The US broadband industry funded millions of fake comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission regarding the 2017 repeal of net neutrality, according to a report published Thursday by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Of the record-breaking 22 million public comments that the FCC received, a staggering 18 million were fake, James’ investigation found.
Millions of the fake comments, her office said, were funded by the broadband industry as part of a “secret campaign” to create the impression of grassroots opposition to net neutrality rules while the agency weighed repealing the policy.
Archaeologists, including the University of Oregon’s Alison Carter, report that 700,000-900,000 people lived in Cambodia’s medieval Greater Angkor region.
The sprawling tropical city, which covered 3,000 square kilometers, thrived from the ninth to the 15th centuries before being abandoned, possibly from climate change. Key to the population estimate, published May 7 in the journal Science Advances, was a multilayered analysis planned and designed at the UO. The paper blended more than 30 years of data with recent airborne lidar sensing.
Knowing the population and how it was distributed is vital for potentially helping cities now under climate pressures, said co-author Roland Fletcher of the University of Sydney and head of the Angkor Research Program.
How to predict the sound produced by a tonewood block once carved into the shape of a violin plate? What is the best shape for the best sound? Artificial Intelligence offer answers to these questions.
These are the conclusions that researchers of the Musical Acoustics Lab of Politecnico di Milano presented in a study that was recently published in Scientific Reports.
Early one morning, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know, including Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for Covid-19, and other expert advisers to the WHO. It was just past 1 pm Geneva time on April 3, 2020, but in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Marr lives with her husband and two children, dawn was just beginning to break.
Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in enough of it. For people indoors, that posed a considerable risk. But the WHO didn’t seem to have caught on. Just days before, the organization had tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” That’s why Marr was skipping her usual morning workout to join 35 other aerosol scientists. They were trying to warn the WHO it was making a big mistake.
The Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden and obtained by Motherboard.
Senator Wyden’s office asked the Department of Defense (DoD), which includes various military and intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for detailed information about its data purchasing practices after Motherboard revealed special forces were buying location data. The responses also touched on military or intelligence use of internet browsing and other types of data, and prompted Wyden to demand more answers specifically about warrantless spying on American citizens.
The Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center is launching the Pandemic Data Initiative as a new resource to spotlight systemic deficiencies in the collecting and reporting of pandemic data, to examine how those challenges hinder COVID-19 responses, and to explore possible solutions to improve public data.
Since the pandemic’s start, Johns Hopkins University experts at the Coronavirus Resource Center had a behind-the-scenes view on how state, federal, and global agencies collected and reported COVID-19 data. Their analyses revealed a troubling truth: In the absence of standards and uniform methods, the states used an uneven patchwork of policies and disjointed reporting that hampered efforts to slow COVID-19’s spread, sowed confusion for policymakers and the public, hindered the ability to target resources to the most vulnerable, and complicated the process of measuring the effectiveness of public health interventions and vaccinations.
Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen. An estimated 400,000 Ring devices were sold in December 2019 alone, and that was before the across-the-board boom in online retail sales during the pandemic. Amazon is cagey about how many Ring cameras are active at any one point in time, but estimates drawn from Amazon’s sales data place yearly sales in the hundreds of millions. The always-on video surveillance network extends even further when you consider the millions of users on Ring’s affiliated crime reporting app, Neighbors, which allows people to upload content from Ring and non-Ring devices.
The Brookings Institution, Jing Liu and Julie Cohen
from
Recent technological advances provide a potentially invaluable complement to inherently limited human-based classroom observations. In our newly published
paper in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, we set out to test this possibility. Our idea is simple: Since language is at the heart of many teaching interactions, we might be able to leverage the power of computers to analyze the linguistic features of classroom discourse and directly derive measures of teaching practices. If such automated measures are proved to have equal or even superior measurement qualities as conventional classroom observations, it could be possible to provide far more consistent and ongoing information to teachers about their practice than a human-rater-based system ever could, with lower costs and a larger potential for scale.
Indeed, in many other research fields, text-as-data methods, or natural language processing, have been widely applied to study conversation features, such as those
that can improve the success of job interviews,
change someone’s opinion by forming persuasive arguments, or
address issues related to mental illness. In education, scholars have also successfully applied these methods to study a wide range of topics, including
features of productive online learning environments,
teachers’ perceptions of student achievement gaps, and
strategies that schools adopt in reform efforts. Yet, the use of such methods is much rarer in natural classroom settings and teacher evaluation and improvement efforts.
