NIMH News Feed NIMH is hosting a series of listening sessions to hear the perspectives and experiences of individuals involved in mental health research worldwide. Go to Source 05/09/2023 - 09:02 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News September 04, 2023 5:00 PMAI can now be applied in any field, ranging from cancer diagnosis and urban planning to fraud detection, and it also has the potential to offer breakthrough solutions that are incomparably better than existing approaches.  Go to Source 04/09/2023 - 12:02 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian A new variant and waning immunity mean surveillance that had been wound down since pandemic will be increasedCoronavirus testing and monitoring are set to be scaled up for the winter, the UK’s public health agency has said, as pressures on the health service are expected to rise in the coming months.Scientists warned last month that the UK was nearly “flying blind” when it comes to Covid, because many of the surveillance programmes that were in place at the height of the pandemic have been wound down. Continue reading... Go to Source 04/09/2023 - 06:02 /Nicola Davis Science correspondent Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News September 04, 2023 11:18 AMMore than 60 companies are trading biofuels from Singapore, said Minister of State for Trade and Industry Low Yen Ling. Go to Source 04/09/2023 - 06:02 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

AWS Machine Learning Blog We’re excited to announce the availability of response streaming through Amazon SageMaker real-time inference. Now you can continuously stream inference responses back to the client when using SageMaker real-time inference to help you build interactive experiences for generative AI applications such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and music generators. With this new feature, you can start streaming the responses immediately when they’re available instead of waiting for the entire response to be generated. This lowers the time-to-first-byte for your generative AI applications. In this post, we’ll show how to build a streaming web application using SageMaker real-time endpoints with the new response streaming feature for an interactive chat use case. We use Streamlit for the sample demo application UI. Solution overview To get responses streamed back from SageMaker, you can use our new InvokeEndpointWithResponseStream API. It helps enhance customer satisfaction by delivering a faster time-to-first-response-byte. This reduction in customer-perceived latency is particularly crucial for applications built with generative AI models, where immediate processing is valued over waiting for the entire payload. Moreover, it introduces a sticky session that will enable continuity in interactions, benefiting use cases such as chatbots, to create more natural and efficient user experiences. The implementation of response streaming in SageMaker real-time endpoints is achieved through HTTP 1.1 chunked encoding, which is a mechanism for sending multiple responses. This is a HTTP standard that supports binary content and is supported by most client/server frameworks. HTTP chunked encoding supports both text and image data streaming, which means the models hosted on SageMaker endpoints can send back streamed responses as text or image, such as Falcon, Llama 2, and Stable Diffusion models. In terms of security, both the input and output are secured using TLS using AWS Sigv4 Auth. Other streaming techniques like Server-Sent Events (SSE)...

AWS Machine Learning Blog Nowadays, the majority of our customers is excited about large language models (LLMs) and thinking how generative AI could transform their business. However, bringing such solutions and models to the business-as-usual operations is not an easy task. In this post, we discuss how to operationalize generative AI applications using MLOps principles leading to foundation model operations (FMOps). Furthermore, we deep dive on the most common generative AI use case of text-to-text applications and LLM operations (LLMOps), a subset of FMOps. The following figure illustrates the topics we discuss. Specifically, we briefly introduce MLOps principles and focus on the main differentiators compared to FMOps and LLMOps regarding processes, people, model selection and evaluation, data privacy, and model deployment. This applies to customers that use them out of the box, create foundation models from scratch, or fine-tune them. Our approach applies to both open-source and proprietary models equally. ML operationalization summary As defined in the post MLOps foundation roadmap for enterprises with Amazon SageMaker, ML and operations (MLOps) is the combination of people, processes, and technology to productionize machine learning (ML) solutions efficiently. To achieve this, a combination of teams and personas need to collaborate, as illustrated in the following figure. These teams are as follows: Advanced analytics team (data lake and data mesh) – Data engineers are responsible for preparing and ingesting data from multiple sources, building ETL (extract, transform, and load) pipelines to curate and catalog the data, and prepare the necessary historical data for the ML use cases. These data owners are focused on providing access to their data to multiple business units or teams. Data science team – Data scientists need to focus on creating the best model based on predefined key performance indicators (KPIs) working in notebooks. After the completion of the research...

