Around the world, some 50 million people have epilepsy, with more than 3 million in the United States alone. It’s one of the most common neurological diseases globally, characterized by recurrent seizures in part or all of the body. It’s also quite treatable with daily antiseizure medications. Yet like many prescription drugs, these have side effects, and they can’t target the exact spot in the brain triggering the seizures.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere see potential in another option called optogenetics. This field uses genetic techniques to increase the light sensitivity of specific neurons in the brain and controls their activity with direct light. “In the near future, this could help treat neurological diseases with high precision and accuracy,” says Sébastien Tremblay, a postdoctoral fellow in the labs of Michael Platt.
Despite a large neuroscience community working on optogenetics, Tremblay noticed that no central database existed to foster information exchange, particularly related to the subset of optogenetics focused on nonhuman primates. That meant anything not published in an academic journal—which, in this case, represented nearly half of in-progress work—never saw the light of day.
Don’t call it StopCovid anymore. France’s contact-tracing app has been updated and is now called TousAntiCovid, which means “everyone against Covid”. The French government is trying to pivot so that it’s no longer a contact-tracing app — or at least not just a contact-tracing app.
Right now, TousAntiCovid appears to be a rebranding more than a pivot. There’s a new name and some changes in the user interface. But the core feature of the app remains unchanged.
From late July through September, students from more than 2,400 colleges and universities went back to campus to participate in what has ultimately become an American experiment in how institutions of higher education can operate during a pandemic.
It has been a few weeks since the most dramatic effects of college reopening have been seen, and in the time since, research has started to show that inviting students back to college probably led to a rise in Covid-19 cases in the US.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that young adults ages 18 to 22 saw a 55% increase nationally in Covid-19 cases in August.
There are 70 million neurons in the mouse brain, and Moritz Helmstaedter wants to map them all. He was a medical student at Heidelberg University in Germany when psychiatrists there suggested that some aspects of the human psyche lack a biological explanation. “I was totally appalled,” recalls Helmstaedter, who is now a director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany.
Although the brain remains a mystery, Helmstaedter was convinced that what goes on there “must be a mechanistic phenomenon in the end, as complex as it may be”. He has dedicated the past two decades to working those mechanisms out — and he and other neuroscientists are finally starting to scratch the surface, one cubic micrometre at a time.
Last month, Twitter users uncovered a disturbing example of bias on the platform: An image-detection algorithm designed to optimize photo previews was cropping out Black faces in favor of white ones. Twitter apologized for this botched algorithm, but the bug remains.
Acts of technological racism might not always be so blatant, but they are largely unavoidable. Black defendants are more likely to be unfairly sentenced or labeled as future re-offenders, not just by judges, but also by a sentencing algorithm advertised in part as a remedy to human biases. Predictive models methodically deny ailing Black and Hispanic patients’ access to treatments that are regularly distributed to less sick white patients. Examples like these abound.
Earlier this month, the USPTO published the resulting report, entitled “Public Views on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property Policy,”7 which summarizes nearly 200 comments from various stakeholders in response to the RFCs (the “Report”). The Report was divided into two parts, the first covering responses to the August 27, 2019 RFC with respect to patenting AI inventions and the second covering responses to the October 30, 2019 RFC with respect to the impact of AI on IP policy areas other than patent law (including copyright, trademark, database protection and trade secret law). Below is a brief summary of some of the key findings and considerations of the Report.
Nebraska Health Information Initiative (NEHII), Nebraska’s statewide health information exchange (HIE), announced it’s expanding its behavioral health data platform, which includes social determinants of health (SDOH) data, to six additional states, including Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
The HIE will connect those rural states to the Unite Us platform. This social services network aims to connect health and social care providers to enhance care coordination and delivery across the six states.
“NEHII is thrilled to be expanding our partnership with Unite Us into six new states, to enable better support and health outcomes for all Americans,” said Jaime Bland, president and CEO of NEHII.
Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) today announced a substantial revision of its Master in Design Studies (M.Des.) program. The new curriculum is designed to encourage multidisciplinary study and to address the changing real-world needs for design.
The new program replaces former eight concentration areas with four “domains,” all designed to address the interaction of design with landscape, ecology, infrastructure, and other environmental concerns. The domains are: ecologies, which explores the connection of design with landscape and infrastructure; mediums, taking up innovative design methods to engage the public and social realms; narratives, centered around the social, technical, cultural, and political contexts of design; and publics, focusing of the relationship between the built environment and its surroundings. More than a dozen possible “trajectories” will be offered across any of the domains for greater flexibility, allowing students to design his or her own program.
