Dear Commons Community,

Leading universities and major technology companies agreed earlier this week to back a new project intended to give academics and other scientists access to the computing resources now available mainly to a few tech giants.  As reported by the New York Times.

“The initiative, the National Research Cloud, has received bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. Lawmakers in both houses have proposed bills that would create a task force of government science leaders, academics and industry representatives to outline a plan to create and fund a national research cloud.

This program would give academic scientists access to the cloud data centers of the tech giants, and to public data sets for research.

Several universities, including Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Ohio State, and tech companies including Google, Amazon and IBM backed the idea as well on Tuesday. The organizations declared their support for the creation of a research cloud and their willingness to participate in the project.

The research cloud, though a conceptual blueprint at this stage, is another sign of the largely effective campaign by universities and tech companies to persuade the American government to increase government backing for research into artificial intelligence. The Trump administration, while cutting research elsewhere, has proposed doubling federal spending on A.I. research by 2022.

Fueling the increased government backing is the recognition that A.I. technology is essential to national security and economic competitiveness. The national cloud legislation will be proposed as an amendment to this year’s defense budget authorization.

“We have a real challenge in our country from China in terms of what they are doing with A.I.,” said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California, a sponsor of the bill.

Funding for the project, the terms for paying the cloud providers and what data might be available would be up to the task force and Congress.

“This is a logical first step,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, another sponsor of the proposed law. “The task force is going to have to grapple with how you pay for it and how you govern it. But you shouldn’t have to work at Google to have access to this technology.”

The national research cloud would address a problem that is a byproduct of impressive progress in recent years. The striking gains made in tasks like language understanding, computer vision, game playing and common-sense reasoning have been attained thanks to a branch of A.I. called deep learning.

That technology increasingly requires immense computing firepower. A report last year from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, working with data from OpenAI, another artificial intelligence lab, observed that the volume of calculations needed to be a leader in advanced A.I. had soared an estimated 300,000 times in the previous six years. The cost of training deep learning models, cycling endlessly through troves of data, can be millions of dollars.

The cost and need for vast computing resources are putting some cutting-edge A.I. research beyond the reach of academics. Only the tech giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft can spend billions a year on data centers that are often the size of a football field, housing rack upon rack with hundreds of thousands of computers.

So there has been a brain drain of computer scientists from universities to the big tech companies, lured by access to their cloud data centers as well as lucrative pay packages. The worry is that academic research — the seed corn of future breakthroughs — is being shortchanged.

Academic work can be crucial particularly in areas where profits are not on the immediate horizon. That was the story with deep learning, which dates to the 1980s. A small band of academics nurtured the field for years. Only since 2012, with enough computing power and data, did deep learning really take off.

There have been smaller efforts for university research to tap into the big tech clouds. But the current concept of an ambitious public-private partnership for a National Research Cloud came in March from John Etchemendy and Fei-Fei Li, co-directors of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

They posted their idea online and sought support from other universities. The academics then promoted the idea to their political representatives and industry contacts.

The federal government has long backed major research projects like particle accelerators for high-energy physics in the 1960s and supercomputing centers in the 1980s.

But in the past, the government built the labs and facilities. The research cloud would use the cloud factories of the tech companies. Academic scientists would be government-subsidized customers of the tech giants, perhaps at rates below those charged to their business customers.

Many university researchers say that buying rather than building is the only sensible path, given the daunting cost of hyper-scale data centers.

“We need to get scientific research on the public cloud,” said Ed Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington. “We have to hitch ourselves to that wagon. It’s the only way to keep up.”

Make no mistake about it, super cloud computing and AI are the technologies of the future!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Joe Biden blasted President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic Tuesday, saying that Trump is “in retreat” with more than 125,000 Americans dead and the virus worsening in many states.

In a speech in Wilmington, Delaware, the former vice president recounted what he cast as Trump’s missteps, from Trump’s early dismissals of the virus to his more recent refusals to wear a mask in public appearances.

Pointing to Trump in March declaring himself a wartime president in battling the coronavirus, Biden said: “What happened? Now it’s almost July, and it seems like our wartime president has surrendered — waved the white flag and left the battlefield.”

Biden’s remarks (see video above) came as recent polls of voters nationally and in key swing states show him with a lead over Trump. Biden’s public appearances in recent months have been limited to small, invite-only crowds.

The 77-year-old former vice president appeared eager to respond to the Trump campaign portraying him as in cognitive decline, a case often made using out-of-context video from Biden’s public appearances. He said he “can hardly wait” to debate the 74-year-old Trump.

Biden also chided Trump for either failing to read or forgetting the contents of the daily briefing delivered to the President. The White House has denied that Trump was “personally briefed” on reports that Russia offered bounties to Taliban fighters to kill US troops in Afghanistan, claiming that the intelligence “wasn’t verified.”

“If he wasn’t briefed, it was a dereliction of duty. And if he was briefed and he didn’t do anything, that’s a dereliction of duty,” Biden said.

And, when asked by a reporter if he has been tested for any sort of cognitive decline, Biden said: “I can hardly wait to compare my cognitive capability to the cognitive capability of the man I’m running against.”