US Top News and Analysis Health care and social assistance was again the top area for job growth in August. Go to Source 01/09/2023 - 18:06 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

NIMH News Feed The primary goal of the workshop is to examine focused ultrasound neuromodulation for mental health applications and share the latest findings and best practices. Go to Source 01/09/2023 - 09:03 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News September 01, 2023 5:00 AMSINGAPORE – The first of three increases in the minimum qualifying salary for S Pass renewals kicked in on Friday, but it is expected to have a muted impact on business costs and operations. Go to Source 01/09/2023 - 00:03 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News September 01, 2023 4:00 AMTechnological transformation is impacting industries across the region, creating potential opportunities for investors, according to AXA Investment Managers. Go to Source 01/09/2023 - 00:03 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

15Five Employee engagement is more than a vague concept. How an employee experiences a company has a tangible and measurable impact on workplace culture, recruitment, and business performance.  When an employee is actively engaged with a business—everybody wins. The employee feels motivated and like they belong, and the company increases productivity and profitability.  But what does it mean to be engaged in the workplace? The Three Levels of Engagement at Work Every employee behaves differently. Some are naturally more engaged than others—and that’s okay! Not everyone will want to join the company lunch and learn or team outing.  What’s important is recognizing the three different levels of engagement, understanding how they impact business performance, and differentiating engaged employees from disengaged ones. Let’s take a look.  Actively Engaged Participates in all or many aspects of company culture Goes above and beyond in their day-to-day activities Encourages collaboration Continuous, open learner Extremely dedicated to their role Employees who show high levels of engagement are committed, proactive, collaborative, and positively impact the overall work environment while contributing to company goals and business success.  Not Engaged  Shows little enthusiasm for role or responsibilities  Doesn’t contribute meaningful ideas or feedback Rarely takes on additional tasks Rarely participates in team discussions  Disinterested in company goals  Employees who struggle with workplace engagement are often accused of clock-watching, leaving promptly, and doing the bare minimum required in their role. The business impact is productivity decreases, work quality suffers, and turnover skyrockets while creating a hostile workplace culture and environment. Actively Disengaged Negative outlook, openly critical of company decisions Consistently absent, takes unscheduled leave Fails to complete tasks on time or misses deadlines Avoids additional responsibilities Doesn’t participate in company culture Not only do actively disengaged employees lack motivation, they negatively impact the morale and performance of their colleagues....

Coronavirus | The Guardian Former security guard who killed nine cats and injured seven more in East Sussex died less than a year into his five-year sentenceThe Royal Navy veteran nicknamed the Brighton cat killer died from Covid-19 while receiving end of life care for cancer in prison, a coroner has found.Former security guard Stephen Bouquet, 55, died in Medway Maritime hospital on 5 January 2022. He was jailed for five years and three months in July 2021 for killing nine cats in East Sussex. Continue reading... Go to Source 31/08/2023 - 18:05 /PA Media Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

NIMH News Feed This symposium will highlight advances in brain and mental health research over the past 75 years and look ahead to continued progress and innovation. Go to Source 31/08/2023 - 09:08 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News August 31, 2023 7:52 AMThe embattled Chinese developer raised concerns about staying in business. Go to Source 31/08/2023 - 03:10 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian Move in England comes after detection of highly-mutated coronavirus variant that is spreading around the worldHealth officials have brought forward plans for autumn flu and Covid vaccinations after detecting a highly-mutated Covid variant that is spreading around the world.The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said vaccinations would be available from 11 September in England as a precautionary measure intended to protect the most vulnerable as the winter months approach. The vaccination programme had not been scheduled to launch until early October. Continue reading... Go to Source 31/08/2023 - 00:03 /Ian Sample Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

US Top News and Analysis Salesforce saw gains in all five product categories, and CEO Marc Benioff sees more growth from artificial intelligence capabilities Go to Source 31/08/2023 - 00:03 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Human Resources News - Human Resources News Headlines | Bizjournals.com Kent Skornia, Krilogy’s president and CEO, said the firm’s growth – to now $2.4 billion in assets under management – required the experience that new CFO Mark Lewis has in finance, mergers and acquisitions, and growth-oriented projects. Go to Source 30/08/2023 - 21:02 /James Drew Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News August 30, 2023 9:36 PMMomentum appears to have picked up early in the third quarter as a tight labour market underpins consumer spending. Go to Source 30/08/2023 - 18:01 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Human Resources News - Human Resources News Headlines | Bizjournals.com This is the final article in a five-part series by Connecting columnist Alana Muller offering practical HR-related management tips. Today’s post marks the fifth and final installment of our Workforce Series. Over the past four weeks, Jesse Meschuk, a career and human resources expert and a senior advisor with Exequity, has offered up advice for 1) reorganizing vs. restructuring, 2) planning for the organization of the future, 3) advocating a performance measurement-oriented culture, and 4) training… Go to Source 30/08/2023 - 15:02 /Alana Muller Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

NIMH News Feed This webinar will discuss different hypotheses about agricultural suicide in the context of current epidemiological research, and examine the effectiveness of telehealth, farming stress hotlines, and clinical opportunities and challenges in addressing suicide within the agriculture community. Go to Source 30/08/2023 - 09:03 /National Institute of Mental Health Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

