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Science and innovation relies on successful collaboration

#artificialintelligence

It may sound obvious, perhaps even clichรฉd, but this mantra is something that must be remembered in ongoing political negotiations over Horizon Europe, which could see Switzerland and the UK excluded from EU research projects. We need more, not fewer, researchers collaborating to solve today's and tomorrow's challenges. By closely working with Swiss and British researchers, who have long played key roles, Horizon Europe projects will benefit โ€“ as they have in the past. This is the motivation behind ETH Zurich, which collaborates with IBM Research on nanotechnology, leading the Stick to Science campaign. This calls on all three parties โ€“ Switzerland, the UK and the EU โ€“ to try and solve the current stalemate and put Swiss and British association agreements in place.


New voices in AI: Isabel Cachola

AIHub

Welcome to the second episode of New voices in AI! This episode features Isabel Cachola talking about how she got into AI and her work on interpretability of NLP models. The music used is'Wholesome' by Kevin MacLeod, Licensed under Creative Commons Daly: Hello and welcome to the second episode of New Voices in AI, the new series from AI hub where we celebrate the voices of PhD students, early career researchers, and those with a new perspective on AI. I am Joe Daly, engagement manager for AI hub and in this episode I will be talking to Isabel Cachola. Without further ado, lets begin!


I'm Worried My Sexual Desires Mean Something Is Very Wrong With My Brain

Slate

How to Do It is Slate's sex advice column. Send it to Stoya and Rich here. My first crush ever was on my uncle. I've noticed an attraction to two of my cousins. I've never, ever considered acting on these desires or told anyone, but I'm wondering if this is normal. Is my brain missing the evolutionary programming that makes you not want to fuck your family?


StoryBuddy: A Human-AI Collaborative Chatbot for Parent-Child Interactive Storytelling with Flexible Parental Involvement

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite its benefits for children's skill development and parent-child bonding, many parents do not often engage in interactive storytelling by having story-related dialogues with their child due to limited availability or challenges in coming up with appropriate questions. While recent advances made AI generation of questions from stories possible, the fully-automated approach excludes parent involvement, disregards educational goals, and underoptimizes for child engagement. Informed by need-finding interviews and participatory design (PD) results, we developed StoryBuddy, an AI-enabled system for parents to create interactive storytelling experiences. StoryBuddy's design highlighted the need for accommodating dynamic user needs between the desire for parent involvement and parent-child bonding and the goal of minimizing parent intervention when busy. The PD revealed varied assessment and educational goals of parents, which StoryBuddy addressed by supporting configuring question types and tracking child progress. A user study validated StoryBuddy's usability and suggested design insights for future parent-AI collaboration systems.


The Sex My New Boyfriend Just Admitted He Had in His 20s Feels Like a Huge Red Flag

Slate

How to Do It is Slate's sex advice column. Send it to Stoya and Rich here. I have been dating my boyfriend for about 10 months now. I'm struggling with information he shared with me very early on. At the beginning of our relationship, he told me that he has seen escorts before.


Where is the Public Square for the Digital Information Age? with Stelios Vassilakis

#artificialintelligence

ANJA KASPERSEN: Today I am joined by Joel Rosenthal and Stelios Vassilakis for an irreverently engaging conversation about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on democracy, what we can learn from the Athenian agora in preserving what it means to be human in the biodigital realm, and how ethics empower civil engagement. Stelios Vassilakis is co-directing programs and strategic initiatives at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which is one of the leading international philanthropic organizations. Stelios is also a classics and modern Greek studies scholar, specializing in the works of Homer. Joel Rosenthal is president of Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and a distinguished public intellectual of international relations and foreign policy. Before handing the floor over to Joel to guide us through this conversation, I am very curious about these concepts that are guiding the work of both of your institutions. For the Stavros Niarchos Foundation it is empowering humanity, and for Carnegie Council it is about empowering ethics, and obviously there is a strong link between the two. I think in today's world we live in a very distrustful world, a crowded and overheated public space--if we can even identify that space, which we have talked about is a difficult space to even find--and so what we are trying to do at the beginning to empower ethics is first of all just to identify the issues, and to identify these issues, put a name on them, label them, and show them to be issues of competing values and competing interests that would benefit from reflection, dialogue, and discussion, even that question of identification and clarification of these issues and to bring them to the fore in a way that will not necessarily lead to polarization but can lead to constructive dialogue. The second step is to provide thought leadership around these questions--there are people who have dedicated their lives to thinking about some of these issues and to studying these issues; they have great competence and some authority in speaking about these issues--and to identify those people and bring that thought leadership to bear on these questions. Critically, though, it is not just about thinking. It is also about experience. There are people who are actually working on these issues, they are working these problems. It is part of their personal and professional life, and I think that the experience that they have themselves is almost as valuable if not more valuable than those who spend their lives thinking about these issues and creating scholarship around them. So when we talk about thought leadership we're talking about both scholarship and lived experience, Carnegie Council being a place where we can bring that expertise, if you will, to bear on these questions. The third part that is also critical today is to create a community of engagement around these issues.


