UK government advised to'urgently' build up contact tracing capacity The UK House of Commons science and technology committee has made recommendations to the government based on evidence from its on-going inquiry into the role of science in the country's pandemic response. These include a call for the government to "urgently" build up capacity for contact tracing. The committee also recommended that the government be more transparent about the scientific advice it receives, asking that the published list of Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) members be updated regularly. They also suggested the government set out a plan for tackling infections spread by people who do not have any covid-19 symptoms, and called for the systematic recording of the ethnicity of everyone who dies from the disease. The committee also urged the government to publish its rationale for concentrating coronavirus testing in a limited number of Public Health England laboratories, rather than making ...

When Doron Hazan '21 was drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) after high school, he had the opportunity to join the army's intelligence unit. It was the obvious choice for the self-described "math and physics nerd" from Kiryat Shmona, a small town in Israel's Hula Valley just south of the Lebanese border. But Hazan was not one to make obvious choices. "All of my life I've been interested in human behavior," says Hazan, a junior who is enrolled in one of MIT's newest majors: computation and cognition, or Course 6-9. Launched in the fall of 2019, Course 6-9 is a joint curriculum offered by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS).

Many of her neighbors have fallen on hard times since Covid-19 shut the city last month, but she's been lifted into the lap of luxury. Akol, who is 28, works for Samasource, a company that labels images and other data for companies such as Google, creating the feedstock for artificial intelligence projects like self-driving cars. She's the main breadwinner in the busy Nairobi apartment she shares with her 7-year-old son and her two brothers, ages 8 and 24. But Akol hasn't seen her family or apartment for around a month because, like most of Samasource's Nairobi staff, she now lives and works from a resort hotel. Her window at the four-star Ole Sereni overlooks the grassy plains of Nairobi National Park--a major change from the company's open-plan office next to a freeway.

In this paper, we propose a new Semi-Nonnegative Matrix Factorization method for 2-dimensional (2D) data, named TS-NMF. It overcomes the drawback of existing methods that seriously damage the spatial information of the data by converting 2D data to vectors in a preprocessing step. In particular, projection matrices are sought under the guidance of building new data representations, such that the spatial information is retained and projections are enhanced by the goal of clustering, which helps construct optimal projection directions. Moreover, to exploit nonlinear structures of the data, manifold is constructed in the projected subspace, which is adaptively updated according to the projections and less afflicted with noise and outliers of the data and thus more representative in the projected space. Hence, seeking projections, building new data representations, and learning manifold are seamlessly integrated in a single model, which mutually enhance other and lead to a powerful data representation. Comprehensive experimental results verify the effectiveness of TS-NMF in comparison with several state-of-the-art algorithms, which suggests high potential of the proposed method for real world applications.

A preliminary test in only eight volunteers suggests the first coronavirus vaccine to be tested in people seems to be safe and can stimulate an immune response against the virus. Antibodies generated by the volunteers were able to stop the virus from replicating in human cells in the laboratory and the levels of antibodies in their blood were similar to those previously detected in recovered covid-19 patients. Tal Zaks of Moderna, the US firm developing the vaccine, said that if the next stages go well, it could be widely available by the end of this year or early next year. The US stock market was up sharply today following the announcement. However, it remains to be seen if such speedy testing and manufacturing of a vaccine is really possible – no vaccine has ever been produced in less than five years. Meanwhile, a trial of another vaccine, developed by researchers at the University of Oxford found it wasn't able to stop six rhesus macaque monkeys from becoming infected with the ...

One expects a Green Beret medic to readily respond to calls for help, so it's not that surprising that Luke Sciulli packed his bags in early April and left Pittsburgh for New York City, an epicenter for the COVID-19 pandemic, to volunteer in a field hospital. Sciulli, a senior research analyst in the School of Computer Science's Auton Lab, explains his motivations more humbly: his house had burned down and he was living in a camping trailer. When he heard that former Special Forces medics and medical personnel were opening an ad hoc hospital in New York, he figured, why not? Whatever his motivation, Sciulli began work April 16 at the NewYork-Presbyterian Ryan F. Larkin Field Hospital, named for a Navy SEAL and medic who took his own life three years ago after suffering traumatic brain injury. Located in an indoor soccer stadium at Columbia University, the temporary hospital served as a step-down unit for COVID-19 patients, providing a place for the recovering patients to convalesce a few more days before heading home.

Two days after the World Health Organization declared coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, the South African data science competition platform Zindi set a challenge. Budding data scientists were asked to come up with a model to predict the spread of Covid-19 using open-source data. A fortnight later, more than 500 hopefuls had entered, vying for the $5,000 prize. Entries will be judged in June against the spread of the disease measured in global deaths. Celina Lee, who co-founded Zindi in Cape Town 18 months ago, describes the platform as a way of showcasing budding African data scientists and matching them with companies that have data but lack the expertise to exploit it.

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here -- just click The Station -- to receive it every Saturday in your inbox. If you're interested in all the future and present ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B, you're in the right place. It felt like Tesla dominated the news cycle once again this week. There was other mobility news though, including layoffs at self-driving company Cruise and new rules that Uber is rolling out Monday that will change the ride-hailing experience for the foreseeable future.

Dr. David Bray is the Inaugural Director of the new global GeoTech Center & Commission of the Atlantic Council, a nonprofit for international political, business, and intellectual leaders founded in 1961. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the Council offers programs related to international security and global economic prosperity. In previous leadership roles, Bray led the technology aspects of the Centers for Disease Control's bioterrorism preparedness program in response to 9/11, the outbreak response to the West Nile virus, SARS, monkey pox and other emergencies. He also spent time on the ground in Afghanistan in 2009 as a senior advisor to both military and humanitarian assistance efforts, serving as the non-partisan Executive Director for a bipartisan National Commission on R&D, and providing leadership as a non-partisan federal agency Senior Executive focused on digital modernization. He also is a Young Global Leader for 2017-2021 of the World Economic Forum. Bray is a member of multiple Boards of Directors and has worked with the U.S. Special Operations Command on counter-misinformation efforts. He was invited to give the 2019 UN Charter Keynote on the future of AI & IoT governance. His academic background includes a PhD from Emory University; he also has held affiliations with MIT, Harvard, and the University of Oxford. He recently took a few moments to speak to AI Trends Editor John P. Desmond about current events, including the geopolitics of the COVID-19 pandemic. AI Trends: Thank you David for talking to AI Trends today.

This is the proceedings of the Computer Vision for Agriculture (CV4A) Workshop that was held in conjunction with the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020. The Computer Vision for Agriculture (CV4A) 2020 workshop was scheduled to be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on April 26th, 2020. It was held virtually that same day due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The workshop was held in conjunction with the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020.