And I saw a tweet go by reporting that the Arecibo platform “acaba de colapsar”—had just collapsed. It was news I’d been dreading, a story I did not want to write.
I’ve seen the same kind of golden light that illuminated Arecibo the morning the telescope collapsed. And I’ve watched as dusk washed over the Puerto Rican mountains, summoning the coquí tree frogs to sing their nightly chorus. Each time I said goodbye to the telescope, I thought it would be waiting when I returned.
Computing Community Consortium, The CCC Blog, Helen Wright
from
The White House yesterday established a new office focused on coordinating U.S. efforts in Artificial Intelligence research. The new National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office, under the leadership of Founding Director and current U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Lynne Parker, “is charged with overseeing and implementing the United States national AI strategy and will serve as the central hub for Federal coordination and collaboration in AI research and policymaking across the government, as well as with private sector, academia, and other stakeholders.” See the new logo that features a bald eagle clutching a neural network.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) established the new office in accordance with the National AI Initiative Act of 2020, which was passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021 (NDAA) earlier this month.
Thanks to the Open Syllabus Project, you can now access the reading lists of more than 2,500 colleges around the country. Whatever subject you’re studying, it is now easy to diversify your reading without straying from reputable sources. Or, if you can’t enroll in college right now, create your own reading list for a bit of home-schooling.
Degree Query was curious what the landscape of American college books looks like. What are the texts that are informing tomorrow’s society? We used Open Syllabus to identify the most commonly assigned college books in every state, overall, and in five core subjects: Political Science, Business, Computer Science, Economics, and (of course) English Literature.
Apple on Wednesday announced the latest phase of its $100 million initiative to tackle systemic racism and promote racial equality. Apple is among the handful of technology giants that have pledged to hire more Black workers and people of color to address inequality.
In its latest move, Apple said it’s launching a global innovation and learning hub for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), a developer academy in Detroit to support coding and tech education for minority students; and venture capital funding for Black and Brown entrepreneurs.
The Propel Center in Atlanta, pictured in a rendering above, will aim to bring coding and career opportunities to HBCU campuses and communities across the US. As part of the company’s ongoing partnerships with HBCUs, Apple said it’s also establishing two new grants to support HBCU engineering programs.
Canada welcomes 29 international researchers to its world-class AI research and training community. The newly-appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chairs are advancing research in a wide range of areas, including machine learning for health and responsible AI.
“On behalf of CIFAR, I am delighted to welcome and congratulate the newest cohort of Canada CIFAR AI Chairs. They will join a vibrant network of talented researchers across Canada who are responding to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Their contributions will transform the future and promote an AI world that benefits all,” says Dr. Elissa Strome, Executive Director, Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, CIFAR.
The Canada CIFAR AI Chairs program, a cornerstone of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, aims to attract outstanding researchers to Canada by providing them with long-term, dedicated funding to pursue innovative ideas.
POLITICO, LORRAINE WOELLERT and CATHERINE BOUDREAU
from
IT’S THE MONEY THAT MATTERS — President-elect Joe Biden made a public splash with his top climate nominees, notably John Kerry and Gina McCarthy. Less showy but equally influential are the dozens of accounting and economic wonks who will be installed throughout Washington’s financial services ecosystem. Steeped in sustainability and social justice, they’re likely to have a deep impact on corporate transparency and the flow of capital.
The appointees and new hires will populate the top echelons — Treasury and the SEC for starters — but they also will have perches at under-the-radar bodies that govern accounting, mortgage-backed securities, export credit and the $4 trillion municipal bond market.
The developer of a period and fertility-tracking app used by more than 100 million consumers has settled Federal Trade Commission allegations that the company shared the health information of users with outside data analytics providers after promising that such information would be kept private.
The proposed settlement requires Flo Health, Inc. to, among other things, obtain an independent review of its privacy practices and get app users’ consent before sharing their health information.
“Apps that collect, use, and share sensitive health information can provide valuable services, but consumers need to be able to trust these apps,” said Andrew Smith, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “We are looking closely at whether developers of health apps are keeping their promises and handling sensitive health information responsibly.”
To help it navigate increasingly complex worlds, the researchers—led by University of California (UC), Berkeley, graduate student Michael Dennis and Natasha Jaques, a research scientist at Google—considered two ways in which they could draw the maps. One method randomly distributed blocks; with it, the AI didn’t learn much. Another method remembered what the AI had struggled with in the past, and maximized difficulty accordingly. But that made the worlds too hard—and sometimes even impossible—to complete.
So the scientists created a setting that was just right, using a new approach they call PAIRED. First, they coupled their AI with a nearly identical one, albeit with a slightly different set of strengths, which they called the antagonist. Then, they had a third AI design worlds that were easy for the antagonist—but hard for the original protagonist. That kept the tasks just at the edge of the protagonist’s ability to solve. The designer, like the two agents, uses a neural network—a program inspired by the brain’s architecture—to learn its task over many trials.
The federal government on Monday released an updated set of detailed hospital-level data showing the toll COVID-19 is taking on health care facilities, including how many inpatient and ICU beds are available on a weekly basis.
