Reflecting on the observation that prestigious prizes and publications run in scientific lineages, Stephen David, a neuroscientist at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland asked: “What is it that you actually learn from a mentor? What is the transfer of knowledge that happens, or the training, that’s really actually influencing your work?”
To start to get at these and other questions, he and several collaborators analyzed a database of nearly 19,000 researchers, focusing on sets of students, graduate mentors, and postdoctoral mentors. Measuring success based on whether or not a student went on to an independent research position and by how many students they went on to train themselves, the researchers found that postdoctoral training appeared to have a stronger influence than graduate training on future success. They also found that scientists were more likely to succeed if they trained with graduate and postdoctoral mentors with disparate expertise that they could incorporate into their own work.
David said he suspects that building connections that had not previously existed might be key to success.
Basic research in biology generates fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems. It is generally impossible to predict exactly where this line of scientific inquiry might lead, but history shows that basic science almost always serves as the foundation for dramatic breakthroughs that advance human health. Indeed, many important medical advances can be traced back to basic research that, at least at the outset, had no clear link at all to human health.
One exciting example of NIH-supported basic research is the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), which began 12 years ago as a quest to use DNA sequencing to identify and characterize the diverse collection of microbes—including trillions of bacteria, fungi, and viruses—that live on and in the healthy human body.
The HMP researchers have subsequently been using those vast troves of fundamental data as a tool to explore how microbial communities interact with human cells to influence health and disease. Today, these explorers are reporting their latest findings in a landmark set of papers in the Nature family of journals. Among other things, these findings shed new light on the microbiome’s role in prediabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, and preterm birth. The studies are part of the Integrative Human Microbiome Project .
Not every new technology that’s made it to the big show has been a home run, however, and just about everyone in the industry has a laundry list of healthcare technology that for one reason or another has had a negative impact on patients’ experiences in care.
“Technology can be so easy to implement that the hard part is strategically picking the right ones and integrating every step of the way,” Paul Cooper, CIO of consumer data analysis group NRC Health, told MobiHealthNews. “If you don’t do that, it can just quickly become noise for the patients and the families trying to navigate who they’re seeing and where that information is being kept.
Facing increasingly overworked doctors and labyrinthine insurance systems, hospitals are searching for a lifeline in AI systems that promises to ease hard diagnoses and treatment decisions.
Reality check: The data underpinning the very first systems is often spotty, volatile and completely lacking in critical context, leading to a poor early record in the field.
The big picture: Basic clinical decision support (CDS) systems have been around for decades, but a skepticism of technology leads many doctors to ignore or override them. Now, experts say a nascent generation of CDS — infused with AI in academic labs and startups — may reduce the estimated 40,000–80,000 deaths a year that result from medical errors.
Historic Guyot Hall will be substantially rebuilt and expanded to create a new home for Princeton’s Department of Computer Science, thanks to a gift from Eric Schmidt ’76 and his wife, Wendy Schmidt.
Twitter, used by 126 million people daily and now ubiquitous in some industries, has vowed to reform itself after being enlisted as a tool of misinformation and hate.
But new evidence shows that the platform may be inflicting harm at an even more basic level. It could be making its users, well, a bit witless.
The finding by a team of Italian researchers is not necessarily that the crush of hashtags, likes and retweets destroys brain cells; that’s a question for neuroscientists, they said.
Rather, the economists, in a working paper published this month by the economics and finance department at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, found that Twitter not only fails to enhance intellectual attainment but substantially undermines it.
Twitter is conducting in-house research to better understand how white nationalists and supremacists use the platform. The company is trying to decide, in part, whether white supremacists should be banned from the site or should be allowed to stay on the platform so their views can be debated by others, a Twitter executive told Motherboard.
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, legal and public policy, said Twitter believes “counter-speech and conversation are a force for good, and they can act as a basis for de-radicalization, and we’ve seen that happen on other platforms, anecdotally.”
“So one of the things we’re working with academics on is some research here to confirm that this is the case,” she added.
For decades, one standardized test has been key to admission to U.S. science graduate programs: the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) General Test, a nearly 4-hour marathon of multiple-choice and written questions that test quantitative, verbal, and writing skills. But the long reign of the GRE may be drawing to a close. In response to recent studies showing little correlation between GRE scores and success in graduate school and concern that the test puts underrepresented groups at a disadvantage, a growing number of programs are dropping the GRE as an application requirement.
Science examined Ph.D. application requirements for eight disciplines at 50 top-ranked U.S. research universities. The life sciences have led the so-called GRExit push: In 2018, 44% of molecular biology Ph.D. programs stopped requiring GRE scores. That number will rise to at least 50% for the 2019-2020 application cycle. In neuroscience and ecology, roughly one-third of programs dropped the GRE requirement between 2016 and 2018, and more plan to do so this year. The movement has yet to take hold in some disciplines—more than 90% of the chemistry, physics, geology, computer science, and psychology Ph.D. programs that were surveyed by Science required general GRE scores in 2018. But a few programs in those fields have also joined the exodus.
