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Mar 24, 2019
The Complex Fortune Growing Inside World’s Most Valuable Startup
Posted by Derick Lee in categories: business, robotics/AI
Software engineer Zhang Yiming started out producing apps for sharing jokes before focusing on news aggregation. That pivot proved lucrative.
The 35-year-old founder of Bytedance Ltd. is worth about $13 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him China’s 9th-richest person and one of the fastest in modern times to amass a mega-fortune. The business, founded in 2012, has more than 1 billion active monthly users across eight mobile apps, including a news aggregator powered by artificial intelligence and a video-sharing platform.
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Mar 24, 2019
Short film created in Unreal Engine showcases a photorealistic world
Posted by Quinn Sena in category: entertainment
Mar 23, 2019
SPECIAL REPORT: Defense Community Slow to Grasp Potential of Quantum-Based Devices
Posted by Klaus Baldauf in categories: materials, quantum physics
CHICAGO — Four stories underground — encased in several feet of concrete — is the University of Chicago’s new nanofabrication facility, where researchers apply the principles of quantum physics to real-world problems and technologies.
A small cadre of faculty and graduate students in a clean room bathed in yellow light wear protective clothing to ensure the integrity of the experiments they are conducting, which involves the very matter that comprise the universe: electrons, photons, neutrons and protons.
The William Eckhardt Research Center where they are working is located across the street from where a team led by Enrico Fermi, the architect of the nuclear age, carried out the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction.
Mar 23, 2019
MIT has just announced a $1 billion plan to create a new college for AI
Posted by Paul Battista in categories: education, finance, robotics/AI, space
One of the birthplaces of artificial intelligence, MIT, has announced a bold plan to reshape its academic program around the technology. With $1 billion in funding, MIT will create a new college that combines AI, machine learning, and data science with other academic disciplines. It is the largest financial investment in AI by any US academic institution to date.
New school: The new college of computing is being built with $350 million in funding from Stephen A. Schwarzman, the CEO and cofounder of Blackstone, a private equity firm. Schwarzman has already donated billions to other institutions for studying issues related to AI. MIT’s new Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing will create 50 new faculty positions and numerous fellowships for graduate students. The school will open next September and will be housed in existing buildings at MIT before moving to its own space, expected in 2022.
Data everywhere: Data and computing are already having a major impact on disciplines like the humanities, and machine learning and AI may have an even bigger one. Rafael Reif, the president of MIT, said in an announcement that the new approach was necessary because of the way computing, data, and AI are “reshaping the world,” and he added that students and researchers will be taught to use AI in their disciplines from first principles, instead of dividing their time between computer science and other departments. “Computing is no longer the domain of the experts alone,” Reif said. “It’s everywhere, and it needs to be understood and mastered by almost everyone.”
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Mar 23, 2019
Revolutions: The incredible potential of induced pluripotent stem cells
Posted by Paul Battista in category: biotech/medical
Revolutions is a series that brings together a hand-picked selection of recent articles canvassing cutting-edge insights into major scientific advances. This installment brings you up to date with the ground-breaking new discoveries made around the regenerative possibilities of induced pluripotent stem cells, which can theoretically be coaxed into any kind of cell in the human body.
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Mar 23, 2019
LHCb discovers matter-antimatter asymmetry in charm quarks
Posted by Quinn Sena in category: particle physics
A new observation by the LHCb experiment finds that charm quarks behave differently than their antiparticle counterparts.
The Beacon-News
The Proton Improvement Plan II, known as PIP-II, is a brand new leading-edge superconducting linear accelerator.
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Mar 23, 2019
NASA’s Working on a Drone to Hunt For Life in Martian Caves
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: drones, space
Mar 23, 2019
Why a Humanist Ethics of Datafication Can’t Survive a Posthuman World
Posted by Steve Nichols in categories: ethics, information science, surveillance
https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/
Geoffrey Rockwell and Bettina Berendt’s (2017) article calls for ethical consideration around big data and digital archive, asking us to re-consider whether. In outlining how digital archives and algorithms structure potential relationships with whose testimony has been digitized, Rockwell and Berendt highlight how data practices change the relationship between research and researched. They make a provocative and important argument: datafication and open access should, in certain cases, be resisted. They champion the careful curation of data rather than large-scale collection of, pointing to the ways in which these data are used to construct knowledge about and fundamentally limit the agency of the research subject by controlling the narratives told about them. Rockwell and Berendt, drawing on Aboriginal Knowledge (AK) frameworks, amongst others, argue that some knowledge is just not meant to be openly shared: information is not an inherent good, and access to information must be earned instead. This approach was prompted, in part, by their own work scraping #gamergate Twitter feeds and the ways in which these data could be used to speak for others, in, without their consent.
From our vantage point, Rockwell and Berendt’s renewed call for an ethics of datafication is a timely one, as we are mired in media reports related to social media surveillance, electoral tampering, and on one side. Thanks, Facebook. On the other side, academics fight for the right to collect and access big data in order to reveal how gender and racial discrimination are embedded in the algorithms that structure everything from online real estate listings, to loan interest rates, to job postings (American Civil Liberties Union 2018). As surveillance studies scholars, we deeply appreciate how Rockwell and Berendt take a novel approach: they turn to a discussion of Freedom of Information (FOI), Freedom of Expression (FOE), Free and Open Source software, and Access to Information. In doing so, they unpack the assumptions commonly held by librarians, digital humanists and academics in general, to show that accumulation and datafication is not an inherent good.
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