Last year’s fire at Paris’s beloved cathedral shocked the world. Now, researchers are making use of the unprecedented opportunity to study its innards.
In 2016, the biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong set himself a deadline: By 2020, he would transform the fight against cancer.
With the help of a coalition of big-name companies, researchers, and physicians, Soon-Shiong vowed, he would enroll 20,000 cancer patients in clinical trials and develop an effective vaccine to treat the disease.
Four years later, independent medical researchers say they’ve heard virtual radio silence from Soon-Shiong’s initiative. And a review by STAT of clinical trial listings, research presentations, and press releases suggests the effort has fallen far short of its major goals.
We see the AI space poised for an acceleration in adoption, driven by more sophisticated AI models being put in production, specialized hardware that increases AI’s capacity to provide quicker results based on larger datasets, simplified tools that democratize access to the entire AI stack, small tools that enables AI on nearly any device, and cloud access to AI tools that allow access to AI resources from anywhere.
Integrating data from many sources, complex business and logic challenges, and competitive incentives to make data more useful all combine to elevate AI and automation technologies from optional to required. And AI processes have unique capabilities that can address an increasingly diverse array of automation tasks, tasks that defy what traditional procedural logic and programming can handle—for example: image recognition, summarization, labeling, complex monitoring, and response.
In fact, in our 2019 surveys, more than half of the respondents said AI (deep learning, specifically) will be part of their future projects and products—and a majority of companies are starting to adopt machine learning.
Dr. Thomas J. Lynch Jr. will become Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s new president and director, the organization announced today. Lynch, a well-known cancer leader with expertise in solid tumor research, precision medicine and immuno-oncology, starts at Fred Hutch in February 2020.
Lynch has been a nationally recognized leader in academic medicine for more than three decades. He has served as chairman and CEO of Massachusetts General Physicians Organization, director of Yale Cancer Center, physician-in-chief of Yale’s Smilow Cancer Hospital, professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine, chief of Hematology-Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Just like 4G brought us Uber and the appification-of-everything, 5G will rewrite concepts of speed, capacity and entire connected experiences, including applications of the internet of things and virtual and augmented reality. With 5G, those trends will accelerate, and we’ll see mainstream applications of virtual and augmented reality and new digital business models we can’t even begin to fully imagine yet. But we can start to get a picture of what the future holds with 5G, especially in what it means for businesses.
So what are the key features of the new 5G technology and what kind of new applications will they unlock? How much more mobile data will be generated compared to today? And which industries and countries are most likely to adopt 5G as part of their core operations and which are not?
The BMJ, Opinion; Danielle Deines, Colleen Kraft, and Tony Waterston
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In extraordinary scenes at the US border last month, four doctors and two allies were arrested while attempting to pressure Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to provide migrants in a detention camp with immunisation against influenza. After three children had died from the flu while in federal immigration centres since December 2018, this event was the culmination of increasing concern over the Trump administration’s stringent policies at the border, and the harm they are inflicting on children.
Since 2014, hundreds of thousands of children and their families have migrated to the US, fleeing the violence in their home countries in the northern triangle of Central America. Yet the Trump administration’s overriding political goal of deterring immigration has seen the implementation of policies that intentionally disregard the rights and basic needs of those fleeing war, climate change, or corruption.
The dark, thumping cavern of an MRI scanner can be a lonely place. How can scientists interested in the neural activity underlying social interactions capture an engaged, conversing brain while its owner is so isolated? Two research teams are advancing a curious solution: squeezing two people into one scanner.
One such MRI setup is under development with new funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and another has undergone initial testing described in a preprint last month. These designs have yet to prove that their scientific payoff justifies their cost and complexity, plus the requirement that two people endure a constricted almost-hug, in some cases for 1 hour or more. But the two groups hope to open up new ways to study how brains exchange subtle social and emotional cues bound up in facial expressions, eye contact, and physical touch. The tool could “greatly expand the range of investigations possible,” says Winrich Freiwald, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University. “This is really exciting.”
Mayo Clinic is creating a library of genomic sequencing data on 100,000 consented Mayo Clinic participants to advance research and patient care.
“We believe that whole exome sequencing has the potential to reveal predispositions to health problems and enable earlier use of preventive measures throughout a person’s lifespan,” says Keith Stewart, M.B., Ch.B., Carlson and Nelson Endowed director, Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine.
Cancer death rates in the United States took their sharpest drop on record between 2016 and 2017, according to an analysis by the American Cancer Society.
Cancer death rates in the U.S. have been falling gradually for about three decades, typically about 1.5% a year. But during the latest study period, the cancer mortality rate dropped 2.2%, “the biggest single-year drop ever,” says Rebecca Siegel, scientific director for surveillance research at the cancer society.
“It seems to be driven by accelerating declines in lung cancer mortality,” Siegel says. That’s “very encouraging, because lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the U.S., causing more deaths than breast, colorectal and prostate cancers combined.” [audio, 2:23]
The White House on Tuesday proposed 10 principles for federal agencies to consider when developing laws and regulations for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in a variety of fields.
Regulations created by agencies should encourage “fairness, non-discrimination, openness, transparency, safety, and security,” the memo distributed by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) recommended.
