Jupyter is a big deal, heavily used at companies as varied as Google and Bloomberg, but it didn’t start that way. It started with a friendship. Fernando Pérez and Brian Granger met the first day they started graduate school at University of Colorado Boulder. Years later in 2004, they discussed the idea of creating a web-based notebook interface for IPython, which Pérez had started in 2001. This became Jupyter, but even then, they had no idea how much of an impact it would have within academia and beyond. All they cared about was “putting it to immediate use with our students in doing computational physics,” as Granger noted.
These things take time
Today Pérez is a professor at University of California, Berkeley, and Granger is a principal at AWS, but in 2004 Pérez was a postdoctoral student in Applied Math at UC Boulder, and Granger was a new professor in the Physics Department at Santa Clara University. As mentioned, they first met as students in 1996, and both had been busy in the interim. Perhaps most pertinently to the rise of Jupyter, in 2001 Pérez started dabbling in Python and, in what he calls a “thesis procrastination project,” he wrote the first IPython over a six-week stretch: a 259-line script now available on GitHub (“Interactive execution with automatic history, tries to mimic Mathematica’s prompt system”).
A blue-ribbon panel wants Congress to establish a U.S. Digital Service Academy (USDSA) to help the federal government meet its need for tech-savvy workers.
The digital academy would be similar to the five existing military academies in providing students with a tuition-free education in exchange for 5 years of government service. But instead of becoming a commissioned military officer, graduates would join the civilian workforce at the Department of Defense and other federal agencies.
These digital specialists would help close a widening skills gap in the federal workforce not currently being met by the nation’s colleges and universities, say members of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which issued its final report last week.
There are occasional announcements from some of China’s majors that cross the U.S./China divide and garner interest like Alibaba’s “Alink” platform for machine learning data collation, for instance, but news like this is a once-per-year event at most.
In short, U.S. webscale companies have been leaders in open sourcing their own tooling but the view into how similarly sized (if not larger) companies in China has been muddled. Transparency has been granted at least in part following a multi-university study that focused on China’s big three tech companies and their various open source undertakings.
Although it is based on a relatively small sample size for the qualitative section, it does reveal something that might be lost on us here in the U.S. China’s largest web companies are emulating the West’s emphasis on open source as beneficial for a host of reasons but where these companies choose to put their open source foot forward is different.
Parallax Advanced Research brought in about $30 million in revenue in 2020, the year the non-profit research company disaffiliated from Wright State University, and it expects to bring in $40 million this year, said Dennis Andersh, president and chief executive of Parallax.
Among those revenue-producing projects: An artificial intelligence (AI) system dubbed “Opera,” designed with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to help decision-makers estimate the viral spread of COVID-19.
Some personal thoughts (not Google’s official opinion!) on the role of companies in rolling back environmental degradation and CO2 pollution. Personally, I think it’s huge.
No single company can do it alone; even Google, with its very large data centers, represents just 0.045% of global electricity consumption, so one could argue that it doesn’t matter what we do.
Roughly 100 Virginia Commonwealth University instructors are demanding what many adjuncts across the state want: a fair wage. Pay for adjunct instructors would more than double if requests are met.
Adjunct instructors marched last week through campus to VCU President Michael Rao’s office to deliver their demands, which include a meeting with Rao on March 19 and a response by March 30.
Tom Burkett, a founder of VCU Adjuncts for Fair Pay, is an adjunct instructor at the VCU School of the Arts.
“We just kind of look at our pay as really a kind of one defining thing that can bring up the quality of life and the accessibility of teaching at the higher education level,” Burkett said.
This is a watershed moment for the tech industry, with implications that reach far beyond it. 17/35
Following in a long tradition, Google workers have been organizing from within, raising inextricably linked issues of toxic workplace conditions and unethical and harmful tech to leadership and to the public. With the firing of… 18/35
MIT Visualization Group; Crystal Lee, Tanya Yang, Gabrielle Inchoco, Graham M. Jones, and Arvind Satyanarayan Interactive Article By Crystal Lee, Jonathan Zong, Anna Arpaci-Dusseau, Katherine Huang, Mateo Monterde, Ethan Nevid
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Controversial understandings of the coronavirus pandemic have turned data visualizations into a battleground. Since the start of the pandemic, graphics like “Flatten the Curve” or line charts showing the pandemic’s death toll have been crucial to helping people understand the spread of the disease and how best to respond to it. Visualizations animate these data-driven stories, giving readers both a high-level understanding of the pandemic juxtaposed with heart-wrenching personal stories. John Burn-Murdoch’s COVID-19 trajectory charts, for example, powerfully illustrate how the pandemic has unfolded in painstaking detail, and each peak in these graphs drives home the sheer devastation that is the US coronavirus death rate. For government officials, medical professionals, and journalists, resources like the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Map, The COVID Tracking Project, and health department data portals give users an overview of the pandemic with datasets focused on testing, patient outcomes, and the racial disparities between those who do and do not receive care. Indeed, rigorous data analysis has also played a pivotal role in successful coronavirus response policies like those in Taiwan.