AWS Machine Learning Blog Maintaining machine learning (ML) workflows in production is a challenging task because it requires creating continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for ML code and models, model versioning, monitoring for data and concept drift, model retraining, and a manual approval process to ensure new versions of the model satisfy both performance and compliance requirements. In this post, we describe how to create an MLOps workflow for batch inference that automates job scheduling, model monitoring, retraining, and registration, as well as error handling and notification by using Amazon SageMaker, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), HashiCorp Terraform, and GitLab CI/CD. The presented MLOps workflow provides a reusable template for managing the ML lifecycle through automation, monitoring, auditability, and scalability, thereby reducing the complexities and costs of maintaining batch inference workloads in production. Solution overview The following figure illustrates the proposed target MLOps architecture for enterprise batch inference for organizations who use GitLab CI/CD and Terraform infrastructure as code (IaC) in conjunction with AWS tools and services. GitLab CI/CD serves as the macro-orchestrator, orchestrating model build and model deploy pipelines, which include sourcing, building, and provisioning Amazon SageMaker Pipelines and supporting resources using the SageMaker Python SDK and Terraform. SageMaker Python SDK is used to create or update SageMaker pipelines for training, training with hyperparameter optimization (HPO), and batch inference. Terraform is used to create additional resources such as EventBridge rules, Lambda functions, and SNS topics for monitoring SageMaker pipelines and sending notifications (for example, when a pipeline step fails or succeeds). SageMaker Pipelines serves as the orchestrator for ML model training and inference workflows. This architecture design represents a multi-account strategy where ML models are built, trained, and registered in a central model registry within a data science development account (which has...

Global HR The Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratization in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) issued an update on the companies that are subject to the Emiratization targets in... Go to Source 29/08/2023 - 18:03 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News August 29, 2023 2:54 PMThere are about 100 Singapore companies present in 40 countries in Africa today. Go to Source 29/08/2023 - 09:02 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

US Top News and Analysis OpenAI on Monday announced its biggest news since ChatGPT's debut: It's launching ChatGPT Enterprise, the AI chatbot's business tier, available starting today.  Go to Source 28/08/2023 - 21:05 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News August 28, 2023 4:36 PMHPL hopes the development will be a “gateway destination” in Orchard Road. Go to Source 28/08/2023 - 12:02 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News August 27, 2023 3:03 PMThe WTO said that its projected trade growth of 1.7 per cent this year “is still attainable". Go to Source 27/08/2023 - 12:02 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian Cases against government, care homes and hospitals relate to deaths in 2020, when patients with Covid were being moved into homesA group of 30 families are suing the UK government, care homes and hospitals over the deaths of their relatives in the early days of the Covid pandemic.The families argue that not enough was done to prevent the deaths and are claiming damages for loss of life and distress. Continue reading... Go to Source 25/08/2023 - 12:00 /Emily Dugan Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

AWS Machine Learning Blog Today, we’re pleased to announce the preview of Amazon SageMaker Profiler, a capability of Amazon SageMaker that provides a detailed view into the AWS compute resources provisioned during training deep learning models on SageMaker. With SageMaker Profiler, you can track all activities on CPUs and GPUs, such as CPU and GPU utilizations, kernel runs on GPUs, kernel launches on CPUs, sync operations, memory operations across GPUs, latencies between kernel launches and corresponding runs, and data transfer between CPUs and GPUs. In this post, we walk you through the capabilities of SageMaker Profiler. SageMaker Profiler provides Python modules for annotating PyTorch or TensorFlow training scripts and activating SageMaker Profiler. It also offers a user interface (UI) that visualizes the profile, a statistical summary of profiled events, and the timeline of a training job for tracking and understanding the time relationship of the events between GPUs and CPUs. The need for profiling training jobs With the rise of deep learning (DL), machine learning (ML) has become compute and data intensive, typically requiring multi-node, multi-GPU clusters. As state-of-the-art models grow in size in the order of trillions of parameters, their computational complexity and cost also increase rapidly. ML practitioners have to cope with common challenges of efficient resource utilization when training such large models. This is particularly evident in large language models (LLMs), which typically have billions of parameters and therefore require large multi-node GPU clusters in order to train them efficiently. When training these models on large compute clusters, we can encounter compute resource optimization challenges such as I/O bottlenecks, kernel launch latencies, memory limits, and low resource utilizations. If the training job configuration is not optimized, these challenges can result in inefficient hardware utilization and longer training times or incomplete training runs, which increase the overall costs...

MIT News - Artificial intelligence The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology has selected three new research projects that will receive support from the initiative. The research projects aim to accelerate progress in meeting complex societal needs through new business convergence insights in technology and innovation. Established in MIT’s School of Engineering and now in its third year, the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative is furthering its mission to bring together technological experts from across business and academia to share insights and learn from one another. Recently, Thomas W. Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management, joined the initiative as its first-ever faculty lead. The research projects relate to three of the initiative’s key focus areas: sustainability, digital health, and the future of work. “The solutions these research teams are developing have the potential to have tremendous impact,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “They embody the initiative’s focus on advancing data-driven research that addresses technology and industry convergence.” “The convergence of science and technology driven by advancements in generative AI, digital twins, quantum computing, and other technologies makes this an especially exciting time for Accenture and MIT to be undertaking this joint research,” says Kenneth Munie, senior managing director at Accenture Strategy, Life Sciences. “Our three new research projects focusing on sustainability, digital health, and the future of work have the potential to help guide and shape future innovations that will benefit the way we work and live.” The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative charter project researchers are described below. Accelerating the journey to net zero with industrial clusters Jessika Trancik is a professor at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Trancik’s research examines the dynamic costs, performance,...