“We are not changing to solve a problem with the program. We’re changing to expand the influence of the program,” K. Michael Hays, program director and Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, said this week. “When this program started in the ’80s we had four subject areas, which exactly mapped the curriculum. It was very efficient and solid, but very boring.
A recent $20 million gift to Miami University for a data science building will help one of the university’s fastest-growing programs grow even faster, associate provost and Miami professor of mathematics Jeffrey Wanko said.
“The department of Emerging Technology in Business & Designs has been growing a lot with its work, for example, with gaming, game design and game theory and analytics,” Wanko said. “That’s a department that has been just bursting at the seams and it’s one of our fastest-growing departments here at the university. So, by providing them with some other kinds of spaces, it’s going to help them grow and have a home that’s more representative of what they do.”
The gift from Rick McVey, Miami class of ’81, was announced Oct. 5. McVey is an entrepreneur as chairman and chief executive officer of MarketAxess, a New York based international financial technology company. The new facility, to be built along Talawanda Road near Withrow and Benton halls, will be named the Richard M. McVey Data Science Building.
Here comes a new big-data approach trying to crack the age-old problem of understanding what a TV show or movie is really about.
Entertainment-analytics startup Vody is coming out of stealth after more than two years of development and testing. Co-founders and co-CEOs Stephanie Horbaczewski and Jeremy Houghton, who both were previously top execs at YouTube network StyleHaul, claim they’ve built a better mousetrap. The company’s proprietary system, they say, uses machine-learning tech to trawl the internet and compile a comprehensive database of entertainment titles — designed to plug into streaming services for more accurate content recommendations.
Australian scientists have developed a new type of sensor to measure and correct the distortion of starlight caused by viewing through the Earth’s atmosphere, which should make it easier to study the possibility of life on distant planets.
Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, University of Sydney optical scientists have developed a sensor that can neutralise a star’s ‘twinkle’ caused by heat variations in the Earth’s atmosphere. This will make the discovery and study of planets in distant solar systems easier from optical telescopes on Earth.
Kansas State University says Pascal Hitzler, professor and Lloyd T. Smith Creativity in Engineering chair in the computer science department and director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science has been awarded almost $300,000 from the National Science Foundation for his project, “Open Science Data in Semantic Web Research.”
“It is critical we establish open science as the default practice in the academic community,” Hitzler said. “Reporting a research result is more than just the manuscript. It is the actual process undertaken, the data and metadata, the implemented software and environment, and more.”
According to K-State, the two-year funded project will leverage the leadership and reputation of the Semantic Web journal which is an open-access prominent journal published by project collaborator IOS Press, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Facebook is trying to scuttle the work of New York University researchers who have played an important role in bringing attention to the company’s political ad-targeting practices.
The researchers collect information about what sorts of political ads that American voters see on the platform.
Facebook (FB) demanded in an October 16 letter that the researchers stop collecting Facebook data through a tool NYU developed to track political ads. The letter, signed by Allison Hendrix from the company’s privacy and data policy team, also demanded the researchers delete all data they have gathered through the tool.
“The Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) offers six to twelve months of support to graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are enrolled in PhD programs in the United States and conducting dissertation research about non-US or US Indigenous cultures and societies.” Deadline for applications is November 4.
Online January 11-12, 2021. “The Rising Stars in Data Science workshop is a new initiative from the Center for Data and Computing (CDAC) at the University of Chicago, focusing on celebrating and fast tracking the careers of exceptional data scientists at a critical inflection point in their career: the transition from PhD to postdoctoral scholar, research scientist, or tenure track position.” Deadline for applications is November 23.
Continuous monitoring for ML models is considered to be the first and perhaps the most important step in model governance. It requires thinking from a dataset as well as a model perspective as explained in the article. On a more ML Ops level, it is important to have version control across your ML pipelines across code, model and data as we talked about in our ML Ops version control topic.
Tracking the model outputs allows biases to be detected and corrected. This is important because models that are programmed to learn as they go may accidentally become biased or drift which could create inaccurate or unethical results. Effective documentation is essential to model governance because it allows companies to trace and document all the inputs that could affect a model’s results.