标签：#science

Relativity Space, the rocket company led by former Google executive Eric Schmidt, was picked to launch NASA's Aeolus payload to Mars in 2028, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Under a new public-private partnership, Relativity Space will provide the "spacecraft, rocket, and cruise operations" to fly Aeolus to Mars, where the payload will "provide the first […]

Stop Fighting Scikit-Learn Pipelines: How Metadata Routing Fixes Sample Weights & Groups A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon this video by Vincent D. Warmerdam about metadata routing in scikit-learn. I'll be honest, I had no idea what "metadata routing" even meant, but Vincent's explanation completely changed how I think about building ML pipelines. The video showed me that one of the most frustrating problems in scikit-learn; passing sample weights and groups through complex pipelines finally had an elegant solution. It piqued my curiosity enough that I dove deep into the feature, tested it extensively, and honestly, I was surprised by how little coverage this gets in technical blogs and articles. So I figured, why not write about it myself and share what I learned? If you've ever struggled with imbalanced datasets, grouped cross-validation, or just wanted to pass custom information through your pipelines, this article is for you. Let's start from the very beginning. What is "Metadata" in Machine Learning? Let's start with a concrete example. You're building a credit card fraud detection model with this data: # Your training data X = transaction_features # Amount, merchant, time, location, etc. y = is_fraud # 0 = legitimate, 1 = fraud # But you also have additional information: sample_weights = [ 1.0 , 1.0 , 10.0 , 1.0 , ...] # Fraud transactions weighted 10x customer_ids = [ 101 , 102 , 101 , 103 , ...] # Which customer made each transaction Metadata is the "extra information" beyond your features (X) and labels (y): sample_weight : How important is each transaction? (Fraud = 10x more important) groups : Which customer does each transaction belong to? (For proper cross-validation) Custom metadata : Transaction timestamps, confidence scores, data quality flags, etc. Why Metadata Matters: The Credit Card Fraud Problem Imagine you're building a fraud detection system for a financial company. You have: Imbalanced data : 99% legitimate transactions, 1% fraudulent T

"Intelligence isn't about searching everywhere—it's about knowing where not to search." Artificial Intelligence is often associated with neural networks, large language models, and autonomous systems. But long before modern generative AI, computer scientists were solving a much deeper question: How do intelligent systems make decisions efficiently? Whether you're building search algorithms, recommendation systems, autonomous robots, or distributed systems, the architecture of intelligence teaches timeless lessons about solving problems under uncertainty. Let's explore five powerful ideas that shaped AI—and why they matter far beyond computer science. ✈️ 1. The Pilot's Dilemma: Why Blind Search Fails Imagine you're a pilot. Suddenly, one of your engines fails. In the next few seconds, there are hundreds of switches, buttons, and controls available. If you treated every control equally, you'd spend precious time trying random combinations. That is exactly how uninformed search works. Algorithms like: Breadth-First Search (BFS) Depth-First Search (DFS) have no knowledge of where the solution might be. They simply explore. Start ├── Option A ├── Option B ├── Option C └── ... The larger the search space becomes, the less practical this strategy is. A pilot doesn't blindly flip switches. They use additional knowledge : Engine pressure Fuel flow Hydraulic readings Warning systems Those clues dramatically reduce the number of possibilities. This is exactly what AI calls Informed Search . Instead of exploring everything, intelligent systems use knowledge to eliminate impossible paths before searching them. 🧠 2. Heuristics: The Cheat Code of Intelligence The secret behind informed search is something called a heuristic . A heuristic is simply an educated estimate. Mathematically, h(n) represents the estimated cost from the current state to the goal. One important rule always holds: h(goal) = 0 Once we've reached the goal, there's no remaining cost. Example: Finding Bucharest

Years after initial tests, researchers are now racing to see if a vaccine developed in 2011 can help fight the current Bundibugyo outbreak in Congo.

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. On TikTok, the tanned youths are explaining why they no longer wear sunscreen. In one video, a young man films […]

A French launch startup is scrapping the name of its rocket, apparently due to a trademark issue.

Researchers say these coral strongholds may help repopulate more degraded reefs.

A new report shows that government agencies failed to communicate and includes recommendations for stronger oversight in a bid to avert future disasters.

A London clinic owner has claimed he is treating people with stage 4 cancer by sealing them into a plastic bag while they're naked from the waist down and gassing them with chlorine dioxide.

"I consider this a success already, just from the fact that we're even going to try this."

