Tag Archives: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

World Science Festival in New York City, May 22 – June 2, 2019

It’s time for the World Science Fair in New York City, which has been around since 2008 according to their About webpage,

The annual live, week-long Festivals, which launched in New York in 2008, have collectively drawn over 2.9 million visitors worldwide, with millions more viewing the programs online. The World Science Festival’s original musical and theatrical works tour nationally and internationally, and March 2016 marked the launch of World Science Festival Brisbane. World Science U is the Foundation’s online education arm where students and lifelong learners can dive more deeply through artfully produced digital education content presented by world-renowned scientists.

I’ve arbitrarily selected three events but there are many more. I notice that several sessions have sold out. From the World Science Festival 2019 events page,

Light Falls: Space, Time, and an Obsession of Einstein

Wednesday, May 22, 2019
7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall
May 2019 marks a pivotal milestone in human intellectual history: the 100th anniversary of astronomical observations that confirmed Albert Einstein’s new conception of space, time and gravity–his General Theory of Relativity. In celebration of this momentous achievement, join Brian Greene and an ensemble Broadway cast for Light Falls, an original work for the stage featuring wondrous, fully immersive projections and an original orchestral score, tracing the breakthrough moments, agonizing frustrations, and final emergence into the light as the world’s most intrepid scientific mind took on the universe. And won.
Written by Brian Greene
Music by Jeff Beal
Design by 59 Productions
Directed by Scott Faris
Executive Producer Tracy Day
Sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation with additional support from the John Templeton Foundation.
NEW TICKETS JUST RELEASED!
Learn More

Buy Tickets

CRISPR in Context: The New World of Human Genetic Engineering

Tuesday, May 28, 2019
8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium, Simons Foundation
It’s happened. The first children genetically engineered with the powerful DNA-editing tool called CRISPR-Cas9 have been born to a woman in China. Their altered genes will be passed to their children, and their children’s children. Join CRISPR’s co-discoverer, microbiologist Jennifer Doudna, as we explore the perils and the promise of this powerful technology. It is not the first time human ingenuity has created something capable of doing us great good and great harm. Are we up to the challenge of guiding how CRISPR will shape the future?
Seats are limited and will be made available to registered guests on a first-come, first-served basis. REGISTER NOW!

The Kavli Prize recognizes scientists for their seminal advances in astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience. The series, “The Big, the Small, and the Complex,” is sponsored by The Kavli Foundation.
Learn More

Register Now

….

The Technology that Transforms Us

Thursday, May 30, 2019
7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

NYU Global Center, Grand Hall
We make tools. It defines us. But since the first proto-human tied a stick to a stone, tools have also been making us. Join our panel of philosophers, anthropologists, and futurists as we examine our journey from the stone age to the computer age—seeking clues about who we are, and what we are becoming. Our smartphones have become veritable appendages. How long before we literally merge with our technology? Wearables, implantables, ingestible sensors, digital telepathy, and brain-computer interfaces are all on the horizon. Join us for a fascinating glimpse of a future that is closer than you think.

The Big Ideas Series is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation.
Learn More

This program is sold out. A small number of tickets will be available at the venue 30 minutes prior to the event on a first-come-first-served basis. CLICK HERE to join the waitlist and you’ll be alerted if tickets become available sooner. 
Sold Out

….


The Great Fish Count

Saturday, June 1, 2019
10:00 am – 6:00 pm

Great Fish Count Sites
From Lemon Creek in Staten Island to the shores of the Bronx River, New York’s waterways are teeming with life — and it’s up to you to find it! Led by top marine scientists and biologists in 18 sites across New York’s five boroughs, Westchester, and New Jersey, the Great Fish Count gives attendees of all ages the chance to strap on a pair of waders, cast a net, and discover the underwater world in their own backyard.

This event is FREE and open to the public. RSVP not required, but encouraged. RSVP HERE!

Produced in partnership with the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation

Supported by the Bezos Family Foundation.

Learn More

Free Admission

….

Should you be in New York City during these dates, I hope you’ll get a chance to participate if not the festival or one of its associated events.

Societal implications of emerging technologies (a Washington, D.C. event)

Here are the details about this book launch event,

Assessing the Societal Implications of Emerging Technologies: Book Launch

Please join us for the launch of Evan Michelson’s new book, Assessing the Societal Implications of Emerging Technologies: Anticipatory Governance in Action, which offers tangible insights into strategies deployed by well-known, high-profile organizations involved in anticipating the societal and policy implications of nanotechnology and synthetic biology.

The book lays out one of the first actionable roadmaps that interested stakeholders can follow when working toward institutionalizing anticipatory governance practices throughout the policymaking process.

David Rejeski, director of the Science & Technology Innovation Program at the Wilson Center, will lead the discussion. A light lunch will be served at noon.