Biden’s speech tied together proposals he has issued in recent months, including calls for a national board to oversee a “massive surge” in coronavirus testing.

It is four months until the presidential election.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

By a 5-4 vote, the US Supreme Court upheld a Montana scholarship program that allows state tax credits for private schooling in which almost all the recipients attend religious schools. 

The Montana Supreme Court had struck down the K-12 private education scholarship program that was created by the Legislature in 2015 to make donors eligible for up to $150 in state tax credits. The state court had ruled that the tax credit violated the Montana constitution’s ban on state aid to religious schools.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“In Espinosa et al. v. Montana Department of Revenue  et al. , Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion that said the state ruling itself ran afoul of the religious freedom, embodied in the U.S. Constitution, of parents who want the scholarships to help pay for their children’s private education. “A state need not subsidize private education. But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious,” Roberts wrote.

In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor described the ruling as “perverse.”

“Without any need or power to do so, the Court appears to require a State to reinstate a tax-credit program that the Constitution did not demand in the first place,” she said.

Parents whose children attend religious schools sued to preserve the program. The high court decision upholds families’ rights “to exercise our religion as we see fit,” said Kendra Espinoza, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit whose two daughters attend the Stillwater Christian School in Kalispell, Montana, near Glacier National Park.

Roughly three-dozen states have similar no-aid provisions in their constitutions. Courts in some states have relied on those provisions to strike down religious-school funding.

Two states with existing private education programs, Maine and Vermont, could see quick efforts to force them to allow religious schools to participate.

Advocates for allowing state money to be used in private schooling said the court recognized in its decision that parents should not be penalized for sending their children to schools that are a better fit than the public schools.

“This opinion will pave the way for more states to pass school choice programs that allow parents to choose a school that best meets their child’s individual needs, regardless of whether those schools are religious or nonreligious,” said Erica Smith, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, which represented the parents in their court fight.

But the president of the Montana Federation of Public Employees, which counts more than 12,000 teachers and other school workers as union members, called the decision “a slap in the face” to its members and the communities they serve.

“Today’s decision violates Montana’s commitment to public education, our children, and our constitution. Extremist special interests are manipulating our tax code to rob Montana children of quality education while padding the pockets of those who run exclusive, discriminatory private schools,” union president Amanda Curtis said.

In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito pointed to evidence of anti-Catholic bigotry that he said motivated the original adoption of the Montana provision and others like it in the 1800s, although Montana’s constitution was redone in 1972 with the provision intact. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose two daughters attend Catholic schools, made a similar point during arguments in January when he talked about the “grotesque religious bigotry” against Catholics that underlay the amendment.

The decision was the latest in a line of decisions from the Supreme Court, which now includes Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, that have favored religion-based discrimination claims. In 2014, the justices allowed family-held, for-profit businesses with religious objections to get out from under a requirement to pay for contraceptives for women covered under their health insurance plans. In 2017, the court ruled for a Missouri church that had been excluded from state grants to put softer surfaces in playgrounds.

The high court also is weighing a Trump administration policy that would make it easier for employers to claim a religious or moral exemption and avoid paying for contraceptives for women covered by their health plans. Still another case would shield religious institutions from more employment discrimination claims.”

Given the current make-up of the Supreme Court, this decision was to be expected.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, officials announced that travelers from the United States will be barred from entering the European Union after it reopens its borders today because the coronavirus is still far too prevalent in the U.S.  As reported by NBC News.

The E.U.’s 27 members have been drawing up a list of countries whose virus levels are deemed low enough to allow people from those places to travel into the bloc, which has been mostly sealed off since March.

That list of safe countries was officially unveiled by European officials on Tuesday. The U.S. — which has the most coronavirus cases and deaths in the world — was not on it.

The 15 countries that did make the list are: Algeria, Australia, Canada, Georgia, Japan, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Rwanda, Serbia, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia and Uruguay.

China will also be included on the list if it allows entry to E.U. travelers in return.

The move is a sign of how the U.S. is seen by Europe and elsewhere as a global coronavirus hotbed.

The E.U. and U.S. experienced infection spikes in late March and early April. But while strict lockdown measures have seen those numbers decline across Europe, in the U.S. there have been recent flare-ups in states such as Florida and Texas while President Donald Trump has encouraged society to reopen.

More than 125,000 people in the U.S. have died from the coronavirus since the pandemic began, according to an NBC News tally.

Back in March, when Europe was the world’s coronavirus center, Trump announced sweeping travel restrictions — without telling any of his E.U. counterparts first.

But the E.U. says its selective travel list was not about political grudges and instead is based on epidemiological criteria.

A European briefing last week noted that the U.S. had seen 107 cases per 100,000 people in the previous 14 days, whereas the average across the E.U. was 16 cases per 100,000 people.

These restrictions do not apply to E.U. citizens abroad, health workers, people involved in the freight and haulage industries, diplomats and military personnel, and “passengers traveling for imperative family reasons.”

The E.U. is prudently protecting its citizens.

Tony