PSA Certified: AI growth outpacing security measures

While the industry acknowledges the need for robust security measures, research from PSA Certified suggests that investment and best practices are struggling to keep pace with AI’s rapid growth. The survey of 1,260 global technology decision-makers revealed that two-thirds (68%) are concerned that the speed of…

Behind the Scenes: Production Gear at the 2024 Summer Games – Videoguys

On this week’s Videoguys Live, join us as James gives us an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the cutting-edge gear from Videoguys being used at the 2024 Summer Games! Discover how our top manufacturers’ equipment is enhancing the performance and coverage of the world’s biggest sporting event. Don’t miss out on this showcase of innovation and excellence in sports broadcasting!

Watch the full video below:

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LiveU provided essential live streaming technology and cloud solutions to numerous broadcasters and media companies during the Summer Games

  • Hundreds of LiveU portable encoders are being rented out to customers for capturing and broadcasting live content from various locations around the city.
  • LiveU has 13 team members on the ground, operating from three dedicated locations in Paris to provide technical support and ensure stress-free operation for our clients.​

​How were LiveU’s remote production capabilities utilized during the Summer Games​

  • LiveU’s LU800 4G multi-camera encoder operates as a remote production unit with a single unit supporting up to four high-res, fully frame-synced feeds that can be streamed back to the customer’s centralized production studio.​
  • LiveU’s cloud-based solutions enable efficient, flexible REMI workflows, reducing further the operation of heavy equipment on-site, enriching the fan experience and expanding the reach of live content.​ LiveU Studio,  LiveU Matrix + Dynamic Share, LiveU Ingest​
  • Our remote production tools are being used to enhance communication between the studio and talents in the field, ensuring professionally produced live broadcasts.​ IP Pipe, Audio Connect, Video Return​

​What is the Lightweight Production Bundle​

  • Pay as you go or Yearly plan that includes the hardware encoder, data, and access to LiveU Studios cloud-based switching platform​

Panasonic’s AV Magic for Paris 2024!​

  • KAIROS delivers video content at almost all competition venues (26 in total)​
  • Its scalability allows to produce content for up to three venues with a single Kairos Core Server to be controlled via multiple control surfaces remotely
  • Each sport venue is equipped with PTZ cameras and live switcher or remote panel in its Press room. ​
  • The AV infrastructure allows the translations to be provided from remote locations, reducing the need for travel and enhancing the operational efficiency, compared to previous events.

Key products in action:​

  • KAIROS IT/IP Platform​
  • AW-UE100 PTZ Cameras​
  • AK-UC4000 Studio Cameras​
  • PT-RQ35K High-Brightness Projectors​

AIR One X robotic camera in the Fencing Venue during the Paris 2024 Summer Games​

  • AIR One robots can be deployed throughout the city and controlled from a central location​
  • They can swiftly and accurately track action, ensuring users always gets the best shot.​
  • They have a minimal footprint and can be mounted in unusual places, getting the angle no one else can get.​
  • They can be quickly deployed and redeployed, saving days or weeks of prep time and damage from exposure to the elements.​
  • They are radically less expensive and simpler to operate than traditional robotics, making AIR One available to a much wider user base.​

Behind the Scenes: Canon Professional Services​

  • Canon has an On-site gear room where photographers can get Camera Bodies and Lenses free of charge​
  • The also offer repair services and support for these products with their on-site technical support team​

Some of Canon’s offerings to accredited photographers include:​

  • 150 x Canon EOS R3​
  • 100 x Canon EOS R1​
  • 100 x Canon EOS R5 Mark II​
  • Large stock of Canon EOS R6 Mark II​
  • 50 x Canon RF 100-300mm f/2.8L IS USM​
  • A few Canon EOS-1D X Mark III were also available​

Vizrt Graphics on Display with BBC Sports

  • Viz Flowics is the most comprehensive cloud-native platform powering remote and in-studio production of live graphics and interactive content for linear and digital broadcasters.​

