When Virginia Norwood was in high school in the 1940s, her guidance counselor advised her to become a librarian instead of a physicist. Luckily, she ignored him. By 1972, Norwood, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate and engineer at Hughes Aircraft Company, had designed a vital component of Landsat, the first satellite launched into space to monitor Earth’s surface. Satellites in the Landsat series still provide valuable data to scientists worldwide and Landsat 9 is expected to launch on 23 September, almost 50 years after the first one.
Norwood’s contribution was the multispectral scanner—a sensor that could be calibrated while in space to detect red, green, and infrared energy reflected from Earth and could transmit data digitally to researchers on the ground. The scanner enabled scientists to track forest loss, crop productivity, and the spread of deserts, and to map inaccessible geological features such as glaciers and ice sheets. “She paved the way for an entire generation of … Earth observation instruments,” says NASA’s Jeffrey Masek, a Landsat project scientist.
I’m a fitness enthusiast. I also adhere to a nutrient-dense, “clean” eating program, which means I minimize my sugar intake and eat a lot of whole foods for the purpose of optimizing my health.
You might wonder how effective such a diet and exercise plan would be in the fight against COVID-19, since some have suggested – without supporting evidence – that vaccination may be unnecessary if a detailed wellness lifestyle is closely followed.
As a research scientist who has studied nutrition for close to 20 years, I have watched the wellness community’s response to the COVID-19 vaccines with great interest. While eating right can favorably impact the immune system, it is not reasonable to expect that nutrition alone will defend against a potentially life-threatening virus.
Fortune, Commentary; François Candelon , Karen Lellouche Tordjman , and Ariane Lafolie
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People will still surf the web and go to the store, but with smart assistants they won’t need to do so with the same frequency as they used to. As voice-enabled ecosystems expand, they’ll become the primary channel for shopping and engagement—and gatekeepers to customer relationships.
For all those reasons, voice-enabled A.I. agents pose a major disintermediation risk for consumer-facing companies. Value pools will shift accordingly. As in any platform economy, a few dominant players will exert a large gravitational pull. These companies will pick and choose which third-party offerings to recommend—including their own—and reap the cross-selling and upselling benefits that accrue.
new research promises to make robotics research available to resource-constrained organizations. In a paper published on arXiv, researchers at the University of Toronto, Nvidia, and other organizations have presented a new system that leverages highly efficient deep reinforcement learning techniques and optimized simulated environments to train robotic hands at a fraction of the costs it would normally take.
The Brookings Institution, TechStream; David Larson, Daniel L. Rubin, and Curtis Langlotz
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As the course of the public-health response to the pandemic is beginning to shift, radiology is continuing to advance our understanding of the disease (such as the mechanisms by which COVID patients suffer neurological issues like brain fog, loss of smell, and in some cases serious brain damage) and beginning to account for some of the costs of our response (such as the fact that the body’s response to vaccines may cause false positives for cancer diagnosis).
In a recent policy brief for Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, we explore the path forward in building an appropriate testing framework for medical AI and show how medical societies should be doing more to build trust in these systems. In suggesting changes for diagnostic AI to reach its full potential, we draw on proposals from the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, the European Union, and the International Medical Device Regulators Forum to regulate the burgeoning “software as a medical device” (SaMD) market. We recommend that policymakers and medical societies adopt stronger regulatory guidance on testing and performance standards for these algorithms.
Is it even possible to do real AI ethics work inside a corporate tech giant? And how can these teams succeed? To explore these increasingly important questions, VentureBeat spoke with a few of the women who pioneered such initiatives — including Gebru and Mitchell, among others — about their own experiences and thoughts on how to build AI ethics teams. Several themes emerged throughout the conversations, including the pull between independence and integration, the importance of diversity and inclusion, and the fact that buy-in from executive leadership is paramount.
Five years after an $11.5 million federal grant launched the COBRE Center for Computational Biology of Human Disease at Brown University, the National Institutes of Health has awarded $10.8M in new funds to Brown to build on the center’s early success.
