For many years, biology and disease appeared ‘too big’ to tackle on a broad level: with millions of genome variants, tens of thousands of disease-associated genes, thousands of cell types and an almost unimaginable number of ways they can combine, we had to approximate a best starting point—choose one target, guess the cell, simplify the experiment. … To achieve this, we need to invest in building the right initiatives—like the Human Cell Atlas and the International Common Disease Alliance—and in new experimental platforms: data platforms and algorithms. But we also need a broader ecosystem of partnerships in medicine that engages interaction between clinical experts and mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers who together will bring new approaches to drive experiments and algorithms to build this Roadmap.
A new study—the largest yet of this phenomenon—estimates that 20 percent of 205,011 men in a large genetic database called the UK Biobank have lost Y chromosomes from some detectable proportion of their blood. By age 70, 43.6 percent of men had the same issue. It’s unclear exactly why, but the authors think these losses might be the most glaring sign of something else going wrong inside the bodies of these men: They are allowing mutations of all kinds to accumulate, and these other mutations could be the underlying links to cancer and heart disease.
As part of an effort to more closely examine the relationship between academia and industry at Stanford, The Daily looked into Stanford’s Industrial Affiliates program, which facilitates a direct connection between university research and private corporations.
Though the specifics of the programs vary by academic department, each of the 68 participating departments allow “companies [to] receive facilitated access to research programs and to participating faculty and students” in exchange for variable “corporate membership fees,” according to the University Corporate and Foundation Relations website. Members of all industrial affiliate programs “attend annual meetings, receive copies of reports and publications, and have opportunities to recruit students.”
Annual membership fees vary among departments, ranging from $15,000 for the Statistics Industrial Affiliates Program to $500,000 for the Premium Stanford Platform Laboratory Affiliates Program.
Celeste Kidd, a cognitive psychologist, used her keynote talk at a prominent artificial intelligence conference to highlight issues around sexual harassment that have roiled the field over the past two years.
Kidd spent most of her keynote address Monday at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, one of the top meetings for A.I. researchers, detailing lessons computer scientists should know about human cognition.
But at the end of her remarks at the gathering in Vancouver, Canada, she turned unexpectedly and dramatically to the issue of sexual harassment and the #metoo movement. Kidd detailed her own experience with sexual harassment. She left the University of Rochester in 2018 after she and eight others accused the university of mishandling their sexual harassment complaints against brain sciences professor Florian Jaeger.
Online shoppers typically string together a few words to search for the product they want, but in a world with millions of products and shoppers, the task of matching those unspecific words to the right product is one of the biggest challenges in information retrieval.
Using a divide-and-conquer approach that leverages the power of compressed sensing, computer scientists from Rice University and Amazon have shown they can slash the amount of time and computational resources it takes to train computers for product search and similar “extreme classification problems” like speech translation and answering general questions.
Roseanna Ander, founding Executive Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the University of Chicago Urban Education Lab, and Kim Smith, Associate Director of Criminal Justice Initiatives, join Justin to talk about the 10-year anniversary of Crime Labs, the impetus for creating the Crime Lab, the challenge of getting police departments interested in emerging data, how the data they gather is used in the community, why Chicago is such an interesting place to do this type of work, why Chicago has more violent crime than New York or Los Angeles and what they can learn from other cities. [audio, 20:01]
When Ruth Cherry goes to bed at night, she’s watched by a camera system. Motion sensors track her every move. Microphones listen to her breathing. If she wakes up and makes a noise, the system activates. A government-employed responder, watching several miles away from Ruth’s home in Glasgow, will ask her what she wants over a speaker system. But Ruth has a disability and can’t talk—so she’s unable to reply. If the government worker decides she’s in distress, someone will be dispatched to her house.
Social listening is widely accepted in the world of business as a way for companies to connect with their target audience and find out what that audience thinks about a given product, campaign or initiative.
It’s a process of watching hashtags, keywords and digital engagement to identify trending topics and monitor brand sentiment, and roughly 70% of local businesses use it to better understand their customer segments, according to a joint survey from the Atlanta Business Chronicle and marketing agency Brunner.
Increasingly, though, social listening isn’t enough. The process is evolving to a more advanced iteration known as social intelligence, said Katie Collins, a brand engagement manager at Brunner, which has offices in Atlanta and Pittsburgh.
“Social intelligence is using machine learning to analyze social data, and it’s using that data to answer some of marketing’s toughest questions: What are my consumers talking about? What do they care about? What are their expectations of me?” Collins explained.
With this blog post, it is our pleasure to unveil the NeurIPS paper awards for 2019, and share more information on the selection process for these awards.
The Broad Center, which has attracted praise and suspicion for its training of school district leaders, will move from Los Angeles to Yale University, along with a $100-million gift provided by founder Eli Broad, the center announced Thursday.
The donation is the largest ever for the Yale School of Management and will help fund a master’s program for public education leaders and advanced leadership training for top school system executives — efforts that had been undertaken by the center in Los Angeles.
