Safety hazards can be associated with EHR usability, which refers to the design and use of the technology and how individuals interact with it. Usability challenges can frustrate clinicians because they make simple tasks take longer, lead to workarounds, or even contribute to patient safety concerns. These challenges can stem not only from the layout of EHRs, but also from how the technology is implemented and operated in health care facilities; how clinicians are trained to use it; and how the EHR is maintained, updated, and customized. Each stage of EHR development and use—the software life cycle from development through implementation and use in a health care environment—can affect the usability and safety of the technology.
While usability and patient safety are related, not every usability challenge will represent a risk to patients, and not every risk to patients stems from an EHR usability problem. In fact, some changes to EHRs might improve safety but result in less-efficient workflows—for example, if clinicians were prompted to enter “lbs.” or “kg.” every time they entered a patient’s weight. But when a system is challenging to use or patient information is difficult for a clinician to find, safety risks could occur.
Because these techniques are so new, people are having trouble telling the difference between real videos and the deepfake videos. My work, with my colleague Ming-Ching Chang and our Ph.D. student Yuezun Li, has found a way to reliably tell real videos from deepfake videos. It’s not a permanent solution, because technology will improve. But it’s a start, and offers hope that computers will be able to help people tell truth from fiction.
When Damon McCoy, an assistant professor of computer science at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, heard from a friend that Facebook was about to publicize all its political-ad data, he was intrigued. With Facebook under increasing scrutiny for its role in reaching voters through targeted-ad campaigns, the move toward heightened transparency was unprecedented in the social-media industry.
“Everyone knows what happened in the election and the allegations against the Russians,” McCoy told The Bridge. “Obviously, Facebook was trying to react to them.”
Yet finding the searchable database Facebook built to display the information, which went live on May 24, required a strenuous search on McCoy’s part. And once he discovered the database, McCoy found it frustratingly minimalist for research purposes, not offering many options for compiling statistics.
On February 7-9, 2018, editors, publisher, funders, and researchers gathered at HHMI Headquarters in Chevy Chase, MD to discuss innovations in peer review. A clear majority of participants at the meeting agreed that publishing peer review reports (ie, the contents of peer review, whether anonymized or not), would benefit the research community by increasing transparency of the assessment process. These benefits include 1) increased reviewer and editorial accountability, 2) training opportunities to educate students about the peer review process, 3) enhancing readers’ understanding of the article in the context of the field, and 4) a pathway to providing credit for peer review. Evidence suggests that publishing peer review reports does not change the quality of reviewers’ assessment. FAQ about publishing peer reviews can be found here.
The property at 585 Third St. has remained empty for years amid Kendall Square’s biotech and high-tech boom. The reason: Constellation president Glenn KnicKrehm’s dream of building a performing arts complex called the Constellation Center on the site.
Company Data Science News
People are trying to get out of the Bay Area: “46% of Bay Area residents said they planned to leave in ‘the next few years’, up from 34% in 2016”. They are fleeing in part because it’s expensive – families earning less than $120,000 are considered low income – and in part because they just don’t like it – traffic sucks and the tech monoculture is increasingly “obsessed” with money.
Foxconn has committed $100 million to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the largest donation the school has ever received. The funds will support a new engineering building and the faculty to fill it up. The company’s plans to open a manufacturing facility in Wisconsin have drawn criticism over the tax incentives the state offered Foxconn. Worth $4bn, they are the largest incentives ever given to a foreign company planning to operate in the US. Now that $100m donation is looking a little skimpy.
Moderating content at Facebook is difficult, sensitive, and ever more challenging as the company grows. The question I have is whether we are running full-steam ahead into an American-style monoculture in which American ideologies about what is proper and improper will be the default, with relevant tweaks made as necessary to fit other ideologies elsewhere. It is evidence of, to quote someone who doesn’t want to be quoted, neocolonialism for the Information Age. John Nye wrote about the soft power of cultural exports – everyone, everywhere watching Hollywood movies, eating McDonald’s, and drinking Starbucks, and Information Age neocolonialism is more likely to be accepted once these cultural products have demonstrated the American narrative of self-determination, anti-establishmentarianism, and free speech in decades of exported blockbusters. What Facebook is now up to is soft power 2.0, a deeper and more personal discourse on personal expression than a venti latte or Avenger’s movie could ever be. Cheryl Sandberg may have as much power as Emma Lazarus, the poet who wrote the words adorning the Statue of Liberty. Give me your poor, your weak, your huddled masses, yearning to breath free. But not if they happen to be nude, violent, exceptionally rude, or openly promoting anorexia, at least not on Facebook. Platitudes don’t work on platforms. The real work of profitable cultural pluralism is in the details. And they are being sorted by a handful of large tech companies, largely behind closed doors.
Cybersecurity is the 21st century version of the good guys vs the mobsters, spies, and dankly evil bad guys. Among other things, this means the sector is full of stories. Wired did us all a solid and published the story of the NotPetya attack, the fastest replicating computer virus in history that racked up $10 billion in damages.
And a much shorter cybersecurity zinger came via tweet thread on McAfee, the man, the company, and the anti-virus software. Credit to VessOnSecurity and h/t to Ben Johnson Obsidian’s CTO.
Planning for Google’s smart city campus in Toronto is underway. The designs will rely on “the aesthetic potential of prefabricated mass timber construction” which, in my opinion after reviewing the renderings, is not an attractive ‘aesthetic potential’. Giant, space-defining, glass-treaded spiral staircases a la Apple are also in the works. No word yet on what the data architectures will be.
