University of British Columbia, The Ubyssey student newspaper, Owen Gibbs
from
“I might need to defer my program by a whole year, which will obviously affect my life, my plans, and all that by a lot,” Aasir Hasan said.
Hasan, who is a second-year chemical engineering student, told The Ubyssey that the Faculty of Engineering has removed any online options for all classes above second-year. The faculty has given no indication that it plans to change course. Last year, the faculty offered courses almost entirely online but chose not to do so for this upcoming term.
Without an online option, advisors have only been able to recommend that Hasan defer his studies by a year. He was even warned that he may lose his place in the chemical engineering program, though this has since been reversed.
An ambitious new plan from the White House that has a $65.3 billion price tag and an Apollo program design would transform the way the United States responds to pandemics in part by vastly accelerating vaccine development, testing, and production.
The plan, announced today, hopes to launch with $15 billion set aside in a budget reconciliation bill now before Congress (but not certain to pass). It asks Congress to provide the rest of the funding over the next decade. It calls for an Apollo-like “mission control” center to coordinate the many branches of government already involved with pandemic preparedness. Nearly 40% of the money would go toward vaccines, followed by just under 20% for treatments. The rest would support new diagnostics, early warning systems, improved public health and biosafety measures, and global health efforts.
Eric Lander, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, says the response to the COVID-19 pandemic built on the previous 5 years of advances in vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics. “Five years from now, we ought to be able to do dramatically better,” says Lander, whose office created the plan with the National Security Council.
The government is getting involved in the fight for your right to repair broken tech yourself, and that may include McDonald’s McFlurry ice cream machines. Here’s what we know.
The Conversation, Nicole Bell and Archil Kobakhidze
from
A sudden rule change by the Australian Research Council — to ban grant applications that cite preprint material — has deemed 32 early and mid-career researchers ineligible to receive critical funding.
A preprint is a scientific paper or report that has been made available before it is published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The researchers were caught unaware by the rule, which many consider unworkable and unethical. It is out of step with the way science operates.
Substituting just half a portion of beef with a handful of nuts, vegetables, fruits, and seafood could buy you 48 extra minutes of healthy life, and reduce your carbon footprint for that meal by 33%.
These findings come from a recent Nature Food study, where a team of researchers meticulously examined the health and environment-related impacts of almost 6,000 foods to provide guidance on the healthiest diets— or the planet, and for us.
Their findings reveal that instead of having to make ambitious large-scale dietary shifts from meat to plant-based foods, we can actually achieve large benefits by making much smaller exchanges—for instance, swapping one ingredient on our plates for another, and on a meal-by-meal basis.
The Fibers and Additive Manufacturing Enabled Systems Laboratory at the Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering has entered into a master research agreement with global medical technology company Cook Medical to explore the use of smart fibers for continuous real-time monitoring of patients’ well-being in medical procedures involving Cook devices.
The agreement, the first of its kind between IU and Bloomington-based Cook Medical, aims to develop a smart-fiber platform that can deliver sensors for efficient monitoring of physiological parameters during interventional procedures and solve the technical challenges of incorporating smart fibers into Cook products, such as catheters and endoscopes. Data provided by the sensors helps medical personnel provide better patient care and also will aid in the development of better medical devices.
“There are many challenges in using sensors in minimally invasive devices,” said Alexander Gumennik, an assistant professor of intelligent systems engineering at the Luddy School and director of the FAMES Lab. “This partnership will allow us to leverage our core smart fiber technology and key products in Cook’s portfolio to create solutions to these challenges, such as sensor function, incorporation and signal processing, and connection to appropriate monitors for the use of medical doctors.
According to German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, Tesla is in line to receive a €1.14 billion grant from the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWI) to help build a new battery factory adjacent to its new factory in Grünheide near Berlin. Peter Altmaier, the head of BMWI, tells the press, “If the product and production is successful, a number of 2000 or more jobs in the battery area of the Grünheide plant is realistic.” BMWI says Tesla’s total investment in the Grünheide battery factory will be approximately €5 billion.
The EU is winning the battle for trust among artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, academics on both sides of the Atlantic say, bolstering the Commission’s ambitions to set global standards for the technology.
But some fear the EU risks squandering this confidence by imposing ill-thought through rules in its recently proposed Artificial Intelligence act, which some academics say are at odds with the realities of AI research.
“We do see a push for trustworthy and transparent AI also in the US, but, in terms of governance, we are not as far [ahead] as the EU in this regard,” said Bart Selman, president of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a professor at Cornell University.
Highly international AI researchers are “aware that AI developments in the US are dominated by business interests, and in China by the government interest,” said Holger Hoos, professor of machine learning at Leiden University, and a founder of the Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe (CLAIRE).
EU policymaking, though slower, incorporated “more voices, and more perspectives” than the more centralised process in the US and China, he argued, with the EU having taken strong action on privacy through the General Data Protection regulation, which came into effect in 2018.
Pittsburgh graduate and IT businessman Chris Bickell made a $20 million donation to the Panthers’ football program on Thursday, which marks the largest single gift in Pitt Athletics history. However, Bickell’s generous donation does come with one strange catch.
The head coaching position at Pitt will now officially be named the “Chris Bickell ’97 Head Football Coach,” per a school announcement. The name change marks the “first named coaching position in the history of Pitt Athletics.”