Despite over 28 million COVID cases and 500,000 deaths in the United States (as of this writing), a report from Pew Research Center shows that 39% of US adults say that they would not get the coronavirus vaccine and 47% say that they are not concerned about contracting the disease. The contrast between these statistics is troubling: how do people living in the epicenter of the COVID pandemic believe that the pandemic is overblown?
Fewer butterflies are flitting across the Western United States, with rising temperatures playing a role in their dramatic decline over the past four decades, a new study finds.1
There’s been a gradual but serious drop in recent decades in species population. Researchers have calculated a 1.6% decrease in the number of butterflies spotted each year since 1977, according to a new report released in the journal Science.
“To put that in concrete terms, if you imagine going to a nice meadow in the middle of summer two decades ago and seeing 1,000 individual butterflies (which wouldn’t be that hard to do, if you think about lots of different species), you would now expect to see around 725 individual butterflies,” study lead author Matt Forister, biology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, tells Treehugger. “So that’s a loss of a bit more than 1/4.”
Forget your smartwatch: Google is adding a new feature to the Fit app that will allow Pixel phones to measure your heart rate and respiratory health. Google said that these new features take advantage of sensors that are already built into Pixel phones, including the microphone, camera, and accelerometer.
While we behavioral scientists cannot change the structure of our universities overnight, we can begin addressing these issues by integrating (small d) democratic principles into our labs. To this end, I recently founded the Union of Democratic Laboratories (UDL), a scientific society that advocates for the establishment of clear standards for fair and humane lab practices and the democratization of scientific workplaces. While we know practices like those described above take place, as a community we need to better understand the scale at which they occur and the damage they cause. The UDL is currently at work on the Humane Labs Project—a large empirical endeavor examining inhumane laboratory practices, how they negatively affect scientists and the rigor of the science they produce, and how to better combat them.
I am determined to continue stepping up EU efforts to increase gender equality in education, culture, sports and research and innovation. The latest “She Figures” report, our flagship publication monitoring the state of play on gender equality in research and innovation, indicates a persisting under-representation of women in research and innovation. All disciplines considered, only a third of researchers in the EU are women and only 15% in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Even more striking, women represent less than 10% of patent holders, only 8% of European startups are founded by all-women teams and only 25% are founded by a team that includes at least one woman.
A changing mindset
We need more innovative ways of tackling gender stereotypes among the younger generations. That is why on International Women’s Day 2020 I started a yearlong social media campaign – #EUwomen4future. Since then, I have had the privilege to highlight the remarkable achievements from European women in research, innovation, education, culture and sport. Because of this campaign, a database of talented women from across Europe remains and we will continue supporting and recognizing them and all other amazing women that have made an impact.
Microplastic particles, present everywhere on the planet, may complicate assessments of black carbon’s role in the melting of snow and of its contributions to Earth’s radiative balance.
The big revamp of Google News in 2018 introduced a “Full Coverage” feature that brings together context and other perspectives for major stories in one feed, and it’s now coming to Search.
In the Google News apps (and Discover feed) today, tapping “Full Coverage” shows you related “top news, local headlines, in-depth pieces, explainers, interviews and more.” That additional context is now coming to Google Search, with Full Coverage meant to help people more easily understand complex stories.
Lee’s Famous Recipe has incorporated artificial intelligence at the drive-thru to combat pandemic induced issues facing the fast-food industry.
The restaurant’s Englewood location has partnered with tech company, Hi Auto, to use conversational artificial intelligence, basically their version of Siri, to take and place orders at the drive-thru. The pandemic has presented staffing issues and increased the number of customers in the drive-thru for many restaurants and Lee’s isn’t excluded.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Florida
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Online March 17, starting at 2 p.m. Eastern. “As part of a two-part series of virtual forums examining the role of AI in higher ed, a panel of leading thinkers and practitioners in the use of AI will join The Chronicle for a discussion of AI and machine learning in higher ed’s future.” [registration required]
University of California-Berkeley School of Information, Berkeley Algorithmic Fairness & Opacity Working Group (AFOG) as part of the Public Interest Technology University Network l
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Online March 15, starting at 10:30 a.m. Pacific. Speaker: Ethan Zuckerman.
“The Shanahan Foundation Fellowship at the Interface of Data and Neuroscience, a 3-year fellowship program co-hosted by the Allen Institute and the University of Washington, is now accepting applications” Deadline for applications is April 15.
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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.
A practical problem faced by teachers applying this learning methodology is to form good teams in a practical way. It is a subject of debate what a good team is. For many, a good team shows a balance of personalities and competencies. Harmony comes from group members with similar personalities, and productive creativity comes from people with opposing personalities. A diversity of competencies guarantees that teams can complete complex tasks. Altogether, whether a team is good or not can be assessed by particular combinations of several criteria, including personality, competencies, social relations, gender, etc.
At IIIA-CSIC, we have tackled this problem using combinatorial optimisation techniques. Eduteams is a free team formation system that partitions a classroom into student teams of the same size. Partitioning classrooms is a prevalent situation in co-operative learning and sometimes a barrier for a teacher to adopt this educational approach.
HadCRUT5, the new version of the Met Office Hadley Centre/Climatic Research Unit global surface temperature dataset from 1850 to 2018, has extended and improved the previous temperature record.
