Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) are working together on an in-home monitoring to monitor vital signs for people with heart failure. One of those innovations: a high-tech toilet seat.
The Fully-Integrated Toilet Seat, or FIT Seat, will use artificial intelligence and other techniques to give updated data for doctors in a format that is easily readable. Sensors embedded on the surfaces of the FIT seat will detect heart rates, blood flow and oxygenation rates.
The EU is trialling Bluetooth app interoperability across multiple countries. But even if the tech can be made to work, the political will to create a global contact tracing system may never emerge
The BYOD Mobile Guide is accessible through visitors’ personal smartphones, with a user experience designed to be fully inclusive and accessible to people of all ages and abilities. It helps guests navigate the Museum and offers a wide collection of content including fast facts, visual descriptions, historic photos, videos and oral histories, statistics, and deep dives into various artifacts and spaces.
“The Museum embarked on this endeavor as part of a longstanding commitment to creating dynamic and accessible experiences for all our visitors,” said Susan Marenoff-Zausner, president of the Intrepid Museum. “When COVID-19 hit, our team, alongside the incredible accessibility experts at NYU’s Ability Project, expanded the project’s scope to solve complex health and safety challenges as well. The result is an innovative tool that we believe is the future of accessible, user-friendly Museum experiences.”
Deloitte is adding a new home-monitoring and remote-care feature to its ConvergeHEALTH MyPath. The new tech, dubbed ConvergeHEALTH Hospital in Home, is focused on combining telemedicine and wearable tools.
It works by capturing data from remote-monitoring tools like wearables, enabling virtual care and linking both up on a dashboard that allows for integrated analytics tools. The tool is able to integrate with EHR systems. Patients are able to tap into support via the service’s digital Rx kit, which helps them set up home monitoring equipment.
Clarkson Provost Robyn Hannigan is looking forward to collaborating with Johns and the faculty to create a new identity for the health sciences across the University and externally through community impact. “With Johns’ experiences and leadership, Clarkson is well poised for national prominence in rural healthcare. Johns understands the reality of the need for more quality rural healthcare options. He passionately works to address complex issues and develop forward-thinking concepts and works hard to build collaborative sustainable educational and experiential learning environments. His entrepreneurial spirit will bring the Lewis School to national prominence in rural healthcare going forward,” Hannigan said.
Bloomberg coronavirus daily, Kristen V Brown and Jonathan Levin
from
The highest case rates per capita in the past seven days have been in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wisconsin and Utah.
While the initial surge of the virus hit densely populated urban areas, it’s now overwhelming rural regions, suburbs and small cities. Based on the seven-day rolling average of new cases, New Mexico, Missouri, South Dakota, Michigan and Illinois have seen the biggest increases in the past week, by percentage.
PLOS, the nonprofit publisher that in 2003 pioneered the open-access business model of charging authors to publish scientific articles so they are immediately free to all, this week rolled out an alternative model that could herald the end of the author-pays era. One of the new options shifts the cost of publishing open-access (OA) articles in its two most selective journals to institutions, charging them a fixed annual fee; any researcher at that institution could then publish in the PLOS journals at no additional charge.
The new PLOS plan includes other features novel in scientific publishing, and it joins other emerging OA financing models that also do away with fees paid by authors. Together, the developments suggest the days of researchers directly paying journals to make their papers free—a system that has made PLOS one of the largest OA publishers—may be numbered, says Sara Rouhi, director of strategic partnerships at PLOS.
Today, when you see an eerie child lift a toy with its mind in some hackneyed ‘80s-horror homage, you can be reasonably certain that kid is supposed to be special in some way. A hundred years from now, that might not translate. A hundred years from now, kids of all kinds—fictional and non-fictional; eerie and normal—might routinely spend their Saturdays spinning furniture in the air by looking at it intensely. Whether this happens depends, of course, on the direction technology takes in the coming century—specifically, advancements in the field of brain implantation. You could ask why a team of researchers would spend millions trying to make telekinesis a reality, but the more interesting question—from our perspective, at least—is: could they? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts to find out.
Howard University, Office of University Communications
from
Howard University’s College of Engineering and Architecture has received a five-year $7.5 million award from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to create a Center of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, known as CoE-AIML. The project is led by Danda B. Rawat, Ph.D., professor of Computer Science and director of Howard’s Data Science & Cybersecurity Center (DSC2).
The Center of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will explore the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in vital civilian applications and multidomain operations. Rawat’s research team at Howard University will be working in collaboration with researchers from Old Dominion University.
