Blog
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Managing/Being a Master’s Student during a Pandemic
For the past five years, Elsevier has been an enthusiastic participant in the UvA Master’s Student programme. In total, more than 45 students have been supervised by researchers across the company, which has led to 12 new recruits for our Data Science teams.
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Data as a material for fashion: How treating data as a material enables a new future for design
Data Science is rapidly changing industries around the world, yet the digital transformation remains difficult for Fashion. Fashion (Design, Business, Branding, and Marketing) has never been known for maths geniuses. (There are a few, but they keep it a secret.) While maths and data may not be a given in the industry, people who work in fashion are material experts. So what would it mean if we treated data as if it were a material?
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Programming Training for Refugees
In August 2020, VodafoneZiggo and Accenture wrapped up their three-month CodeMasters training programme for refugees. The training course was tailor-made to help refugees integrate in the Dutch labour market by teaching participants to write computer code.
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Making the sum greater than the parts – FAIR Data
Obtaining access to the right data is a first, essential step in any Data Science endeavour. But what makes the data “right”?
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Digital Humanism
For a long time, Informatics has been viewed as a foremost technical scientific discipline; an idea aptly captured by the name "Computer Science". This view may have been justified in the past, but as our society becomes increasingly digitized, ICT technologies undeniably have a full-scale fundamental impact on society at large. An international and multi-disciplinary group of academics seek to analyse this new digital society and to ensure that technology is developed in line with human values and needs.
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The Discovery Lab: the pearls and perils
Elsevier reflects on its experience in working with the University of Amsterdam and the VU Amsterdam to establish the Discovery Lab. What was the most important element for collaboration and what were the success factors that led to the launch of the Lab?
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IoT as an enabler of AI: Revolutionizing fish production
With the use of IoT and AI, the Blue Planet Ecosystems (BPE) bioreactor can farm fish in any location. The founders of the biotech startup want to revolutionize methods of food production. In their artificial ecosystems, they produce fish from sunlight. In this concept, algae, water, sunlight and IoT support fish-farming in containers.
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Responsible Artificial Intelligence in Practice
AI has created a wealth of opportunities for innovation across many domains. However, along with these opportunities comes unexpected and sometimes unwanted consequences. For example, algorithms can discriminate or lead to unfair treatment of groups of people. This calls for a responsible approach to AI.
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AI for Social Good & Equality of Opportunity
AI for Social Good is on the rise. Many organisations in the public, private and nonprofit sectors are deploying AI for positive social initiatives, with varying degrees of success. The potential of AI to reduce socio-economic inequality, one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, is yet to be realized. The Civic AI Lab was launched to address this challenge.
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Europe needs its own Google!
On October 20th 2020, the US Department of Justice announced a lawsuit against Google for violating antitrust laws. On November 18th and 19th 2020, the GAIA X Summit will take place. The GAIA X project, a collaboration between the German and French governments and industry, aims to build a European cloud infrastructure for data. Although these two events seem unrelated, they share one clear objective: to limit the power of the existing Big Tech elite.