol.
The app will also use the aggregated data to assist public health agencies and the CDC in their efforts to help the public with the best available information about potential risk factors around COVID-19, and around what constitutes exposure and exposure risk.
Smoke. Coal dust. Fine leather. Dark berry fruit. Coffee grounds.
So many descriptors and personal perceptions swirl around a glass of whiskey. Published whiskey reviews include sensory and nonsensory descriptions of thousands of these distilled spirits.
Finding meaning in and understanding these descriptors is at the heart of discriminating whiskey connoisseurs’ debates. But even for the not-so-discriminating, all of these words can be confusing for investigating the flavor and value of a bourbon that costs $130 a bottle – when a $55 similar substitute would do.
A research project by [Virginia Tech] Department of Food Science and Technology researchers Jacob Lahne and Leah Hamilton and University Libraries’ data consultants Chreston Miller, and Michael Stamper received a SEAD Major Grant from The Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) to create a tool that finds a common language in a data set of 6,500 published whiskey reviews of about 50 to 100 words each.
Army Futures Command is investing in a number of new efforts to help bolster its soldiers understanding of artificial intelligence, the command’s leader said June 10.
The military is gung-ho about the possible benefits that could be reaped from better utilizing artificial intelligence. The Army established its new Futures Command in 2018 to spearhead the service’s top acquisition priorities. The command is now looking to boost the service’s AI skills with a new military program.
“I’m convinced that the Army has got to start now to build the talent that they’re going to need in a future environment if machine learning and artificial intelligence is going to be important to us and I’m convinced it absolutely is,” Gen. John “Mike” Murray said during a webinar hosted by the Association of the United States Army.
In the turbulent days since the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, Jack Glaser has been following the storm of protests, including dozens of incidents in which police appeared to escalate conflicts, use excessive force and target journalists. Like millions of others in the United States and worldwide, he is alarmed by what he’s seen.
Glaser, however, is watching through a different lens. He is a UC Berkeley social psychologist and an expert in police practices, and where some might see a stark conflict between police and protesters, he sees a more complex dynamic: The devastating history of American racism and the biases that all people carry. Police officers’ difficult and dangerous work. And a political system that is inconsistent, at best, in its approach to police reform.
“I wouldn’t infer that there’s anything particularly unusual happening now,” he said. “Black Americans have been encountering this for centuries. It is a steady-state problem. … The main difference we’re seeing now is that the capacity to video record these incidents is widespread. But it’s no surprise to the black community — they have known it’s been happening.”
University of California-Santa Barbara, The UCSB Current
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“Some of the early epidemiological models of COVID-19 rely on assumptions about human movement and connectivity that are totally unrealistic given that most of the country has been shut down,” said UC Santa Barbara disease ecologist Andy MacDonald.
MacDonald, UCSB postdoctoral researcher Dan Sousa, and their colleagues at Columbia and UC Berkeley just received a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to address this issue. The funding comes from the foundation’s Early-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER), which supports high risk, high reward proposals.
“These are ideas that may not pan out, but if they do, they have the potential to be transformative,” MacDonald said. “They often bring together expertise from multiple different disciplines.”
Nextplayism is Silicon Valley’s whole culture: What are you gonna do next? “I hear people ask it of each other two or three times a week,” Ian McCarthy, a vice president of product at Yahoo, told me. Progress is based not on the virtues of results, but on reaching a milestone. What comes before is relevant only insofar as it brings about what will have followed.
This ethos helps explain some of the context around recent worker unrest at Facebook, which erupted last week after the company refused to moderate President Donald Trump’s posts implying that protesters could be shot. Mark Zuckerberg’s inaction ignited a revolt by Facebook staff: Some employees staged a virtual walkout, others criticized the CEO in a staff meeting, and at least one engineer resigned in protest.
Apple Inc. told staff at its main Silicon Valley headquarters that the first phase of a plan to return to the office will begin on June 15, but stressed that most employees won’t go back for several months at least.
Phase 1 will be “very limited” and workers will only be allowed in the office on certain days depending on their job, the Cupertino, California-based company wrote in a recent memo to staff. More details will be shared later this month, it added.
A new artificial intelligence system allowing shoppers on Facebook to identify characteristics of items in uploaded photographs is based on Cornell computer vision research into fine-grained visual recognition.
Announced May 19 by CEO Mark Zuckerberg via Facebook Live, the product-recognition system can identify attributes across billions of photographs in dozens of categories including fashion and home decor.
The “click photo and search” technology behind the system was first developed in 2015 by Kavita Bala, professor and chair of computer science, and her then-doctoral student, Sean Bell, M.S. ’15, Ph.D. ’16, now a research scientist at Facebook.
In a new Insider poll, 18% of Americans said they knew someone who was hospitalized from the coronavirus, and 16% knew someone who died from it.
The racial breakdown of those numbers are stark: While 14% of white respondents said they knew someone who died from the disease, 26% of Black respondents did.
“If the nose is the dominant initial site from which lung infections are seeded, then the widespread use of masks to protect the nasal passages, as well as any therapeutic strategies that reduce virus in the nose, such as nasal irrigation or antiviral nasal sprays, could be beneficial,” said study co-senior author Dr. Richard Boucher, the James C. Moeser Eminent Distinguished Professor of medicine and director of the Marsico Lung Institute at the UNC School of Medicine.
Online June 16-17. “DataRobot, the leader in enterprise AI, today announced its inaugural AI Experience Worldwide conference, “Accelerating the Impact of AI in Changing Times.” The event, which will be held virtually June 16-17, will feature presentations from Free Solo’s Alex Honnold, Freakonomics author Stephen J. Dubner, and MLB legend and ESPN commentator Orel Hershiser, among many others.” [free, registration required]
Online September 24-27. “Because of the global pandemic, we decided to transform Why R? 2020 into the online event.” Deadline for paper submissions is July 31. [free]
I am shocked how little I knew despite being an educator in a prominent US institution and a lifelong learner. Here are a few things I have learned in the book /THREAD
A new collection of freely accessible social and behavioral science research related to structural racism and police brutality is now available on SAGE Journals. The collection aims to support researchers in their future work and amplify Black scholars’ critical scholarship; educators in discussions on systemic racism; and policymakers and community organizers in their efforts to create an equal society.
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.
If you’ve ever wanted to try out OpenAI’s vaunted machine learning toolset, it just got a lot easier. The company has released an API that lets developers call its AI tools in on “virtually any English language task.”
Basically, if you’ve got a task that requires understanding words in English, OpenAI wants to help automate it. The various abilities of the GPT-3 family of natural language understanding models are at the disposal of developers, at least if you can get into the private beta. (Request access here.)