NBC Rises to the Tech Challenges of the 2024 Summer Games​

  • NBC Broadcasted over 5,000 hours of live Summer Games coverage produced in 1080p HDR at 50Hz​
  • NBC Team was split between Paris, France and Stamford, Connecticut with many of the commentators and on-air talent being in Stamford.​
  • The team now has less equipment to rip out and relocate after each broadcast.​
  • Having two separated technical areas and operations is more efficient than having it all in one place and the separation leads to increases in both speed and efficiency of the production​
  • Using both baseband SMPTE SDI and IP with ST 2110 with about 60% being IP​
  • NBC is also using  Network Device Interface (NDI) standard. “We are using NDI in some areas, specifically NDI v6, with support of HDR and enhanced audio” ​
  • Worked with Avid on editing and asset management​

New open-source tool helps to detangle the brain

In late 2023, the first drug with potential to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease was approved by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration. Alzheimer’s is one of many debilitating neurological disorders that together affect one-eighth of the world’s population, and while the new drug is a step in the right direction, there is still a long journey ahead to fully understanding it, and other such diseases.

“Reconstructing the intricacies of how the human brain functions on a cellular level is one of the biggest challenges in neuroscience,” says Lars Gjesteby, a technical staff member and algorithm developer from the MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Human Health and Performance Systems Group. “High-resolution, networked brain atlases can help improve our understanding of disorders by pinpointing differences between healthy and diseased brains. However, progress has been hindered by insufficient tools to visualize and process very large brain imaging datasets.”

A networked brain atlas is in essence a detailed map of the brain that can help link structural information with neural function. To build such atlases, brain imaging data need to be processed and annotated. For example, each axon, or thin fiber connecting neurons, needs to be traced, measured, and labeled with information. Current methods of processing brain imaging data, such as desktop-based software or manual-oriented tools, are not yet designed to handle human brain-scale datasets. As such, researchers often spend a lot of time slogging through an ocean of raw data.

Gjesteby is leading a project to build the Neuron Tracing and Active Learning Environment (NeuroTrALE), a software pipeline that brings machine learning, supercomputing, as well as ease of use and access to this brain mapping challenge. NeuroTrALE automates much of the data processing and displays the output in an interactive interface that allows researchers to edit and manipulate the data to mark, filter, and search for specific patterns.

Untangling a ball of yarn

One of NeuroTrALE’s defining features is the machine-learning technique it employs, called active learning. NeuroTrALE’s algorithms are trained to automatically label incoming data based on existing brain imaging data, but unfamiliar data can present potential for errors. Active learning allows users to manually correct errors, teaching the algorithm to improve the next time it encounters similar data. This mix of automation and manual labeling ensures accurate data processing with a much smaller burden on the user.

“Imagine taking an X-ray of a ball of yarn. You’d see all these crisscrossed, overlapping lines,” says Michael Snyder, from the laboratory’s Homeland Decision Support Systems Group. “When two lines cross, does it mean one of the pieces of yarn is making a 90-degree bend, or is one going straight up and the other is going straight over? With NeuroTrALE’s active learning, users can trace these strands of yarn one or two times and train the algorithm to follow them correctly moving forward. Without NeuroTrALE, the user would have to trace the ball of yarn, or in this case the axons of the human brain, every single time.” Snyder is a software developer on the NeuroTrALE team along with staff member David Chavez.

Because NeuroTrALE takes the bulk of the labeling burden off of the user, it allows researchers to process more data more quickly. Further, the axon tracing algorithms harness parallel computing to distribute computations across multiple GPUs at once, leading to even faster, scalable processing. Using NeuroTrALE, the team demonstrated a 90 percent decrease in computing time needed to process 32 gigabytes of data over conventional AI methods.

The team also showed that a substantial increase in the volume of data does not translate to an equivalent increase in processing time. For example, in a recent study they demonstrated that a 10,000 percent increase in dataset size resulted in only a 9 percent and a 22 percent increase in total data processing time, using two different types of central processing units.

