… Today, slightly more than a million people have had their whole genomes sequenced. Compare that to the 17 million estimated to have had their DNA analyzed with direct-to-consumer tests sold by 23andMe and Ancestry. They use a technology called genotyping, which takes about a million snapshots of a person’s genome. That might sound like a lot, but it’s really less than 1 percent of the full picture. Genotyping targets short strings of DNA that scientists already know have a strong association with a given trait. So say, for example, scientists discover a new gene that increases your risk of developing brain cancer. If that gene is not one that 23andMe looks at (because how would it know to look if the gene hasn’t been discovered yet), then you’d have to get tested all over again to learn more about your brain cancer risk. Whole genome data on the other hand, once you have it, can be queried with computer algorithms whenever a new genetic discovery gets made.
PLOS One; Bryor Snefjella, Daniel Schmidtke, Victor Kuperman
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National character stereotypes, or beliefs about the personality characteristics of the members of a nation, present a paradox. Such stereotypes have been argued to not be grounded in the actual personality traits of members of nations, yet they are also prolific and reliable. Stereotypes of Canadians and Americans exemplify the paradox; people in both nations strongly believe that the personality profiles of typical Canadians and Americans diverge, yet aggregated self-reports of personality profiles of Canadians and Americans show no reliable differences. We present evidence that the linguistic behavior of nations mirrors national character stereotypes. Utilizing 40 million tweets from the microblogging platform Twitter, in Study 1A we quantify the words and emojis diagnostic of Canadians and Americans. In Study 1B we explore the positivity of national language use. In Studies 2A and 2B, we present the 120 most nationally diagnostic words and emojis of each nation to naive participants, and ask them to assess personality of a hypothetical person who uses either diagnostically Canadian or American words and emojis. Personality profiles derived from the diagnostic words of each nation bear close resemblance to national character stereotypes. We therefore propose that national character stereotypes may be partially grounded in the collective linguistic behaviour of nations.
Facebook has recruited Kate Patchen, a veteran of the U.S. Department of Justice who led its antitrust office in Silicon Valley, to be a director and associate general counsel of litigation.
Patchen takes up her post amid ongoing scandals and reputation crises for her new employer, joining Facebook this month, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Apple’s HomePod is a distant third behind Amazon and Google when it comes to market share for smart speakers that double up as home hubs, with less than 5 percent share of the market for these devices in the U.S., according to one recent survey. And its flagship personal assistant, Siri, has also been determined to lag behind Google when it comes to comprehension and precision. But there are signs that the company is intent on doubling down on AI, putting it at the center of its next generation of products, and it’s using acquisitions to help it do so.
The Information reports that Apple has quietly acquired Silk Labs, a startup based out of San Francisco that had worked on AI-based personal assistant technology both for home hubs and mobile devices.
Today I am introducing Canopy, a new company focused on giving you a new way to explore the world—without ever revealing your personal data. We’re building Canopy the way we believe personalization should have been built from the beginning: with you in control of what you discover and how. For too long, the accepted standard for how we learn about people on the internet has benefited the wrong side. Over the past year, a great group of people have come together to work on a new way to do personalization and discovery on the internet. We are building a new kind of technology and product, but also a new kind of company that optimizes for delight and discovery.
More taste decisions than ever are being mediated by an algorithm—and those algorithms are running on more and more personal data than ever before. The data you give away to services can be used against you, or sold, or lead to results that you don’t understand. We’ve all seen the “creepy” side of personalization at work, aligned with revenue or time spent rather than improving your experience or happiness. And in the worst case we saw people being radicalized from aggressive personalization, or saw state actors steal or manipulate personal data for their own needs.
In a new $5.5 million center that spans engineering and cardiology specialties at Johns Hopkins, experts aim to improve the diagnosis and treatment of heart rhythm disorders that affect millions of people by leveraging innovations in cardiac imaging, computer simulations, and data science.
The new center, called the Alliance for Cardiovascular Diagnostic and Treatment Innovation, or ADVANCE, is co-led by biomedical engineer Natalia Trayanova, and cardiologist Hugh Calkins.
Trayanova pioneered the use of 3-D virtual replicas of the heart and its electrical function that are personalized to individual patients with certain heart conditions. The simulations help physicians, for example, use radiofrequency waves more precisely to destroy regions in heart tissue believed to sustain and propagate erratic electrical waves.
In a continuing effort to increase students’ readiness for the challenges and opportunities they’ll face after graduation, the College of Business and Economics has redesigned its undergraduate core curriculum to put stronger emphasis on business analytics, business communications and leadership.
With CEOs reporting a growing concern about widening skill gaps, the College has recognized the need for students to better understand how to use data as well as to effectively communicate information to managers, colleagues and others.
The new curriculum puts a sharper focus on immersing and engaging undergraduates in job-critical learning earlier in the students’ academic career than in the past.
