Deepnote, a startup that is building a data science platform on top of Jupyter-compatible notebooks, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A round co-led by Index Ventures and Accel, both of which participated in its 2020 seed round. Existing investors Y Combinator and Credo Ventures also participated in this round.
As Deepnote co-founder and CEO Jakub Jurovych told me, the company has pretty much stayed true to its original vision since its launch a couple of years ago.
“When we started out, we were coming from this data science and machine learning background,” Jurovych explained. “We were pretty confident that something needed to change in the data science space because we tried everything out there — like all the tools you could possibly imagine — the collaboration was always broken, no matter what we tried.”
Most consumer wearables use heart rate and wrist-based motion to calculate calorie burn during activity. But heart rate isn’t directly related to the energy you are expending, says Slade. “Your heart is just pumping blood through your body and has a bunch of different factors that affect it,” he says. “How tired you are, if you had coffee, worked out, this time history makes it really volatile.”
Instead, his system breaks down motion into each step, then uses a machine-learning model to calculate energy expenditure. It was tested with over a dozen participants of varying ages and weights and averaged 13% error, compared with 40% to 80% error from consumer wearables.
To test its accuracy for myself, I’ve come to Stanford University’s human performance lab, filled to the brim with a range of sophisticated workout equipment including an antigravity treadmill. But for the purposes of testing out this new wearable, only regular gym machines like a stair climber and exercise bike are needed. I’ll be doing four workouts for 5 minutes each: walking, running, cycling and stair stepping.
The UK government has announced the first chief executive of its new high-risk, high-reward research-funding agency: Peter Highnam, the deputy director of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), on which the British organization is modelled.
The UK agency, known as the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, or ARIA, will have a budget of £800 million (US$1 billion) over 4 years. It will give Highnam, and whoever is recruited to chair the organization, the power to choose which areas of science to fund. Although the full details of ARIA’s funding mechanism are yet to be laid out, this approach stands in contrast to UK Research and Innovation, the country’s mainstream research-funding organization, which disburses its £7.8-billion yearly budget mostly through competitive grant schemes. Highnam, a UK national, will start his five-year post in May.
Google parent company Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) advanced nearer to joining peers Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) in the elite $2 trillion market valuation club on Wednesday as the search giant’s shares surged more than 8% following a blowout quarterly report.
Last trading at about $2,975, Alphabet’s stock was on track for its largest one-day percentage gain in almost two years, easing concerns around owning Big Tech following a sector-wide selloff in the past few weeks
The Washington Post; Elizabeth Dwoskin, Will Oremus and Rachel Lerman
from
Facebook parent Meta’s quarterly earnings report on Wednesday revealed a startling statistic: For the first time ever, the company’s growth is stagnating around the world.
Facebook lost daily users for the first time in its 18-year history — falling by about half a million users in the last three months of 2021, to 1.93 billion logging in each day. The loss was greatest in Africa, Latin America and India, suggesting that the company’s product is saturated globally — and that its long quest to add as many users as possible has peaked.
For the past year, as NFTs have breached spectacular and speculative heights, we’ve seen a growing amount of skepticism. The most recent wave was touched off by a 138-minute video essay by Canadian media critic Dan Olson that condemned NFTs and other blockchain-based technologies as fundamentally broken and unworkable. In just over a week, it’s garnered more than 3 million views on YouTube. Regardless of your perspective on the video, it’s hard to deny that there’s a lot of bullshit percolating around NFTs. Even hardcore Bitcoiners agree. And despite what the loudest NFT boosters insist, the beatings have continued and morale has not improved.
Last month, as part of the regulatory push on data privacy, the FTC issued a $2 million fine against the advertising tech firm OpenX for illegally collecting and monetizing location data from children on a mass scale. Advertising platforms such as OpenX serve as an exchange, with data from thousands of web publishers and tens of thousands of apps feeding profiles of users into a system that advertising agencies use to place targeted ads that appear across multiple news websites as users browse the web.
Many gaming, weather, and dating apps, as well as a variety of websites, quietly collect behavioral, demographic, health, and location data on users that is sold to advertising tech brokers. Advertising agencies go to data brokers to better target potential consumers. As individuals browse the web, they are greeted by custom advertisements based on profiles of what data brokers believe to be their shopping habits, interests, or concerns.
This year Medicare started paying for its first autonomous AI procedure. We discuss the significance and explore some of the legal challenges with expanding the use of artificial intelligence. [video, pre-roll + 3:52]
Loneliness among elderly adults skyrocketed during the pandemic. Two Barrett, The Honors College students are developing a mobile app to help alleviate social isolation and loneliness among older individuals as a result of COVID-19 induced quarantines.
