What can artificial intelligence learn from biological brains? At this Wednesday’s lunch seminar series at CDS, Professor Partha Mitra from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory explained how he has been mapping biological brain connectivity in his Mouse Brain Architecture Project to discover how we can transfer biological brain architectures to machine brains. AI has made … Continue reading Constructing Machine Brains Using Neuroanatomy
We already know that the tone of media coverage influences people’s attitudes and opinions. But is that influence conditional? Amber Boydstun, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Davis, addressed this question at last Thursday’s Text as Data seminar titled The Conditional Effects of Media Tone on Public Opinion: The Case … Continue reading Tracking The Tones of Media Coverage
Although financial agencies and financial instruments vary, they are underpinned by the same risk management methodology: estimate the worst-case hypotheticals to hedge against financial upheavals. Value at Risk (VaR), one quantitative risk management strategy that emerged as a solid method following the 1987 stock market crash, was heavily trusted prior to the 2008 financial crisis … Continue reading Improving Stress Tests on Financial Portfolios
Why is “unbreakable” such a special word for linguists? Unbeknownst to the general public, the word is actually composed of three smaller units that linguists call morphemes. Referring to the smallest meaningful grammatical unit of a language, the three morphemes in ‘unbreakable’ are ‘un’ , ‘break’, and ‘able’. Studying the underlying morpheme structures within a … Continue reading Creating Synthetic Languages
There currently exist two main approaches to generating images using artificial intelligence: Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Variational Autoencoding (VAE). GAN pits two neural networks against one another in order to improve their generation of photorealistic images. In GAN, there is a generator which produces fake images, and a discriminator, which differentiates the fake images … Continue reading Using AI To Generate Images
Just last week, CDS Professor Kyunghyun Cho and an international group of his colleagues* released Nematus, an exciting toolkit for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Nematus performs neural machine translation using an encoder-decoder model, an approach that replaces traditional ‘phrase based’ translation and has become … Continue reading Say Hello to Nematus, A New Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation
As the data surrounding Automated Vehicles grows, safety improves but privacy concerns also arise. The majority of human-operated vehicle accidents occur due to human errors like drunk driving or road rage. Presumably, AVs will lead to a safer driving environment by reducing, and one day, removing, the human factor from the road. Big data is … Continue reading How Can We Use Data to Make Self-Driving Cars Safer?
While we know that data science is rapidly becoming a vital strategy in several academic fields, what role does it play in running our government? Last Wednesday, the CDS Lunch Research Seminar heard from Dr. Jaime Anne Earnest, a program analyst and data scientist from the US Department of Defense. Surprisingly, until former President Barack … Continue reading Future State: How Can We Use Big Data To Develop Better Governance?
A group of professors and researchers at the Technical University of Berlin, the University of Vienna, and ETH Zurich have recently been working on understanding deep neural networks (computer systems that are modelled after the human brain) in “a mathematically sound way”, as Dr. Phillip Petersen refers to it. Although the official paper for this … Continue reading Math& Data Seminar: Optimal Approximation with Sparse Deep Neural Networks
Are robots taking over? Vasant Dhar, a data scientist and professor at CDS, focuses his research on the balance between automation and humans and has recently published his work in Harvard Business Review. Given the growing number of industries where computers are able to make decisions, a need has risen for a systematic way to … Continue reading Using Robots To Make Decisions
