news 2020

Unfortunately, our society is not yet free of inequality and discrimination. When you develop artificial intelligence in such an environment, you have to be careful that algorithms do not copy this inequality. UvA neuroinformatician Sennay Ghebreab is committed to AI technology that safeguards values such as equality and privacy.

A team of researchers from ETH Zurich has used simulations on the CSCS supercomputer "Piz Daint" to investigate how ageing mechanisms of soot particles in the atmosphere affect cloud formation. The results show that the influence of ozone and sulfuric acid on soot ageing alters cloud formation and, ultimately, the climate.

The welfare of livestock could be improved thanks to a new research project that will use novel artificial intelligence methods combined with behavioural analytics to provide rapid and reliable insights to animal health for farmers across the UK. The team headed by Dr Chris Cormack at QF will run a feasibility study with Professor Andrew Dowsey and animal welfare experts, Dr Siobhan Mullan, Dr Suzanne Held and Professor Michael Mendl at the University of Bristol and Agri-EPI Centre at their South West Dairy Development Centre in Somerset.

The effort to construct GRETA (Gamma-Ray Energy Tracking Array) , a cutting-edge spherical array of high-purity germanium crystals that will measure gamma-ray signals to reveal new details about the structure and inner workings of atomic nuclei, has received key approvals needed to proceed toward full build-out.

What makes a photo perfect? This usually was a question of experience and gut feeling for marketers, until recently. PhD candidate Gijs Overgoor went looking for the answer with the help of machine learning, focusing among other things on the visual complexity of images on Instagram. Overgoor divides his time between the Netherlands, where he is conducting research for his PhD at UvA's Amsterdam Business School, and in the United States.

By Christoph Pelzl TU Graz algorithm-based method provides a basis for decisions on the correct amount of tamping measures on tracks, thus reducing their life-cycle costs by up to 20 per cent. Train journeys should be safe and comfortable, and track systems are crucial to this. So-called "tamping" (positioning, compacting and stabilizing) of the ballast in the track bed is one of the most important maintenance tasks in the railway industry.

Imagine a plastic bag that can carry home your groceries, then quickly degrade without harming the environment. Or a super-strong, lightweight plastic for airplanes, rockets, and satellites that can replace traditional structural metals in aerospace technologies. Machine learning and artificial intelligence have accelerated the ability to design materials with specific properties like these.

Noisy open plan offices full of workers hunched over desks while wearing noise cancelling headphones could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to new research from The Australian National University (ANU). The ANU researchers have developed a new formula to show how effective noise cancellation technology can be in different spaces.

Tiny movements in Earth's outermost layer may provide a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the physics and warning signs of big quakes. New algorithms that work a little like human vision are now detecting these long-hidden microquakes in the growing mountain of seismic data. Measures of Earth's vibrations zigged and zagged across Mostafa Mousavi's screen one morning in Memphis, Tenn.

For decades, the push toward renewable energy sources like solar and wind has necessitated the development of countless technologies. From generation techniques, to power grid infrastructure and storage methods, renewable power development requires innovation from all angles. Today, thanks to the tireless work of researchers and engineers all over the world, methods for generating renewable energy have come a long way.

Team uses NERSC supercomputer simulations to achieve high-sensitivity analysis of Higgs bosons decaying into pairs of muons A display of a candidate Higgs boson event at CERN's ATLAS experiment in which a Higgs boson decays into two muons. The muons appear as red tracks in this rendering.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can become more efficient and reliable if it is made to mimic biological models. New approaches in AI research are hugely successful in experiments. Artificial intelligence has arrived in our everyday lives-from search engines to self-driving cars. This has to do with the enormous computing power that has become available in recent years.

SCAMP-5d vision system The University of Manchester, 2020 SCAMP-5d's hardware architecture.

The roar of a lion is one of the most thrilling and captivating sounds of the wild. This characteristic call is typically delivered in a bout consisting of one or two soft moans followed by several loud, full-throated roars and a terminating sequence of grunts.  A team of scientists based in WildCRU at the University of Oxford, well-known for their research involving Cecil the Lion, has teamed up with colleagues in the Department of Computer Science to discover the precise ways in which each lion's roar is distinct, identifiable and trackable.

Violence reduction strategies, which have traditionally focused on pubs and nightclubs, need to be broadened to include places where alcohol is not served if they are to be effective, a new study has suggested. Researchers from Cardiff University's Violence Research Group gathered data from 10 city centres across England and Wales and used machine learning to map the distribution of reported incidents of violent crime against alcohol outlets and, crucially, locations where alcohol is not sold.

Virtual reality software which allows researchers to 'walk' inside and analyse individual cells could be used to understand fundamental problems in biology and develop new treatments for disease.

A human research team and a machine learning algorithm have found that we need to rethink much of what we know about iridium oxide.

SURF recipient applies computational skills to biomedical engineering As a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University, Sean Pereira took a seminar with biomedical engineering professor Rosalyn Abbott. Despite Pereira's focus on the computational aspects of biology, he was drawn to the work Abbott was exploring with silk applications to different challenges in biomedical engineering.

Math puzzle resolved by translating it into satisfiability problem Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists and mathematicians have resolved the last, stubborn piece of Keller's conjecture, a geometry problem that scientists have puzzled over for 90 years. By structuring the puzzle as what computer scientists call a satisfiability problem, the researchers put the problem to rest with four months of frenzied computer programming and just 30 minutes of computation using a cluster of computers.

A new system capable of automatically turning words into molecules on demand will open up the digitisation of chemistry, scientists say. Researchers from the University of Glasgow's School of Chemistry, who developed the system, claim it will lead to the creation of a 'Spotify for chemistry' - a vast online repository of downloadable recipes for important molecules including drugs.