Coronavirus | The Guardian Active community testing required on an intermittent basis to see ‘the whole iceberg, not just the tip’, Prof Catherine Bennett saysGet our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastPolitical momentum for the monitoring and surveillance of Covid-19 is “fading”, the Australian virologist who developed a world-first method for rapidly isolating and characterising variants said.Prof Stuart Turville, with the University of New South Wales Kirby Institute, said while the impact of Covid-19 in Australia is waning, the Sars CoV-2 virus that causes disease is constantly changing and “there is still a lot we don’t know”.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Continue reading... Go to Source 24/08/2023 - 18:02 /Melissa Davey Medical editor Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian Royal Society review looks at non-pharmaceutical interventions when applied in packages of several measuresMeasures taken during the Covid pandemic such as social distancing and wearing face masks “unequivocally” reduced the spread of infections, a report has found.Experts looked at the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) – not drugs or vaccines – when applied in packages that combine a number of measures that complement one another. Continue reading... Go to Source 24/08/2023 - 12:03 /PA Media Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

MIT News - Artificial intelligence Imagine you want to carry a large, heavy box up a flight of stairs. You might spread your fingers out and lift that box with both hands, then hold it on top of your forearms and balance it against your chest, using your whole body to manipulate the box.  Humans are generally good at whole-body manipulation, but robots struggle with such tasks. To the robot, each spot where the box could touch any point on the carrier’s fingers, arms, and torso represents a contact event that it must reason about. With billions of potential contact events, planning for this task quickly becomes intractable. Now MIT researchers found a way to simplify this process, known as contact-rich manipulation planning. They use an AI technique called smoothing, which summarizes many contact events into a smaller number of decisions, to enable even a simple algorithm to quickly identify an effective manipulation plan for the robot. While still in its early days, this method could potentially enable factories to use smaller, mobile robots that can manipulate objects with their entire arms or bodies, rather than large robotic arms that can only grasp using fingertips. This may help reduce energy consumption and drive down costs. In addition, this technique could be useful in robots sent on exploration missions to Mars or other solar system bodies, since they could adapt to the environment quickly using only an onboard computer.       “Rather than thinking about this as a black-box system, if we can leverage the structure of these kinds of robotic systems using models, there is an opportunity to accelerate the whole procedure of trying to make these decisions and come up with contact-rich plans,” says H.J. Terry Suh, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and co-lead author of a...

The Straits Times Business News August 24, 2023 10:08 AMSan Francisco’s crises of drugs and homelessness have worsened, leading to tourists and business visitors staying away. Go to Source 24/08/2023 - 06:00 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian Department of Health says improvements are due to to vaccine coverage, hybrid immunity and ready access to treatmentFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastAustralia’s Covid-19 deaths are at the lowest levels observed since December 2021, with fewer hospitalisations and intensive care admissions – despite fewer people receiving a booster vaccine this year.“The improvements in 2023 are likely to be the combined result of high levels of vaccination coverage, hybrid immunity, and ready access to oral antiviral treatments for those who need them,” a Department of Health spokesperson said.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Continue reading... Go to Source 24/08/2023 - 00:03 /Melissa Davey Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

15Five Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a cultural phenomenon that promises to transform how workplaces operate. But when any exciting new technological innovations emerge, our society tends to put the cart before the horse. And we haven’t had a technology this powerful in many years (maybe ever). While there are people on both extremes of the AI argument—some ready to dive head-first into an AI-powered future and others warning of an imminent robot apocalypse—most AI experts fall somewhere in the middle. They’re cautiously optimistic and recommend that governments and businesses alike spend more time thinking through the potential risks and ethical implications of AI before implementing the technology on a large scale.    When it comes to people operations, HR leaders have a bit of a tightrope to walk with AI. At a time when HR teams are being asked to do more with less, AI tools are already becoming available to streamline tasks, free up time, and make work more efficient and effective. At the same time, people leaders understand the importance of maintaining employee privacy and trust, data security, and keeping the “human” in human resources.  As AI continues to be integrated into HR solutions, we want to help you think through some of the ethical considerations of using AI in HR. In this article, we’ll cover five implications to consider as you create AI policies and integrate the technology into your own workflows. How is AI currently being used in HR? The use of AI and automation in HR technologies is expected to expand rapidly, and we’ll have much to learn about how to best leverage those capabilities in the coming months and years. But we’re already seeing some use cases that give us a peek into what is (and will be) possible in HR and beyond. Talent...

