Christophe Coupé, Yoon Mi Oh, Dan Dediu and François Pellegrino show that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually

NATURE - Luis Ceze, Jeff Nivala and Karin Strauss provide an overview of the DNA storage process, a comprehensive history of research in the field and the state of the art in this area. And challenges for mainstream adoption.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN - Life’s information-storage system is being adapted to handle massive amounts of information

Emma Strubell, Ananya Ganesh and Andrew McCallum quantify the approximate financial and environmental costs of training a variety of recently successful neural network models for NLP

Anvaka proposes a starter project for building graph algorithm explorations, providing basic graph layout and pan/zoom interaction. Users can load .dot files to render new graphs.

Georgi Gerganov's collection of command-line and GUI tools for capturing and analyzing audio data.

Quantamagazine - Computer scientists are looking to evolutionary biology for inspiration in the search for optimal solutions among astronomically huge sets of possibilities.

Wired - The world's most popular fruit is facing extinction, and scientists are racing to use gene-editing to save it. To succeed, they'll need to overcome an even bigger problem: opposition to GMO crops

Comprehensive deep learning course by François Fleuret, providing slides, recordings, and a virtual machine.

The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) gives consumers more control over the personal information that businesses collect about them and the CCPA regulations provide guidance on how to implement the law.

Wade Brainerd proposes a python implementation of the Eliza Chatbot

VIDEO - Ali Rahimi, Google, talking about alchemy in machine learning back at the 2017 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

Luca Pappalardo, Paolo Cintia, Dino Pedreschi, Fosca Giannotti, Albert-László Barabási machine learning to design an artificial judge which accurately reproduces human evaluation, allowing us to demonstrate how human observers are biased towards diverse contextual features.

Wired - The Chinese government plans to launch its Social Credit System in 2020. The aim? To judge the trustworthiness – or otherwise – of its 1.3 billion residents

New Scientist - If an enormous solar flare like the one that hit Earth 150 years ago struck us today, it could knock out our electrical grids, satellite communications and the internet.

Karin Fister, Iztok Fister Jr., and Jana Murovec show that artificially encoded data can be stored and multiplied within plants.

VIDEOS | Each section of Sheldon Axler's textbook Linear Algebra Done Right in a video format with links to pdf files of the slides that accompany the corresponding videos

A curated list of awesome adversarial machine learning resources.

Science - Seth L. Shipman, Jeff Nivala, Jeffrey D. Macklis, and George M. Church harnessed CRISPR to generate records of specific DNA sequences into a population of bacterial genomes.

Ilya Loshchilov and Frank Hutter propose a simple warm restart technique for stochastic gradient descent to improve its anytime performance when training deep neural networks.

European Union's official regulation on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (GDPR)

Quantamagazine - The same brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time. The research suggests that our thoughts may take place on a mental space-time canvas.

Tyler Vigen's collection of 30,000 spurious charts

Quantamagazine - The same mental processes that organize memories may also coordinate how we make decisions.

VIDEO | NASA Goddard present two model runs that allow to estimate consequences of a large CME hitting Earth, so we can better protect power grids and satellites.