New conference chairs

In September 2022, two months before Ph.D. student Megan Kerr was scheduled to board a military plane bound for the Antarctic ice sheet, she found herself in a conference room on Oregon State University’s campus, waiting to ask a question that had been nagging her for weeks. She sat intently through a presentation from the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. Then, she raised her hand. The room full of graduate students turned in their chairs. “This NSF report about all the sexual harassment that’s going on in the field,” she said. “What is the NSF going to be doing in the short term, also long term, about that?” Because “a lot of us are going into the field in like, two months.” These students and about a hundred other researchers from roughly a dozen institutions had gathered at Oregon State University to kick off COLDEX , a 5-year, $25 million-dollar paleoclimatology project tasked by the NSF, the federal science agency, to find and drill a core of Earth’s … [Read more...] about As Antarctic fieldwork ends, a sexual harassment reckoning looms

Google is working on AI-powered responses for web searches , a bit like how ChatGPT works when answering questions. It turns out Microsoft also has big plans for AI-powered search, with major changes coming to the Bing search engine. Microsoft discussed upcoming changes to Bing at an in-person press event today, which the company is just calling “the new Bing.” Bing will use a next-generation learning model from OpenAI, the same company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E , which is supposedly more powerful than ChatGPT. Similar to ChatGPT, the new Bing has a text box for typing a prompt or question, which is then answered in a short statement. Unlike ChatGPT, the generated answer has annotations with links, which helps identify the source of information (like in a Wikipedia article). However, it’s still an experimental AI technology, so it’s possible Bing could spit out incorrect results even when the source data is correct. For example, someone asked Bing if a specific IKEA seat … [Read more...] about Microsoft Is Transforming Bing Into an AI Search Engine

Doctors rarely make diagnoses based on a single factor — they look at a mix of data types, such as a patient’s symptoms, laboratory and radiology reports, and medical history. VinBrain, a Vietnam-based health-tech startup, is ensuring that AI diagnostics can take a similarly holistic view across vital signs, blood tests, medical images and more. “Multimodal data is key to delivering precision care that can improve patient outcomes,” said Steven Truong, CEO of VinBrain. “Our medical imaging models, for instance, can analyze chest X-rays and make automated observations about abnormal findings in a patient’s heart, lungs and bones.” If a medical-imaging AI model reports that a patient’s scan shows lung consolidation, Truong explained, doctors could combine the X-ray analysis with a large language model that reads health records to learn the patient has a fever — helping clinicians more quickly determine a more specific diagnosis of pneumonia. Funded by Vingroup — one of Vietnam’s … [Read more...] about Vietnam’s VinBrain Deploys Healthcare AI Models to 100+ Hospitals

Democrat President Joe Biden is set to give his second State of the Union address as Commander in Chief of the United States on Tuesday evening before a joint session of Congress. The speech, set to begin at 9 p.m. ET, is Biden’s third address to a joint session of Congress, having given a first one in 2021, then his first State of the Union address in 2022. Now, he gives his second such address–an annual tradition for presidents speaking in the U.S. House chamber before Senators, House members, members of the Cabinet, and members of the U.S. Supreme Court. Biden’s address comes at a particularly fraught time for his presidency, just days after a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spy balloon floated across the continental United States before the president ordered it shot down when it had moved off the South Carolina coast in the Atlantic Ocean. It also comes as Biden faces a special counsel investigation over his mishandling of classified documents from his time as Vice President … [Read more...] about *** SOTU Livewire *** Joe Biden Gives Second State of the Union Address