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In today’s multicultural society, language is the biggest barrier between the employer and the employee. And now as more opportunities for remote jobs are open, employees’ biggest fear is the language barrier or the different accents that might put them in a tough spot with the company they are applying for. Three Stanford students decided to encounter this problem after one of their own friends lost a customer support job due to his accent.

We decided to help the world understand and be understood, student Andres Perez Soderi, who is one of the founders of the new firm, told IEEE Spectrum. The friend group-turned-partners include a computer science major from China, an AI-focused management science and engineering major from Russia and a business-oriented MSE major from Venezuela.

After extensive research, the group found out that a lot of work had been done for voice conversion for deep fake technology but very little attention was given to accent translation. “We knew about accent-reduction therapy and being taught to emulate the way someone else speaks in order to connect with them. And we knew from our own experience that forcing a different accent on yourself is uncomfortable,” added Soderi. “We thought if we could allow software to translate the accent [instead], we could let people speak naturally.” Hence, in 2020 they started a company called Sanas which specializes in different accent translation.

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Discussing The Future Of “Seno-Therapeutic” Development — Dr. Judith Campisi, PhD, Professor of Biogerontology, Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

Dr. Judith Campisi, PhD (https://www.buckinstitute.org/lab/campisi-lab/) is a biochemist, cell biologist, and Professor of Biogerontology at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

Dr. Campisi received a PhD in biochemistry from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and completed her postdoctoral training in cell cycle regulation at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. As an assistant and associate professor at the Boston University Medical School, she studied the role of cellular senescence in suppressing cancer and soon became convinced that senescent cells also contributed to aging. She joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a senior scientist in 1991 working with Dr. Mina Bissell. In 2,002 she started a second laboratory at the Buck Institute. At both institutions, Dr. Campisi established a broad program to understand the relationship between aging and age-related disease, with an emphasis on the interface between cancer and aging.

Continue reading “Dr. Judith Campisi, Ph.D. — Professor of Biogerontology — Buck Institute for Research on Aging” | >

Shokrollah Elahi led a new study showing that short-lived white blood cells called neutrophils play a role in impaired T cell functions and counts in people with HIV, as well as the chronic inflammation that is common with the virus. (Photo: Najmeh Bozorgmehr)

In a groundbreaking study of people living with HIV, University of Alberta researchers found that elusive white blood cells called neutrophils play a role in impaired T cell functions and counts, as well as the associated chronic inflammation that is common with the virus.

Neutrophils are a foundational part of the body’s immune system and the most abundant type of white blood cell, making up about 60 to 80 per cent of circulating immune cells in the blood. However, unlike other types of white blood cells, neutrophils are extremely short-lived and cannot be frozen and thawed like other immune cells, making them extremely difficult to examine, said study lead Shokrollah Elahi.

“Neutrophils live for hours to a day or two maximum,” Elahi said. “The body produces a lot of neutrophils, and they do their job and then they die and have to be regenerated in the bone marrow. But despite the fact that neutrophils are the most abundant white blood cells in the blood circulation, their role in the context of HIV has not been very well defined.”

Continue reading “Landmark study points to source of rapid aging, chronic inflammation in people living with HIV” | >

Laser lidar startup Luminar, founded and led by the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by Forbes, will supply its sensors to Nvidia for a new autonomous vehicle technology platform that the chip and computing powerhouse is developing for automakers to install in consumer cars and trucks. The news pushed Luminar’s shares up more than 20%.

Nvidia aims to supply the DRIVE Hyperion system, powered by its Orin “systems on a chip” computing hardware, AI-enabled software and Luminar’s long-range Iris lidar, to automakers starting in 2,024 Luminar said at Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia’s annual GTC conference. The platform, which also integrates cameras and radar for additional sensing capability, includes everything needed for mass-production vehicles to operate autonomously in highway driving, Nvidia said earlier this year.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has big promise to solve problems in almost every industry. AI-supported, AI-fueled, AI-based technologies are now present and capable of automating tasks in retail businesses and wealth management, to name a couple. These automations reduce error, manage increasingly vast datasets, and free up humans to do intelligent, strategic tasks. At the enterprise level, AI-architecture is transforming capacity and steadily shaping the way businesses of the future operate.

