In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers at MIT CSAIL, Nvidia, the University of Washington, and the University of Toronto describe an AI system that learns the physical interactions affecting materials like fabric by watching videos. They claim it can extrapolate to interactions it hasn’t seen before, like those involving multiple shirts […]
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The number of studies about COVID-19 has risen steeply from the start of the pandemic, from around 20,000 in early March to over 30,000 as of late June. In an effort to help clinicians digest the vast amount of biomedical knowledge in the literature, researchers affiliated with Columbia, Brandeis, DARPA, UCLA, and UIUC developed a […]
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One way to quickly see if a coronavirus vaccine works would be to immunize healthy people and then deliberately expose them to the virus, some researchers are suggesting. Proponents say this strategy, called a human challenge trial, could save time because rather than conducting tests the usual way — by waiting for vaccinated people to […]
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Researchers at Salesforce and the University of Virginia have proposed a new way to mitigate gender bias in word embeddings, the word representations used to train AI models to summarize, translate languages, and perform other prediction tasks. The team claims that correcting for certain regularities — like word frequency in large data sets — allows […]
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When we start to lift weights, our muscles do not strengthen and change at first, but our nervous systems do, according to a fascinating new study in animals of the cellular effects of resistance training. The study, which involved monkeys performing the equivalent of multiple one-armed pull-ups, suggests that strength training is more physiologically intricate […]
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A new study offers the first physical evidence that the coronavirus was circulating at low levels in New York City as early as the first week of February. The city confirmed its first infection on March 1. Mathematical models have predicted that the virus was making its way through the city weeks before then, but […]
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A new study offers the first physical evidence that the coronavirus was circulating at low levels in New York City as early as the first week of February. The city confirmed its first infection on March 1. Mathematical models have predicted that the virus was making its way through the city weeks before then, but […]
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The Montreal AI Ethics Institute, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to defining humanity’s place in an algorithm-driven world, today published the inaugural edition of its State of AI Ethics report. The 128-page multidisciplinary paper, which covers a set of areas spanning agency and responsibility, security and risk, and jobs and labor, aims to bring attention […]
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The reason is that the physical world is the most desirable of worlds because theories about normal human behavior were developed back when the internet was still a pipe dream and over a decade before social media tore apart our social fabric. An analogy from the car industry would be measuring how much we drive […]
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Leading universities and major technology companies agreed on Tuesday to back a new project intended to give academics and other scientists access to the computing resources now available mainly to a few tech giants. The initiative, the National Research Cloud, has received bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. Lawmakers in both houses […]
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ImageA drug that has recently been found to help some Covid-19 patients could form the basis of natural experiments.Credit…Nati Harnik/Associated Press The recent news that a decades-old steroid drug, dexamethasone, showed a one-third reduction in mortality for patients with severe Covid-19 infections has generated immense hope in the medical community. The finding came from the […]
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At a May 30 birthday party in Texas, one man reportedly infected 18 friends and family with the coronavirus. Reading reports like these, you might think of the virus as a wildfire, instantly setting off epidemics wherever it goes. But other reports tell another story altogether. In Italy, for example, scientists looked at stored samples […]
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At a May 30 birthday party in Texas, one man reportedly infected 18 friends and family with the coronavirus. Reading reports like these, you might think of the virus as a wildfire, instantly setting off epidemics wherever it goes. But other reports tell another story altogether. In Italy, for example, scientists looked at stored samples […]
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Jake Socha is an expert on flying snakes who uses detailed scientific terminology such as “this big, wiggly, ribbon thing” to describe his soaring quarry. It is an apt description, but don’t be fooled. When a snake launches off a tree in its Southeast Asian habitat and lands on another tree dozens of feet away, […]
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Planarians have unusual talents, to say the least. If you slice one of the tiny flatworms in half, the halves will grow back, giving you two identical worms. Cut a flatworm’s head in two, and it will grow two heads. Cut an eye off a flatworm — it will grow back. Stick an eye on […]
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Microsoft recently open-sourced Lumos, a Python library for automatically detecting and diagnosing metric regressions in “web-scale” applications. In a technical paper, company researchers claim Lumos has been deployed in millions of sessions across the developer teams at Skype and Microsoft Teams, enabling engineers to detect hundreds of changes in metrics and reject thousands of false […]