“With the estimated 86 billion neurons making 100 trillion connections in the human brain, manually labeling all the axons in a single brain would take lifetimes,” adds Benjamin Roop, one of the project’s algorithm developers. “This tool has the potential to automate the creation of connectomes for not just one individual, but many. That opens the door for studying brain disease at the population level.”

The open-source road to discovery

The NeuroTrALE project was formed as an internally funded collaboration between Lincoln Laboratory and Professor Kwanghun Chung’s laboratory on MIT campus. The Lincoln Lab team needed to build a way for the Chung Lab researchers to analyze and extract useful information from their large amount of brain imaging data flowing into the MIT SuperCloud — a supercomputer run by Lincoln Laboratory to support MIT research. Lincoln Lab’s expertise in high-performance computing, image processing, and artificial intelligence made it exceptionally suited to tackling this challenge.

In 2020, the team uploaded NeuroTrALE to the SuperCloud and by 2022 the Chung Lab was producing results. In one study, published in Science, they used NeuroTrALE to quantify prefrontal cortex cell density in relation to Alzheimer’s disease, where brains affected with the disease had a lower cell density in certain regions than those without. The same team also located where in the brain harmful neurofibers tend to get tangled in Alzheimer’s-affected brain tissue.

Work on NeuroTrALE has continued with Lincoln Laboratory funding and funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to build up NeuroTrALE’s capabilities. Currently, its user interface tools are being integrated with Google’s Neuroglancer program — an open-source, web-based viewer application for neuroscience data. NeuroTrALE adds the ability for users to visualize and edit their annotated data dynamically, and for multiple users to work with the same data at the same time. Users can also create and edit a number of shapes such as polygons, points, and lines to facilitate annotation tasks, as well as customize color display for each annotation to distinguish neurons in dense regions.

“NeuroTrALE provides a platform-agnostic, end-to-end solution that can be easily and rapidly deployed on standalone, virtual, cloud, and high performance computing environments via containers.” says Adam Michaleas, a high performance computing engineer from the laboratory’s Artificial Intelligence Technology Group. “Furthermore, it significantly improves the end user experience by providing capabilities for real-time collaboration within the neuroscience community via data visualization and simultaneous content review.”

To align with NIH’s mission of sharing research products, the team’s goal is to make NeuroTrALE a fully open-source tool for anyone to use. And this type of tool, says Gjesteby, is what’s needed to reach the end goal of mapping the entirety of the human brain for research, and eventually drug development. “It’s a grassroots effort by the community where data and algorithms are meant to be shared and accessed by all.”

The codebases for the axon tracing, data management, and interactive user interface of NeuroTrALE are publicly available via open-source licenses. Please contact Lars Gjesteby for more information on using NeuroTrALE. 

Building bidirectional bridges

In June 2023, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that colleges and universities could no longer use race as a factor in their admission decisions, many higher education institutions across the United States faced the same challenge: how to maintain diversity in their student bodies. So Noelle Wakefield, director of MIT’s Summer Research Program (MSRP) and assistant dean for diversity initiatives in MIT’s Office of Graduate Education (OGE), started planning.

On July 31, a little more than a year after the decision was released, the OGE hosted the inaugural Inclusive Pathways to the PhD Summit, which brought representatives from nearly 20 minority-serving institutions (MSIs), including several historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to meet with MIT administrators, faculty, and doctoral students. The admission question — how to continue attracting a diverse cohort of graduate students with the new legal restrictions? — was only the first of many that framed a broader and more complex picture.

“What are fresh ways for us to find talent in places that aren’t typically represented at MIT?” Wakefield asks. “How can we form partnerships with institutions that aren’t already part of our ecosystem? What is the formula for partnerships where both institutions benefit and feel good about the work that is happening?”

These aren’t new outreach questions for MIT, Wakefield says, but the changing admissions landscape sparked a need for the Institute to “be more thoughtful.”

And a need to clear up misperceptions, adds Denzil Streete, senior associate dean and director of the OGE. “MIT faculty may have outdated perspectives about HBCUs and MSIs,” he says. “And our visitors may be relying on historical knowledge of MIT that is largely negative” when it comes to attracting graduate applications from smaller, lesser-known colleges and universities. The summit was designed to be a first step in demystifying these assumptions and in establishing “a common platform and a shared understanding for moving forward,” Streete says.