On December 7, a judge will deliver the terms of a settlement between Duke University and a former employee who blew the whistle on the school’s knowledge of another researcher using fraudulent data in applications for millions of dollars of grant money, according to Science and Retraction Watch.
Joseph Thomas, a former Duke biologist, sued the university in 2015 under the federal False Claims Act (FCA), alleging that his supervisor Erin Potts-Kant used faked data in 60 grant applications worth some $200 million. The university might have to return up to three times that amount to the government under the federal law, with Thomas receiving 30 percent of any payout.
The University of Evansville’s Department of Mathematics has started a new bachelor’s degree in actuarial science. The program includes work in statistics, data science, finance and other fields. Students can begin enrolling in the Fall 2019.
“Actuaries are experts at modeling and managing risk,” said Mark Gruenwald, PhD, professor of mathematics and director of actuarial science. “They are highly trained professionals with strong analytical skills and specialized knowledge of math, statistics, and business. Their work provides financial security for insurance companies, multinational corporations, and the government. Not surprisingly, there is a growing demand for individuals with this rare combination of talent and expertise.”
As a professor of both statistics and neuroscience at Columbia University, Liam Paninski straddles two worlds. Paninski, an investigator with the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain, argues that this type of scientific bilingualism is becoming increasingly important in neuroscience, where new approaches are needed to analyze ever-expanding datasets.
Paninski’s team is focused on developing tools to extract information encoded in large populations of neurons, such as that from calcium imaging and multielectrode array recordings. As part of the International Brain Laboratory, a large-scale collaboration funded in part by the SCGB, his group is developing a data processing pipeline that he hopes will enable data sharing much more broadly.
Paninski described some of these advances in a lecture, “Neural Data Science: Accelerating the Experiment-Analysis-Theory Cycle in Large-Scale Neuroscience,” which he presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego in November. He spoke with the SCGB about the research and about the need to improve data-sharing in neuroscience. An edited version of the conversation follows.
JetBlue is partnering with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to launch a fully integrated biometric self-boarding gate for international flights.
The gate, which uses facial recognition technology to verify travelers with a quick photo capture, will be available at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport for customers flying to select international destinations from Terminal 5.
The launch comes on the heels of the airline’s successful biometric boarding trials at Boston Logan International Airport, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and New York-JFK.
Like artificial intelligence or blockchain, data science is a popular buzzword in the industry. Marketers are often confused around the distinction between data scientists — those who design and test experiments using statistics, calculus, linear algebra — and data analysts — those who use spreadsheets to implement strategy around data.
In the latest installment of our Confessions series, where we exchange anonymity for honesty, Digiday spoke with a data scientist inside the marketing department of a company who says marketers are still lost when it comes to the science and are wasting money on data scientists.
The University of Hawaii at Hilo is offering for the first time this fall a certificate program in data science.
The program is four courses geared toward giving students data science skills “that will flag to future employers that they have (these) computational and statistical tools to be able to solve industry problems more quickly and more efficiently and more intelligently,” data science program director and associate professor of mathematics Roberto Pelayo said.
The research, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, suggests that using these techniques could help health practitioners accurately monitor the risks faced by patients and put in place measures to avoid unplanned admissions, which are a major source of healthcare spending.
‘There were over 5.9 million recorded emergency hospital admissions in the UK in 2017, and a large proportion of them were avoidable. We wanted to provide a tool that would enable healthcare workers to accurately monitor the risks faced by their patients, and as a result make better decisions around patient screening and proactive care that could help reduce the burden of emergency admissions,’ said Fatemeh Rahimian, former data scientist at The George Institute UK, who led the research.
Aetna’s inaugural Health Ambitions Study explores the transformation of care, examining consumers’ health goals and preferences, as well as relationships among patients and providers in the evolving health landscape.
According to the report, consumers’ perceptions of health are expanding, now encompassing a more holistic point of view that includes their mental health status and stress reduction. Yet many don’t feel they can talk to their doctor about these topics.
“When people think about health and healthcare, the definition of what that means is increasing pretty dramatically,” says Aetna’s Chief Digital Officer Firdaus Bhathena, whom I spoke to recently about the survey and other topics, such as how Aetna’s merger with CVS will complement, not compete with health systems and physicians.
Berkeley, CA December 5-7. “TextXD brings together researchers from across a wide range of disciplines, who work with text as a primary source of data. We work to identify common principles, algorithms and tools to advance text-intensive research, and break down the boundaries between domains, to foster exchange and new collaborations among like-minded researchers.” [free, registration required]
“The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) together with the Partnership on AI (PAI) wish to notify the community of their interest in supporting EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGERs) to understand the social challenges arising from AI technology and enable scientific contributions to overcome them.” Deadline to submit project prospectus is January 9, 2019.
“Falcon describes his latest contribution, Test Tube, as ‘a python library to track, optimize and parallelize Deep Learning experiments across GPUs and compute clusters. It’s framework agnostic and is built on top of the python Argparse API for ease of use.'”
