Fidelity Investments Inc has become the first financial institution to join the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies & Contracts, a group of academic institutions and technology companies looking to develop blockchain-based technology.

Fidelity Labs, the innovation arm of asset manager Fidelity, will be a member of IC3 along with Cornell University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the Technion, IBM Corp and Intel Corp, the company said in a statement.

The Boston-based fund manager will collaborate with the group to develop blockchain programs to help make financial systems more efficient and secure.

Read the full article on Reuters.

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New research by economists Gustavo Grullon of Rice University, Yelena Larkin of York University and Roni Michaely of Cornell University argues that U.S. companies are moving toward a winner-take-all system in which giants get stronger, not weaker, as they grow.

That’s the latest among several recent studies by economists working independently, all arriving at similar findings: A few “superstar firms” have grown to dominate their industries, crowding out competitors and controlling markets to a degree not seen in many decades.

Let’s look beyond such obvious winner-take-all examples as Apple or Alphabet , the parent of Google.

Read the full article on Wall Street Journal.

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Not that Facebook hasn’t exercised editorial judgment before. “Facebook has never been a neutral platform,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor of law who studies social networks at Cornell Tech. “It has always helped some content spread better than others.”

Facebook’s technical and social decisions have had an observable impact on content before, Grimmelmann says. Supporting long, silent GIFs helped make cooking videos a viral genre (a technical construct), for example, and the company’s algorithmic prioritization of clicks helped salacious content rise to the top (a social one). “The fact that Facebook will be an explicit content creator won’t change the fact that it’s still going to pick winners and losers among content creators,” he says.

Read the full article on Wired.

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Is that a bufflehead? A coot? Maybe a loon? Get close enough to take a picture and the Merlin bird identification app will tell you in seconds — sort of like a Shazam for would-be ornithologists.

The photo ID capability has actually been a part of the greater Merlin ecosystem for more than a year, but the Cornell birders behind it just recently added the ability to do it from the mobile app. Take a picture, zoom in and let the database do the work.

Read the full article on Tech Crunch.

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If you’re a budding birder struggling to identify all the weird and wonderful feathered creatures you happen upon, the latest version of a free bird ID app could be just the ticket when you’re out and about.

Developed by Cornell Tech and California Institute of Technology computer vision researchers in partnership with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the powerful Merlin Bird ID app was built using machine-learning technology to help it instantly identify hundreds of different species from across North America.

Read the full article on Digital Trends.

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That ability to adapt and change to defeat cyberthieves shows how blockchain technology can be made secure, says Prof Ari Juels, a computer scientist at Cornell University and co-director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts which studies the technology and its uses.

“Ethereum has showed just how resilient crypto-currencies can be in the way that it has unwound the damage done by the attacker,” he says, adding that it, and virtual currencies in general, are still going through some “growing pains”.

Read the full article on BBC News.

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For the first time, developers can download and install Chain Core to start or join a Blockchain network, build financial applications, and access in-depth technical documentation and tutorials. Users have the option to run their prototypes on a test network, or “testnet,” operated by Chain, Microsoft, and the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), a collaboration of Cornell University, Cornell Tech, UC Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Technion.

Read the full article on Blockchain News.

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 By training their own AI with the target AI’s output, they found they could produce software that was able to predict with near-100% accuracy the responses of the AI they’d cloned, sometimes after a few thousand or even just hundreds of queries.

“You’re taking this black box and through this very narrow interface, you can reconstruct its internals, reverse engineering the box,” says Ari Juels, a Cornell Tech professor who worked on the project. “In some cases, you can actually do a perfect reconstruction.”

Read the full article on WIRED.

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