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The South Pole, the most isolated part of the planet, is also one of the most rapidly warming ones, scientists said Monday, with surface air temperatures rising since the 1990s at a rate that is three times faster than the global average. While the warming could be the result of natural climate change alone, the […]
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The number of coronavirus infections in many parts of the United States is more than 10 times higher than the reported rate, according to data released on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The analysis is part of a wide-ranging set of surveys started by the C.D.C. to estimate how widely the […]
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Symptomless transmission makes the coronavirus far harder to fight. But health officials dismissed the risk for months, pushing misleading and contradictory claims in the face of mounting evidence. By Matt Apuzzo, Selam Gebrekidan and David D. Kirkpatrick June 27, 2020 MUNICH — Dr. Camilla Rothe was about to leave for dinner when the government laboratory […]
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In a study not yet published in a journal, scientists have reported that the new coronavirus was present in wastewater in Barcelona, Spain in March 2019, a finding that, if confirmed, would show that the pathogen had emerged much earlier than previously thought. But independent experts who reviewed the findings said they doubted the claim. […]
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For a human, a breeze-ruffled garden is a peaceful scene: Dandelion seeds float, leaves rustle and flowers bob their heads. But if you’re a bee, it’s a minefield. For a small creature with delicate wings, airborne seeds, shifting leaves and lurching flowers are basically projectiles, trap doors and Godzilla-tipped skyscrapers. It’s a situation honeybees and […]
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When hunger strikes, dolphins don’t mess around. In Shark Bay, Western Australia, these swimming mammals have devised devious tactics to snare slippery prey. In one trick, dolphins chase fish into empty seashells, then chauffeur the shells to the ocean surface, where they use their beaks to jostle the prey into their mouths. This behavior, called […]
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In an announcement on Thursday, astronomers described the detection of an epistemological marvel: an invisible collision of invisible objects — black holes — had become briefly visible. The story goes like this: Long, long ago, about 4 billion years before now and in a faraway galaxy, a pair of black holes collided. Typically such an […]
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In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers at Google and the University of Illinois propose mixture invariant training (MixIT), an unsupervised approach to separating, isolating, and enhancing the voices of multiple speakers in an audio recording. This approach requires only single-channel (e.g., monaural) acoustic features, and researchers claim it “significantly” improves speech […]
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In a preprint paper this week published on Arxiv.org, researchers at Intel describe Sample Factory, a system that achieves high throughput — higher than 105 environment frames per second — in reinforcement learning experiments. In contrast to the distributed servers and hardware setups those experiments typically require, Sample Factory is optimized for single-machine settings, enabling […]
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Researchers at MIT, Adobe Research, and Tsinghua University say they’ve developed a method — differentiable augmentation (DiffAugment) — that improves the efficiency of generative adversarial networks (GANs) by augmenting both real and fake data samples. In a preprint paper, they claim it effectively stabilizes the networks during training, enabling them to generate high-fidelity images using […]
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In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers at Facebook describe wav2vec 2.0, an improved framework for self-supervised speech recognition. They claim it demonstrates for the first time that learning representations from speech, followed by fine-tuning on transcribed speech, can outperform the best semi-supervised methods while being conceptually simpler, achieving state-of-the-art results using […]
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The Coalition for Critical Technology (CCT) penned a letter opposing the publication of research called “A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing.” At the time of publication the letter has more than 1,000 signatures from researchers, practitioners, academics, and others. According to a press release from Harrisburg University, the paper is […]
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In spite of headwinds from the pandemic, organizations are devoting increased time, attention, and budget to their AI strategies. That’s the takeaway from Appen’s State of the AI and Machine Learning 2020 survey, which found that among 374 directors, product managers, engineers, IT staff, data analysts, and data scientists at companies with over 500 employees, […]
Read More In spite of headwinds from the pandemic, organizations are devoting increased time, attention, and budget to their AI strategies. That’s the takeaway from Appen’s State of the AI and Machine Learning 2020 survey, which found that among 374 directors, product managers, engineers, IT staff, data analysts, and data scientists at companies with over 500 employees, […]
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NASA is about to take to the air on another planet. As part of its next mission to Mars, leaving Earth this summer, the space agency will attempt to do something that has never been done before: fly a helicopter through the rarefied atmosphere of Mars. If it works, the small helicopter, named Ingenuity, will […]
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