Using an analysis from the University of Minnesota’s COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, NPR has created a tool that allows you to see how your local hospital and your county overall are faring.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, it emerged that many people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus were losing their sense of smell — even without displaying other symptoms. Researchers also discovered that infected people could lose their sense of taste and their ability to detect chemically triggered sensations such as spiciness, called chemesthesis.
Almost a year later, some still haven’t recovered these senses, and for a proportion of people who have, odours are now warped: unpleasant scents have taken the place of normally delightful ones. Nature surveys the science behind this potentially long-lasting and debilitating phenomenon.
The US Pentagon plans to spend $2 billion on AI over the next five years through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its OFFSET programme, for example, is looking to develop drone swarms comprising of up to 250 unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and/or unmanned ground systems (UGSs) for deployment across a number of diverse and complex environments.
The USAF is investigating how to control multiple unmanned drones from its latest fighter jets, the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter and the F-15EX. The drones are to act as wingmen to the manned fighters, scanning the skies for aerial threats which will then be acted upon by the manned fighters. The program would capitalize on the Air Force’s Skyborg AI program aimed at pairing AI with a human in the cockpit.
Efforts are on to incorporate Skyborg network into Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie planned stealthy drone alongside manned fighters, so the machine can learn how to fly and even train with its pilot. The drones will then be sent out alongside F-35 Joint Strike Fighters or other fighters to scout enemy territory ahead of a strike, or to gather intel for the pilot in the formation.
The German Federal government and the State of Baden-Württemberg have announced plans to significantly increase their support for Tübingen as a location for excellence in AI research and innovation. In the years to come, several hundred million euros will be earmarked for research and development in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) – including 100 million euros from the Hector Stiftung, a foundation founded and run by SAP co-founder Hans-Werner Hector. Among other things, the money will support “Hector Endowed ELLIS Fellowships” for outstanding researchers in machine learning and related fields.
We tend to think of drifting, or any wheel-spinning tomfoolery, as a crude, reckless and indulgent act when not done in the safe confines of a closed course. Yet researchers at Toyota’s Research Institute and Stanford University’s Dynamic Design Lab are hard at work testing technology that may use drifting for good — in this case, getting you and your passengers out of a sure collision.
To do this, the two teams have developed a Supra (with the appropriate modifications, of course) that can literally drift itself. It seems a little pointless on the surface until you consider that insufficient car control is often a factor in accidents.
If a car can remain composed, especially in occasions where the driver or collision avoidance system has made initial corrective action, but that action has sent the vehicle into oversteer, it could prevent collisions and save lives.
Today I want to provide some background on HBCUs by discussing some data about these critical institutions, as I suspect there is much that is not widely known—at least outside the Black community. The simple message in the numbers is that HBCUs work their magic with very little money.
To keep things comparable, I’ll limit my numbers to public and nonprofit HBCUs that offer a four-year degree or more. And as a warning, because accounting definitions vary from one government source to another, definitions of the variables I look at are not perfectly consistent across sources, though any consequent errors should be quite small.
If you’re on Facebook, click on “Why am I seeing this ad?” The answer will look something like “[Advertiser] wants to reach people who may be similar to their customers” or “[Advertiser] is trying to reach people ages 18 and older” or “[Advertiser] is trying to reach people whose primary location is the United States.” Oh, you’ll also see “There could also be more factors not listed here.” Such explanations started appearing on Facebook in response to complaints about the platform’s ad-placing artificial intelligence (AI) system. For many people, it was their first encounter with the growing trend of explainable AI, or XAI.
But something about those explanations didn’t sit right with Oana Goga, a researcher at the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory, in France. So she and her colleagues coded up AdAnalyst, a browser extension that automatically collects Facebook’s ad explanations. Goga’s team also became advertisers themselves. That allowed them to target ads to the volunteers they had running AdAnalyst. The result: “The explanations were often incomplete and sometimes misleading,” says Alan Mislove, one of Goga’s collaborators at Northeastern University, in Boston.
Online January 26, starting at 1 p.m. Eastern. “A conversation with Daniel Larremore (@DanLarremore) & Kate Bubar (@bubar_kate); Moderator: Rafael Irizarry (@rafalab)” [registration required]
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The eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program is now accepting applications for student fellows and project leads for the 2021 summer session. Fellows will work with academic researchers, data scientists and public stakeholder groups on data-intensive research projects that will leverage data science approaches to address societal challenges in areas such as public policy, environmental impacts and more. Student applications due 2/15 – learn more and apply here. DSSG is also soliciting project proposals from academic researchers, public agencies, nonprofit entities and industry who are looking for an opportunity to work closely with data science professionals and students on focused, collaborative projects to make better use of their data. Proposal submissions are due 2/22.
i’ve just finished teaching this semester together with Yann and Alfredo. the course was in a “blended mode”, implying that lectures were given in person and live-streamed with a limited subset of students allowed to join each week and all the other students joining remotely via Zoom. this has resulted in more active online discussion among students, instructors and assistants over the course, and indeed there were quite a few interesting questions posted on the course page which was run on campuswire.
i enjoyed answering those questions, because they made me think quite a bit about them myself. of course, as usual i ended up leaving only a short answer to each, but i thought i’d share them here in the case any students in the future run into the same questions. although my questions are all quite speculative and based on experience rather than rigorously justified, what’s fun in rigorously proven and well-known answers?
