News

How much information about a person’s behavior can you ascertain from a wearable device? Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Alan Turing Institute sought to investigate this in a study involving over 280,000 hours of wrist accelerometer and wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) data. They claim they successfully trained classifiers on the dataset to capture physiologically meaningful…

AI researchers from Virginia Tech and Western University have concluded that an unequal distribution of compute power in academia is furthering inequality in the era of deep learning. They also point to the impact on academia of people leaving prestigious universities for high-paying industry jobs. The concentration of compute power at elite universities crowds out mid- to low-tier research…

Microsoft and OpenAI, the AI research lab in which Microsoft has invested over $1 billion, today submitted a document to the U.S. government describing how a “digitally transformed” export controls system might work and the benefits it could provide. The organizations suggest that their proposed solutions could bring commercial benefits to users, as well as a more powerful, dynamic, and…

Some polls predicting results of the U.S. 2020 presidential election appear to have missed the mark. Aggregator RealClearPolitics showed former vice president Joe Biden with a 7-point advantage over current president Donald Trump, while FiveThirtyEight suggested Biden was ahead by at least 8 points at the national level on average. In reality, the race turned out to be substantially tighter. In…