Interesting
Reads – 2019-04-15
Contents
Articles
- No sleep, no sex, no life: tech workers in China’s Silicon Valley face burnout before they reach 30
- Why your smartphone is causing you ‘text neck’ syndrome
- What Can You Do With a Liberal Arts Degree? Answers to All Your Questions
- The European Union has published new guidelines on developing ethical AI
- 32 Statistical Concepts Explained in Simple English (a series in 11parts)
- Facial Recognition: 16 Industries The Tech Could Transform
- Ghost World
- Meet Katie Bouman, One Woman Who Helped Make the World's First Image of a Black Hole
- Why there’s so little left of the early internet
- Algorithms have already taken over human decision making
- Web 3.0: the decentralised web promises to make the internet free again
- The Rivers in Our Skies
- 11 Challenges Facing Tech Execs In 2019 And Their Plans To Overcome Them
- CBSE releases a list of compendium courses for students to pursue after 12th
- Bonus: The complexity of memory (videos)
Events /
Announcements
- SPINCON-2019: Conf. on “Agility, Automation & Cloudification” on 20th Apr 2019 at Chennai
- National Small Industries Corp (NSIC) offers job assisted training pgms
- MIDS-2019: International Workshop on Machine Intelligence and Data Science at Kochi 31st May 2019 & 1st Jun 2019
- Call For Papers: IEEE TENCON 2019 at Kochi during 17-19 Oct 2019
- IEEE INDICON-2019 at Marwadi University, Rajkot, Gujarat during 13-15 Dec 2019
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========================================================
Articles
No
sleep, no sex, no life: tech workers in China’s Silicon Valley face burnout
before they reach 30
He
is so focused on keeping his start-up alive that he can't sleep at night. She
was asked in an interview if she would be willing to break up with her
boyfriend for the job. A young couple want their own family but have no energy
for sex after work.
These
are some of the struggles faced by the hundreds of thousands of young workers
in China’s tech industry like Yu Haoran, a 26-year-old computer science major,
who in 2014 founded Jisuanke, a start-up in Beijing’s hi-tech Zhongguancun
district to teach kids coding.
Yu
has worked nights and weekends to grow his business from a 10-coder team to one
with a 200 million yuan (US$29.8 million) valuation thanks to venture capital
backing. But the personal price he pays is chronic insomnia, sometimes getting
just two hours of sleep every night.
Why your smartphone is causing you ‘text neck’ syndrome
Most of us hunch over our smartphone for at least
two hours a day. This can effectively increase the weight of your head by up to
27kg, damage your posture, and if you text while walking, expose you to all
kinds of accidents.
Typically people crane their neck forward 45 degrees
when sending text messages. This places a weight of almost 22kg on the spine,
cervical ligaments and other muscles – five times the pressure considered
normal, according to a Surgical Technology International study. Over the course
of a year, this amounts to an additional 1,000 to 1,400 hours of pressure on
the average smartphone user’s spine.
What
Can You Do With a Liberal Arts Degree? Answers to All Your Questions
A
liberal arts education integrates multiple disciplines, critical thinking
strategies and effective communication skills to prepare students for success
in any professional path they choose. This humanities-based approach gives
undergraduates the opportunity to explore their passions and acquire a vast
array of skills that can be applied to various fields and job positions.
Whether
you're pursuing a liberal arts education or already have, we're going to
provide insight on the fields you can enter, opportunities for continued
education and skills you can acquire from obtaining this degree.
The European Union has
published new guidelines on developing ethical AI
The European Union today published a
set of guidelines on how companies and governments should develop ethical
applications of artificial intelligence.
These rules aren’t like Isaac Asimov’s
“Three Laws of Robotics.” They don’t offer a snappy, moral framework that will
help us control murderous robots. Instead, they address the murky and diffuse
problems that will affect society as we integrate AI into sectors like health
care, education, and consumer technology.
Related
Story: Congress wants to protect you from biased algorithms, deepfakes, and
other bad AI
32
Statistical Concepts Explained in Simple English (a series in 11parts)
This
resource is part of a series on specific topics related to data science:
regression, clustering, neural networks, deep learning, decision trees,
ensembles, correlation, Python, R, Tensorflow, SVM, data reduction, feature
selection, experimental design, cross-validation, model fitting, and many more
Links to the rest 10 parts are at the
end of the post
Facial
Recognition: 16 Industries The Tech Could Transform
From
screening patients for clinical trials to assessing the emotional state of
drivers, we dive in to how facial recognition technology is shaping the future.
The
biometric software behind facial recognition applications can identify facial
structures, contours, and expressions, making it a no-brainer for security and
identification purposes.