A study of more than 57,000 childcare providers across the United States has found that those who continued working through the initial months of the pandemic weren’t more likely to catch COVID-19 than those who were out of work. The findings, which were published October 14 in the journal Pediatrics, indicate that childcare programs aren’t likely to spread COVID-19 through the community when employees take precautions such as wearing masks and keeping the kids in their care socially distanced from each other.
“These childcare providers were doing near-Herculean things to try to keep children safe; the good news is it appears to have worked,” says Walter Gilliam, director of Yale University’s Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy and a coauthor of the new findings. “We need to continue supporting childcare providers a
Melissa Stephens, assistant director of the Genomics and Bioinformatics Core Facility, established the saliva testing lab, and has overseen the lab’s renovation, stocking, hiring and training of staff to process the samples from collection to data reporting.
That takes time, but fortunately, “We have all this expertise on campus, which enabled us to get this lab up and running quickly,” [Mike] Pfrender said. “Melissa recruited the temporary help of some postdocs and technicians working in similar high-tech molecular biology labs. Without that help, it would have been another month before we could be in operation.”
Another crucial jumpstart to the process came through the generosity of an alumnus and researcher at the University of Illinois whose daughter is a student here. “He shared with us, under a non-disclosure agreement, the chemistry they’re using at Illinois for surveillance testing. That’s how we were able to move very quickly to say we want to do this kind of lab with this kind of equipment. We were able to jump ahead through the generosity of people at the University of Illinois, and they continue to help us and field our questions,” [Liz] Rulli said.
Northeastern University has launched new undergraduate degree programs in the United Kingdom to help working professionals quickly upskill in emerging tech fields. The new degrees and certificates are offered by Northeastern’s London campus, NCH at Northeastern, and are designed to help U.K. employers fill an immediate demand for skilled digital talent—inside their own companies.
Northeastern partnered with ServiceNow, the Santa Clara, California-based digital workflow technology provider, to launch the initiative, which will be expanded globally in the coming months. Designed by Northeastern faculty and ServiceNow, the programs are being rolled out to ServiceNow’s customers and partner companies.
The University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science has entered into a $9 million agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The college of Marine Science, located on USF St. Petersburg’s campus, will work with NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey through a five-year agreement to launch the Center for Ocean Mapping and Innovative Technologies. The center will be located on USF St. Pete’s campus and use new technologies to map ocean and coastal zones.
Sandia National Laboratories, Sandia Lab News Releases
from
The development of a new method to make non-volatile computer memory may have unlocked a problem that has been holding back machine learning and has the potential to revolutionize technologies like voice recognition, image processing and autonomous driving.
A team from Sandia National Laboratories, working with collaborators from the University of Michigan, published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced Materials that details a new method that will imbue computer chips that power machine-learning applications with more processing power by using a common material found in house paint in an analog memory device that enables highly energy-efficient machine inference operations.
“Titanium oxide is one of the most commonly made materials. Every paint you buy has titanium oxide in it. It’s cheap and nontoxic,” explains Sandia materials scientist Alec Talin. “It’s an oxide, there’s already oxygen there. But if you take a few out, you create what are called oxygen vacancies. It turns out that when you create oxygen vacancies, you make this material electrically conductive.”
“On May 6–7, 2021, MIT will host — most likely online — the first AI Policy Forum Summit, a two-day collaborative gathering to discuss the progress of the task forces towards equipping high-level decision-makers with a deeper understanding of the tools at their disposal — and trade-offs to be made — to produce better public policy around AI, and better AI systems with concern for public policy. Then, in fall 2021, a follow-on event at MIT will bring together leaders from across sectors and countries and, built atop the leading research from the task forces, the forum will provide a focal point for work to move from AI principles to AI practice, and serve as a springboard to global efforts to design the future of AI.” [save the date]
Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are like crowded highways packed with billboards. If we add charts, maps, and graphs to our billboards, we can both grab attention and say something meaningful. But the image and message should be simple and clear to travelers zooming by.
Towards Data Science, Alejandro Saucedo Alejandro Saucedo
from
A hands on tutorial that teaches you how to leverage your on-device phone GPU for accelerated data processing and machine learning. You will learn how to build a simple Android App using the Native Development Kit (NDK) and the Vulkan Kompute framework.
“I have aggregated some of the notable papers released recently, esp. ICLR 2021 submissions, with concise summaries, visualizations and my comments. The development in each field is summarized, and the future trends are speculated.”
