The primary focus will be to develop and conduct research projects—beginning with the University’s Faculties of Mathematics, Engineering, and Science, in conjunction with the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute and the Waterloo Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute—to refine BlackBerry’s product ideas through prototyping and R&D challenges. This will include the development of new business partnerships with faculty members and students who have commercial aspirations for their invented intellectual property.
As city populations boom and the need grows for sustainable energy and water, scientists and engineers with the University of Chicago and partners are looking towards artificial intelligence to build new systems to deal with wastewater. Two new projects will test out ways to make “intelligent” water systems to recover nutrients and clean water.
“Water is an indispensable resource of our society, as it is required for sustaining life and economic prosperity,” said Junhong Chen, the Crown Family Professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago and lead water strategist at Argonne National Laboratory. “Our future economy and national security greatly depend on the availability of clean water. However, there is a limited supply of renewable freshwater, with no substitute.”
When Puerto Rico’s famed Arecibo telescope collapsed in 2020, astronomers lost access to one of the world’s most treasured pieces of equipment – but also, potentially, decades of priceless data holding still undiscovered secrets about the universe. Now, thanks to a data rescue plan led by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin, Arecibo’s observations will be preserved for generations of future astronomers.
USPS contracted with Accenture Federal Services and Hewlett Packard Enterprise to provide ECIP infrastructure. Nvidia, a supplier for the AI project, touted the new machine vision application this week as an enterprise-scale AI deployment unique to government agencies. The GPU leader is providing its EGX platform, each consisting of four V100 GPUs running on HPE servers used to train package-sorting algorithms.
Combined with Nvidia’s inference server that delivers models to USPS processing centers, the algorithms are used for image classification and object detection applications. For example, a model could be trained to spot damaged bar codes.
Those models would help accelerate steps like determining the size, weight and postage requirements for packages as well as tracking down lost parcels.
Tyrese Thomas and Jacob Ngai were thrilled when they learned that they’d been offered places in the Google BOLD internship program for summer 2021. The program would place them at one of the world’s most famous companies, giving them a summer job that pays an intern salary equal to more than $50,000 a year full-time. They were less excited to realize that their salary wouldn’t include one of the most famous Google perks — a relocation stipend up to $11,000.
Ngai and Thomas took the internships anyway. Negotiating changes in an intern contract at a world-famous company is just not something most students do. And Google BOLD is a renowned internship program: It’s designed to expose undergraduates to careers in tech who wouldn’t normally have access to the industry, and it provides tons of perks and benefits, including health benefits, hardware, a $1,000 technology stipend and the all-important, extremely common “return offer” to a full-time job post-graduation.
To observe the swift neuronal signals in a fish brain, scientists have started to use a technique called light-field microscopy, which makes it possible to image such fast biological processes in 3D. But the images are often lacking in quality, and it takes hours or days for massive amounts of data to be converted into 3D volumes and movies.
Now, EMBL scientists have combined artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms with two cutting-edge microscopy techniques – an advance that shortens the time for image processing from days to mere seconds, while ensuring that the resulting images are crisp and accurate. The findings are published in Nature Methods.
“Ultimately, we were able to take ‘the best of both worlds’ in this approach,” says Nils Wagner, one of the paper’s two lead authors and now a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich. “AI enabled us to combine different microscopy techniques, so that we could image as fast as light-field microscopy allows and get close to the image resolution of light-sheet microscopy.”
The Conversation; Will Hughes, George David Dickinson, Luca Piantanida
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We and our colleagues have developed a way to store data using pegs and pegboards made out of DNA and retrieving the data with a microscope – a molecular version of the Lite-Brite toy. Our prototype stores information in patterns using DNA strands spaced about 10 nanometers apart. Ten nanometers is more than a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair and about 100 times smaller than the diameter of a bacterium.
Trees lining a street may encourage people to take a longer stroll or choose to bike to work. New research shows how access to natural areas in cities can improve human health by supporting physical activity. The researchers plan to equip city planners with tools to create healthier, more sustainable cities around the world.
From the subarctic community of Yellowknife, Canada, to the subtropical city of Brisbane, Australia, scientists in more than 50 nations are now monitoring the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in sewage. The number of sewage-surveillance programmes tracking COVID-19 has exploded during the past year from a dozen or so research projects to more than 200, following the discovery that whole virus particles and viral fragments are shed in faeces.
The information garnered is helping scientists to track down cases, predict surges, identify where to target testing, and estimate overall numbers of infected people in cities or regions. Although sewage surveillance has been used for several decades to identify polio outbreaks and target immunization programmes, and, more recently, to detect illicit drug use, the pandemic has brought new focus and investment in it as a means of tracking public health.
“There was always an interest in wastewater epidemiology, but now it’s taken flight,” says Ana Maria de Roda Husman, an infectious-diseases researcher at the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven.
NASA engineers are getting one last look at the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a final test to show that its 18 gold-tinted mirror segments can unfold into a precise honeycomb configuration. After the test concludes this week, the giant instrument will be folded up, packed into a shipping container, and shipped off to French Guiana, where it will launch into space on 31 October.
