Following the keynote press conference, AMD invited a number of key press partners for some Q&A time with Dr. Lisa Su. On the table, we were told, was any topic relating to AMD. Given that the company launched a number of products just as the previous year ended, and supply issues are tight for end-users, there were opportunities to quiz the CEO on production demand against supply, AMD’s product cadence, and expectations for 2021.
Topics on the front of mind were AMD’s announcements that had just come through the wire – the new Ryzen 5000 Mobile family, featuring an updated processor core, as well as target markets for gaming ultraportables as well as the best gaming notebooks AMD has ever been in. There was also a brief preview of AMD’s interplay in the enterprise market with next-generation Milan processors, and a tie in with the Mercedes AMG Formula 1 team, given that AMD provides a technical partnership.
Amazon, AWS Open Source Blog; Carl Meadows, Jules Graybill, Kyle Davis, and Mehul Shah
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Last week, Elastic announced they will change their software licensing strategy, and will not release new versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2). Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic License (which limits how it can be used) or the Server Side Public License (which has requirements that make it unacceptable to many in the open source community). This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software. In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.
JAMA; Leo Lopez III, MD, MHS; Louis H. Hart III, MD; Mitchell H. Katz, MD
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One of the most disturbing aspects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in the US is the disproportionate harm that it has caused to historically marginalized groups. Black, Hispanic, and Asian people have substantially higher rates of infection, hospitalization, and death compared with White people.1,2 According to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Epic Health Research Network, based on data from the Epic health record system for 7 million Black patients, 5.1 million Hispanic patients, 1.4 million Asian patients, and 34.1 million White patients, as of July 20, 2020, the hospitalization rates and death rates per 10 000, respectively, were 24.6 and 5.6 for Black patients, 30.4 and 5.6 for Hispanic patients, 15.9 and 4.3 for Asian patients, and 7.4 and 2.3 for White patients.2 American Indian persons living in the US also have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19.
The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated many societal inequities in the United States. Among them is the “digital divide”—the lack of access to reliable and affordable high-speed internet in many areas. As public health measures forced many people to work from home or attend remote school, the critical importance of internet connectivity became evident, as reflected in stories of children doing schoolwork in parked cars in search of wireless internet.
In a new project funded by a $1.2 million grant from data.org, University of Chicago professor Nick Feamster will lead a team of UChicago researchers pinpointing gaps in digital infrastructure, from the lack of cable or fiber connectivity to a spotty video streaming session. The effort will also build a toolkit to help civic organizations—cities, government agencies, community-based organizations and others—make informed decisions about improvements to effectively narrow the digital divide.
The project will start with focused efforts in several Chicago communities, creating a framework and template that can eventually be scaled across the entire city and replicated in other cities and communities.
In our telling of stories around open source software, we often frame things in terms of good and bad, open and closed, free and not free. Two years ago, when Amazon Web Services (AWS) created the Open Distro for Elasticsearch, some argued that what the company was forking the project to sidestep its attempts at restricting AWS from selling Elasticsearch as a service. The general consensus among those opining on Twitter and elsewhere was that this was yet another case of an internet giant using its heft to bully the smaller open source company. In that David versus Goliath telling of the story, Goliath AWS was unfairly profiting off the toils of Elastic, essentially stealing the fruits of their labor, using their market dominance to overshadow the smaller company and sell its product as a service.
Third Way; Tamara Hiler, Rachel Fishman, Sophie Nguyen
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To better understand the pandemic’s impact on current and prospective college students, New America and Third Way have partnered with Global Strategy Group to commission a series of national polls to track how the COVID-19 crisis has shifted these students’ perceptions of higher education over time. Similar to what we gleaned in our first round of research conducted in August of 2020, our latest poll from December 2020 finds that students continue to be concerned about the health and economic impacts of the virus, face challenges in an online learning environment, and expect institutions and Capitol Hill to lower tuition costs and set higher standards for quality learning both now and when the pandemic ends.
Google on Monday said new test results show promising signs that the technology it’s hoping will replace cookie-based ad targeting is working.
Why it matters: Google and web browser rivals Apple and Mozilla have all introduced sweeping privacy changes recently that will collectively phase out cookies, an internet tracking tool that tracks users’ web browsing history.
An evidence review led by the Ada Lovelace Institute will examine practical and ethical issues around digital vaccine passports and health status apps.
The review, launched this month, will include a series of expert panels, an open call for evidence and an expert body chaired by Professor Sir Jonathan Montgomery to establish recommendations and open questions.
The project will build upon the institute’s rolling research on the societal implications of COVID related technologies. An open call for evidence ends on 19 February 2021.
Sometime toward the end of the last ice age, a group of humans armed with stone-tipped spears stalked their prey in the bitter cold of northeastern Siberia, tracking bison and woolly mammoths across a vast, grassy landscape. Beside them ran wolflike creatures, more docile than their ancestors and remarkably willing to help their primate companions hunt down prey and drag it back to camp. These were the world’s first dogs. Their descendants flowed both west and east, populating Eurasia as well as accompanying the ancestors of Native Americans as they spread into the Americas.
