Deloitte today announced the launch of the Deloitte Center for AI Computing, a first-of-its-kind center designed to accelerate the development of innovative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for Deloitte clients. Built on NVIDIA’s DGX A100 systems, the Center brings together the supercomputing architecture and AI expertise that clients require as they become AI-fueled organizations.
The MIT Press has announced the launch of Direct to Open (D2O). A first-of-its-kind sustainable framework for open access monographs, D2O moves professional and scholarly books from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model.
D2O gives institutions the opportunity to harness collective action to support access to knowledge. Beginning in 2022, all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections will be openly available on the MIT Press Direct eBook platform. Instead of purchasing a title once for a single collection, libraries now have the opportunity to fund them one time for the world through participant fees.
The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine
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Young and middle-aged adults (25-64 years old) in the U.S. have been dying at higher rates since 2010, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. High and Rising Mortality Rates Among Working-Age Adults says that rising death rates are striking working-age Americans, whose risk of dying from certain conditions — such as drug overdoses or hypertensive heart disease — has been climbing since the 1990s.
The comprehensive report, based on data from 1990-2017, documents a public health crisis sweeping the American workforce, which has profound implications for families, employers, and the U.S. economy. This trend was prevalent before the pandemic arrived, but working-age Americans have been deeply affected by the pandemic, the report notes. Americans are more likely to die before age 65 than peers in other rich nations.
Apple researchers are working on ways to teach Siri to determine if a speaker is stuttering and compensating so the voice assistant can understand what they are saying. A new study showcases their work developing a database of relevant audio clips to train the AI accordingly.
The ACM Conference for Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) has decided to suspend its sponsorship relationship with Google, conference sponsorship co-chair and Boise State University assistant professor Michael Ekstrand confirmed today. The organizers of the AI ethics research conference came to this decision a little over a week after Google fired Ethical AI lead Margaret Mitchell and three months after the firing of Ethical AI co-lead Timnit Gebru. Google has subsequently reorganized about 100 engineers across 10 teams, including placing Ethical AI under the leadership of Google VP Marian Croak.
“FAccT is guided by a Strategic Plan, and the conference by-laws charge the Sponsorship Chairs, in collaboration with the Executive Committee, with developing a sponsorship portfolio that aligns with that plan,” Ekstrand told VentureBeat in an email.
Much of the world’s focus has been on health care at a global scale this year. The following images celebrate the work of researchers who have been toiling away on tinier work. The pictures are stunning visualizations of life sciences and biomedical research being conducted to find treatments and cures for cancer.
These photographs, which includes colorful images of micro needles, brain cells, and so-called mini livers, are the winners in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Koch Institute’s annual image awards. Large-scale versions are hung in a public gallery in the Koch Institute’s Cambridge, Mass., lobby.
How can we summarise the Covid year from a broad historical perspective? Many people believe that the terrible toll coronavirus has taken demonstrates humanity’s helplessness in the face of nature’s might. In fact, 2020 has shown that humanity is far from helpless. Epidemics are no longer uncontrollable forces of nature. Science has turned them into a manageable challenge.
Why, then, has there been so much death and suffering? Because of bad political decisions.
In previous eras, when humans faced a plague such as the Black Death, they had no idea what caused it or how it could be stopped. When the 1918 influenza struck, the best scientists in the world couldn’t identify the deadly virus, many of the countermeasures adopted were useless, and attempts to develop an effective vaccine proved futile.
Google will stop tracking users across their internet searches to sell targeted ads, the tech giant said Wednesday.
Google confirmed in a blog post that it will not build alternative methods to track users after phasing out its existing tracking methods, which involve using third-party cookies.
“Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products,” David Temkin, Google’s director of product management, ads, privacy and trust, said in a blog post.
The artificial intelligence boom isn’t slowing yet, with new figures showing a 34.5 percent increase in the publication of AI research from 2019 to 2020. That’s a higher percentage growth than 2018 to 2019 when the volume of publications increased by 19.6 percent.
