Education
Firm's school attack video game 'Active Shooter' slammed by next of kin of real-life victims
WASHINGTON – An upcoming video game that lets players simulate a school shooting is coming in for criticism from parents of shooting victims and from politicians. The game, "Active Shooter," is to be released by Valve Corp. of Bellevue, Washington, on June 6 for between $5 and $10. A trailer on the website of Valve's digital distributor Steam opens with the player's character as a SWAT team member entering a school to tackle a shooter, before switching over to the perspective of the attacker, with the action set to a pounding heavy metal score. It ends with a trail of students' bodies littering an auditorium room as a stats box keeps count of the numbers of police and civilians killed. In addition to allowing players to pick sides, the game boasts a multiplayer mode and the ability to play as an unarmed student trying to survive.
Neural Models for Key Phrase Detection and Question Generation
Subramanian, Sandeep, Wang, Tong, Yuan, Xingdi, Zhang, Saizheng, Bengio, Yoshua, Trischler, Adam
We propose a two-stage neural model to tackle question generation from documents. First, our model estimates the probability that word sequences in a document are ones that a human would pick when selecting candidate answers by training a neural key-phrase extractor on the answers in a question-answering corpus. Predicted key phrases then act as target answers and condition a sequence-to-sequence question-generation model with a copy mechanism. Empirically, our key-phrase extraction model significantly outperforms an entity-tagging baseline and existing rule-based approaches. We further demonstrate that our question generation system formulates fluent, answerable questions from key phrases. This two-stage system could be used to augment or generate reading comprehension datasets, which may be leveraged to improve machine reading systems or in educational settings.
Foresee: Attentive Future Projections of Chaotic Road Environments with Online Training
Abstract--In this paper, we train a recurrent neural network to learn dynamics of a chaotic road environment and to project the future of the environment on an image. Future projection can be used to anticipate an unseen environment for example, in autonomous driving. Road environment is highly dynamic and complex due to the interaction among traffic participants such as vehicles and pedestrians. Even in this complex environment, a human driver is efficacious to safely drive on chaotic roads irrespective of the number of traffic participants. The proliferation of deep learning research has shown the efficacy of neural networks in learning this human behavior . In the same direction, we investigate recurrent neural networks to understand the chaotic road environment which is shared by pedestrians, vehicles (cars, trucks, bicycles etc.), and sometimes animals as well. We propose Foresee, a unidirectional gated recurrent units (GRUs) network with attention to project future of the environment in the form of images. We have collected several videos on Delhi roads consisting of various traffic participants, background and infrastructure differences (like 3D pedestrian crossing) at various times on various days. We train Foresee in an unsupervised way and we use online training to project frames up to 0 . We show that our proposed model performs better than state of the art methods (prednet [20], Enc. Dec. LSTM [28]) and finally, we show that our trained model generalizes to a public dataset for future projections. Environment anticipation is an important task for situation awareness and decision making.
From Machine Learning to Machine Unlearning
After all, the term Machine Learning was coined based on the way the human (or animal) brain learns, meaning that somehow, machines could also benefit from a similar kind of learning. But human beings, successful ones for sure, know how to un-learn. In my case, while I was always fascinated by mathematics since my very early years, the school system's training (as in training an algorithm in ML) failed on me. It failed not because I did not succeed at school (I ended up at Cambridge University) but because I was fed (the way an ML learning algorithm is fed with a training set) with the most boring, least valuable kind of mathematics when attending high school. Later on, during my academic years, I can say the same about the way I was trained to write academic articles: emphasis was on delivering esoteric content that few could read or leverage.
Parkland Parents Angry at Video Game That Allows Players to Act Out a School Shooting
Parents of school shooting victims, and other survivors of mass shootings, are decrying an upcoming video game that is set to allow players to commit a school shooting--as well as stop one. Active Shooter, which is scheduled for a June 6 release, is a "dynamic SWAT simulator," where players can choose whether to be an armed officer who is responding to a shooting, the shooter, or a victim trying to escape. The game will be sold for $5 to $10 in the online marketplace Steam, which is run by the Valve Corporation. The game comes with a disclaimer: "Please do not take any of this seriously. This is only meant to be the simulation and nothing else. If you feel like hurting someone or people around you, please seek help from local psychiatrists or dial 911 (or applicable). "It's disgusting that Valve Corp. is trying to profit from the glamorization of tragedies affecting our schools across the country," Ryan Petty, whose daughter Alaina died in the February shooting in Parkland, Florida, said in a statement. "Keeping our kids safe is a real issue affecting our communities and is in no way a'game.'" The father of another Parkland victim, 14-year-old Jaime Guttenberg, called for a boycott on Twitter. "I have seen and heard many horrific things over the past few months since my daughter was the victim of a school shooting and is now dead in real life," Fred Gutenberg wrote. "This game may be one of the worst." Andrew Pollack, the father of 18-year-old Meadow Pollack, who was also killed in Parkland said the game would desensitize young people to potential school shootings. "The last thing we need is a simulated training on school shootings," he said. "Video game designers should think of the influence they hold.
R for Data Science Solutions Udemy
R is a data analysis software as well as a programming language. Data scientists, statisticians and analysts use R for statistical analysis, data visualization and predictive modeling. R is open source and allows integration with other applications and systems. Compared to other data analysis platforms, R has an extensive set of data products. Problems faced with data are cleared with R's excellent data visualization feature.
Using Databases with Python Coursera
This course will introduce students to the basics of the Structured Query Language (SQL) as well as basic database design for storing data as part of a multi-step data gathering, analysis, and processing effort. The course will use SQLite3 as its database. We will also build web crawlers and multi-step data gathering and visualization processes. We will use the D3.js library to do basic data visualization. This course will cover Chapters 14-15 of the book "Python for Everybody".
The Robots Are Coming to Your LMS --- And You're Going to Love It
We love new usability until it becomes routine, then we hate it again. The problem isn't that the software is clunky and too hard to use -- we just don't want to use it. No matter how much we gamify the experience and add cute little icons and progress bars, we still must point and click our way to learning activities, training plans, and history. We must manipulate a mouse and keyboard and search through web pages, menus, and unending lists when we would rather be doing creative work or interacting with colleagues or customers.
'Active Shooter' game lets players act out a school shooting. Parkland parents are angry
A computer video game called'Active Shooter' would allow players to choose between a member of a SWAT team disarming an active shooter, or to become the shooter themselves. Lawmakers and parents of school shooting victims are expressing anger at an upcoming video game allowing players to either stop or commit a school shooting. The game, called Active Shooter, is scheduled to launch on June 6, according to its web page on the video game marketplace Steam. It's described as a "dynamic SWAT simulator" where players can choose to work as the member of a SWAT team attempting to disarm the shooter, or the shooter themselves. A box to the left of the screen keeps track of how many police officers and civilians were killed.
Active Shooter video game condemned by parents of Parkland victims
A video game that simulates a school shooting incident has been labelled "disgusting" and "despicable" by parents of children who died during the mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida, in February. Billed by its Russian publisher, Acid, as a swat team simulator, Active Shooter invites players to take on the role of an armed officer responding to a school shooting. However, the game also allows users to play as the shooter or as a civilian attempting to escape the scene. Using a first-person perspective, similar to shooters such as Call of Duty, Doom and Counter-Strike, the game looks to be entirely set within a school. Screenshots released by the developer and seemingly taken from the perspective of the shooter show swat team officers and students being gunned down in various locations including a gymnasium, corridors and canteen.