MapR Technologies Inc., one of the troika of unicorn startups that emerged from the early days of the big-data movement, may cut up to 122 jobs and shut down its Santa Clara, California headquarters if it can’t secure additional funding.
The company, which raised a total of $280 million in financing since it was founded in 2009 and whose market capitalization once topped $1 billion, said it is seeking a “strategic transaction” that would enable it to avoid closing its headquarters. The company said it has “more than one letter of intent from interested parties.”
In a May 13 letter to employees released under California’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification laws, Chief Executive John Schroeder blamed the decision on “extremely poor results” in the most recently completed fiscal quarter. “While the reasons for the results are not entirely understood, they were at least in part to to the sudden, last-minute and unexpected postponement of several customers’ timelines to make a purchasing decision,” he wrote.
In my ongoing quest to track The Popularity of Data Science Software, I’ve just updated my analysis of the job market. To save you from reading the entire tome, I’m reproducing that section here.
Google announced new rules that will restrict access to user data for third-party add-ons in Chrome and Drive. From now on, Chrome extension developers must request the least amount of user data their app requires to function. Apps that connect with Google Drive — such as Pixlr and many popular document signing apps — will be barred from accessing the entirety of the user’s files. The changes are a result of Project Strobe, an audit Google launched in October to study how third-party services handle user data.
Notably, Google will require browser extensions that handle user-provided content and personal communications to post a privacy policy.
Researchers have analysed anonymized phone records of tens of millions of people in low-income countries. Critics question whether the benefits outweigh the risks.
The Governance Lab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering announced the launch of the 100 Questions Initiative — an effort to identify the most important societal questions whose answers can be found in data and data science if the power of data collaboratives is harnessed.
The initiative, launched with initial support from Schmidt Futures, seeks to address challenges on numerous topics, including migration, climate change, poverty, and the future of work.
For each of these areas and more, the initiative will seek to identify questions that could help unlock the potential of data and data science with the broader goal of fostering positive social, environmental, and economic transformation.
After a successful new method of geothermal exploration found two new geothermal systems in Nevada, the Department of Energy has awarded a major new grant to the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology to research and expand the use of machine-learning to make the exploration process even more effective.
The two successful discoveries in the Great Basin by the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology used a previously untried method for finding unknown, hidden geothermal resources, called blind systems, where there are no surface indications of hot water.
There had been no exploration previously in one of these areas and only minor previous exploration in the other. University of Nevada, Reno geologists in the Bureau of Mines and Geology used a number of other surface and subsurface clues in their methodology developed as part of their Department of Energy funded Play Fairway project that has been underway since 2014.
Santa Fe, NM June 14-16. “Each year InterPlanetary compiles all manner of scientists, sci-fi authors, business leaders, artists, etc., to create an interesting and engaging lineup of panels, all revolving around the fundamental systems and questions of our existence as a species, both on Earth and beyond.” [registration required]
Cambridge, MA July 16, starting at 1:15 p.m. “Topics we’ll cover include: an internet call to action; privacy and security; the internet of things; the future of social media; and of course, predictions on what the internet might look like in another 50 years.” [$$$]
Detroit, MI July 15-17. “For the second year in a row, DARPA is convening the electronics community to discuss the ambitions and achievements of its five-year, upwards of $1.5 billion investment in U.S. microelectronics advancement.” Deadline to register is June 24.
“A panel will evaluate the submissions and fund selected projects up to $300K, with funding for up to 70 percent of the total project cost. The projects will be reviewed against four specific factors, which include encouraging applicants to share their knowledge by, for example, publishing case studies or holding a public seminar. Other criteria include the impact projects will have on the news ecosystem, how innovative they are and how feasible the plan is to achieve.” Deadline for submissions is July 15.
“This essay makes a lot of suggestions, but the most useful/non-obvious/actionable are likely: (1) Be generous. (2) Use author contribution statements. (3) Put “author order not finalized” if it hasn’t been.”
“Before his many data scientist stints in companies scattered throughout Germany, Abhishek Thakur earned his bachelor’s in electrical engineering at NIT Surat and his master’s in computer science at the University of Bonn. Currently, he holds the title of Chief Data Scientist at Norway’s boost.ai, a “software company that specializes in conversational artificial intelligence (AI).” But I’m most impressed by Abhishek’s Kaggle clout.”
Salesforce, Developer Force Blog, Christophe Coenraets
from
“A few months ago, we introduced Lightning Web Components, a new JavaScript framework that leverages the web standards breakthroughs of the last five years. Today, we are excited to announce the open sourcing of the Lightning Web Components framework, allowing developers to contribute to the roadmap and to use the same framework whether they are building applications on Salesforce or on any other platform.”