November promises to be action-packed and unpredictable because [next] is upon us: agenda and registration. Beginning on November 10 and running until December 8, you’ll hear from names you know such as George Church, Tony Fadell, Gill Pratt, Jerry Kaplan—and a slew of others whose names you will not forget!
Did you join us for our virtual field trip to the New Jersey Institute of Technology on Tuesday? TTI/V staffer Nancy Kleinrock and longtime community member David Bader exceeded our highest expectations. If you missed the event, please visit the video link and presentations in our archive. Kelly Baughman can help you access all the treats.
(Speaking of field trips, stay tuned for our 2021 calendar which includes armchair visits to technology hubs around the world, such as Berlin, New Zealand, Israel, and more. We may all still be safe at home, but that hasn’t slowed our quest for the most cutting-edge technologies and research.)
Yesterday, on the 51st anniversary of the dawn of the Internet, the website of Len Kleinrock’s UCLA Connection Lab went live. The Lab, which is situated just down the hall from where the first ARPANET connection emanated, supports advanced research in technologies at the forefront of all things regarding connectivity: networks, wireless, security, cryptography, blockchain, advanced network protocol design, and distributed systems. Connect with the Connection Lab through Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Economist Mariana Mazzucato provides a bit of speculative fiction depicting life in 2023—a picture that is likely rosier than what will actually come about from the literal snafu that is 2020. Of course, what she sees as a utopian vision includes losers as well as winners. So, depending on your industry or outlook, it might strike you as a Halloween-worthy horror story, instead. https://time.com/collection/great-reset/5900739/fix-economy-by-2023/
Even if Mazzucato’s future doesn’t play out in full, researchers at the University of Surrey are using structural health and functionality monitoring data to influence proactive infrastructure decision making to render transport networks more robust to natural disasters. (Jennifer Mathieu, McLean, Sep 2017) https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-roadmap-critical-infrastructure-safer-natural.html
Marko Papic (San Francisco, Dec 2019; virtual, Sep 2020) recently warned us of a global decoupling in technology, especially amidst trade tensions with China. And here it comes: The Chinese leadership is meeting to develop the nation’s 14th Five Year Plan, a top-down blueprint for the nation’s activities and direction. Although still a behind-closed-doors discussion, this year’s deliberations appear to point significantly toward Chinese self-reliance, both for chip development and production and for general consumerisms. (Perspectives on China, workshop, Philadelphia, Apr 2006)
In an Americanized echo of the Arab Spring (Revolutions conference, Washington, D.C., May 2012), Portland (OR)-based activists are using Google’s TensorFlow to perform facial recognition to deanonymize police officers, even when they wear masks. (Andrew Bud, Washington, D.C., Sep 2017) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/technology/facial-recognition-police.html
An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Kansas reports that it’s not whether people trust in other people or in artificial-intelligence systems; instead, those with a trusting affect toward other people are easier to convince to view AI as yet another trustworthy team member. (Julie Ancis and Senjuti Basu Roy, NJIT field trip, Oct 2020) https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-artificial-intelligence-boosted-people-relationship.html
Bristol Myers Squibb is underwriting work by inistro, which is applying machine learning to the development of induced pluripotent stem cell-derived disease models as well as candidates for drug discovery for two debilitating diseases: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). (Jamie Heywood, Jersey City, Oct 2009; Sean Scott, Boston, Sep 2007) https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/bristol-myers-insitro-ally-to-apply-machine-learning-to-als-r-d
Gary Marcus (San Francisco, Dec 2019; Brooklyn, Jun 2018; San Diego, Feb 2015; Boston, Apr 2014) and Rodney Brooks (Atlanta, Dec 2004) have raised a pile of Series A cash for their cognitive-engine startup Robust.AI. https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/28/robust-ai-raises-a-15m-series-a-to-improve-problem-solving-for-collaborative-robots/
A doctoral student at the University of Waterloo provides a k-nearest neighbors-based proof of concept of an AI model derived from “less than one”-shot (LO-shot) learning, which requires tiny training sets by pre-compressing a conventional (i.e., giant) training set into one with just a handful of examples that are highly distilled and with carefully engineered so-called soft labels. “With two points, you can separate 1000 classes or 10K classes or 1M classes,” says the researcher. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/16/1010566/ai-machine-learning-with-tiny-data
TTI/Vanguard is bicoastal (is the new word “distributed”?), but the group was born and bred in Santa Monica. So congratulations to the Los Angeles Dodgers!
“If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.”—Aristotle