But
it can also lead to creative applications that serve a different purpose.
Listerine, for example, created an app that uses facial recognition to notify
people who are blind that they were being smiled at.
While
the technology is still developing, many companies (including Amazon) are
banking on it as a disruptive force in a myriad of markets. At the same time,
the tech is highly controversial — with privacy as a point of concern.
From
creating checkout-free retail stores to eliminating concert tickets, here are
16 industries that are starting to transform with facial recognition
technology.
Ghost
World
In
mid-2017, a Uyghur man in his twenties, whom I will call Alim, went to meet a
friend for lunch at a mall in his home city, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous
Region in northwest China. At a security checkpoint at the entrance, Alim
scanned the photo on his government-issued identification card, and presented
himself before a security camera equipped with facial recognition software. An
alarm sounded. The security guards let him pass, but within a few minutes he
was approached by officers from the local “convenience police station,” one of
the thousands of rapid-response police stations that have been built every 200
or 300 meters in the Turkic Muslim areas of the region. The officers took him
into custody.
Over
the past five years, the People’s War on Terror has allowed Chinese tech
startups such as Leon, Meiya Pico, Hikvision, Face++, Sensetime, and Dahua to
achieve unprecedented levels of growth. In just the last two years, the state
has invested an estimated $7.2 billion on techno-security in Xinjiang.
Freedom
of movement through airports, railways, and bus stations throughout Zimbabwe
will now be managed through a facial database integrated with other kinds of
biometric data. In effect, the Uyghur homeland has become an incubator for
China’s “terror capitalism.”
“Uyghurs
are alive, but their entire lives are behind walls,” Dawut said softly. “It is
like they are ghosts living in another world.”
Meet
Katie Bouman, One Woman Who Helped Make the World's First Image of a Black Hole
The
space was tiny and hot. On a fateful day last summer, Katie Bouman and three
fellow researchers filed into a small room at Harvard University, safe from
prying eyes, in order to see an image that had been years in the making.
Researchers
from all over the world had combined forces to gather masses of astronomical
data — enough to fill a half ton of hard drives — that they hoped to turn into
the world’s first image of a black hole. In order to do that, the team needed
algorithms that could distill all that noisy, messy information into one
comprehensible picture. And Bouman, whose expertise is not in astrophysics but
computer science, was one of a small group of people who spent years developing
and testing those methods.
Related
Story: Meet Katie Bouman, the scientist behind the first-ever picture of a
black hole
Why
there’s so little left of the early internet
It
took nearly five years into the internet’s life before anyone made a concerted
effort to archive it. Much of our earliest online activity has disappeared.
Algorithms have already taken over human decision making
I can still recall my surprise when a book by
evolutionary biologist Peter Lawrence entitled “The making of a fly” came to be
priced on Amazon at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping). While my colleagues
around the world must have become rather depressed that an academic book could
achieve such a feat, the steep price was actually the result of algorithms
feeding off each other and spiralling out of control. It turns out, it wasn’t
just sales staff being creative: algorithms were calling the shots.
This eye-catching example was spotted and corrected.
But what if such algorithmic interference happens all the time, including in
ways we don’t even notice? If our reality is becoming increasingly constructed
by algorithms, where does this leave us humans?
Our exploration led us to the conclusion that, over
time, the roles of information technology and humans have been reversed. In the
past, we humans used technology as a tool. Now, technology has advanced to the
point where it is using and even controlling us.
Related
Paper: When Humans Using the IT Artifact Becomes IT Using the Human
Artifact
Web 3.0: the decentralised web promises to make the internet free
again
Have you recently considered deleting your Facebook
account, boycotting Amazon or trying to find an alternative to Google? You
wouldn’t be alone. The tech giants are invading our privacy, misusing our data,
strangling economic growth and helping governments spy on us. Yet because these
few companies own so many of the internet’s key services, it seems there is
little people can do to avoid having to interact with them if they want to stay
online.
However, 30 years after the world wide web was
created, a third generation of web technology might offer a way to change
things. The DWeb, a new decentralised version of cyberspace, promises to enable
better user control, more competition between internet firms and less dominance
by the large corporations. But there are still serious questions over whether
it’s possible – or even desirable.
Related
Story: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web
Related
Story: The internet is now an arena for conflict, and we’re all caught up
in it
The Rivers in Our Skies
In December 2016, meteorologist F. Martin Ralph was
sitting in a restaurant in San Francisco. On the TV screen, the weather report
was talking about a particular kind of weather formation called an atmospheric
river, which was headed right for California.
Atmospheric rivers are exactly what they sound
like—rivers of water vapor, flowing through the atmosphere. They move from the
tropics toward the continents and poles, stretching to as much as 375 miles
wide and carrying more water than multiple Mississippi Rivers.
