[Popular STEM] Curating the Internet: STEM digest for January 9, 2021
IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; Human dendrites reveal previously unknown biological computational capability; Study of gender bias in scholarly journals reveals no penalty for female authors; European Research Council launches platform and grants for crowdsourced image classification; and 2021's 11 biggest planned space missions
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- Video Friday: These Robots Are Ready for 2021 - IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos includes these articles:
- A DanceBots for Christmas from the ASL: Autonomous Christmas Lab
- Happy Holidays from NATO's Estonia Atlantic Treaty Association (EATA)
- Season's Greetings from Voliro
- Eve, a humanoid robot from Halodi Robotics, teaches us how to make gingerbread cookies
- And more...
Here is A Robot XMAS Tale from Energy Robotics:
- Dendritic action potentials and computation in human layer 2/3 cortical neurons - Dendrites surround and connect neurons in the brain. Until now, what we know about dendrites has come mostly from the study of dendrites in animals, such as rats. This study was able to examine dendrites in tissue from surgeries involving human epilepsy patients, and they discovered a new capability that was previously not known to be possible and has not been observed in dendrites from animals. In particular, these dendrites were able "to classify linearly nonseparable inputs". Conventional thinking had it that this computational task required multi-layer networks, but these dendrites were able to do it in a single layer. -h/t Daniel Lemire
- Peer review and gender bias: A study on 145 scholarly journals - A study of 145 journals found that the academic editorial process does not penalize authors with female names. In fact, evidence was found to suggest that manuscripts may have an advantage when written by women as single authors or co-authors. -h/t Daniel Lemire
- Harnessing the power of crowd-driven artificial intelligence - Picture Pile is a new proof of concept image classification system that lets people establish and run their own crowdsourced image classification campaigns that can be used for training AI systems. The system was created by the European Research Council (ERC). In addition to developing the system, the ERC is also working to distribute "Proof of Concept Grants". In addition to providing a new method for classifying images, the project also aims to address shortages of certain data types in existing training data that's available to the public. Researcher, Tobias Sturn, summarizes the project like this:
If it is possible for everyone to easily, quickly, and freely run their own Picture Pile campaigns, and choose for the resulting data to be made openly and freely available to everyone, scientists and application developers from many different fields will be able to train AI models that can solve tasks faster, more reliably, and more cost effectively than humans. The opportunities for applying this innovation to a broad range of sectors promises far-reaching benefits to society and scientific research
-h/t Communications of the ACM - The 11 biggest space missions of 2021 (and their chances of success) - Three Mars missions, another test for Boeing's Starliner, two commercial lunar payload missions ot the moon, and more. Most likely to succeed: "End of Juno, July 30", rated at 10/10; Least likely to succeed: "Blue Origin’s big year, TBD", rated at 2/10.
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