The Covid Symptom Study, a smartphone-based surveillance study on COVID-19 symptoms in the population, is an exemplar of big data citizen science. As of May 23rd, 2021, over 5 million participants have collectively logged over 360 million self-assessment reports since its introduction in March 2020. The success of the Covid Symptom Study creates significant technical challenges around effective data curation. The primary issue is scale. The size of the dataset means that it can no longer be readily processed using standard Python-based data analytics software such as Pandas on commodity hardware. Alternative technologies exist but carry a higher technical complexity and are less accessible to many researchers. We present ExeTera, a Python-based open source software package designed to provide Pandas-like data analytics on datasets that approach terabyte scales. We present its design and capabilities, and show how it is a critical component of a data curation pipeline that enables reproducible research across an international research group for the Covid Symptom Study.
Trolley ridership increased sharply with the opening of the new UC San Diego Blue Line extension between Old Town and La Jolla on Sunday, according to officials.
The San Diego Metropolitan Transit System recorded more than 85,000 trips taken on its entire trolley network, up from 49,000 trips the previous Sunday.
That included more than 60,000 trips on the UC San Diego Blue Line, which now runs between San Ysidro at the U.S.-Mexico border and University City. Trolley rides were free on Sunday.
University of California, San Diego; UC San Diego News Center
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“If you imagine a cell, you probably picture the colorful diagram in your cell biology textbook, with mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum and nucleus. But is that the whole story? Definitely not,” said Trey Ideker, PhD, professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center. “Scientists have long realized there’s more that we don’t know than we know, but now we finally have a way to look deeper.”
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Ideker led the study with Emma Lundberg, PhD, of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and Stanford University.
In the pilot study, MuSIC revealed approximately 70 components contained within a human kidney cell line, half of which had never been seen before. In one example, the researchers spotted a group of proteins forming an unfamiliar structure. Working with UC San Diego colleague Gene Yeo, PhD, they eventually determined the structure to be a new complex of proteins that binds RNA. The complex is likely involved in splicing, an important cellular event that enables the translation of genes to proteins, and helps determine which genes are activated at which times.
citing specifically our recent research showing the effects of the pandemic on scientists can be long lasting: https://nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26428-z
Office commuting may not return to its pre-pandemic place in the work life, but snarled traffic and transit delays probably won’t go away for good.
As hybrid and remote options remake the office, a new study demonstrates the link between commuting and job performance. The research also shows how consumer technology can predict individual work quality based on the daily grind of commuting.
“Your commute predicts your day,” says Andrew Campbell, the Albert Bradley 1915 Third Century Professor of computer science, the lead researcher, and a co-author of the study. “COVID-19 may have upended the work world but traveling to and from the office remains an important part of life that affects the quality of work that people produce.”
[Shaoxiong] Zheng was the third student or recent graduate from the university to have been fatally shot in Chicago within a year: two in Hyde Park, one on the Green Line. He was the second victim who was an international student from China. These deaths, while unrelated, brought Chicago’s biggest problem close to the students, especially those who grew up in countries where gun violence is nonexistent.
“This tragedy happens so many times, and we cannot just let it happen again and again and say, ‘Oh, we’re so glad that it’s not me this time. OK, who’s next? Probably not me,’” Cai said. “And it’s OK to just be like that. It’s OK to let this happen.”
Zheng’s death became a catalyst that attracted media attention and a response from the city.
The complex ecology of organisms living in algae in a water system – the algal microbiome – can help researchers learn what makes an environment healthy, what makes it potentially toxic and how algae growth can spur a shift between these two extremes. To learn more about this, a multidisciplinary team will to translate the codex contained in the microbiome of common algae into computer algorithms that can predict a wide range of microbial interactions.
The team, which includes researchers from NAU, University of California-Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will conduct experiments in rivers in Arizona and California. By manipulating nutrients and sunlight, they will look for the biological “switches” that get turned on and off by organisms living in the algal mat, a laminate composed of algae, bacteria, fungi and tiny animals that grows on rocks and sediments of riverbeds.
It has not been a happy time for researchers at big tech companies. Hired to help executives understand platforms’ shortcomings, research teams inevitably reveal inconvenient truths. Companies hire teams to build “responsible AI” but bristle when their employees discover algorithmic bias. They boast about the quality of their internal research but disavow it when it makes its way to the press. At Google, this story played out in the forced departure of ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru and the subsequent fallout for her team. At Facebook, it led to Frances Haugen and the Facebook Files.
