Personal
MIT Schwarzman College of Computing awards named professorships to two faculty members
The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing has awarded two inaugural chaired appointments to Dina Katabi and Aleksander Madry in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). "These distinguished endowed professorships recognize the extraordinary achievements of our faculty and future potential of their academic careers," says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "I'm delighted to make these appointments and acknowledge Dina and Aleksander for their contributions to MIT, the college, and EECS, and their efforts to advance research and teaching in computer science, electrical engineering, artificial intelligence, and machine learning." Dina Katabi is the inaugural Thuan (1990) and Nicole Pham Professor. Katabi is being honored as an exceptional faculty member and for her commitment to mentoring students.
Google CEO Says Artificial Intelligence Will Be Mankind's Greatest Discovery
In an interview with the BBC, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, spoke about artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and the company's monopoly, among other things. For the leader of the technology giant, in the next 25 years artificial intelligence and quantum computing will completely revolutionize our lives. Pichai compared AI to other discoveries like fire and electricity, saying the change it will bring will be just as profound. Artificial intelligence is the technology that replicates human cognitive processes in machines. Several companies such as Google and Amazon already use it to carry out certain processes because it is more efficient and makes fewer mistakes. Quantum computing works through qubits, rather than bits.
The new Anthony Bourdain documentary 'Roadrunner' leans partly on deepfaked audio
On July 16th, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain will open in US theatres. Like many documentaries, the film pieces together archival footage, including interviews and show outtakes, to attempt to tell the story of its subject in their own words. It also includes words Bourdain never spoke to a camera before his death by suicide in 2018, and yet you'll hear his voice saying them. In an interview with The New Yorker, the film's director, Morgan Neville, said there were three quotes he wanted Bourdain to narrate where there were no recordings, and so he recreated them with software instead. "I created an AI model of his voice," he told the magazine.
How to Unlearn a Disease - Issue 103: Healthy Communication
My father, a neurologist, once had a patient who was tormented, in the most visceral sense, by a poem. Philip was 12 years old and a student at a prestigious boarding school in Princeton, New Jersey. One of his assignments was to recite Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. By the day of the presentation, he had rehearsed the poem dozens of times and could recall it with ease. But this time, as he stood before his classmates, something strange happened.
The Top 100 Software Companies of 2021
The Software Report is pleased to announce The Top 100 Software Companies of 2021. This year's awardee list is comprised of a wide range of companies from the most well-known such as Microsoft, Adobe, and Salesforce to the relatively newer but rapidly growing - Qualtrics, Atlassian, and Asana. A good number of awardees may be new names to some but that should be no surprise given software has always been an industry of startups that seemingly came out of nowhere to create and dominate a new space. Software has become the backbone of our economy. From large enterprises to small businesses, most all rely on software whether for accounting, marketing, sales, supply chain, or a myriad of other functions. Software has become the dominant industry of our time and as such, we place a significance on highlighting the best companies leading the industry forward. The following awardees were nominated and selected based on a thorough evaluation process. Among the key criteria considered were ...
'Hannity' on Biden's speech, voting measures
California gubernatorial candidate lays out his agenda on'Hannity' and Leo Terrell endorses him This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," July 13, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. I do get a kick out of it. Tonight, a massive record-setting inflation, spiking violent crime, unprecedented waves of illegal immigration, China, Russia, Iran rolling over this great country, and sadly, whoever is in charge at the Biden White House -- well, is just getting started. Now, state-mandated vaccine programs, that may also be headed your way. We'll tell you the details. Government doctor, wannabe celebrity, Anthony Fauci demanding that all your young children wear masks indefinitely. We have that news tonight. Larry Elder is now officially running to unseat Newsom as governor of the great state of California. He will join us for his very first TV interview since his big announcement, and it comes with an endorsement. But, first, an important update from the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees' bizarre proposal to redesign the American flag. We're going to explain that in detail. We've had a back-and-forth with this organization all day. If you are one of millions of Americans who disagree with the radical policies put forth by the Democratic Party, watch out because Joe Biden -- well, he referred his political opponents today -- referred to them as domestic enemies. Where's the media that got so upset when Donald Trump said the media is an enemy of the people because they lie and tell fake news? Anyway, he's saying they're working to subvert American democracy. In a set of prepared remarks, this wasn't off the cuff, better suited for a despotic socialist dictator frankly, Joe Biden said that our country is facing its most significant test since the civil war echoing Jen Psaki because all state legislatures, why, they're requiring voter ID like his state?