For more information, please visit:
https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138123434

Speakers:

Evan Michelson, author, Assessing the Societal Implications of Emerging Technologies

David Rejeski, Director, Science and Technology Innovation Program

Thursday, June 9th, 2016
12:00pm – 1:30pm

5th Floor Conference Room

Wilson Center
Ronald Reagan Building and
International Trade Center
One Woodrow Wilson Plaza
1300 Pennsylvania, Ave., NW
Washington, D.C. 20004

If planning to attend in person, you can RSVP here.

Unfortunately, there is no indication as to whether or not the event will be livestreamed or webcast at a later date.

I have found a little more information about the author, Evan Michelson on the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation website,

Evan S. Michelson, Ph.D. is a Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Dr. Michelson is responsible for overseeing the Foundation’s Energy and Environment Program, which seeks to advance understanding about the economic, environmental, security, and policy tradeoffs associated with the increased deployment of low- and no-carbon resources and technologies across the energy system. He also manages the Foundation’s grantmaking to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (IV), an international astrophysics research collaboration focused on exploring the evolution and structure of the universe, the formation of stars and galaxies, the history of the Milky Way, and the science behind dark matter.

Enjoy!

Robo Brain; a new robot learning project

Having covered the RoboEarth project (a European Union funded ‘internet for robots’ first mentioned here in a Feb. 14, 2011 posting [scroll down about 1/4 of the way] and again in a March 12 2013 posting about the project’s cloud engine, Rapyuta and. most recently in a Jan. 14, 2014 posting), an Aug. 25, 2014 Cornell University news release by Bill Steele (also on EurekAlert with some editorial changes) about the US Robo Brain project immediately caught my attention,

Robo Brain – a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available Internet resources – is currently downloading and processing about 1 billion images, 120,000 YouTube videos, and 100 million how-to documents and appliance manuals. The information is being translated and stored in a robot-friendly format that robots will be able to draw on when they need it.

The news release spells out why and how researchers have created Robo Brain,

To serve as helpers in our homes, offices and factories, robots will need to understand how the world works and how the humans around them behave. Robotics researchers have been teaching them these things one at a time: How to find your keys, pour a drink, put away dishes, and when not to interrupt two people having a conversation.

This will all come in one package with Robo Brain, a giant repository of knowledge collected from the Internet and stored in a robot-friendly format that robots will be able to draw on when they need it. [emphasis mine]

“Our laptops and cell phones have access to all the information we want. If a robot encounters a situation it hasn’t seen before it can query Robo Brain in the cloud,” explained Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science.

Saxena and colleagues at Cornell, Stanford and Brown universities and the University of California, Berkeley, started in July to download about one billion images, 120,000 YouTube videos and 100 million how-to documents and appliance manuals, along with all the training they have already given the various robots in their own laboratories. Robo Brain will process images to pick out the objects in them, and by connecting images and video with text, it will learn to recognize objects and how they are used, along with human language and behavior.

Saxena described the project at the 2014 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference, July 12-16 [2014] in Berkeley.

If a robot sees a coffee mug, it can learn from Robo Brain not only that it’s a coffee mug, but also that liquids can be poured into or out of it, that it can be grasped by the handle, and that it must be carried upright when it is full, as opposed to when it is being carried from the dishwasher to the cupboard.

The system employs what computer scientists call “structured deep learning,” where information is stored in many levels of abstraction. An easy chair is a member of the class of chairs, and going up another level, chairs are furniture. Sitting is something you can do on a chair, but a human can also sit on a stool, a bench or the lawn.

A robot’s computer brain stores what it has learned in a form mathematicians call a Markov model, which can be represented graphically as a set of points connected by lines (formally called nodes and edges). The nodes could represent objects, actions or parts of an image, and each one is assigned a probability – how much you can vary it and still be correct. In searching for knowledge, a robot’s brain makes its own chain and looks for one in the knowledge base that matches within those probability limits.

“The Robo Brain will look like a gigantic, branching graph with abilities for multidimensional queries,” said Aditya Jami, a visiting researcher at Cornell who designed the large-scale database for the brain. It might look something like a chart of relationships between Facebook friends but more on the scale of the Milky Way.

Like a human learner, Robo Brain will have teachers, thanks to crowdsourcing. The Robo Brain website will display things the brain has learned, and visitors will be able to make additions and corrections.

The “robot-friendly format” for information in the European project (RoboEarth) meant machine language but if I understand what’s written in the news release correctly, this project incorporates a mix of machine language and natural (human) language.

This is one of the times the funding sources (US National Science Foundation, two of the armed forces, businesses and a couple of not-for-profit agencies) seem particularly interesting (from the news release),

The project is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Robotics Initiative, whose goal is to advance robotics to help make the United States more competitive in the world economy.

For the curious, here’s a link to the Robo Brain and RoboEarth websites.