For these reasons, it’s always of note when a tech platform takes one of those unflattering findings and publishes it for the world to see. At the end of October, Twitter did just that.
Ohio State University has launched an ambitious, 10-year plan to raise $800 million to eliminate all loans from financial aid packages given to undergraduates.
“It’s not free college, it’s not free tuition,” says Kristina Johnson, the president of Ohio State, “but can we take one of the largest universities in the country and develop pathways for our students so that they can graduate debt-free?”
It’s designed to test gas-guzzlers, but it will also be one of the greenest buildings in the country.
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) burns a lot of fuel. As the air pollution rule maker and regulator for the state, with the most stringent emissions standards in the U.S., the agency is charged with making sure vehicles comply. It also researches how those standards can be brought even lower. To do so, the agency runs the engines of lots of vehicles.
The Daily Californian student newspaper, Alexander Wohl and Lydia Sidhom
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The UC Board of Regents received public criticism on the lack of student voices in its voting process and discussed standardized testing and artificial intelligence during its final day of meetings Thursday.
The board heard public comment from 20 community members during the meeting, who brought attention to issues ranging from the university’s recently approved faculty wage increases and budget to their investment in development on native Hawaiian land.
Many expressed gratitude for the Board of Regents’ and UC President Michael Drake’s support of an increase to projected faculty pay scales for the upcoming fiscal year.
“This amendment helps in making us financially whole and moves the UC closer to truly being an employer of choice,” said Arlene Bañaga, Council of UC Staff Assemblies senior delegate for UC Berkeley, during the meeting.
How high will low code applications go? The jury is still out on how high this is all going. Low code and no code may even play a role in enabling business users to build artificial intelligence-driven applications, some observers predict.
Low and no code platforms make it possible “to deploy artificial intelligence without hiring an army of expensive developers and data scientists.,” states Jonathon Reilly, writing in Harvard Business Review. “Removing friction from adoption will help unleash the power of AI across all industries and allow non-specialists to literally predict the future. In time, no-code AI platforms will be as ubiquitous as word-processing or spreadsheet software is today,”
Reilly advises looking for platforms that make such development as easy as possible — a simple interface that integrates with popular enterprise applications; that data is automatically classified; automates model selection and training; and monitors model performance. “The user should not need to know their way around regression or k-nearest neighbor algorithms.”
Not everyone agrees that low code and no code platforms can blaze a path to high-end application development — at least not yet.
Privacy and surveillance experts say they’re cautiously optimistic about a draft policy that outlines how Toronto police will be able to use artificial intelligence systems (AI) — but they add that the devil is in the details.
That draft policy, released by the Toronto Police Services Board (TPSB), is now open to public consultation until Dec. 15.
In a press release, the TPSB says the policy aims to ensure AI is used by the Toronto Police Service (TPS) in a way that is “fair, equitable, and does not breach the privacy or other rights of members of the public.” The release also claims it’s the first policy of its kind among Canadian police boards or commissions.
The University of Alabama is leading a program among six state universities to prepare secondary education students to fill the need for trained computer science teachers in the state.
The statewide program builds off a successful computer science education training program at UA. With a nearly $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, this new phase aims to train 90 secondary education students over the next three years. The program’s goal is to help high schools comply with state mandates to offer computer science in the secondary grades.
The Brookings Institution; Emiliana Vegas, Michael Hansen, and Brian Fowler
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This report makes the case for expanding computer science education in primary and secondary schools around the world, and outlines the key challenges standing in the way. Through analysis of regional and national education systems at various stages of progress in implementing computer science education programs, the report offers transferable lessons learned across a wide range of settings with the aim that all students—regardless of income level, race, or sex—can one day build foundational skills necessary for thriving in the 21st century.
“Participating sponsors team up with graduate students and faculty members to solve a research question with an applied data science focus on an urban issue. Apply today.” Deadline for applications is December 8.
The eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program is now accepting applications for student fellows and project leads for the 2021 summer session. Fellows will work with academic researchers, data scientists and public stakeholder groups on data-intensive research projects that will leverage data science approaches to address societal challenges in areas such as public policy, environmental impacts and more. Student applications due 2/15 – learn more and apply here. DSSG is also soliciting project proposals from academic researchers, public agencies, nonprofit entities and industry who are looking for an opportunity to work closely with data science professionals and students on focused, collaborative projects to make better use of their data. Proposal submissions are due 2/22.
I tried to learn Nix, and it was pretty hard. I kept a diary of every command I tried, every wrong assumption that I made, and every realization that I had along the way.