AWS Machine Learning Blog Amazon CodeWhisperer, the AWS AI coding companion, is a step change in developer productivity tools. Based on generative AI technology, Amazon CodeWhisperer offers contextualized code snippets or recommendations based on natural language prompts to build software quickly, responsibly, and securely. It enables productivity gains and increases accuracy for accelerated digital transformations. Amazon CodeWhisperer ensures enterprises have greater control over AI-generated code, especially the code written by developers who may have a limited understanding of code attribution, quality, and security requirements. Persistent Systems, a global digital engineering provider, has run several pilots and formal studies with Amazon CodeWhisperer that point to shifts in software engineering, generative AI-led modernization, responsible innovation, and more. This post highlights four themes emerging from Persistent’s Amazon CodeWhisperer experiments that could change software engineering as we know it. Beyond productivity gains: Reimagining coding with Amazon CodeWhisperer In this section, we discuss some of the ways that Amazon CodeWhisperer is reimagining coding. Improving responsible delivery Ownership, explainability, and transparency of AI-generated code are the most contentious points for the commercial adoption of coding companions such as Amazon CodeWhisperer. Amazon gives developers complete ownership of the code they write using Amazon CodeWhisperer. The Amazon CodeWhisperer team has carefully curated the training data and omitted restrictive licenses, ensuring developers don’t inadvertently use restrictively licensed code when they use Amazon CodeWhisperer. In addition, because recommender pipelines can be strongly influenced by open-source code, if Amazon CodeWhisperer detects a lineage, it flags the license references (for example, MIT or Apache, an open-source project). This enables the developer to attribute code snippets to the source owners, instituting coding best practices. Although Amazon collects data such as code snippets, recommendations, and comments from files open in the integrated development environment, for Amazon CodeWhisperer Professional users, these are not stored or...

The Straits Times Business News August 23, 2023 5:45 PMSINGAPORE - PropNex has named a deputy chief executive officer and announced other management changes as part of what the mainboard-listed property agency says is a remaking aimed at helping the company become an even more dominant player in Singapore and the region. Go to Source 23/08/2023 - 12:07 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

AWS Machine Learning Blog We’re excited to announce Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler support for Amazon S3 Access Points. With its visual point and click interface, SageMaker Data Wrangler simplifies the process of data preparation and feature engineering including data selection, cleansing, exploration, and visualization, while S3 Access Points simplifies data access by providing unique hostnames with specific access policies. Starting today, SageMaker Data Wrangler is making it easier for users to prepare data from shared datasets stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) while enabling organizations to securely control data access in their organization. With S3 Access Points, data administrators can now create application- and team-specific access points to facilitate data sharing, rather than managing complex bucket policies with many different permission rules. In this post, we walk you through importing data from, and exporting data to, an S3 access point in SageMaker Data Wrangler. Solution Overview Imagine you, as an administrator, have to manage data for multiple data science teams running their own data preparation workflows in SageMaker Data Wrangler. Administrators often face three challenges: Data science teams need to access their datasets without compromising the security of others Data science teams need access to some datasets with sensitive data, which further complicates managing permissions Security policy only permits data access through specific endpoints to prevent unauthorized access and to reduce the exposure of data With traditional bucket policies, you would struggle setting up granular access because bucket policies apply the same permissions to all objects within the bucket. Traditional bucket policies also can’t support securing access at the endpoint level. S3 Access Points solves these problems by granting fine-grained access control at a granular level, making it easier to manage permissions for different teams without impacting other parts of the bucket. Instead of modifying a single bucket...

MIT News - Artificial intelligence ChatGPT has made headlines around the world with its ability to write essays, email, and computer code based on a few prompts from a user. Now an MIT-led team reports a system that could lead to machine-learning programs several orders of magnitude more powerful than the one behind ChatGPT. The system they developed could also use several orders of magnitude less energy than the state-of-the-art supercomputers behind the machine-learning models of today. In the July 17 issue of Nature Photonics, the researchers report the first experimental demonstration of the new system, which performs its computations based on the movement of light, rather than electrons, using hundreds of micron-scale lasers. With the new system, the team reports a greater than 100-fold improvement in energy efficiency and a 25-fold improvement in compute density, a measure of the power of a system, over state-of-the-art digital computers for machine learning.  Toward the future In the paper, the team also cites “substantially several more orders of magnitude for future improvement.” As a result, the authors continue, the technique “opens an avenue to large-scale optoelectronic processors to accelerate machine-learning tasks from data centers to decentralized edge devices.” In other words, cellphones and other small devices could become capable of running programs that can currently only be computed at large data centers. Further, because the components of the system can be created using fabrication processes already in use today, “we expect that it could be scaled for commercial use in a few years. For example, the laser arrays involved are widely used in cell-phone face ID and data communication,” says Zaijun Chen, first author, who conducted the work while a postdoc at MIT in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and is now an assistant professor at the University of Southern California....

