Education
Women In Machine Learning: Katie Malone Udacity
For resources, the single best thing you can do is find people who can challenge you and make you think. These can be collaborators that you work with in "real life," or folks online (say, for example, contributing to open source projects). I've also found that the projects that turn out the best for me are the ones that I find most interesting or exciting, so I've grown to put a lot of effort into reading about many different things so I can find out what seems most cool or fun and then go after that--at first it felt a little backward, like instead I should be reading up to find out what I "should" be excited about and then letting that guide my choices, but I've found that thinking about it instead from the perspective of "what makes me excited, and let's think of a way to apply machine learning or data science to that" is way more fun for me. That's not really a resource, sorry, but I think it's important. For resources, I love online courses (like Udacity of course, but there are lots of good ones out there), podcasts (I have to say that, since I host one as a side project–Linear Digressions), and there are some excellent blogs out there too.
MIT student designs gardening robots that could grow produce for astronauts on Mars
A NASA fellow and aerospace engineering student at the University of Colorado has invented a robot and artificial intelligence system that's may open new avenues for space exploration and habitation. Heather Hava won the 15,000 "Eat it!" Lemelson-MIT undergraduate prize for her robotic gardeners, and now she hopes to raise 150,000 to fund further development of the product through her company Autoponics.
Elmo has made a new friend: IBM's Watson
The next chapter of early childhood education may be coming courtesy of Sesame Workshop and the letters I-B-M. Sesame Workshop, which has made the beloved children's education show "Sesame Street" for decades, and IBM's Watson -- of "Jeopardy!" The firms will work together for three years to develop products for the classroom and the home, which combine the artificial intelligence prowess of Watson with Sesame Workshop's deep knowledge of how to teach to the preschool set. The hope is that Watson, which can learn and adapt based on its user, will be able to adjust its teaching based on a child's skill level and learning style. Sesame Workshop has worked for years to provide a mix of learning styles in its flagship show, but is looking to do more.
New report calls for ban on 'killer robots' amid U.N. meeting
A full-scale figure of a Terminator "T-800" robot used in the movie "Terminator 2" is displayed at a preview of the Terminator Exhibition in Tokyo on March 18, 2009. UNITED NATIONS -- Technology allowing a pre-programmed robot to shoot to kill, or a tank to fire at a target with no human involvement, is only years away, experts say. A new report called Monday for a ban on such "killer robots." The report by Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic was released as the United Nations kicked off a week-long meeting on such weapons in Geneva. The report calls for humans to remain in control over all weapons systems at a time of rapid technological advances.
How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine
In 2007, Stephanie Costello had a boring office job with a lot of downtime that she spent online. She recalls the day she read one of those articles on MSN.com that have become a staple of the Internet: how to make extra money online. These types of articles often appear in the soft-news sections of MSN, Yahoo and other sites, usually with the message that there is money being left on the table. Costello was intrigued at the prospect of cutting through the boredom of her day with the opportunity to pick up a little extra cash. She went to the website, Mechanical Turk, where companies can post tiny tasks and workers can find and perform them online. It was free to register--no call for an "investment" up front, which indicated that it was not on its face a scam. And she began making money immediately. Costello is a trailblazer of sorts. She was one of the early workers to join Mechanical Turk, the first online, crowd-based, micro-labor platform.
IBM Watson to build tech with Sesame Street
IBM (IBM, Tech30) Watson is teaming up with Sesame Workshop to develop a new suite of preschool products that could range from consumer apps and toys, to educational tools for schools. Sesame Workshop is the nonprofit that creates "Sesame Street." The company says it entered into this partnership because it wants to provide personalized learning to as many kids around the world as possible. "There's not necessarily anything wrong with preschool education today," Harriet Green, IBM's GM for Watson IoT, Commerce and Education told CNNMoney. But not enough kids have access to the right level of education at the right time in their lives.
What happens when robots are assigned ethnicities?
In 2010, a group of students and faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, Qatar, introduced their campus to Hala, the latest in a line of what the school termed "roboceptionists." Consisting of a truncated torso and an LCD screen featuring a blue-skinned female CGI head, Hala was designed to provide students and visitors with instructions, directions, and anecdotes in either formal Arabic or American English. In addition to educating visitors about Qatar, Hala's purpose was to explore human-robot interaction (HRI) in a multicultural setting. The population of Doha is a demographic mosaic; the city is primarily inhabited by expatriates from all over the world (most of whom speak Arabic and/or English). Because of this relative diversity, Hala interacted with visitors from a slew of countries, using features like natural language understanding and facial expressions to conduct, in Carnegie Mellon's words, "culturally appropriate" exchanges.
The New Rules for Becoming a Data Scientist
Summary: What do you need to do to get an entry level job in data science? This article is written for anyone who is considering becoming a data scientist. That includes young people just starting their bachelor's degrees and folks in the first two or three years of their careers who want to make the switch. It's not for folks who know they are going to pursue one of the new Master's in Data Science or Ph.D. candidates. It's for folks looking for entry level jobs that are specifically on the data science career ladder.
It isn't just Uber: Carnegie Mellon's computer science dean on its poaching problem
Andrew Moore was a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University for a dozen years when Google hired him away in 2006 to lead some of its efforts around ad targeting and fraud prevention. CMU lured Moore back in 2014, making him the dean of its computer science school. But he still understands well what goes through his colleagues' minds when industry comes calling, and he says the battle to keep them in academia grows fiercer by the year. Earlier today, we talked with Moore about Uber, which famously raided the school's robotics department a year ago, poaching 40 of its researchers and scientists. We also talked about how Moore entices people to stay, and the newest new thing his 2,000-student school is focused on right now.