For decades, the OGE has focused its HBCU and MSI outreach efforts on student recruitment, but the summit signals a broadening of that approach to include faculty and staff mentors — the people Wakefield describes as “levers for decision-making” among prospective graduate students. Streete says, “if we at MIT say we attract the best and brightest in the world and we don’t include these institutions, then our supposition comes into question.”

The summit agenda included information sessions about navigating the MIT graduate admission process and finding research opportunities for undergraduates, as well as conversations with current MIT doctoral students who’d graduated from the MSIs represented at the summit. There was a campus tour, a poster session by students in the MIT Summer Research Program, and a panel discussion on forming reciprocal relationships with HBCUs and MSIs, featuring visitors from Spelman College, Prairie View A & M University, and the University of Puerto Rico, among others.

That discussion resonated with visitor Gwendolyn Scott-Jones, dean of the Wesley College of Health and Behavioral Sciences at Delaware State University. “It felt like an authentic discussion about the disparities and lack of equal resources that HBCUs historically contend with compared to predominantly white institutions,” she observes. “HBCUs have been known to do more with less and have produced very talented professionals, and I believe MIT is trying to provide HBCUs with access and opportunity.”

One of the summit’s goals was to begin ensuring that this access and opportunity would be “bidirectional” — going both ways between an institution like MIT and an HCBU like Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where Christina Chisholm, one of the panelists, did her undergraduate work. Collaborations “aren’t spaces in which you’re just throwing money at something to fix it, or to bridge a gap,” says Chisholm, a biophysicist who’s now director of the McNair Scholars Program and Thrive Student Support Services at Rutgers University.

Instead, she advised, focus on cooperation, coordination, and positive mentorship. Tiffany Oliver, a biology professor at Spelman, recalled a potential student-research project she was exploring with a partner at a larger institution who would host her students in his lab. “His attitude was, ‘We have the money so we’re going to tell you what you need to do.’” she recalls. “That’s a reflection of how you’re going to treat my students, and I would rather send my students to some other place if the people show that they care. I want my students to leave school still loving science, not tarnished by science.”

Another piece of advice came from Kareem McLemore, assistant vice president of strategic enrollment management at Delaware State. “When you’re partnering with us, the first thing we’re going to ask is, ‘Are you doing this to check a box?’” he says. “If it’s a checkbox, we don’t want it. We want to know what the objectives are, the key goals, the KPIs [key performance indicators]. You may have the money, but think about the resources we have as HBCUs that can help you raise your brand. We have to ride the wave together.”

The summit served as a starting point: a way to build trust among institutions with different histories and resources, and to stimulate ideas for future partnerships, whether that means a joint research project, a shared curriculum, or a faculty exchange.

“We all understand that talent is everywhere but opportunity is not distributed in the same manner,” says Bryan Thomas Jr., assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a co-organizer of the event. Broadening MIT’s networks through the Inclusive Pathways Summit means “expanding our ecosystem of opportunity, collaboration, and adding new ways of solving problems,” he says. “And that ultimately benefits all of us.”

“Smart” Layouts With Container Queries

Modern CSS keeps giving us a lot of new, easier ways to solve old problems, but often the new features we’re getting don’t only solve old problems, they open up new possibilities as well.
Container queries are one of those …

“Smart” Layouts With Container Queries originally published…

Direct Preference Optimization: A Complete Guide

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and preferences is challenging. Traditional methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), have paved the way by integrating human inputs to refine model outputs. However, RLHF can be complex and resource-intensive, requiring substantial computational power and…

Anand Kannappan, CEO & Co-founder of Patronus AI – Interview Series

Anand Kannappan is Co-Founder and CEO of Patronus AI, the industry-first automated AI evaluation and security platform to help enterprises catch LLM mistakes at scale.. Previously, Anand led ML explainability and advanced experimentation efforts at Meta Reality Labs. What initially attracted you to computer science? Growing…