Coronavirus | The Guardian The studio behind John Wick and The Hunger Games has reinstated the use of masks after several employees tested positive for Covid-19The Hollywood film studio Lionsgate has reinstated its mask mandate as cases of Covid-19 continue to rise.In a company-wide email obtained by Deadline, it was announced that nearly half of the company’s employees would need to wear “medical grade” face masks again in the flagship offices in Los Angeles. The rule applies “except when alone in an office with the door closed, actively eating, actively drinking at their desk or workstation, or if they are the only individual present in a large open workspace”. Continue reading... Go to Source 22/08/2023 - 18:03 /Benjamin Lee Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News August 22, 2023 4:56 PMThe private banking unit of Citigroup added 350 new clients in 2022. Go to Source 22/08/2023 - 12:03 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

BBC News - Business New airline data indicates the number of lost, delayed or damaged bags is returning to pre-pandemic levels. Go to Source 22/08/2023 - 03:03 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

AWS Machine Learning Blog Explainability of machine learning (ML) models used in the medical domain is becoming increasingly important because models need to be explained from a number of perspectives in order to gain adoption. These perspectives range from medical, technological, legal, and the most important perspective—the patient’s. Models developed on text in the medical domain have become accurate statistically, yet clinicians are ethically required to evaluate areas of weakness related to these predictions in order to provide the best care for individual patients. Explainability of these predictions is required in order for clinicians to make the correct choices on a patient-by-patient basis. In this post, we show how to improve model explainability in clinical settings using Amazon SageMaker Clarify. Background One specific application of ML algorithms in the medical domain, which uses large volumes of text, is clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) for triage. On a daily basis, patients are admitted to hospitals and admission notes are taken. After these notes are taken, the triage process is initiated, and ML models can assist clinicians with estimating clinical outcomes. This can help reduce operational overhead costs and provide optimal care for patients. Understanding why these decisions are suggested by the ML models is extremely important for decision-making related to individual patients. The purpose of this post is to outline how you can deploy predictive models with Amazon SageMaker for the purposes of triage within hospital settings and use SageMaker Clarify to explain these predictions. The intent is to offer an accelerated path to adoption of predictive techniques within CDSSs for many healthcare organizations. The notebook and code from this post are available on GitHub. To run it yourself, clone the GitHub repository and open the Jupyter notebook file. Technical background A large asset for any acute healthcare organization is its...

AWS Machine Learning Blog Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to collect and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes. You can streamline the process of feature engineering and data preparation with SageMaker Data Wrangler and finish each stage of the data preparation workflow (including data selection, purification, exploration, visualization, and processing at scale) within a single visual interface. Data is frequently kept in data lakes that can be managed by AWS Lake Formation, giving you the ability to implement fine-grained access control using a straightforward grant or revoke procedure. SageMaker Data Wrangler supports fine-grained data access control with Lake Formation and Amazon Athena connections. We are happy to announce that SageMaker Data Wrangler now supports using Lake Formation with Amazon EMR to provide this fine-grained data access restriction. Data professionals such as data scientists want to use the power of Apache Spark, Hive, and Presto running on Amazon EMR for fast data preparation; however, the learning curve is steep. Our customers wanted the ability to connect to Amazon EMR to run ad hoc SQL queries on Hive or Presto to query data in the internal metastore or external metastore (such as the AWS Glue Data Catalog), and prepare data within a few clicks. In this post, we show how to use Lake Formation as a central data governance capability and Amazon EMR as a big data query engine to enable access for SageMaker Data Wrangler. The capabilities of Lake Formation simplify securing and managing distributed data lakes across multiple accounts through a centralized approach, providing fine-grained access control. Solution overview We demonstrate this solution with an end-to-end use case using a sample dataset, the TPC data model. This data represents transaction data for products and includes information such as customer demographics, inventory, web...