When an atmospheric river meets mountainous terrain
like the Sierra Nevada, the water vapor condenses and becomes rain or snow.
Strong atmospheric rivers can bring about floods and landslides, but the water
and snowpack they leave behind provide California with 25 to 50 percent of its
yearly precipitation in just a few days.
11 Challenges Facing Tech Execs In 2019 And Their Plans To Overcome
Them
Often the start of the new year brings new
challenges for most companies, ranging from growing revenue and scaling to
expanding the client base, attracting and retaining top talent, and more.
So, what are the challenges facing tech industry
leaders this year, and how are they planning to overcome them? We asked 11
experts from Forbes Technology Council exactly that.
CBSE releases a list of compendium courses for students to pursue
after 12th
Central Board of Secondary Education has prepared a
list of compendium courses in order to help students get information about
various course choices after +2. This is an earnest effort of the board to help
students while scouting for the right choice of course for pursuing higher
education. The Board has included a total of 113 courses and their main motive
is to generate enough curiosity in the child to want to explore further on the
scope, possibilities, avenues, etc. for each of these courses. Students can
also look for other options that go beyond these courses.
Bonus: The complexity of
memory (videos)
The mind is a diligent recorder, taking note of all
that happens and storing data on it for retrieval later, right? Well actually,
no. Enjoy these 7 illuminating talks on the science—and oddities—of our memory.
Events /
Announcements
SPINCON-2019:
Conf. on “Agility, Automation & Cloudification” on 20th Apr 2019
at Chennai
Bosses
love it when you bring them solutions. And that’s exactly what you get at SPIN
Chennai's Agility, Automation & Cloudification conference; essential
insight, hindsight and out-of-sight on the rapidly changing cloud landscape,
valuable insights from industry experts on Automation and smart ideas from your peers. So ask your
fearless leader to send you this year.
Reduced
registration fee applicable to members of supporting organisations such as CSI,
IEEE, ACM, ISACA etc.,
National Small
Industries Corp (NSIC) offers job assisted training pgms
NSIC
offers job assisted training pgms on Mobile App Development & IOT for Healthcare
from 22nd Apr 2019. For details pl. see https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6523176279703937024
Or
contact: Dr Rajesh Kumar 9944067397
MIDS-2019:
International Workshop on Machine Intelligence and Data Science at Kochi 31st
May 2019 & 1st Jun 2019
This two-day
workshop is designed for research scholars / graduate students/ faculty and
researchers from the academia and industry who wish to learn about the latest
methodologies in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. The International
workshop on Machine Intelligence and Data Science (MIDS) brings together
established speakers in the field of Machine Intelligence and Data Science. Day
1 will cover various aspects of machine intelligence and its current
applications in data science. Day 2 will cover research methodologies, sharing
experiences in writing papers for impact journals and grant applications
followed by a short symposium for PhD scholars. MIDS is co-organized by Machine
Intelligence Research Academy (MIRA), India and Machine Intelligence Research
Labs (MIR Labs), USA and will be held in Kochi, India as follows:
May 31, 2019:
Plenary talks / workshop sessions
June 01, 2019:
Research writing skills / How to Innovate Research? / PhD symposium
For details pl.
visit http://www.mirlabs.net/mids19
Call For Papers: IEEE TENCON 2019 at Kochi during 17-19 Oct 2019
TENCON is the flagship premier
international technical conference of IEEE Region 10. The Theme for TENCON 2019
is "Technology, Knowledge, and Society", and it will be held during
17th to 20th October, 2019 at Hotel Grand Hyatt, Bolgatty, Kochi, Kerala.
Paper submission deadline: 29th
Apr 2019
More at http://www.tencon2019.org
IEEE INDICON-2019 at Marwadi University, Rajkot, Gujarat during 13-15
Dec 2019
IEEE INDICON 2019 – the flagship
conference of the IEEE India Council – will be held at Marwadi University,
Rajkot, Gujarat from December 13 to 15, 2019 with the theme “Applying
Artificial Intelligence in Engineering for prosperity and betterment of humanity”.
The Call for Papers is now available
on the IEEE INDICON 2019 website; http://indicon2019.in/.
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Feedback
We
will be pleased to have your feedback on the “Interesting Reads” posts being
sent once in five days.
Pl.
share the links of any interesting things you come across so that we can
include them in these email posts.
Also,
pl. share the email ids of your colleagues, friends, peers and contacts, if you
want them to be included in the google group to get regular posts.
Pl.
send all your communications to hrmohan.ieee@gmail.com
With
regards
HR
Mohan
