The University of Virginia’s Faculty Senate voted unanimously Wednesday to establish the University’s 12th school – the School of Data Science. UVA’s Board of Visitors and the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia must further approve creation of the school.
The School of Data Science will be built on the foundation of UVA’s Data Science Institute, which was established in 2013 as a pan-University institute. That institute will be integrated into the new School of Data Science, with plans to ultimately offer doctoral degrees, undergraduate degrees and certificate programs, in addition to an existing master’s degree in data science. The plan is to open the school this fall.
There are lots and lots of guidelines and best practices for defining AI fairness and what to do about bias, as we describe in a companion article in this special report, Can AI Fairness Be Regulated? There are not a lot of tools that design engineers could use to detect and correct bias in algorithms or datasets, however. Such tools are lacking both for engineers developing their own products and for customers who want to optimize third-party AI systems.
Artistic sketches can be used to capture details of a scene in a simpler image. MIT researchers are now bringing that concept to computational biology, with a novel method that extracts comprehensive samples — called “sketches” — of massive cell datasets that are easier to analyze for biological and medical studies.
Recent years have seen an explosion in profiling single cells from a diverse range of human tissue and organs — such as a neurons, muscles, and immune cells — to gain insight into human health and treating disease. The largest datasets contain anywhere from around 100,000 to 2 million cells, and growing. The long-term goal of the Human Cell Atlas, for instance, is to profile about 10 billion cells. Each cell itself contains tons of data on RNA expression, which can provide insight about cell behavior and disease progression.
With enough computation power, biologists can analyze full datasets, but it takes hours or days. Without those resources, it’s impractical. Sampling methods can be used to extract small subsets of the cells for faster, more efficient analysis, but they don’t scale well to large datasets and often miss less abundant cell types.
A team of University of Washington researchers including former eScience postdoctoral fellow Anisha Keshavan, along with senior data scientist Ariel Rokem and affiliate Jason Yeatman have recently published a study titled “Combining citizen science and deep learning to amplify expertise in neuroimaging” in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics.
The team wants to understand how the brain develops during childhood and adolescence, and how deviations from normal brain development are related to mental health disorders. A large, open biobank called the Healthy Brain Network plans to release up to 10,000 brain magnetic resonance images of children and adolescents.
Sune Lehmann is a professor of applied mathematics and computer science at the Technical University of Denmark, where he’s been conducted research for the past several years. He, like a lot of us, was wondering, “Am I becoming a grumpy old man, or are things moving more quickly?”
Recently, he and colleagues published a paper in Nature Communications that suggests the latter is true — the length of time our “collective attention” is on any given event has grown shorter, and topics become popular and then drop out of public view at an accelerating rate. The result: It’s no surprise if it feels harder and harder to dwell deeply on any topic.
Since late 2016, the Chinese government has subjected the 13 million ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang to mass arbitrary detention, forced political indoctrination, restrictions on movement, and religious oppression. Credible estimates indicate that under this heightened repression, up to one million people are being held in “political education” camps. The government’s “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism” (Strike Hard Campaign) has turned Xinjiang into one of China’s major centers for using innovative technologies for social control.
One million plant and animal species are on the verge of extinction, with alarming implications for human survival, according to a United Nations report released Monday.
The landmark report by seven lead co-authors from universities across the world goes further than previous studies by directly linking the loss of species to human activity. It also shows how those losses are undermining food and water security, as well as human health.
More plants and animals are threatened with extinction now than any other period in human history, it concludes. Nature’s current rate of decline is unparalleled, and the accelerating rate of extinctions “means grave impacts on people around the world are now likely,” it says.
Each clinical trial participant wears a connected mHealth sensor with a unique identifier. The device remotely and continuously collects real-world patient data, such as blood pressure and blood glucose levels, and then sends the information, via Bluetooth, to the patient’s mobile device. From there, the data is routed through Oracle Health Sciences mHealth Connector Cloud Service, an enterprise-class, highly secure, scalable, integration platform that aggregates, summarizes, and disseminates the targeted data into Oracle Health Sciences InForm or Oracle Health Sciences Data Management Workbench (DMW).
The traditional American supermarket is dying. It’s not just Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, an acquisition that trade publication Supermarket News says marked “a new era” for the grocery business — or the fact that Amazon hopes to launch a second new grocery chain in 2019, according to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, with a potential plan to scale quickly by buying up floundering supermarkets. Even in plush times, grocery is a classic “red ocean” industry, highly undifferentiated and intensely competitive. (The term summons the image of a sea stained with the gore of countless skirmishes.) Now, the industry’s stodgy old playbook — “buy one, get one” sales, coupons in the weekly circular — is hurtling toward obsolescence. Today, with new ways to sell food ascendant, legacy grocers like Rich Niemann are failing to bring back the customers they once took for granted. You no longer need grocery stores to buy groceries.
Niemann hired [Kevin] Kelley in the context of this imminent doom. The assignment: to conceive, design, and build the grocery store of the future. Niemann was ready to entertain any idea and invest heavily. And for Kelley, a man who’s worked for decades honing his vision for what the grocery store should do and be, it was the opportunity of a lifetime — carte blanche to build the working model he’s long envisioned, one he believes can save the neighborhood supermarket from obscurity.
Eos; Daniel T. Trugman, Gregory C. Beroza, and Paul A. Johnson
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The geosciences are data rich, with petabytes of readily and publicly available data. This availability, combined with the complexity of unsolved problems in the field, has motivated vigorous interest in the application of machine learning (ML) techniques. ML offers a new “lens” for viewing data and scientific hypotheses that differs from the perspective of traditional domain expertise. Initial uses of ML have tended to be limited in scope and isolated in application, but recent efforts to promote benchmark geoscientific data sets and competitions promise to propel broader, deeper, and increasingly coordinated and collaborative efforts.
This year, we were astonished by a flood of interest, with attendees representing institutions from across the globe and a range of career stages.
We organized the second Machine Learning in Solid Earth Geoscience Conference to promote discussion of the latest findings and to brainstorm for the future.
The safety and economic well-being of Americans will be put at risk if the Senate confirms Barry Lee Myers as the next administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
As a nonscientist, Mr. Myers lacks the professional credentials to lead a science-centric agency responsible for daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings, climate monitoring, fisheries management, coastal restoration and support for marine commerce.
As the former chief executive of the private weather-forecasting company AccuWeather, which relies on data from NOAA’s National Weather Service, he spent years trying to privatize NOAA’s public weather information so his company could profit from it. His family continues to run the family-owned company, raising concerns that they could benefit from decisions he might make as NOAA’s administrator.
Daniel Huffman thinks “color is overused, and the challenges of a limited palette can be liberating. I want to draw more attention to the great work that mapmakers are doing in this medium, and encourage more people to experience the joy of composing with only one ink. So, I’m hereby declaring a Monochrome Mapping Competition!” Deadline for submissions is June 15.
Facebook Artificial Intelligence; Eytan Bakshy, Max Balandat, Kostya Kashin
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How can researchers and engineers explore large configuration spaces that have complex trade-offs when it may take hours or days to evaluate any given configuration? This challenge frequently arises across many domains, including tuning hyperparameters for machine learning (ML) models, finding optimal product settings through A/B testing, and designing next-generation hardware.
Today we are open-sourcing two tools, Ax and BoTorch, that enable anyone to solve challenging exploration problems in both research and production — without the need for large quantities of data.
