Marc Ethier
Mon, November 1, 2021, 7:33 AM·4 min read
Michigan Ross photo
A top 10 list of most bid-on courses by full-time MBA students at the Ross School of Business this year shows that students favor a broad array of interdisciplinary subjects, ranging from environmental policy to the psychology of startup teams and big-data analytics.
The Michigan Ross Full-Time MBA curriculum takes students through a series of core courses in the first year, including the signature MAP (Multidisciplinary Action Projects) course. In their second year, students are able to choose electives that meet their academic and career goals and interests.
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Advanced Big Data Analytics is among the top ten. Taught by Professor Sanjeev Kumar, the course teaches students how to apply machine learning algorithms to various big-data sources in a business context. By the end of this course, students gain a better understanding of processes, methodologies, and tools used to transform the large amount of business data available into useful information and support business decision making by applying ML algorithms.
Professor Mike Barger’s Business Leadership in Changing Times is often called the “CEO’s course.” In it, students are challenged to navigate complex leadership crises that executives from some of the world’s most recognizable companies have faced, right in front of those very execs. During simulated press conferences, students reenact crises by role-playing members of different stakeholder groups while the executives are watching.
One of the surprises in the top ten? The Business of Biology, an interdisciplinary graduate course that explores the intersections between science, technology, commerce, and social policy as they come together to advance or retract progress toward more personalized health care.
A collaboration between the Florida Atlantic University Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute and Charles E. Schmidt College of Science has resulted in the launch of a unique partnership to train the next generation of brain scientists through the newly announced Neuroscience Graduate Program (NGP). The innovative, multi-campus Ph.D. program will blend a comprehensive curriculum that ranges from molecules to mind with exceptional research opportunities, and will serve as a key element in FAU’s pursuit of groundbreaking interdisciplinary neuroscience research.
When you walk up the stairs of the Museum of Museums and into the gallery, you enter a church-like atmosphere. You see shifting stained-glass windows projected on the walls and pews for sitting. You hear what sounds like Gregorian chant and a friendly (yet authoritative) voice delivering a sermon. The Word of the Future is a neural network that made all that — not the pews, and not the projector, but all the churchy media you see and hear. The images of stained-glass windows do not exist in any church in the world, but are The Word’s idea of what stained glass should look like. The Gregorian chant was never sung by human voices, but is The Word’s idea of what that kind of music should sound like. The Word of the Future is a machine intelligence. (“The Word of the Future” also happens to be the name of the exhibition.)
Rad AI, a radiologist-founded firm using artificial intelligence to alleviate burnout, has raised $25 million, officials announced Wednesday.
San Francisco-based Artis Ventures investment firm led the Series A financing with additional contributions from existing backers such as Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused fund. The money will go toward further developing Rad AI’s initial offerings, used for auto-generating impressions from radiologists’ dictations and aiding in incidental findings follow up.
In October, The Harvard Crimson reported that a matchmaking survey called the “Harvard Marriage Pact” had been making the rounds on campus until the service’s website and social media presence suddenly “disappeared without explanation,” which led some students to believe that they had been scammed.
But the service later reappeared on Oct. 31 under a new name, ExExEx, and students who had participated finally received an email with their “match,” according to the Crimson.
On Nov. 4 the Crimson reported that the service was created as a prank by an MIT undergraduate named Liam Kronman. The newly branded ExExEx website states that “you’re probably really compatible with your exes’ exes’ exes,” above a large button that says “let’s find them.”
Vizio is a surveillance company that incidentally manufactures TVs. A Vizio TV nonconsensually spies on you and shows you ads, and it does so despite the fact that you’re paying for it. Vizio’s latest financials show that the company makes more money from spying on you than it does from selling TVs.
As Richard Lawler writes for The Verge, the division that handles ads and surveillance booked $57.3 million in profits, while the hardware division’s profits were $25.6 million.
The argument that Bender et al. advance has two parts: first, that large language models pose social risks, and second, that they will turn out to be “misdirected research effort” anyway, since they pretend to perform “natural language understanding” but “do not have access to meaning” (615).
I agree that the trajectory of recent research is dangerous. But to understand the risks language models pose, I think we will need to understand how they produce meaning. The premise that they simply “do not have access to meaning” tends to prevent us from grasping the models’ social role. I hope humanists can help here by offering a wider range of ways to think about the work language does.
Chimpanzees in West Africa have a clever trick to get at the tasty kernels inside oil palm nuts. They carefully select a flat rock to act as an anvil and place a nut on top. Then, using another stone as a hammer, they pound away until the nut’s hard exterior cracks with a crunch.