It's unclear whether the system is currently intact.

We can't blame the Neolithic Transition for the plague anymore.

Wellness influencers have stumbled onto a huge issue when it comes male fertility, though not every solution they're pitching is good advice.

Midjourney CEO David Holz just showed off the company's first hardware product and plans to build a San Francisco spa, which he admitted is a bit different from the "cat pictures" produced by its AI image generator. Dubbed The Midjourney Scanner, it's an ultrasound-based full-body scanner that uses a ring of sensors to capture vertical […]

I recently calibrated a recovery-rate model that had only two weak features. Its point accuracy was almost nothing — R² basically zero. I expected its uncertainty estimates to be junk too. They weren't: the 90% conformal prediction intervals covered ~89% of held-out outcomes. Valid, just wide . That surprised me enough to nail it down, because it contradicts a belief a lot of us carry around: "my model isn't accurate, so I can't trust its uncertainty." For split conformal prediction, that's backwards. Here's the precise statement, a runnable demo, and the one caveat that actually bites. Coverage is a property of the procedure, not the model Split conformal prediction gives a distribution-free, finite-sample marginal coverage guarantee : P( Y ∈ Ĉ(X) ) ≥ 1 − α and it holds for any point model, as long as the calibration and test data are exchangeable. The model is a black box. You fit it however you like, then on a held-out calibration set you take the (1−α) quantile of the absolute residuals, and that quantile becomes the half-width of your intervals. Nowhere does that construction require the model to be good. A bad model just has large residuals, so the calibration quantile is large, so the intervals are wide — wide enough to still cover at the stated rate. Accuracy doesn't buy you validity ; it buys you efficiency (narrower intervals at the same coverage). The demo (numbers are reproducible, seed fixed) Same dataset and target, three models from strong to useless, target coverage 90%: model R² marginal coverage mean interval width gradient boosting 0.741 0.895 5.39 weak linear (1 noisy feature) 0.061 0.905 10.39 predict-the-mean −0.000 0.907 10.83 All three land at ~90% coverage. The only thing that changes is width: the good model's intervals are half as wide . That's the whole story in one table — validity is constant, efficiency tracks accuracy. import numpy as np from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression from sklearn.ensemble import GradientBoostingReg

Elsewhere, beyond-classical quantum hardware, plus classical computing fires back.

Why Your Chinese-Tenured Faculty Resume Won’t Work in US Industry US data scientist hiring managers scan a resume in 7–15 seconds looking for one thing: evidence you can solve business problems with data. A Chinese faculty resume often leads with tenure status, publication counts, and grant amounts—none of which translate to industry value. Worse, the CV-style length and Chinese-specific qualifications (e.g., “Professor of Record,” “National Natural Science Foundation PI”) confuse HR software and recruiters unfamiliar with that system. You need to strip the academic frame and rebuild around what a US data scientist does: clean messy data, build predictive models, deploy to production, and communicate results to non-technical stakeholders. Think of every faculty achievement as raw material you must reframe. Core Rewriting Rules: From Academic to Industry Rule 1: Replace Tenure Rank with a US-Equivalent Data Science Title Do not list “Tenured Associate Professor” unless it is your most recent position at a well-known university (e.g., Peking University, Tsinghua). Instead, use a title that reveals your function: “Senior Data Scientist – Research Computing” or “Lead Data Scientist – Machine Learning Research Lab.” The point is to signal the job function, not the academic rank. Example: Before: “Tenured Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Fudan University” After: “Senior Data Scientist / Research Lead, Fudan University AI Lab” Rule 2: Translate Every Accomplishment into a Business-Relevant Metric Chinese faculty resumes often say “published 15 papers in top-tier journals” or “secured ¥3M in research funding.” That means nothing to a hiring manager at a fintech startup. Instead, describe what you did with the data and the outcome. Concrete example – before and after: BEFORE (faculty bullet): “Led research project on deep learning for medical image segmentation; published 3 papers in IEEE TMI.” AFTER (industry data scientist bullet): “Built and validated a co

Jackery is jumping on the fridge-battery trend with what it says is the "world's slimmest." FridgeGuard also looks nice; a break from power stations that tend to look more at home at a job site than the kitchen or living room. Measuring just 2.63 inches (67mm) thick, the Jackery FridgeGuard power station is meant to […]

Temperatures have climbed up to 45 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, stopping ice from forming in the dead of Antarctic winter.

Transferring genes across species doesn't just happen in microbes.