PhD position "Data-based Probabilistic Parameter Estimation for Ocean and Earth System Models" (m/f/d)

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The Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) is a member of the Helmholtz Association (HGF) and funded by federal and state government. AWI focuses on polar and marine research in a variety of disciplines such as biology, oceanography, geology, geochemistry and geophysics thus allowing multidisciplinary approaches to scientific goals. Background Climate models are essential for understanding complex physical and biogeochemical interactions across the planet. However, these models rely on many parameters that are necessary to accurately describe the effects of small-scale structures and processes that cannot be directly simulated. The project's goal is to develop data-driven methods of accurate, efficient parameter estimation in climate models.


Tucker: Give Americans a voice in the policies that affect their lives

FOX News

This is a rush transcript of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on February 9, 2022. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. It would be pretty fascinating to see the Democratic Party's latest internal polling on COVID restrictions. We haven't seen it, but it must have been pretty awful, apocalyptic, because something spooked them bad. Over the course of less than a week, the same people who have systematically turned America into a quarantine camp suddenly out of nowhere started calling in unison for medical freedom. Suddenly, they sound like Bobby Kennedy, Jr., pretty much all of them, even the whiny hypochondriacs at "The Atlantic" Magazine, those neurotic cat owners who've turned COVID hysteria into a religion are now calling for a total abandonment of all corona restrictions. Open everything, "The time to end pandemic restrictions is now." Believe it or not, that was the headline on "The Atlantic's" website today. So if even "The Atlantic" has given up on corona restrictions, obviously the pandemic is over. You should know this virus was killed not by science, but by the midterm elections. It turns out the only real cure for COVID-19 is the political ambition of the Democratic Party. Yes, every upside has a downside. It means that pasty NPR listeners are going to emerge from their apartment for the first time in two years, they will be loose on the streets. You're going to see them at Whole Foods again, shuffling along with their tote bags, looking bewildered and annoyed. That's bad, but it's still worth it, anything to make the insanity go away, we're celebrating. But we're also looking forward, and the question is, how do we guarantee that nothing like this ever happens again? How do we prevent future mass hysteria events in the United States?


Farewell Douglas Trumbull, visual effects pioneer

Engadget

If you've watched a classic, landmark sci-fi movie and you were blown away by the quality and realism of its effects, then there's a good chance Douglas Trumbull's name is in the credits. The VFX pioneer, who passed away on February 8th, 2022, has worked on key films in the sci-fi canon. Even a short version of his resume would have to include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner and Silent Running. To have worked on one of those in your lifetime would have been a big deal, but to have contributed to all of them speaks to just how much work Trumbull did to push the artform forward. Trumbull was the son of an artist and engineer, Donald Trumbull, who worked on VFX for The Wizard of Oz.


Andrew Ng: Unbiggen AI

#artificialintelligence

Andrew Ng has serious street cred in artificial intelligence. He pioneered the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) to train deep learning models in the late 2000s with his students at Stanford University, cofounded Google Brain in 2011, and then served for three years as chief scientist for Baidu, where he helped build the Chinese tech giant's AI group. So when he says he has identified the next big shift in artificial intelligence, people listen. And that's what he told IEEE Spectrum in an exclusive Q&A. Ng's current efforts are focused on his company Landing AI, which built a platform called LandingLens to help manufacturers improve visual inspection with computer vision. He has also become something of an evangelist for what he calls the data-centric AI movement, which he says can yield "small data" solutions to big issues in AI, including model efficiency, accuracy, and bias.