Experts in artificial intelligence have gotten quite good at creating computers that can “see” the world around them—recognizing objects, animals, and activities within their purview. These have become the foundational technologies for autonomous cars, planes, and security systems of the future.
But now a team of researchers is working to teach computers to recognize not just what objects are in an image, but how those images make people feel—i.e., algorithms with emotional intelligence.
“This ability will be key to making artificial intelligence not just more intelligent, but more human, so to speak,” says Panos Achlioptas, a doctoral candidate in computer science at Stanford University who worked with collaborators in France and Saudi Arabia.
For CEA-Leti scientists, it means that traits of resistive-RAM (ReRAM) devices that have been previously considered as “non-ideal” may be the answer to overcoming barriers to developing ReRAM-based edge-learning systems, as outlined in a recent Nature Electronics publication titled “In-situ learning using intrinsic memristor variability via Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling.” It describes how RRAM, or memristor, technology can be used to create intelligent systems that learn locally at the edge, independent of the cloud.
Thomas Dalgaty, a CEA-Leti scientist at France’s Université Grenoble, explained how the team were able to navigate the intrinsic non-idealities of ReRAM technology—the learning algorithms used in current ReRAM-based edge approaches cannot be reconciled with device programming randomness, or variability, among others.
As Portland’s Roux Institute welcomed its first students last summer, the coronavirus pandemic was exposing the tenuousness of a local economy heavily reliant on hospitality and retail. But the institute — a graduate-studies and research center focused on artificial intelligence, life sciences, computer and data sciences, and digital engineering — aims to push Portland in a new, high-tech direction. Lewiston-raised tech investor David Roux and his wife, Barbara, donated $100 million to Boston-based Northeastern University to seed the institute, and the Harold Alfond Foundation has since given another $100 million in support. The New York Times called the fledgling project “a template for the many American cities struggling to share in the nation’s prosperity.”
Now, the Roux Institute has moved into an Old Port campus it shares with WEX, the financial-tech firm, and started partnering on research and student work experiences with companies ranging from small startups to L.L.Bean. We talked with chief administrative officer Chris Mallett about how the institute could shape Portland’s prospects of becoming a mini–Silicon Valley.
Early last year, the biologist Michael Levin and his colleagues offered a glimpse of how versatile living matter can be. Levin and Douglas Blackiston, a member of his laboratory at the Allen Discovery Center of Tufts University, brought together nascent skin and muscle cells from a frog embryo and shaped the multicelled assemblies by hand. This sculpting process was guided by an algorithm developed by the computer scientists Josh Bongard and Sam Kriegman of the University of Vermont, which searched for simulated arrangements of the two cell types capable of organized movement. One design, for example, had two twitching leglike stumps on the bottom for pushing itself along.
The researchers let the cell clusters assemble in the right proportions and then used micro-manipulation tools to move or eliminate cells — essentially poking and carving them into shapes like those recommended by the algorithm. The resulting cell clusters showed the predicted ability to move over a surface in a nonrandom way.
Facebook today published a blog post detailing Fairness Flow, an internal toolkit the company claims enables its teams to analyze how some types of AI models perform across different groups. Developed in 2018 by Facebook’s Interdisciplinary Responsible AI (RAI) team in consultation with Stanford University, the Center for Social Media Responsibility, the Brookings Institute, and the Better Business Bureau Institute for Marketplace Trust, Fairness Flow is designed to help engineers determine how the models powering Facebook’s products perform across groups of people.
The post pushes back against the notion that the RAI team is “essentially irrelevant to fixing the bigger problems of misinformation, extremism, and political polarization [on Facebook’s platform],” as MIT Tech Review’s Karen Hao wrote in an investigative report earlier this month. Hao alleges that the RAI team’s work — mitigating bias in AI — helps Facebook avoid proposed regulation that might hamper its growth. The piece also claims that the company’s leadership has repeatedly weakened or halted initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth.
The Energy Department, in all aspects of its work, is turning to artificial intelligence to accelerate its output.
DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) is using artificial intelligence to monitor threats to the electric grid. Its inspector general is looking at AI to flag potential fraud.
Fred Streitz, the chief AI scientist in DOE’s Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office, said all of the agency’s offices are using AI at some level, and said the use cases are getting more advanced.
“It’s going to touch everything, in the same way that electricity now touches everything that happens. We believe that AI is going to wind up touching, in some way or another, almost every aspect of our lives going forward,” Streitz said last week at an AI conference hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association.
Lawfare; Brian Nussbaum, Unal Tatar, Benjamin Yankson, Gary Ackerman, Brandon Behlendorf
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Much of the public discussion around the Internet of Things (IoT) focuses on smart cities and how the IoT is revolutionizing urban services such as parking, lighting and transportation. But less discussed is how the IoT is moving into and changing the nature of remote environments. Deserts, oceans, and space present harsh conditions for mundane activities, let alone for the use of remote technology. Despite these challenges, progress in such austere environments—and specifically in the Arctic and Antarctic regions—has been greater than might be imagined. IoT operations in the polar regions present opportunities for researchers and industry in terms of how to assess distinctive cyber risks and their implications for future operations.
IoT applications are proliferating in these regions for the same reasons they are everywhere else: cost savings from automation, increased focus on optimization and efficiency through data analytics, and a growing need to understand industrial and commercial operations through large-scale data collection. Moreover, the computerization of Arctic petroleum extraction is occurring for the same reason that the computerization of parking and lighting systems is occurring on Main Street in many dense urban areas—to improve the quality of services and operations provided by firms and governments, and to better understand complex phenomena using data.