China continues to be a growing force in AI R&D, overtaking the US for overall journal citations in artificial intelligence research last year. The country already publishes more AI papers than any other country, but the United States still has more cited papers at AI conferences — one indicator of the novelty and significance of the underlying research.
These figures come from the fourth annual AI Index, a collection of statistics, benchmarks, and milestones meant to gauge global progress in artificial intelligence. The report is collated with the help of Stanford University, and you can read all 222 pages here.
the culmination of months of work among approximately 120 people working across 4 organizations: @stanfordio
@uwcip
@Grapika_NYC and @DFRLab
We had 3 primary goals: 1. Identify mis- and disinformation before it went viral and during viral outbreaks; 2. Share clear, accurate counter messaging; and 3. Increase understanding of the dynamics shaping the information space during the 2020 US election and its aftermath.
Our final report expands upon the EIP’s rapid-response research and policy analysis surrounding the 2020 election and details how misleading narratives and false claims about voting coalesced into the metanarrative of a “stolen election.”
If you have a canine friend, they might enjoy https://joincompanion.com as a source of treats (and maybe a little training along the way), all using ML.
Neuroscientist and tech entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins claims he’s figured out how intelligence works—and he wants every AI lab in the world to know about it.
Artificial intelligence is becoming a true industry, with all the pluses and minuses that entails, according to a sweeping new report.
Why it matters: AI is now in nearly every area of business, with the pandemic pushing even more investment in drug design and medicine. But as the technology matures, challenges around ethics and diversity grow.
Driving the news: This morning, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) released its annual AI Index, a top overview of the current state of the field.
MIT researchers analyzed more than 800,000 online school reviews using advanced natural language processing, determining that reviews were largely associated with schools’ test scores — a measure that correlates closely with race and family income and tends to reinforce inequities in educational opportunity — rather than measures of student growth, which reflect how well schools actually help students learn.
“Our hope is that parents who learn about our study will be highly discerning when they read school reviews and take what they are reading with a grain of salt, triangulating subjective assessments with a range of metrics that try to capture what’s really going on at the school,” says Nabeel Gillani, a doctoral student and research assistant in MIT’s Media Lab, and the lead author of the study, which was published this week in AERA Open, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.
New York University, NYU Tandon School of Engineering
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Machine-learning (ML) systems are becoming pervasive not only in technologies affecting our day-to-day lives, but also in those observing them, including face expression recognition systems. Companies that make and use such widely deployed services rely on so-called privacy preservation tools that often use generative adversarial networks (GANs), typically produced by a third party to scrub images of individuals’ identity. But how good are they?
Researchers at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, who explored the machine-learning frameworks behind these tools, found that the answer is “not very.” In the paper “Subverting Privacy-Preserving GANs: Hiding Secrets in Sanitized Images,” presented last month at the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, a team led by Siddharth Garg, Institute Associate Professor of electrical and computer engineering at NYU Tandon, explored whether private data could still be recovered from images that had been “sanitized” by such deep-learning discriminators as privacy protecting GANs (PP-GANs) and that had even passed empirical tests. The team, including lead author Kang Liu, a Ph.D. candidate, and Benjamin Tan, research assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, found that PP-GAN designs can, in fact, be subverted to pass privacy checks, while still allowing secret information to be extracted from sanitized images.
Online March 18, starting at 9 a.m. Pacific. “a meeting to discuss how a new breed of data journalists collected quantitative data that helped fight the pandemic. The forum will also discuss how data scientists utilize their resources to create better models.”
Online “We’ll hear from Ashan Choudary about their funding vehicle for minority serving institutions. Ashan Choudary is the Assistant Director of Research Development at @MSRDConsortium.” [registration required]
“The Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) is seeking applications for its Michigan Data Science Fellows (DS Fellows) Program. This two-year program provides outstanding young researchers with intensive data science experience as they ready themselves for independent research and faculty positions.” Deadline for applications is April 23.
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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.
Twitter, The Institute for Ethical AI & Machine Learning, JetBrains
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JetBrains has published the results for their Python Dev Survey in collaboration with the Python Software Foundation. In this interesting edition they showcase results from more than 28k Python devs from almost 200 countries.