The center — a federal Center of Biomedical Research Excellence funded by the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences — uses sophisticated computer analyses to advance research aimed at understanding and fighting human diseases.
Director David Rand, a professor of biology at Brown, said the renewal funds will enhance the center’s research infrastructure, enable strengthened collaboration among scientists working with computational and bioinformatics tools, and support four new research projects. Rand said there is a “computational revolution” happening in the biomedical sciences, as researchers need computational analyses to help them make sense of massive amounts of available data.
On Friday, invited guests and members of the Penn community celebrated the groundbreaking of the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s new data science building and the unveiling of its official name, Amy Gutmann Hall. The event was presided over by President Gutmann, naming donor Harlan Stone, Nemirovsky Family Dean Vijay Kumar, and Penn Engineering Board Chair Rob Stavis.
The 116,000-square-foot, six-floor building, located on the northeast corner of 34th and Chestnut Streets near Lauder College House, will centralize resources for researchers and scholars across Penn’s 12 schools and numerous academic centers while making the tools of data analysis more accessible to the entire Penn community.
The University of Oregon rejected a petition on Sept. 17 by graduate employees in the Department of Computer Science and Information to raise their stipends for the 2021-22 academic year. The petition, which the GEs submitted on Sept. 13, cites below average pay and lack of a livable wage as motivations for the initiative.
The petition had 167 signatures and demanded higher stipends for all GE levels. The CIS GEs asked for a 17% increase for level one GEs, a 28% increase for level two GEs and 35% increase for level three GEs, according to Sam Schwartz, one of the CIS GEs behind the initiative.
Computer science teaching assistants working for a public university in a large city like Eugene make approximately $20,000 per year on average, according to a Computer Research Association study. A CIS GE at UO made an approximate median salary of $17,700 during the 2020-21 academic year, according to the initiative’s website.
A team led by Zachary Ulissi of Carnegie Mellon University has now taken a different approach by developing a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) programme, dubbed CatGym, that iteratively changes the positions of atoms on the surface of a catalyst to find the best configurations from a given starting configuration.
The researchers showcased their technique by predicting the surface reconstruction pathways of a ternary Ni3Pd3Au2(111) alloy catalyst. Their results show that the DRL programme can not only be used to explore more diverse surface compositions than conventional methods, but that it can also generate new pathways based on how energetically favourable they are.
This manyfesto is a provocation, a question, an opening, a dance about a future of AI technologies that is decolonial. We call it manyfesto, since it reflects some visions among many, and we hope to invite exchange, conversation, and the development of statements from people affected by AI technology.
We begin with the challenge posed by the language we use to talk about AI: language that has emerged, as much of the technology has, dominated by Western male voices, whiteness, and wealth. We seek to uncover, to question, upend, and reinvent the assumptions underlying this language, even as we use it.
The “DS Fellows Program accepts young researchers who have a strong track record of research in their respective fields and who plan to acquire additional skills in data science and AI. The new Fellow will work in an intellectually vibrant environment, and build collaboration with other Fellows, over 420 MIDAS affiliate faculty members, and the Rocket Companies data science team.” Deadline for applications is November 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.
NPR, Life Kit; Stacey Vanek Smith, Janet W. Lee, Connie Hanzhang Jin
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For Tina Opie, a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School and the head of Opie Consulting Group, the answer is obvious: “What’s really going on is power,” she explains. “When you interrupt someone, you’re trying to see who is at the top of the pyramid and who’s at the bottom.”
In certain cases, this is super obvious. The CEO is at the top of the pyramid, and the intern is at the bottom. The CEO might interrupt the intern, but the intern probably will not interrupt the CEO. Sometimes there are some more complicated issues at play, including gender, race and sexuality.
So what should you do when you get interrupted or talked over or have an idea stolen in a meeting? Here are four ways to be heard in the workplace. I’ve included upsides and downsides because one thing I learned in researching women and marginalized workers is that solutions are always messy and imperfect
