Harvard will take a close look at the brain to build better AIs

There’s no AI that can learn as fast as the human brain — at least not yet — but Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) wants to change that. The government organization has granted three departments within Harvard University a total of $28 million dollars to find out why our brains are so darn good at learning things compared to artificial systems. For instance, we only have to see a car once or a few times to recognize one, but even the most advanced AI has to look at thousands of samples before it can say what it’s seeing is a car.

The researchers from Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Center for Brain Science (CBS) and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology have been tasked to record the activities going on inside the brain’s visual cortex. They have to find out how the neurons there are connected to each other. Then, they have to use the data they gather to find a way to build better artificial intelligence systems.

Harvard assistant professor David Cox said:

This is a moonshot challenge, akin to the Human Genome Project in scope. The scientific value of recording the activity of so many neurons and mapping their connections alone is enormous, but that is only the first half of the project. As we figure out the fundamental principles governing how the brain learns, it’s not hard to imagine that we’ll eventually be able to design computer systems that can match, or even outperform, humans.

Clearly, this is a very ambitious project and the team members “have no illusions that this will be easy.” Since the whole process is expected to generate over a petabyte (or 1.6 million CDs) worth of data, the researchers believe it could lead to other advances in computing, as well. After all, as the research progresses, they will have to think up new ways to manage data and to speed up its processing.

Source: Harvard (1), (2)

Here’s how to stream the NFL’s AFC and NFC Championship games

Football isn’t going to stop just because of cold weather and snow moving through your part of the country. Thousands of people will be filling Sports Field at Mile High in Denver and Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte on Sunday as millions of people watch CBS and FOX to see which of the four teams remaining in the NFL Playoffs will head to Santa Clara on February 7 to play in Super Bowl 50.

We’re telling you how you can stream both the AFC Championship and NFC Championship games.

• New England Patriots @ Denver Broncos (3:05PM ET on Sunday, January 24)
  • Television: CBS
  • Phone:  NFL Mobile (Verizon only), TuneIn
  • Tablet: CBS Sports
  • Web: CBSSports.com
  • Other: Android TV, Chromecast, Roku, Xbox One, Apple TV
• Arizona Cardinals @ Carolina Panthers (6:40PM ET on Sunday, January 24)
  • Television: FOX
  • Phone: NFL Mobile (Verizon only), TuneIn
  • Tablet: FOX Sports GO
  • Web: FOXSports.com
  • Other: Android TV, Amazon Fire TV

TuneIn is probably your best bet if you can’t be in front of a television and lack an account with a television provider. The audio streaming service signed a deal with the NFL back in October to give TuneIn Premium subscribers radio feeds to each and every football game. Just fork over $7.99 per month to enter and TuneIn will also give you MLB and Barclays Premier League games in addition to free NHL games.

People outside of the United States can purchase NFL Game Pass to stream the games internationally.

Have any picks to win this weekend? Tell us in the comments section below. We’ll see if you’re a real NFL Nostradamus.

Source: NFL

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Consumer Reports backs Fitbit accuracy despite lawsuit

Given that there’s a lawsuit over the accuracy of Fitbit trackers’ heart rate monitors, you might be wondering how trustworthy those wearables really are. Should you buy a chest strap if you need to track your BPM? Not necessarily, if you ask Consumer Reports. It just retested both the Charge HR and Surge under more stringent conditions (additional arm locations and higher-impact workouts), and it found that both were effectively as accurate as a chest-based heart rate monitor. The only significant deviation was when using the Charge HR in particularly intense workouts, and even that could be fixed by wearing the wristband on the forearm.

This doesn’t mean that the devices are flawless, or that the lawsuit has no merit. If your Fitbit occasionally underreports your heart rate by a wide margin, that’s a real concern — you could perform high-intensity workouts without realizing that you’re over-stressing your heart. And of course, there are questions as to whether or not the test is really comprehensive. The Consumer Reports study isn’t broad enough to completely rule out issues that could crop up with different body sizes and fitness routines. However, the findings suggest that the errors might not be as widespread as implied by the lawsuit. They may well exist, but they’re not necessarily easy to replicate.

Source: Consumer Reports

Feds change up how they do background checks after OPM hack

The White House is taking steps to prevent another massive security breach that can compromise the information of future federal employees. It plans to replace (and absorb) the Office of Personnel Management’s background check division with a new one called the National Background Investigations Bureau. If you recall, the intruders that infiltrated OPM’s network last year took millions of people’s fingerprints, SS numbers, bank info and other personal details. NBIB will still be part of OPM, but it will be led by a presidential appointee. Plus, the data it collects won’t be kept within its offices anymore.

Its records will instead be guarded by the Pentagon, as the Department of Defense takes over their storage. The agency’s network isn’t exactly impenetrable — it had been hacked a few times in the past — but it designed a cloud-based storage system specifically for the records. The White House official who made the announcement said the DoD learned a lot from its own experiences, and the administration wants “to exploit that.”

The president wants to allocate $95 million of the country’s 2017 budget for the endeavor and will submit his proposal to the Congress in the next few weeks. Some of the changes will take effect as early as this year, though it might take a while before everything’s in place.

Source: The New York Times