Apple Watch and iPhone could enable at-home assessment of functional capacity in cardiovascular disease patients.
According to data published this week by Stanford University researchers in PloS ONE, Under a supervised in-clinic setting, the smartphone and Apple Watch with the VascTrac app were able to accurately assess ‘frailty’ with a sensitivity of 90% and specificity of 85%.
You may not be traveling or hanging out in malls much these days, but Google Maps is preparing for a return to such places in the not-so-distant future: It’s rolling out a new feature that uses augmented reality to navigate malls, airports, and train stations.
On Tuesday, Google unveiled the feature, called Indoor Live View, which shows graphics like arrows, directions, and icons on your smartphone’s screen, laid atop a camera view of the world around you. It can be used to help you find a store in a shopping mall or a bathroom at an airport, for instance. The feature is more interactive than Google Maps’ existing indoor maps, and expands on a similar feature for city-street navigation that launched in 2019. It’s available for Android and iOS users at some malls in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Long Island, Seattle, and Newark, New Jersey. Google said it will be available for use at a limited number of airports, malls, and transit stations in Tokyo and Zurich in the coming months.
The National Weather Service has turbocharged its lagging forecast model to better predict extreme weather events such as hurricanes, blizzards and downpours, as well as day-to-day weather.
By including much higher layers of the atmosphere, increased factoring of ocean waves and other improvements, the weather service’s update to its Global Forecast System is trying to catch up with a European weather model that many experts consider superior.
Tests for the past two years show the upgrade, which kicked in Monday, forecast heavy rains and snowfall 15% better five days out and improved hurricane and tropical storm tracks by more than 10%, better pinpointing storm formation five to seven days in advance.
Catastrophe modeler Risk Management Solutions Inc. said Monday it will launch climate change models in June initially for its North Atlantic hurricane, Europe inland flood and windstorm models.
The models are designed to help customers assess the near- and long-term impacts of climate change on physical assets and their businesses so they can make risk and financial decisions, Newark, California-based RMS said in a statement.
The models incorporate forward-looking predictive insights and analysis and feature probabilistic modeling to capture events across different climate change scenarios, RMS said.
The Harvard Crimson, Ariel H. Kim and Anjeli R. Macaranas
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The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard announced Thursday the launch of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center, which will aim to promote human health by integrating machine learning and the life sciences.
Funded by a $150 million endowment gift from former Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt and his wife, businesswoman Wendy Schmidt, the Schmidt Center will bring together academic and industrial professionals from around the world to conduct interdisciplinary research in data science and biology.
The Schmidts’ gift will coincide with an additional $150 million contribution from the Broad Foundation to the Broad Institute’s general endowment. Eric Schmidt, who left Google in 2020 after 19 years and has an estimated net worth of roughly $19 billion, serves on the Broad Institute’s board of directors.
The Federal Statistical Office (FSO) is joining forces with the Swiss Data Science Center, a joint venture between the two federal institutes of technology, to encourage the use of data science and artificial intelligence within the administration. This partnership is taking shape in the FSO’s Data Science Competence Center.
As society becomes more digitalised, institutions need more and more data science skills. This includes the integration of tools arising from artificial intelligence in a way that is safe and beneficial to society as a whole. To this end, as a pioneer within the federal administration, the FSO is teaming up with the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC), a joint venture between the two federal institutes of technology.
“I am extremely enthusiastic about this strategic partnership in a joint flagship project between our two institutes and the FSO”, said Martin Vetterli, EPFL President. “It reminds me of the partnership between the Alan Turing Institute in London and the British Office for National Statistics, committed to a joint vision of research and innovation in regard to data science.”
The Ohio State University, Institute for Materials Research
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Ayanna Howard, dean of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University, recently appeared on the daytime talk show The View to discuss her new book ‘Sex, Race, and Robots.’
Dr. Howard joined the ABC co-hosts Tuesday to discuss public perceptions and expectations of artificial intelligence, how human biases and prejudices in science translate into tech, and women in STEM education and employment.
“Community and inclusive excellence around students, research, and innovation are my passions,” Howard said in an Engineering release. “I’m of the belief that it takes a village to drive excellence, and my goal is to fully support us in that effort.”
Women account for just 24% of all top income earners at US universities, according to a study from the Eos Foundation. The study, conducted in association with the Washington DC-based American Association of University Women, found that highly compensated women are especially scarce at the tenured and tenure-track faculty level. Although some female faculty members have salaries of well over US$1 million a year, they are the exception. Among faculty members, top-earning men outnumber women by nine to one1.
The study gathered salary data for employees — including academic, sports and medical-school faculty and staff members — from 93 public and 37 private research-intensive US universities. Where possible, researchers identified the top ten earners at each institution. Although most public US universities are required to publish salaries of their employees, private universities have no such obligation, so data for those institutions are largely incomplete. Still, the gender gap at the top is undeniable and pervasive, says study co-author Andrea Silbert, president of the philanthropic Eos Foundation in Harwich Port, Massachusetts. Women accounted for 60% of all employees, but for only 24% of those with the highest earnings. “We have to address the embedded notions of who deserves top pay,” says Silbert. “We’re educating people in a system that reinforces gender bias.”
Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment Inc. has awarded nearly $70 million in grants to help 16 Indiana colleges and universities address long-term priorities, including $10 million each to Butler University and Purdue University. … $10 million to Purdue University for the program Indiana Digital Crossroads, a new statewide network of regional hubs that use data science to bring together students, faculty, industry partners and community leaders. These groups will collaborate to solve regional challenges and help manufacturing companies adopt cutting-edge technologies in automation and data exchange.
UF will likely be the nation’s first comprehensive research institution to integrate AI across the curriculum and make it a ubiquitous part of its academic enterprise. It will offer certificates and degree programs in AI and data science, with curriculum modules for specific technical and industry-focused domains. The result? Thousands of students per year will graduate with AI skills, growing the AI-trained workforce in Florida and serving as a national model for institutions across the country. Ultimately, UF’s effort will help to address the important national problem of how to train the nation’s 21st-century workforce at scale.
Further, due to the unparalleled capabilities of our new machine, researchers will now have the tools to solve applied problems previously out of reach. Already, researchers are eyeing how to identify at-risk students even if they are learning remotely, how to bend the medical cost curve to a sustainable level, and how to solve the problems facing Florida’s coastal communities and fresh water supply.
Arm’s chip designs are getting better-suited to machine learning as AI becomes more a part of every layer of computing. Segars said that can be tough, especially as low- and no-code tools let people build things at even higher layers of abstraction. Abstraction is the enemy of efficiency, of course; true believers write as close to ones and zeros as possible.
An expert on the social implications of technology responds to Shiv Ramdas’ “The Trolley Solution.”
Imagine a university without any teachers, just peer learners, open-access resources, and an office space full of high-speed internet-enabled computers, accessible to anyone between 18–30 years of age, regardless of any prior learning. That university is called 42. It does not have any academic instructors; the teachers are the self-starting students who have their eyes set on a job in Big Tech. Aided only by a problem-based learning curriculum, students gain a certificate of completion about three to five years after starting out. They are guaranteed internships in some of the world’s most prestigious firms and have set their sights on launching their careers as coders. 42’s philosophy is steeped in peer-to-peer learning, where human learners themselves spearhead the learning process.
I explore these questions in a new piece that’s part of an exciting special issue on AI discontents of Interdisciplinary Science Review
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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.
When users want to find an item or a piece of information and they don’t know what it’s called, they face a difficult problem. Sometimes in our research, we see users engage in keyword foraging. … Think of keyword foraging as the search before the search: one or more preliminary queries to help the user formulate her actual query.