Understanding and managing data requires strong critical thinking and problem-solving skills, skills that are essential for engineering students, according to Rebecca Napolitano, assistant professor of architectural engineering at Penn State. However, contextualized data science courses that teach students to apply such skills to their fields — including the importance of data management for other sectors — are not typically a requirement for students in engineering and other disciplines.
Napolitano leads national multidisciplinary research teams developing curricular framework for data science and workforce development that will be transferrable across engineering disciplines and institutes. The teams recently received two grants totaling $2.25 million: a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation through the Harnessing the Data Revolution solicitation program and a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Projects selected in today’s announcement cover a wide range of topics that promise important innovations in data-reduction techniques, including techniques using advanced machine learning, large-scale statistical calculations, and novel hardware accelerators. A sample of the projects includes:
Methods to compress streaming data: Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory will develop techniques to compress data coming directly from a scientific instrument or a computer model by taking advantage of its specific structure and integrating advanced machine-learning techniques, while allowing scientists to control certain features of the data.
Methods to intelligently select and tune compression techniques: Researchers at Texas State University will develop techniques to search the vast space of potential data compression techniques and select the best method based on the user’s requirements for fidelity, speed, and memory usage.
Compression methods for related groups of data sets: Researchers at the University of California, San Diego will develop scalable techniques for compressing multiple related streams of data, such as those from multiple sensors observing the same physical system, by taking advantage of the relationships between the data sets.
Domestic surveillance programs may be in for an AI upgrade.
The National Security Agency of the United States just awarded a $2 billion contract to Hewlett Packard Enterprise to develop high-performance computing power that the agency will use to reach its data analytics and artificial intelligence needs, according to a Wednesday statement from the company.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that the NSA has repeatedly pushed for access to private information from telecommunications companies and internet servers, which could mean a major upgrade is in store for the surveillance of ordinary people.
Recognizing the growing intersection of humanities, social sciences, and STEM, West Virginia University has established a new School of Mathematical and Data Sciences that prepares students for a world where understanding large volumes of data is required in a broad spectrum of professions.
The new School has launched an additional major—data sciences—that will help students develop quantitative and computational skills to create real-world solutions to the world’s most pressing questions, including maintaining dashboards during the COVID-19 pandemic, predicting traffic patterns to improve driver safety and optimizing food delivery apps.
Drawing on longstanding research and teaching strengths in engineering and applied mathematics, Brown University is launching a new one-year master’s program in data-enabled computational engineering and science.
The program, which is now accepting applicants, aims to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the computational modeling and data science techniques that have become standard in industry and academia.
“Computational modeling and simulation are the primary means of analysis in national laboratories and industry,” said Yuri Bazilevs, a professor at Brown’s School of Engineering and the program’s director. “Realistic applications in computational science and engineering involve highly complex datasets that need to be incorporated in simulations for validation and robust predictions. Our program will prepare students to use such state-of-the-art modeling techniques, as well as to properly interpret and utilize the output they produce.”
Vanderbilt University, The Vanderbilt Hustler student newspaper, Stephanie Ting and Shunnar Virani
from
The Computer Science Department is witnessing growth in its number of student majors, faculty numbers, research opportunities and courses offerings. The department split from the Electrical Engineering Department in Fall 2021 to better accommodate growing interest.
Per Julie Johnson, associate chair of the Computer Science Department and director of undergraduate studies in computer science, this is largely an administrative change and will be seen by students through growth in faculty.
Fall 2021 will mark the start of the second year of Destination Vanderbilt, a three-year $100 million program that aims to kindle a growing interest in the field. The program’s goal is to hire around 20 new computer science faculty members, adding to the previous 20 faculty members. The Computer Science Department has already hired seven people this past year and hopes to hire another seven to eight new faculty members in the upcoming year, according to Johnson.
If you ever wanted to test your knowledge in the area on an academic level, one historic NYC college will be offering the first-ever cannabis minor degree program for a CUNY campus.
Official statements from Medgar Evers College confirm that students will be able to enroll in “Introduction to the World of Cannabis” as a prerequisite course that will be followed by other cannabis courses in this degree program. Thirteen newly-developed courses were put in place to earn a cannabis degree minor in one of four different tracks, with students able to pick up to four courses.
To provide Hawaii educators with the skills needed to integrate computer science (CS) into their instruction, University of Hawaii at Mānoa Assistant Professor Dan Hoffman is researching the role of culturally-relevant computing. Hoffman, of the College of Education (COE) Department of Learning Design and Technology (LTEC), was awarded nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his three-year grant program, Advancing Research and Practice in Culturally-Relevant Computing.
“This is an opportunity to collaborate with teachers in ways that open up the world of CS while promoting and sustaining Hawaii’s unique place, history, culture and language,” said Hoffman. “By adopting an interdisciplinary stance, we hope to move beyond brief, standardized CS experiences toward something deeper and more personally relevant for learners.”
“Ellora is at the forefront of engaged labor economics, studying issues that matter for the world today like the racial wealth gap and minimum wage policy. But she also brings deep knowledge of the historical roots of these issues—something that is critical to growing our understanding of entrenched inequities.”
In addition to her teaching and research activities, Derenoncourt will spearhead the development of a new research center within the department to advance the study of inequality. The group will not only serve as a hub for researchers at Princeton and around the world, but create new opportunities for students to learn about how researchers can use economics to study important issues in social justice.