The title page of the new Oxford edition of Shakespeare's three Henry VI plays will, for the first time ever, include the words "by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe". Most people have heard of Shakespeare's hunchback king Richard III.
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Published on: 1 Nov 2016
The end of September saw the formation of a new team of rivals: the Partnership on AI, whose motto is "to benefit people and society". The partnership includes tech giants Amazon, Google and its subsidiary Deepmind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft.
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Published on: 3 Oct 2016
Last Friday's edition of The Globe and Mail newspaper included a story on how predictive analytics might help decrease university drop-out rates. Several Data Science companies, including IBM’s Watson Analytics and Microsoft, are offering universities their expertise on identifying students at risk of dropping out. Of course, having low marks is a good predictor, but it is not the only one. Women, for example, are less likely than men to leave university before finishing their studies, but when they do, their marks are usually quite good. So why are they dropping out?
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Published on: 21 Sep 2016
Yesterday (September 6, 2016) saw the launch of a new book by Cathy O'Neil with the provactive title Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. O'Neil holds a Ph.D. from Harvard in Math and was a tenure-track math professor until 2007, when she quit academia to join Wall Street. That fledging second career came to an end just a year later with the Financial Crisis, after which O'Neil again changed careers and became a data scientist.
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Published on: 7 Sep 2016
The August 24 episode of "Babbage", a podcast from The Economist about science and technology news, reports on an worrisome new Russian web-site, FindFace.ru. This website allows you to input a picture of a face and do a search for that person, or someone who looks like that person, on VK.com, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. The website boasts of a 70% accuracy rate.
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Published on: 25 Aug 2016
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming more and more integrated in our daily lives: AI agents might decide if you get a bank loan, or if your job application will ever reach human eyes. Not everyone is comfortable with this trend, since we don't always know exactly how the AI comes to its decision. AI learns from existing data to predict future data, but its inner workings can be a mystery even to the AI's programmers. That's a problem if the AI is making life or death decisions, as it would in missile systems or unmanned drones.
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Published on: 18 Aug 2016
There is a dark corner of the Internet where hackers sell their software. The process unfolds in three steps.
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Published on: 10 Aug 2016
What causes depression? Of course, life circumstances such as traumatic events, severe stress or grief play a role, but heredity studies have shown that a genetic predisposition to depression is equally important as environmental triggers [1]. Until very recently, though, the genes that underpin such a predisposition have proven elusive.
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Published on: 10 Aug 2016
Phishing messages typically get 5-10% response rates, but a new system has boosted its rate to 40%. John Seymour and Phil Tully, two data scientists from the security company ZeroFOX, presented their system SNAP_R at Black Hat, a Las Vegas conference on cyber-security, on August 4. SNAP_R uses a deep neural net to study a person's past tweets and then mimics that person's writing style using a Markov model, generating a phishing tweet. So far, there is no reason to think that criminals are using a similar system, but Seymour and Tully's work show how it might be done.
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Published on: 5 Aug 2016
Online bullying and trolls are the darker side of social media. Twitter's Chief Executive Officer stated in a February 2015 memo that he wanted to make it a corporate priority to detect abuse and hate speech on Twitter.
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Published on: 2 Aug 2016
A team of researchers in the Netherlands has developed the means to store data at the atomic level. This technique would allow 502 terabytes of data to fit into one square inch. According to the authors, "[t]ranslating the two-dimensional storage density presented here to three dimensions, would ... allow the storage of the entire US Library of Congress in a cube 100 µm wide." At the moment, the memory array can operate up to a temperature of 77 K (about -210 C), meaning that the technology would be restricted to data centres capable of maintaining such temperatures.
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Published on: 26 Jul 2016
An item in today's CBC News reports on towns in Labrador West that are repositioning their economies for the 21st Century. These local economies once relied on mining minerals but are now housing data centres. The cheaper power and cooler air of the area make them ideal for data warehousing, since such centres use a lot of electricity and cause machines to heat up. Great North Data, a company based out of St.
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Published on: 26 Jul 2016
