Having spent over 20 years working on food-poisoning lawsuits, Bill Marler simply doesn’t eat certain foods anymore.
The attorney, who’s litigating suits a
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Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have developed a model powered by AI. The AI model is designed to tag road features in digital maps using satellite imagery. This AI-driven RoadTagger model combines a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a graph neural network (GNN) to automatically envisage the number of lanes and road types concealed by obstructions, improving GPS navigation, especially in countries with limited map data.
The model helps drivers in incorporating information about parking spots, while mapping bicycle lanes that can assist cyclists to negotiate busy city streets. Providing updated information on road conditions, the RoadTagger model can also improve planning for disaster relief.
Unlike other GPS navigation systems, RoadTagger makes use of an amalgamation of neural network architectures to automatically predict the number of lanes and road types, including residential or highway, even when roads can be blocked by trees or buildings.
Sam Madden, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a researcher in the Computer Science and AI Laboratory (CSAIL) says, “Most updated digital maps are from places that big companies care the most about. If you’re in places they don’t care about much, you’re at a disadvantage with respect to the quality of map. Our goal is to automate the process of generating high-quality digital maps, so they can be available in any country.”
When testing RoadTagger on occluded roads from digital maps of 20 US cities, the model reckoned lane numbers with 77 percent accuracy and inferred road types with 93 percent accuracy. Also, the researchers are planning to enable the model to foresee other features, such as parking spots and bike lanes.
The model relies on CNN and GNN, where GNNs form relationships between connected nodes in a graph, CNNs take as input raw satellite images of target roads. RoadTagger is based on an end-to-end model, meaning it is fed only raw data and automatically generates output, without human intervention. This combined architecture of CNN and GNN signifies a more human-like intuition, researchers noted.
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When it comes to AI, Elon Musk has a name in treating it like some aliens’ attack or God.
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has warned about artificial intelligence before, tweeting that it could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Speaking Friday at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium, Musk called it our biggest existential threat:
- I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.
Musk was so caught up on artificial intelligence that he missed the audience’s next question. “Sorry can you repeat the question, I was just sort of thinking about the AI thing for a second,” he said.
Musk spoke expansively for over an hour, at one point even asking a MIT student what his favorite sci-fi books were. He left to a standing ovation. You can watch the entire interview here.
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By uniting efforts, the International Brain Initiative can help shape the future of neuroscience research at a global scale.
The initiative, at the time of writing, includes Japan’s Brain/Minds, Australian Brain Alliance, the EU’s Human Brain Project (HBP), Canadian Brain Research Strategy, the US’ BRAIN Initiative (BRAINI), the Korea Brain Initiative, and the China Brain Project.
Few times in history has mankind ever united to solve a single goal. Even the ultimate moonshot in history—putting a man on the moon—was driven by international competition rather than unification. So it’s perhaps fitting that mankind is now uniting to understand the organ that fundamentally makes us human: our brain. First envisioned in 2016 through a series of discussions on the “grand challenges” in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, the International Brain Initiative (IBI) “came out” this week in a forward-looking paper in Neuron.
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CDC is closely monitoring an outbreak of respiratory illness caused by a novel (new) coronavirus (named “2019-nCoV”) that was first detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China and which continues to expand. Chinese health officials have reported thousands of infections with 2019-nCoV in China, with the virus reportedly spreading from person-to-person in many parts of that country. Infections with 2019-nCoV, most of them associated with travel from Wuhan, also are being reported in a growing number of international locations, including the United States. The United States reported the first confirmed instance of person-to-person spread with this virus on January 30, 2020.
Coronaviruses are a large family of RNA viruses that are common in many different species of animals, including camels, cattle, cats, and bats. Rarely, animal coronaviruses can infect people and then spread between people such as with MERS and SARS.
Laboratory testing of human suspected cases of novel coronavirus (nCoV) infection (PDF)
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Researchers at Columbia University and University of California, San Diego, have introduced a novel "multi-messenger" approach to quantum physics that signifies a technological leap in how scientists can explore quantum materials.
The findings appear in a recent article published in Nature Materials, led by A. S. McLeod, postdoctoral researcher, Columbia Nano Initiative, with co-authors Dmitri Basov and A. J. Millis at Columbia and R.A. Averitt at UC San Diego. "We have brought a technique from the inter-galactic scale down to the realm of the ultra-small," said Basov, Higgins Professor of Physics and Director of the Energy Frontier Research Center at Columbia. Equipped with multi-modal nanoscience tools we can now routinely go places no one thought would be possible as recently as five years ago."
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One of the greatest unsolved puzzles in all of science is dark energy. The Universe isn’t just expanding, but the expansion rate that we infer for distant galaxies is accelerating: their recession velocity speeds up from our perspective as time goes on. This was a surprise when it was discovered empirically in the 1990s, and more than two decades later, we still don’t understand where this mysterious form of energy, the most abundant in all the Universe, comes from.
While you can explain dark energy in the context of General Relativity, it’s recently become fashionable to attempt to explain dark energy by modifying gravity instead. Recently, the award-winning theoretical work of Dr. Claudia de Rham has come into focus, leading The Guardian to ask, "Has physicist’s gravity theory solved ‘impossible’ dark energy riddle?" It’s a fascinating possibility, but one that demands an appropriate level of skepticism.
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This year will see a relatively low number of icebergs drifting into busy shipping regions in the north-west Atlantic, according to a combination of control systems and artificial intelligence forecasting models developed by experts at the University of Sheffield.
A recently published control systems model has been used to predict that between 479 and 1,015 icebergs will reach waters south of 48°N—the area of greatest risk to shipping traveling between Europe and north-east North America—in 2020, compared with 1,515 observed there last year.
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Visa is buying Plaid in a deal worth $5.3 billion — roughly double the start-up’s last private valuation.
Plaid’s API software lets start-ups connect to users’ bank accounts and works with Venmo, mobile investing app Robinhood and cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Gemini.
Plaid says 25% of people in the United States with bank accounts have connected to the fintech company through an app. Visa and rival Mastercard were early investors in the start-up, along with the venture arms of Goldman Sachs, Citi and American Express.
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Deaths from lung cancer dropped by 51 percent among men since the early 1990s and by 26 percent among women since the early 2000s. The report also credits drops in lung cancer mortality for a 2.2 percent dip from 2016 to 2017 — the largest decline of cancer deaths in a single year ever reported. Doctors attribute the success in part to lower smoking rates but also to significant advances in treatment.
"The years we have been investing in basic science of cancer therapeutics [are] now starting to pay off," said Dr. Patrick Hwu, division head of cancer medicine at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Hwu, who was not involved with the new report, credited targeted therapies, which are drugs that work to eliminate the circuitry that turns on cancer cells.
Another of the biggest advances, experts said, has been the development of immunotherapies such as Keytruda, also known as pembrolizumab. It uses the body’s immune system to fight tumors, and it is approved for lung cancer and melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer.
The American Cancer Society report also found rapid declines in melanoma death rates, up to 7 percent a year from 2013 to 2017 among adults, also attributable to new treatments. The Food and Drug Administration approved two key drugs to treat melanoma: ipilimumab and vemurafenib.
"We’re actually seeing the effect of those drugs reflected in the overall melanoma death rate," said Rebecca Siegel, scientific director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society and an author of the new report. "That’s really exciting." Physicians are seeing it in practice, as well.
"In the past decade, how we treat invasive melanoma has evolved so unbelievably rapidly that it is, for some, becoming more of a chronic disease than a death sentence," said Dr. Adam Friedman, a professor of dermatology at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D.C.
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