The most powerful supercomputer to debut on the November 2019 Top500 ranking of supercomputers, also the most powerful supercomputer in New York State, was recently unveiled at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center for Computational Innovations (CCI). Part of a collaboration between IBM, Empire State Development (ESD), and NY CREATES, the eight petaflop IBM POWER9-equipped AI supercomputer is configured to help enable users to explore new AI applications and accelerate economic development from New York’s smallest startups to its largest enterprises.
Named AiMOS (short for Artificial Intelligence Multiprocessing Optimized System) in honor of Rensselaer co-founder Amos Eaton, the machine will serve as a test bed for the New York State-IBM Research AI Hardware Center, which opened on the SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly) campus in Albany earlier this year. The AI Hardware Center aims to advance the development of computing chips and systems that are designed and optimized for AI workloads to push the boundaries of AI performance. AiMOS will provide the modeling, simulation, and computation necessary to support the development of this hardware.
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania announced today the establishment of the Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative (WSABI). WSABI represents an expansion of school-wide sports business activities by building on the Wharton Sports Business Initiative (WSBI), founded in 2008. The addition of sports analytics offerings dramatically expands the scope of engagement for industry, alumni, and students.
“With sports being a multibillion-dollar international industry that engages individuals around the globe, Wharton is uniquely capable of applying our prowess in data analytics to yield new understanding of a topic that has fascinated societies for thousands of years,” said Wharton Dean Geoff Garrett. “The Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative will give the leading minds involved in sports – from students to owners to ‘Moneyball’ type data scientists – a ringside seat to better examine the future of sports.”
The Veterans Affairs Department recently launched a National Artificial Intelligence Institute to coordinate and advance strategic vet-focused research and development efforts to harness the budding technology.
“VA has a unique opportunity to be a leader in artificial intelligence,” Secretary Robert Wilkie said in a statement. “VA’s artificial intelligence institute will usher in new capabilities and opportunities that will improve health outcomes for our nation’s heroes.”
The Daily Iowan student newspaper, Katie Ann McCarver
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University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld said he “declare[s] a climate crisis” Monday in an interview with The Daily Iowan — but he went further to contemplate the UI community’s action to end it.
“We declared a climate crisis,” he said. “We just did it and it’s now on tape. There’s a climate crisis. What are we going to do about that climate crisis?”
As institutions such as the University of Illinois declare climate emergencies and the pressure builds for their peers to follow suit, Harreld said a climate crisis is not as important as the action taken to address it beyond just declaring its existence.
If you thought Marty Chavez was joking in January 2019 when said that the future of finance is all about Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), you haven’t been paying attention. “The way we see it [the future] going is to APIs,” Chavez declared. “I cannot say it enough; it is going in the direction of who produces APIs and who consumes APIs.”
Chavez left Goldman in September 2019, but the firm’s emphasis on APIs remains. Goldman sees APIs as the future. Needless to say, it wants to be an API producer, not a consumer.
The firm’s emphasis was reiterated yesterday when CEO David Solomon told attendees at Amazon’s Reinvent Conference in Las Vegas that Goldman’s new Marquee products, which make its SecDB database directly accessible to clients, will be available as APIs on the cloud.
San Jose, CA March 15-18, 2020. “Data feeds AI; AI makes sense of data. So it also made sense to combine the O’Reilly Strata Data and AI Conferences—covering two of the most pressing technological trends of the decade—and giving you access to the full breadth of both programs.” [$$$$]
Las Vegas, NV February 9-14, 2020. “Start 2020 off right by elevating your skills for in-demand data and analytics careers. TDWI Las Vegas features foundational, new, and updated full- and half-day courses to address today’s top challenges for data professionals.” [$$$$]
“Use our official release of TensorFlow 2.0 to do something nifty: build a model, a mobile or web application, an art installation, or something else entirely! The sky is the limit – and creativity is encouraged. We’re excited to see what you build!” Deadline for submissions is December 31.
Portland, OR June 9, 2020, co-located with SIGMOD 2020. “HILDA brings together researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and results on human-data interaction. It explores how data management and analysis can be made more effective when taking into account the people who design and build these processes as well as those who are impacted by their results.” Deadline for submissions is March 23, 2020.
“TLDR; We’re going to be sharing our product development process with you, from feedback loops to timelines. We’ll be doing so through our new series – The Loop. You can give us your thoughts on what you’d like to see us do by filling out this survey: Through the Loop. We’ll also be releasing Moderator Training and some new feedback mechanisms to help us form decisions as we grow.”
Automated software testing starts with the often annoying and time-consuming process of writing tests. But no matter how annoying it is, in the end it always pays off, at least that’s my experience. For this article, I assume that the reader acknowledges the importance of automated software testing, because I would like to point to a way on how to write better tests in less time by using property based testing.
The Python package hypothesis provides a toolkit for doing property based testing. The concept works like this: You have piece of code that you want to test, e.g. a function that accepts certain inputs as arguments. This function returns a value and you have certain assumptions about this value. These are the properties of the return value that you test. Some of these assumptions should always hold true, no matter what the input looks like.
Two researchers and friends from opposite ends of the Earth have created a world-first high spatial resolution atlas that maps the environmental characteristics of all the globe’s rivers and catchments.
HydroATLAS was co-developed by Bernhard Lehner and his team from McGill University’s Department of Geography and Simon Linke from Griffith University’s Australian Rivers Institute.