Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Government


Roundup: The art world braces for Brexit, Lucas dumps Chicago museum plan, searching for Vincent Van Gogh

Los Angeles Times

How Brexit may affect artists and the art market. George Lucas abandons plans for a museum in Chicago. Miami models allege that an artist asked them to do intimate things with a rope. The Chicago Tribune says good riddance. Plus, how the referendum may affect artists.


Google-affiliated Sidewalk Labs has big plans for its 'city of the future'

#artificialintelligence

Sidewalk Labs, a top-secret urban innovation division run under Google's parent company Alphabet, wants to improve city life for city-dwellers by reinventing public parking and transportation. Its first testing grounds - Columbus, Ohio - may host subsidized ride-sharing, a service that finds free parking spots, and an artificial intelligence platform that will help meter maids fine more people, all in the Buckeye State capital. Earlier in 2016, Sidewalk Labs announced plans to buy up land in major US cities and transform the parcels into ultra-high tech municipalities. In conjunction with the US Department of Transportation, it launched the Smart City Challenge to identify a launchpad for its innovations. The Guardian revealed on Monday never-before-seen documents and proposals from the Smart City Challenge.


Google-affiliated Sidewalk Labs has big plans for its 'city of the future'

#artificialintelligence

Sidewalk Labs, a top-secret urban innovation division run under Google's parent company Alphabet, wants to improve city life for city-dwellers by reinventing public parking and transportation. Its first testing grounds - Columbus, Ohio - may host subsidized ride-sharing, a service that finds free parking spots, and an artificial intelligence platform that will help meter maids fine more people, all in the Buckeye State capital. Earlier in 2016, Sidewalk Labs announced plans to buy up land in major US cities and transform the parcels into ultra-high tech municipalities. In conjunction with the US Department of Transportation, it launched the Smart City Challenge to identify a launchpad for its innovations. The Guardian revealed on Monday never-before-seen documents and proposals from the Smart City Challenge.


Tracking Switched Dynamic Network Topologies from Information Cascades

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Contagions such as the spread of popular news stories, or infectious diseases, propagate in cascades over dynamic networks with unobservable topologies. However, "social signals" such as product purchase time, or blog entry timestamps are measurable, and implicitly depend on the underlying topology, making it possible to track it over time. Interestingly, network topologies often "jump" between discrete states that may account for sudden changes in the observed signals. The present paper advocates a switched dynamic structural equation model to capture the topology-dependent cascade evolution, as well as the discrete states driving the underlying topologies. Conditions under which the proposed switched model is identifiable are established. Leveraging the edge sparsity inherent to social networks, a recursive $\ell_1$-norm regularized least-squares estimator is put forth to jointly track the states and network topologies. An efficient first-order proximal-gradient algorithm is developed to solve the resulting optimization problem. Numerical experiments on both synthetic data and real cascades measured over the span of one year are conducted, and test results corroborate the efficacy of the advocated approach.


The AI 'Top Gun' that can beat the military's best

#artificialintelligence

It is every Top Gun's worst nightmare - an AI can can outmanoeuvre them in the air. Now researchers have tested their AI on a retired top gun - and left him stunned. Retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee took on the AI in a simulator - and lost. An AI has beated Air Force pilots in simulated showdowns for the first time. Retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee took on the AI in a simulator.


Beyond video games: New artificial intelligence beats tactical experts in combat simulation

#artificialintelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate was recently assessed by subject-matter expert and retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee - who holds extensive aerial combat experience as an instructor and Air Battle Manager with considerable fighter aircraft expertise - in a high-fidelity air combat simulator. The artificial intelligence, dubbed ALPHA, was the victor in that simulated scenario, and according to Lee, is "the most aggressive, responsive, dynamic and credible AI I've seen to date." Details on ALPHA - a significant breakthrough in the application of what's called genetic-fuzzy systems are published in the most-recent issue of the Journal of Defense Management, as this application is specifically designed for use with Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) in simulated air-combat missions for research purposes. The tools used to create ALPHA as well as the ALPHA project have been developed by Psibernetix, Inc., recently founded by UC College of Engineering and Applied Science 2015 doctoral graduate Nick Ernest, now president and CEO of the firm; as well as David Carroll, programming lead, Psibernetix, Inc.; with supporting technologies and research from Gene Lee; Kelly Cohen, UC aerospace professor; Tim Arnett, UC aerospace doctoral student; and Air Force Research Laboratory sponsors. ALPHA is currently viewed as a research tool for manned and unmanned teaming in a simulation environment.


Beyond Video Games: New Artificial Intelligence Beats Tactical Experts in Combat Simulation

#artificialintelligence

The artificial intelligence, dubbed ALPHA, was the victor in that simulated scenario, and according to Lee, is "the most aggressive, responsive, dynamic and credible AI I've seen to date." Details on ALPHA – a significant breakthrough in the application of what's called genetic-fuzzy systems are published in the most-recent issue of the Journal of Defense Management, as this application is specifically designed for use with Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) in simulated air-combat missions for research purposes. The tools used to create ALPHA as well as the ALPHA project have been developed by Psibernetix, Inc., recently founded by UC College of Engineering and Applied Science 2015 doctoral graduate Nick Ernest, now president and CEO of the firm; as well as David Carroll, programming lead, Psibernetix, Inc.; with supporting technologies and research from Gene Lee; Kelly Cohen, UC aerospace professor; Tim Arnett, UC aerospace doctoral student; and Air Force Research Laboratory sponsors.


Obama's Education Department Has a Flawed Plan for Student Debt Forgiveness

U.S. News

If a change is needed, it is of a different kind. The process through which students may petition for loan forgiveness may need to be streamlined and made clearer. If it acts at all, the Department of Education should redefine the current process and better communicate its availability to students. The new initiative, even if that is not its intention, has the potential to go too far because those who feed off society's productive activities – because that's where the money is – will take it there. They will find ways to expand on language so vague its inevitably loose interpretation leaves public and private universities vulnerable to countless claims that are without merit.


History of Data Mining

#artificialintelligence

Data mining is everywhere, but its story starts many years before Moneyball and Edward Snowden. The following are major milestones and "firsts" in the history of data mining plus how it's evolved and blended with data science and big data. Data mining is the computational process of exploring and uncovering patterns in large data sets a.k.a. It is fundamental to data mining and probability, since it allows understanding of complex realities based on estimated probabilities. The goal of regression analysis is to estimate the relationships among variables, and the specific method they used in this case is the method of least squares.


Ray Kurzweil's Wildest Prediction: Nanobots Will Plug Our Brains Into the Web by the 2030s

#artificialintelligence

I consider Ray Kurzweil a very close friend and a very smart person. Ray is a brilliant technologist, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google focused on AI and language processing. As reported, "of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990s, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be "essentially correct" (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunning 86% accuracy rate." Two weeks ago, Ray and I held an hour-long webinar with my Abundance 360 CEOs about predicting the future. During our session, there was one of Ray's specific predictions that really blew my mind. "In the 2030s," said Ray, "we are going to send nano-robots into the brain (via capillaries) that will provide full immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system and will connect our neocortex to the cloud. Just like how we can wirelessly expand the power of our smartphones 10,000-fold in the cloud today, we'll be able to expand our ...