Training Compact CNNs for Image Classification using Dynamic-coded Filter Fusion
Lin, Mingbao, Ji, Rongrong, Chen, Bohong, Chao, Fei, Liu, Jianzhuang, Zeng, Wei, Tian, Yonghong, Tian, Qi
The mainstream approach for filter pruning is usually either to force a hard-coded importance estimation upon a computation-heavy pretrained model to select "important" filters, or to impose a hyperparameter-sensitive sparse constraint on the loss objective to regularize the network training. In this paper, we present a novel filter pruning method, dubbed dynamic-coded filter fusion (DCFF), to derive compact CNNs in a computation-economical and regularization-free manner for efficient image classification. Each filter in our DCFF is firstly given an inter-similarity distribution with a temperature parameter as a filter proxy, on top of which, a fresh Kullback-Leibler divergence based dynamic-coded criterion is proposed to evaluate the filter importance. In contrast to simply keeping high-score filters in other methods, we propose the concept of filter fusion, i.e., the weighted averages using the assigned proxies, as our preserved filters. We obtain a one-hot inter-similarity distribution as the temperature parameter approaches infinity. Thus, the relative importance of each filter can vary along with the training of the compact CNN, leading to dynamically changeable fused filters without both the dependency on the pretrained model and the introduction of sparse constraints. Extensive experiments on classification benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our DCFF over the compared counterparts. For example, our DCFF derives a compact VGGNet-16 with only 72.77M FLOPs and 1.06M parameters while reaching top-1 accuracy of 93.47% on CIFAR-10. A compact ResNet-50 is obtained with 63.8% FLOPs and 58.6% parameter reductions, retaining 75.60% top-1 accuracy on ILSVRC-2012. Our code, narrower models and training logs are available at https://github.com/lmbxmu/DCFF.
Addressing vertigo with AI
Vertigo is a common but under-treated medical condition that affects up to 40% of people at some point in their lives. Currently, the diagnosis and treatment of vertigo-causing conditions is done primarily by specialists who represent only 1% of the doctors in Australia, but AI could change this. Dr Allison Young has recently received a junior fellowship from The Garnett Passe and Rodney Williams Memorial Foundation to address this. Her project, in collaboration with clinicians, data scientists and statisticians, will use machine learning and AI techniques to develop a "virtual expert" diagnostic tool to assist the diagnosis of vertigo-causing conditions in the hospital emergency room, general practice, and in outpatient clinics.
Cybersecurity can protect data. How about elevators?
Advanced cybersecurity capabilities are essential to safeguard software, systems, and data in a new era of cloud, the internet of things, and other smart technologies. In the real estate industry, for example, companies are concerned about the potential for hijacked elevators, as well as compromised building management and heating and cooling systems. According to Greg Belanger, vice president of security technologies at CBRE, the world's largest commercial real estate services and investment company, securing the enterprise has grown more complex--security teams must be familiar with controls and hardware on new devices, as well as what version of firmware is installed and what vulnerabilities are present. For example, if a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system is connected to the internet, he questions, "Is the firmware that's running the HVAC system vulnerable to attack? Could you find a way to traverse that network and come in and attack employees of that company?" Understanding enterprise vulnerabilities are crucial to safeguard physical assets but investing in the right tools can also be a challenge, says Belanger. "Artificial intelligence and machine learning need large sets of data to be effective in delivering the insights," he explains. In the era of cloud-first and industrial internet of things, the perimeter is becoming far more fluid. By applying AI and machine learning to data sets, he says, "You start to see patterns of risk and risky behavior start to emerge." Another priority when securing physical assets is to translate insights into metrics that C-suite leaders can understand, to help boost decision-making. CEOs and members of boards of directors, who are becoming more security savvy, can benefit from aggregated scores for attack surface management. "Everybody wants to know, especially after an attack like Colonial Pipeline, could that happen to us? How secure are we?" says Belanger.