Researchers have developed a tool to help governments and other organizations with limited budgets spend money on building repairs more wisely.
The new tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) and text mining techniques to analyze written inspection reports and determine which work is most urgently needed.
“Those assessments are now largely subjective, the opinions of people based on experience and training,” said Kareem Mostafa, an engineering PhD student at the University of Waterloo who led the project. “We’re using actual data on buildings to make spending decisions more objective.”
According to BlackBerry, the partnership will aim to develop and conduct research projects to refine the company’s product ideas through prototyping and research and development (R&D) challenges.
The agreement will also allow for the development of new business partnerships with faculty members and students who have commercial aspirations for their invented intellectual property (IP). BlackBerry said its Advanced Technology Development lab will work with the university to identify, explore, and create new technologies.
The strategic partnership is the second BlackBerry has reached with an Ontario postsecondary institution in the last month, after it teamed up with Ottawa’s Carleton University in a five-year, $21 million USD deal to train the “next generation of software engineers.”
Adela Timmons, a psychology professor at Florida International University, hopes that wearables can be used to detect when a couple is headed for trouble and intervene before things get out of hand.
Traditional therapy can provide couples with strategies to deal with conflict in a healthy way, but when you’re stressed or angry with your partner, it can be hard not to fall into old patterns of yelling, or shutting down, or bringing up old issues you’ve long since resolved. In your moment of conflict, your therapist isn’t there to help you. You’re on your own.
“You’re in therapy with someone for an hour a week, and that’s like 1 percent, or a tiny sliver of someone’s life,” says Timmons. “If we [psychologists] could be in the context in which the problem is occurring, in the optimal moment… we could potentially do more and be more effective.”
More than 70 percent of chief security officers and physical security decision makers Ontic recently surveyed (sample size: 300) said physical-threat activity has “dramatically increased” since the beginning of 2020. More than one-third of respondents said physically protecting corporate data was their biggest security challenge and about the same percentage said they were worried about reduced security headcoun due to the economy.
Still, 80 percent said they expect their physical security budget to increase this year, most of them attributing the increase at least partially to the pandemic. On top of the pandemic, there were concerns related to political unrest, both due to racial-justice activism and far-right protests and attacks.
Just under one-third said a growing amount of physical threats and company backlash spurred by political unrest kept them up at night – before news of the AWS data center bombing plot broke.
A new cross-disciplinary research initiative at MIT aims to promote the understanding and use of AI across all segments of society. The effort, called Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (RAISE), will develop new teaching approaches and tools to engage learners in settings from preK-12 to the workforce.
“People are using AI every day in our workplaces and our private lives. It’s in our apps, devices, social media, and more. It’s shaping the global economy, our institutions, and ourselves. Being digitally literate is no longer enough. People need to be AI-literate to understand the responsible use of AI and create things with it at individual, community, and societal levels,” says RAISE Director Cynthia Breazeal, a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT.
“The mission of the organization is to bring a human aspect back into the admissions process,” said Andrew Martelli, the chief technology officer at Kira Talent, a Canadian-founded company that works with learning institutions around the world in hopes of delivering a more holistic approach to reviewing candidates.
Hopeful students applying to institutions that partner with Kira undergo a video interview process in which they will not encounter another live person. Instead, video- and text-based prompts lead applicants through a series of questions. Their answers are then used to evaluate things like leadership potential, verbal and written communication skills, comprehension of key concepts, drives and motivations, and professionalism.
Martelli said artificial intelligence has entered the picture in a beta phase, and one way it is used is not to evaluate students but rather the admissions officers and their possible biases.
In Alaska, West Virginia and other mostly rural states, census takers relied more on the word of neighbors, landlords and others for information about a home’s residents. In New Jersey, New York and other more densely populated states in the Mid-Atlantic region, they were more likely to come away from a household lacking basic information on race, sex and ethnic background.
An Associated Press review of the first data-quality measurements released by the U.S. Census Bureau last month shows some early patterns that may point to red flags in the data that could emerge when more detailed numbers from the 2020 census are released in August.
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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.