The IoT infrastructure in Antarctica and the Arctic are often tied to particular industries, like mining, petroleum extraction, maritime, shipping, telecommunications and others. The combination of such industries and remote environments creates complex physical, economic and regulatory environments.
Five years ago, scientists created a single-celled synthetic organism that, with only 473 genes, was the simplest living cell ever known. However, this bacteria-like organism behaved strangely when growing and dividing, producing cells with wildly different shapes and sizes.
Now, scientists have identified seven genes that can be added to tame the cells’ unruly nature, causing them to neatly divide into uniform orbs. This achievement, a collaboration between the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI
), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Bits and Atoms, is described in the journal Cell.
The Chronicle of Higher Education; Dan Bauman , Julia Piper, and Brian O’Leary
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The Chronicle‘s executive-compensation package includes the latest data on more than 1,700 chief executives at more than 600 private colleges from 2008-18 and nearly 290 public universities and systems from 2010-19.
In Washington, D.C., where the key national policy makers work and often live, vaccination has been a fiasco. Software for a same-day registration system—immediately likened universally to The Hunger Games—spat out so many error messages that the city had to get the vendor, Microsoft, to build a new system.* The new Microsoft system, which went online in early March, worked better and allowed preregistration, but for people without qualifying medical conditions or work circumstances, the District continues to restrict availability to people age 65 and up, even as well over half the states (including neighboring Maryland) have lowered their age thresholds. In New York the age threshold has fallen to 30. That is a sore point for your correspondent, age 63.
Yale undergraduates interested in both fields can pursue the Computer Science and Economics (CSEC) interdepartmental degree program, which launched in fall 2019, with coursework covering topics such as machine learning and computational finance.
Philipp Strack, CSEC’s inaugural director of undergraduate studies, is comfortable straddling multiple disciplines. With an academic background in economics and mathematics, his research reflects this broad and interdisciplinary outlook — ranging from behavioral economics and neuroscience to auction design, market design, optimization, and pure probability theory.
Strack, an associate professor of economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, recently spoke to YaleNews about the real-world implications of this work
The Institute for Protein Design (IPD) at the University of Washington School of Medicine today announced a multiyear, $5 million gift from Microsoft to advance research on biotechnological tools that may be used against future pandemics. The funds, together with computing resources and expertise from Microsoft, will be leveraged to explore how artificial intelligence can best be applied to protein design. A key goal of this research is to speed the development of potent antivirals and experimental vaccines.
“We are at a turning point in biotechnology. After decades of foundational research, it is now possible to use computers to create new proteins with new biological functions such as shutting down a virus. With this generous gift, Microsoft will help us propel this exciting work into new frontiers,” said David Baker, director of the institute and a UW professor of biochemistry.
“We’re deeply inspired by the scientific advances emerging from the Institute for Protein Design,” said Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft.
Meharry Medical College has announced the launch of its School of Applied Computational Sciences (SACS) which will offer Master of Science degrees in Data Science and Biomedical Data Science, beginning in August 2021. The College is taking a critical step toward advancing scholarship in computational sciences and supporting the industry through academic research by establishing the SACS—the fourth of Meharry’s academic schools.
“People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends—that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans,” he says. “We don’t have that, but people are talking as if we do.”
On March 1st, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) released its Final Report and Recommendations to the President and Congress. While the Report is the outcome of an extended period of discussion and consultation, the Commission’s recommendations rest upon a set of unexamined, and highly questionable, assumptions.
1. National security comes through military advantage, which comes through technological (specifically AI) dominance.
Online April 15, starting at 2:30 p.m. Eastern. Michael Wakin (Colorado School of Mines), Title: Spectral Properties of Time-limited Toeplitz Operators and Applications in Signal Processing [free]
“BARDA DRIVe, in partnership with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), is proud to present the “Mask Innovation Challenge: Building Tomorrow’s Mask”. This challenge aims to support the development of innovative masks that can protect Americans from respiratory pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2.” Deadline for submissions is April 21.
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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.
To further our understanding of the neural basis of behavior, the Visual Behavior 2P project utilized the Allen Brain Observatory (schematized below) to collect a large-scale, highly standardized dataset consisting of recordings of neural activity in mice that have learned to perform a visually-guided task. This dataset can be used to investigate how patterns of activity across the visual cortex are influenced by experience and expectation, as mice are exposed to new stimuli or unexpected events during behavior. In addition, fluctuations in attention and motivation can reveal the impact of internal states such as task engagement on neural representations.
This initial dataset includes neural and behavioral measurements from 82 mice, including 3021 behavior training sessions and 551 in vivo imaging sessions, resulting in longitudinal recordings from 34,619 cortical cells. These data are made openly accessible, with all recorded timeseries, behavioral events, and experimental metadata conveniently packaged in Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) files that can be accessed and analyzed using our open source Python software package, the AllenSDK.
At last week’s GoodCon Europe, hosts Afdhel Aziz and Bobby Jones kicked off the gathering with words of wisdom from their years of experience helping companies find and incorporate purpose into all they do.
One principle that resonates extraordinarily with our mission at Data Clinic: Purpose should be an open source pursuit. As Bobby explained, when companies make breakthroughs in helping the greater good, they should be open sourced so others can also benefit and make use of these solutions.