The Straits Times Business News August 21, 2023 9:05 PMGDP is forecast to grow 2.2% annually over the 40 years, 0.9 percentage point slower than the previous four decades. Go to Source 21/08/2023 - 18:03 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Human Resources News - Human Resources News Headlines | Bizjournals.com Meta Platforms Inc. told employees that management will be watching how they comply with return-to-office rules and that workers could be fired if they don't, according to a report in Insider. The Facebook parent is a significant tech employer in Boston. Go to Source 21/08/2023 - 18:02 /J. Jennings Moss Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News August 21, 2023 1:32 PMInvestor confidence will suffer further if problems arise in the transition to a new government. Go to Source 21/08/2023 - 09:02 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian Two students – one forced into a foundation year, another waiting for her GCSEs – describe their exams experienceLast week’s A-level results revealed a growing educational divide between state school pupils and those who have been privately educated – one which has been exacerbated by Covid. Experts believe this week’s GCSE results are likely to show a similar trend. The Observer spoke to two state school students about their hopes for the future. Continue reading... Go to Source 20/08/2023 - 12:08 /Donna Ferguson Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Human Resources News - Human Resources News Headlines | Bizjournals.com Meta Platforms Inc. on Thursday delivered a message to employees: management will be watching how they comply with the company's return-to-office rules and workers could be fired if they don't, according to a report in Insider. Go to Source 19/08/2023 - 03:00 /J. Jennings Moss Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News August 19, 2023 5:00 AMSINGAPORE – Companies in Singapore and Colombia should begin to find it easier to do business together with the signing of a deal to boost cooperation and interaction between the two nations. Go to Source 19/08/2023 - 00:10 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian It is unclear whether BA.2.86 causes more severe disease but its detection in several countries has put scientists on alertA new Covid variant that is causing concern among scientists due to its large number of mutations has been detected in London.The variant, named BA.2.86, has been detected through genetic sequencing, although only a handful of such sequences have so far been reported. The first was reported in Israel, with the variant since being detected in Denmark and the US. Continue reading... Go to Source 18/08/2023 - 21:05 /Nicola Davis Science correspondent Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian Public health expert says value of contracts cannot be assessed as they are described using ‘waffle words generated by the obfuscation machine’Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastThe Victorian government paid the consultancy firm EY more than $30m to help manage and deliver key public health projects during the pandemic, including contact tracing and the rollout of tests and vaccines.Government contracts show the health department paid EY $17.4m for its work on the test-and-trace program, known as Operation Drasi, with EY staff seconded into the department.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Continue reading... Go to Source 18/08/2023 - 18:03 /Henry Belot Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian Health officials reiterate support for private provision as lower age limit for NHS booster vaccines raised to 65Covid booster vaccines may become available for the UK public to buy for the first time after health officials reiterated their backing for the proposal.Pharmacists and private clinics will be allowed to offer jabs for sale on the high street, as they do with the flu vaccine. They are unlikely to be available in time for an autumn booster campaign but could become available next year. Continue reading... Go to Source 18/08/2023 - 15:04 /Nadeem Badshah Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News August 18, 2023 7:30 PMBENGALURU - Estee Lauder projected full-year net sales and profit below market expectations on Friday, signalling a slower-than-expected recovery in its travel retail business, mainly in Asia, and easing demand in the United States. Go to Source 18/08/2023 - 15:03 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian Pharmaceuticals company announce appointment of one of UK’s public faces of the pandemic on LinkedInSir Jonathan Van-Tam, the UK’s former deputy chief medical officer who became a household name during the pandemic, has become a senior medical consultant to the Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna.Known by the initials “JVT” and remembered for the striking metaphors he used during Downing Street briefings on the progress of the virus, he took up the role as part-time clinical adviser to the American biotechnology company on 2 May. Continue reading... Go to Source 18/08/2023 - 12:00 /Julia Kollewe Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News August 18, 2023 1:00 PMBank Negara Malaysia said the full-year growth will come in at the lower end of its 4% to 5% forecast range. Go to Source 18/08/2023 - 09:14 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian Health officials support proposal for private provision of vaccines after age limit on NHS booster programme raised to 65Covid booster vaccines are expected to become available for the UK public to buy for the first time after health officials supported the proposal.Pharmacists and private clinics will be allowed to offer jabs for sale on the high street, as they do with the flu vaccine. They are unlikely to be available in time for an autumn booster campaign but could become available next year. Continue reading... Go to Source 18/08/2023 - 03:12 /Nadeem Badshah Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News August 18, 2023 4:54 AMThe stock market’s weakness in recent days is due to robust US economic growth. Go to Source 18/08/2023 - 00:03 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

MIT News - Artificial intelligence Prior to receiving a PhD in computer science from MIT in 2017, Marzyeh Ghassemi had already begun to wonder whether the use of AI techniques might enhance the biases that already existed in health care. She was one of the early researchers to take up this issue, and she’s been exploring it ever since. In a new paper, Ghassemi, now an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Science and Engineering (EECS), and three collaborators based at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, have probed the roots of the disparities that can arise in machine learning, often causing models that perform well overall to falter when it comes to subgroups for which relatively few data have been collected and utilized in the training process. The paper — written by two MIT PhD students, Yuzhe Yang and Haoran Zhang, EECS computer scientist Dina Katabi (the Thuan and Nicole Pham Professor), and Ghassemi — was presented last month at the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning in Honolulu, Hawaii. In their analysis, the researchers focused on "subpopulation shifts" — differences in the way machine learning models perform for one subgroup as compared to another. “We want the models to be fair and work equally well for all groups, but instead we consistently observe the presence of shifts among different groups that can lead to inferior medical diagnosis and treatment,” says Yang, who along with Zhang are the two lead authors on the paper. The main point of their inquiry is to determine the kinds of subpopulation shifts that can occur and to uncover the mechanisms behind them so that, ultimately, more equitable models can be developed. The new paper “significantly advances our understanding” of the subpopulation shift phenomenon, claims Stanford University computer scientist Sanmi Koyejo. “This...