The advisory agency stressed that new rules should be preceded by “risk assessment and cost-benefit analyses,” and must incorporate “scientific evidence and feedback from the American public.”
The nonprofit n-Lorem Foundation has launched with the goal of making it easier, safer, and cheaper to develop individualized antisense oligonucleotide therapies—sometimes called N-of-1 drugs—for people with ultra-rare genetic diseases.
n-Lorem represents a new chapter for Stanley Crooke, stepped down as CEO at the end of 2019 after 3 decades leading Ionis Pharmaceuticals. The antisense pioneer will lead the nonprofit and, with his wife, longtime Ionis researcher Roseanne Crooke, contributed $1.5 million to the effort. n-Lorem received another $1.5 million from Ionis, $1 million from Biogen, and funds from other individual contributions.
The Trump administration on Wednesday unveiled its most recent round of guidelines for autonomous vehicle makers that rely on voluntary standards despite calls for specific regulations.
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao announced the proposed guidelines in a speech at the CES gadget show in Las Vegas, saying in prepared remarks that “AV 4.0” will ensure U.S. leadership in developing new technologies.
But the guidelines fall short of expectations of auto safety advocates and the National Transportation Safety Board. In November, the NTSB, which investigates crashes and makes safety recommendations, condemned a lack of state and federal regulation for testing autonomous vehicles.
In April 2018, Facebook sent the Yale cardiologist and researcher Freddy Abnousi on a strictly confidential assignment to liaise with medical groups across the country on behalf of Building 8, Facebook’s experimental research team. Building 8—which had originally been led by Regina Dugan, the former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—worked on long-term, moonshot projects, such as developing devices that would allow people to type with their brain or hear through their skin.
Abnousi’s task was less radical: He was to get the Stanford University School of Medicine and the American College of Cardiology on board with a new project that would combine Facebook user information with hospital-patient data in order to influence patient outcomes. Facebook hoped it could leverage the cache of data users already give it—about their education, relationships, habits, spoken languages, employment status, and more, all of which have an enormous impact on health outcomes—to create a sort of subclinical health-care system, warning providers if, for example, a user recovering from surgery had a small support group.
Can you publish in Nature if you haven’t already published in Nature? It may sound like a riddle—but according to a new study, it is in fact getting harder to publish in prestigious multidisciplinary journals such as Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences if you haven’t previously done so. So-called “chaperoned” researchers who first publish in these journals as nonsenior authors have a leg up when it comes to publishing in these journals as principal investigators (PIs), the study found—and the trend has gotten stronger in recent years. In Nature, for example, the share of papers authored by chaperoned senior authors grew from 16% to 22% between 1990 and 2012, while new senior authors dropped from 39% to 31%.
Columbia University, Data Science Institute, Jeannette Wing
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Data science is a field of study: one can get a degree in data science, get a job as a data scientist, and get funded to do data science research. But is data science a discipline, or will it evolve to be one, distinct from other disciplines? Here are a few meta-questions about data science as a discipline.
Austin, TX March 3-4. “The Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) Conference on Undergraduate Informatics Education will explore how to prepare undergraduate students for careers in the public and non-profit sectors, serving the public interest, particularly in support of social justice.” Deadline for submissions is January 14.
“On June 5-6 2020, Temple University will host the 10th Annual Interdisciplinary Symposium on Decision Neuroscience (ISDN) in Philadelphia, PA. This symposium is unique in that it brings together a range of constituencies involved in the use of neuroscience techniques to understand consumer decision making.” Deadline for oral presentation submissions is February 15.
I’ve been happy to see an increase in funding for open source software across research areas and across funding bodies. However, I observed that a majority of funding from, say, the NSF, goes to projects that do not exist yet, and where the funding is supposed to create a new project, or to extend projects that are developed and used within a single research lab. I think this top-down approach to creating software comes from a misunderstanding of the existing open source software that is used in science. This post collects thoughts on the effectiveness of current grant-based funding and how to improve it from the perspective of the grant-makers.
Science, Policy Forum; Research Policy Waiting for data: Barriers to executing data use agreements; Michelle M. Mello, George Triantis, Robyn Stanton, Erik Blumenkranz
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Many academic researchers who use preexisting data to conduct research describe a common experience: waiting for university officials to finalize and sign contracts necessary to transfer the data. These data use agreements (DUAs) detail the terms under which data will be disclosed, transferred, stored, and used, specifying rights and obligations for both the data supplier and the recipient (1). Faculty members often struggle to understand why DUAs for transfers of seemingly low-risk data take so long to conclude. To understand reasons for delays and explore what might be done to streamline the process, we interviewed a sample of university officials responsible for negotiating DUAs. This first empirical investigation of the DUA process found that procedural inefficiencies, incomplete information, data suppliers’ lack of incentives and familiarity with academic practices, and faculty unresponsiveness may be more important contributors to delays than the lawyers being at loggerheads over their respective positions. Although researchers may view DUAs as another symptom that research has become “overlawyered,” our study suggests that they may underappreciate the importance of these contracts and the complexity of negotiating them.
The East Coast campus of the research institute received shipments of freeze-dried or frozen samples of more than 210,000 microbial strains, which scientists plan to mine for potentially useful natural products.