Until now, scientists eager to learn more about this tool use could spend weeks combing through hours of raw footage to find the relevant recordings. But a new artificial intelligence system out today can do the grunt work for them, automatically finding and identifying the right clips in footage captured from the wild.
If the system can be used on videos of other primates and behaviors such as scratching or sleeping, “that could be pretty exciting,” says Sara Beery, a conservation technology researcher at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved with the study.
The Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science has been awarded a three-year, $300,000 grant from the Clare Boothe Luce Program for Women in STEM to increase the number of undergraduate women pursuing research in computer science.
The grant will fund three cohorts of eight undergraduate women, who will be named Clare Booth Luce Research Scholars. The funding will support the students’ research and participation in conferences.
The University of Nebraska–Lincoln is transforming its Department of Computer Science and Engineering into the School of Computing.
With faculty approval and university support, the School of Computing is now fully housed in the College of Engineering following an endorsement this summer from Nebraska’s Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education. The school is receiving a nearly $10 million investment from the Chancellor’s Office to support new faculty and academic programs. Before the creation of the School of Computing, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering was shared between the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering.
In the next aisle, smart packaging on a ready meal updates you in real time with the carbon footprint of your food’s journey. But once you take it home, the label changes to display a live warning: allergens were detected unexpectedly in the production factory, and your food may have to be recalled.
How much extra energy would be used to power such a system? Who makes sure the app is taking care of your personal medical information? And what if an accidental alert meant you were told to throw away your food when it was perfectly edible, or resulted in a small business being blacklisted by supermarkets?
These are just some of the questions that will require our attention if we manage to connect up the vast amounts of data flowing through the food system by storing and sharing it in systems called data trusts.
The University of Dayton Research Institute has been awarded a $88 million contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory for research and development to advance, evaluate and mature Air Force autonomous capabilities. The contract was awarded with initial funding of $1.8 million.
Through the five-year program, dubbed “Soaring Otter,” researchers will support the Air Force in its quest to increase its capabilities in autonomy by maturing autonomy technologies — including machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural networks, neuromorphic computing and data exploitation — from lab to field use.
Scientists scrambled to study a rare surge of the Muldrow Glacier in Denali National Park earlier this year that invited a barrage of questions.
Is the motion of a surging glacier smooth and continuous, or does it vary? Does the elevation of the glacier’s surface change? Would there be a gradual slowdown, or an abrupt end to the surge? Where does the floodwater come from?
In the quest for answers, glaciologists have begun to analyze data gathered this summer about the surge phenomenon, which the Muldrow Glacier –– known as Henteel No’ Loo’ in Athabascan –– experiences roughly once every 50 years.
Middle Tennessee State University, Sidelines student newspaper, Kailee Shores
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The Middle Tennessee State University Board of Trustees held a committee meeting on Tuesday to prepare for the December board meeting.
The Academic Affairs, Student Life and Athletics committee discussed and approved a new Master of Science in Data Science degree, expedited tenure for the Department of Communication Studies Chair and approved a change in University Policy 301 that will affect future university applicants.
University Provost Mark Byrnes presented the M.S. in Data Science program for a second approval, as the board had previously approved the development of the program.
In the new study, Humphreys, Baker and their colleagues model most of the protein interactions that occur in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This single-celled organism resembles human cells in how it carries out basic functions like growth, division, waste disposal and environmental sensing — all controlled by protein complexes.
The yeast has about 6,000 proteins. To predict which of these proteins might interact, the researchers turned to evolutionary biology. As proteins evolve, they often accumulate mutations in tandem — if a building block is changed in one protein, a corresponding building block is changed in a partner protein. Such tandem changes assure that the complex stays intact.
Online November 18, starting at 4 p.m. Eastern. “The White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) is launching a series of listening sessions and events to involve the American public in the development of a Bill of Rights for an Automated Society. With the growing influence of data-driven technologies, the series is part of a national endeavor to ensure that emerging socio-technical systems are safe and just.” [registration required]
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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.
TigerGraph has been a leader in graph data management with its real-time scalable graph database, and graph algorithms have been part of TigerGraph’s DNA since our start. We used to call our collection of algorithms the GSQL Graph Algorithm Library, GSQL being our analytics-friendly query language. Recently, as part of a major initiative to deliver out-of-the-box Graph Data Science and Graph Machine Learning, we decided to fine-tune the algorithm library. To signal this change, we’ve renamed it the Graph Data Science Library.
The BPCnet.org Statistics & Data Hub brings together different sources of publicly-available data to support PIs and Departments in creating their BPC Plans. The Tools section contains BPCnet.org-created web apps that summarize some of these public datasets. The Data section lists other useful public datasets, allowing PIs and Departments to access data more specific to their context.
