MIT News: Toward artificial intelligence that learns to write code. “Learning to code involves recognizing how to structure a program, and how to fill in every last detail correctly. No wonder it can be so frustrating. A new program-writing AI, SketchAdapt, offers a way out. Trained on tens of thousands of program examples, SketchAdapt learns how to compose short, high-level programs, while letting a second set of algorithms find the right sub-programs to fill in the details.”
Research & Opinion
The Next Web: How to read a scientific research paper
The Next Web: How to read a scientific research paper. “One of the most important skills any discerning media consumer can have is the ability to comprehend a scientific research paper. Reading a paper won’t imbue you with the ability to understand all the science behind it, but it could help you debunk BS when you see it on the news or social media.” Good for the basics, not a deep dive.
EurekAlert: One class in all languages
EurekAlert: One class in all languages. “Now anyone from around the world can listen live to a Nobel Prize Laureate lecture or earn credits from the most reputable universities with nothing more than internet access. However, the possible information to be gained from watching and listening online is lost if the audience cannot understand the language of the lecturer. To solve this problem, scientists at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan, presented a solution with new machine learning at the 240th meeting of the Special Interest Group of Natural Language Processing, Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ SIG-NL).”
The Straits Times: Scientists to develop global microorganism DNA database to tackle foodborne diseases
The Straits Times: Scientists to develop global microorganism DNA database to tackle foodborne diseases. “Just like the genetic databases used by police to nab offenders who leave their DNA at the crime scene, experts in foodborne disease are setting up a global data bank which will help them identify, track and treat outbreaks fast. The effort will see laboratories and clinics around the world sharing the DNA of various strains of diseases (including foodborne diseases), and promises to transform the way food poisoning cases are contained.”
NBC News: I swapped social media for meditation — and it turned me into a monster
NBC News: I swapped social media for meditation — and it turned me into a monster. “I believe in making big changes in my life only after I’ve made big mistakes. I know that’s not the most logical way of handling things that aren’t going so well, but as someone who is inherently stubborn, it’s nearly impossible for me to wake up and smell the roses, until, of course, the flowers are completely wilted. And that’s how it happened with my social media addiction. I started to realize I had an extreme reliance on social media when my boyfriend asked me a question that made my insides tingle.” NOT THAT KIND OF QUESTION! Geez, y’all.
Campus Technology: UC System, Carnegie Mellon Pilot Tool for Sharing Research Methods
Campus Technology: UC System, Carnegie Mellon Pilot Tool for Sharing Research Methods . “The University of California system and Carnegie Mellon University are both piloting the use of a platform … in an effort to bring down a major barrier to reproducible research: the creation and sharing of detailed methods in published articles. As part of the larger open access movement, the universities hope to facilitate collaborative method development and to increase research reproducibility.”
The whisper of schizophrenia: Machine learning finds ‘sound’ words predict psychosis (EurekAlert)
EurekAlert: The whisper of schizophrenia: Machine learning finds ‘sound’ words predict psychosis. “A machine-learning method discovered a hidden clue in people’s language predictive of the later emergence of psychosis — the frequent use of words associated with sound. A paper published by the journal npj Schizophrenia published the findings by scientists at Emory University and Harvard University. The researchers also developed a new machine-learning method to more precisely quantify the semantic richness of people’s conversational language, a known indicator for psychosis.”
