In a recent interview for CNBC’s “Work in Progress” series, [Rachel] Lipson discussed trends she says the workforce will need to adapt to in a post-pandemic economy. Here are three of the big ones.
When [Ray] Sheldon and his colleagues organized their plankton samples by orders of magnitude, they found that each size bracket contained exactly the same mass of creatures. In a bucket of seawater, one-third of the mass of plankton would be between 1 and 10 micrometers, another third would be between 10 and 100 micrometers, and the final third would be between 100 micrometers and 1 millimeter. Each time they would move up a size group, the number of individuals in that group dropped by a factor of 10. The total mass stayed the same, while the size of the populations changed.
Sheldon thought this rule might govern all life in the ocean, from the smallest bacterium to the largest whales. This hunch turned out to be true. The Sheldon spectrum, as it became known, has been observed in plankton, fish, and in freshwater ecosystems, too. (In fact, a Russian zoologist had observed the same pattern in soil three decades before Sheldon, but his discovery went mostly unnoticed.) “It kind of suggests that no size is better than any other size,” says Eric Galbraith, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at McGill University in Montreal. “Everybody has the same size cells. And basically, for a cell, it doesn’t really matter what body size you’re in, you just kind of tend to do the same thing.”
But now, humans seem to have broken this fundamental law of the ocean. In a November paper for the journal Science Advances, Galbraith and his colleagues show that the Sheldon spectrum no longer holds true for larger marine creatures.
Over the next seven minutes during the university’s football game against Oregon State on Oct. 30, Cal Band’s showcase of five separate K-pop acts and songs dazzled the crowd. The joyous display bridged the gap between musical aesthetics and cultures, presenting a vision of K-pop that was immediately recognizable to the legions of fans but still a spectacle for college football fans to savor.
Complete with a fight scene, a dance number and a seamless medley, it’s little wonder that the performance went viral, amassing more than 230,000 views on TikTok and thousands more on YouTube.
Elise Park, a 22-year-old UC Berkeley double major in Japanese and data science, said the showcase was the culmination of years of work and incredibly fortuitous timing.
The Harvard Crimson student newspaper, Anjeli R. Macaranas
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Harvard epidemiologist Michael J. Mina — whose snippets of medical advice on Twitter throughout the pandemic have captivated hundreds of thousands — is leaving academia for a leadership position at biotech software company eMed.
Mina resigned from his faculty positions at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, as well as at the Harvard Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, on Nov. 12. He is beginning his new role as Chief Science Officer at eMed Thursday, the company announced in a press release.
Beginning July 2019, Mina served as an Epidemiology and Immunology and Infectious Diseases assistant professor at HSPH and an associate medical director in clinical microbiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many health jurisdictions deployed digital informatics systems to support “manual” case investigation and contact tracing (CICT). This case study evaluates the implementation and use of a digital information system through the experiences of CICT workers in the City and County of San Francisco (CCSF). We conducted semi-structured, 90-min interviews with a sample of the CCSF CICT workforce (n = 37). Participants also completed standardized assessments of the digital system using the System Usability Scale (SUS). Qualitative analyses highlighted (1) the importance of digital tools to ensure rapid onboarding and effective data capture in a public health emergency; (2) the use of digital systems to support culturally sensitive care; and (3) the role of digitals tools in building supportive work environments. The mean SUS score was 70/100 (SD = 17), indicating relative ease of use. In summary, the analysis highlights the importance of digital tools to support manual CICT in the COVID-19 response. [full text]
”Fair Representation in Arts and Data” is an almost year-long collaboration between data scientists, artists and museum curators that was funded by the President’s Arts Initiative. The project analyzed the collection at UMMA using several of the most common face detection algorithms which are designed to distinguish a variety of factors including gender and race. Museum visitors can now get a first glimpse at these initial research findings from the working group, which can be found inside of the “YOU ARE HERE” exhibit at UMMA.
Contrary to popular belief, there has been no great migration in the U.S. during the pandemic.
New figures released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau show that the proportion of people who moved over the past year fell to its lowest level in the 73 years that it has been tracked, in contradiction to popular anecdotes that people left cities en masse to escape COVID-19 restrictions or in search of more bucolic lifestyles.
Researchers at Columbia Engineering have teamed up with the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) to upgrade the FDNY’s ambulance Emergency Medical Services (EMS) response operations and optimize hospital capacity balancing so that hospitals aren’t overwhelmed in the future by an unprecedented patient surge like the one that occurred in the early months of the pandemic.
FDNY oversees New York City’s 911 EMS system, providing coverage for all five boroughs of the city with ambulances and specialized response vehicles. It currently operates two-thirds of the nearly 450 ambulances in NYC’s 911 system directly, with the rest provided by about 22 of New York City’s private hospitals. In addition, 198 fire engine companies provide medical response to a subset of life-threatening emergencies. These services were sorely stretched during the pandemic, and FDNY has been developing a number of innovations in its EMS system to reduce response time to potentially life-threatening medical emergencies. One of its most critical innovations is how to improve its approach to deploying its EMS resources to minimize response time.