Highly talented employees are refusing to work for companies they deem to be unethical. This has caused some difficulty for Amazon and Palantir, in a highly anecdotal article.
we are based on an ethics-first approach, so feel free to peruse our career site or ping me if we haven’t listed your dream job and you want to work here
At Obsidian, we are based on an ethics-first approach, so feel free to peruse our career site or ping me if we haven’t listed your dream job and you want to work here.
Thank goodness Uber has partnered with Toyota on its self-driving car project. Now, neither company has a great safety record at the moment – remember Tempe? And Takata? – but somehow I feel that I am more likely live if they get together than if they don’t. Or maybe I’m just a big, dopey Pollyanna when it comes to driverless cars.
FitBit let David Pogue have access to their 150 billion hours of heart rate data. It’s very cool, but also brings up an opportunity to talk about the importance of random sampling. Size is not everything. Not everyone has a Fitbit, so the data in the pool are representative of people who are likely more well-off than average, younger, and more health-conscious than average. This is one of the problems with deriving baseline assumptions from non-representative datasets. Or with PR-initiated datasets, given Apple’s fast-approaching WatchOS5 launch.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is arguably one of the most famous experiments in modern psychology and has been used as a demonstration of how people rapidly conform to their roles in extraordinary circumstances and perform acts that would be branded as “evil” in average contexts.
The experiment has become part of the fabric of modern psychology and has been taught routinely to first-year psychology students around the world, making an appearance in the great majority of social psychology textbooks.
However, its legitimacy is now being openly debated by a panel of international psychology experts including professor Philip Zimbardo, the researcher from Stanford University who designed and conducted the experiment.
Syracuse University, School of Information Studies
from
Deficiencies in the scientific community’s centralized peer review process can impact more than a researcher’s career. Faults in the process can ultimately affect the kinds of scientific discoveries that are made, the distribution of information about findings, the technology innovations that do – or don’t – result, and even the economic impact of scientific research work.
With that premise and a goal and plan to improve the process, School of Information Studies (iSchool) Assistant Professor Daniel Acuna has attracted a $531,339 grant from the National Science Foundation.
For the next three years, he and two co-researchers will determine ways to optimize scientific peer review by creating a better understanding of the factors that affect the process and developing insights and plans to improve it.
The idea that artificial intelligence can compose music is scary for a lot of people, including me. But music-making AI software has advanced so far in the past few years that it’s no longer a frightening novelty; it’s a viable tool that can and is being used by producers to help in the creative process. This raises the question: could artificial intelligence one day replace musicians? For the second episode of The Future of Music, I went to LA to visit the offices of AI platform Amper Music and the home of Taryn Southern, a pop artist who is working with Amper and other AI platforms to co-produce her debut album I AM AI.
What’s stopping business schools from catching up to the business world which relies heavily on Big Data and Data Science? Schools that can incorporate these into all areas of their educational offerings will be the ones that prepare students the best for the challenges they’ll face today — and the ones we haven’t even imagined.
Lehigh University, P.C. Rosson College of Engineering & Applied Science
from
Creating quantitative and computational modeling of complex FEW systems is the focus of a four-year, $500,000 grant that Yang and an international team of colleagues from several institutions across the United States and China have been awarded by the National Science Foundation.
With Yang as principal investigator, the NSF-backed “US-China: Quantifying Complex Adaptive FEW Systems” project will use data and analysis from two major river basins to develop a single basin-scale modeling framework that could apply to either body of water. The goal is to decipher the food-energy-water nexus and to evaluate the vulnerability, resilience and sustainability of these “system of systems,” especially in light of changes in both human and natural domains.
The U.S. team will focus on the Columbia River basin bordering the Pacific Northwest, while the Chinese team will focus on the Mekong River basin that traverses much of Southeast Asia.
For the first time, the EPA offered the option to certify accessory products by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations, which describe the properties and interactions in a flow—in this case, the airflow that runs past traveling tractor trailers. Certification by CFD would be convenient and, ultimately, cheaper by eliminating uncontrollable variables that hamper physical testing (e.g., weather, test track availability, and the cost of wind tunnel testing). The Phase 2 program requires the more rigorous unsteady (versus steady) CFD analysis and aims to determine best practices that could extend to a range of CFD challenges in the industry.
Access to the computational resources at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), enabled SmartTruck to successfully complete, for the first time, a detailed unsteady analysis using modeling and simulation. As a result, SmartTruck also became the first company to request certification through computational analysis instead of through physical testing.
“The University of Washington’s Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering welcomes proposals for sponsored projects and invites you to register your company or organization for our biggest career event of the year. See below for upcoming deadlines.” Deadline for Master’s projects is September 15. Deadline for undergraduate projects is December 1.
“Facebook Reality Labs has launched the Scene Understanding and Modeling (SUMO) Challenge, which targets development of comprehensive 3D scene understanding and modeling algorithms. The challenge has been developed by a team of computer vision researchers at Facebook together with collaborators from Stanford, Princeton and Virginia Tech.” Contest runs through November 16.
Between unstable connections and the sheer cost of expensive day passes, you might write off midair internet as not worth the trouble. But with the right tricks up your sleeve, you can finish your work without spending too long waiting for that email to load.
Search is fundamentally a data product. Everyone on the team needs to continually look at how searchers behave and what impact that has throughout the search stack, in order to understand which problems need to be solved and how best to solve them.
“On May 25th, 2018 the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect. It enacted a sweeping set of new regulations intended to provide European citizens better control over their own data. Of concern here is one particular article of GDPR: the right of Erasure.” … “This blog post presents a high level overview of the system Strava implemented to provide our customers with that functionality.”