Overview: Science&Technology

Freedom of speech, and of the press... also brings responsibility. The Editors’ Code of Practice... requires the “highest professional standards”... IPSO’s overall message is that ocean acidification is just a matter of opinion – not a hard-won, testable understanding ... Why support any research if 250 peer-reviewed papers ... can all be summaril…

deep learning... is the reason we’re on the brink of a more general intelligence... essentially one algorithm (with many minor variants) that can adjust its own structure to solve a problem, directly from whatever massively large data set you feed it... we’re seeing extremely narrow systems right now is because they’re extremely useful... we are …

As IoT grows, the need for distributed computing becomes an absolute necessity... fog computing, distributed AI and parallel stream processing... both data and compute-intensive, and they don’t cope well with centralized infrastructure... A distributed network of computers managed by blockchain and smart contracts can create a shared economy wher…

the 'Try Before You Fly' scheme ... generated flights and hotel bookings of over $17,000 and a 40% return on investment... a 190% uplift in New York excursions proving how this technology captures the imagination of travelers.

many leading physicists now consider space-time and gravity to be “emergent” phenomena: Bendy, curvy space-time and the matter within it are a hologram that arises out of a network of entangled qubits... space-time really is just a geometrical representation of the entanglement structure of these underlying quantum systems

the science on how to best communicate science across different issues, social settings and audiences has not led to easy-to-follow, concrete recommendations... becoming increasingly clear that the “deficit model” ... if we just “fill people up” with science knowledge and understanding, they’ll become increasingly rational decision-makers – simpl…

Facebook’s application for Patent 0350675: “systems and methods to identify objectionable content.” ... filed in June 2015, describes a sophisticated system for identifying inappropriate text and images and removing them from the network... improve the detection of pornography, hate speech, and bullying... much easier to identify than false news s…

the increasingly collaborative nature of modern science. Perhaps nothing captures this dichotomy better than the story of the Higgs discovery... Almost 3,000 people qualify as authors on the key physics papers ATLAS produces... easier to guard against bias in interpreting the data The depth and breadth of this effort transform the act of discov…

a new contract where the focus of consulting support doesn’t fall so much on prompt responses (“I have the answers and come to tell you what to do”) as on the facilitated co-creation and dissemination of new operational models (“I’ll use my experience to accelerate your ability to learn and change) ... Only under this condition digital transformat…

founders of the Hub Institute in Paris, have just released a manual (in French) The guide to Digital Transformation... a useful and simple way for every company to measure its progression, with prioritized steps to follow in order of degree of maturity, as well as defining the next stages to undertake.

most deployments fall into the ‘deploy and pray’ category, a minority address known pain points and use cases, whilst only about 20% of projects involve a concerted organisation-wide roll-out aimed at creating a connected company. He argued that some kind of paradigm shift is needed to go beyond just adopting social technologies towards creating a…

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

Where are companies at in their digital transformation efforts?... I define iteration as doing the same things better. Innovation is doing new things that unlocks new value for your customers. Only one of those can lead to disruption, which is doing new things over time that make the old things obsolete.

Perfectly open communities always go sour. You need filters. Every functional community has them. And that’s where machine learning comes in... If you can detect trolls, you can protect the people they’re trolling by muting or putting a warning over the trolls’ posts... Twitter... already have a way of screening out porn. Why don’t they do the sam…

mainstream AI tools: machine learning and deep learning...lack an element that will be key to building the sentient machines ...

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020... technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns get ... so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. The single most important factor influencing your voting decision is your social network… so you can bet that politi…

trillions of dollars are spent on making the world technologically ‘smarter’ ... but very little is spent on getting humans ready for that future... We will need to decide, very soon, where humans end and machines start, and vice-versa- and this is an ethical question NOT a technological challenge.

the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction... Writing more than half a century before our age of computers, touch-screens, and the quantified self, Watts admonishes ... "The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its w…

We talk to a digital journalist from the Euronews about the rise of ‘immersive’ videos like 360° and VR. ... VR (or 360° video) is a very social medium. Some of the earlier comments we received complained the shots were too static, too empty... one of the videos we are the most proud of, and which performed the best... more a feature-style piece, …

Fernando Pereira, who leads Google’s projects in natural language understanding, is less excited about his company’s shiny new devices than he is about what will happen when people use them... how can a machine truly understand phrases... machine learning; specifically... neural networks... use sophisticated algorithms and tons of data to train t…

we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of journalists experimenting with immersive storytelling to tell important stories in new ways... Journalism 360, an initiative to build a network of journalists willing to tackle those challenges and share what they’re learning. With this effort, we’re looking to support experiments, provide training wor…

Decline of text in favour of videos means more Trumps and Berlusconis around the world... the internet which was the last word-centred public space after the decline of print journalism, is capitulating to the television format... public opinion in the age of television is more a set of “emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the …

When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence... Memorial bots ... seemed both inevitable and dangerous. ... is it really what’s beneficial for us? Is it letting go, by forcing you to actually feel everything? Or is it just having a dead person in your attic? ... Today’s bots remain imperfect mimics ... Any suggestion …

Most events are not designed for VR... The rule of thumb is ‘would you look around you in a certain situation?’ if the answer is yes, then ...maybe there is an opportunity to create a VR experience short storytelling is better for breaking news... stick to longer time frames for feature stories

Circa 360, will produce two weekly ad-supported VR pieces... brands can run VR-shot pre-roll ads... take our consumers to places that journalists get to go but the public very seldom gets to ... immersive advertising ... augmented reality ad spots... short videos that hand off to each other—they have a purpose or a pathway to see other stuff b…

it is very clear that ‘Digital Transformation’ is a difficult, ambiguous, misleading and even potentially dangerous term and we have to get better at explaining it... It’s not about digital or technology ... it does have everything to do with business models, people, culture, leadership and change... We should be aiming for nothing less than Hum…

All silos are not equally silo-y.... Twitter is a silo, but I can reliably point to a tweet from outside Twitter... we could come up with a Consumer Reports-like rating for all sites that indicates how much they participate in the open web at a content level.

Within five years robots and so-called intelligent agents will eliminate many positions in customer service, trucking and taxi services, amounting to 6 percent of jobs... The bots of 2021 will be much better at understanding human language, and they will be better at learning from users and increasingly able to handle more complex scenarios.

This report is the first in a series to be issued at regular intervals as a part of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100).

image... apparently shows the spread of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident... being shared widely ... despite the fact that it... shows the wave height of the tsunami... you might want to doublecheck before hitting Share... here’s how