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Category: government – Page 107

Research papers come out far too rapidly for anyone to read them all, especially in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry and company. This column aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in but not limited to artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter.

This week brings a few unusual applications of or developments in machine learning, as well as a particularly unusual rejection of the method for pandemic-related analysis.

One hardly expects to find machine learning in the domain of government regulation, if only because one assumes federal regulators are hopelessly behind the times when it comes to this sort of thing. So it may surprise you that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has partnered with researchers at Stanford to algorithmically root out violators of environmental rules.

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The report said the wildlife farms were part of a project the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years.

Daszak said: “They take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity,” NPR cited. He added that the project was a means to “alleviate rural populations out of poverty,”

In the next two weeks, the WHO is expected to reveal the team’s investigative findings. However, Daszak provided NPR with a “highlight” of what the team determined.

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April 2020…

Daszak says the China bat sampling project has already racked up quite a number of successes. The team and its collaborators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have collected about 15000 samples from bats. From these they have already identified about 400 wholly new coronaviruses. About 50 of those fall into a category that caused the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and, now, the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers were also able to demonstrate that at least some of the new bat coronaviruses they have found are capable of infecting a human cell in a petri dish. Then the team sampled the blood of people in China who live near various bat caves. They found evidence that for some time now, these bat coronaviruses have been spilling over into the human population.

Updated on May 1 at 10:50 a.m. ET

The U.S. government has suddenly terminated funding for a years-long research project in China that many experts say is vital to preventing the next major coronavirus outbreak.

The project was run by a U.S. nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance. For more than a decade, the group has been sending teams to China to trap bats, collect samples of their blood, saliva and feces, and then check those samples for new coronaviruses that could spark the next global pandemic. The idea is to identify locations that need to be monitored, come up with strategies to prevent spillover of the virus into human populations and get a jump on creating vaccines and treatments. Already the project has identified hundreds of coronaviruses, including one very similar to the virus behind the current outbreak.

Continue reading “Why The U.S. Government Stopped Funding A Research Project On Bats And Coronaviruses” | >

By 2050, the number of adults over the age of 65 globally will double, reaching a staggering 1.6 billion, with the largest growth in the developing world. This growth will be one of the greatest social, economic, and political transformations of our time, that will impact existing healthcare, government and social systems, that today are largely not inclusive of the ageing population or built to the scale needed to support it.

But we can begin to make investments in our support systems (enabled and scaled by technology) that encompass a coordinated response from governments, society, academia, and the private sector.

A precursor to investing in innovative solutions will be to acknowledge the needs of older adults and identify their caregiving challenges. These are the issues that will inform the solutions agenda.

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Japan’s space agency wants to keep the satellite’s cameras out of military hands.

An unusual geopolitical situation is brewing aboard the International Space Station. Prior to the military coup in Myanmar earlier this year, Japan’s space agency JAXA had been collaborating with the country to build microsatellites that it planned to deploy in partnership with Myanmar’s government.

Now, JAXA has no idea what to do with the pair of 50-kilogram satellites, according to SlashGear. And while Japanese scientists hope to bring the agriculture and fishery-monitoring satellites to life, they’re currently holding them on the ISS instead of deploying them out of fear they might be misused for military purposes — a striking example of real-world geopolitics spilling over into space.

After the military coup in Myanmar, Teppei Kasai, the Asia program director for the group Human Rights Watch noted that it would be relatively straightforward to use the satellites’ Earth-facing cameras for military or surveillance purposes, according to SlashGear.

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Check out “How Watson Works here.”

Is it possible to live forever by using narrow AI that can perform faster and smarter than humans? Having a doctor give you the correct diagnosis and treatment plan only happens on average, 54% of the time, as the New England Journal of Medicine has pointed out. Having Watson instantly diagnose you with the correct diagnosis and treatment plan 95% of the time will become the new standard. Our crop of new personal medicine products such as continual internal diagnostics, synthetic immune systems, virtual assistants, and regenerative medicine will diagnose and stop sickness from ever occurring while constantly rebuilding and improving body and mind capabilities.

IBM has made a series of Watson computer systems so that any company can raise their industries products and services far beyond our human capability. IBM’s Watson was first featured to the public with its historic Jeopardy win over Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter the best human Jeopardy players. At the time, Watson contained 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content in a ninety server computing system with an analytical software IBM designed called DeepQA. Now, the financial markets, medicine, insurance companies, government, engineering, and customer service call centers are employing (buying) Watson is an artificial intelligence system, that can be specifically tailored to any digitized industry and quickly evolve their industries potential.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX is preparing to further expand testing of its Starlink satellite internet in a test for the U.S. Air Force, an FCC request revealed.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is preparing to further test its Starlink satellite internet in a demonstration for the U.S. Air Force, the company revealed in a recent request to the Federal Communications Commission.

“SpaceX seeks to make minor modifications to its experimental authorization for additional test activities undertaken with the federal government,” the company wrote to the FCC in a filing on Thursday.

“The tests are designed to demonstrate the ability to transmit to and receive information from two stationary ground sites and one airborne aircraft at one location, and would add to these limited testing from a moving vehicle on the ground,” SpaceX said.

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These shifting dynamics in India’s digital marketplace are yet another warning sign of what’s been dubbed the splinternet, foreshadowing a possible world where each country sticks to its own apps and abandons the open and global nature of the internet. For now, however, these homegrown apps may find it difficult to compete at the same level unless the government decides to ban Facebook and Twitter, too.

While Twitter finds itself in a prolonged standoff with the Indian government over the company’s refusal to take down certain accounts, a senior executive of a very similar Indian social network says the sudden attention on his app has been “overwhelming.”

“It feels like … you’ve just been put in the finals of the World Cup suddenly and everyone’s watching you and the team,” Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of Koo, told CNN Business.

Koo, touted by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and used enthusiastically by several officials and ministries in his government, has been downloaded 3.3 million times so far this year, per app analytics firm Sensor Tower. It’s a promising start for a company founded less than a year ago, but less than Twitter’s 4.2 million Indian downloads during the same period.

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