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10 Bits: The Data News Hotlist

by Hodan Omaar
by

This week’s list of top data news highlights covers March 30, 2024 to April 5, 2024 and includes articles on detecting dementia using mobile data and using algorithms to renourish food deserts. 

1. Streamlining Business Operations

AI startup Cohere has released a new language model called Command R+ to perform business-critical tasks more effectively and at a cheaper cost to firms. The model uses advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which optimizes the output of a large language model, improving the quality and relevance of generated text.

2. Predicting the Solar Corona

Ahead of the expected solar eclipse in North America on April 8, scientists have used data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to predict what the Sun’s corona (Latin for “crown”) may look like. The solar corona is the Sun’s outer atmosphere that surrounds and encompasses planets in the solar system. The model uses the computational capabilities of one of NASA’s supercomputers to update solar corona predictions almost in real-time by continuously ingesting data as it gets closer to the date of the eclipse.

3. Detecting Dementia Early

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have partnered with New York-based software company Datacubed Health to quickly detect dementia by using data collected from a mobile app, such as voice recordings and body movements. To train the app, researchers used data collected from 360 participants who are gene carriers of dementia with no symptoms, display early signs, or have symptoms already. The data helps improve early detection of this widespread disease since most patients are diagnosed too late for early treatment to be effective.

4. Renourishing Food Deserts

A team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego and San Francisco are combining government, private sector, and crowdsourced data to create interactive maps of food deserts. The platform, available in multiple languages, will include recommendation algorithms that customize business plans for suppliers based on local consumer preferences for price, convenience, and flavor to help increase consumer access to healthy and fresh food options.

5. Building Secure AI

Microsoft has announced a range of new tools in Azure AI Studio to help developers make more secure and reliable generative AI models. The new tools can help ensure AI systems are not generating errors or adding information that isn’t substantiated in the application’s data sources.

6. Revamping Music

Generative AI developer Stability.ai, has introduced a tool that can produce high-quality, full tracks up to three minutes long. The tool was trained on a licensed dataset from AudioSparx, a music library with thousands of independent music artists, allows users to upload audio samples and transforms them into new tracks based on what they ask for.

7. Understanding the Arctic 

Researchers at the College of William and Mary have used satellite data to study the physics underlying the landscape in the Arctic region and how it responds to changes in climate. The research team used large datasets to make several breakthrough discoveries in a region where collecting data is challenging, including density patterns of water tracks within specific sites and how slope affects water track density.

8. Advancing 6G Research

VIAVI, a network technology company based in Arizona, has partnered with researchers from Northeastern University to make digital twins of wireless networks.  The digital twins will allow researchers to test new technologies without investing in physical real-world equipment, making it safer and easier to experiment with ideas for 5G and future networks.

9. Monitoring Disasters

Researchers at the University of Connecticut have developed a machine-learning model that can better analyze satellite data to detect land disturbances that indicate a disaster. The model improves upon existing methods because it more accurately identifies small changes in noisy data caused by things like clouds, cloud shadows, or smoke.

10. Expediting Hiring

The global job posting website Indeed launched an AI-powered tool called Smart Sourcing to help employers more efficiently source candidates from a global talent pool of nearly 300 million people. The generative AI tool expedites the hiring process for employers and job hunting for candidates at the same time by analyzing the candidate’s resume and highlighting their relevant skills or alternatively showing possible gaps in their experiences.

Image credits: Unsplash user Laura Skinner

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