The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) has chosen eight scientists who will each be given up to £50 million to allocate as they see fit, in the hopes that a high-risk, high-reward approach to research funding will deliver results that benefit UK society and fuel economic growth. ARIA is the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, an adviser to former UK prime minister Boris Johnson who has long wanted to shake up UK science funding. "A small group of people can make a huge breakthrough with little money but the right structure, the right ways of thinking," Cummings wrote in 2017. He was inspired by the US's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which spurred computer science as a discipline and created a forerunner of the internet in the 1960s and 1970s. It did this, in the words of one of its leading scientists, by having "visions rather than goals" and because it "funded people, not projects".

Learning analytics (LA) as a research discipline focuses on multiple perspectives of understanding and supporting educational activities utilizing collected log data. To do so at a national and even international level, educational technology platforms that enable gathering users' interaction traces and digitally generated artifacts must store data in a standardized format. In Japan, the government initiated the GIGA School project in 2020, which installed more than nine million tablet PCs and high-speed Internet access at compulsory education institutions (elemental and middle schools). Such infrastructure enables the collection of educational data and analysis with the aim to improve educational practices in each school. With standardized data logging, it is possible to aggregate data from all schools and to generate educational Big Data that can support evidence-based policy-making and research at a national level.

We propose a new single-winner voting system using ranked ballots: Stable Voting. The motivating principle of Stable Voting is that if a candidate A would win without another candidate B in the election, and A beats B in a head-to-head majority comparison, then A should still win in the election with B included (unless there is another candidate A' who has the same kind of claim to winning, in which case a tiebreaker may choose between such candidates). We call this principle Stability for Winners (with Tiebreaking). Stable Voting satisfies this principle while also having a remarkable ability to avoid tied outcomes in elections even with small numbers of voters.

"Data is the new oil." Although the expression has found widespread use, it has not been accepted by all as relevant for several reasons. One of these is the fact that while oil is a natural resource destined to run out, the quantity and availability of data is going in the opposite direction, that is, it is constantly increasing. Another is the fact that extrapolating facts is not the same as gaining insights on which to base informed decisions. Ronald Schmelzer talked about this in his article for Forbes [2], where he dismantled Humby's saying through precise reasoning.

Government and private-sector organizations want to update data privacy and management approaches. Dense privacy policies and misleading website cookie notices are legacies of a bygone era. Today, data collection is becoming more ambient, often happening in places where there's no ability to post a notice at all. Instead, digital experiences have expanded beyond our phones and web interactions, and data is collected in virtually augmented environments, whether through IoT devices on city streets or in our homes. These third parties would serve as links between people and entities collecting their data, or between businesses and their partners.

Revenue-cycle management company R1 RCM on Monday said it plans to acquire Cloudmed in an all-stock transaction that values Cloudmed at roughly $4.1 billion. Cloudmed uses artificial intelligence and automation to analyze medical records, payment data and medical insurance models for revenue-cycle management. The company has more than 3,100 healthcare provider customers. The acquisition fits into R1's vision of creating an end-to-end platform for managing revenue cycle for providers and engaging patients around payment. "We have been very deliberate and very consistent in terms of our excitement around the long-term automation potential that exists in this industry," said Joe Flanagan, R1's president and chief executive officer, Monday at a conference. "This transaction significantly increases our data footprint and we are positioned very well for meaningful innovation in and around data." Cloudmed's data will accelerate R1's work in machine learning, which requires data to create accurate models, Flanagan said at J.P. Morgan's annual healthcare conference--which is virtual for the second year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A 9-foot-tall (2.7-meter-tall) video game joystick made of wood, rubber and steel has made it into the Guinness World Records 2022 as the largest. Dartmouth College professor Mary Flanagan created the giant controller -- nearly 14 times the size of an original classic Atari controller -- in 2006 to celebrate her childhood experience of "maniacally" playing Atari 2600 video games. She also wanted to see what it would be like when a single-player experience becomes collaborative: It takes at least two people to operate the joystick and push the button to play classic Atari games such as "Centipede" and "Breakout." "To have this common pop culture artifact just erupt in the middle of a space and allow people to play something familiar, yet not familiar, was exciting," said Flanagan, an artist who is chair of Dartmouth's Film and Media Studies and the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities. The joystick, which toured Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, is now part of the permanent collection of ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Here's a video game controller for the record books: A 9-foot-tall Atari joystick that plays Centipede and Breakout. The giant – and functional – joystick, made of wood, rubber and steel is now in the Guinness World Records 2022 as the largest joystick. Dartmouth College professor Mary Flanagan created the joystick, which is nearly 14 times the size of the classic Atari controller, in 2006 to celebrate her childhood gaming history "maniacally" playing Atari 2600 games, she said on Dartmouth's web site. Currently housed at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, the joystick has previously been exhibited in Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 'Call of Duty: Vanguard':Latest edition of first-person shooter video game is bloody, exciting fun Flanagan created the eight-direction joystick in 2006 with a single red button, which needs two people to operate it, to "investigate the idea of collaboration and the sharing of an otherwise single-person gaming experience, and also to focus on the'exploration of the cultural and sociological effects of technology,'" according to Guinness.

Health departments around the U.S. that are using contact tracers to contain coronavirus outbreaks are scrambling to bolster their ranks amid a surge of cases and resistance to cooperation from those infected or exposed. With too few trained contact tracers to handle soaring caseloads, one hard-hit Arizona county is relying on National Guard members to pitch in. In Louisiana, people who have tested positive typically wait more than two days to respond to health officials -- giving the disease crucial time to spread. Many tracers are finding it hard to break through suspicion and apathy to convince people that compliance is crucial. Contact tracing -- tracking people who test positive and anyone they've come in contact with -- was challenging even when stay-at-home orders were in place.

An aviation industry startup accelerator program has selected an artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP)-based platform called Whispr to help improve the speed, accuracy and safety of aircraft inspections and turnarounds. As part of International Airline Group's (IAG) Hangar 51 accelerator program, Whispr is partnering with Spanish carrier Iberia to implement its hands-free voice guidance platform on two projects. The first project is being conducted with Iberia Maintenance at Madrid-Barajas Airport (MAD) to digitize the aircraft inspection documentation process on the airline's new fleet of Airbus A350s, which up until now has been entirely paper-based. According to Hugh O'Flanagan, Whispr's co-founder and CEO, the existing inspection process entails engineers walking around the aircraft and checking tens of items in each different section as they manually complete a paper-based report, which then has to be manually input into a system.