That’s the scenario laid out in a new study combining DNA data from ancient dogs and humans. The analysis, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, aims to end years of debate about where and when dogs were domesticated. It may even explain how wary wolves were transformed into faithful companions in the first place.
“I love this study,” says Jennifer Raff, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, and an expert on ancient people in the Americas. More genomes from ancient dogs and people will be needed to confirm the findings, she says, but already, “It’s amazing to see how the dog story and the human story match up.”
IEEE Intelligent Systems is promoting young and aspiring AI scientists via its biennial “AI’s 10 to Watch” special section. The 2020 group consists of 10 young stars who have demonstrated outstanding AI achievements. In April 2020, IEEE Intelligent Systems called for nominations worldwide, with the requirement that nominees with doctorates must have received their PhDs since 2014. The selection committee, made up of IEEE Intelligent Systems editorial and advisory board members, finally had to select from a pool of 20+ highly competitive nominations. After a careful and detailed selection process, they voted on a short list of 10 top candidates. This final selection was based on scientific quality, reputation, impact, expert endorsement, and diversity. The vote for the final winners was unanimous. This year’s 10 to Watch are listed. [List is pdf download.]
University of Hawaii System News, University of Hawaii Manoa
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Former oceanography graduate student Nemanja Komar and professor Richard Zeebe, both at UH Mānoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), applied the most comprehensive computer model of the ocean carbonate chemistry and CCD to date, making this the first study that quantitatively ties all the important pieces of the carbon cycle together across the Cenozoic (past 66 million years). … “The variable position of the paleo-CCD over time carries a signal of the combined carbon cycle dynamics of the past,” said Komar, lead author of the study. “Tracing the CCD evolution across the Cenozoic and identifying mechanisms responsible for its fluctuations are therefore important in deconvolving past changes in atmospheric CO2, weathering and deep-sea carbonate burial. As CO2 and temperature dropped over the Cenozoic, the CCD should have shoaled but the records show that it actually deepened.”
Jan. 24 marks the one-year anniversary of a momentous but largely unnoticed event in the history of the Covid-19 pandemic: the first published report of an individual infected with the novel coronavirus who never developed symptoms. This early confirmation of asymptomatic infection should have set off alarm bells and profoundly altered our response to the gathering storm. But it did not. One year later we are still paying the price for this catastrophic blunder.
At least one of three people infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, do not develop symptoms. That’s the conclusion of a review we just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It summarizes the results of 61 studies with more than 1.8 million people.
But during much of the pandemic, fierce resistance — and even outright denialism — in acknowledging this not-so-typical disease pattern led to ineffective testing practices that allowed the pandemic to spin out of control.
Early in the pandemic, as many states started shutting down businesses to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Daniel Sarewitz felt a sense of optimism. Sarewitz, an expert on the interplay between science and society, reasoned that unlike the polarized issues of climate change, genetically modified organisms, and nuclear energy, the pandemic presented an immediate, tangible threat. Surely the necessary role of science in the US response to COVID-19 would bring the country together.
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“For once, we all agree,” Sarewitz wrote in an editorial that appeared in Slate in March. The cause of the crisis was clear. The consequences of inaction were obvious. “We are thus unified by the shared value of preserving life,” he wrote. “For this crisis, the things that unite us are outranking those that divide us.” He continued, “The threat of COVID-19 is bringing out the best in both science and politics.”
The article didn’t age well. “Dumbest thing I ever wrote,” says Sarewitz, who is codirector of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University. “I underestimated, like so many have, how profound the divisions are in this country.”
Northeastern University, The Huntington News, Ethan Wayne
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The Office of the Provost announced Dec. 7 that Carla Brodley, dean of the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, has been appointed as the inaugural Dean of Inclusive Computing at the Northeastern Center for Inclusive Computing.
The Center will focus on bringing women and other people from underrepresented demographics into computer science. According to the Office of the Provost, since joining Northeastern in 2014, Brodley has overseen the increase of female representation in the undergraduate computer science program to 30%, over 10% higher than the national average for female professionals in the computer science field. Additionally, rates of Black, Latinx, Pacific Islander and Native American students have increased to 14% across the program.
Graphcore Mk2 IPUs are now available to run customer workloads through specialist AI cloud provider Cirrascale. This is the first publicly available Mk2 IPU-POD technology, though Graphcore’s Mk1 product was available to selected customers as part of Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering. Graphcore hopes the new cloud offering will help customers scale from experimentation, proof of concept and pilot projects to larger production systems. … Graphcore also announced an academic program aimed at grad students, researchers and professors who want to use Graphcore systems for research or teaching. The program will give free access to IPU-powered systems (based on Dell DSS8440 server with 16 Mk1 IPUs on 8x C2 PCIe cards). Graphcore also offers free support for these systems.
Online February 26, starting at 1 p.m. London time. Speaker: Aidan Peppin from Ada Lovelace Institute.
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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.