In mid-January 2021, FDNY launched an ambulance system optimization process designed by Columbia engineers in collaboration with FDNY analysts and subject matter experts that was integrated with existing FDNY computer-aided-dispatch (CAD) functionality.
To continue growing its research expertise and educational leadership position in artificial intelligence and data science, as well as support Western New York’s growing entrepreneurial ecosystem, UB has formed the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (IAD).
“At UB, we’re committed to tackling globally pressing problems through cutting-edge research and groundbreaking educational programs. The Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science will help the university achieve this mission, as artificial intelligence, data science and related fields offer unparalleled potential to improve everything from medicine and transportation to digital literacy and robotic systems,” says A. Scott Weber, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.
Harvard Business School announced that its class of 2021 graduates, on average, earned a $150,500 base salary, a $30,000 signing bonus, and a $37,000 performance bonus; that’s a $217,000 base salary immediately after earning an MBA from Harvard. It’s also a 14.2% increase from 2017, when grads were earning a total compensation package of $190,000, on average.
In 2017, genomics-based health intelligence company Human Longevity and other research groups reported that it was feasible to predict a person’s facial appearance from their DNA.
Intrigued by the privacy risk implications of this work, Washington University in St. Louis’ Yevgeniy “Eugene” Vorobeychik, an expert in applying game theory to determine privacy risks in data sharing settings, undertook his own study.
“We wanted to see to what extent these results can generalize to the real world,” said Vorobeychik, associate professor of computer science and engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering. “We explored whether it was possible to demonstrate in a more practical situation that these concerns were real.”
More trees mean healthier neighborhoods, and a new map is helping the city of Chicago identify neighborhoods that could benefit from increased investment in street trees.
Health geographer and data scientist Marynia Kolak and a team of fellow University of Chicago researchers recently partnered with Chicago’s Department of Public Health to develop a new advanced mapping tool—one that combines tree data with other metrics related to health outcomes, including air quality, surface temperature and traffic volume.
That information will help shape the city’s plan to spend $46 million planting approximately 75,000 new trees over the next five years, focusing in part on census tracts with relatively lower numbers of trees.
Artificial intelligence technology is now used by a growing number of companies looking to hire the best employees, but new research from Rice University warns how it can incorporate biases and overlook important characteristics among job applicants.
The study explores the scientific, legal and ethical concerns raised by personnel selection tools that rely on AI technologies and machine learning algorithms. Authors Fred Oswald, a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Rice University; Nancy Tippins of the Nancy T. Tippins Group, LLC, and independent researcher S. Morton McPhail reviewed the use of this technology.
I think highly of all of the work I’ve read, and hope to nudge things toward considerations that are missing, yet are *really* important from a PC perspective… 1/n
Most rev-pap matching systems set up the problem as a bipartite matching problem, where edge weights are some rev-pap similarity, (and -\infty for connecting rev-pap with COI), setting limits of pap/rev and rev/pap, and then solving an optimization problem.
2/n
Typically these auto-assignments are then tweaked by hand, both by area chairs and by program chairs.
A major challenge now is that *I don’t recognize most reviewer’s names* so tweaking becomes very difficult.
I want more automation, but more control over that automation.
PolyAI Ltd. is an ambitious startup that creates artificial voices to replace call center operators. Based in London, it has raised $28 million to bring AI-powered customer service to Metro Bank Plc, BP Plc and more. The idea is that instead of the nightmare of dialing random digits in a decision tree, you can instead ask to, say, book a table and a voice — with just the slightest inflection of its machine-learning origins — responds with great civility. That’s nice. But there was a brief moment two years ago when it wasn’t polite at all.
A software developer with PolyAI who was testing the system, asked about booking a table for himself and a Serbian friend. “Yes, we allow children at the restaurant,” the voice bot replied, according to PolyAI founder Nikola Mrksic. Seemingly out of nowhere, the bot was trying make an obnoxious joke about people from Serbia. When it was asked about bringing a Polish friend, it replied, “Yes, but you can’t bring your own booze.”
FIFA, soccer’s governing body, other associations introduced an official position called the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) to review game-changing moments with the help of footage. These included potential penalties, red-cards, and offside offenses.
While penalty and red card calls are largely subjective — even when they are being checked by VAR — offside is an objective call that can be measured using players’ relative position and kick-point of the ball (when the ball was released by a player). So now, AI is getting involved to help decide the course of major matches by calling offside more accurately.
The turmoil of the pandemic took a heavy toll on everyone. When employers didn’t provide sufficient support for their workers, the tough times got even tougher. Just two-thirds of respondents in a recent survey commissioned by Modern Health said their employers cared about their mental wellbeing.
That perception of employers’ indifference or lack of support is leading some workers to look for jobs elsewhere. A third of workers – managers and non-managers alike – said in the survey that they were considering changing companies for the sake of their mental health.
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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.