The 6.5-meter-wide JWST is the agency’s next great observatory, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. In a NASA briefing today, Program Scientist Eric Smith told reporters it was born out of a realization in the mid-1990s that, no matter how long it stared into deep space, Hubble would never be able to see the universe’s very first stars and galaxies and learn how they formed and evolved. The expanding universe has “redshifted” the light of those primordial objects out of the visible spectrum; NASA needed a space telescope that worked in the infrared. “So the idea of Webb was born,” Smith says. Since then, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets. Smith says JWST will be able to probe their atmospheres for molecules such as carbon dioxide, water, methane, and others that could suggest the presence of life.
Getting the $9 billion contraption to the point of departure has taken NASA much more time and money than it or Congress ever suspected.
A mathematician who uses number theory to provide new perspectives on some of the oldest and most difficult problems in mathematics, and a social scientist whose innovative contributions show the impact of increased opportunity and representation on our nation’s most important decisions — Melanie Matchett Wood, a Harvard University mathematician, and Nicholas Carnes, a Duke University social scientist and scholar of public policy, have earned the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the nation’s highest honor for early-career scientists and engineers.
Many tech companies have produced annual diversity reports for the past several years, but comparing companies to each other can be challenging, since there’s still no standardized way of evaluating them. The Race Equality Index, spearheaded by the Race Equality Project, aims to do that.
“We got underwhelmed with the way companies and even external media track and rank companies based on DEI,” Dion McKenzie, co-creator of the Race Equality Project, told Protocol. “It only tells one piece of the pie, and even that’s not standardized across the different companies.”
The index measures how companies are performing in regards to diversity, equity and inclusion, and how they stack up against their counterparts in the tech industry. Many DEI leaders are already in conversation with each other, McKenzie said, but this “allows companies to have a conversation around a similar framework.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; M. Usman Mirza, Chi Xu, Bas van Bavel, Egbert H. van Nes, Marten Scheffer
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Reliable data on economic inequality are largely limited to North America and Western Europe. As a result, we know the least about areas where inequality presents the most serious developmental policy challenge. We demonstrate that spatial variation in night-light emitted per person can reflect the distribution of income. This allows us to map global patterns and trends in economic inequality using remote sensing.
The General Services Administration is developing a governmentwide cloud acquisition strategy and wants feedback from cloud service providers and other industry partners.
GSA‘s plan is to deliver a multiple-award blanket purchase agreement (BPA) for Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud offerings on a pay-as-you-go basis. New innovations, dubbed Anything-as-a-Service, may be considered for future procurement vehicles.
The request for information (RFI) comes a day after President Biden issued a long-awaited cybersecurity executive order requiring federal agencies to develop zero-trust security architecture implementation plans making use of secure cloud services.
A start-up incubator focused on life science, engineering, and data science is coming to the University of California, Berkeley, this fall. The non-profit Bakar BioEnginuity Hub will stand out in the entrepreneurial Bay area, organizers say, for its size, affiliation with the university, and focus on innovations that benefit society.
The hub will be located in Berkeley’s former art museum. When renovations are complete, Bakar Labs will have 3,700 m2 of space for as many as 80 start-ups. Other programs will include fellowships and programming for Berkeley students and researchers, paid access to advanced facilities on campus, and connections to potential investors. Founders can get help from experts at the university’s business and law schools.
Simeon Bird, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside, is a member of a team of astrophysicists that has used machine learning to simulate the universe with high resolution in a thousandth of the time conventional methods would take.
The researchers uploaded models of a small region of space at both low and high resolutions into a machine learning algorithm that is trained to upscale the low-resolution models to match the detail of the high-resolution versions. Such training allows the code, which uses “neural networks,” to generate super-resolution simulations containing up to 512 times as many particles as the low-resolution models.
National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and the Harvard Data Science Initiative
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Online June 23-24. “Join the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and the Coleridge Initiative for this two-day conference to advance understanding of the value of data by showcasing new data, products and use resulting from recent NCSES investments.” [registration required]
Online June 16-18. “The programme and abstract booklet for the 2021 Insurance Data Science (16 – 18 June) conference (fka R in Insurance) is now out!” [registration required]
As we plan for this year’s 2021 #CSforALL Summit, we need your feedback. Please take this survey to help us evaluate the type of interest for an in-person event vs hybrid and/or virtual CSforALL Summit.
“An awardees’ contribution will have substantially expanded the scale of computational capability and/or the size of datasets that are exploitable by the worldwide community of engineers, scientists, and others using computing in their work.” Deadline for nominations is June 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.
We’ve put together a beginner’s guide to using StatsBomb Data in R, as well as releasing full StatsBomb datasets to work with (ft. Lionel Messi’s ENTIRE La Liga career!)
There’s a wide array of work a data scientist (DS) can be involved with. This post aims to address the common elements that will make a great DS, or a bad one, no matter what part of the stack you are working on.
There’s also a core set of technical chops every DS must have: SQL, an analytical mindset, fluency in a programming language like Python or R, an understanding of statistics & common statistical procedures, and machine learning methods, if the product calls for it. But that is only half the story. If we condition on people who have those required baseline skills, this post is what separates the good from the bad.
