Thinking Allowed

medical / technology / education / art / flub

showing posts for 'tech'

2023: A year of groundbreaking advances in AI and computing

"This has been a year of incredible progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and its practical applications." A review of 2023 posted by Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist, Google DeepMind & Google Research, Demis Hassabis, CEO, Google DeepMind, and James Manyika, SVP, Google Research,...
Source: research.google

This AI Trained on the Life Events of Every Person in Denmark. It Can Now Predict Their Future.

Artificial intelligence is very good at finding patterns. Given enough data it will start making telling you what's going to happen. "The AI can make highly accurate predictions about people’s lives, including how likely they are to die in a given time window and their personality traits." ... ...
Source: singularityhub.com

NFTs died a slow, painful death in 2023 as most are now worthless

A reminder that early adoption of technology is not without risk. "Non-fungible tokens promised to revolutionise the concept of ownership using the blockchain technology behind bitcoin, but the market seems to have all but collapsed."
Source: newscientist.com

Innovating Pedagogy 2023

blog post image Looking for something innovative to try in 2024? MedEd professionals would benefit by looking through these ideas first. Open University's, Institute of Educational Technology's latest innovating pedagogy report from August 2023. This is the 11th annual report on emerging technologies in education...
Source: open.ac.uk

Machines may be better at assisting, not replacing us.

Journalist Kawandeep Virdee sees if he can be replaced by AI by writing some predictions for 2024. "I gave ChatGPT the last 13 years of Nieman Lab predictions ... [and asked it what I'd write about in 2024]" [ChatGPT suggested] Navigating the infodemic: Strategies for media in the era of misinformation...
Source: niemanlab.org

Coding excursions

blog post image Anonymity with encryption At Outcomes Engine we are working on techniques to gather data from learners, analyse the data, and share the data whilst maintaining anonymity. I was involved in some work in my previous company (pharmaceutical) with the security of personal data - in our case it was data...

These six questions will dictate the future of generative AI

Generative AI took the world by storm in 2023. Its future—and ours—will be shaped by what we do next. TL;DR 1. Will we ever mitigate the bias problem? (Probably) 2. How will AI change the way we apply copyright? (A lot) 3. How will it change our jobs? (Maybe not as much as feared but things will...
Source: technologyreview.com

Introducing Gemini: our largest and most capable AI model

Gemini is our most capable and general model, built to be multimodal and optimized for three different sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano.
Source: blog.google

Meta Trained Its New AI Image Generator on a Billion Of Your Facebook, Instagram Posts

Your cat photos, your friends’ selfies, and my desert landscapes are now a part of Imagine, whether we like it or not.
Source: extremetech.com

Artificial intelligence for healthcare and medical education: a systematic review

"After searching and reading a large amount of literature, we were surprised to find that most of the literature related to “AI+medical/medical education” was of low quality... This suggests us to conduct new research or improve the quality of research related to AI and medical/medical education....
Source: nih.gov

AI cuts treatment time for cancer radiotherapy

The technology will be offered at cost price to all NHS trusts in England, following successful pilot studies.
Source: bbc.com

News: Basel to become Europe’s Silicon Valley of biotech

Silicon Valley is synonymous with technology and innovation. On the other side of the Northern Hemisphere, Basel in Switzerland draws parallels, edging the city closer to becoming Europe’s Silicon Valley of biotech.
Source: baselarea.swiss

In the ’80s, We Decided Bike Helmets Make Riders Safe. Cyclists Have Paid for It Ever Since.

Good review of the complex science around cycle helmets and safety. The article also touches on the unintended effects of helmet mandate laws (which have been repealed in many US cities). Shout out to Ian Walker of Swansea University and his heroic measuring of passing distance of vehicles with various...
Source: slate.com

Lecturer detects bot use in one-fifth of assessments as concerns mount over AI in exams

Deakin University’s Sally Brandon says technology ‘not going away’ as educators strive to adapt to use of software such as ChatGPT
Source: theguardian.com

Gender differences in individual variation in academic grades fail to fit expected patterns for STEM - Nature Communications

Fewer women than men pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), despite girls outperforming boys at school in the relevant subjects. According to the ‘variability hypothesis’, this over-representation of males is driven by gender differences in variance; greater male...
Source: nature.com

Police seize on COVID-19 tech to expand global surveillance

JERUSALEM (AP) — Majd Ramlawi was serving coffee in Jerusalem’s Old City when a chilling text message appeared on his phone. “You have been spotted as having participated in acts of violence in the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” it read in Arabic.
Source: apnews.com

Remembering the people

blog post image Please suggest some technology that might help ... but remind me who you are first. What do you use to keep track of everyone that you work with, live near, party with, study with, or just share time with? Mere humans can only maintain about 150 close relationships (Dunbar's number) so just wondering...
Source: wikipedia.org

Tax Filing Websites Caught Sending Users' Financial Data to Facebook - ExtremeTech

Filing status, dependent names, adjusted gross income...once it's on any of these three websites, it's likely in Facebook's hands. ”H&R Block, one of the country’s most recognizable tax filing firms, was found using Meta Pixel to obtain users’ health savings account usage data as well as dependents’...
Source: extremetech.com

Unchecked Carbon Dioxide Is Shrinking Earth’s Upper Atmosphere - ExtremeTech

The resulting domino effect could make it difficult for ships and satellites to deorbit in the future.
Source: extremetech.com

Inside a radical new project to democratize AI

A group of over 1,000 AI researchers has created a multilingual large language model bigger than GPT-3—and they’re giving it out for free.
Source: technologyreview.com