Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Burmese pythons, one of the world's largest snakes, are also one of the most problematic invasive species in South Florida. First spotted in the Florida Everglades in the 1970s, the snakes were introduced, either accidentally or intentionally, through the exotic pet trade. Since then, pythons have become top predators in the local food ecosystem. Despite the fact that they now exist throughout much of South Florida, they remain difficult to track down.

Ground Delay Programs (GDPs) have been widely used to resolve excessive demand-capacity imbalances at arrival airports by shifting foreseen airborne delay to pre-departure ground delay. While offering clear safety and efficiency benefits, GDPs may also create additional delay because of imperfect execution and uncertainty in predicting arrival airport capacity. This paper presents a methodology for measuring excess delay resulting from individual GDPs and investigates factors that influence excess delay using regularized regression models. We measured excess delay for 1210 GDPs from 33 U.S. airports in 2019. On a per-restricted flight basis, the mean excess delay is 35.4 min with std of 20.6 min. In our regression analysis of the variation in excess delay, ridge regression is found to perform best. The factors affecting excess delay include time variations during gate out and taxi out for flights subject to the GDP, program rate setting and revisions, and GDP time duration.

Artificial intelligence has its ups and downs, but the Florida Department of Transportation is using the upside of the technology to improve safety when opening and closing their bridges. "Using technology to improve safety is something big for us and we're doing it," said Pablo Orozco, District 6 Structures Maintenance Engineer with the Florida Department of Transportation. The AI pilot program with the FDOT began in 2019 and is being tested out on the 5th Street Bridge which goes over the Miami River. Engineers showed NBC 6 how the technology works. "When it opens, we have defined an area that is unsafe for pedestrians or any cars or bicyclists and it will stop the bridge from opening if they are in that unsafe area," said Orozco.

Does your car drive itself? And sooner than you expect. Analysts predict the global self-driving car market to grow from 20.3 million units in 2021 to 62.4 million units by 2030, at a CAGR of 13.3%. Of course, that is still a small portion of the almost 1.5 billion cars in the world – 300 million of which are in the US. Still, these prospects excite Harald Braun, executive chairman of Guident, a Boca Raton-based startup that is developing software to power the next generation of autonomous vehicles. "I focus on making autonomous vehicles connected," Braun told Refresh Miami.

Hurricane Ian left an extraordinarily broad path of destruction across much of South Florida. That was evident in reports from the ground, but it also shows up in satellite data. Using a new method, our team of spatial and environmental analysts was able to quickly provide a rare big picture view of damage across the entire state. By using satellite images from before the storm and real-time images from four satellite sensors, together with artificial intelligence, we created a disaster monitoring system that can map damage in 30-meter resolution and continuously update the data. It's a snapshot of what faster, more targeted disaster monitoring can look like in the future – and something that could eventually be deployed nationwide.

A mobile app may soon be able to diagnose you with chronic health conditions using the sound of your voice. Scientists are building an artificial intelligence that analyzes vibrations in speech and breathing patterns to look for clues for illness. The National Institutes of Health is funding a mammoth research project to collect voice data that will build the AI. Experts already know that speech is altered by conditions like Parkinson's or stroke, while breathing is affected by lung diseases. But the hope is that the computer program will be able to diagnose a wide range of conditions - including cancer and depression.

Yu Sun, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida, created and organized the Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition. Yu talks about the impact robots will have in domestic environments, the disparity between industry and academia showcased by competitions, and the commercialization of research. Yu Sun is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida (Assistant Professor 2009-2015, Associate Professor 2015-2020, Associate Chair of Graduate Affairs 2018-2020). He was a Visiting Associate Professor at Stanford University from 2016 to 2017, and received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Utah in 2007. Then he had his Postdoctoral training at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Cambridge, MA (2007-2008) and the University of Utah (2008-2009).

Tech hubs are communities that are geared toward educating and encouraging new talent, and also providing space for the growth and acceleration of high-tech businesses. We had the chance to talk to local tech leaders about Miami as a tech hub at the Miami AI and Machine Learning Meetup Week, and discuss the advantages of being located in a tech ecosystem as well as what the future will bring for Miami. Tech hubs exist as an ecosystem to facilitate collaboration between startups and large technology-based companies. Tech hubs make interaction, networking, innovation and co-innovation easily accessible for community members. Companies located within a tech ecosystem will benefit from the free flow of talent, ideas, resources, workspace, and networking for accelerated growth.

The health & safety of our attendees & speakers is our primary concern. While this currently proves to be a tricky time for public gatherings, Dataiku is still committed to providing great tech content & facilitating discussions in the data science space. As such, weve decided to pivot towards online webinars via our partner platform, BrightTalk. IMPORTANT - RSVP HERE: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/17108/445121?utm_source Dataiku&utm_medium brighttalk&utm_campaign 445121 Tentative Schedule: (EST) 2:00pm: Intro 2:05pm: What Can You Do With Unstructured Text Data? w/ PwC 2:45pm: Q&A Talk Abstract: In this talk we will explore the opportunities that arise from unstructured text data. Then we will take a deep dive into a few concepts that are used in applying Machine Learning to text data & discuss how can they be leveraged using deep learning & other methods Speaker Bio: Abdallah Musmar is a Manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

A large public research university figured out how to tap the power of artificial intelligence and human intelligence to produce impressive gains in student success. Over the past ten years, the University of South Florida (USF) has experienced dramatic improvement in student success, as measured by the first-year persistence rate, the four-year graduation rate, and the six-year graduation rate. Each of those metrics has improved substantially. To promote persistence and completion, the university implemented a wide array of programs, practices, and policies based on a campus Student Success Task Force Report released in April 2010. These initiatives included many of the standard student success initiatives in place at many other colleges and universities, including living learning communities, the professionalization of academic advising, gradual increases in admissions requirements, course redesigns, expansion of on-campus housing, and promotion of student engagement.