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Dr. Emily Rice, an Associate Professor of Astrophysics at the Macaulay Honors College of CUNY and resident research associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), is one of the keynote speakers at the TEDxCUNY conference to be hosted on March 10, 2023.

Dr. Rice is extremely involved in the scientific community through her role as a researcher and professor. Dr. Rice co-founded the research group Brown Dwarfs in New York City (BDNYC) with Dr. Kelle Cruz from CUNY Hunter College and Dr. Jackie Faherty from AMNH. Brown Dwarfs are objects that have masses between giant exoplanets and low mass stars. Dr. Rice explained there was a lot about Brown Dwarfs that scientists were yet to explore and understand.

“The three of us started this research group following a small project we had collaborated on,” Dr. Rice said. In 2010, Dr. Cruz had started their work with Hunter College, Dr. Rice was wrapping up her postdoctoral work, and Dr. Faherty was finishing up graduate school. “We all happened to be in New York City at the time, and we were all working with Brown Dwarfs, so we decided to create a research group focused on these substellar objects,” Dr. Rice remarked.

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A green bullet train capable of touching 200 miles per hour

The proposed 218-mile high-speed network will connect Las Vegas and Southern California with technology that allows it to maintain a cruising speed of 200 miles per hour (321 km/h). This means the travel time between the cities will be just over an hour. In comparison, a journey by car takes over four hours.

The expenditure on the project is expected to provide a much-needed boost to the economy, including the creation of nearly 35,000 jobs during the construction phase and around 10,000 permanent jobs. According to Brightline, the fully electric, emission-free system will be one of the greenest forms of transportation in the U.S., removing 3 million cars and 400,000 tons of CO2 each year.

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You’re going to have strong feelings about this redesign.

Gustav Söderström has worked at Spotify for a long time; his first big project was leading the launch of its mobile app back in 2009. That makes him the perfect company leader to talk to about Spotify’s recent redesign, which introduces a visual, TikTok-like feed for discovering new content on the app’s homepage. As his boss, CEO Daniel Ek, put it last week, it’s the biggest change Spotify has undergone since we introduced mobile.

Spotify is launching a feed that will help you discover new artists, podcasts, and audiobooks.

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Google will soon offer ways to generate text and images using machine learning in its Workspace products as part of a scramble to catch up with rivals in the new AI race.

Google has announced a suite of upcoming generative AI features for its various Workspace apps, including Google Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and Slides.

Google is pumping its productivity apps full of AI.

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The news comes after 13 percent of the company was cut in November. ‘This will be tough and there’s no way around that,’ CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees.

Meta will lay off an additional 10,000 employees through multiple rounds of cuts over the coming two months, close hiring for 5,000 open roles, and cancel more low-priority projects, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday. These cuts come just four months after he laid off 11,000 employees, or 13 percent of the company, last November.

Meta plans to cut its workforce by another 10,000 people and withdraw around 5,000 open roles that it had yet to fill, company co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday, confirming recent rumors that another round of layoffs was imminent.

Zuckerberg also said that the company will cancel “lower priority projects,” adding that he “underestimated the indirect costs” associated with these initiatives.

The announcement comes just four months after Meta revealed that it was eliminating about 11,000 roles as the social networking giant pushes ahead with what it’s calling a “year of efficiency.” Combined, this means that Meta has effectively laid off — or plans to lay-off — roughly one-quarter of its workforce since the tail-end of last year.

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OpenAI has released a powerful new image-and text-understanding AI model, GPT-4, that the company calls “the latest milestone in its effort in scaling up deep learning.”

GPT-4 is available today to OpenAI’s paying users via ChatGPT Plus (with a usage cap), and developers can sign up on a waitlist to access the API.

Pricing is $0.03 per 1,000 “prompt” tokens (about 750 words) and $0.06 per 1,000 “completion” tokens (again, about 750 words). Tokens represent raw text; for example, the word “fantastic” would be split into the tokens “fan,” “tas” and “tic.” Prompt tokens are the parts of words fed into GPT-4 while completion tokens are the content generated by GPT-4.

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Microsoft laid off an entire team dedicated to guiding AI innovation that leads to ethical, responsible and sustainable outcomes. The cutting of the ethics and society team, as reported by Platformer, is part of a recent spate of layoffs that affected 10,000 employees across the company.

The elimination of the team comes as Microsoft invests billions more dollars into its partnership with OpenAI, the startup behind art-and text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, and revamps its Bing search engine and Edge web browser to be powered by a new, next-generation large language model that is “more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search.”

The move calls into question Microsoft’s commitment to ensuring its product design and AI principles are closely intertwined at a time when the company is making its controversial AI tools available to the mainstream.

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