Wendy Liu
Abolish Silicon Valley
“Silencing marginalized voices like this is the opposite of the NAUWU [Nothing About Us Without Us] principles which we discussed. And doing this in the context of ‘responsible AI’ adds so much salt to the wounds.”
TIME recognises 15-year-old scientist and inventor Gitanjali Rao as its first ever U.S. Kid of the Year. “Rao not only researches scientific tools such as artificial intelligence and carbon nanotube sensor technology and applies them to problems she sees in everyday life, like cyberbullying and water contamination,” TIME writes. “She also shows other kids how to tap into their curiosity, aspiring to create a generation of innovators.”
“We heard a loud sound, a loud bang outside the control room. We started to see the eventual downfall of the observatory.”
“Dedicated to showcasing the best of international contemporary video and digital art” Daata Fair Miami has launched, and runs through Dec 13. Fusing online destination and limited edition distribution hub, the platform strikes a curious balance between an open access online exhibition and red velvet rope gallerist for artists including Petra Cortright & Jeremy Couillard, Rosa Menkman, and Alex McLeod (image: McLeod’s 2018 piece Endless Runner (NPC Cycles)).
“Every human in the supply chain—from crane drivers up to the captain of the ship I was on—was constantly receiving instructions from unseen, distant, management algorithms.”
Google AI offshoot DeepMind announces a major breakthrough in solving what biologists call the “protein folding problem”—determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence. Considered one of the field’s grand challenges due to myriad possible configurations, DeepMind’s AI system AlphaFold has demonstrated it can predict protein structures with high accuracy, vastly outperforming other more laborious, costly techniques. “It’s a game-changer,” says Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany. “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything.”
“He knew as little as I did about how to make the computer draw. But he trusted me, his student. Throughout my academic career, I tried to follow Prof. Knödel’s example—trusting students rather than mistrusting them. Isn’t this what teaching is all about?”
The New Normal
A recent paper by amateur astronomer and YouTuber Alberto Caballero identifies a possible source of the Wow! signal, the curious cosmic radio blitz recorded in 1977 that expedited the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and puzzles experts to this day. Looking for “sun-like stars that might host an exoplanet capable of supporting intelligent life” in the signal’s celestial region, Caballero scanned ESA’s 1.3 billion star-strong Gaia database and found a potential match: “This candidate source, which is named 2MASS 19281982-2640123, therefore becomes an ideal target to conduct observations in the search for potentially habitable exoplanets.”
“Like all technologies, light reflects larger expressions of power, carving up an architecture of visibility that shapes how lives are led at night, providing shelter for some and harmful exposure for others.”
“…as familiarity with coding increases, more people will use that skill to produce music or art. There are people who say ‘I spend all day behind a computer; the last thing I want to do after work is look at a computer again,’ but for me, the computer is not a burden but more like water. I don’t think I’m alone in that regard.”
“For me, personally, there’s no separation between my activities as a citizen and my activities as an artist.”
