Let's talk infrastructure: What does it take to support Biomedicine?

Researchers have already demonstrated how Amazon's facial analysis software, for example, distinguishes gender among certain ethnicities less accurately than other services, while Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Elizabeth Warren has called on federal agencies to address questions around algorithmic bias, such as how the Federal Reserve deals with money lending discrimination. Against this backdrop, "in-the-wild" software-testing company Applause is looking to "reinvent" AI testing with a new service that better detects AI bias by crowdsourcing larger training data sets. By way of a brief recap, Massachusetts-based Applause, formerly known as uTest, offers companies like Google and Uber a different kind of app-testing platform, one that taps hundreds of thousands of "vetted" real-world users around the world to squish bugs and iron out usability issues -- it's all about harnessing the power of the crowd rather than running tests entirely in contrived laboratory settings. The company had raised north of $115 million before it was acquired by investment firm Vista Equity Partners in 2017. A key facet of the Applause platform is not only the sheer number of crowd testers in its community, but the demographic diversity -- spanning language, race, gender, location, culture, hobbies, and more.

For a factory where robots toil around the clock to build a rocket with almost no human labour, the sound of grunts echoing across the parking lot make for a jarring contrast. "That's Keanu Reeves' stunt gym," says Tim Ellis, the chief executive and cofounder of Relativity Space, a startup that wants to combine 3D printing and artificial intelligence to do for the rocket what Henry Ford did for the automobile. As we walk among the robots occupying Relativity's factory, he points out the just-completed upper stage of the company's rocket, which will soon be shipped to Mississippi for its first tests. Across the way, he says, gesturing to the outside world, is a recording studio run by Snoop Dogg. Neither of those A-listers have paid a visit to Relativity's rocket factory, but the presence of these unlikely neighbours seems to underscore the company's main talking point: It can make rockets anywhere.

Day after day, Walter Diaz, an immigrant truck driver from El Salvador, steers his 18-wheeler toward the giant ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Will it take him a half hour to pick up his cargo? Or will it be as long as seven hours? Diaz is paid by the load, so he applauds the arrival of more waterfront robots, which promise to speed turnaround times at a port complex that handles about a third of the nation's imported goods. "I'm for automation," Diaz says.

AT&T Labs will be hosting the NYC WiMLDS community for an Intro to PyTorch event with Dr. Michela Paganini from Facebook AI Research! We would also like to thank Facebook for sponsoring this event. Links to Google Colab notebooks will be provided at the event. She joined Facebook in 2018 after earning her PhD in particle physics from Yale University under the supervision of Paul Tipton. Her work focuses on the empirical characterization of neural network dynamics using tools from theoretical and experimental physics.

As artificial intelligence evolves and becomes more intelligent, it's important for organizations to question its power. Certainly, AI is being designed to help organizations make jobs more efficient, streamline business processes, and acquire and retain more customers. Companies that haven't yet incorporated AI are tempted by its operational promises. They're also tempted by a sense that AI is a tool that will be vital to ensuring competitive advantage, relevance in a rapidly changing world, and not being inadvertently left behind. But even though AI should be designed to improve human function, it can also hinder it.

Mitch Aide, a tropical ecologist based in Puerto Rico, thinks we should listen to the earth a lot more than we do now -- and not just listen to it, but record and store its sounds on a massive scale. His aims are not spiritual, but scientific: He, his colleagues, and other experts are developing and deploying audio recorders, data transmission systems, and new artificial intelligence software that together are rapidly expanding scientists' ability to understand ecosystems by listening to them. Today, Aide can nail a cheap digital audio recorder to a tree in Puerto Rico's Luquillo Forest and transmit its recordings to a computer running prototype software, which indicates almost in real time whether any of 25 species of frogs and birds are vocalizing in the forest. The system's apparent simplicity belies its power – Aide thinks that it and similar systems will allow scientists to monitor ecosystems in ways we can't yet imagine. He dreams that one day soon, audio recordings of natural soundscapes will be like rainfall and temperature data, collected from a worldwide network of permanent stations, widely available for analysis, and permanently archived.

TLDR: Many people worry about another AI Winter. We don't lack ML pilots, but enterprises are only deploying about 10% of them. We must lower the cost of deployment with five tactical solutions. I hope this post can help ML Executives, Managers, and Practitioners to think deeper and act faster. We are the last line of defense against another AI Winter. Lastly, you can find a real-time survey to see how others think about this problem.

The unique nature of the Science article is its reference to race. Doing scientific work to test healthcare algorithms is difficult. Many are concealed behind a wall of intellectual property protection. They may be trade secrets, and unlike patents, unavailable to the public. Discussing the methodologies used to do this is beyond the scope of this article.

Tesla will show the world its first electric pickup truck later this month, Elon Musk tweeted on Wednesday. The CEO called the vehicle a "Cybertruck," adding that it will be unveiled in Los Angeles on November 21, near the company's SpaceX rocket factory. The timing coincides with the L.A. auto show which takes place during the last week of November. Still, Tesla tends to host its own carefully choreographed car events rather than taking center stage at trade shows. Musk has said in the past that the brand's pickup will be priced below $50,000 and be more powerful than Ford's wildly popular F-150.