Claire Pishko, a senior studying biochemistry, and Haley Harelson, a senior studying data science, are working to develop the app in conjunction with the Luminosity Lab to connect elderly individuals with one another. The idea for the app was inspired by their honors thesis investigation into how the solitary nature of COVID-19 impacted adults age 50 and older.
The America COMPETES Act would exempt STEM PhD graduates from green-card caps, effectively stapling a green card to the doctoral diploma of every international student in STEM. It also would charge these applicants an extra fee to fund scholarships for U.S. STEM students 2/
The bill would require the US Depart of Education to review all Confucius Institute contracts to make sure they protect academic freedom & give full managerial & curricular control to the American college partner. Colleges that fail to comply could lose federal higher ed funds 3/
When it comes to the lives of proteins in our cells, there is a constant whirl of activity. But scientists may be seeing only a fraction of it. Researchers have trained their spotlight on many proteins in our cells, but other proteins perform their movements in the dark, out of scientists’ view.
These unknowns, both known and unknown, are the dark proteome. Inside this dark proteome are proteins that scientists think should exist but haven’t found, proteins that can be constructed and modified in different ways, and proteins that scientists have found but whose structures and roles are still unknown. Researchers hoping to learn more about our biology, including details about diseases and how to treat them, are developing new tools and ways to explore this dark proteome.
“For me,” says Sean O’Donoghue at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, “darkness is a metaphor for what we don’t understand.”
Writing this story was dangerous. Before, I was only vaguely aware of the existence of Wordle, a wildly popular online word game created by Josh Wardle and recently bought by the New York Times. Now I can’t stop playing it. The objective of the game sounds deceptively simple: try to guess the right five-letter word in six attempts or fewer.
Thanks to Devang Thakkar, a fourth-year PhD student in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Duke, the 200+ Wordle games released before I discovered its charms are readily accessible online. So now I’m making up for lost time.
Thakkar recently spent a weekend building an archive of every Wordle game in existence. You can play them in any order.
“Universities will be directly challenged to respond to research opportunities that are specific, measurable, focused on industry needs and driven by explicit national goals, the University Research Commercialisation Plan, released yesterday, states.
The long-awaited document adds, the challenge “will drive a culture change within the higher education sector, through a focus on translation and outcomes rather than the dominant model of ‘publish or perish’.”
While the research translation process to be introduced under the $1.6bn Australia’s Economic Accelerator has dominated discussion, the new system includes changes for the way universities manage research.
Early-stage projects funded by Accelerator will have a priority manager expert in the relevant National Research Priority (resources and critical minerals, food and beverage, medical products, recycling and clean energy, defence, plus space).
The four new initiatives are the ACS Campaign for a Sustainable Future Initiative, the Strategic Initiative on Fostering a Skilled Technical Workforce, the Accelerating Digital Research Data Products Initiative, and the CAS Accelerating Life Science Growth Initiative. Taken together, ACS Chief Operations Officer LaTrease Garrison says, the initiatives will expand ACS’s global impact “so that we can demonstrate the power of chemistry, the effectiveness of chemistry, and how chemistry is contributing to the overarching global economy.”
ACS’s Scientific Advancement division will lead the ACS Campaign for a Sustainable Future Initiative. The multifaceted initiative will include a campaign promoting sustainability, increased advocacy for sustainability research funding, and expanded efforts to modernize the chemistry curriculum for 2- and 4-year colleges to include a focus on sustainability. The initiative will also include a prize for international collaborations focused on sustainable chemistry research.
Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, News Center
from
Northwestern, the University of Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Illinois, Chicago and Rush University are part of a $170 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) program that is the first comprehensive study to investigate precision nutrition. The goal of “Nutrition for Precision Health” (NPH), powered by the All of Us Research Program, will be to develop algorithms to predict individual responses to food and dietary routines.
Northwestern and its partners will comprise the Illinois Precision Nutrition Research consortium, one of six centers around the country. Their grant will be $13,321,184 awarded over five years, pending availability of funds.
Millions of Americans are affected by a mental illness each year, but providers are often in the dark about what is happening to their patients day to day and in between doctor visits.
Turns out, tracking mental health could be as easy as counting steps.
A startup led by mental health and technology experts offers an app that can track mental health and predict depressive relapses up to a week in advance. And all the patient has to do is carry around their smartphone.
which is a hackathon that allows for women + nonbinary students in the community to come together + explore technology. This hackathon will be held February 18-20. Register now by using the link below!
A program that will provide you with tools and skills to drive discussions about #preprints & represent #ASAPbio. Applications close March 25
SPONSORED CONTENT
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.
Crafting an effective poster presentation isn’t always straightforward. The best approach may depend on whether the conference is being held in person or virtually. Strategies and preferences also vary widely among scientists. So, Science Careers asked researchers in a range of disciplines and career stages to share their tips for making the most of presenting a poster at a conference, including any adjustments they’ve made for conferences held online. The responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