US Top News and Analysis Walmart beat earnings and revenue expectations as it capitalizes on its low-priced reputation with consumers looking for value. Go to Source 17/08/2023 - 15:04 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian People not eligible for autumn booster programme should have option to pay for jab, experts argue, amid new wave concernsCovid vaccines should be made available for people to buy privately in Britain, leading scientists have urged, amid concerns over a new wave of the virus which could worsen in autumn and winter.Unlike flu jabs, which individuals or employers can buy for about £15 from high street pharmacies, Covid jabs are only available on the NHS in the UK. Continue reading... Go to Source 17/08/2023 - 06:03 /Nicola Davis Science correspondent Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

Coronavirus | The Guardian We look at the current levels of the coronavirus and who will be offered a booster jabWith Covid in the UK on the rise once more, we take a look at the current situation and what the plans are for vaccination. Continue reading... Go to Source 17/08/2023 - 06:03 /Nicola Davis Science correspondent Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

AWS Machine Learning Blog This is a guest blog post co-written with Ben Veasey, Jeremy Anderson, Jordan Knight, and June Li from Travelers. Satellite and aerial images provide insight into a wide range of problems, including precision agriculture, insurance risk assessment, urban development, and disaster response. Training machine learning (ML) models to interpret this data, however, is bottlenecked by costly and time-consuming human annotation efforts. One way to overcome this challenge is through self-supervised learning (SSL). By training on large amounts of unlabeled image data, self-supervised models learn image representations that can be transferred to downstream tasks, such as image classification or segmentation. This approach produces image representations that generalize well to unseen data and reduces the amount of labeled data required to build performant downstream models. In this post, we demonstrate how to train self-supervised vision transformers on overhead imagery using Amazon SageMaker. Travelers collaborated with the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab (now known as the Generative AI Innovation Center) to develop this framework to support and enhance aerial imagery model use cases. Our solution is based on the DINO algorithm and uses the SageMaker distributed data parallel library (SMDDP) to split the data over multiple GPU instances. When pre-training is complete, the DINO image representations can be transferred to a variety of downstream tasks. This initiative led to improved model performances within the Travelers Data & Analytics space. Overview of solution The two-step process for pre-training vision transformers and transferring them to supervised downstream tasks is shown in the following diagram. In the following sections, we provide a walkthrough of the solution using satellite images from the BigEarthNet-S2 dataset. We build on the code provided in the DINO repository. Prerequisites Before getting started, you need access to a SageMaker notebook instance and an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon...

AWS Machine Learning Blog This post is cowritten by Shirsha Ray Chaudhuri, Harpreet Singh Baath, Rashmi B Pawar, and Palvika Bansal from Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters (TR), a global content and technology-driven company, has been using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in its professional information products for decades. Thomson Reuters Labs, the company’s dedicated innovation team, has been integral to its pioneering work in AI and natural language processing (NLP). A key milestone was the launch of Westlaw Is Natural (WIN) in 1992. This technology was one of the first of its kind, using NLP for more efficient and natural legal research. Fast forward to 2023, and Thomson Reuters continues to define the future of professionals through rapid innovation, creative solutions, and powerful technology. The introduction of generative AI provides another opportunity for Thomson Reuters to work with customers and once again advance how they do their work, helping professionals draw insights and automate workflows, enabling them to focus their time where it matters most. While Thomson Reuters pushes the boundaries of what generative AI and other technologies could do for the modern professional, how is it using the power of this technology for its own teams? Thomson Reuters is highly focused on driving awareness and understanding of AI among colleagues in every team and every business area. Starting from foundational principles of what is AI and how does ML work, it’s delivering a rolling program of company-wide AI awareness sessions, including webinars, training materials, and panel discussions. During these sessions, ideas on how AI could be used started to surface as colleagues considered how to use tools that helped them use AI for their day-to-day tasks as well as serve their customers. In this post, we discuss how Thomson Reuters Labs created Open Arena, Thomson Reuters’s enterprise-wide...

Human Resources News - Human Resources News Headlines | Bizjournals.com CEO Maggie Peters has picked up where her late husband left off, continuing to drive growth for the restaurant technology company. It's adding clients and employees by following the spirit of Gene Peters — but also by wedding that with what current management envisions. Go to Source 16/08/2023 - 15:05 /Leslie Collins Twitter: @hoffeldtcom

The Straits Times Business News August 16, 2023 5:21 PMSINGAPORE - Despite posting first-quarter losses, Sats drew positive calls from analysts, who cited the company’s upward business momentum, strong cash flow, cash-generating ability and expected smooth integration of its newly acquired air cargo logistics business Worldwide Flight Services (WFS). Go to Source 16/08/2023 - 12:03 / Twitter: @hoffeldtcom