Looking up an unknown sign in an ASL dictionary can be difficult. Most ASL dictionaries are organized based on English glosses, despite the fact that (1) there is no convention for assigning English-based glosses to ASL signs; and (2) there is no 1-1 correspondence between ASL signs and English words. Furthermore, what if the user does not know either the meaning of the target sign or its possible English translation(s)? Some ASL dictionaries enable searching through specification of articulatory properties, such as handshapes, locations, movement properties, etc. However, this is a cumbersome process and does not always result in successful lookup. Here we describe a new system, publicly shared on the Web, to enable lookup of a video of an ASL sign (e.g., a webcam recording or a clip from a continuous signing video). The user submits a video for analysis and is presented with the five most likely sign matches, in decreasing order of likelihood, so that the user can confirm the selection and then be taken to our ASLLRP Sign Bank entry for that sign. Furthermore, this video lookup is also integrated into our newest version of SignStream(R) software to facilitate linguistic annotation of ASL video data, enabling the user to directly look up a sign in the video being annotated, and, upon confirmation of the match, to directly enter into the annotation the gloss and features of that sign, greatly increasing the efficiency and consistency of linguistic annotations of ASL video data.

SAN FRANCISCO – Until recently, Brett Schickler never imagined he could be a published author, though he had dreamed about it. But after learning about the ChatGPT artificial intelligence program, Schickler figured an opportunity had landed in his lap. "The idea of writing a book finally seemed possible," said Schickler, a salesman in Rochester, New York. "I thought'I can do this.'" Using the AI software, which can generate blocks of text from simple prompts, Schickler created a 30-page illustrated children's e-book in a matter of hours, offering it for sale in January through Amazon.com

ChatGPT is listed as the author or co-author of at least 200 books on Amazon's Kindle Store, according to Reuters. However, the actual number of bot-written books is likely much higher than that since Amazon's policies don't explicitly require authors to disclose their use of AI. "I could see people making a whole career out of this," said Brett Schickler, a Rochester, NY salesman who published a children's book on the Kindle Store. "The idea of writing a book finally seemed possible." Schickler's self-published story, The Wise Little Squirrel: A Tale of Saving and Investing, is a 30-page children's story -- written and illustrated by AI -- selling for $2.99 for a digital copy and $9.99 for a printed version. Although Schickler says the book has earned him less than $100 since its January release, he only spent a few hours creating it with ChatGPT prompts like "write a story about a dad teaching his son about financial literacy."

Jim Rock has stepped down as CEO of Seegrid after nearly a decade. Seegrid is a Pittsburgh-based developer of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for logistics operations. Joe Pajer has been named the new CEO of Seegrid, effective immediately. Pajer, who obtained both his master's in management and bachelor's in civil engineering, engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University, most recently served as the president and CEO of Calero Software, a Rochester, New York-based provider of communications and cloud lifecycle management solutions that merged with a competitor – MDSL – in 2019. He served as president and CEO of two other companies: Thinklogical, a Connecticut-based IT firm, and Vocollect, a Pittsburgh-based software maker that now operates as a division of Honeywell Safety & Productivity Solutions.

L3Harris will research, develop and demonstrate the interface using data science techniques under a new multimillion-dollar contract to support DOD applications. L3Harris will perform the work in Rochester, N.Y., Melbourne, Fla., and Herndon, Va.

The thresholded feature has recently emerged as an extremely efficient, yet rough empirical approximation, of the time-consuming sparse coding inference process. Such an approximation has not yet been rigorously examined, and standard dictionaries often lead to non-optimal performance when used for computing thresholded features. In this paper, we first present two theoretical recovery guarantees for the thresholded feature to exactly recover the nonzero support of the sparse code. Motivated by them, we then formulate the Dictionary Learning for Thresholded Features (DLTF) model, which learns an optimized dictionary for applying the thresholded feature. In particular, for the $(k, 2)$ norm involved, a novel proximal operator with log-linear time complexity $O(m\log m)$ is derived. We evaluate the performance of DLTF on a vast range of synthetic and real-data tasks, where DLTF demonstrates remarkable efficiency, effectiveness and robustness in all experiments. In addition, we briefly discuss the potential link between DLTF and deep learning building blocks.

Nicole (Niki) Black is an attorney in Rochester, New York and the legal technology evangelist at MyCase.com, a law.

How good are you at picking out fibbers from a crowd? According to a new paper from researchers at the University of Rochester, New York, there are particular (involuntary) quirks and facial movements that give us away – whether we like it or not. The team used a combination of big data, machine learning technology, and automated facial feature analysis software to identify differences in facial and verbal cues between people who are lying and people who are telling the truth. Volunteers were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and split into pairs. In total, there were 151 couples and 1.3 million frames of expressions for the team to analyze.

Four games were inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in Rochester, N.Y., on Thursday, May 4, 2017. This undated photo provided by the Strong Museum in Rochester, N.Y., shows the 2018 inductees to the World Video Game Hall of Fame. They are from left, "Final Fantasy VII," "Spacewar!," The World Video Game Hall of Fame revealed the inductees Thursday. The inductees, dubbed the Class of 2018, were chosen from the 12 finalists revealed in March at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y., where the hall of fame is housed.

Jim Rulison serves as the CEO for Media Loop LLC (formerly the National Center for Pain Inc). Jim oversees the day to day operations for all lead generation accounts, with concentration in the health care industry. Before joining Media Loop, Jim was the CEO of PME Home Health and was the founder of one of the nation's first virtual call centers. He lives in Rochester New York area where he and his late wife raised their two children. Jim spends his free time with his family and enjoying cooking and his two dogs.