Connecting to Core Systems of Commerce Businesses Operationalizing machine learning or AI at scale is a key priority for the world of retail and commerce. Enterprise tech stacks leverage AI and predictions for high-frequency, ambiguous situations. Active learning and continuous improvement of AI are embedded in business applications and workflows. Making use of these requires contextual stitching of signals to create a single unified view of the truth, which empowers teams to make contextual decisions in the present. While the technological frameworks have existed for the better part of a decade, most businesses have been unable to overcome the barrier of applying technology in real world contexts, or at scale.

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After a series of delays for bad weather, the ill-health of an astronaut and then a wait for the splashdown of the previous mission this morning the world’s only re-usable orbital rocket take four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) as SpaceX and NASA launch the Crew-3 mission.

Originally due to launch on October 27 2021 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA has now confirmed that its SpaceX Crew-3 mission will take-off no earlier than 9:03 p.m. EST on Wednesday, November 10 2021.

After the night launch the Falcon 9 rocket will attempt to land on a drone-ship in the Atlantic.

It will be SpaceX’s fourth NASA flight with astronauts, though last month it also successfully launched and landed the first all-civilian private astronaut crewed mission to orbit Earth.

Continue reading “NASA And SpaceX’s Delayed ‘Halloween’ Mission Is Finally Going Skywards. Here’s When And Where To Watch Four Astronauts Blast-Off” | >

Wastewater samples are being used to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

It’s sometimes called ‘wastewater-based epidemiology’ (WBE) – a scientific and public health field that involves detecting and monitoring specific molecules in untreated wastewater, to determine how prevalent they are. First proposed more than 70 years ago as a way to track the spread of the deadly poliovirus, WBE has since been used to measure human population exposure to pollutants, and even to estimate the level of drug consumption in major cities. In 2,020 it hit global news headlines when it was first proposed as a way to track SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

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You’ve heard the phase “we are all made of star-stuff,” attributed to the late astronomer Carl Sagan, but that grand statement can be broken-down into every constituent part of the human body–such as your teeth and bones.

Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory (ESO)‘s mighty Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile have detected fluorine in a distant star-forming galaxy 12 billion light-years away.

It’s the first time fluorine has been observed in a star-forming galaxy so early in the history of the Universe.

“We all know about fluorine because the toothpaste we use every day contains it in the form of fluoride,” said Maximilien Franco from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, who led the new study, published today in Nature Astronomy.

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Continue reading “An Element Found In Our Bones, Teeth And In Toothpaste Has Been Discovered In An Ancient Galaxy 12 Billion Light-Years Away” | >

The four Crew-2 astronauts returned to Earth after 199 days in space.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — After six months in space, SpaceX’s Crew-2 astronauts returned to Earth late Monday (Nov. 8), splashing down off the Florida coast to end the private company’s second long-duration mission.

SpaceX’s Crew-2 mission for NASA splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico just south of Pensacola, Florida, at 10:33 p.m. EST (0333 GMT on Nov. 9), with a recovery ship swiftly retrieving the spaceflyers’ Crew Dragon capsule from the sea. Their return wrapped up a six-month trip to the International Space Station (ISS).

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Four diaper-wearing astronauts undocked from the International Space Station on Monday and have embarked on their journey home following a 200-day stay in space.

NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, along with the European Space Agency’s Thomas Pesquet and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s astronaut Akihiko Hoshide separated from the ISS at 2:05pm ET, as scheduled, and are now on track for at 10:33pm ET splashdown off the Florida coast.

Their return was initially set for Sunday afternoon, but high winds pushed the return for the Crew-2 team back one day.

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